The Mind Killer
I’m looking out my window right now at the cranes on top of the rising Freedom Tower – they only recently became visible, previously being obscured by other buildings in lower Manhattan. And trying to figure out what’s worth saying about the attacks of ten years ago.
I could reminisce about my own experience of the day, but it was not terribly exceptional or interesting. I reacted more like the flag-cake woman than I would probably care to admit. I wandered around in a daze of rage and fear for, oh, days it seems. My boss was actually trapped in Europe at the time, trying to close a critical deal – he didn’t get home for weeks, and I recall my inarticulate amazement that he could focus on anything. I couldn’t do much more than stare out the window at the plume of smoke.
I remember being struck by how nobody seemed to understand that everything had changed – everyone still sounded like themselves, still said the sorts of things that they would have said before, still believed the sorts of things they believed before. And in retrospect, I feel the same way, including about myself. Most people didn’t change their minds about anything. The belligerent ones found a new justification for their belligerency. The self-critical ones found a new justification for self-criticism. The nervous, finger-to-the-wind types found new reason to be extremely careful about figuring out which way the wind was blowing before committing. Even the iconoclasts set out to find a new basis for their iconoclasm. And those who did change, it seems to me, had been primed for a change beforehand in some fashion or other. However people reacted, it said more about them than it did about the attacks, what they might have meant.
Because the attacks meant almost nothing, at least in terms that would mean anything to us (which are the terms that matter in this case). They were not a sign of some kind of essential decadence or weakness. Al Qaida successfully exploited a series of simple loopholes that allowed an unprecedented attack to succeed. If we had had almost any kind of screening for passengers, the attacks would have failed. If cockpit doors had been routinely reinforced, the attacks would have failed. If the officers and crew had imagined that terrorists might not hijack or blow up a plane, but instead want to use one as a flying bomb, the attacks would have failed. And so forth – the attacks succeeded basically because we had no defense in place at all against such an attack, and preventing a recurrence was actually trivial.
The political significance was similarly nugatory. Al Qaeda’s political goals were outlandish to the point of absurdity. Afghanistan was more like Grand Fenwick than it was like the Empire of Japan. Fight Club was probably a better movie to watch to understand the people who attacked us than The Battle of Algiers. All the efforts to ascribe a meaning to the events – the terrorists hate our freedom, or they hate that we are supporting dictators in their region, or they hate that we are infidels, or they hate that we are engaged in wars of aggression against Muslims, or whatever – were responses to our need for meaning rather than to the events themselves. But the indifference of reality to our needs – in this regard as in most – is comprehensive.
In retrospect, what suffered the most lasting damage from the terrorist attacks of ten years ago was my belief in my own rationality. I believed that I was thinking things through seriously, and coming to difficult but true conclusions about what had happened, what would happen, what must happen. Here is part of what I wrote, to friends and family, several days later:
Our President has made it clear: we are at war. I do not anticipate that this will be a short or an easy war. Our enemy has operations in dozens of countries, including this one. He is supported, out of enthusiasm or fear, by many governments among our purported friends as well as among our enemies. He has shown his cunning, his ruthlessness, and most of all his patience, in his successful plot to kill thousands of innocents and bring down the symbols of our civilization. And in striking at him, as we must, we will bring down others who will in turn seek their own vengeance upon us.
There is not a single factual assertion in that paragraph that I had any reason to believe I could substantiate. I did not know anything about the enemy. I had no idea whether or not there were “operations” in dozens of countries – I don’t even know what I meant by “operations.” I know what I was referring to with the business about being “supported” by friends and enemies, but “support” is a deliberately fuzzy word; I wouldn’t have used it if I was trying to make a concrete assertion with clear implications. The purpose of that assertion, like everything else, was to build up my first assertion. We were at war. And it wouldn’t be short or easy. Because that conclusion, though grim, was one that imparted meaning to the murder of 3,000 people. I thought I was being serious – examining the facts, calculating the likely negative consequences of necessary action, preparing myself for the unfortunate necessities of life. But I wasn’t doing anything of the kind. I was engaged in a search for meaning in which reason was purely instrumental.
The great intellectual victors in the immediate post-9-11 period were the people who could imbue it with meaning. To do that required a plausible explanation and the confidence to advance it. Nobody would have that confidence without the explanation being pre-packaged, ready to be deployed in any available circumstances. In other words, the very fact that there was so little we knew, and that what there was to know wasn’t very satisfying in terms of imparting meaning to events, very naturally empowered those whose views didn’t depend on knowledge. That’s how we wound up in Iraq. The advocates of war did not begin advocating for war on 9-11 – “finishing the job” in Iraq had been on the agenda for the entire decade prior. Nor did they need to prove any connection to the 9-11 attacks. We wound up in war in Iraq, in a very real sense, because “finishing the job” in Iraq imparted an appealing meaning to the terrorist attacks. And opposing the war felt like it tore the meaning off that terrible day, leaving its empty horror naked before us. That’s how it felt to me, at the time, when I think back.
And that’s what I mean by saying that what suffered the most lasting damage was belief in my own rationality. Or in anybody else’s.
All I hope is that this has been a fortunate fall from a kind of innocence, that, aware that I – and others – are not nearly so rational as we suppose, that we want to understand more than we do, and that this motivates us to believe that we do understand more than we do – that, aware of this, I will be less likely to lead myself to believe what I do not know.
(But, then again, if I really did that, I suppose I’d have to stop blogging. And if I do that, then the terrorists really will have won. Won’t they?)
I remember thinking on 9/11 that life had changed irrevocably and I resented the change as well as grieved the tragic loss of life. I read each mini-obituary in the NY Times. I recognized the name of someone with whom I had gone to elementary school. My cousin let me know he got out at the subway near the Twin Towers, saw the turmoil and immediately retreated home. Life as we knew it was over permanently. I don’t see what rationality has to do with it. Why seek rationality in murder? What we did not know, but would learn later, is that George Bush wanted to go into Iraq to take out Saddam Hussein from the beginning of his presidency and he used 9/11 as an excuse. His reason to take out Saddam Hussein was to show he is a bigger man than his father, who lied to the Kurds and Shia in the First Gulf War when he told them that if they rose up against Hussein, we would support them. They rose against Hussein, we sat on our hands, and Hussein slaughtered them. And why did we engage in the First Gulf War? Our friends, the Saudis, insisted on it. Was it really against our interests that Hussein seized Kuwait? By the younger Bush’s irresponsible action in taking us to war in Iraq, we lost any momentum in Afghanistan, stopped pursuing Osama ben Laden, handed Iraq to a civil war with a newly empowered Al Queda in Mesopotamia, and served Iran’s interests by creating a new Shiite middle eastern country. Bush, being completely irresponsible, pushed through a $1.7 billion tax cut, failed to pay for the Iraqi war, prolonged the war in Afghanistan, and eliminated any controls over the financial chicanery that ultimately destroyed our economy and that of the world. You worry about the meaning of 9/11 and whether you were rational. We have through political corruption and immorality destroyed a good portion of our life in this country and the lives of millions of others worldwide. And all in the name of personal power. Ponder that.
— LDM · Sep 12, 12:54 AM · #
So maybe instead of remembering 9/11, it’s time to forget it? It can’t happen again, and the security measures that will prevent it are absurdly cheap and trivial. All the rest – the nudie scanners, the shoes, the liquids – is just security theater. Maybe it’s time once again that security against terrorist attacks returns to the way it was in the Clintonian era – weighed against its fiscal costs and the erosion of civil liberties. Maybe it’s time to stop pretending that the worst thing that could happen to the country would be for about 3,000 people to die for one reason but not another. Maybe it’s time to reject the framing that says that every additional dollar spent on the military makes us “safer.” Maybe it’s time to be reminded, instead, that in 2001 twice as many people died in motorcycle accidents as died on 9/11.
— Chet · Sep 12, 03:30 AM · #
My wife and I walked out yesterday to find that a small cellophane postcard-sized US flag (“Made in China”) had been stabbed into the lawn near the mailbox of our house, and into every house in the neighborhood. Affixed to its post beneath the flag was a business card for a local professional wrestler (and, why do wrestlers have business cards? “Honey, we need a wrestler, do we still have that guy’s card?”).
The card is great. It has a picture of the wrstelr clobbering some poor schmoe in a black leotard, adjacent to his slogan (“It’s Quittin’ Time!”) Below there are some promotional web links.
It is easily the most tasteful and appropriate 10-year-anniversary remembrance I’ve seen so far.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Sep 12, 01:56 PM · #
that’s a difficult point for almost everyone.
— research papers · Sep 12, 02:25 PM · #
Your two points are that (a) everybody reaffirmed their prejudices and (b) people who could provide a coherent narrative gained power. Taken as absolutes these contradict one another but I agree with you that they are both mostly true, with the second rule providing explanations to exceptions from the first.
Undoubtedly the single most important exception to the first rule was George W. Bush, who lest we forget just a year before 9/11 had foreign policy talking points consisting entirely of “humble foreign policy” and “readiness” (read: no nation-building) and who in response to the famous pop quiz question couldn’t name Musharraf but did know we should work with him (read: a general policy of “realism”). As did more than a few other people, President Bush seems to have felt that the appropriate response to 9/11 was not gunboat diplomacy but le mission civilatrice based on the internally consistent and morally resonant theory provided by the neocons that tyranny was the root cause of terrorism and that we could address this root cause through a policy of “domino theory in reverse.” The neocons provided and Mr. Bush adopted this strategy in good faith but in retrospect it seems likely that it would have been better for both America’s international posture and several thousand fewer dead and maimed American warfighters if he stuck to the instincts he exhibited during the debates with Mr. Gore.
— gabriel · Sep 12, 03:04 PM · #
I saw a fairly large split between people in their response to 9-11, and I think the difference had a lot to do with hubris.
To me, 9-11 was just another tragedy. I’d known that we had enemies, I’d known that any sufficiently complicated system has weaknesses, and on that day our enemies found a weakness. Once the weakness had been pointed out to us, fixing it was simple.
In other words, I didn’t need for it to have “meaning”. I was aware that everyone, even Americans, are mortal and vulnerable. I don’t want to make light of it, but measured purely by body count, worse things happen in Africa every month.
Some people couldn’t handle that. I remember a coworker arguing that the 9-11 gang had to have state support. I pointed out to him that the whole thing almost certainly had a budget of under $50K, but he just would not imagine that a bunch of nobodies with little backing could have done it.
You see the same thing with the Kennedy assassination. There are people who have little problem imagining that some random nutjob shot the president, and people who just can’t (regardless of what actually happened there, because I really don’t know).
— Jay · Sep 12, 03:56 PM · #
9/11 was not a “tragedy”:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/020339.html
I’m not sure what Chet’s point is, other he seems to think it’s O.K. for America to deal with the mass murder of almost 3,000 of its citizens every decade or so?
Meanwhile, here is a much better reflection on that terrible day:
http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2011/09/a_sunday_thought_for_the_victi_1.html#more
— Fake Herzog · Sep 12, 05:19 PM · #
How is it less “OK” than, say, the deaths of 40,000 American citizens a year from traffic fatalities? Or 15,000 Americans murdering each other a year? Or almost 200,000 Americans dying from preventable medical mistakes?
Specifically how is it “less OK” in a way that justifies expenditures ten or even a hundred times that spent on reducing those other fatalities? Dead is dead. Why is being killed by a terrorist somehow a hundred or a thousand times worse than being murdered by one of your countrymen or dying because your doctor was poorly trained? Please be specific.
As I said there was a time when we balanced the risks of terror, and the costs of protection against it, against other risks and threats and the costs of controlling those. 9/11 was the beginning of a kind of national delusion, particularly among “law-and-order” conservatives, that the minuscule risk of being killed by a terrorist was somehow more significant from a policy perspective than literally anything else (except lowering taxes, of course.) What an idiot you continue to be.
— Chet · Sep 12, 05:46 PM · #
> I pointed out to him that the whole thing almost certainly had a budget of under $50K, but he just would not imagine that a bunch of nobodies with little backing could have done it.
I suppose being off by a factor of 10 isn’t too bad for an initial estimate.
— gwern · Sep 12, 08:11 PM · #
“Why is being killed by a terrorist somehow a hundred or a thousand times worse than being murdered by one of your countrymen or dying because your doctor was poorly trained?”
Murder is worse than accidental death because the one is immoral, the other is just an accident.
The deaths of Americans are a greater concern for us than the deaths of Africans because we are part of a community of mutual concern. Those deaths are a greater concern for our government because the government is our agent, charged with a high responsibility for keeping us safe but only the most modest (if any) responsibility for keeping Africans safe.
Mass murder by strangers for political reasons is worse than the typical murder (i.e., being killed by your boyfriend or a rival gang member) because (i) it involves large numbers of people dying and (ii) it does not in any way result from bad choices made by the victims.
These don’t seem like very difficult points to me.
— y81 · Sep 12, 09:54 PM · #
Worse to who, exactly? How much worse? Suppose that we all agreed that it was worth exactly one hundred thousand dollars to prevent a single death by medical error. How many dollars would it be worth to prevent a single death by murder? A single death by terrorism? And what, again, is the basis for these differentials?
— Chet · Sep 13, 02:12 AM · #
“And what, again, is the basis for these differentials?”
The way normal people respond differently to accidents and deliberate killing.
Mike
— MBunge · Sep 13, 02:29 PM · #
I’m not seeing any evidence that it’s somehow worse to lose a loved one to an act of terror than it is to a murder or a medical error. My own intuition is that there are almost no circumstances under which the death of a loved one isn’t an enormous blow. People grieve even for the natural deaths of the old and infirm.
Normal people don’t respond any differently to an accidental death or a deliberate killing. They feel the loss, they get angry and sad, they miss the person forever. I guess maybe you don’t know too many “normal people.”
— Chet · Sep 13, 03:52 PM · #
“The advocates of war did not begin advocating for war on 9-11”
On the contrary, according to the Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, that was the agenda in the very first NSC meeting of the Bush II administration:
“And what happened at President Bush’s very first National Security Council meeting is one of O’Neill’s most startling revelations.
““From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic “A” 10 days after the inauguration – eight months before Sept. 11.
““From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”
“As treasury secretary, O’Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as “Why Saddam?” and “Why now?” were never asked.
““It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’” says O’Neill. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”
“And that came up at this first meeting, says O’Neill, who adds that the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml
pbh
— pbh51 · Sep 13, 07:04 PM · #
“Normal people don’t respond any differently to an accidental death or a deliberate killing.”
Just stop. You’re spouting nonsense now even you can’t really think is true just because you don’t want to let the argument go.
Mike
— MBunge · Sep 13, 08:28 PM · #
Wow, man, that one sort of wins even for the Chetmeister.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Sep 13, 11:16 PM · #
I’m enjoying these dispatches from an alternate universe, but you can’t honestly believe you’re accurately representing this one. Can you?
Jesus. WTF is wrong with people like you?
— Chet · Sep 14, 01:15 AM · #
Chet,
I think you are in the minority here. I seriously doubt that the subjective experience of losing a loved one to old age or illness is similar to losing one to homicide. I would even expect that varieties of homicide are different in the subjective experience of a victim’s loved ones—after all, our justice system punishes certain types of homicide more harshly than others.
Regards,
Chris
— Chris · Sep 14, 01:57 AM · #
Chet’s statement is perfectly defensible once you understand that for him, a “normal” person is someone who thinks like Chet.
— kenB · Sep 14, 03:05 AM · #
I’m certainly in a minority of people who aren’t willing to say stupidly wrong things just to maintain an argument.
I mean, come on. Nobody says “Oh, well, my wife died; but it’s ok because at least it was cancer and not terrorism. Boy, dodged a bullet there!” People cry just as hard for their grandparents as for their children. Death is death and it sucks balls when it happens to people you love for whatever reason. People want their loved ones to live! The idea that a single death from terrorism justifies spending more than a hundred thousand times what we spend to stop a single traffic death because other people feel worse about terror deaths than traffic deaths is stupidly wrong from both directions: people don’t feel worse (it’s not the cause, but the loss that they feel) and even if they did, it’s insufficient justification.
The arguments being put forward by you guys are perhaps the worst in TAS comments history, and I’m counting all of the shoe spam, too.
— Chet · Sep 14, 02:41 PM · #
“I mean, come on. Nobody says “Oh, well, my wife died; but it’s ok because at least it was cancer and not terrorism. Boy, dodged a bullet there!””
If anything in this thread is a candidate for “Worst argument in TAS comments history”, it would be the above. I mean, what’s worse than a Strawman Argument? Dry Grassman Argument? Used Dental Flossman Argument? Snotman Argument?
And just because Kieselguhr Kid seems to have missed the point, Chet isn’t arguing that people SHOULDN’T be more concerned about deaths from terrorism than from other reasons. He’s arguing that “Normal people don’t respond any differently to an accidental death or a deliberate killing”, a position that is absolutely, totally, completely, 100% refuted by simply observing the way people actually respond to accidental deaths and deliberate killings.
Mike
— MBunge · Sep 14, 03:20 PM · #
Oh, no, Mike, I didn’t miss the point, sorry I’m with you on this one or actually a little ahead of you. I was marvelling at the awesome, awesome dumb contained within the Chetster. It surpassed my most generous assumptions. You’re catching up with me, Mike! Although I guess youu’re surging ahead in trying to come up with a name for the phenomenon.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Sep 14, 04:50 PM · #
Oh, wait, I get you, Mike. No, when I said it “wins” I meant, it sort of wins stupidest thing ever said even among the vast, vast opus of amazingly stupid things the Chetorama says. Which if you think about it is kind of awesome, thus my post. It’s like they should have a ceremony at Cannes.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Sep 14, 04:53 PM · #
I’m sorry, but it’s not. You’re the one asserting that people can take solace in the fact that their loved ones died in one way and not another, and that it’s a legitimate and even obvious function of government to try to shift causes of death from terrorism to, say, traffic accidents. The simple fact that nobody ever takes solace in that, which completely disproves your position, doesn’t seem to have much of an impact on you. Have you just never known anyone who lost a loved one? That degree of sheltering is the only explanation I can come up with for your incredible stupid wrongness in this matter.
I’m sorry that you and the Kid can’t even recognize your own positions, but there they are, up in black and white.
— Chet · Sep 14, 05:13 PM · #
Chet,
Believing as you do, how do you account for the wide disparity of official state responses to deaths? In the case of accident or disease, there may be no official response at all. In the case of homicide, a range of punishments are levied depending upon an offender’s culpability, etc.
Regards,
Chris
— Chris · Sep 14, 06:17 PM · #
Very simply – competing special interests. Spending money to reduce traffic deaths means working against very powerful American interests – car manufacturers, oil companies, etc. Spending money to reduce medical accidents means working against the interests of doctors and hospitals, or at least as those groups perceive their interests. Working to reduce terrorism deaths means working against nearly powerless interests, like the American people, and on behalf of very powerful interests, like the “military industrial complex.”
The reason we spend so much unjustifiable money on terrorism is because it’s a kind of welfare giveaway to powerful interests. Rates of traffic fatalities? Not so much.
There’s always an official state response to a death; diseases and accidents are no exception. That’s why we have coroners. That word comes from the Latin for “crown.” Whatever difference in response, it’s because of the consequences of the actions of living actors, not because some deaths are ten thousand times worse than others.
— Chet · Sep 14, 07:27 PM · #
“You’re the one asserting that people can take solace in the fact that their loved ones died in one way and not another”
Neither I nor anyone else in this thread has actually asserted that. Keep trying, though.
Mike
— MBunge · Sep 14, 08:52 PM · #
Oh, I see. So when you said “the way normal people respond differently to accidents and deliberate killing”, that was a kind of semantically-empty nonsense that was a complete non-sequitur to the point of contention. You’ll pardon me for having tried to interpret it in context – it wasn’t, after all, even a complete sentence.
Why did you post it if it was intended to mean nothing at all?
— Chet · Sep 14, 09:56 PM · #
Chet – “the way normal people respond differently to accidents and deliberate killing”
Putting aside the word salad that makes up the rest of your response, I’ll try to clarify things for a non-normal person such as yourself. In my defense, it’s often hard to anticipate what you can and cannot comprehend.
Saying some people respond differently to accidents and deliberate killing is NOT the same as saying people care less about accidental deaths or care more about murders. It’s simply to point out the obvious fact that people have DIFFERENT responses to those DIFFERENT events. Someone murdering your mother is NOT the same thing as your other dying of a heart attack and stating that basic truth is in no way equivalent to saying that someone would “take solace” in their mother dying one way as opposed to another. Again, I don’t think any normal person would ever infer that from what I or anyone else on this thread wrote, so I think we can be forgiven for not expecting your non-normal interpretation.
And just to try to drag you kicking and screaming into the world or normality, on what do you base your contention that people DON’T respond differently to terrorist attacks than they do to the same number of deaths caused by auto accidents, for example? Upon that evidence do you base that seemingly odd analysis?
Mike
— MBunge · Sep 14, 10:15 PM · #
Mike, dude — say “the sky is blue” or something like that, too, and maybe we can go for the Palme D’Or. Which comes from the word “or.”
— Kieselguhr Kid · Sep 14, 10:54 PM · #
Chet,
You are right re: every death having a government response. I meant that not every death is responded to in a punitive fashion.
If you don’t mind, I’ll try to paraphrase your position—is this a fair summary?
1) All human deaths deliver equal emotional injuries to the survivors of the deceased.
2) Therefore, as a matter of public policy, priorities should be set such that the most effort is placed towards mitigation in the activities that cause the most deaths. For the sake of argument, since the deadliest activities may also be the most expensive to ameliorate, let’s assume that these priorities could also be set according to some type of expected value calculation, quality adjusted life years or something similar.
3) The reason that priorities differ from those in 2) is that special interests lobby for their own preferences.
4) Absent intervention from special interests, a majority of people would agree with 1) and could be convinced to vote for policies to implement 2).
Regards,
Chris
— Chris · Sep 14, 11:41 PM · #
Obviously, people do react differently when loved ones are killed violently than when they are killed accidentally. That is a basic fact of human psychology. Progressives aren’t immune to it, which is why there are more anti-death penalty activists than anti-sky diving activists.
— Pithlord · Sep 14, 11:56 PM · #
Just ‘cause a couple glasses of nice beer have put me in a serious mood, I’ll point out that y’all have allowed a usual stupid comment from the Chetasaur to throw you, like a pack of too-eager-hounds, on to the wacky angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin scent of, does a death from murder feel different to the survivors of the victim, which, who cares? Murder is so obviously different from a policy standpoint, that you’re all stupid with incomprehension that the Chetler can’t see that, and just keep tugging at this feelings-of-the-survivors bone.
The reason murder is different isn’t the hurt to the survivors (which, who knows, maybe it’s different, whatever). It’s that the survivors aren’t the only victim: the law is. Murder defies the whole system. If you can’t do a credible job minimizing it, you can’t reduce medical error or auto accidents or anything else, because you can’t seem to uphold your law, and in fact the most important of those laws — government is a monopoly on violence, remember? That’s why if a hospital more or less follows its procedures but biffs something and kills Uncle Fred, you’re going to sue their pants off in a civil trial, but if instead Uncle Fred returns home fine and a disappointed suitor of Aunt Louise knocks his head off with a cast-iron pan, the state is going to press a criminal charge before you get a bite at the apple.
Deaths due to terrorism are still worse, because the terrorist seeks not merely to defy but to destroy whole systems of law. 9/11 was intended as a blow against the entire American establishment. In that sense all members of society are genuinely directly aggrieved parties and understanding that to be fundamentally true is why they get pissed off and go bomb the hell out of people and building memorials and shit. If that establishment is weakened significantly, then all the laws and norms which collectively make it up are weakened, and so it’s Chetmongeresque stupid to say you prioritize, say, reducing medical error through regulation over protecting the integrity of the state and the law.
None of that addresses whether we overreacted or underreacted or what or whether in fact there is a significant threat to the state present, but it is the frame in which you have to address those things, and it’s just plain stupid in that frame to equate murder with accidental death. And the fact is that most Americans, possibly wrongly, see terrorism as a serious threat to law and order and so for them, putting that on a back burner behind, say, auto accidents, makes no sense. Tallying up the dead is therefore an argument for a complete ass; what you want to establish is that there is no serious threat to domestic American security.
I know everyone but Chet-a-Chet-Chet knows this stuff, but you are way away from articulating it.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Sep 15, 12:30 AM · #
I think this illustrates Noah’s point about the mind killer very well. Taking a Jewish housewife from Toledo off a plane in handcuffs because she happened (surprise) to look middle eastern and who got booked into a seat beside two Indian men illustrates security hysteria better than anything else could.
Noah writes cogently about one of the factors driving the overblown security responses to perceived terror threats: the search for meaning in an act largely devoid of it, at least insofar as we define meaning as a relation to a larger whole.
The atrocities of 9/11 happened because some young, disaffected men, who needed a cause in their lives, embraced the grandiose notion that their role in a superpower skirmish had led to the demise of the whole Soviet system. Bereft of employment and meaning after the first Afghan war, they decided to try to mount an assault on the “West”. They exploited a security vulnerability and struck in an unexpected manner, and they managed to kill a great many Americans.
But it seems also that the unbalanced way many of us look at 9/11 reflects grief and anger shading into something else, going from the anguished or angry question of why this happened to the more self-centred, even narcissistic one: how could this happen to us (or to people like us)? In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, it makes sense that many Americans and others should have experienced shock, rage and extreme apprehension. I remember the terrifying uncertainty of that time, the survivor’s stories, and I vividly remember my own anger. But the efforts to keep same the anger alive ten years later seem forced and in many ways inappropriate. “Fake Herzog” linked to a post containing this description of the hijackers: “…an enemy so foreign and morally alien that one wonders how God’s good earth could be their home.” I can clearly see the atrocities of September 11 2001 as a terribly wicked act, perpetrated by wicked men, and still not lose sight of the fact that such wickedness also has found a comfortable home in the Western tradition, both before and after the enlightenment. Simply, anyone who cannot think offhand of about ten people who came straight out of a European tradition and whose actions would fit right into Mohammad Atta’s moral universe needs to study their history.
Wicked men and women exist. They defile every civilization. We will never eliminate them, and in the end we have no way to deal with them except courage and endurance. Bad things will happen. They happen to us and to people we love. And we cannot always stop or prevent them. We can only choose to respond with courage and dignity, or not.
— John Spragge · Sep 15, 01:00 AM · #
And yet people don’t respond differently to accidents or to deliberate killings. They experience some combination of denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and ultimately acceptance regardless of the cause of a loved ones death.
You really have to be genuinely sheltered and ignorant of that kind of loss to think that there’s some kind of meaningful difference – especially a difference that would justify spending a hundred thousand times as much money to prevent one kind of death as another – when people lose loved ones. How they lost them is really the last thing on their minds. What matters is the loss. And I continue to not understand what kind of person you have to be to think otherwise. I don’t understand how you’re not getting this.
My personal experience with people who have grappled with those kinds of losses. It’s clearly an experience you’ve never had.
— Chet · Sep 15, 03:30 PM · #
“Mike, dude — say “the sky is blue” or something like that, too, and maybe we can go for the Palme D’Or. Which comes from the word “or.””
“I know everyone but Chet-a-Chet-Chet knows this stuff, but you are way away from articulating it.”
You’re basically right, but…
1. While the Chet’s of the world have always been with us, the physical and practical limitations of our public discourse isolated them from each other and largely segregated them from the rest of us. Now, not only are the Chet’s connected to each other in an echo chamber of social and emotional retardation, but they worm into the discussion in ways that are almost impossible to prevent. I’m not saying I know what to do with them, but ignoring them isn’t an option because there’s no longer any authority or structure to enforce that exclusion. Over at Outside the Beltway there was a recent post quoting a guy about how he always tries to avoid being insulting or dismissive in his arguments and either makes his case reasonably or simply ignores those who are too stupid. Unfortunately, that approach only works in academic settings where there’s a universal acceptance that the truth matters and where morons are not allowed to constantly stink up the debate.
2. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to try and delineate exactly why willful murder and accidental death are different when you’re dealing with someone who’s denying that people respond differently to them. Explaining a difference to someone who won’t even acknowledge visible evidence the difference exists is as big a waste of time as anything else.
Mike
— MBunge · Sep 15, 03:34 PM · #
“And yet people don’t respond differently to accidents or to deliberate killings.”
See what I mean?
Mike
— MBunge · Sep 15, 03:35 PM · #
Why on Earth would they be? Who do you “punish” for an earthquake?
Regardless, the difference here is that after a murder you have a murderer before you who needs to be punished; after an earthquake you do not. That has nothing to do with it being better for your loved ones to die in an earthquake than at the hands of a murderer, which is exactly not how any human being (except apparently MBunge) has ever reacted.
I don’t understand how you got it so wrong. My position is really very simple: there’s nothing about terrorism deaths that makes them one hundred thousand times worse than traffic deaths, which is why spending a hundred thousand times what we spend reducing a single traffic death to reduce a single terrorism death is delusional. My position is very simple – the money spent on reducing terror deaths should be subject to the same cost-benefit analysis applied to reducing traffic deaths or murder deaths or any other kind of death. I asked “what was so special about terror deaths that it justifies these expenditures?” and MBunge replied that people view terror deaths as one hundred thousand times worse or more.
But that’s just not at all how any human being reacts to death. On planet Earth, anyway. I’m still unclear as to where it is MBunge lives.
— Chet · Sep 15, 03:37 PM · #
Right, this is exactly what I’m talking about. This is a cost ostensibly paid to prevent terror deaths.
Is it worth it? Did it prevent even a single death? Even if it did, aren’t terror deaths sufficiently rare on their own that these kinds of costs aren’t worth it?
By comparison, if taking this woman off the plane would have saved, say, a thousand deaths in car accidents, you could argue that it was justified. But even accepting the Kid’s argument that 9/11 was an insult to the very notion of America, or whatever, how can just the low probability of preventing less than even one death from terror justify these kinds of racist, police-state type infringements of our rights?
That’s the system you’re defending, MBunge, because of your assertion that weighing one death from terror at a hundred thousand times more important than a traffic death is a perfectly natural reaction. It certainly is not and I continue to fail to understand how you think it could be.
— Chet · Sep 15, 03:42 PM · #
Oh, for god’s sake. Why couldn’t you have just called me a “moron” or something and gotten on with it? Jesus Christ. You fail even at being entertaining.
— Chet · Sep 15, 03:44 PM · #
Kid, I agree with you for the most part, but policy still exists and we still have to make it. And I still don’t see how terrorism is such a unique threat to the rule of law that it justifies infinite expenditure on wars and memorials and getting pissed off.
That’s what I’m talking about. That’s all I’ve ever been talking about. It’s right up there in black text on white. You and MBunge seem to believe that people react so differently to terrorism in particular that any and all absurd amounts of money are justified. Can you elaborate on how they are? The “natural reaction” of people to terror vs traffic deaths, which we don’t agree on, isn’t relevant to that in any case. It’s just not that different for people or for the state that it justifies that kind of money and cost. There was literally no danger of the dissolution of American law due to the acts of the 9/11 terrorists. They were delusional; murdering a few thousand people was the absolute maximum of which they were capable. The rule of law was truly in no danger from them.
— Chet · Sep 15, 03:53 PM · #
This whole thing is so much like that commercial where well-heeled guys attempt to justify their outlanding spending on luxury items, like a $40,000 watch: “it’s the same steel used for making swords.”
— Chet · Sep 15, 03:54 PM · #
Wow — 42 comments and counting!
First of all, how the heck did the Kid get Chet to agree with him? I love the Kid. Secondly, Chet is right about this basic idea — we should ask ourselves whether or not a particular policy designed to protect ourselves from terrorism is cost effective. But he is wrong in another sense to be so worried about all those “other deaths” because as the Kid tried to explain, there is a category error of trying to lump the different functions and policy goals of government together in one big bucket called “save lots of lives”. If such a bucket existed it would obviously lead to_reductio ad absurdum_arguments of the sort that Chet tries to employ: if we spend $X dollars on policy #1 we can reduce traffic fatalities by 450%. Imagine policy #1 is installing automatic speed monitors on roads all across America, mandating a speed limit of 30 miles per hour and spending hundreds of millions of dollars going after speeders using our electronic detection equipment. This policy will save lives. It will also cost enormous amounts of money and therefore lead to a drag on the economy, not to mention inconvenience millions of Americans who like the freedom (and risk) of driving faster. So we have to balance the goals and values of the American population — economic growth and freedom versus a decrease in the number of deaths.
Likewise with terrorism — as the Kid says, a terrorist attack is not just about killing people but about the attempt to “destroy whole systems of law”. So like the traffic death example we have costs to weigh against various goals and values. As one example, Chet seems to be worried about “racist, police-state type infringements of our rights” — me, I’d like some more of those policies implemented (i.e. profiling Muslims, stopping Arabic immigration, etc.) For policy suggestions that will make Chet’s head explode (and I’m sure most Scene readers will find these ideas in some form or fashion extreme), check out this post (the first of three):
http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2010/11/disinviting_islam_part_ithe_ne.html
Again, you might not agree with all the ideas there, but many are cheaper than what we are doing now, so the cost isn’t the issue — the issue is the goals of our policy and what are our values and how to weigh competing values.
P.S. Chet, it would help your arguments if you would stop with the hyperbole: “And I still don’t see how terrorism is such a unique threat to the rule of law that it justifies infinite expenditure on wars and memorials and getting pissed off.” I don’t think we are currently spending infinite amounts of money on wars or memorials. And how does one spend money on “getting pissed off” — doesn’t that just happen?
P.P.S. Both of my grandmothers died this year — I was sad but I am also hopeful that they will join God in heaven. When Todd Beamer died and I found out the details I was sad and angry and wanted justice to be done. This year, to President Obama’s credit, Seal Team 6 delivered justice in Pakistan, 10 years late. I think it was worth the cost.
— Fake Herzog · Sep 15, 07:04 PM · #
Pithlord’s reference to capital punishment captures the essential reason we find a greater horror in death by murder or war than we do in death by disease or accident: as Sister Helen Prejean put it, the infliction of death violates basic human solidarity. At an accident scene or a sickbed, we can assume everyone present will fight together with their fellow humans against pain and death. On a battlefield, in an execution chamber, at a murder scene, someone or many people has turned against other humans and wishes to inflict these things. That betrayal of basic human solidarity changes the way we view a death by murder, war or execution.
Chet, however, makes some good points. In the context of public policy, as opposed to individual choice, the meaning of our solidarity against suffering and death gets complicated. If we spend so much money preventing ten murders that we fail to make an investment that would prevent a thousand earthquake deaths, have we really acted in meaningful solidarity against suffering and death? And behind all of this lies a tactical but morally important question: what if we can only fight terrorism effectively by enduring it?
By enduring terrorism, I mean, in the famous phrase from Britain in the early months of World War II, keeping calm and carrying on. It may also mean acting in peaceful solidarity with the victims; if terrorists blow up a movie theatre, then next night everyone goes to the movies. A good argument exists that invasions, torture, renditions, and intrusive security make bad responses to terrorism precisely because the terrorists want us to do these things; that no outcome discourages terrorists as much as no response.
Many people do not realize that in 1985, Canada suffered a terrorist attack that killed almost as many Canadians as 9/11 killed Americans. The bombing of Air India flight 182 killed 280 Canadians in a population 1/10th the size of the American population. Canada invaded no countries, did not institute any major new security measures, and to the shame of our security services even botched the criminal cases against many of the perpetrators. They never attacked us again. The idea that doing nothing signals weakness and weakness invites attack simply does not hold: doing what the terrorists want may encourage them more. And the terrorists want governments to act out of anger, or panic, in a way that will further their goals.
— John Spragge · Sep 15, 07:05 PM · #
The inconvenience introduced into driving and the massive costs of enforcement and drain on economically-advantageous travel are exactly the kind of costs I’m suggesting should be considered, Herzog. I’m not suggesting that we naively compare only dollar amounts “on paper”. We should consider all the costs.
Similarly, the massive inconvenience and civil liberties erosion introduced by the TSA, ostensible to “protect” flights that are in approximately zero danger, is another such cost. I’m saying we should be considering these things as costs in exactly the way you describe. But for some reason, when it comes to terrorism, a lot of people are operating under the delusion that any cost is justifiable under the rubric “preventing terrorism.” Mbunge tried to justify that perspective by saying it’s worse to die in a terror attack like 9/11 than in a regular plane crash (for instance), except that he couldn’t explain why with any reason that actually made sense.
So we agree, too. Our expenditures on “preventing terrorism” should be justified by actual terror deaths prevented, and we haven’t accomplished anything if Cost X prevented zero terror deaths (because none were going to happen anyway) but could have prevented thousands of traffic fatalities instead. We’ve actually killed people by doing that.
That’s a cost I’d be willing to consider paying, I guess, if you could identify what we’re supposed to gain in return. Or are these, as I suspect, not means to an end for you but the ends itself?
I certainly think we’re spending unlimited money on wars and memorials. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t even on the budget; we just print whatever money is needed to pay whatever the military asks for. Can you identify the statutory limit on money spent on 9/11 memorials? The only limit on expenditures in these areas now is that nobody’s asked for more, yet. Certainly they’re not subject to any cost/benefit calculation.
— Chet · Sep 15, 09:19 PM · #
The latest comment by “Fake Herzog” links to an argument for a course of action its authors coyly refer to as “disinviting Islam”: in practise, nothing less than a series of discriminatory measures against Muslims. He offers a curious argument in its favour: he claims it will cost less. Now, I don’t remotely believe that systematic discrimination against Muslims will cost less in any monetary sense, but that hardly matters. Discrimination against any faith invalidates the most basic moral premise of the American experiment. If you do not trust the great body of the people to choose the best course, given free access to all the applicable facts and arguments, then nothing about the American experiment or the United States constitution. A United States that officially defined Islam as wrong, and abridged religious liberty to prevent people from choosing it, would have discredited its most basic founding principles.
— John Spragge · Sep 15, 09:21 PM · #
Chet,
Has the space/time continuum suddenly stopped, or are you and I agreeing a little too much for comfort?! Anyway, I think our disagreement ends up centering on the risks involved in terrorism versus the cost and benefits. So be it.
Also, at some point in the future, maybe ten years from now, maybe 100 years from now, we will stop spending money on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and on 9/11 memorials. At that point, expenditures are technically not infinite, nor “umlimited”, or any other synonymns you might want to use.
John,
I mentioned the cost efficiencies related to profiling in passing, but I’m actually more interested in what you call discrimination because it works. I’m not sure why you think such discrimination against “any faith invalidates the most basic moral premise of the American experiment” — what is this premise? Certainly the First Amendment is important to our “experiment” but without getting into a lengthy combox debate about its meaning, I’m sure you understand that if a particular faith held that its followers needed to kill the infidels and said followers decided to start killing said infidels, other considerations besides their free exercise of religion would come into play? So the content of those beliefs and how they are lived in the real world seems to matter and we can and should discriminate against faiths that would seek to undermine our very way of life.
— Fake Herzog · Sep 15, 09:43 PM · #
Why wouldn’t we agree? Contrary to how I’m being portrayed by my less-intelligent detractors, the things I’m saying are actually eminently reasonable.
My preference would be for us, as a society, to arrive at that sudden outbreak of reasonableness sooner, rather than much later.
Works at what? Please be specific.
— Chet · Sep 15, 11:06 PM · #
Well, sure, Mike, I mean, I’d blow it off just because I think there’s other good folk to work with so you can get the useful idea you have out there, but you pointed out elsewhere that you don’t tell me how to have fun. But I think the thing I was pointing out isn’t that the Chetty is amazingly stupid, but that in fact he is so stupid that it’s sort of contagious and you all had let the sheer amazing stunning dumb on display, amaze and stun you (!!) into kind of stammering along into his stupid train of thought and debating the wacky unmeasurable of how bad the victim’s family is grieving or some shit like that.
That is, you had it exactly right the first time when you said the difference between a murder and an accident is “The way normal people respond differently to accidents and deliberate killing.” I mean, totally right, and only a complete ass could disagree, and so when Chettles did, everybody tripped on themselves.
But of course what you meant wasn’t how you “respond differently” when your wife is killed — hell, at that time you arguably aren’t even a “normal person” — but how “people” respond: that is, your neighbor and your postman and the guys who read about it in the paper and so on. “Normal people respond differently” because, as I reminded above, normal people are also the targets of those crimes, which attack the systems they support and in which they participate. But the Chetmizer came along with the redonkulous concept that by “people” you didn’t mean, y’know, people, but just the grieving widower, which is so fucked up that it tripped you up, like when you find out that Bruce Willis has been dead all along and it’s so wow that you forget the whole movie sucks the royal pud.
Ironically the Chetbo actually kind of reminded everyone with his wacky invocation of coroners to show that there’s no difference in the state response to murder or accidental death. The problem is that as usual Chetalong Cassidy got it so spectacularly, stunningly wrong — the whole point of the coroner is to determine whether a crime has been committed against the state, so that the whole response will be different, it’s stupid to say the coroner shows that the response to a murder is no different because it’s not a “murder” until the coroner says it is so the Chetwad requires time to go backward — that everyone tripped on the dumb again and got more embroiled in this, how does the bereaved feel, crap.
So I’m not saying, don’t play with the sick kids. I’m just saying, make sure you’re up on your damn shots.
Like, don’t be confuse by the dumb when he asks why we aren’t just straight-up calling him a moron.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Sep 15, 11:22 PM · #
Fake Herzog:
I dig you too, man, even when (especially when) you’re wrong. But I’d love you more if I thought Real Herzog were Werner — which would be wonderfully random — and not Moses.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Sep 15, 11:36 PM · #
The guy who reads about it in the paper says “huh, that’s too bad” and flips over to the sports section. Just like the guy who reads about a traffic accident says “huh, that’s too bad” and flips over to see if his commute is going to be longer. Similarly, reading about any individual 9/11 death, most people say “huh, that was too bad” and flip over to something much more relevant and interesting. Hopefully I’m getting the point across about how these reactions are the same, unless you’re really going to be so stupid as to maintain that when Hypothetical Man flips to Section A in “response” to one death and Section B in “response” to another, that’s a meaningful difference? Nobody would put it past you at this point.
Again, there’s just no perceivable difference in how these irrelevant people perceive and react to death. You can say that it’s “obvious” all day long, but nobody here thinks the two of you know what you’re talking about.
— Chet · Sep 15, 11:45 PM · #
Although, actually, FH, the stuff you linked up there is some fucked-up, bigoted, unAmerican shit, and Spragge was too nice about it really.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Sep 15, 11:49 PM · #
KK,
We don’t have to agree about everything to respect one another. I don’t agree with all of those proposals in the “What’s Wrong with the World” post I linked to and yet I admire and respect those writers (calling them names, especially prosaic ones, is beneath you — at least think of some clever insults like you do for Chet). For example, I still hold out the hope that Islam can be reconciled with the modern world or at least some small subset of Muslims (particularly Asian Muslims) can contribute in a meaningful way to the modern world and to American life. But my hope used to be stronger — learning about the “Other” has a way of changing your worldview and not the way the diversity crowd thinks it does (sometimes the more you know, the more scared you become).
Anyway, the fact that we both love Werner Herzog (I just saw “Little Dieter Needs to Fly” and “Rescue Dawn” back to back and I like the documentary even more than the drama) Moses Herzog means that you, me and Chet could probably enjoy a stiff drink or two the next time you guys wind up in Chicago…
— Fake Herzog · Sep 16, 01:25 AM · #
Dude, the Chetamajig isn’t old enough.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Sep 16, 01:48 AM · #
Says the guy named “kid.”
— Chet · Sep 16, 03:46 AM · #
As a Canadian, I think you have to take into account the reality that almost all the victims on Air India 182 were in a minority group, and one that was much more marginal to Canadian politics and culture in 1985 than it is today. I can assure you it remains a big deal in the Sikh community – a community that is still divided between those who supported and those who opposed the bombers. A better comparison would be the kidnapping of James Cross and the murder of Pierre Laporte by the FLQ in 1970. The supposedly-supeior Canadians supported the Federal Governement’s invocation of martial law and detention without trial by a margin of 90-10.
Sorry, the American overreaction to 9/11 was nothing unusual.
— Pithlord · Sep 16, 04:34 AM · #
It seems to me that “Fake Herzog” missed the basic thesis underlying the posts he linked to. The whole thrust of their argument hold that we should resist Islam not just because Islamists commit crimes (for which we already have laws) but because people may believe what Muslims teach. But we have a system based on the belief that the free choice of all people to accept or reject an idea, based on the evidence and their own conscience offers the best possible means of determining the truth. This means people must make the choice to freely accept or reject Islam. If you interfere with that choice, you indicate, again according to our rules for discovering the truth, that you fear more than anything else that people will accept Islam, which according to our rules also indicates that you endorse its truth; you just don’t want to believe it.
As an alternative, you can reject the notion that having each person individually weigh logic and evidence and choose what to believe or affirm gives us the best means available to discern the truth. But in that case, you cannot behave in the American system of government, because the whole validity of the American democratic system rests on the notion that the great body of the people, working individually and together, can eventually sift out errors from truth.
Also, I agree with Pithlord; the muted response to the bombing of flight 182 came about because of racism, complacency, the lack of a shared visual reference such as burning buildings, and the impossibility of a military response to the atrocities (at least by Canada). I didn’t cite it to suggest any superior morality on the part of Canadians, but rather the outcome; we did nothing because we chose to do nothing, and we could not do much in any event, and the terrorists never attacked us again.
— John Spragge · Sep 16, 03:03 PM · #
“I didn’t cite it to suggest any superior morality on the part of Canadians, but rather the outcome; we did nothing because we chose to do nothing, and we could not do much in any event, and the terrorists never attacked us again.”
Connection does not prove causality, however. Given the repeated attacks made on US interests by Al Qaeda in the years before 9/11, it seems somewhat unlikely that such attacks would not have continued.
Mike
— MBunge · Sep 16, 03:33 PM · #
“It seems to me that “Fake Herzog” missed the basic thesis underlying the posts he linked to. The whole thrust of their argument hold that we should resist Islam not just because Islamists commit crimes (for which we already have laws) but because people may believe what Muslims teach.”
John — I don’t think that’s what those posts are arguing. Instead they are arguing something akin to you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater and not expect consequences. Or to put it another way, not all speech is neutral, despire what First Amendment zealots will tell you. If you are a turn of the 20th century anarachist and you argue that it is a good thing to bomb and kill government officials, then you should be locked up because your speech is dangerous to civil society, even if you haven’t hurt a fly.
You may not understand the First Amendment in the same way as I do, but that is the argument (and it’s an old argument, going back to the Alien and Sedition Acts).
— Fake Herzog · Sep 16, 04:50 PM · #
Sikh extremists weren’t interested in attacking Canada anyway. They were attacking India. They certainly kept up violence against moderates in the Sikh community in Canada, including killing Tara Singh Hayer in 1998.
— Pithlord · Sep 16, 10:34 PM · #