Was 9/11 really that bad?

January 28, 2007 3:44 PM

Was 9/11 really that bad?
posted by stp123 (29 comments total)

Yes, it was a big deal, no, politicians shouldn't have used it as a reason to strip away our civil rights. Even if it had been 3 million in a nuclear blast, that doesn't justify warrentless ANYTHING.
posted by ®@ at 3:48 PM on January 28, 2007

When you're (apparently) a nation of pussies, 9/11 is the BIGGEST MOST TERRIBLE THING THAT EVER HAPPENED.
posted by interrobang at 3:51 PM on January 28, 2007

It is well documented that people are disproportionately afraid of things that actually kill very few people (serial killers, terrorism) and unafraid of relatively common killers (heart disease, car accidents, domestic violence).

Psychologically, risks to which we are not accustomed seem more frightening.
posted by sindark at 3:52 PM on January 28, 2007

9/11 was terrible. But it was an act of TERROR, done by enemies who will never have the capacity to fight us directly.

The thing those absolutely ridiculous Pearl Harbor comparisons missed is that Pearl Harbor is not historically significant because of loss of life. It's significant because it was the start of a war against an enemy who wanted to take over the world, and HAD THE MILTARY CAPACITY TO DO SO.

It seems like a childishly simple distinction, but a lot of people have taken taken that awful analogy seriously.
posted by drjimmy11 at 3:54 PM on January 28, 2007

SLOE
posted by dios at 3:57 PM on January 28, 2007

The quotation from Bruce Schneier's Beyond Fear on this page provides a more authoritative version of what I said above.
posted by sindark at 3:58 PM on January 28, 2007

Common sense, no? But certainly worth saying.

18,000 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance. How's that for a fireball?
posted by washburn at 4:01 PM on January 28, 2007

that could have been fraised in a less retared way. i think history will show that to be true.
posted by nola at 4:02 PM on January 28, 2007

retarded*
posted by nola at 4:02 PM on January 28, 2007

don't the consequences speak for themselves? ... 3,000 dead in american, thousands more across the world, 2 countries invaded and a superpower that is increasingly distrusted and disliked by the rest of the world

SLOE

say what?
posted by pyramid termite at 4:03 PM on January 28, 2007

Single link to an op-ed, pyramid termite.
posted by matthewr at 4:05 PM on January 28, 2007

I love this article. The author goes right from “Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction?” to “So why has there been such an overreaction?” via some innuendo, a citation of Norman Podhoretz, and the number 6500. He cites no good evidence of what an “overreaction" might be (or, by extension, what a “right-sized reaction” might be). How would you measure it? Against what? Who does the judging?

Clearly, HE thinks there has been an over-reaction (so do I), but—just like in math—you gotta show your work to get credit.
posted by MarshallPoe at 4:06 PM on January 28, 2007

not every enemy is in fact a threat to our existence.

That conclusion is acurate, but the numbers game he plays is wrongheaded and detracts from his point.

Russia lost those numbers in a fight against an army. That was something that the world had seen before-- and something that Russia had seen recently.

9/11 was the world's worst ever act of terrorism, in a country who had lost around 200 civilians in its history. You have to account for context, you can't just stack up numbers.

Also, sindark is right-- it's a disproportionate amount of fear produced by risks that seem unusual and out of our control.
posted by ibmcginty at 4:07 PM on January 28, 2007

®@ : "Even if it had been 3 million in a nuclear blast, that doesn't justify warrentless ANYTHING."

Whether or not a 3 million dead nuclear blast justifies anything or not, "X doesn't justify warrantless Y" is a tautology. It can be easily countered by "No, but X does justify a warranted Y". I think what you meant to say was simply "X doesn't justify Y", which is a much stronger and more useful statement, be it true or false.
posted by Bugbread at 4:08 PM on January 28, 2007

9/11 was so horrific to the national psyche precisely because we were under the delusion that we live in the USA and therefore nothing bad can ever happen to us, not like those other countries.
posted by konolia at 4:11 PM on January 28, 2007 [1 favorite]

@Bugbread: That was "warrant" in the sense of "legal authorization to search," not "warrant" the synonym for "justification."

(right?)
posted by grobstein at 4:12 PM on January 28, 2007

Still too soon.
posted by Dave Faris at 4:15 PM on January 28, 2007

Well, as of October it was claimed that 655,000 people had died in Iraq since 2003. But apparently those weren't Americans... so, whatever.
posted by miss lynnster at 4:15 PM on January 28, 2007

No, 9/11 wasn't all that bad. It was weird, but not any worse than any other day, really. You know, from Michigan. In New York, pretty sucky.
posted by klangklangston at 4:21 PM on January 28, 2007

3000/655,000 that's sort of "218 eyes for an eye"..

hell, even the most literal christian should be happy with those numbers... can we stop now?
posted by HuronBob at 4:22 PM on January 28, 2007

"9/11 was so horrific to the national psyche precisely because we were under the delusion that we live in the USA and therefore nothing bad can ever happen to us, not like those other countries."

Except that, y'know, some of us weren't idiots and thought we'd probably get come-uppance sooner or later (and remembered earlier WTC bombings).
posted by klangklangston at 4:22 PM on January 28, 2007

9/11 was the world's worst ever act of terrorism

Heh. The firebombings of Dresden were pretty bad. So were the V2s. So was Hiroshima. Was Birkenau not an act of terrorism? Trench warfare and chemical weapons in WW1?

I don't see any point to splitting semantic hairs about what defines terrorism and what defines an act of war - the definition and difference basically depends entirely on the opinion of the beholder. To us, 9/11 was terrorism. To them, it was an act of war.

So, no. 9/11 was not the world's worst ever act of terrorism. That's specious bullshit.
posted by loquacious at 4:23 PM on January 28, 2007

It did billions in damage and the buildings it struck were major financial centers. I say that it was a big deal, but the death and destruction caused in Iraq is a much bigger deal by a couple orders of magnitude.
posted by bhouston at 4:24 PM on January 28, 2007

SLOE
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:24 PM on January 28, 2007 [1 favorite]

Islamist terrorists have not come close to deploying weapons other than knives, guns and conventional explosives.

Getting back to the "show your work" line, let's re-phrase this as "to the best of my knowledge, Islamist terrorists" etc.

Which means, of course, we must trust those in the know to calibrate civil rights and unwarranted intrusions correctly. Which is a little hard to take, given the demonstrable rubbish we've been fed so far by those in the know.
posted by IndigoJones at 4:25 PM on January 28, 2007

It did billions in damage and the buildings it struck were major financial centers.

Yes, but the buildings were insured and all the data was backed up on server farms miles away so no significant information was lost.
posted by IndigoJones at 4:28 PM on January 28, 2007

Seemed pretty bad at the time.
posted by thirteenkiller at 4:28 PM on January 28, 2007

SLOE
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:24 PM EST on January 28 [+] [!]

Any other SLOE comment is just a waste of time.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:29 PM on January 28, 2007

Well it was surely terrible, but speaking from here in New Orleans I'd have to say not the most terrible thing ever.
posted by localroger at 4:30 PM on January 28, 2007