2006.08.11
Terrorism and Statistics
Being on vacation and all I failed until today to hear about a foiled terrorist attempt to blow up several planes using liquified explosives and an iPod. I’m happy they caught people who would do these terrible things but it still reminds me of an article I wrote over a year ago that shows you have a significantly better chance of dying in your bathtub or by lightning than you do by the hands of a terrorist. You can find that article here (reprinted here).
Kind of funny that just a few days ago bOING bOING posted a link to a PDF that has the same point of view and noted that the point of terrorism is to create terror, not to kill people. This is true. Yet I know in the coming days and weeks I will be supremely irritated when all we will hear over and over again from our governments and the media is that we are under attack, that our way of life is threatened, that if we don’t spend billions of dollars on senseless and useless security measures we’re all going to die, and the pundits saying if I don’t agree with that then I’m at best misguided and at worst a traitor.
Terrorists are criminals. Gramma getting on a plane to visit her son across the country and bringing water with her is not. Never-you-mind if she wants to listen to some music instead of her neighbor on the plane.
Dear anti-terrorist brigade: please start using your brains instead of your panic. You are letting the terrorists win without even killing anyone. Thank you.
2 Comments Categorized: thoughts
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2 Responses to “Terrorism and Statistics”
- NHK says (August 11th, 2006 at 01:39:45 )
The suspects arrested in London had been under survielance since December last according to the BBC; Okay, fine, MI5 acted jointly with Pakistan on certain intelligence and a bunch of people who were, it appears, planning to do some very bad things are now under lock and key.
No, there would not have been a dry run of any dastardly plot in a few days. Rather, a dry run was allegedly planned.
Disaster was not narrowly averted. The criminals were allowed to scheme while evidence and further intelligence were being gathered. And so, disaster was apparently averted by a gaping wide margin circa Christmas 2005.
I certainly agree with you about the hip granny with her iPod. On a related note, I got a call from cmatt today; she claimed she’d gouge her eyes out if she had to check her iPod en route to MAN. I told her I thought the heightened security nonsense will have largely abated by the time we fly to the UK this Winter as the lemmings will hopefully have been appeased by then. My question is why the US and UK governments insist on catering to the stupid and spooking the fearful (not to mention irritating the crap oot of the rest of us) rather than attempting to educate them as to what steps are taken *outside* the airport to make air travel (somewhat) safer. But no, instead we have a carnival of idiocy at the airports, and I suspect, several TSA halfwits drinking abandoned bottles of single-malt and Château Margaux paid for by rightfully pissed off passengers.
- douglas says (August 14th, 2006 at 15:46:51 )
It looks like I’m not alone in this perspective. A couple days after I wrote this article a post appeared here that says much the same. It’s a good read, unless you’re one of those people cowering under your bed with your security blanket and an empty bottle of Xanax.
