There is baseless hatred. Which is based on irrational ideas. Such hate
is basically neurotic. No amount bicycles will change that. Which is
why the idea of Christian love vs. Islamic Jihad is so ridiculous.
Ppl do think about terrorism differently and make irrational decisions.
Which is why ppl cede "war powers" to the gov't to stop terrorism. And,
politians will go overboard in trying to defend their country against
terrorism. Because one mistake is one too many. Not just in lives.
But, in panic, fear, economics.
In this debate about over reacting to terrorism, I think the long term
effect of just one terror act is not taken into account.
Ex. After 9-11, the economy, especially in the NYC area took a nose
dive. The theater district was hurt terribly for a year. Restaurants
suffered for a year very badly-a bit less than theater. You could go
out on a Saturday night and find a parking spot. That's an unheard of
phenomenon in NYC. Jobs, esp. IT, just dried up as major corporations
moved all their operations out of NYC to their backup sites in
Pennsylvania. Something that was hidden quite well from the public.
That cost lots of ppl lots of jobs. Ppl without jobs don't buy. Sales
across the board went down. Scared ppl don't go shopping. Lots of ppl
were forced to move out. Couldn't pay those high rents. Landlords in
NYC got stuck with properties they couldn't rent. Another unheard of
phenomenon. So, an act of terrorism is not just about the few ppl who die.
On 12/1/2015 11:34 PM, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
On 2015-12-01, at 1:40 PM, Arshad Noor <arshad.n...@strongauth.com> wrote:
It is a "choice amongst losses" only when you believe you are in a zero-sum
game. However, there is another choice that can reduce, if not eliminate, violence.
Well sure it would be good to behave in a way that doesn’t result in people
wanting to attack you; but when looking at securing something, we should always
assume that there will be those who wish to attack.
I don’t lock my bicycle because I think that everyone is a criminal. I lock it
because I think that the chances of a criminal noticing it is high enough it
becomes worthwhile to lock it. And to continue with this analogy, saying “well,
let’s work towards a world in which everyone has all of the bicycles they need”
just doesn’t feeling like a realistic approach.
My country, the US, is being hit with small acts of domestic right wing
terrorism (one can quibble about definitions), but it isn’t organized or
funded. (And so it is exceedingly difficult to identify attackers or plots
before they act.) Whatever the merits of the kinds of foreign policy you
advocate, it really isn’t going to make this threat go away.
I bring that up only to point out that the question of terrorist-like attacks
will always remain unless one believes in some sort of utopia. But in a utopia
we wouldn’t need encryption either because nobody would try to read documents
that they weren’t supposed to. We wouldn’t need authentication and encryption
in a utopia because everyone would respect each others privacy rights without
it having to be enforced.
The questions we need to ask about “preventing terrorism” are the same
questions we ask about “preventing crime”. What powers do we give to the state,
what costs do we bear, and how much terrorism/crime are will willing to accept.
Just as we don’t give the state unlimited powers to prevent crime, and just as
we don’t build our houses with solid steel walls with no windows to prevent
crime, there are things that we shouldn’t do to prevent terrorism.
I think that a huge part of the problem is that people (and politicians) think
about terrorism in radically different ways than they think about more mundane
crime. And so returning to your point, sure it is a good idea to build a
society in which few people are drawn to crime, that doesn’t mean that we can
avoid the questions of the other choices we have to make about preventing crime.
Cheers,
-j
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