Obvious points: blimey, not good. Don’t worry about terrorists, entirely fuck-up produced disasters are far more likely to land you up dead (update: sounds like nobody died after all. At 11:30BST last night, it looked rather different…). If only it had’ve been going to Montreal, all the passengers would’ve been French Canadians.
Relatedly to the first point, which is perhaps more accurate than the second: "The last major jumbo jet crash in North America was on Nov. 12, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 587 lost part of its tail and plummeted into a New York City neighbourhood, killing 265 people" (here). Hands up who remembers that one? No, seriously… and yet it topped more people than any terrorist event apart from the events of 31 days beforehand.
Normally, I point out that planes and trains are safe compared to roads. One of the intriguing things about The War On Not Very Terrifying Terror is that it buggers about people’s public transport vs car risk perception to be *even more* useless than it already is.
(also relevant: December 23, 2002. I believe the expression is "heart of stone not to laugh".)
I remember it. I think the neighbourhood was Rockaway Beach (as in the Ramones song). Since it was only a couple of months after 9/11 the papers had headlines like "Accident… or bin Laden?"
Bloody Islamists.
btw, Aeroplanes are not safer than cars per hour travelled (though trains are). Lots and lots of rich people in private jets cark it every year.
Yes, I remember it too, also the headlines…
What’s the poiint of mentioning the possible nationality of the passengers given a theoretical destination?
So, what are you trying to say, exactly? A popular argument is "More people die in Israel from car accidents than from terrorist attacks,…" I could never quite make the leap to "… therefore shut up about being blown up on buses already, you whiny fucks." But more power to you if you can.
So, please do explain the logic to me. More people die from car accidents than from lung cancer. Does this mean that we should allow cigarette sales to minors and cancel all the no-smoking rules? A very minor proportion of people die from prosate cancer. No more check-ups for you?
Or do we, perhaps, admit that *many* bad things could happen to us and then try to deal with *many* different dangers simultaneously? Or should we all just concentrate on car accidents while tumbleweeds roll through medical research facilities and daily bombs go off in London?
"Stop being terrified of" != "Shut up about".
Terror is a serious problem, and it’s good that we’re investigating it and (hopefully) infiltrating terrorist organisations, getting intelligence, arresting people who appear to be terrorists, etc.
However, it’s a radically less serious problem than many of the serious problems we manage to deal with without turning into crazy drooling fanatics, as the whole ‘accidental plane crashes killing more people than deliberate terrorist attacks’ thing suggests.
This is a good sign that we should avoid being overly mentalist about terrorism, either.
Angua,
How about taking your analogy about smoking and car crashes the other way: just because cars kill more people than smoking doesn’t mean that, say, all cars come with massive signed printed on them saying "Speed kills" or "Pollution may cause global warming". Nor have we banned cars from travelling over, say, 20mph (which would massively reduce death).
John’s point is, I think, that some of the reactions to terrorism are as over-the-top as my above suggestions about how to deal with cars. This is bad.
As I’ve come rather late to this, I’m sure no-one’s interested now, but I just wanted to say that deaths due to smoking in the UK massively outnumber deaths due to cars by something like 33 – 1. Lung cancer is just one of many effects of smoking.
If cars DID kill more people than smoking then of course we would be doing something about it, though I’m not sure about the efficacy of massive signs saying "Speed kills."
As it is, terrorism in the UK this year will be outnumbered as a cause of death by smoking by something like 2000 – 1, assuming nothing else happens. So while I (a smoker) would certainly expect the police to do their job and prevent more of these atrocities (and avoiding killing innocent brown people while they’re at it), I can’t say I’m quaking in my boots at the prospect of being blown to kingdom come by terrorists.
And that isn’t just because I live 300 miles from London.