How secure do you want the world to be?

Interesting question, Matt, thank you.

I would choose an unsafe world, as a safe world does not exist in reality.

There is a constantly shifting interplay between our desire for privacy and our need for security. I do think the US has gone way overboard in invasiveness since 9/11 and I am very disappointed in this and other things about the Obama administration – following the mistakes of the Bush administration. But I don’t think we should act as if we are permanently at war.

Yes – I prefer a somewhat unsafe world in terms of privacy yet I would like to see gun ownership more controlled.

@janbb – I think it’s a safe bet that the risk of an American citizen getting killed by one of the over 200,000,000 guns floating around is considerably higher than Angela Merkel calling Al Qaeda. Makes one wonder about priorities when it comes to keeping Americans safe.

@mattbrowne: “A world with a trustworthy man or woman on a chair in every bedroom is safer than a world without supervised bedrooms. We can expect fewer rapes.

Do we choose the safer world? If not, why?”

No.
First, because we value privacy. And second, because there’s a 100% chance that the person supervising the bedrooms will start raping one or both of the people in the room.

@mattbrowne: “A world in which the NSA and GCHQ spies on every person on our planet is a safer world than the one in which they only spy on terrorists and suspected terrorists, because they might miss some of them.

Do we choose the safer world? If yes, why?”

No.
First, because we value privacy. And second, because there’s a 100% chance that the person supervising the bedrooms will start raping one or both of the people in the room people given the power to spy on everyone will abuse that power. In order for an agency to be effective, it must be given enough power (and shielded from scrutiny) to do the things people do when given that much power.

@mattbrowne: “What is the difference between the bedroom and the world of bits and bytes?”

The people in the bedroom know they are being watched.

@mattbrowne: “Are we better off without search warrants? Without privacy laws?”

No.

@mattbrowne: “What kind of society do you want to live in?”

A nice one? :)

Thanks @tom_g! Great answer :-)

Interesting question.

Somewhere over the last couple of years, I read an interesting statistic. Of course, it could be wrong – statistics often are – but I think it approximates reality.

On 9/11/2001 – THE 9/11, where 2700+ people were killed by terrorists, there were 2000 fatalities from auto accidents around the country, there were 75 murders across the country, and so on.

We as a society tolerate (even encourage) these random and meaningless death through the use of fast cars and easily available guns. And the US citizenry doesn’t feel strongly enough about it to take any sort of preventative steps.

So what makes death by terrorism so much worse than the 2000 traffic deaths on 9/11? I’m not sure that I want to give up my right to privacy in a tradeoff for “more security” whatever that is.

People die needlessly every day.

@elbanditoroso Odd rationale, but I’m sure statistically correct. Over 90 countries had citizens killed on 9/11, it wasn’t just Americans.

I guess I’ll say it’s more offensive & enraging to me to be hunted in my own land by foreign predators than to be involved in a random accident.

@elbanditoroso – I think your statistics are correct. I even read that more people died in car accidents right after 911, because people who used to fly refused to board airplanes. Despite 911, planes are safer than cars. There are a lot of needless deaths. But there’s one thing that makes 3000 dead people on 911 so much more horrible than the 280,000 when the tsunami stuck in 2004: evil intent. We are more scared of that. We are scared of people who want to harm us. But we should also realize that far more than 99% of all humans on Earth never kill other people. Most people are good despite all their flaws. When the NSA spies on Merkel and not on Cameron, it makes Merkel look like an untrustworthy person. It looks like a lack of respect of an elected leader of a very stable democracy. It’s this lack of respect that creates the feelings of humiliation in Germany.

@mattbrowne Excellent question. I agree with Benjamin Franklin, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” What is worse, they get neither liberty nor safety. In your bedroom scenario, the couple in the bed are just humans, with all the fallibility that implies. They are subject to human passions, to lust, greed, anger, violence. But the guy in the chair is a human too. He’s every bit as fallible as the couple he has been assigned to protect. Putting a badge on someone’s chest and empowering them to beat, detain or even kill “suspects” doesn’t render them harmless, it makes them more dangerous than the rest of us are. There are way too many cases of police brutality and corruption to think that isn’t so.

Looking back over history, a few nation states have fallen to lawlessness or invasion by barbarians, but only when they were in an advanced state of internal decay. But while terrorism and lawlessness has enslaved and killed a small number of humans, police states with their enormous power has slaughtered millions of their own people. Chairman Mao murdered 50 million of his countrymen. Stalin killed 20 million citizens of the Soviet Union. Hitler murdered 9 million private citizens and touched off a war that claimed another 51 million or so. And that’s just the top 3 contenders in recent times.

We don’t have solid numbers for all the rulers of the ancient world, but many of them ran amok killing their own people. Nation states in the hands of psychopaths pose a far greater threat to life and happiness than terrorists do.

We do need to take reasonable steps to foil terror plots and bring terrorists to justice or to an early end. But we must be careful not to violate Franklin’s prescient warning. Protect liberty at all costs.

Excellent quote @ETpro. Just curious, how do Tea Party Republicans react when confronted with Benjamin Franklin words? I mean he’s a great American hero after all. Do they reject him?

Can’t help but wonder if this question would have been asked the day after 9–11.

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room You can verify this with my son, a staunch anti-liberal, my statement after 9/11 was “Well, we’re fucked now” followed by many statements immediately thereafter and throughout the Bush years that we are doing to ourselves what our enemies could not do to us.

So, I can say that it is what I was thinking immediately after 9/11

@mattbrowne they just point to Franklin’s extramarital affairs.

Ad hominem for the win. ~

@mattbrowne Right-wing authoritarian followers have highly compartmentalized minds. When a belief of theirs is challenged, they pull it from its compartment and give it a check against their ideology. If it passes muster, they put it back. Tell them they hold 2 beliefs that are contradictory, and their evaluation process works thus: You tell them, “Ben Franklin, who was a great Patriot said, ‘They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’ ” and “The Patriot Act is bad because it takes our essential liberty.” and they will examine each statement separately. Statement A passes the ideology test because good old Ben was a fine Patriot and a founding father. So statement A goes back in its compartment. Next, statement B. Well, the Patriot Act lets us kill them damn terrorists, to it’s not bad. It passes the ideology test. Back it goes in its compartment. It is impossible to recognize logical contradictions with a compartmentalized mind. That’s what makes right-wing authoritarian followers impossible to reason with, and right wing authoritarian leaders, who know the weakness of the minds they command, such a danger to humanity.

Read more about the two types, followers and leaders, in Dr. Altemeyer’s free PDF book.

Learning to live with uncertainty is the task of enlightenment.

Thanks for your answers !