Papers Please

[Stereodude]

You got it in one.

In the United States, in the two year period that included the worst terror year ever (i.e., 9/11), 142 times as many people were killed by road accident as were killed in terror events.

In other words, you could have a 9/11-scale terror event occur every single week and you would still have only a minor problem compared to road accidents[/b].

And road accidents themselves are only a minor cause of death, trivial by comparison with the biggies like heart problems, cancer, and stroke.

Percentage death rates (USA, 2002 figures)

1: Heart: 28.5%
2: Cancer: 22.8%
3: Stroke: 6.7%
4: Lower resp disease: 5.1%
5: Diabetes: 3.0%
6: Flu: 2.7%
7: Alzheimer's: 2.4%
8: Non-road accidents: 2.4%
9: Road accidents: 2.0%
10: Kidney disease: 1.7%
11: Septicemia: 1.4%
12: Suicide: 1.3%
13: Liver disease: 1.1%
14: Blood pressure: 0.8%
15: Murder: 0.7%

Even in the 9/11 year terrorism was so minor a problem that it is completely off the scale. Sure, take some measures to defend against it if you want to. But the moment you spend money defending against terrorism that you could have spent dealing with any of those actual, real, significant causes of death listed above (or with the next 100 or 200 minor causes that are still much worse than terrorism) .... the moment you divert dollars from important work into non-productive life-saving work (i.e., so-called "counter-terror" measures), you are killing people.

Simple as that: if you waste money fixing a "problem" that is so minor that, statistically speaking, it doesn't exist, you are effectively killing the people with real problems - problems that kill more people in a single day than terror kills in a period of years - that you could have helped and didn't.

Do you know that more people died in road acccidents because they didn't want to fly after 9/11 than were killed in the attacks themselves?

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong...

Your argument is so flawed it isn't funny.

One instance of heart disease puts 1 person at risk, 1 case of cancer puts 1 person at risk. Same for most of the things on your list.

One instance of terrorism can kill tens of thousands, if not millions of people. One nuke in a major city would result in millions of dead people. When fighting terrorism you have to be right 100% of the time, which can be very expensive. The terrorists only have to be right once.

But, hey... we can send all the terrorist's to Oz if you want.

 

[Tannin]

Sterodude, your "wrong, wrong, wrong" post is completely nonsensical. The figures I gave you are for total deaths[/i] - i.e., the number of individual people killed. It has nothing to do with the number of fatal incidents in which those people were killed.

Read the numbers, huh? You are talking about a risk that is so far down the causes of death chart that it doesn't even get onto the chart in the first place. You are panicing over a non-issue - and in doing so, you (and others like you) are the best friends Osama bin Laden ever had.

PS: And you already did send the terrorists to Oz. Or, at least our culpably stupid Prime Minister with his arse-licking all-the-way-with-LBJ policy ... er ... sorry, all-the-way-with-GWB policy, did just that, made us a target too. Not that it's a significant risk, not compared to snakebite, being eaten by a crocodile, struck by lightning, or eating at McDonalds, but even addng a statistically trivial risk to our lives is an unfriendly act. How about we send you John Howard? He'd fit right in over there, and I'm sure he'd be happier than he is here.

I'll repeat it for those who missed it the first time: you would have to have a huge 9/11-scale terror attack be successful twice a week before it would kill any more people than are already killed by road accidents - and as we all know, the United States is well behind the more advanced western countries when it comes to figuring out how to prevent road deaths. There really seems to be no excuse for this: it is not as if preventing road trauma is particularly difficult or even (by the standards of the Waste against Terror) expensive. Other countries have worked out and implemented remarkably effective methods years ago, and are continuing to improve.

As for the argument that terror attacks effect everyone through fear, that is entirely the fault of the media barons and our leaders. Well, and the fault of Joe Public who, in many cases, is too stupid to assess the real risk, and in consequence becomes scared about risks that are close to non-existent, meanwhile not worrying about risks that are - as demonstrated above - hundreds of times and in some cases thousands of times more serious.

 

[LiamC]

One instance of terrorism can kill tens of thousands, if not millions of people. One nuke in a major city would result in millions of dead people. When fighting terrorism you have to be right 100% of the time, which can be very expensive. The terrorists only have to be right once.

But, hey... we can send all the terrorist's to Oz if you want.

Ermm, I believe that Homeland Security estimated that terrorists are unlikely to have access to suitcase nukes. The only downside to this assertion is their track record of capability assessments. Far more likely is a dirty bomb, and/or biological agent, and this is less likely to kill "thousands" at a stroke.

Why is this? Because disaster planning is something that governments routinely do, it's one of the things that they are responsible for. The cry for more money for the WoT is something that they do already. A case could be made for double dipping. Sure there are contingencies that are unique, but a disaster, be it natural or man-made is a disaster:

stop unnecessary people entering the zone,
evacuate as many as possible who are not in the "threat zone",
identify threat zone, develop plan for rescuing those in the threat zone (if possible).

What is the WoT? Fear. If govt. doesn't "do something", they are replaced at next election. If govt. concentrates on (for arguments sake) the health system (using funds/resources from WoT) and saves extra 30 000 lives, this is a good thing. If 1 000 die as a result of a terrorist attack, govt. gets replaced, and is unlikely to regain power for 10/12 years.

Did the govt. do a good thing? Yep.
Did they save more people? Yep.
So why are they blamed and criucified?

The WoT is an exercise in getting re-elected. It is not

logical,
morally correct, or,
morally courageous.

It has no metrics that you can measure to say that you are winning--it is not provable. So you have to "trust" the politicians who have a vested interest in the result, and are taking actions that are ethically suspect at best.

No thanks. I hate the politics of fear. Ich bin Jude?

 

[Stereodude]

You still don't get it.

In my previous post I highlighted that a single terror event could completely turn your numbers around to where terrorism was way up on your list of what kills Americans. That is not the case for nearly every other item in your list.

Your numbers are bogus because you assume they are an accurate representation of people who would die if 0 money was spend on the said item. The fact is, you don't know how many people would die from terrorism in a year in the US if no money was spent and the problem was ignored. You assume because so few people have died in the due to terrorism in US that there isn't a problem with terrorism. Sorry, but what that means is what has been done is, at least, mostly effective.

For example, we know that nearly every person who is diagnosed with cancer will die from it without treatment. As such we can extrapolate how many people are saved by modern medicine and the fight against cancer.

On the other hand we have no way to know how many Americans would die each year from terrorism if nothing is done. That makes it impossible to compared the cost vs. the number of lives saved. But, that's exactly what you're trying to do. Argue that money spent defending against terrorism doesn't save very many lives.

So using your method, say hypothetically that the US spent 10 billion dollars a year vacinating people against smallpox and measles, and if we look at how many people die of smallpox and measles each year (very small) we must conclude that the money is wasted and should be spent on cancer and heart disease which kill more people. Or... could it be that the smallpox and measles vaccine is very very effective and worth every penny?

 

[sechs]

More US citizens have been killed by being struck dead by lightning than killed by terrorists in the last 3 years.

Actually, I'd say that we've had more citizens killed by attempting to thwart terrorists in the last year than actually killed by terrorists (not including ourselves). And all because Brownie was doing a good job!

Considering the recent report card from the so-called 9/11 Committee, I'd suggest that the so-called War on Terror is, at best, ineffectual, and, more likely, a waste of money.

 

[Tannin]

In my previous post I highlighted that a single terror event could completely turn your numbers around ...

No you didn't. I already used figures for the worst terrorism event period in American history to generate those numbers. Those numbers already include something approximating your hypothetical worst case scenario.

... completely turn your numbers around to where terrorism was way up on your list of what kills Americans

Not even close. Not just missing the ballpark, we haven't got to the right suburb yet.

Let's assume a terror event 10 times worse than 911. No, to hell with that, let's stetch our imagination to science fiction levels and assume a terror event 100 times worse than 911. How "way up" the list would that get? Well, not all that far, when you look at the actual numbers instead of fantasizing about the headlines.

Take 2002 figures as your base line. You get:

1: Heart disease: 696,947
2: Cancer: 557,271
3: Imaginary mega, mega terror event: 200,000
4: Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 162,672
5: Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,816

So, even if we take a ridiculously inflated worst-case, one 100 times worse than the worst such event in the whole of recorded history, we still wind up with the leading cause of death accounting for three and a half times as many death as terrorism. And that is for a single year. Unless you are going to assume a worse-than-Tom-Clancy event every single year, the number gets smallr still.

Finally, no-one hee has argued that we should spend zero on terror. That would be stupid. We should spend an ammount commensurate with the risk - i.e., an amount in the same ballpark as the amount we spent in 1949 or 1971 or 2001. No-one has advocated sacking the police or getting rid of the intelligence agencies. I am advocating returning the massive extra sums that have been diverted into the pointless WoT back to things that actually make a difference to people.

On the other hand we have no way to know how many Americans would die each year from terrorism if nothing is done

Nonsense. We have moe than 200 years worth of historical records. We know exactly how many Americans died from terrorism-related events. Very few, in fact.

 

[LiamC]

You still don't get it.

No, I do get what you are saying, I just don't agree with it for reasons I've outlined.

I second what Tannin said in the post above, and especially about the increased (note the emphasis) spending on the WoT. I would add that there is probably room for some increase, but not the huge increases we've seen. Given that (as you say yourself) that the effectiveness can never be measured, and the people yammering for this money know that—they aren't stupid—then there has to be (at the least) typical, unethical, politics at play—an "opportunity" has arisen, let's grab us some more money/power.

Save the lives/improve the quality of life of those you can, not the nebulous politics of fear. If you play the fear game (isolationism), you've already lost.