I think we’re on the same page. I may think it is a bigger threat than you do, but we’d probably be splitting hairs. I do believe it is something serious enough that we have to be extremely vigilant and far more effective than we were in the past in terms of tracking down and disrupting the networks and organizations. But I agree that it has been used more as a political tool than is digestible.
Rationally, terrorism is less a threat to your well-being than driving in a car. People aren’t rational, of course, so it’s irrelevant.
Well, rationally the Vietnam war took less lives than cars. People have used the argument of “what takes the most lives” for years to argue that AIDS in the U.S. is a relatively trivial problem, compared to diseases that are far less publicised and which take far more lives, so I’ve never been a real fan of the body count approach to setting the bar on the seriousness of an issue.
I think you’re right, as to our perspective on this issue. That’s why I wanted to make sure to clarify my initial statement. I also agree that we absolutely have to be more effective in tracking down and eliminating the structures that enable and propogate terrorism. However, I feel it’s critically important that, as a nation, we learn how to put the risk that terrorism poses within the proper perspective.
AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease. People like to have sex without fear of death.
Well, rationally the Vietnam war took less lives than cars. People have used the argument of “what takes the most lives” for years to argue that AIDS in the U.S. is a relatively trivial problem, compared to diseases that are far less publicised and which take far more lives, so I’ve never been a real fan of the body count approach to setting the bar on the seriousness of an issue.[/quote]
And what’s all the fuss about World War I? It was the 1918 Spanish 'flu pandemic that really piled up the body counts…
Taking this logic to its extreme we might argue that one shouldn’t even bother to notice when one is at war, and more effort should always be put into curing diseases. That’s a reductio ad absurdum but where is the line drawn? :?
(Of course, in many cases especially in the past, curing certain diseases just wasn’t/isn’t technologically feasible, whereas one can always take action to try to deal with human enemies.)
I’m actually pretty mad about the Flu shot shortage. I mean, there was plenty of warning about it. It’s yet another failure of this administration. Kerry could be smart to harp on it because the elderly vote big and they care a great deal. So do women. Other than that, Lackey could be right that hammering a single message might be a better strategy but the problem with Bush is…
which fuck up do you hammer? Too many choices.
WWI/flu isn’t a very good analogy:
WWI killed 5 million and wounded 12 million; the flu pandemic killed 20 to 40 million. Multiplier of 4 to 8.
Automobile fatalities are about 40 thousand a year, every year, while 9/11 was 3,000. Multiplier of 13 to 75*13=975, depending on how frequently you think 9/11-level events will happen.
Ok, but let’s take this to the logical extreme. After 9/11, a president says “This was a tragic attack but more lives can be saved if we use all that government money not to invade Afghanistan or hunt down Al Qaeda, but to improve highway safety. Ergo I am going to urge Congress to pass a radical new Highway Safety bill that will save 10 times as many lives per year as 9/11 cost.”
Most everyone would declare this president stark raving mad. Would everyone be wrong in feeling this way? If not why not?
One way to approach the problem is of course that an attack on a nation is about more than just a body count. (Though one does need to cross a certain threshold of corpses; i.e. previous attacks such as the Cole, Kenya & Tanzania embassies, etc., did not have a response on the scale of 9/11.)
The other obvious point is that some things just aren’t preventable/curable. You can’t stop all traffic accidents, you can’t cure all diseases (at least not right away), etc. Well you could stop all traffic accidents but only by abolishing the automobile, which would destroy vast chunks of Western society’s infrastructure and probably initiate a global depression of unimaginable scope.
We have always played a bloody price for trade & transport… shipwrecks, trainwrecks, car accidents, and so forth. it is indeed one of those things we just accept.
The question isn’t normally framed in an “either/or” way, of course. One wants to do everything – cure disease and limit traffic accidents and kill terrorists etc. This is a broad rather than deep allocation of funds and attention to a wide spectrum of problems.
You mean statistically. Statistics are a poor measure of rationality.
Gordon, I was trying to make a point about how people’s priority preferences aren’t rational by any measure, not to argue with our preferences.
But it is interesting to critically examine those priorities, don’t you think? Just as an exercise you know.
Well it’s important to keep it in perspective. Think about everything that gets done to protect us from terrorism, a lot of it bad… the alert system? The Patriot Act? Etc.? For the sake of protecting us from something that, in it’s worst year by a long shot, killed one twelfth the people the flu kills every year. The flu. It’s crazy.
Keep in mind if terrorists ever do get a nuke we could be looking at a body count in the tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands depending on where it is detonated. That’s a potentially real threat.
No doubt, but tens of thousands could still be less than the flu for that year. And it wouldn’t be an annual event.
It’s just a question of not getting carried away and letting our fears get the better of us.
In dealing with this “war on terror” we are importing modes of thought from traditional war. When Japan attacked us in 1941 I don’t think we viewed it strictly in terms of body count or even potential body count. We might have “not overreacted” and decided that, since only a few thousand died in Pearl Harbor, and more die all the time in car accidents or of polio or what have you, we shouldn’t fight a war against Japan unless we really believed they could invade us and remove our government system. (Of course many did believe such an invasion possible at the time.)
We fought the war anyway for many reasons, not least of which is, when a nation is attacked it fights back. This is just how it’s done, same as if a bully in the schoolyard punches you, you punch back. Looking back through history, a nation that does not defend itself will tend to stop being a nation at all after a while, and so as a matter of course one must maintain a ready response to any attack. Body counts, or the lack thereof, are not the only consideration. (But again, a certain “threshold” of body counts does help to grease the emotional wheels in setting this process in motion and generating the necessary outrage = political will.)
Transplanting this thought pattern to 9/11we have gotten in the habit of viewing Al Qaeda as a kind of enemy nation, rather than a bunch of dudes with plans to blow things up. We (well, many of us, and most of our political leadership) have concluded that, just as with previous “real” wars, we are in a conflict and it is worth seeing that conflict through to victory regardless of how many or how few individuals die along the way.
The problem again is this whole “asymmetric threat” thing. It is now possible for small groups of people who do not represent nations, to provoke the same responses that were once reserved for clashes of nation against nation. Whether such responses are appropriate is, it seems, debatable.
Yes, but it’s also a threat with litlte or not relevance to the current anti-terrorism framework - where we suck up to all the people who might actually give them the nukes.
What people are actually scared of, if you ask them, is regular bombs in shopping malls and whatnot. Which again, isn’t rational; if they’re going to be worried about anything, they should worry about nukes and nothing else. Do they? No.
So why are people worried about the flu? Cancer kills far more people each year. For that matter, so do cars (a la Jason.) So who cares about the flu? We probably pay too much for air safety also, since so very few people die in plane crashes. We could cut back on the safety costs in aircraft and accept, oh, say about 1000 people a year on average - maybe none some years, perhaps 3000 one year.
I just think that once you start trying to reduce things to pure stats you can make all kinds of silly arguments.
Just out of genuine curiosity - did the admnistration have plenty of warning about this? Chiron’s problem was announced around the first of October (my first hit on a search was CNN, October 6th.) It was an unexpected problem, as far as I could see, due to an issue with a small portion of their production, but it shut them down and they were scheduled to produce about fifty percent of the U.S. flu shots. I’m not sure how that can be legitimately tied to Bush et al. (am I missing something? I admit I didn’t due an extensive search beyond what I heard when this first became news.)
But in many ways, didn’t something similar happen? Didn’t the President effectively go up in front of the American people and say that “This was a tragic attack but more lives can be saved if we use all that govenment money and manpower not to keep rebuilding Afghanistan or hunt down Al Qaeda, but instead move most of both into invading and occupying Iraq?”