The excellent blog TechDirt, which covers intellectual property issues, flattered me by asking for my favorite TechDirt posts of the week. My thoughts include:
"If we can lose hundreds of thousands of people a year to guns and cars and cigarettes with no impact at all on national security, how can it be that something like the Boston Marathon bombing, as tragic as it was, was a national security event?"
Read the whole thing here. I think you'll enjoy TechDirt.
1 comment:
There is a strange psychological phenomenon attached to the lethality of terrorism. Low statistical probability of ever experiencing it; high level of anxiety over it. Driving is quite a bit more dangerous than al Qaeda to the average American.
I also recall an argument I had with a friend who supported the Iraq invasion who opined that in the big scheme of things, our casualties there were small and acceptable. After all, how many people are killed in car accidents each year? When I said he could apply the same logic to the 3,000 deaths of Sept. 11, 2001, he looked at me blankly and then mumbled, "That's different..."
The point is not that we should accept terrorist attacks, but that treating them as existential threats creates an insidious threat potentially much more dangerous than the terrorism itself.
Jim Cornelius
www.frontierpartisans.com
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