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London Bombs · This morning I read on CNN that “Authorities across the United States worked to increase security on subways, trains, and other potential targets...”. That’s really, really stupid. If someone wants to kill you so badly that he doesn’t mind dying in the process, chances are he’s probably going to get you, and a few more cops on the subway aren’t going to help. As for London, well we’re all Londoners today; but in the big picture Londoners have proven, plenty of times, that you can’t push them around this way. So this was not just sick, twisted and evil, but also futile. That’s three Western capitals in four years, yeah they’ll probably come back and do it again, and “tightened security” is just treating the symptoms. What’s the alternative? This may sound nuts, but doing our best to just ignore them would be good. They’re not gonna cause any policy changes this way, but at least they get to control what’s on CNN & the BBC for a while; maybe if they couldn’t even do that, the strap-on bomb would be less attractive. My other radical suggestion—which some will denounce as treason—is to work harder at figuring out the “Why?” of it. I’m not saying that there’s any political grievance to which attacking New York, Madrid or London is a reasonable response. But when something is driving enough people into insane belief systems that we see regular explosions in our cities, it would be smart to care—a lot—what that something is. Because, on the evidence, I don’t think the leaders of the Western world have a clue. [Update: This one got lots of linkage, but until today the only direct feedback was from Savanna Slave of “Porn Pic a Day dot Com” (no kidding), who said “We understand ’em just fine”, and from Christaan Briggs, who quoted at length from Osama. I don’t think I’ll link to either, but you can find them if you want. On the other hand, Britt Blaser wrote a big essay, which I highly recommend.]
