Could British invention foil terror bombs?(bbc.co.uk) |
Could British invention foil terror bombs?(bbc.co.uk) |
- that causes little deaths compared to most diseases or social issues.
- cost little compared to most economical or educational issues.
- has little long term consequences on the country compared to internal and external policies, laws, politics and visions;
- is a direct consequence of social, economical and educational issues and a by product of policies, laws, politics and visions.
Our response was to go over and kill 100 of their innocent civilians for every 1 of our innocent civilians that the extremists killed in order to make our political point. I don't buy the argument that this was premised on any noble principle such as the one you describe.
To be the first to invoke Godwin's here, the Nazis did not statistically represent a significant daily threat to health and safety in 1928, either. Looking at present body counts as a gauge for what's worth "freaking out" about seems incomplete.
The real question is not whether it is irrational to fear terrorism, but, rather, whether the warmongers, snoops and profiteers exploiting terrorist attacks should be heeded, or not.
> Terrorism isn't just an attack on people; it's intended to be an attack on our institutions and our society.
The fact that you're calling it terrorism instead of murder, and that we're discussing this in the context of an OP about the development of new technologies to detect explosives, shows that it's working.
Once an attack "gets through", which will always happen eventually, anyone that didn't support the PersonalRights-Devouring Anti-Terrorist Bill will get crucified by the press and their opponents.
Most people don't appear to care about numbers, or facts or evidence. They only seem to care about pushing their ideology (normally authoritarianism) that "makes them feel safe", rights and freedoms be damned (which is why I can never take the US's obsession with "rights and freedoms" seriously).
A natural disaster is scary and can kill a lot of people, but to most people it feels more impersonal.
When someone is targeting people directly (serial killers, murderers, terrorists) it feels scarier because there is an intention to harm.
This bias is stronger that probability. Even if someone lived near a volcano that had a 5% chance of killing you every year, I bet that same person would be more scared of a terror attack that had .01% chance of killing you per year.
This is reflected in our legal institutions. If you kill a person accidentally, even through neglect, that is involuntary manslaughter, but if you kill deliberately, that is murder.
9/11 was an extra 20% on top of US murders in 2001. The Paris attacks also clock in at an extra 20% of the murder rate in France. Larger versions of sophisticated ambushes like the ones in Paris or Mumbai could very conceivably run up death tolls in the thousands. These people would kill millions of us if they could, so why exactly should we let down our guard?
Not to mention that murder is not the totality of terrorism's effects. When people critical of Islam are repeatedly targeted by terrorists, we all lose our freedom to speak our minds. We live in societies almost completely free of political violence, which has allowed an amazing flourishing of industry, technology, and culture. Terrorism is a huge threat to that. Europe in particular has a serious problem on their hands, given how many European-born Muslims are alienated from and hostile to Western society.
>is a direct consequence of social, economical and educational issues and a by product of policies, laws, politics and visions.
Huh? Isn't this true for any societal issue?
>"I'm sorry to say, but the Brussels attack, this would have instantly sorted out the terrorists before they came into the terminal, and similarly the concert in Paris," he says. "If it had been on the doors there, it would have stopped people getting in."
The terrorists who attacked the Bataclan didn't arrive as simple concert goers, they had AK-47s and shot their way in.
So you would be able to cause disruption AND get innocents locked up by simply covertly dabbing innocents in a crowd.
2. Is it possible to create a way to make many people catch this residue ?
Now to read the article.
Problem? People blowing themselves up on airplanes. Solution: Check them for bombs before they board the airplane.
Next Problem? People blowing themselves up in the lines before the bomb check in the airport. Solution: Check people outside the airport.
Next Problem? People blowing themselves up in the lines outside the airport Solution: Check people for bombs before they board the trains for the airport.
Next Problem? ...
s/[airplanes|airports|trains]/<crowded place>/g
Apparent Actual Problem? Crowds of people are hard to protect without making the crowds live's very uncomfortable.
Actual problem? People want to blow themselves up in crows of people.
Solution: Spend more effort making the world a place in which people do not like blowing themselves up anymore and/or in which they are too lazy to be motivated to do it.
Plan?
First, get news media to lift their embargo on trying to understand the motivations of people who perpetrate these awful attacks. Right now, it seems the only acceptable explanation is comic-book evil plus religious prejudice ("they hate our freedoms!"). This is basically a taboo on the application of reason, and we'll get nowhere until it goes away.
Second, reflect a little on the possible motivations of these people.
Third, I suspect, attempt to persuade Western governments to stop (or significantly scale back) blowing people up, murdering them without trial, etc, in other parts of the world. Best estimates for the body count in Iraq, for example, are in the many hundreds of thousands, and many of those cannot be combatants. I absolutely condemn terrorism, but if I were a terrorist, I'm pretty sure this would be my motivation.
Speaking of which, the dumbest NYT editorial I've read in the past decade was their nonsensical insistence on airport-style security for "international trains" in Europe.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/opinion/heroes-thwart-a-tr...
Trains are not an especially interesting target for terrorists! I have no idea how this piece could have been written without any of the editors putting the tiniest bit of thought into the basic premise.
All they need is for it to be installed in ONE airport and then they can say "Hey, look. They've got it installed because they are anti-terror. Look at you. You don't have one. You know what that looks like to all of us? Yeah, you are pro-terror. To be anti-terror you need this device."
Any politician who gets one of these installed using government anti-terror funds! Sweeeet! They can strut around telling everyone how much money they are spending to foil terrorists and ACTUALLY HAVE A BOX THEY CAN POINT AT. <press release/photo shoot>
That, of course, ignores a central lesson of the Brussels attacks: They happened before security. This device might make it reasonably hard to get explosives into an airport building and concerts halls (because thousands theatres like the Bataclan are totally going to invest millions in these devices and the necessary physical reconstruction), but there are plenty of other buildings where large numbers of people congregate, including busy streets that will be impossible to protect like this.
Also, having a mechanism to seal your targets inside during an attack is totally never going to be abused by the bad guys (and if you evacuate on a trigger, you just need a few guys with AKs outside the exits).
That said, I'm sure there are good applications for an effective non-intrusive explosives detector (eg in making airport security smoother) -- these attacks just ain't it.
Did I mention that my rock is on sale?
- cost a lot of money by forcing events to be cancelled;
- enforce more invasive/costly security measures;
- diminush the value of the security mesure and pass a bomb in.
People lives their lives according to different narratives. There is a fire-and-sword Muslim narrative, a quiet-life Muslim narrative, various Western narratives. Some-one living their life according to the fire-and-sword Muslim narrative is a bad guy by many other narratives. But that doesn't liberate them to be a bad guy by their own standards. They still have to be the good guy in their own head.
They have to be the hero, not the ass-hole. They cannot just be a nihilist who wrecks stuff to make things miserable for every-one. There has to be a sense that they are a warrior, fighting bad guys.
Perhaps it is as simple as attacking a cafe where they serve alcohol or a venue where the music is haram, or a business district where they charge interest on loans. I don't really get the inner logic, but I'm sure there is one and it constrains the kind of attacks they can make.
Modern society is incredibly dependent on lots of complex systems with moving parts all functioning at high capacity, it wouldn't take a lot to get things wobbling.
And that's just Iraq - there is also Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria[2], Somalia...
[1] https://www.iraqbodycount.org
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/03/us-led-air-stri...
Tony Blair had some good thoughts on this lately: ""The centre has become flabby and unwilling to take people on. We concede far too much. There's this idea that you're part of an elite if you think in terms of respectful tolerance towards other people. It's ridiculous [...] You have to give a real solution and not one which is populist but false. If you don't give a solution, and you leave people with a choice between what I would call a bit of flabby liberalism and the hardline, they'll take the hardline I'm afraid." Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/education-35862598
Sorry, but Tony Blair is a war criminal - why on earth would anyone care what he has to say?
But we've ended up in a position where killing people because they stepped onto your drug dealing territory will get you a mention on the evening news, followed by a trial by jury, while everyone gets on with their lives.
But killing people because you believe you're in a holy war will get you wall to wall news coverage for several days, any associates in foreign countries will be summarily killed by drone attack, and whatever particular tactics you used (shoe bomb, liquid explosives in drinks bottle, attacking outspoken news publication) will be memorialised across the globe within days in the form of updated security procedures or public reaction.
I don't particularly fear being killed by a religious fanatic, it's so rare it would be irrational to fear that. But I do fear the disintegration of my open and free society due to a social engineering hack called "Terrorism".
Your view of how HN moderation has changed is quite wrong. PG would have banned you many times over (and IIRC actually did).
Even the narrow automatic one-way sluice doors[2] increasingly popular as you leave the secure area of an airport only ever seem to cause a queue when some idiot tries to go back, and security has to reset them.
When there's a queue at security/immigration it's because the checkpoint is understaffed (or otherwise under-provisioned), not because there's a checkpoint.
1: http://cdn.kone.com/www.kone.co.uk/Images/49562_Entrance_dou...
2: http://www.recorduk.co.uk/images/getImage?t=product&img=imag...
This is rather sensationalist. There are infinite ways that anyone with a bit of intelligence could hurt or kill large numbers of people with small arms, explosives, chemicals, vehicles etc - and yet we see time and time again that terrorists usually display extreme incompetence (e.g. underpants bomber). The few terrorists that there are, just aren't very good at it.
The idea of terrorists getting hold of a nuke and actually being able to use it effectively is, frankly, ridiculous.
There are many more-likely but still catastrophic scenarios. A bigger Paris/Mumbai-style attack could kill thousands. An attack on the Hoover Dam or a chemical plant could also kill thousands and cause billions of dollars of economic damage.
Sure, but let's say we take the "stop freaking out about it" approach and it enables further mobilization. Suddenly those things change in a hurry.
> The idea of terrorists getting hold of a nuke and actually being able to use it effectively is, frankly, ridiculous.
Unless a terrorist organization is able to morph into a pseudo-state. Which sounds a little less ridiculous than it did five years ago.
The point is primarily that chastising fear/effort/resources/counterattacks based only on the current statistical threat level is short-sighted.
Probably because most airports don't have security before entering. For those that do, there are indeed large queues outside. Mumbai airport is one such example.
Devices like this, or indeed body scanners, just add to the security theatre that makes corporations money and allows our politicians to further continue the narrative of fear that allows them to get away with almost anything.
