The town of Ballymena, in Northern Ireland, had a big scare yesterday. An unidentified “object” was found outside a police station, and duly detonated in a controlled explosion by the army due to terrorism concerns.
From a police spokesperson:
In this case, the object was outside the perimeter of the station, and away from the entrance - and totally out of place - so we therefore had concerns for the safety of members of the public as well as for police officers and staff.
The object in question? A roll of tape.
This seems to be the type of overreaction on the scale of the Boston Mooninite Scare last month.
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When this discussion comes up i always ask people:
“Do you think alqaeda, hezbulla, et al, have not struck America since 9/11 because… a) they cannot or b) they choose not ?”
Trust me, if an adolescent can enter a fast-food restaurant, mall, school, or highway over-pass with a semi-automatic, surely you believe a highly advanced organization could quite easily muster ten?, thirty?, no… probably several *hundred* individuals to do likewise, and easily on a moment’s notice. They have chosen not to poison our food supplies, disrupt or economy to point of city-level fuel and food shortages, or bomb our police stations, courts, supermarkets, or places of worship because… to do so would merely eradicate the publics’ naive misconceptions of their capabilities — and their intent.
In most place in the world, placing blinking, toy-like devices on commuter-underpasses would land you in prison — and the public? It wouldn’t even be an issue for debate.
The disneyworld of our youth is no longer.
rob@egoz.org
I basically agree with Rob, but I’m glad it was only a roll of tape and not a fully loaded Scottish haggis!
This really is getting out of control. It’s to the point now where terrorists don’t actually have to do anything any more; they can just sit back and laugh at our self-imposed paranoia.
I’m sorry, Rob, but I don’t buy it.
This is getting ridiculous - I feel like there’s so much profit to be made on paranoia. This kind of fear is an outright enemy of rational thought.
Think of the things that have been all over the news of late - terrorist attacks, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Avian Flu, mad cow disease, MySpace predators, teen rampagers… I’m not at all denying that such dangers exist, but the emotionalism attached to them is such a powerful force that they cause people to put their efforts (and their paranoia) towards them, even if it’s at the expense of more logical and probable hazards.
In Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner say that that Risk = hazard + outrage. They quote risk communications consultant Peter Sandman as saying, “When hazard is high and outrage is low, people underreact. And when hazard is low and outrage is high, they overreact.”
Reminds me of the book “Risk” (Ropeik & Gray)
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/now/oct18/book.html
They have a website here:
http://www.hcra.harvard.edu/
Fear of death-by-terror isn’t wholly irrational, and isn’t entirely emotionally driven. Heart disease, while pernicious, isn’t proactive on a one-act-massive scale, only on an individual level. And, there is no conscious, organized, systematic association of like pathogens seeking out the ripe hearts of all Americans alike, en masse. There’s none of that with heart-disease, the leading organic killer to date.
Terrorism, in contrast, is pro-active and seeks out victims of a certain demographic and geography with skill and intent — and with systemized organization.
I just don’t get why Westerners feel largely safe.
Perhaps it is because:
[] out fear or ignorance they refuse to entertain that first question i posed
[] for so long we have truly lived in a disneyworld-like society, compared to most of the planet, disproportionate to Earth’s common lifestyle
[] and, i also think, it rests in our collective inability to believe that other societies can plan and operate on the scale 15-25 years, not 1-4 (one of our biggest culture-gaps with the world’s cultures).
I think such news pieces as you posted will, one day, be held up as examples of our fantastic, unrealistic sense of security and a naive sense of how probable future terrorist activities are within our borders. I think, come the months after 9/11v2, these articles will fascinate us in a sad, angry way.”
Most people in 1980 would have never believed the USSR wouldn’t exist by the year 2000, especially the Soviets.
rob@egoz.org
Rob-
I think it’s very likely that another terrorist attack will occur, and will kill many people. However, the odds of it affecting me are very, very low - much lower than, say, the risk of heart attack.
That’s not to say I don’t care. I do feel for the people who suffer or die in terrorist attacks. However, I think it’s important to keep the problem in perspective - while I don’t doubt that there will be future attacks, I don’t think terrorists have infinite capacity to cause harm.
By their very nature, terrorist attacks can’t be completely prevented. There are points of leverage where certain efforts can make a difference. There are other weak spots that we can never fully fill in. Some of the money being spent on security is being used well; in other cases, it’s a pointless waste.
We have a choice, though, of how we feel on a day to day basis about the threat of attack. We can be paranoid, and blow up anything that could be a bomb. Or we can be cautious, and have sensible policies that react to risks proportionately.
I suppose it’s up to law enforcement experts to decide what policies make the most sense given the level of threats they’re aware of, and I don’t know that I would opt to investigate a suspicious object that I could just as well blow up and be done with. These people put their lives on the line each day, and I suppose I can’t quibble with a decision they make in the heat of the moment.
But for every roll of tape or guerrilla advertisement we detonate, we look stupid. The terrorists laugh at how they’ve affected us without doing anything more. It’s worth keeping in mind.