Meanwhile, the stupid authorities inconvenience vast numbers of people and cause huge economic loss because some dopey young men caused a small fire. Pathetic. The authorities are guilty of far more than the actual terrorists. They are using the trivial attacks as an excuse to build their own position.
Don't forget the media, Mq.
Fear (and sex) sells ad space.
The world's cultures are divided between cultures of guilt and those of shame. The West has been typicaly known as a guilt driven culture, one in which normative rules are driven internally, by the guilt one might feel if one acted like a clod. Cultures of shame, mostly Eastern, are driven by the shame one brings upon oneself and the tribe if an event is somehow shameful - if your sister is not a pulchritudinous virgin when married, brother must kill her. Ditto should she get raped.
But the prevalent cultural norm is changing in the Advanced West. We are rapidly becoming a culture of fear. A few inept hotheads with more hormones than IQ set a Jeep on fire and the whole of Scotland must be shut down. An idiot with a shoe bomb almost blows up an airliner and we are still taking off our shoes at airports. Someone thinks gels and other liquids will be used to do the same thing, and baby formula isn't allowed on airliners.
Massive unthinking responses to threats are the norm, and they condition us to accept fear as a normal condition.
My thesis is that unwarranted fear is ultimately debilitating, A Very Bad Thing. It is I suspect somehow connected to left wingers, PC and multiculturalism, all of which are in the business of exaggerating, but I haven't worked out the link yet.
In the good old days, there were famines with millions dying. There were wars with millions of Germans rolling over neighbours with Panzers. There were earthquakes destroying whole cities. The Great Depression economic collapse ruined millions. The Blitz was a nightly mass bombing. Hiroshima and Nagasaki disappeared. Guy Fawkes nearly got the whole of parliament.
Those threats were indeed real.
OBL unfortunately got lucky a few times and we are now all hiding under our beds, rolls of duct tape within reach. But OBL cannot even use a Globalstar phone for fear that a Hellfire missile will home in on his signal, and turn him into a puddle of warm grease. Now, he and his buddies have lots of very good reasons to be afraid.
The true head hacking Salafowahabbists must be getting quite a giggle out of this weekend's events: "Look, Ahmed, a stupid brother has a Jeep catch on fire in Glasgow, and the entire country goes into conniptions! Just think what will happen if we set off a few fireworks."
Fear makes us cringe, become ineffective. |
