I compare this to death % while travelling in car vs plane. There is lot more chances to die in a car than a plane (for the same distance), but more people will fear plane because the death is more spectacular, and they don't make a special TV report every time there is a car accident.

Fear is not something rational.

Yet it exists in all of us and when a major terrorist attack happens in your country even the most right-brain dead liberals are more cautious at busy transportation locations.

You can count the bodies(including the ones wounded in the hospital), but the economic and political impact is a little harder to measure.

Wow!

Once again, ISIS cannot get hold of a drone large enough to be able to cause any significant damage to a nuclear facility. A nuclear power plant is designed to be able withstand a direct crash from a large commercial airliner and still not release any harmful radiation

I don't know what you thought I meant when I said that they cannot get hold a drone large enough to cause any significant damage to a nuclear facility, but I was basically addressing that a market drone would not be capable of holding such explosives. A market drone can only carry 3 to 10KGs of weight, you are a complete idiot if you think that's enough to carry any kind of explosives that could cause significant damage to a nuclear facility. Especially if we're talking about the home made explosives produced by these terrorist

This post was edited by TCassa89 on Mar 28 2016 02:37am

Good points. You are hitting two important things:

1) Fear. As you said, fear is not rational. You are more likely to be killed by your own furniture than by a terrorist, but we still fear the terrorist more. It's not logical, but fear is deeply biologically ingrained in us. Terrorism is scary.

2) Focusing Events. September 11th was probably the largest focusing event in American history (ahead of Pearl Harbor). Focusing events create public policy and set agendas, and 9/11 was a huge opportunity for the American government to create a new anti-terror agenda and national security regime.

Obviously, some of it is very important to keep us safe, but a lot of it also invaded our personal privacies and are being used by businesses and corporations to take advantage of us. Thank goodness we have some reasonable people like Rand Paul and many Democrats that realized the US Government was taking advantage of our fears by setting up an unconstitutional (4th Amendment) surveillance state for nefarious reasons other than national security.

Not on topic per say but such a clever burn I couldnt help but post.

Reddit news article about a recent 10,000 strong protest in Pakistan. One of the top comments: "10,000 of them all in the same spot? Missed opportunity."

Morbid sure but clever as all hell.

I'm assuming he meant bombing them?

If so, that doesn't make sense. How would killing 10000 people protesting terrorist violence help anyone?

There are some people out there who believe the only way to defeat terrorism is to become terrorists ourselves

The 10,000 protesters were calling for Sharia law.