Very true but I don't know if people can use this reasoning rationally. I know a well known news site that gets posted here often. That ran a big piece on how rare terrorism is and how you shouldn't worry about it at all. But then ran a bunch of stories freaking out about mass shootings. I'm sure the reverse situation probably happens on conservative outlets.
I tried to explain to somebody else here [0] already - "[This establishes] a frame in which stressors are measured solely by their impact on fatality. The extra attention given to terrorism relates more to the conservative fear of losing their 'way of life'. Attempting to measure both of these things solely in relation to their impact on fatality misunderstands the reasons for fear over terrorism and creates a communication problem between the left and right."
Effectively the reason terrorism appears to over-dominate the public sphere is that it does so for different reasons than the ones that are visible to you. You can mitigate these reasons but first you have to acknowledge them (otherwise you're just preaching to the choir.)
An example I have in mind is gang related murders in US (e.g. Chiraq). Their scale is greater than all terrorist events in US put together, yet the media/popular reaction to it is orders of magnitude less. It might not be obvious to everyone, but we're quite picky as to when to get terrified.
So it goes. Terror attacks provide opportunities for special interest groups to advance their agenda while public is frightened and irrational. Makes you think about the implicit beneficiaries of terrorism, doesn't it?
Yes. This is most obvious when comparing say an "ISIS inspired gun attack that killed 3 people" vs a ransom mass shooting attack where 20 died. The former is way more mediatized reported on, while on the latter it's recommended "not to politicize the event." But for the terror attack every war-nut and surveillance nut come out to call for bigger military budgets and more surveillance.
A crime's motive determines in part how you understand it and how you prevent it. Terrorism isn't random; it is focused on a particular goal and planned in advance. Unhinged mall shooters won't be stopped by coordinated intelligence gathering, and they can't be investigated for links to other such shooters. Any similarity between such acts and terrorism is superficial at best and requires that you ignore the crime's context. A media that doesn't distinguish the two will either trivialize terrorism or needlessly sensationalize random violent acts.
Yeah, I don't think it's as much a "widespread fear" as much as "widely accepted as a legitimate excuse for exceptional acts by government".
Most people aren't really that terrorized, but when the government (which is pretty distinct from median Americans) does stuff that's unprecedented or otherwise eyebrow-raising, it's generally accepted by most as an explanation.
I think it's more of a circumstance where it's made to seem that society cares a lot about preventing terrorism (via media channels), so individuals go along with stuff thinking that most OTHER people are afraid/terrorized/in crisis, even if the majority is not terrorized/apathetic/et c.
Interestingly, this state of affairs is also congruent with it then seeming to foreigners like the US population is actively afraid, because there's no good way to stop the media message at the borders.
But it's a fact that we're terrible at evaluating how likely/dangerous terrorism is. We percieve far more risk than there actually is.
Terrorism is designed to play to our cognitive biases, as is the news, as is politics. A triumvirate of douchegoblins taking advantage of our inability to correctly assess risk.
I understand that is a real problem but you should know terrorism is not like the others. It's almost never about the absolute numbers of injuries or deaths.
Acts of terror (the number of them) follow an exponential curve culminating in civil conflict. The objective of terror isn't to kill large numbers of enemies, it is to stress society into dragging one faction into battling the other.
That is why you should be more worried about terrorism than slippery showers. It scales differently. Violence is a contagion.
People's intuitions about this are actually correct. Bear in mind I dislike both the media and democracy! Sometimes what the 'man in the street' thinks is more accurate than an expert opinion, and that is because intuition is more holistic than a collection of expert opinions in specific fields conjoined together.
The irrational fear about "terr'ists" the parent post is getting at, though, seems to rarely have anything to do with cataclysmic events like nuclear weapons these days. I literally hear people I know talk about keeping their guard up around Muslims because they're afraid of knife attacks, or you see the TSA freaking out about people pulling their clear plastic bag containing travel size toothpaste out of their suit case when this particular airport doesn't require you to do that. Statistically, individual acts of terrorism like that are indeed exceptionally unusual.
A lot of issues are met with the mindset of "It would never happen to me". Terrorists blowing something up make the front pages, so people think it might happen to them (even though the odds of it are tiny). Slow erosions of civil liberties usually do not make the front pages, so people don't pay much attention and assume that only bad people are going to be arrested, denied due process, shot, or otherwise the victim of a resulting injustice.
A lot of issues related to freedoms and civil rights also take second place to much more immediate practical concerns, particularly in an economic downturn, like whether your kid has a good school to go to, or whether your parent gets looked after properly at hospital. The old "It's the economy, stupid" line is as true in politics today as it ever was.
To be fair, it is also true in the West today that just as the risk of being a victim of terrorism is low, so the risk of being a victim of government abuse or incompetence in applying these anti-terrorism measures is also low. A rational and objective citizen looking at the practical reality right now might consider that neither issue is that significant and there really are much more important things to worry about.
The strongest arguments for promoting civil liberties and reducing government powers are generally those of equality (just because something bad is unlikely to happen to you, it doesn't mean it's unlikely to happen to someone equally innocent but in a less fortunate position) and long term risk (just because today's governments and security services and police forces don't routinely abuse these capabilities and legal powers on a wide scale, that does not mean tomorrow's won't, and history shows that the risk of such abuse is real and the consequences can be catastrophic).
The statistics are always misinterpreted; they can't be considered in the same domain. Terrorists fall in the risk domain that is subject to tail events. Toddlers with guns don't. In plain English, you're not going to see a 10x increase in deaths one year from toddlers playing around with guns, while that's very possible with terrorist activity. In fat-tailed domains like terrorism, single, extreme events make up the entire mean, so just because something bad doesn't happen for a short period of time doesn't mean it's any safer. All it takes is one extreme terrorist event to do some serious damage.
Your view attributes much rationality to how people are acting.
My view of it is that humans routinely miscalculate risk and behave quite irrationally from a risk-minimization perspective. At the same time, a public that is largely apathetic about politics in general is easily moved by fear-mongering, us-vs-them rhetoric, etc. -- like any fad, terrorism simply captures the imagination of some people.
Attempts to stop the overreaction suffer from the typical challenge: the majority who don't care about terrorism care about the issue less than the vocal minority for whom it's a very big (as in scary or as in profitable) deal.
Also, due to the government's habit of paying for terrorism prevention, the typical corruption/overspending problems happen far more easily than they would in a decentralized system. And, due to the political nature of terrorism prevention, our leaders work to minimize the extent to which they would likely be blamed for an attack rather than working to make us feel/be safer.
Quibble: the terrorists don't want your life, they want your attention, and more specifically, your panicky attention. Political reactions like Bloomberg's help keep the terrorism availability cascade rolling.
They are just about exactly the wrong way to respond.
There are a few important facts about terrorism that should put our fear in context:
* Terrorists tend to be spectacularly inept.
* Terrorist organizations tend to collapse over time, through various combinations of frustration, attrition and overreach.
* The methods of terrorism tend to be highly ineffective at killing people.
On the same day that the Boston bombings killed three people, approximately 40 Americans country-wide were murdered for various non-terrorist reasons. Also on the same day, approximately 140 Americans died via guns (this includes suicides, which make up two-thirds of the total, and accidental deaths).
We can keep going: for example, approximately 85 Americans are killed every day in automobile accidents. My point is that the fear that we feel about terrorism is utterly disproportionate to the risk that we will experience it - especially compared to the kinds of things we rarely think about but really should worry about.
By no means do I mean to dismiss or demean or make light of the trauma, injury and death experienced by the people who experienced the Boston Marathon terror attack. However, it would only compound the tragedy if we allow such an event to transform our civilization from one that esteems liberty, autonomy and privacy into one that sacrifices those things for needless expedience.
I don't buy your logic, the terror "busts" rarely make a the news more than just a passing mention these days. So I doubt it has much psychological effect on the public. Also very few, outside of maybe conservative talk radio, said the San Bernardino shooters were "foreign." The line was always "home grown terror with possible ties to (or inspired by) ISIS."
Pretty much everyone I've seen recognizes the risk of terror is far greater among people already living inside the U.S. (or Europe), "sleepers" or otherwise, usually first or second generation immigrants.
In terms of "far right" terror groups, that's a different story entirely, and usually those groups are vocal in their communities (making them easier to track;) with the exception of "lone wolves," which are harder to track because they usually don't have international connections or travel records (or domestic ties to groups) that would raise flags.
The Times Square bomb was reported by a bystander who was on guard (certainly in part) because the media has effectively kept the terrorist threat fresh in our minds.
He noticed that a car was filling up with smoke. Even if had never heard of terrorism before, he still would have called the police because that's what people do when they notice a fire nearby.
pretending like the problem doesn't exist hardly seems like the answer either.
There are 300,000,000 people in the US. On any given day, tens of thousands of them will notice something that looks like terrorism to them. On almost every day of the year, every single one of those tens of thousands of people will be wrong. Completely and totally wrong. As a result, those people will become extremely anxious and will cause law enforcement to waste time and hassle innocent people needlessly.
We need to face facts: the vast majority of people are completely incapable of distinguishing terrorist activity so what they report as suspicious is often nothing but an artifact of their own prejudice. Terrorism has become an excuse to systematically harass out groups. And in the process, we are all made less safe because the police have to investigate these stupid incidents instead of focusing on real crimes.
I couldn't disagree more. The Times Square bomb was reported by a bystander who was on guard (certainly in part) because the media has effectively kept the terrorist threat fresh in our minds.
While terrorist attacks may be rare, the ones that are attempted are often thwarted by people simply being aware of their surroundings. Terrorism and the threat of terrorism are not just a media creation. They are real, with real people wanting to kill real people. While we shouldn't surrender our fundamental ideals and liberties on the altar of security, pretending like the problem doesn't exist hardly seems like the answer either.
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