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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Large scale responses to purely imagined nightmares do not come without consequences to civility and society. On the contrary, it elicits a response to something that will probably not happen as if it actually already occurred!

The purpose of terrorism is to elicit this exact response. When we have the same reaction whether they show up or not, their goals are met without any effort or risk on their part!

Extraordinary success. They've gotten all they asked for and didn't have to lift a finger. Good job for them!

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>The purpose of terrorism is to elicit this exact response.

I don't buy this argument. Sure, you defeat your enemy in war by either destroying his legions or sapping his will to fight, but the last thing that you want him to do is take defensive positions that will hamper your attacks while being minimally invasive to his productivity and happiness.

Now, if fear causes your opponent to take self-defeating measures, like ones that severely hamper economic activity or suppress individual freedom, that's a different story. It comes down to what the specific measures are.

War and terrorism are different things.

If I am amassing political power by putting people in fear of say, the United States, I ought to depict the US as a bunch of people to be feared.

So I show the political leaders saying that they want to kill us and I get more power. I show all the repressive state tactics of the Americans on their own people, I get more power. "Look", I say "Even at their sports games, the evil Americans treat their own citizens like they are in a prison!"

Make no mistake, much of this is puppetry in the same way that the cold war, or terrorism, or the reds etc was used as a mechanism to gain political power in the US.

Extreme things like this give an assist to facilitate a foreign orchestration of political attacks on the other (in this case, the US) and help them consolidate power. It's geopolitically and intrapolitically counter-productive --- well that is unless you are trying to control people through the forced-hand of FUD and not their actual consent.

If this is still hard, think of WW2. It was justified historically because of how Germans treated the Jews. Everyone is on board with the presumed necessary large scale destruction of Europe because of the holocaust. It was the internal horrific politics of the Nazis on people they considered foreigners which justify this.

If you want your people on board to what they think is a good, justifiable moral war, depicting your enemy as horrific and anti-freedom is a great effective way to do this. This only has to be true in the minds of the people you need to persuade - not objectively true in any sense.

These tactics enfold hawkism and make a mockery of diplomacy and civility. What kind of world do you want?

One where terrorism campaigns are a smashing success for winning local support or one where they don't actually work so people stop doing them?

>Make no mistake, much of this is puppetry in the same way that the cold war, or terrorism, or the reds etc was used as a mechanism to gain political power in the US.

It turns out that protecting people from their enemies is (sometimes) good politics. It's very much a desired quality of a democracy, that politicians pursuing their own self-interests will be driven to pursue the interests of the people. Unfortunately, it can also work when the enemies are imagined or exaggerated. Again, we can only look to the particular circumstances for the answer. I take strong issue with your particular implication that the Cold War threat from the Soviet Union was in any sense overstated. If anything, McCarthy was more right about Soviet infiltration than he was ever given credit for until recently. That doesn't justify blacklists and the horrifying HUAC sessions; those are the self-defeating measures I was talking about.

>So I show the political leaders saying that they want to kill us and I get more power. I show all the repressive state tactics of the Americans on their own people, I get more power. "Look", I say "Even at their sports games, the evil Americans treat their own citizens like they are in a prison!"

There's a lot of clever propaganda against the US, but I can't imagine this being a big winner. And anyway, the ability of demagogues to twist our actions for their propaganda purposes cannot be an overriding consideration. The US is very rich and very powerful, so people will hate us no matter what we do. And if they can't find any facts to base it on, they'll just make some up. Defending 50,000 people's lives from an attack has to be the primary consideration.

Military protection is the primary quality of feudalism, not democracy.

The cold war threat from the soviet union was factually incorrect and had many theories like the domino theory which are irrefutably wrong. It was more about placing neoclassical economics as the only framework to think about markets. And if you don't know what I'm talking about it's because it was a huge success.

And if you don't think anti American propaganda is what created groups like ISIL, I strongly advise you to do a very small bit of research just about anywhere - Wikipedia is probably fine. Heck, even conservapedia might be OK here.

And finally, there's thousands of attack vectors daily. You have the subway system, theme parks, universities, tourist attractions, busy intersections, elementary schools, transport hubs, parades, celebrity at the local book store, water towers, shopping malls during the holidays, festivals, sporting events, music concerts...

The probability of terrorism is very likely p < 0.001. More people will die traveling to and from the events by many orders of magnitude.

Just like how you'll stop mass shootings is when you stop making the shooters celebrities, you'll stop terrorism when the entire world stops reacting in batshit crazy ways to it.

>If this is still hard, think of WW2. It was justified historically because of how Germans treated the Jews. Everyone is on board with the presumed necessary large scale destruction of Europe because of the holocaust. It was the internal horrific politics of the Nazis on people they considered foreigners which justify this.

This is just not true. The plight of the Jews was not a major factor in the United States entering the war, or in the war at all for that matter. The US entered in response to a direct attack, though we could say that that was just the tipping point that escalated America's involvement to outright war. The underlying factors were the defense of allied democracies, and particularly the fear of a hostile international order where America would stand alone against the massive totalitarian regimes in Germany, Russia, and Japan, who likely would have controlled the rest of the world (and thus people and resources, and thus industrial capacity, and thus military might) between them. As for how we look back at it, Lincoln's formulation for the Civil War could apply just as well:

[...]that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Correct.

I referred to it as historically. I did not claim that the 1945 policies justified a 1941 entry.

Unlike with say Desert Storm, the Spanish American War, Vietnam, Iraq round 2, Afghanistan, or the Korean War, nobody I've seen argues in hindsight that we should have stayed out of the European theater in WW2.

I think that the point of terrorism is fear itself - hence the name terrorism.

If they've gotten the population to behave in a fearful manner, they've accomplished their goals, regardless of economic impact, loss of life, etc. The whole point is to elicit an emotional response and establish (psychological) dominance.

I don't necessarily think that prudent security measures are a bad thing, but some aspects of post 9/11 security like the "see something, say something" program or the security theater at airports are absolutely playing into the terrorist's hands. Good security is generally invisible.

The point isn't to make the enemy protect itself though. It is to get the enemy to give into ones demands.

Alright I'll bite, what did al qaeda demand and what does ISIL demand?

That no one should criticize or make fun of islam seems to be one thing, if you look at the targets they have gone after. I assume they also want The West not to interfere when they create a space for themselves by killing and/or displacing other peoples in the Middle East.

They demand the removal of Western influences from their society, the removal of current governments in the Middle East (and elsewhere), and the establishment of an expansionist caliphate with Sharia law in their place. Terrorism is not their goal, it is their method.

>The purpose of terrorism is to elicit this exact response.<

I agree with this statement...

>bombing of the Super Bowl would be both a symbolic and a devastating coup for a terrorist.<

I agree with this statement...

>precautions are exactly what I'd like to see.<

I agree with this statement...

Precautions...what other reasonable option is there?

Terrorism's modus operandi is the disruption of an enemy's "comfort zone"....if you don't want your zone disrupted, for whatever reason you are forced to do what you can to prevent it from happening...

"Terrorists" are viewed as extremists...unwilling to work through conventional societal means to effect change, or achieve an end...they lack the consensus necessary to coalesce majority opinion...they act, non-the-less, in brutal ways...

Their willingness to act brutally, and kill innocents, ultimately makes putting a bounty their heads perfectly acceptable...

Surveillance has been around for years...there are good and bad aspects, the acceptable and the unacceptable...this is being sorted out globally, not just in the U.S....

Look, I'm not trying to say that we have to turn into a police state. Far from it. But it's within reason to increase security at a major symbolic event with thousands of people.

The existing security has worked fine. There's already police with guns and security all over a sporting event.

In real-politik, the existing systems are apparently sufficient.

> The existing security has worked fine.

Agreed 100%. But I don't know, and I'm betting you don't either - how much surveillance information has been fed from the Three Letter Agencies through backdoor measures to ensure that things have worked fine.

I'm all for being against security theater and police states. I'm not an anarchist though: I believe security forces have a valid place in society. My basic question is: "How much of the hoopla being put in place for Super Bowl 50 is reasonably lawful, useful, and coherent with the American tradition of liberty". Because I'm quite prepared to bet that a non-zero amount is, as well as a non-zero amount isn't.

Its deterrent value has worked fine. No actual attack has been attempted thus far, so you can't judge how well it "works" until then.

Reminds me of an old joke about elephant repellant. I forget exactly how it goes ...

  Person A: (something about elephant repellant)
  Person B: But there's no elephants around here!
  Person A: See? It's working!

A stroke well put by. But what if you are in elephant country, and you have both repellent and a tasty elephant snack - yet no elephants showed up. Perhaps it works? Or perhaps they are down the valley having a party. Hard to say more without fundamental knowledge. :-)

To paraphrase nassim taleb, the turkey thought his evaluation of risk was perfectly accurate, and history confirmed this notion. until thanksgiving morning.

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