
Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking – It’s an Act of Political Resistance - etiam
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/03/edward-snowden-whistleblowing-is-not-just-leaking-its-an-act-of-political-resistance/
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krylon
"even if we had a 9/11 attack every year, we would still be losing more people
to car accidents and heart disease, and we don’t see the same expenditure of
resources to respond to those more significant threats."

This has been bothering me for years, now. Once one realizes this apparent
contradiction, it is one of those "how could I have missed that"-moments, but
the media - who for better or worse lead or at least shape public discourse -
never mention it. In Germany, more people die in car crashes every year than
have been killed by terrorists in the ~70 years since the end of WWII. Yet
everyone gets hysterical about the "terrorist threat" to a degree that makes
public concern about car accidents look ... nonexistent. We never hear
politicians declare the War on Cancer, even though that horrible disease
brings immense suffering and far too often death to so many people.

Is it because people know that you cannot simply declare war on a disease and
make it go away? Is it because people know that reducing the number of car
accidents would require them to drive more carefully (a desirable result, but
kind of hard to enforce)?

Are more afraid of terrorist attacks because it's just more people dying at
the same time, the same place, in a common event, whereas car accidents happen
one by one, scattered all over the country, all over the year?

NB that I am not dismissing terrorist attacks as harmless, nor am I trying to
belittle the suffering of the victims. But the actual threat to Western
societies that terrorist attacks pose makes the resources we put into fighting
them look way out of proportion, especially since any talk about that
underlying causes for terrorist attacks is either ignored by the mainstream
media or denounced as some kind of heresy.

Not only are we "fighting" a minor target (in terms of deaths caused), we are
also employing means that are not well-suited for this purpose. Kind of like
the War on Drugs, now that I think of it.

