What you should be afraid of instead of terrorists
According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, between 310,000 and 580,000 of us will commit suicide by cigarette this year. Another 260,000 to 470,000 will go in the ground due to poor diet and sedentary lifestyle. And some 85,000 of us will drink to our own departure.The Most Dangerous Person in the World? (via Schneier)After the person in the mirror, the next most dangerous individual we're ever likely to encounter is one in a white coat. Something like 200,000 of us will experience "cessation of life" due to medical errors - botched procedures, mis-prescribed drugs and "nosocomial infections". (The really nasty ones you get from treatment in a hospital or healthcare service unit.)
The next most dangerous encounter the average American is likely to have is with a co-worker with an infection. Or a doorknob, stair railing or restaurant utensil touched by someone with the crud. "Microbial Agents" (read bugs like flu and pneumonia) will send 75,000 of us to meet the Reaper this year.
If we live through those social encounters, the next greatest danger is "Toxic Agents" - asbestos in our ceiling, lead in our pipes, the stuff we spray on our lawns or pour down our clogged drains. Annual body count from these handy consumer products is around 55,000...
Imagine what the world could look like if we made a conscious choice to live out whatever time we have with courage, compassion, service and joy.
Terrorism is an act of the weak. But so is walking through the airport in our socks.
the latest
latest episodes
BoingBoing needs a thumbs up button like on facebook.
Great, now i'm afraid of cigarettes, cheeseburgers, and beer.
@PURLY Check out the
"❤ FAVORITE THIS!" It is underneath the tags, and to the left of "SEND THIS TO A FRIEND." I clicked it for you, don't worry
We should worry most about government treating us as enemies and possibly becoming homicidal. Nazi Europe, China, Soviet Union, Cambodia, etc. The Jews in nearly every place they have lived for almost 3500 years has eventually lead to them facing pograms that were at minimum officially tolerated. The list goes on but lets say in our modern world governments and their well armed spies, police, and military are our greatest threat.
Sure, but is those are all "familiar and socially accepted" causes of death.
I dislike the "terrorism is unlikely" argument. This is not about likelyhood.
We are not computers.
But without the irrational fear of "invaders", immigrants, non-believers, and generally people who are not like us, why would we need government? Oh wait...
I agree with the premise, but I question some of the numbers. 55000 dead per year from asbestos, lead and household chemical exposure versus "only" 32000 per year dying in car crashes? Come on.
Reminds me of one of the London "anti-terror" poster mockups I did:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33483825@N06/3385241746/in/photostream
@BCJ Hey wow, the things you never notice after visiting a blog for years. Thanks.
The article left out one of my favorite causes of death: Old Age - how many thousands die needlessly simply by aging?
@5: "We are not computers"
So we should be irrational? Fear of terrorism really *is* irrational. The chances of me being killed in a terrorist attack are only slightly better than winning a multi-million dollar lottery jackpot.
We should not abandon rational thought and behave as though the odds are astronomically higher than they truly are.
And more importantly, we should not sacrifice civil liberties to engage in security theater designed more to make us irrationally *feel* safer while doing little or nothing to actually combat terrorism.
... and up until now the chances of someone dying from nuclear weaponry is still pretty low so perhaps we shouldn't worry about them proliferating ...
I don't think this guy factored in nuclear dolphins.
http://terrorbusters.blogspot.com/2009/04/terror-busters-alert-nuclear-dolphins.html
@11 correct, we should not, should not, should not.
And some won't.
But some will. We are not computers.
Some people are more irrational than others. Sometimes they get a word in and tell others about their fears (real fear, albeit irrational).
The last couple of years of US politics prove that point.
Don't dismiss the irrational, just because they don't follow the logic.
I'm saying this argument preaches only to the choir.
How about fear that there is another horrible terrorist attack and, in the aftermath of the resulting racism, I get a mob-beating by a bunch of meatheads?
> And some 85,000 of us will drink to our own departure.
This one really ought to have been followed up by a figure for those owing their departure to someone else's drinking [and driving].
Also, just a reminder: if you give up smoking and drinking, go to a doctor that never makes mistakes, completely eliminate toxic chemicals from your personal environment, etc., etc.--you'll die anyway.
I posted a similar piece to Daily Kos a few years back:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/12/29/175009/-Dying-by-TerrorThe-Real-Odds
I hate to accuse Goekler of anything, but there's so much similarity between the pieces that I can't let it go unremarked-upon.
Thanks,
Troutwaxer
Wait a second. If governments address threats in order of their actual severity, how will they convince people to surrender their civil rights and liberties so complacently?
The odds of dying from terrorism are substantially different for Doctorow than for your average Yemenite. Cory's trying to argue that terrorism is worth confronting only when it claims as many lives as a disease or social ill that he can personally relate to; i.e., be concerned only when terrorist violence is completely incorrigible in London and paralyzes society, at which point he will presumably move back to Canada.
Incidentally, Cory should steer clear of North Africa - Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb kidnaps Canadians (incl. Robert Fowler & Louis Guay) and Western Europeans because the hostages' respective governments are infamous for paying ransoms rather than rescuing their citizens by force (something that only those terrible Americans do).
"The strong are made weak because of their inhibitions, the weak are strong because of their insolence."
@12: "I'm saying this argument preaches only to the choir."
Oh, well, you've probably got me there.
ikhwanelbanat; I'm pretty sure that he's not arguing that at all. Perhaps it's the Corey Doctorow that lives in your head?
Whilst I agree with the sentiment, where are all the cancer deaths? unless he's suggesting all cancers are caused by smoking/poor diet/poor exercise
As for teh asbestos deaths, the commenter above questioned the numbers but asbestosis deaths are rising because of the length of time it takes to kill people.. it's a huge number very nasty as well.
though also raises the question of work related deaths
Speaking of risk and odds, the Pakistanis behind the Mumbai massacres didn't exactly run a lottery to decide that they would murder and mutilate the organs of the rabbi and his pregnant wife. And the Taliban appears to have murdered the Canadian pro-Taliban activist Beverly Giesbrecht, so I guess you can't even use irony as a shield these days. Clearly, there's more at work than just statistics or Bayesian probability theory. Maybe I'm a chauvinist, but I'd rather that governments grew a set and protected their citizens, instead of letting the likes of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith leave that to chance while she bills taxpayers for her barbecue grill.
@10 : People don't die of old age.
@#5: "We are not computers."
Please speak for yourself: "Computer" was onceuponatime my father's job title and one of my great-uncles was a computer. If these electronic machines on our desktops had never come about, my job title would also probably be "computer". (Or possibly copy-editor).
The PC/Workstation/Servers/Networking you use every day aren't alien things. They mechanically reproduce things that HUMANS do.
Merely because you choose to live your life thinking that the life of many kids killed by drunk drivers are collectively less 'valuable' or important than the life of an Air Force colonel killed by a jet impact -- doesn't mean the rest of us have to subscribe to your particular moral blinders.
I made a very, very similar post to Daily Kos on December 29th of 2005. I'd hate to accuse Mr. Goekler of plagiarism - the statistics are, after all, publicly available, and the comparison is to some degree obvious - but the similarities between my work and his are problematic, to say the least:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/12/29/175009/-Dying-by-TerrorThe-Real-Odds
T.
#12 you seem to be saying that anyone who is afraid of terrorists is completely irrational and can't be move by reasoned argument.
#17 the point is not that we should not fight terrorism. The point is that we should not pay such a high price in freedom and democracy to do it, and that we should put more effort into stopping things that kill us MUCH more frequently. Are you saying that if we don't fight medical error that's OK because people in other parts of the world threatened by terrorism?
The major reasons certain Americans fear terrorism so much is A) the attacks on September 11th were an affront to their American illusions of unlimited power and immortality. B) Its the media's best way to raise ratings and get people's attention.
@4 - that's a convincing impression of a paranoid schizophrenic - what drama school did you attend?
This is, of course, fantastic. I heart it. If we exploded in a mess when we had a heart attack, people would be much more concerned. Maybe we should deliberately die in public, surrounded by weeping and grieving family members, to get the point across. A sandwich board on us - "I'm dying of tar-choked lungs", "My liver is on vacation, and ain't coming back until I'm dead and can't drink no more", "My kids though I was great until I weighed 350 pounds, then they left me for dead". Any sociologists out there know about that kind of thing?
I didn't think too much about mortality and continuity until I had kids. Now - well, it seems so important to live vividly! My old uncle died of emphysema - what a shit way to go. Dreadful to see, dreadful to be.
But give me that over paranoia.
"Imagine what the world could look like if we made a conscious choice to live out whatever time we have with courage, compassion, service and joy."
Regardless of mortality, I'd trade happily trade a world as mentioned above for the one we have now.
And if it meant I had to take up smoking, drinking, having unsafe sex, driving too fast and overeating...
Clearly the governments should be doing something about this. Why don't they tax the hell out of tobacco and alcohol? They could ban certain foods even. I just wish the government was there to protect us.
@17: If you re-read the first line of the article, it clearly says "Are you an American who worries about terrorism?".
Obviously the article's not talking about people who live in areas of the world where terrorism is a constant daily threat. It's referring to people who live in a safe well-protected country, yet feel the irrational need to create more illusions of safety.
@#16 - I think the major problem the government would run in to if they tried to address threats in order of their severity (or even in order of how much they can be reduced by throwning money and laws at them - there's not all that much you're going to be able to do to lower the suicide statistic, for example) would be that people would get upset. People are used to death by alcohol and car accident - they're no longer scary. That's more a hardwired fault in the human brain than media fearmongering.
I had thought that right-thinking people wanted to prevent or limit the predictable thousands of deaths from traffic, smoking, obesity, asbestos, etc. (not least by bringing them to public attention against the common human tendency to overlook or ignore what happens under our very noses), rather than accept them as immutable conditions and used to make arguments against prevention efforts with respect to other causes of death.
"Terrorism is an act of the weak. But so is walking through the airport in our socks."
Okay! Even though I'm not worried about terrorism at all, I've decided not to take my shoes off for airport security anymore! Aaaand now I've missed my flight.
"Terrorism is an act of the weak. But so is walking through the airport in our socks."
What about preening and posturing about one's strength?
Here's the thing about the numbers- the numbers of the past aren't an accurate reflection of the future risk.
Before 9/11, the risk by these standards would have been astronomically lower. It only takes one successful large scale attack to throw these numbers out of whack. One single successful large biological attack would change the picture completely.
That's like saying "I've never had cancer, so the risk from smoking for me is 0.00"
It also ignores the fact that direct deaths is never the primary goal of a terrorist attack. The 9/11 attacks were meant to destabilize our economy, military and government by targeting those specific centers, not crash a plane into every living American. If an attack were successful at killing, let's say, a few hundred members of congress, or the NYSE etc etc. The effect on our country's stability could be catastrophic, especially as fragile as we are now.
Is any of this an excuse to become a police state? Of course not, but it's important to be accurate.
The threat of terrorism to Americans is not accurately measured by past casualties.
@22 - and for anyone else vaguely concerned over ROTM (and I know you're out there, suffering the same paranoi as me) - check out "Adam", computer at the Uni. of Aberystwyth (aberrantspelling?) in Wales.
Adam hypothesed, experimented, proved, apparently on his own, about some enzyme or content of yeast. By "himself". "Eve" is coming, and boy, you can bet she's going to raise hell.
Not mechanical reproduction of the things humans do.
I for one have 16 magnetic mini-bomb grenades about my person at any given time. I prefer emphysema to being squashed by an angry robot. Ref CB2 - notice how the researchers laugh at it towards the end of the youtube clip? It's going to know.
When can we go back to fearing extra terrestrials?
I've been making this argument to my parents for years (they didn't want me flying home from college in 2001), and on the individual level it's certainly true - we should not be afraid of terrorism.
However, on the larger societal and political level, we do need to be protected against terrorism. The parallels with car wrecks or the rest don't hold up, because those don't have the same degree of danger if left unchecked. All of us have the potential to quit smoking; without the government we don't have the potential to stop terrorism in countries across an ocean from us. Nor, if we stopped wearing seatbelts, would cars attempt any sort of conquest.
Now, I'm not a fan of the fearmongering or most of the government's public means of "protecting" us from terrorism (especially because I'm on the b$**shit watchlist). However, that's no reason to get up a false analogy and then suggest that heart disease requires the same approach as terrorism, or that action should only be taken related to the easy sum total of deaths rather than any attention to differences. Perhaps the author is just speaking personally, and then I agree; but knowing the extreme biases of Counterpunch, and noting some of the comments here, it seemed important to note the potential error one can get into with this argument.
No American should fear terrorism. This I agree with wholeheartedly. But math is seldom the basis of people's emotions, thus using math to assuage them is, unfortunately, fairly ineffective.
According to the post, 42,000 people will die in car accidents this year, yet few of us bat an eye when we settle into our daily commute to work. 15 people per year have died from terrorism since 2001, yet it's a common fear. Irrational? Totally. But let's explore this.
What if every American household had a neighbor who visibly trained a sniper rifle on our head from a window in his house every time we stepped out? He hates our guts and would like nothing more than to blow our brains out, but a machine attached to the rifle permits only a one-in-a-billion chance (or whatever odds would make this statistically accurate) of the rifle actually discharging every time he pulls the trigger. Thus, only fifteen times a year does anyone actually get their head blown off somewhere in the US by one of our neighborly snipers.
Obviously, this isn't completely analogous to the nature of terrorism, as terrorists don't live next door, they're not visible, and are not targeting you personally. But my point is this - why would anyone fear the sniper but not fear getting into their car? It's all about intent. The sniper WANTS to kill you very badly. The other commuters on the way to work, however, very much want to avoid that. The intent does not increase the likelihood... it just makes it "scarier".
Math is rational. Emotions rarely are.
The key seems to be the idea of "just deserts". People who smoke, engage in unsafe sex, drink, etc presumably bring their death on themselves which is how it's usually rationalized afterward. Deaths resulting from preventable causes (or causes that were seen as preventable) tend to be seen as less tragic than "real" victims who are killed for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Terrorist bombings get more press when the idea of "innocent victims" is exploited rather than the ones who were "asking for it".
We shouldn't worry about terrorism. We pay people to do that for us. Just like our cattle slaughtering, campground maintenance and water delivery.
Some of the arguments against this article are just bizarre. I thought the author's point was pretty simple: you are very afraid, and being horribly inconvenienced by, something that has an even smaller statistical likelihood of happening to you than things you just accept as part of life. Certainly no one was suggesting the government starts policing food in the same way as they police terrorism, or that they treat terrorism the same way they treat disease. All we're asking for is a little proportionality, here, people.
@Archanoid: "The chances of me being killed in a terrorist attack are only slightly better than winning a multi-million dollar lottery jackpot."
I think you hit the nail on the head there. It's the same impressionable people who fall for the lottery scam who live with the unshakable fear of terrorism.
(They're two sides of the same coin, really: Infinitesimally small odds of either winning spectacular amounts of money or dying in a spectacularly public way.)
I don't live in fear of terrorists, and I think to do so is stupid. But this whole "you are statistically more likely to die from _____ than terrorism" has been done by everyone and their dog. It really isn't persuasive anymore (if it ever was), and I don't see the point to it.
I've been saying this for years. Of course, I'm Canadian.
The fear of having your kid get abducted/molested/killed by a random stranger is pretty much the same thing.
hey there Ikh #20, good to see ya again! Don't forget the war crime terror recently committed in Gaza by the invading army, while your listing away there.
Americans should ask themselves: if this isn't an important distiction, then how did you somehow lose all those civil rights in the past decade or so?
After several decades working in a hospital and watching people gasping for breath for days or weeks on end, I would much rather be eaten by Ripley's aliens than die in a hospital bed. Even with equal odds, pneumonia is a hell of a lot scarier than Al-Qaida.
The quoted portion in this post treads beyond ridiculous by insinuating that medical professionals kill 200,000 people a year. Medication errors do occur, because no one is perfect. But there is no one more trained than the person who is in charge of you at your local doctor's office, hospital, or pharmacy. If you think you can do a better job of taking care of yourself, then by all means, please do. The rest of us will trust the hard-working people of all medical professions when the time comes.
@#18 Halloween Jack
"Also, just a reminder: if you give up smoking and drinking, go to a doctor that never makes mistakes, completely eliminate toxic chemicals from your personal environment, etc., etc.--you'll die anyway."
...in about 50 - 60 years. I think I can live with that.
The list goes on but lets say in our modern world governments and their well armed spies, police, and military are our greatest threat.
If you look at world history, law mostly evolved to protect citizens from their governments.
commies, gay people, furriners, drug dealers, sex maniacs, commies some more, AIDS, terrorists, interweb monsters, terrorists.... when terrorist is worn out, what will be chosen next? Extra-terrestrials would be nice.
Just out of interest, does anyone know definitively how many US citizens have died due to acts of terrorism a) on home soil, b) abroad?. Lets count since the beginning of the first Iraqi unvasion just to make the numbers as high as possible.
@56: "...when terrorist is worn out, what will be chosen next?"
Furries.
furries...furries... yeah, yeah, could work....
The article also skims over the fact that death isn't really the full threat of terrorism, that's what invading armies do, not terrorists.
The threat of terrorism isn't that you as an individual will be killed by a bomb. Even in the parts of the world with the most terrorism, it isn't their goal to kill everybody.
Terrorists poisoning food supply can drive huge sectors of commerce out of business through fear. After 9-11, the airlines almost went under if not for hefty hefty government aid. It's the disruption of effective government and economy that could really do damage, much more than the actual bomb blasts.
It has been said, and doesn't impact whether one should be afraid, but this is not a random distribution like accidents, smoking, etc, but the deliberate act of an adversary.
That said terrorism by definition is about fear- no fear, no terrorism, just murder.
the way i see it, re: smoking and drinking, if the world in 40 years isn't a world where organs can be grown and replaced at a nominal fee, something has gone horribly wrong with the progress of society, and im not sure i'd want to live in such a dystopia as that.
A more technical term for "just deserts" is "moral hazard".
Nutbastard, you might enjoy Bruce Sterling's book Holy Fire, or some of Larry Niven's universe.
And by "enjoy" I mean, "be strongly unsettled by".
I've just always thought of it this way: Which is better, 60 more years of constantly watching my diet, not smoking, and drinking only rarely, or 40 more years of good food, good smoke, and good drink? is simply being alive THAT desirable of a state? really? Because it seems to me that being alive is the source of most of my problems.
so really, 60 years of bland or 40 years of spice? I know which one i'm picking.
i mean how annoying would it be to live the straight life, eating expensive health food and not smoking and drinking only rarely, working out all the time etc... and then a deer goes through your windshield and kills you? the risks i take, smoking, drinking and eating red meat, are far less likely to kill me than some sort of accident, or some unpreventable disease/situation.
it's weird, if a terrorist kills me the day before i die of lung cancer, it's a tragedy, but if they miss me and i die the next day, i had it coming??
eat, drink, and be merry!
Many problems with the stats have already been mentioned, but not the biggest one that makes the whole article invalid.
Raw numbers are meaningless without statistical context.
One cannot, for example, estimate the average risk of a medical procedure without knowing the total number of such procedures performed.
Risk is best expressed in terms of X per thousand or equivalent, not in raw numbers of death.
Furthermore, one cannot then evaluate the applicability to one's circumstances and thus come up with a personal risk factor. I don't smoke, take drugs, or drink alcohol aside from the occasional glass of wine - but I live in a major city which is a potential terrorist target.
Someone else may smoke like a chimney and drink themselves to sleep every night - but live in the middle of rural Vermont, which is not exactly a major focus of global terrorism.
The article shows that the raw number of deaths from aspirin overdose and from drowning. But, if you look at the number of times the average person consumes aspirin in a year, vs the number of time people swim, there is a huge difference (ignoring for the moment that "average person" does not provide any useful measure of individual risk).
This is the kind of article that has emotional appeal, but falls short upon rational review.
It is, sadly, all too often the kind of thing that gets promoted around the Net by people who may have expertise in one area, but not in the topical area relevant to the article. Because we tend to be deferential to authority of any kind, particularly in the hero-worshipping US, and to a lesser extent elsewhere, and because the Internet amplifies the tendency to seek out only information that confirms our existing biases, these kind of faulty assertions become adopted as fact without critical examination.
The first reaction upon reading anything like this - no matter how much it may appeal to one's personal politics or ideology - should be skepticism.
There used to be a popular bumper sticker that said, "question authority". Unfortunately, that is usually understood to mean, "question The Man" or any authority one already objects to, rather than *all* authoritative statements.
"Terrorism is an act of the weak."
I disagree. It takes strength to fly a plane into a skyscraper or explode a bomb strapped to your chest.
Or did you mean that terrorism is a resort of a weaker faction in a fight with a stronger faction?
Years ago I printed up a bunch of little info notes, business card size, to leave around as a bit of political activism. One of them was something like this (pardon the ascii art here...)
..............................................In the Last 5 Years
...................................................Cost..|..Lives
............................$100,000,000,000s..|..1,000,000s
Heart Disease....*****************|******************
Cancer.................................********|**************
Stroke........................................*****|****
Lung Disease...........................******|***
Terrorism.........................**********|
Yeah, it's a big simplification, but the gist is that the U.S. spent more money on an issue that averages less than 1,000 deaths per year than on an issue that takes almost 1,000,000 lives per year.
Of course we should not ignore the possibility of terrorism, and we should plan realistically and responsibly, but there seems to be quite a disparity in the numbers, around three orders of magnitude, to me. Likewise with the fear.
There is at least a psychological difference between things we may have some different amount of control over (like dying of cancer versus being hit by a drunk driver or an act of terrorism), and there's at least a psychological difference between a "one at a time" death (like cancer) and an "all at once" event (like a massive terrorism strike or an asteroid hitting the earth).
But still, three orders of magnitude in spending. I've read several places (Green Cross for one) that for a small fraction of the trillion dollars or so the U.S. has spent on waging war in Iraq, we could have supplied appropriate technology so that Everyone In The World had access to safe drinking water.
Personally I think that would have been a much better use of the money to start along the path of world peace, and would be a start to saving tens of millions of lives each year.
Assuming the article is correct, then Jack Bauer is redundant. What am I gonna do on Monday nights?
@ Hypnoid:
Those figures seem close but ultimately inaccurate. There were 13,470 fatalities in crashes involving an alcohol-impaired driver in 2006, or 32 percent of total traffic fatalities for that year. That's about one fatality every 39 minutes. If you count alcohol-related fatalities, the number increases considerably. By contrast, people can and do kick the bucket from prolonged exposure to asbestos that took place as many as eighty years prior.
The author is playing with his numbers, claiming that "after the person in the mirror, the next most dangerous individual we're ever likely to encounter is one in a white coat." This assumes that all medical errors are the fault of doctors and technicians, which is simply false. Some inadvertent deaths are even the patients' faults. Of course, he goes on to cite "nosocomical infections," but that still places the blame with the people unable to provide a clean medical facility. I understand that the intent was to redirect anger from terrorists to other killers, but I believe that, all things considered, alcohol is one of the worst killers around.
Take a look at how his argument is framed, and you will see many examples of inflating a given threat for the sake of making a compelling argument. So, the threat of terrorism may be played up by our elected officials and the media, but the fact is: highlighting other threats based on specious reasoning is no better. For one thing, all "microbial agents" are lumped together, as are "toxic agents." I expect that all those "medical errors" would look a lot less frightening if the THOUSANDS of ways a person can die in a hospital were broken down into subcategories. Specificity is key. We can see that alcohol contributes significantly to the overall traffic fatalities. How many fatal medical errors involve patients whose conditions are terrible to begin with? How many people are so sensitive that misprescription is tantamount to killing them? The bottom line is: most of us don't die as the result of medical error, and there are many good reasons for that.
Although I'm sure that if we started to break down the drunk driving statistics, we'd find that incidents involving alcohol-impaired drivers wearing bunny slippers and clown makeup probably account for less than one fatality per year. We don't do that for the simple reason that it messes up our findings. "Toxic agents" may cause many American deaths this year, and it is not my interest to diminish these numbers. Instead, we must examine them more closely. It lacks the same urgency as alcohol-related fatalities because we know that alcohol impairs people. How many people whose lives are taken by "toxic agents" were doing something ignorant?
In alcohol-related traffic deaths, we can be certain that all incidents involved three things: alcohol, at least one vehicle, and at least one human being. There is no wiggle room. With "toxic agents" we are left with a veritable mountain of data, and virtually no way of parsing it to determine the percentage of incidents involving stupidity. 100% of alcohol-related fatalities are preventable. Death by mixing bleach and ammonia is also easily preventable. Stupidity would feature prominently here, were this list an accurate reflection of real-life threats.
' Terrorism is an act of the weak. But so is walking through the airport in our socks. '
Absolutely beautifully summed up - that belongs on my t-shirt. And, just for fun, on my socks.
to be snardpicky about it: Terrorism is a deliberate choice of tactic to use less resources to achieve a leveraged result. Fundyloonies kill a few thousand people to terrorize billions, The TSA randomly abuses a few innocent citizens with sexual humiliation and destruction of personal property to terrorize millions of fliers. Same diff.
Please...
If I want to eat, drink or sex myself to death than good on me. But if some weirded out dufus wants to blow up my whole family thinking he will get an extra shot of virgins, then we are talking about an epic fail.
I'm not sure people really understand what the term "terrorist" actually means. Hint, it has nothing to do with a bottle of Chivas nor does it have anything to do with walking through an airport in your socks.
Terrorism: revolution? Small factions fighting back against oppression? Freedom fighters?
Terrorism is about terror. Not freedom. Invoking terror into a populace does not help any cause but terrorism. It's driven by hatred, and doesn't care if innocents are harmed/killed.
It's not a tool of the weak- it takes a lot of fortitude to 'strap on the backpack', it takes a lot of courage, but mostly a lot of hate. Don't make the mistake of thinking them cowards.
And Takky, I've been searched very, very thoroughly. It's not the same. The TSA doesn't intend to invoke terror- they think they're preventing it, and once in a while they do.
"doesn't intend"? Hah! If they don't intend to terrorize the flying public it beggars imagination to suggest they haven't figured out they are after this many years of their incompetence and criminal abuses. Everyone hates them.
Commiting suicide by cigarette?
What an arrogant and insulting thing to say.
Those stats seem a little far fetched and why would he highlight cigarettes, junk food, and alcohol? There are plenty of other frequent causes of death that are out of our control, like driving on the fucking high way...oh wait, as of late, terrorist are a threat...the domestic breed it seems.
Oh, Takuan, you provocateur. I don't hate TSA, ergo not everyone does. And while some may be errorists or even unfairists, they are not terrorists.
fear of terrorism is not about fear for yourself but fear for your relatives and people of your country. a lot of the anti war on terror people focus on the personal fear irrationality. terrorism is not really special either, it is an act of war and fear of being attacked by another group of people on the whole constitutes the greatest threat to humans *as a whole*. again i emphasise the group identification factor.
the war on terror spin works so well because it addresses the herd mentality, and every single one of the idiotic things humans do as a group added together, constitutes all the greatest threats. the global economic crisis, the bubbles and manias of history, the rise of totalitarianism... and they are all linked to the one thing, herd mentality.
my personal theory is that this tendency is going to exert a great deal of natural selection pressure on the human species and gradually purge this tendency. the people who tend to survive mass disasters of any kind (and one should include ones humans contribute to causing) are ones who take opportunities for escape that the herd does not take, or is too paralysed with fear or herd identification to take. i don't buy the eschatological theories that it will result in extinction, survival will win out, and the herd mentality will have to die.
we know what to do with tellerist sympathizers...
And zombies. Don't forget those.
Uh oh. Guess what causes more throat cancer than alcohol or tobacco?
I shall fight your adjectivism with love.
"Terrorism is an act of the weak. But so is walking through the airport in our socks. " - I almost laughed myself out of my chair!
The TSA/Zombie theory of abiogenesis...
The core message is very good. We should fear terrorists in the same way that we hope to win a lottery jackpot. We shouldn't base our daily lives around the expectation that either will happen, nor should we spend huge amounts of money on them.
However, there are some lazy statistics in there, spewed out by some media whore pusing left-wing anger buttons.
Firstly, aspirin overdose (as a hangover cure or not). Orly? Paracetamol is the killer, but that's just a subset of the suicide statistic. You aren't going to accidentally OD on an NSAID.
Secondly, dying from those chemicals we put down our drains and spray on our lawns? Yeah, those evil chemicals made by the man, in his underpant-gnome-style-plan to poison us for profit, amirite?
It's actually asbestos and things like coal-dust or particulates from combustion that are the problem. Lifestyle chemicals like cleaners and pesticides are heavily regulated and won't kill anyone (directly, they might kill some ) so long as you don't drink them or something.
The medical mistakes thing is always dodgy stats. If you're in danger of dying you'll sometimes get given a treatment which might kill you, but is less likely to kill you than leaving it untreated. These get recorded as death due to the treatment, and people lump this in with death stats from a wrong prescription.
I wonder where he got all those figures from. I doubt many of them are accurate.