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Article on difference between feeling secure and being secure
Some interesting thoughts by Bruce Schneier. Check out the linked pieces, too, where he explores such topics as why the human brain is second-rate when it comes to logically assessing risk (the assessment appears wired into two different parts of the brain, one advanced and one primitive), why we have cognitive challenges when trying to undertake it (overestimating risks that are rare but spectacular, new risks, man-made risks, risks over which they have no control, etc.), and thus why companies, governments, etc. target making people feel safer, whether are not they are safer.
All interesting points. I remember flying out of San Fran airport after 9/11. National Guardsmen all over. Only a gunny would recognized that none were allowed to have magazines in their M-16s. Heard a rumor, not confirmed, that they weren't even allowed to have magazines with live ammo on them. Even if they did, they'd obviously be gunned down while loading. But people who didn't know enough to see that their guns were unloaded undoubtedly felt more secure.
Hat tip to reader Jerry in Detroit.
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well, flash, consider that the well-being of your nest egg depends on the well-being of people on the other side of the country (people who don't give a shit about you) that are potentially directly in the line of fire. not only are they in the line of fire, but there are attacks on record against them. you personally attest to that here, "much more of a possibility than i would have thought."
so. how badly do you rely on that pension? care to call into question your ability to assess risk? it's your hide, man, not mine.
previous to a few contemporary tragedies, terrorism was merely a description of tactics. tactics that, at the very least, helped wage genocide against native american tribes and then freed the colonies. or so i was taught.
it's now a kind of categorical buzzword that carries symbolic baggage -- islamic, freedom-hating, anti-occupation, take your pick -- and shortcuts to a specific issue that we now pay far more attention to than the author suggests the evidence warrants. it's not a dissertation; it's an op-ed to introduce you to cognitive bias and security theory.
The terrs have alreday won. We aren't free to travel without submitting to unconstitutional searches, being on a list maybe according to rules we aren't allowed to know what those rules are, its entirely up to the TSA jerkoff's individual discretion. They won't arm the pilots. They won't seal off the border with Mexico. That "smart"fence consisting of bollards every twenty feet and cameras and motion detectors is working so well.
The whole Barry O campaign is running on the same delusion that feelings=reality.
The discussion in the article is a microcosm of much silliness by our savants in the poltical class, and unfortunately more and more people are growing up being told the same thing.
Interesting book from 1946, Ideas Have Consequences, by Richard Weaver. Read it now, you can see exactly why and where we are headed. And things were comparatively sane then...
I completely follow the point in this article that there are people who will exaggerate danger and make up false threats for their own gain. But I don't follow his main example of this, which, according to the author, is the threat of terrorism.
We know two things about the threat of Islamic terrorism. First, we know it happened before, 3,000 were killed and my 401K tanked. Second, the Islamic terrorists would like to do some more of that, and on an even bigger scale.
So I don't think I am guilty of feeling more insecure than I really am. It's not that I think I'm going to die everyday when I go out the door. But I know it's much more of a possibility than I would have thought before 9/11. I also know that even if I am safe in my bunker out west and only a bunch of liberals in New York are killed, that my retirement nest egg will take a big hit.
Besides, Rick Rescorla was among those killed on 9/11 and his death alone was an atrocity to be avenged and forever guarded against anything similar happening again.