I’ve been hoping that somebody would do something like the video I’ve embedded above and, finally, Atlantic has done it. Thanks.
I have one quibble with it and that’s at the very end. By the logic by which they compare the total number of deaths due to terrorism with the deaths due to other forms of homicide, we should never have declared war against Japan after the attack at Pearl Harbor. Only 2,400 people or so were killed. That’s a tiny fraction of the U. S. population. That’s simply not the way that you measure threat.
I agree, the inevitable “more people die in the bathtub” tropes are pointless apples and oranges comparisons. People will never, ever be okay with bombs going off in cafes and stores.
The funny thing is that once we eliminate ISIS in Syria and Iraq they may be more dangerous rather than less, at least in the short term. They’ve conveniently decided to occupy territory – which is deeply stupid for a terrorist organization – so for now at least we have one convenient location for retaliation. But they could morph into more of an Al Qaeda deal, shift from a “Coming Caliphate” to a “Lost Caliphate” narrative and rely on ideology as the disease vector to spread to lone wolves or small cells that way.
Then it becomes a police/intel rather more than a DoD thing. I think ISIS’d be weaker in the end just because I don’t think you can motivate and pay as many people to act as lone wolves. It’s one thing to sign up for some raping and murdering, there are fewer people interested in the whole blowing yourself up thing. What worries me is that with less opportunity to react overseas we might overreact at home.
If we were really Machiavellian we’d allow ISIS the equivalent of an Indian reservation, hemmed in by Syrians and Iraqis and Kurds. Someplace where we knew we could find them if a bomb goes off anywhere west of Beirut. It would have the add-on effect of showing them to be impotent, not so much a tumor as a blister. If we weren’t so impatient we’d go with the protracted withering death rather than the quick kill. A quick kill clears the field for the next player, while a slow death makes internecine conflict more likely as ISIS loses steam but still commands loyalties.
Or we could be all Spartans at Thermopalyae and accept their prophecy of an armageddon at Dabiq, in Syria. Put up or shut up. Your god or our machines. Dabiq, baby, you bring everything you got, we’ll even it a little and just bring, say, 20% of what we’ve got. Where’s your god now, al-Baghdadi?
I don’t think the point is that we should not respond to bombings, rather that we should respond in a rational and proportionate manner. Attacking in Afghanistan after 9/11? I know Dave disagrees, but I think most of us believe it was appropriate. Invading Iraq? No way. If we want to go down the path of invading another country or engage in massive bombings in response to a few killings by isolated terrorists, I don’t see how we sustain that financially and think that it will be counterproductive. Killing lots of innocent people pretty much guarantees creating more terrorists.
Contrast how much money we have spent on terror, and how many of our own soldiers have been killed, with what we have spent on the following.
“(CNN)Despite efforts to fight the opioid epidemic, deaths from drug overdoses reached an all-time high in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Deaths from overdoses of prescription drugs and heroin continue to be the leading cause of unintentional death for Americans, rising 14% from 2013 to 2014.
Last year, 47,055 people died from drug overdoses — 1.5 times greater than the number killed in car crashes. Opioids are involved in 61% of all drug overdose deaths.
The latest CDC data finds that deaths from natural opiates such as morphine, codeine and semisynthetic prescription pain killers like oxycodone and hydrocodone jumped 10% from 2013 to 2014. Deaths from heroin overdoses rose 26%.”
We spent some time with our GOP senator recently, trying to convince him that part of the effort to stop this should be funding for mental health and drug addiction counseling. Be interesting to see how far that goes.
Steve
It’s suddenly an “opioid epidemic.” Remember when it used to be a dangerous crime wave? Can anyone tell me what changed between “lock ’em up and throw away the key,” and “we must ensure that they have treatment options?” Anyone? Jan? Drew? Tasty?
“lock ’em up and throw away the key,â€
Having fun with your usual debating partner, Mr Strawman, Michael?
@michael reynolds
What changed is that progressives decided to end the War on Drugs, and they demanded treatment instead of incarceration. It is your side you idiot that wants the prisons emptied. You all are some of the dumbest mother f*ckers around.
Other than a few of my wife’s friends, I do not know anybody that wants smack addicts running around their neighborhood, and they damn sure do not want drug dealers anywhere near them or their children.
Take your bullshit and shove it up your a$$. You all have your heads shoved so far up each others a$$es that you think you are smelling a sweet wonderful oder. The rest of us know it is the foul stench of worn over, moldy, used up, wretched ideas that are worse than an open sewerage plant on a hot, humid, and windless day.
So can we put you down as “I beg to differ,” Tasty?
Tasty:
Dude. It’s the GOP presidential candidates who are falling all over themselves to offer love and understanding to druggies. It started with Christie. It continued through Kasich and Rubio and even Cruz.
So, not only do you not understand the issue, you are unaware of the state of the race, and then pivot to attack me for something you have wrong from the start.
The reason that the debate has shifted is really very simple: Crack is black, Vicodin is white. Not hard to get, Tasty. Really.
Oh, the ignorance. It burns… Anyway, a bit over half of these deaths were from prescription narcotics. Lots of these are nice middle class folks. There are people who OD and survive who then run up huge costs in our ICUs. We have at least 2 now. Then there are the ones who manage to limp along an dont kill themselves, but lose their jobs, families break up, etc. The costs to us all are huge. Sorry, the stereotype of burned out heroin addict ( I worked at a heroin clinic for a short while when younger so I know what they are) does not fit for a lot of these folks.
On the plus side, our senator has a business background. I think we made a pretty good case (had help with the numbers) that in the long run it would be more cost effective to be able to treat these people rather than just leave them addicted and going where that leads. Right now there just isn’t much care available. In our network, revenues about $2 billion, we don’t have a single addiction expert/counselor/therapist/whatever. We can’t treat even if we and the pt want to do so. We are typical of most networks throughout the country.
Steve
I knew it. Racism. The universal bogeyman. I hear the Jooooz are really behind it all, locking up the cuh-luds, wetbacks and Mooooslims while the white meth addicts are set up at the Peninsula.
@michael reynolds
Progressives have been clamoring for the end to the War on Drugs and treatment instead of incarceration for years. I cannot help it that you have just noticed this little fact when Republicans agreed. If I understand correctly, we have @steve saying that treatment is better, and I do not think he is a racist.
You get your wish, and you still bitch.
To my friends on the right, this is how the Left plays you. They put forth proposals that they think you will never agree to, but if you do, they call you racist.
They do not want crack heads, crack whores, or crack dealers in their neighborhoods, and they will get their hired thugs (you call them the police) to remove the undesirables. Guess where the crack heads, whores, and dealers get dumped? That’s right – into the poor black neighborhoods.
Poor black people do not want to live with crack heads, whores, and dealers, but they do not have the political power of the white progressives. They are forced to live the downside of the policies that make white progressives feel good about themselves.
Never listen to what they say. Always pay attention to what they do. A progressive living in an all white community (or only one or two token black families) are segregationists. They do not live there by mistake. White progressives do not send their children to all or almost all white schools by mistake. They do not live, shop, or work around overwhelmingly white people by mistake. Why does the minority population never match the overall population?
The reason they act like rabid dogs is to divert attention, but this does not give you a pass. Just like the Trump supporters have been swallowing Republican bullshit for years, black voters have been swallowing Democrat bullshit for years.
Tasty:
You seem confused.
1) I have always favored decriminalization and some legalization.
2) I’ve always opposed draconian sentences for drug use, indeed any sentence for drug use.
The point you seem to be having a hard time with is that we are as a society treating recent white drug use with peace, love and understanding, while black drug use was met with contempt and harsh sentences.
Duh.
Now, feel free to continue with your rant about how black people should join the party that has the KKK endorsements, not the one that supported civil rights.
@michael reynolds
Again, you seem to be confused, but after rereading your statements closely, I see what you have done. Another attempt at word trickery. You have intermingled the present and the past. In the past “was” when the harsh drug laws were affecting black people. You have no problem with crack heads, whores, and dealers in the poor black neighborhoods, but you will not tolerate them in yours.
(Here is something you might want to learn about: How was all the cheap cocaine getting into the US and into the black community?)
But, we are not finished unpacking your bullshit. Now that you have reached into the past to condemn a party of racism, it is your party that is the genesis of the problems in the poor black community. Your party is the one filled with racist shitheads that used the Supreme Court sanctioned Jim Crow laws to segregate every f*cking thing you all could segregate, and when you could not, you used ropes, dogs, and firehoses.
If anybody should be making amends or paying reparations, it is your party and its members. You all have benefited from the racism you all dealt out with the noose. If you all had not terrorized blacks for 100 years, there would be no Democrat party. It would have simply vanished. Your party is as vile and disgusting as its roots, and if any of you had any decency, you would eliminate it and everything associated with it.
The Democrat party is no different than the Confederate flag it is a symbol of racism, and the stench cannot be cleansed. It is especially abhorrent that many of its white members live in de facto segregated communities, and those members are still oppressing the black community. If you would like, we can consult Minister Farrakhan. As I will tell a black man, you cannot trust any white man, but Minister Farrakhan is looking out for his people.
In the future get your tenses aligned. I can do this shit all day and night.
Again, please point out where I suggested where any person, black, white, brown, or purple, should join the Republicans. I’ll wait. I do advise black men to check out Minister Farrakhan because they can trust him. (The UFO stuff is a little out there.)
Tasty:
I think there’s a bit too much of a gap here for me to waste more time reaching across it. I’m going to go talk to people over here in reality, okay?
@michael reynolds
There is a gap between things the way you would like them to be, and the way they are. You realize that the Democrat’s hold on black voters is becoming very tenuous, and you need to instill hate. I understand, and I suspect more than one person has noticed that you have gone beyond your usual irrational rabid racial accusations. They are not working, and you are going to double-, triple-, and quadruple-down.
Good luck. The BLM movement wants an answer from you, and calling everybody a racist ain’t gonna satisfy them. Like the Trump voters, they are tired of being used. Ignore the warnings. I love chaos. I would vote for Sen. Sanders.
If it were up to me, I would integrate every community in the country along income and racial lines. 20% of the houses in your and every neighborhoods would be set aside for poor and low income people, and if needed, the government would take the top 20%. I would not spread the wealth around, I would spread the less wealthy people around. Instead of “a chicken in every pot”, we would have “a poor black, white, hispanic, Native American, and Asian family on every block”.
When I was finished helping the poor, you would find religion and pray for the most rightwing Republican to get elected.