Richard Stallman response to Boston Police efforts (pastebin.com)
This is what Stallman wrote right after the suspect was caught.
My personal response is:
There will always be a situation that is worse or where more people died, but that doesn't mean this isn't a very emotional and trying time for many, where the police and people of Boston were desperate to catch a person throwing explosives and shooting magazines of bullets in their city. Telling people to stay home for a few hours does not seem unreasonable in this situation.
Have some decency and respect for the lives lost, and save your opinions for a more appropriate time.
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Difference being of course, one was a deliberate attack on human life, and the other a very _very_ unfortunate accident.
Stupid comparison to make for the sake of pushing his agenda of "free software". I expected more from someone so smart.
Not sure how accurate that statement is in America.
Also, even with someone who religiously carries a gun as much as possible it would be unusual for them to carry a full-sized duty pistol and the ammunition that most cops do (stereotypically a Glock 22 w/ a 15 round magazine and 2+ additional magazines, a total of 45 or more rounds). Certainly some folks do but I'd doubt that number is even in the double digits throughout the entire US, excluding off-duty LE and people working security in some capacity. People who carry concealed tend to choose smaller, lighter guns and not quite as many total rounds, because ammunition is heavy (stereotypically a Kahr PM9 w/ an extra magazine, a total of 14 rounds, or maybe a Glock 26 w/ an extra magazine, a total of 20 rounds).
It's within the realm of possibility that there are "tens of thousands" of folks who concealed carry with that amount of ammunition, but I would be surprised if that was the case.
Also, even if it is that many, it's still a tiny fraction of the populace. Even in the most enthusiastic pro-gun states only a tiny fraction of the public carries on a regular basis.
America isn't the wild west. We value our right to keep and bear arms, but not that many people actually carry weapons with them. Most gun owners keep their guns at home.
The best numbers I could find [1] indicate 8 million active concealed carry permits; so at most ~4% of the adult population has a permit to carry a gun outside the home. And most of those (anecdotally) don't do it often.
[1]: http://www.nraila.org/news-issues/articles/2012/7/new-federa...
The general citizen, even when armed, will often run for his life instead.
Thanks to regulatory capture oversight is weak, and this is not an accident but an intended outcome of the political system.
Yes, because it's obviously good for business to have your plant blow sky high, destroying the entire surrounding neighborhood and killing most of your employees. If I were a plant manager, I'd make sure to put doing all that right at the top of my TODO list.
Or, maybe, just maybe, not everybody who owns/runs a business in a capitalist system is a greedy, evil, soul-sucking bastard, and maybe, just maybe, accidents happen, some of which are damn near unpredictable and unavoidable. And maybe we can't regulate our way to a society where nothing bad ever happens to anybody, ever?
You know how this is - most often poor working practice has no immediate consequence. Perhaps a critical patch is installed a few days late, and the website does not get hacked, no adverse consequences most of the time. At some point someone will run the numbers, and conclude that good safety practice isn't that necessary. That's a recipe for disaster. Most everyone here should be familiar with the Challenger explosion and the runup to it.
> maybe, just maybe, accidents happen, some of which are damn near unpredictable and unavoidable.
That's the issue of fault-tolerant design. In an ammonium nitrate plant there is a risk of explosion; they quite simply do not belong anywhere near a town.
That's a fair point in a sense, and I'm not arguing that it isn't beneficial to have some independent eyes looking at things and helping avoid bias. I would argue that it's not necessarily required to regulate that sort of thing and make it the job of government to try and prevent every possible contingency though. I think working to develop a voluntary certification process, something akin to ISO9001, where being certified would be a "badge of honor" and - eventually - all but a prerequisite to doing business, would be preferred.
In an ammonium nitrate plant there is a risk of explosion; they quite simply do not belong anywhere near a town.
That was definitely a sub-optimal design, for sure. I'd be curious to know the history of how that setup happened, actually.
OTOH, to play devil's advocate a little bit... how often do ammonium nitrate plants explode? One could probably argue that the industry actually is very safe if you look at it over the long-run. Or not... I don't actually have those statistics. Just a point of discussion.
But maybe, just maybe, added regulation doesn't need to hurt the honest business owners, and can be used to keep those whose ethics may be a little more sketchy in check.
Nobody ever said that we will regulate our way to a perfect society. Nobody said that every business owner is a greedy, evil, soul-sucking bastard
Not overtly, but it seems implied by a lot of the verbiage you hear from people arguing for more regulation and blaming business owners for pretty much everything. (Note: I don't mean just here, now, in this very discussion. I'm generalizing based on other experiences)
But maybe, just maybe, added regulation doesn't need to hurt the honest business owners, and can be used to keep those whose ethics may be a little more sketchy in check.
I would argue that that is an awfully big maybe. Government regulation, however well-meaning, is notorious for having unintended consequences... sometimes even to the point of having an effect totally counter to the original intent.
If for example cars were allowed (mechanically and legally) to only accelerate to maximum 50mph many of those accidents would never happen, but people are not willing to loose their freedom to drive at crazy speeds but somehow they are willing to loose other freedoms for extremely rare events such as terrorism attacks just for the emotional effect it haves over them because it is an attack (and not an accident) with nothing rational backing it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Act#The_Locomotive_A...
If we were attacked by real, organized terrorists, we are screwed.
I really do not get all the celebration and back-patting, it's disturbing.
Oh and while this huge distraction was going on - no background checks for guns, the most basic bill failed.
But several senators were quick to voice their desire for no miranda rights.
Also, no one knew how many other bombs there may have been, so public areas still posed an unknown risk.
A large part of the expense was due to the successful effort to apprehend him without killing him or bystanders.
Tweets aren't precisely geolocated, so that's not really relevant.
The US has a "value of a statistical life"[1] of around $7M, and they had already killed 4 people and injured over a hundred more, so $50M seems like it would be very easily justified.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life
My point was this was one person (okay, two brothers originally) what would have happened if it was a team of people who were organized and actually secretive and didn't use twitter or live out in the open?
No, the United States Government is saying that, by using the Value of a Statistical Life that they use. So I'm telling you that (by their own terms) they can justify spending a lot of their money on catching someone who has killed several people and intends to kill more.
I do not agree that it makes sense to value US lives at $7M each and developing world lives at apparently less than $2000 each (the approximate price of saving one according to GiveWell). But that's what the link I cited says is the case here.
I'm not sure this adequately captures it, though; the bombers are said to have talked in front of their carjacking victim about planning to escape to NYC. Shouldn't we include some expected value term of the cost of shutting down NYC, in case they moved there and had to be hunted there too? Seems like the entire country/world has an interest in seeing them caught here.
On the other hand, if they had simply expanded the search area block by block without lifting the stay-indoors request, then they probably would have found him quickly with less risk to Watertown residents. In any case, I agree that it's important for the governments involved to evaluate what could have been done better.
You find it really odd we don't live in a police state?
But I think it's also worth noting that the stay-indoors request was a request, as far as I know. Every notification that I received was something along the lines of people being asked to stay indoors with the doors locked, and I know people who chose to go outdoors before the request was lifted. The city shut down because people chose to honor the request out of confidence in the judgement and good intentions of the police. I personally chose to stay indoors because I thought the suspect was probably wandering around on foot in the Watertown/Cambridge area and I thought the inconvenience of staying inside for a day outweighed the risk of running into him.
On the other other hand, it was getting dark -- the stay-indoors request was lifted an hour from sunset -- and it would have been harder to see the blood without daylight. So maybe they lifted it just in time, or should have lifted it much earlier?
And I think that was why they might have decided to allow it. Most people would NOT have felt comfortable going outside until he was caught and by letting people go out they had more eyes and a better chance of spotting him. It worked, and quickly.
Alternatively, if they had lifted the shelter-in-place order earlier, the guy would have gone out in his yard and noticed something going on in his boat sooner.
I doubt the reason was 4th Amendment scruples.
I was suggesting a search of a prioritized list -- initially based on visual examination of aerial photographs -- of sheds, boats, and other simple structures in the area.
I think your understanding of how easy it is to locate people is influenced by fiction and dramatization.
One man is tiny compared to an entire city. What can you realistically do if that man decides to hide in a covered boat in someone's yard?
The problem is that these kids were "organized" after a fashion. They were muslims, discontent, and grabbed up by some radical muslim and told that massacring random americans is the way to heaven. They're very unlikely to be the only ones that believe so.
And what choice is there but to move against whatever persons and/or organizations that radicalized their "interpretation of islam". They pointed out that the muslim prophet was a mass-murdering genocidal raider, which is correct, so it's hard to argue against this point. And of course these 2 boys chose to join their prophet's ways, as opposed to denying them. It's an ingenious way for an ideology to create terror, really. You center the ideology around a figure that's described as "perfect"(/holy/enlightened/...), but in reality that figure is a mass-murdering lying cheating bastard. Then of course the vast majority of people will choose to deny that fact (because 90% of people even in the most radicalized islamic country know perfectly well there's nothing good about massacres, and if "the prophet" committed genocide, that means he and his islam is evil), leading to a society that's workable, even if periodic sudden mass-outbursts of violence are unavoidable if you expect people to live in cognitive dissonance, with the associated risk that such an outburst wins over any government in place, destroying everything .
But any preacher can of course trivially use this to get recruits for terror acts against anyone he pleases (anyone he can realistically paint as an enemy of the ideology, which is to say anyone, if the preacher is any good). Now the vast majority of people will choose to maintain their cognitive dissonance and just add this preacher to the list of things they flat-out deny about the world, so the preacher that has just advocated genocide for 30 minutes can easily share dinner with anyone who just listened (When I first saw someone deny in his mind that a door existed to the point that he had to be restrained because he would keep "walking through it". He was hurting himself to the point that restraint + sedation was the only solution. I left that institution still firmly convinced that such people didn't exist, but after a few nights I seem to have come to terms with it).
However some people will chose to end their dissonance, usually under stress, and crucially, at this point they'll have been in the ideology for years and years, with everybody they know telling them that islam is good and great and can't be criticized. Then this "great insight" comes, that they've known about for decades too : islam works by ambushes and genocide, that's how the prophet did it, that's how muslims should do it. And at that point they will be extremely vulnerable to "suggestions" from said preacher, and of course they'll be looking to imitate what their prophet did, and they'll be looking for exactly the kind of mission that the preacher is likely to give them : ambush and kill innocents who are part of a group that "opposes" islam (and the prophet massacred muslims that he accused of allying with an enemy just the same, so no need to worry about killing a few traitor muslims).
No amount of policies can prevent psychological stress, nor by the way, would you want to do that. Stress may be the way to insanity, but it's also the way to improving yourself. Aside from that, of course you can't "end" psychological stress (though of course you can massively reduce it by providing basic needs services). But you'll never minimize it to the point the supply of terrorists dries up. And of course there's going to be points where the economy of the country is stressed, and there's an explosion in the number of candidate terrorists.
As a bonus, any society with this ideology can of course not allow "free" preachers, or any form of freedom of ideology. That would lead to mass acts of terrorism in short order (what we're about to see in Europe and America). So any society wh...
The point seems to be that in neither case does the "average" follower become any better or worse, but the extremists of those religions are significantly different. In every case the extremists become closer to the idealized figures from the ideology, so Christians are prone to self sacrifice, Buddhists are prone to an ascetic, isolated life, and Muslims are prone to violence if this happens.
Not sure about how it causes mono-culture. It seems to me at the beginning of the 20th century, every region on earth was a mono-culture, no matter it's ideology.
It's the Old Testament that's the terror religion, whether as practiced by Mohammed or by Moses or by the Crusaders.
And Moslems react when they think their religion is under attack just like Christians do. Have a look at some of the IRA types who were into butchering Irish Protestants. They were "defending" the Catholics in their minds.
It's not "kill the infidels to get into heaven". The religion is merely the language they use to frame the real motivation, which can be defensiveness, reaction, or even sheer prejudice.
And not all the bombers are loonies, by the way, not even the suicidal ones. If the official story so far is correct, the Boston two seem to be good planners with a healthy sense of self-preservation.
Background checks are already required for almost all gun sales, including ones at gun-shows. This whole discussion is a red-herring. And what the f%!# good do you think a "database for guns" is going to do? You think the terrorists buy their guns over the counter, with legit IDs and happily register them with the authorities? You expect the terrorists to register their pressure cookers? Maybe we should have background checks for buying those?
And then what? Background checks for buying nichrome wire, because it can be used as a bridgewire in a detonator? A database of Arduinos, since they can be used as timers for bombs?
Or how about a national database of people who guy gasoline, Drano, nails, ball-bearings, lithium-ion batteries, soldering irons, solder...
Better still, let's implement a Great Firewall of America to keep people from accessing subversive content like Inspire magazine, the Unabomber manifesto, the writings of Timothy McVeigh, the Koran, Cryptome, Wikileaks, Paladin Press, Justin Bieber songs, Anarchist's cookbook, Poor Man's James Bond or the Federalist Papers...
I mean look at all the silencers people have to get away with murder - oh wait, they don't - because they are illegal and highly regulated.
BTW it's worth pointing out that some countries like Finland do not regulate silencers/sound suppressors on the grounds that they reduce noise pollution and benefit public health by reducing the risk of hearing damage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Finland#Related...
Also: "The data indicates that use of silenced firearms in crime is a rare occurence, and is a minor problem" ( http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v08n2/44.clark/clark.pdf )
Not at all. Real "hackers" are intimately knowledgeable regarding the systems with which they work.
OR, it could be because they're expensive, ineffective, don't last, and hurt accuracy. Or because most murders are not planned out in advance, in excruciating detail, by criminal masterminds (or even the crooks in episodes of Columbo). Somebody who finds out their spouse is cheating on them and decides to kill them in a fit of rage isn't going to care about a silencer.
Likewise, gang on gang crime over drug deals doesn't seem to involve a lot of stealthy, hit-man style assassination stuff. Those guys don't need silencers.
And the people who do want one and want to avoid your regulations? Well, they just build their own, no license, background check, or anything else needed.
Suppressors are dead easy to make out of household products as is, they just aren't worth more than 2 shots. Likewise, any individual sent as the imaginary "hitman" that everyone seems to believe exists, would probably be aligned with a group with enough finances to either buy legitimate suppressors, or procure them from the black market.
The only people that cannot purchase automatic weapons and restricted modifications (suppressors, grenade launchers, etc) are the poor. The legal roadblocks are overcome (perfectly legally) with money.
People just ignore the slaughter of spouses and mass murder of the destitute on the streets in favor of only focusing on shooting sprees.
The emotional rage murder would be culled by stricter gun laws, but gangs and mass shooters will just go to underground channels to get their armaments if they can't try to get them legally.
On the other hand, a regular 9mm handgun or a .223/.308 rifle with a suppressor will still be very loud: comparable to a car's engine back firing, a tire blow out, or a firecracker. That's definitely a reduction in noise compared to a regular gun shot, but while one such noise might go unnoticed, a rapid succession of such noises certainly will.
Murderers rarely use such things
A silencer is cheap and trivial to manufacture from common materials.
I think you overestimate the deterrence of an additional felony charge. "Q. What are you in for? A. Murder... and an unlicensed weapon accessory."
Remember, they got Al Capone on income tax violations.
And really the proper term is sound suppressor, they're far from silent.
Yet we all support background checks. I don't find the 90% number hard to believe at all.
So quoting that 90% number might be technically accurate for some specific question on some specific poll, but I'd question whether or not it actually reflects public sentiment on this issue, from people who actually have an informed opinion on the issue.
Sure do love that anecdotal evidence.
Plus, if we're serious about reducing gun violence, we limit handguns, not rifles. We can pat ourselves on the back and make us feel better over dead kids, but the real problem in this country with gun violence is handguns. The fact that it's all about "assault rifles" (a meaningless loaded nonsense term) shows that people are not the least bit sincere or knowledgable.
I know 3 places right now I can purchase a handgun without paperwork that are not gun shows.
- National Fraternal Order of Police President Chuck Canterbury, February 16, 2013
http://www.coloradofop.org/index.cfm?zone=/unionactive/view_...
PoliceOne’s Gun Policy & Law Enforcement survey was conducted between March 4 and March 13, 2013, receiving 15,595 responses from verified police professionals across all ranks and department sizes.
http://ddq74coujkv1i.cloudfront.net/p1_gunsurveysummary_2013...
As for popularity, I'd bet "90%" of people would support virtually anything after being subject to four months of wall to wall propaganda by the corporate media and government. It is amazing to me how erstwhile supporters of minority rights now champion the most literal majoritarianism when convenient.
And how do you see the kind of extraordinary show of force we just saw in Boston and conclude that the citizenry should be even more helpless, more disempowered? Life is a Rorschach test, I guess.
I'd also like to point out that the gun industry doesn't really run ads in the same way most industries do. I've never seen a single gun ad outside of a gun magazine.
Worth a bit of Googling. Methinks you don't have a good order-of-magnitude estimate of how much money is on each side.
On the other hand, "lone wolfs" cannot be tracked by agencies, and their actions are hardly predictables.
I suppose if Mr. Stallman's home or office were to catch fire, we shouldn't paralyze the immediate area with noisy fire trucks.
The background check issue is a completely separate, legislative one. Democracy is a messy thing -- the democrats killed the bills so they could come back and fight another day.
This is way less about a real accomplishment, and more about what people need to feel. After the bombings, people felt vulnerable and scared. And for the police, I'm sure also embarrassed and angry. Catching this kid is the vindication they all needed emotionally. I'm just glad they didn't get overzealous and kill him, as most manhunts end.
Cops were sending around a photo of the first suspect after he died, saying that seeing it was "cathartic." Apparently another is circulating of the second captured suspect, with the caption "WE GOT HIM." It's like a locker room after winning a football game.
It's true there was danger and violence here, and the death of innocent good people. But the response today was largely about ego and fear of vulnerability. There were literally thousands of SWAT units in Watertown today, going from door to door, publicly demonstrating America's reaction to terrorist attacks. It was about sending a message to the citizens and police of Boston, as well as the rest of the country.
> Law enforcement agencies are being lambasted time and again (whether it's valid criticism or not is irrelevant), and they continue to ignore claims of how ineffectual they are. Someone needs to stand up and say "We are here for you and we support you" otherwise it stands to reason that there are dangerous undertones forming.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5544924
It's exactly what that younger gentleman demonstrated -- the police will go above and beyond for you, even to the point of actively impeding normal functions of society.
Questioning the State™? Thats a no-no.
But then again, i'm just a lowly peasant, what could i possibly know about anything?
While he very well may be, everyone is supposed to be innocent til proved otherwise by trial and judgement. That goes for everyone. Murderers, thieves, rapists, politicians and rich dudes alike. Oh, and you and I. Hopefully.
Note also that the general public should also know better - there is in fact, no confusion. You're simply disagreeing - part of the people I criticize, in fact, then.
Clearly, if you can plan not to Mirandize a suspect, then the public safety exception cannot apply in the first place, so calling for the public safety exception merely makes a mockery of the law. The concluding sentences of the FBI's explanation of the public safety exception are worth quoting in full:
"When police officers are confronted by a concern for public safety, Miranda warnings need not be provided prior to asking questions directed at neutralizing an imminent threat, and voluntary statements made in response to such narrowly tailored questions can be admitted at trial. Once the questions turn from those designed to resolve the concern for safety to questions designed solely to elicit incriminating statements, the questioning falls outside the scope of the exception and within the traditional rules of Miranda."
But let's not kid ourselves, Eric Holder and co give zero fucks about the law or our rights. Fast and Furious anyone?
The problem with this exemption, from what I understand (please correct me if wrong) is that any testimony in this questioning WOULD be admissible in court over some nonsense post 9/11 legalese in some crazy ass bill somewhere.
It is the latter than our country wants, or at least our politicians say we want.
I think you're right, it is a very emotional time for many. I think he's trying to put that in a more rational perspective so that we, collectively, don't forget about the big picture.
I thought I was pretty jaded, but it turns out I have a long way to go still. After the events of this week I was worried about the hundreds of maimed victims, "Uncle Ruslan", the families of those 4 persons killed and the possible backdrop on geopolitics. But judging from Dr. Stallman's comments I should be most concerned about how the TSA might benefit from what happened.
Because no offense, but Dr. Stallman sounds exactly like that dipshit in charge of the NRA who says that you can't change one single little thing about gun control because that would invite a slippery slope to the government disarming all law-abiding citizens.
There's no doubt that Stallman is intellectually inflexible and completely tone deaf. It's one of his primary virtues, really.
It doesn't require the concern of all those who have no further interaction with the event. They gave money, they comforted relatives and friends, they let the police go find those responsible, and they move on. You don't linger on a unique incident with nigh impossible odds of something similar happening again that close to any of them with any similarity to this event.
They can care about pollution, chemical threats (that they can influence via money or time), and the overbearing reach of federal authority.
At this point, unless you are giving time or money to the aftermath or contributing to its investment, you are wasting your time and effort having any further thoughts on the matter. It is beyond your hands and influence then. Spend your time on things that matter.
The people of Boston should not wake up tomorrow any less secure in their wellbeing than the day before. Like Stallman said, the likelihood of dying to some asshole terrorist is so slim you can accurately discount the probability and just tell everyone "you won't die to a terrorist". The chances of you meeting one person that is incorrect for is absurdly small.
What Stallman speaks of is what you can take action about. The dinner table discussions should not be "those two brothers in Boston" that were a discontinuity of expectations but of real issues that you can change.
Right, because we should totally let the emotionality of a situation determine whether or not we completely overreact to the situation.
>and save your opinions for a more appropriate time.
RMS (and anyone else) is perfectly within his rights to say whatever he wants, whenever he wants. There is no "more appropriate time."
Also really looking forward to the knee-jerk anti 2nd ammendment lobby using another tragedy as a prop.
I'm not sure if they searched empty homes, but if they did, then they probably believed it to be exigent circumstances.
Here's the list and mitigation strategies if any: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm
1 - Heart disease: don't eat foodstuffs that are known to increase the probability of heart disease, get plenty of cardio.
2 - Cancer: avoid all known carcinogens, refined sugars, etc. stay out of the sun (made easy by being in a Hazmat suit all the time)
3 - Chronic lower respiratory diseases: avoid exposure to transmission vectors, hazmat suit solves this.
4 - Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): Similar to 1
5 - Accidents (unintentional injuries): Don't participate in risky movements or behaviors, wear a helmet at all times, keep a comprehensive first aid kit on your person with all modern emergency responder equipment. Follow the buddy rule, but don't stay too close, stay away from high probability of injury transport methods.
6 - Alzheimer's disease: no known mitigation strategy
7 - Diabetes: mostly diet, see #1 and 4
8 - Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: no known strategy, but don't eat foods that might challenge your kidneys
9 - Influenza and Pneumonia: Hazmat suit, solved
10 - Intentional self-harm (suicide): don't do this, solved
and then way down the list...
NNN - Death by terrorism with a probability so low that even during an active terrorist attack RMSs conjecture is to just keep on keeping on with your normal day-to-day routine.
"Every death or injury is a sad thing, but the fact is that many happen every day, and we should not let these few upset us disproportionally more than the others. Let's make an effort not to get bent out of shape about them, so that we can resist when people try to cite them as an excuse for tyranny."
You're picking out his statement of proportionality as some sort of logical flaw in his argument, but you're completely missing the main point.
A reasonable statement would have been, "Let's not let these deaths be cited as an excuse for tyranny." But what he said was more along the lines of, "Let's not be very upset about these deaths, because then they will be used as an excuse for tyranny." Why should we let the government's supposed tendency towards tyranny influence our emotional reactions to the deaths of friends and colleagues? Instead, let's react however is natural to these deaths, and at the same time ensure that we don't stand for fear-mongering and security theater.
"Our response to deaths should scale exactly proportionally to the number? I shouldn't let the death of a friend upset me disproportionally more than the death of a stranger?"
You're misrepresenting what he said. He never compared the death of a stranger to the death of a loved one. What he said is that it's silly to raise the tragedy the those who lost their lives in Boston to those who lost their lives in Texas this week. All premature death is a tragedy, but I didn't know anyone personally in Boston or Texas. So why should the deaths of those in Boston be more prolific to me than those that died in Texas?
You said,
"But what he said was more along the lines of, 'Let's not be very upset about these deaths, because then they will be used as an excuse for tyranny.'"
What he actually said was,
"Every death or injury is a sad thing, but the fact is that many happen every day, and we should not let these few upset us disproportionally more than the others. Let's make an effort not to get bent out of shape about them, so that we can resist when people try to cite them as an excuse for tyranny."
You can't change the words he used to misrepresent his argument because you didn't appreciate his bluntness. I'll admit, RMS is a very emotionally detached person, but that doesn't allow the opportunity to bend his words so that it makes it easier for you to shame him.
I don't think prolific is the word you mean, but I'll assume you meant "meaningful" or "emotional." No one is telling you how much you should care about Boston versus Texas. The point is that for those of us who are personally affected by the Boston incident, we resent being told that we should care more about the Texas incident, because it is natural that we would be more upset about the incident that personally affected us.
You can't change the words he used to misrepresent his argument because you didn't appreciate his bluntness.
The change of wording wasn't relevant to my point, I was simply trying to summarize his view. Insert "let's make an effort not to get... as an excuse for tyranny" (his actual quote) for the paraphrased quote that I used, and the point still stands: the government's supposed tendency towards tyranny should cause us to resist tyranny, not to temper our emotional reactions to the deaths of community members.
Look, if you know someone that was killed or injured, then it obviously affects you more personally than it would other people, and there's nothing in RMS's statement that says otherwise. And if you were effected, you obviously weren't the intended audience (he was replying to a message to stay inside during Boston's pseudo-curfew). However, if your only connection to the event is your geographical proximity, then that does not grant you some sort of higher-level of emotional standing that the rest of us could not make. Every death of an innocent person is a sad, tragic thing; we don't need to be in Boston to understand that.
"The change of wording wasn't relevant to my point, I was simply trying to summarize his view. Insert "let's make an effort not to get... as an excuse for tyranny" (his actual quote) for the paraphrased quote that I used, and the point still stands: the government's supposed tendency towards tyranny should cause us to resist tyranny, not to temper our emotional reactions to the deaths of community members."
No, you're still taking what he said out of context. And your summarization of this comments is not correct. He did not say "temper", that's your word. He said "[...]let these few upset us disproportionally more than the others." Keyword is 'disproportionally'.
I'm, statistically speaking, more likely to die in a car accident than a terrorist attack. I could die in a car accident tomorrow. My family would be very sad and traumatized. However, I doubt they would stop using cars to get around. In fact, I'd bet they would take a car to the hospital to come get my body. With the Boston attack though, the authorities said everyone should stay inside in the entire city, because of the violence that happened in a few public places. That's the disproportionality that RMS was trying to point out in his statement.
In that you took that he was said you should 'temper' your emotions is no fault of Stallman. You're attempting to parse out an argument that just isn't there.
I disagree with you, but I think you're being thoughtful about it.
This is the problem I have with RMS.
Some deaths are more meaningful. Some events are more important.
If a man has a gun pointed at your face, do you ignore it because your singular death won't reach the number of yearly deaths for cancer or car accidents? By RMSs absurdly detached logic, you ignore the gun in your face.
Intention is everything in this issue. A pair of men running around blowing up people and emptying entire magazines in busy neighborhoods trying to murder their pursuers is so qualitatively different from any other quantitatively comparable event where people are killed and hurt without similar intention as to be virtually incomparable. RMS is admonishing us for not comparing the raw body counts.
He would have us walk ignore the gunman with the gun to our head while wearing a hazmat suit and SPF90 sunblock because quantitatively the flu and cancer result in a higher body count than just little old me and I shouldn't be so selfish and not walk around with those protections or I might add to the tally for those kinds of deaths.
Once you start just adding up bodies and comparing the tallies, you've lost the narrative.
This seems to hinge on the assumption that we should value our lives infinitely. This isn't particularly logical, however, given the fact that most people do dangerous things. If you are like most people, you probably want to maximize your total happiness over the course of your life, regardless of how long it is. Would you rather be miserable and live to be 80, or live happily until 50?
So if the cost of mitigating such an event happening results in a lower expected net happiness than the cost of of the event happening (including all future happiness) multiplied by the probability of it happening, it would make logical sense to not attempt to mitigate it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility
Depends; you'll probably not want to share this point with strangers. Since we've been repeatedly traumatized as a nation over the fears of 'terrorism' by war-hawks and sensationalist media outlets, many Americans expect a similar level of emotional reactionism from their compatriots. And when they don't get it from you, they turn on you quickly. I don't think it's healthy, but I guess it's understandable from all the mental abuse we've received as a nation since 9/11.
RMS is out there on a lot of things, and he's very blunt with his opinions, but his emotional detachment does serve him well sometimes. The first step of healing from that mental disease we have now is step back a bit and realize the problem. We are addicted to fear.
These guys filled hospitals with people who had their limbs blown off. And they shot cops willy nilly. The fact that only a few people are dead is small comfort. These were some of the most dangerous people in the entire country, comparing their danger to the danger of industry or automobile transit is just silly. Those are very different problems with very different solutions.
This is why naive numbers comparisons are just stupid.
Edit: Here's another example I came up with. To date only about 120,000 people have been killed by nuclear weapons. Which is a tiny fraction of the people killed by conventional weapons, or even heart disease. By naive logic we shouldn't worry about nuclear weapons, we should worry far more about heart disease, and strategic arms limitation talks should concentrate on the far more lethal conventional weapons.
this is not a bad thing.
In fact, it's pretty unavoidable and perhaps even desirable that government have access to a fine level of information which could be used for utter tyranny. So the energies spent worrying about or averting such threats had best be focused on controlling what government will actually do with the information it has.
http://www.dbms2.com/2010/04/04/privacy-liberty-continued/ on the subject is 3 years old, but I think it still holds up pretty well.
The two suspects, after settings off anti-personnel bombs in a civilian area, executed a police officer, then got into a firefight with automatic weapons, grenades, and more anti-personnel bombs.
They demonstrated the means and the lack of conscience to do a LOT of damage in an urban area. A lot more than the average day in greater Boston's automotive death toll and as such were met with a massive response to prevent that possible outcome.
What the fuck else could the police do?
This isn't 'fear of shadows', as Stallman puts it.
I've been in Colombia when some government buildings were destroyed by FARC bombs. People died, each one was a tragedy, but cities weren't shut down and society didn't let itself be overcome with fear. That's not to say they accepted that violence as OK; but the response was (and continues to be, as the FARC are still sometimes active here) very different.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I look forward to RMS's anti-terrorism proposal.
But to use a metaphor, it's possible to find a bug without knowing what the patch is.
This is very different from civil safety, or defending against terrorism. RMS takes the (in my mind very reasonable) view that terrorism is not costly if it doesn't provoke an auto-immune response, and that civil liberties are more important than obliterating terrorism.
I think there's a reason the us has been relatively stable over a long period of time, and it has everything to do with civil rights that serve as another check to the power of the government. As the balance is tipped in the favor of government power over civil power, the chances for large scale loss of life and limb (civil wars, internal power grabs etc.) increases.
History provides good examples of ever powerful governments, spectacularly collapsing, and crushing way more people than are killed from individuals abusing 'lax' civil rights.
It's probably not a good idea to mix the emotional with the analytical, but when it happens, the emotional wins; we're human beings.
I hate to get moral/philosophical, but utilitarian motives, in the eyes of societal norms, usually is the loosing position. The canonical example of this is the man waiting by the railroad switch who must decide whether to divert a train to certain doom or let the train run over an individual. According to society the man must always divert the train.
The super-parent argument is that the loss of life in the immediate is shallow compared to the inevitable loss of life from the loss of liberty and rise of tyrrany in the name of security.
If people are on the train, condemning many to die for one is never the right decision. If the train is unmanned (assumed if there is no conductor to manage it) you are trying to minimize loss of life, so of course you divert the train and just lose some resources in the crash. That example just doesn't make sense.
I'm much more concerned for the living than I am for the dead.
Prosecuting the marketing guys for a "hoax" device? Yeah, that was an overreaction. The actual police response response? They shut down the roadway, removed the devices, and reopened the roads. That was an entirely appropriate response. And no, that wasn't a "9/11 changed everything response" - in my occupation (acoustical consulting) we often leave equipment in the field for long-term data collection. I've heard stories going back to the 1980's about consultants going back to retrieve their equipment only to find the bomb squad had been called. As such, it's always been good practice to a) get permission/inform the property owner about what you're doing, and b) leave contact information on the equipment so someone with questions can call/email you. The ATHF marketers did neither, and I'm not surprised authorities freaked.
I'm just relieved that they haven't managed to kill any bystanders.
The "stay home" suggestion (it wasn't mandatory, folks I know in Boston/Boston-area who had reason to be out had no problems being out) probably helped a lot here.
shut Boston down for days
I have no idea what you're talking about. Bolyston St on Monday after the bombing was shut down, but that was pretty much going to happen anyway because of the giant marathon that was happening there. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were normal days. Because of the events that occurred late Thursday night/Friday morning, most of Boston was shut down for much of Friday, but normal operations started up around 6pm (before the manhunt was over). Given that the suspects were engaging in gun fights and had a propensity for using explosives, asking folks to stay in for 12 hours (we're not talking martial law here) is not an undue burden.
Even after it was obvious that the Mooninite devices were harmless, they persisted in the charade with all the melodrama they could muster. I'm sure they wanted the devices removed, it would have been a potent embarrassment for them. As for asking permission and leaving contact information, yeah, bad form on their part, but still no reason for hamming it up the way they did.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Bolyston St on Monday after the bombing was shut down, but that was pretty much going to happen anyway because of the giant marathon that was happening there. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were normal days. Because of the events that occurred late Thursday night/Friday morning, most of Boston was shut down for much of Friday, but normal operations started up around 6pm (before the manhunt was over). Given that the suspects were engaging in gun fights and had a propensity for using explosives, asking folks to stay in for 12 hours (we're not talking martial law here) is not an undue burden.
Fair enough, I'm far from Boston. The news coverage has been getting a lot of mileage out of the "lockdown" as they call it. I did hear one interview of a person being held at gunpoint for some time who was merely trying to return home.
(I had something more pithy to write but I think this captures the essence better)
It's not every day that people have their legs blown off while enjoying a public social event.
There's an expectation of danger while driving a car. There is no expectation of danger while spectating at the Boston Marathon.
It's not complicated.
There also is no expectation of getting struck by lightning while spectating at the Boston Marathon, yet that is much more likely to happen than getting hit by a terrorist's bomb.
It's an obvious appeal to emotion that doesn't refute the point that terrorist attacks are so infrequent that the average person ought to worry more about, say, slipping and falling in their bath tubs than getting killed by a terrorist.
So I suppose this would be a red herring on your part, if we're accusing each other of logical fallacies.
Unless you're trying to say that the odds of being struct by lightning while spectating the Boston Marathon, on a clear sunny day, is high.
Not sure where you're getting your data from.
You are in the presence of many other human beings. You are always in a present state of danger around everyone, ever. It is naive to think you can predict the actions of others.
I'm not saying be paranoid, I'm saying treat people like people and not faces in a crowd. You don't know their intentions with rare exception to those you actually know.
EDIT: The parent comment was along the lines of "Well RMS wouldn't think this way if HIS legs were blown off."