Hacker News Reader

Comment by _the_inflator | Hacker News Reader

Looking at how stuck the ship is, this could also be a new terrorist vector to attack the channel via such a „derailed“ ship.

View on HN

It does legitimately seem like you can do tremendous damage by derailing a few ships in the right spots. Bringing bombs or other small ships or something else seems doable for a terrorist organization on the face of it.

This is true more generally. When I lived in London and the IRA campaign was going on I never understood why they didn't just set fire to a few stolen vans on Euston road/City road/Waterloo bridge every morning rather than actually killing people. Would have been more effective.

What freedom fighter would throw away their life to cause a traffic jam?

And what government would cave to whats essentially a minor inconvenience

At the time, London transport was pretty much at gridlock anyway and made the city pretty hard to live in IMO. It wouldn't have taken much to threaten the major income-generating source of the country (look up the economics of the city of London).

I don't even think it requires you to throw your life away. It could just be classified as civil disobedience.

To be clear, I had no sympathy at all with the IRAs violent campaign. I'm just pointing out that committed civil disobedience could be pretty effective if you have people committed enough that they will already kill people and go to prison quite often (or blow themselves up for that matter).

Wasn’t this the plot of an Ian Banks novel? Canal dreams. Imagine die hard, with the Bruce Willis part being a middle-aged, female, Japanese cellist.

Shh! The modern world is based on the fact a few really mad stupid people don't realise how brittle the hacks we built society on are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com