filed under: guns, life, politics, terrorism

Posted 342 days ago

From time to time, I add a quote to my quotes list. When I find a quote that catches my eye, I usually sit on it for a week or two to see if I really agree with it. That way my quote list reflects the ideas I truly hold dear, and not just the things that sounded good at the time.

Recently, a friend sent me this quote:

There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. — Ed Howdershelt

I’ve been holding on to this quote for a while, trying to figure out what I thought about it. It didn’t really inspire me, but I couldn’t figure out if I agreed with it or not. Just tonight I realized that the quote is based in the notion that the first three ideas can come before the fourth. That is false. Without the power of force behind them, the other three don’t survive. It’s the basic ability to defend against aggressors that enables peace among those with that power. The quote works within a society that has already created a basically peaceful and just environment, through force or the threat of force. (Note that an unjust society can also be created through force; the force is merely the means to the end, not a guarantor of it.) In the raw world, without the protection of pre-existing force, the quote seems almost quaint.

Within such an already-stable society, though,I agree that force should generally be the last defense of liberty. But I don’t agree that it should only ever follow after the first three. I’m not going to wait for a speech, a politician, or my neighbor to stop the man intent on killing me.

I think a better quote would have been one that demonstrated that each of the first three ideas depends on the last. That idea rings true with me, and ties strongly to why I believe in guns as a good thing. Without the ability to defend ourselves, and our ideas, none of the rest of it is possible. Guns are simply an effective tool for earning and preserving freedom. Without them, the rest isn’t possible.

As you can imagine, I’ve decided not to add this quote to my quotes list, but I am very glad for the intellectual push. If any you readers care to comment, I would love to hear it. Please just post something here, and I’ll be sure to think, and to respond. Or send me a quote :)

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filed under: links, politics, terrorism

Posted 609 days ago

Bruce Schneier: “I’d like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute … we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.”

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filed under: politics, terrorism

Posted 645 days ago

My “things to blog about” list has had an item named “war on terror” on it for a long time. Inspired by zefrank’s excellent monologue on the subject (the first part isn’t safe for children), I’ve decided that the time has come.

Here’s the gist of it: having a “war on terror(ism)” is like having a “war on reading” or a “war on war.” Terrorism, like reading and war, is an activity, not a physical thing that can be fought and defeated. Anyone, anytime, anywhere can be a terrorist, and there’s no way to stop it all. There’s no way to even stamp out the major things that frighten us, because the possibilities are so endless. But we’re still fighting a war against a style of war that we don’t like. It’s ludicrous.

Terrorism works. In the free-market economy of public emotion, terrorism is a high-risk (death), high-reward (mass fear), low-cost (relatively), easy (there’s a million ways) investment, and as long as it continues to be that way it will continue to exist in the world.

Given the equation above (risk/reward/cost/difficulty), any “war” on terror has to modify at least one part of that equation. Right now, the U.S. government’s focus is exclusively on the “difficulty” part. They’re trying to make it harder and harder for terrorists to pull off their plots, by making it harder to do things like put bombs on airplanes. (This also has a minor effect on the “cost” front because increased difficulty generally leads to increased cost.) But this is just one attack vector – there are millions more. As soon as the cost and difficulty of putting bombs on planes hits some threshold, the terrorists will move on to another target that is cheaper/easier, and we’ll have to start restricting the rights of Americans to try to block it.

There are too many options for the terrorists for us to be able to block them all. There are too many creative ways to cause fear and panic, and too many that are easy to pull off. We’ll never block them all, no matter how much we lock down the country. That’s why terrorism is so effective, and why it is so often the war-style of choice for small groups trying to cause revolutions.

The scary part of all of this is not all the wasted flailing-about on increasing the difficulty of terrorism. The scary part is that we’re also messing with another part of that equation – the reward part. Over and over again, we’ve seen the government, media, public, peers, etc. etc. etc. increase the reward portion of the equation by over-hyping the threat. As the most obvious example, look at the color-coded “national threat level indicators.” The only purpose of such a thing is to tell us “here is how much you should be afraid of some unspecific thing.” Generalized fear is the goal of terrorism, and we’ve encoded a mechanism for facilitating generalized fear into our political landscape. It’s absurd.

As ze points out, terrorism works because it’s easy to do something that generates more fear than it is worthy of. Terrorists hoist us by our own petard, in that our reverence for the free-flow of (unintelligent) information and communication allows panic to spread like wildfire among people who don’t stop to think about what is really going on. (I’m for that free-flow – but my point remains that they’re still using it against us.) Our fear is far higher than is justified by our risk, because the biological roots of our fear-response aren’t designed to wait for our brain to kick in :) The only way to really win the war on terror is to bring our fear in-line with the actual risk, and that will require us to think critically about terrorism and terrorist acts.

It will also require our government to set the example. Leadership, in this case, would best be done by helping us avoid unnecessary fears, not by playing them up.

I don’t have a lot of hope for the improvement of this situation. On the surface, it’s not in the politicians’ best interest to downplay fear, because public fear generally leads to increased governmental power (as is happening in the U.S.). One layer deeper, Bush’s style is to act, not think, and a policy of “think before speaking” isn’t high on his list of capabilities. A layer deeper than that, we see that we elected this man, even though it was obvious that he doesn’t like to think. That leads me to believe that this problem may simply be endemic to Americans, and will never go away. That makes me sad and angry.

And that makes me blog :)

I hope that we can all stop and think about what’s really going on here. I’d like to see a world where we didn’t waste so much energy on this stuff, and the key to that may simply be to get people thinking critically.

Please let me know what you think – add a comment.

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