Discussions about ISIS, especially right-wing ones that immediately jump the discussions to “Beheadings and evil!”, and more specifically that thing that @afloweroutofstone just posted and I don’t want to stretch that post even longer, but they always remind me of that Think Tree song The Living Room: a seeming refusal to conceptualize of anything bigger than one person doing something to another. “You stole my job.” “They beheaded him,” etc., with either no conception of larger political and economic forces or anything more than two weeks ago, or a refusal to conceive of these larger forces because they undermine the immediacy of the gut appeal. “Just keep the sound of the mortar fire far from me / don’t want to have to close the windows here in my room”.
Yeah, and I think also wrt to that topic there’s a tendency to overestimate threats associated with explicit malice, which is part of what makes terrorism especially distressing. Except under pretty extreme circumstances, people are more threatened by their own state (whether local or national) than by virtually any other group, even if the state is interested in their welfare while the other groups want them dead, simply because the state has so huge a role in their lives that small compromises, mistakes, and betrayals have enormous repercussions, whereas the groups that want people dead tend to have a hard time getting the leverage to do comparable levels of damage.
But people are always willing to increase the threat the state poses to them in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, because psychologically the character of the threats matters more than their magnitude. “Statistically, you have more to fear from a powerful and disinterested bureaucracy than from mad bombers who hate you” is never going to work as a line of argument, whether or not it’s true.
It might have more sticking power if it weren’t often followed by “therefore, we should bring in tens of thousands of immigrants from cultures that still practice honor killings and FGM”.
