whatever (or however good) the motive, reason, or justification
... I'm not sure going around killing people really counts as a "win".
(haberman is singing in the changes, Tue 3 May 2011, 16:52, 1 reply)

No, but
taking away the central figure of al Quaeda certainly counts as something positive.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 3 May 2011, 19:56, closed)

Hmmmm, I struggle with this

I was reading something today which mentioned that 33,000 people died on the roads in the US last year. 33,000. It just seems that people hugely lose perspective. I know that it is different, because those were accidents as opposed to a deliberate act, but the scale is totally different.

How about the drug violence in Central America atm? Mexico is still a mess and it's spreading into Guatemala, El Salvador, the whole way down. All fuelled by US demand for cocaine. I don't know how much coverage it gets over there but it almost never gets even mentioned here.

It just seems to me that, as morally bad as it is, it really isn't that big a deal. Your odds of being killed by terrorists are statistically insignificant. So the only way that it works as a tactic is if everyone keeps banging on about it and telling us how scared we should be by it. Which we shouldn't.

As I said, it's not that I lack sympathy for victims and their families, more that there are bigger problems in the world to get angry about, and that getting angry and scared about this one is the only way in which the people responsible for these attacks can win in any way.

/EDIT btw, I will quite happily put my hand up and say that if someone I loved was killed, or it was my town that was attacked, I wouldn't be quite so sanguine about the whole thing. Preposterous hypocrisy, but there you go

/Edit2 Sorry, turning into a bit of a stream of conscious rant. I think that the media have a lot to answer for in creating a climate of fear, but governments have hardly tried to dispel them. Case in point; dirty bombs. Absolutely useless as any kind of radioactive device, but was that reported? Was is buggery.

As for Bin Laden's death changing the world.... There is a documentary by Adam Curtis called the Rise of the Politics of Fear. It's excellent (IMO). My main reason for mentioning it is that in it he describes how, after the Soviet Union broke up, the western publics were surprised at the contrast between what they'd been told about how powerful the Soviets were, and as the truth gradually came out, how much of a shambles they were really in.

Right, I've rambled enough. Hope that some of that makes sense. Or is at least coherent enough to read. I shall await the potential flaming.
( kappynitty doubled your entendre on, Tue 3 May 2011, 21:06, closed)