{"id":6565,"date":"2016-03-24T07:01:05","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T07:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/03\/24\/brussels-whats-the-big-deal\/"},"modified":"2016-03-24T07:01:05","modified_gmt":"2016-03-24T07:01:05","slug":"brussels-whats-the-big-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/03\/24\/brussels-whats-the-big-deal\/","title":{"rendered":"Brussels? What’s the Big Deal?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In the 22 March 2016  attack in Brussels 34 people<\/a> (31 victims and 3 perpetrators) were killed and 300 injured. Why should anyone care about this?  In 2013 in Belgium alone there were 746 traffic-related<\/a> fatalities.  And in 2010 there were in Belgium 197 gun-related<\/a> deaths.  Surely it can't be rational to get excited over 34 dead as compared to the 746 dead or the 197 dead.  People kill people.  Things happen: things like nail bombings, highway crashes, and gun deaths.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

My astute readers will of course detect something severely 'twisted' in the 'reasoning' I  presented above.  Horribile dictu<\/em>, this is the way many leftists and some libertarians think!  I shit you not.  Shit happens. <\/span><\/p>\n

Robert Paul Wolff writes<\/a>,<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Fourteen people were murdered in San Bernardino, and almost two dozen were injured, several critically. That is perfectly awful. Since September 11, 2001, I believe almost three score people have been killed in the United States in similar terrorist attacks, or so one television commentator asserted. The number sounds about right. During those same fourteen years, 120,000 Americans have been killed by guns (including those who killed themselves, just to be clear .) I cannot imagine any rational mode of discourse that treats the former number as somehow more important than the latter number.<\/strong> And yet, people who would pass most tests for sanity, if not intelligence, are eager to take dramatic steps to prevent another San Bernardino although they would not even consider equally vigorous steps to diminish, say by half, the number of deaths from firearms in the next fourteen years. [Emphasis added.]<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I refute Wolff  in Thinking Clearly About Terrorist and Non-Terrorist Gun-Related Deaths<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

And then there is this:<\/span><\/p>\n

Bryan Caplan quotes<\/a> "the brilliant Nathan Smith" who advances  "A familiar truism<\/a> well-expressed:"<\/span><\/p>\n

If we're still driving cars despite thousands of automobile accident deaths per year, we don't really <\/em>set the value of human life so high that attacks in Paris<\/a> (130 victims) and San Bernardino<\/a> (22 victims) objectively warrant the massive media attention, revolutions in foreign policy, and proposals to shut the borders completely to Muslims<\/a> that they evoke. Such events get such attention because of statistical illiteracy.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My refutation of this nonsense is in Why Some Think that Terrorism is no Big Deal<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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In the 22 March 2016  attack in Brussels 34 people (31 victims and 3 perpetrators) were killed and 300 injured. Why should anyone care about this?  In 2013 in Belgium alone there were 746 traffic-related fatalities.  And in 2010 there were in Belgium 197 gun-related deaths.  Surely it can't be rational to get excited over … Continue reading “Brussels? What’s the Big Deal?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119,163,375],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-islamism","category-leftism-and-political-correctness","category-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6565\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}