The DOJ gathers statistics on ammunition use and crime, last I checked was 2004 or something like that and more then 3 trillion rounds of handgun caliber ammunition were bought in the US that year.
First, you mean "more than", not "then". Second, you fail arithmetic. I couldn't find a DOJ report, but three trillion rounds is not plausible: that would be 3,000 for each person in the US. At 10 cents each, 300 billion dollars' worth. wiki.answers.com (not a great source, but there it is) claims the entire world-wide production of ammunition is about 14 billion rounds a year. It also says 39% of that is in the US, which would be about 5.4 billion rounds a year. The US National Shooting Sports Federation says the whole firearms industry is worth 4.1 billion US dollars a year, about 1/3 of that from ammunition sales.
Bottom line is you have to be living some kind of "lifestyle" to warrant surveillance or investigation.
True, a lifestyle like those of Patrick Henry, John Hancock, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela -- not to omit Jesus Christ, a noted political radical who was executed for sedition. Even those who feel entirely satisfied living in their little constrained boxes benefit from the rare people willing to suffer inconvenience and worse indignities.
It's depressing that this isn't obvious to everyone.
What has been the rate of *successful* terrorist attacks over the previous 10 years?... My opinion is that such common sense analysis will prove that we aren't gaining much by all this theater appart from inconvenience, and that (no matter how much tragic and traumatic it has been for the victims of 9/11 and their families) the impact of terrorism is a very small and insignificant occasional bump in the statistics.
There is an analogous situation with regard to gun control: namely, there are at least two ways to evaluate risk: one is the way you suggest, statistically (and, in this case, "estimated years of life lost" would be a better measure than just "number of lives lost"). The other way is to estimate risk based on degree of emotional reaction, so high-profile events like an airplane crash (or even a well-publicized thwarted hypothetical attack) have disproportionate weight. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman mentions a study which found people were willing to pay MORE money for an insurance policy covering "death resulting from terrorism" than for a policy covering "death for any reason" (even though the second one includes the first). The proposed reason is that evaluating actual risk is hard; instead, people tended to base their estimate of value on how afraid they felt, and terrorism is more scary than just plain death.
Doing statistics, even at a basic level, is hard and often counter-intuitive. Reacting emotionally is much easier and more natural. Good luck getting many people to do statistics, especially when their emotional reactions are much more useful to those who want to manipulate them.
Besides, employing TSA people and buying security scanners are good for the economy, right?
There are times when security trumps free speech ("Fire!" in a theater, etc.) but those are few and rightly heavily restricted.
The example you mention was first used by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in his opinion in the US Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States (1919). According to Wikipedia, the Court "... upheld the Espionage Act of 1917 and concluded that a defendant did not have a First Amendment right to express freedom of speech against the draft during World War I," which seems relevant to the present instance of suppression of free speech. The written opinion by Justice Holmes, in reference to handing out literature critical of wartime conscription, held that "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic." (The opinion also introduced the phrase "a clear and present danger".) "In A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn suggests that, since the defendants were prosecuted for handing out anti-war literature, a more apt analogy would be "someone shouting, not falsely, but truly, to people about to buy tickets and enter a theater, that there was a fire raging inside."
One can well imagine a representative assembly in Athens being less than keen on taking on Sparta, but there was no representative assembly. If a guy could stand in front of the assembly of eligible Greek voters and convince them that Athens would become a great empire if it went to war with Sparta, they voted right then and there, and it became policy.
Clearly the system in the United States is better, because it prevented unwise wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Or not.
One Athenian custom the US should adopt is ostracism.
Robert Heinlein considered this in "Starship Troopers": anyone working for the government doesn't get to vote. The problem in the real world of AD 2012 is finding anyone who doesn't benefit from government largesse (as opposed to the artificially narrow definition of entitlements). In the US, home mortgage interest and real-estate taxes are deductible from Federal personal income taxes. Are those deductions entitlements? Surely anyone who gets these deductions will vote for politicians who promise not to reduce the deductions or increase taxes, right? What about corporate deductions for oil exploration, research and development, a host of others? Farm subsidies and price supports? Government payments to the defense industry?
What actually happens is that most people don't even vote for their own economic interests: about 80% vote straight party tickets (according to research reported in the book "The Political Brain"). Political parties are nothing more than scale-up tribes or sports teams: you join a team and then want your team to win. Can't get much less intelligent than that.
Ultimitely working for what you get is better for the human spirit than handouts. And there really is a trade off between the amount of handouts and the difficulty of self-sufficiency.
Good point. Consider the implications:
(1) The average CEO must be working 400 times as hard as the average employee.
(2) No one should be allowed to inherit.
(3) No form of insurance should be permitted. Everyone should be required to pay their medical expenses out of their own pockets; after all, insurance involves sharing risk, which is Communism. (Of course, the most seriously ill could do sport.)
(4) No children should be given free education; they should have to work to pay the salaries of teachers and administrators. Obviously, many students don't appreciate the education they're being given for free now.... and so on.
Is it really an invasion of your privacy that the people who run a website or cable company providing you network services to be able to figure out where their resources are being used? What portion of their resources are used? Did you catch that use of the word THEIR, these aren't YOUR resources being monitored so if the owner wants to monitor them, so be it. You are the one CHOOSING to use THEIR resources.
There are two problems with this: first, there's a distinction between monitoring resource usage and monitoring content. For Google to note that my IP address is issuing an unusually high number of requests is resource monitoring; for Google to keep a list of all queries it received from my IP address is content monitoring.
Second, in the case of network bandwidth, I PAID for it, so it's mine, no one else's. It's valid for my provider to monitor the quantity of data I send and receive; it's not valid for them to keep track of my DNS queries or my connections.
> "After having spent multiple deployments in Iraq and Africa guarding against the same types of situation, I would consider her lucky to be alive."
First, there are obvious differences between Iraq and Boston.
> "Can you honestly tell me you know or can spot when someone is going to spontaneously explode?"
No, I can't, and obviously neither can TSA. They've been given an impossible job. That doesn't mean they have license to engage in reckless behavior in pursuit of an impossible goal.
> "If you neutralize them, one person is lost. If you miscalculate, many people will die."
So, hypothetically, if you kill a hundred people because they looked suspicious, but none was actually a threat, how many lives have you saved?
There are other problems as well. As others have pointed out, even after Star Simpson was determined not to be a threat, she was arrested and charged with a felony: "possession of a hoax device". When and how did possession of a hoax device become a crime? Doesn't that strike anyone as intolerable?
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The DOJ gathers statistics on ammunition use and crime, last I checked was 2004 or something like that and more then 3 trillion rounds of handgun caliber ammunition were bought in the US that year.
First, you mean "more than", not "then". Second, you fail arithmetic. I couldn't find a DOJ report, but three trillion rounds is not plausible: that would be 3,000 for each person in the US. At 10 cents each, 300 billion dollars' worth. wiki.answers.com (not a great source, but there it is) claims the entire world-wide production of ammunition is about 14 billion rounds a year. It also says 39% of that is in the US, which would be about 5.4 billion rounds a year. The US National Shooting Sports Federation says the whole firearms industry is worth 4.1 billion US dollars a year, about 1/3 of that from ammunition sales.
Bottom line is you have to be living some kind of "lifestyle" to warrant surveillance or investigation.
True, a lifestyle like those of Patrick Henry, John Hancock, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela -- not to omit Jesus Christ, a noted political radical who was executed for sedition. Even those who feel entirely satisfied living in their little constrained boxes benefit from the rare people willing to suffer inconvenience and worse indignities. It's depressing that this isn't obvious to everyone.
What has been the rate of *successful* terrorist attacks over the previous 10 years? ... My opinion is that such common sense analysis will prove that we aren't gaining much by all this theater appart from inconvenience, and that (no matter how much tragic and traumatic it has been for the victims of 9/11 and their families) the impact of terrorism is a very small and insignificant occasional bump in the statistics.
There is an analogous situation with regard to gun control: namely, there are at least two ways to evaluate risk: one is the way you suggest, statistically (and, in this case, "estimated years of life lost" would be a better measure than just "number of lives lost"). The other way is to estimate risk based on degree of emotional reaction, so high-profile events like an airplane crash (or even a well-publicized thwarted hypothetical attack) have disproportionate weight. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman mentions a study which found people were willing to pay MORE money for an insurance policy covering "death resulting from terrorism" than for a policy covering "death for any reason" (even though the second one includes the first). The proposed reason is that evaluating actual risk is hard; instead, people tended to base their estimate of value on how afraid they felt, and terrorism is more scary than just plain death.
Doing statistics, even at a basic level, is hard and often counter-intuitive. Reacting emotionally is much easier and more natural. Good luck getting many people to do statistics, especially when their emotional reactions are much more useful to those who want to manipulate them.
Besides, employing TSA people and buying security scanners are good for the economy, right?
There are times when security trumps free speech ("Fire!" in a theater, etc.) but those are few and rightly heavily restricted.
The example you mention was first used by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in his opinion in the US Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States (1919). According to Wikipedia, the Court "... upheld the Espionage Act of 1917 and concluded that a defendant did not have a First Amendment right to express freedom of speech against the draft during World War I," which seems relevant to the present instance of suppression of free speech. The written opinion by Justice Holmes, in reference to handing out literature critical of wartime conscription, held that "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic." (The opinion also introduced the phrase "a clear and present danger".) "In A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn suggests that, since the defendants were prosecuted for handing out anti-war literature, a more apt analogy would be "someone shouting, not falsely, but truly, to people about to buy tickets and enter a theater, that there was a fire raging inside."
Minor correction: the FBI is part of the judicial branch, not executive.
You fail US civics. The FBI is an agency within the US Department of Justice, which is a cabinet-level department of the Executive Branch.
One can well imagine a representative assembly in Athens being less than keen on taking on Sparta, but there was no representative assembly. If a guy could stand in front of the assembly of eligible Greek voters and convince them that Athens would become a great empire if it went to war with Sparta, they voted right then and there, and it became policy.
Clearly the system in the United States is better, because it prevented unwise wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Or not.
One Athenian custom the US should adopt is ostracism.
What actually happens is that most people don't even vote for their own economic interests: about 80% vote straight party tickets (according to research reported in the book "The Political Brain"). Political parties are nothing more than scale-up tribes or sports teams: you join a team and then want your team to win. Can't get much less intelligent than that.
Ultimitely working for what you get is better for the human spirit than handouts. And there really is a trade off between the amount of handouts and the difficulty of self-sufficiency.
Good point. Consider the implications: (1) The average CEO must be working 400 times as hard as the average employee. (2) No one should be allowed to inherit. (3) No form of insurance should be permitted. Everyone should be required to pay their medical expenses out of their own pockets; after all, insurance involves sharing risk, which is Communism. (Of course, the most seriously ill could do sport.) (4) No children should be given free education; they should have to work to pay the salaries of teachers and administrators. Obviously, many students don't appreciate the education they're being given for free now. ... and so on.
Is it really an invasion of your privacy that the people who run a website or cable company providing you network services to be able to figure out where their resources are being used? What portion of their resources are used? Did you catch that use of the word THEIR, these aren't YOUR resources being monitored so if the owner wants to monitor them, so be it. You are the one CHOOSING to use THEIR resources.
There are two problems with this: first, there's a distinction between monitoring resource usage and monitoring content. For Google to note that my IP address is issuing an unusually high number of requests is resource monitoring; for Google to keep a list of all queries it received from my IP address is content monitoring. Second, in the case of network bandwidth, I PAID for it, so it's mine, no one else's. It's valid for my provider to monitor the quantity of data I send and receive; it's not valid for them to keep track of my DNS queries or my connections.
> "After having spent multiple deployments in Iraq and Africa guarding against the same types of situation, I would consider her lucky to be alive." First, there are obvious differences between Iraq and Boston. > "Can you honestly tell me you know or can spot when someone is going to spontaneously explode?" No, I can't, and obviously neither can TSA. They've been given an impossible job. That doesn't mean they have license to engage in reckless behavior in pursuit of an impossible goal. > "If you neutralize them, one person is lost. If you miscalculate, many people will die." So, hypothetically, if you kill a hundred people because they looked suspicious, but none was actually a threat, how many lives have you saved? There are other problems as well. As others have pointed out, even after Star Simpson was determined not to be a threat, she was arrested and charged with a felony: "possession of a hoax device". When and how did possession of a hoax device become a crime? Doesn't that strike anyone as intolerable?