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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated
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To: D. Long who wrote (78232)10/17/2004 5:40:49 AM
From: Lane3  Read Replies (1) of 793851
 
No sane person sits around thinking that a dirty bomb detonated over Westminster is no big deal, because the risks of actual harm are minimal.

You may be prepared to automatically expend 300,000 American lives to stop a dirty bomb over Westminster to make a statement about the unacceptability of such immorality but I think that the metrics have to be at least considered before rushing to war.

The criminal justice system does not settle on an optimum level of murders - it seeks to stop all murders.

I think that you are mistaken about that.

And it does so by a. hunting down and imprisoning or (as in Texas) killing those that murder and b. seeking to de-incentivize murder by making the sanction cost very high (death or life imprisonment).

And this is what it takes to "stop all murders"? Not hardly. What it does is mitigate the murder rate. If we wanted to stop all murders, we would have to make a much greater effort, draconian effort, and incur much more cost, an unacceptable cost. We don't do that. We don't because society has, indirectly and passively, established a threshold for the number of murders it unhappily tolerates. When the murder rate goes up, we get campaigns that up our efforts temporarily. When the rate stabilizes, we go back to regular policing.

Society does this for all immoral acts. I know of no reason why we would treat terrorism differently. Terrorism is abhorrent. We must go after the low hanging fruit and the most rotten of the fruit mercilessly and the medium hanging fruit with vigor. And we must grudgingly accept that there will always be some fruit that is out of reach just as we accept that people will be murdered.

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