9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.
Mass surveillance has certainly gone too far, but comparing 3000 premeditated murders to car accidents is not really a logical way to argue that. We investigate murder for a reason, despite it being a much rarer cause of death than natural causes and accidents.
Only about 2500 Americans died at Pearl Harbor. I don’t know what automobile safety was like in 1941, but I’m sure it wasn’t great, then, either.<p>I’m therefore not sure what weight this argument is supposed to carry.
If Pearl Harbor had been the only thing that happened that day, and the nature of the attack had been such that it was automatically prevented from happening again, then what came after would have been a severe overreaction too.
> even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year<p>I have trouble understanding your logic. A lot of trouble is made to prevent car accidents. We require driving licenses, we develop whole categories of law and do plenty of research to make driving safer.
We’re certainly not trying 15x harder to prevent car accidents as done to prevent another 9/11.<p>Prior we had metal detectors for people and hand luggage x-ray. Now we have x-ray backscatter for people, ID and facial photography, and a whole lot of other nonsense. Liquids banned, visitors at the gate not permitted, and the list goes on…<p>I don’t entirely agree with the actual measures taken purportedly to prevent a recurrence, but it’s hard to argue anything other than significant steps were taken.<p>Roughly a million people have died in car accidents since. Was there really nothing possible to prevent a fraction of them?<p>Where’s the new government organization? What new laws have been passed to prevent? What safety features are now required to mitigate such?<p>Ok, we have backup cameras and the funny headlights that turn off when the turn signal is on. Mission Accomplished?
Right, so we would expect the magnitude of the changes from 9/11 to be about 1/14th the magnitude of the changes we do to prevent car deaths.
Maybe if you have zero understanding of things like emotion and humanity, and also cannot tell the difference between an <i>accident</i> and a <i>mass murder</i>.<p>Otherwise, this is surface-level insanity.
This is America. We see constant mass murder of random citizens, often children, via mass shootings. So maybe the question is, why was 9/11 special among murder?
Is this a serious question?<p>Because it was a terrorist group killing people to make a point, not somebody who has lost their sanity and, failing to have any other outlets, takes it out on the weak.<p>How are people THIS dense?
Is this a serious response?<p>Do you seriously believe that among the thousands of mass shootings to have taken place in America since 9/11, none were the work of sane people trying to make a statement? The shooting death toll of people trying to make a statement since 9/11, exceeds the death toll of 9/11.<p>Maybe you missed that since it's diluted by all the other shooting death of children and random citizens.<p>Though it would be unkind to accuse you of being that dense.
hn comment threads on most articles have rapidly taken on the character of Reddit threads ca. 2009. This argument in particular was a classic back then.<p>I’ve started downvoting inanity and flagging one-liner, content-less snark, but unless the mods get serious on stuff that hits the front page, I don’t see that trajectory changing.
We have a whole licensing apparatus and traffic policing as well as safety regulations for vehicles driven on public roads. It's not cheap.
They died from car crashes.<p>Not accidents.<p>Fixing this broken language and attitude is a step towards ending these deaths.
The terrorists keep winning each day the 4th Amendment is not restored.
hello, is this thing on?<p>bye, bye, miss american pie.
drove my Chevy to the levee but
the levee was dry.
and good old' boys were drinking
whisky and rye<p>singin,
this'll be the day that I...<p>it's report card time fellas, the department of homeostasis is feeding marijuana users to the prison system when the incumbent promised to reschedule.<p>edit: spelling.
It definitely precipitated the surveillance state and the erosion of civil liberties across not just the USA but large parts of the west, but it's not about body count.<p>Everyone knew, even in the immediate aftermath, that a copycat situation would never happen again, because passengers now knew to fight back and risk possible death vs certain death being used as living munitions inside a flying death tube.<p>Don't forget that in 2004 when traumatic memories of 9/11 were still raw and on everyone's daily consiousness, we had the Madrid bombings, the London bombings I think the following year, and then the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.<p>The world felt like it was rapidly becoming more unstable, and people feared that surprise terror attacks were the new normal. That kind of loss of confidence in security services can cause a rapid unravelling of the social fabric in ways that car accidents can't.<p>Nobody was talking about starting pogroms against people with brown skin because of car accidents.
>then the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris<p>Not that it really matters to your point, but this happened in 2015. Seems kind of odd to include that in this list.
Most of that fear was driven by the response, not the attacks themselves. The government could have tried to calm the people down, but instead it amped them up and treated terrorism as the most dangerous thing imaginable. You can't say that the ridiculous over-the-top response was justifiable because people were terrified, when that is a big part of <i>why</i> people were terrified.
I'm an American turning 50 in the next year. Today made me aware of the fact me that I've now lived in a "post-9/11" world longer than before. (Time gets away from us, doesn't it... >sigh<)<p>In the years immediately following the attacks I thought the country's collective paranoia would subside. I thought the encroachments on civil liberties would fade away.<p>I didn't understand how much money there was in fear-based capitalism (and I really should have, seeing as how I lived thru the fear and hype around Y2K) and how quickly the interests profiting from keeping Americans afraid would become entrenched.<p>I feel like people who were young when the attacks happened developed a normalized view of mass surveillance. Likewise, I feel like they have a stronger deference to authority. As today's early-to-mid 30's-aged people assume the reigns of power I think we'll have even less of a shot to see a return to pre-9/11 attitudes about civil liberties.
Y2K was potentially a real problem. It didn't materialize as such because we actually fixed it.
I totally agree. I was there helping fix it, too.<p>The occasion of Y2K was used by merchants of hype and fear to make a quick buck with people who had "prepper" tendencies. I can't believe I didn't expect them to glom-on to 9/11 the way they did with Y2K.
Here! Here! This always annoys me. My company hired a bunch of older programmers to fix many Y2K problems in our legacy but critical systems. Even the (then) new-fangled thing I was working on needed some amount of Y2K work, which I did myself, to avoid disaster.
I mean, given recent voting patterns, people currently in their 30’s probably won’t be elected until like 2060, right?
The US tendency toward gerontocracy is frustrating to me. Besides being out-of-touch, our federal officeholders being so old, as a group, feeds a self-fulfilling stereotype.
just look at all the doomposting, announcements of people leaving and companies disclosing that their chatbots totally could destroy the world! fear-based capitalism, as you put it.
The sentiment here seems pretty anti-surveillance -- but why the false dichotomy? Both are important issues. It just comes off as demeaning to the people that died in 9/11.<p>So much vitriol here today, jeez.
I had the same thought about the death count when I was 11 years old. Then you grow up and realize why an attack of that nature on American soil was and still is the big deal. That's how they were able to push the PATRIOT Act and normalize surveillance, the death count numbers weren't scary enough to get that job done.
Okay now you are just being demeaning to victims of drunk driving