Under a Gibbous Moon

Today, Bruce Schneier discusses the faults with a statement in an AP story about how terrorists are drooling over the chance to target high profile events.

Essentially, he argues that virtually all terrorist attacks are on mundane targets on average days. I agree with him but he does not go into why this is the case.

Simply put, terrorists are out to create terror and disruption. Sure they could blow up the Super Bowl but, unless you spent your life savings or are wealthy, you won’t be there. The average person watches the Super Bowl but only a small and non-representative percent actually attend.

Because of this, blow up the Super Bowl and life goes on. So therefore you have to hit things that everybody does and where everyone goes. Crash planes into office buildings. Most people fly and millions work in office buildings. In Europe they blew up train stations and subways. In the middle east, shopping centers and Mosques/Synagogues are popular targets.

What this accomplishes is that it makes people afraid to go outside. To live their lives. That is a real effect. If you hit something “big”, yes everyone will see it and it will be a tragedy but simply put it won’t have the same impact on people’s lives.

What this simply means is that all the money that is being spent on hardening these targets is money that is being diverted from places that are much more likely to be attacked.

A recent Slate article, nicely titled Buy local, act evil, talks about a recent Psychology Science paper that concluded that people who made eco-friendly purchases were less altruistic and more likely to cheat and steal.

It then goes into a bunch of complicated and competing theories that essentially amount to people being good so they can be bad. I find that to be general bullshit. Oddly enough, the author basically hits it on the head in the last paragraph:

A decade or two ago, buying green products and other environmentalist measures might have just seemed idiosyncratic. Now such conduct is widely lauded…

Exactly, it has become the “thing” to do. Even more so, it has become a form of conspicuous consumption. When you start buy a dozen organic, free range brown eggs for $5 you’ve graduated to showing off. Which is not to say that everyone who spends money on such products is an asshole, merely that assholes tend to gravitate toward such trends.

It’s not that doing good makes you feel good about being bad, just that selfish, pretentious people like to put on airs of sainthood but given the chance will rob you blind and leave you dead on the side of the road (think Wall Street).