Horrible attack in Turkey

I don’t have anything to say about this, nor I think did I blog on the attacks in Florida or Paris or all the terrible things going on in the Middle East every day. It’s not my area of expertise and I don’t have anything particular to add.

I’m only posting this note here because we’ve had a bunch of recent posts related to Brexit news, and during the next several months we’ll continue to be interrupting our regular fare of himmicanes, power pose, and Stan with posts on the U.S. election. (The blog is already full through mid-Nov but polling and election news will certainly be causing us to bump some scheduled material.) It seems kinda weird to sometimes be posting topically but then to completely ignore things like the Turkey attack.

We learn from anomalies. And, the sad thing is, these terror events are no longer anomalous; they’re common place. Speaking as a social scientist, the way to study these is no longer, why do they happen, but rather, when and how do they occur, how do people and organizations react to them, and so forth.

Again, I have no special insight here; it just felt odd not to not react at all to something which, considered in isolation, is such a striking and scary thing. You can take it as representative of all the striking and scary things happening in the world that we just let pass by us.

16 thoughts on “Horrible attack in Turkey

  1. I always thought that it is amazing that they don’t happen more often!

    There’s so many people in the world with so little to lose and so much to feel bitter about.

    It only needed the means for evil to scale. It is now easier than ever before to translate individual resentment into massive impact.

    • Dont be naive. These terrorist movements are supported by one or multiple government some of them, well-known western allies, not to say by the West itself. This includes ISIS. Any analyses of the terrorism fenomenon without acess to archives of intelligence services around the world is pointless.

      The situation in Syria is very similar to the situation in Afganistan in the 80s, the only exception that they can not invite the terrorists to the White House anymore and call them freedom fighters as Reagan did…

        • My point is: these attacks are politically motivated, thus they are driven by politics. Not by random individuals with little to lose, though these movements use this type of people to carry out their attacks. (I am not necessarly disagreeing with what you said to be clear).

        • Fair enough.

          Maybe this is better: Evil organizations find willing foot soldiers in discontented people who have little to lose and a bleak future?

          My key point was: agnostic to whether the particular evil is terrorism or mass shootings we should be surprised that these things don’t happen more often.

        • Well, the thing i am not sure thats the case. Maybe they feel like losers in the society, but I am not sure if they can be really classified as poor.

  2. I think the last few attacks are revealing. First, we’ve set up the entire security system around keeping bombs off planes, as though terrorists could not adapt or, perhaps, because there’s a misunderstanding of how the goals of terror may be reached. Second, that raises issues about why targets are chosen. Why planes? We can understand the symbolism of the big attack of 9/11 but why planes in general, as in why the idiocy with shoes and liquids/gels that might be combined on a plane to make a bomb? Those attempts took a lot of planning and entailed high risk of detection. We could argue the costs imposed by security was a terrorist “victory” but I think most people would agree standing in security lines isn’t as scary as being hit by bomb fragments or bullets. Third, one guess is the reactions to attacks and the massive expansion of news coverage of them has taught terrorists they can achieve the same level of disruptive fear by hitting easier targets. And that makes me wonder why they couldn’t think of that before. I think, for example, of movies like Black Sunday about an attempt to bomb the big game and I can understand the desire to make the big splash during the event. But the odds of success are so much lower and the responses to other terror attacks are now so large, I’d say awareness within terror groups has shifted toward easier targets. That would mean the crowd outside the security gates at the airport, at the game, etc.

  3. Isn’t this called the availability heuristic or something, the thing that’s fooling people into thinking that terrorist attacks are increasing?

  4. I have been wondering what would happen if no one publicly reported on terrorist attacks. Would that make them stop? (reduce, certainly). Is there some kind of moral obligation to “inform” people on them? Does that really help anyone?

    • When I did my Master’s studies, I have read several studies that claimed that higher press freedoms lead to more terrorist attacks (higher chance of media coverage increases incentives for terrorism). I also read a rebuttal stating that it only higher “reported” terrorist attacks (countries with low press freedoms may be censoring real attacks). The point is…at least some people are thinking along the same lines as Alex.

      Interestingly, the studies seem to also say that democracy reduces terrorism…when you control for press freedoms. In other words, dictatorships have less terrorism than democracies, but once you control for press freedoms, then democracies have less terrorism. Could that be an argument for a pro-censorship democracy? Could that regime even be stable and avoid degenerating into a dictatorship?

      • Why sacrifice press-freedom for a tiny bit of added security? After all, what fraction of the preventable deaths in any western nation are terrorism related?

        PS. Suicides are a good analogy where (I think) the press has a self-imposed embargo on reporting the details for fear of precipitating copy-cat suicides.

  5. You can add the dead in Bangaladesh to this, as well.

    It’s unclear if these events are actually overall more common than they were, or just more publicized since the advent of 24 hour news channels. Recall, for example, all those IRA attacks, airplane hijackings, the airliner downed in Lockerbee, Scotland, etc. from a generation ago. Go back farther, and we get to the anarchists in the late 19th century, the Puerto Rican nationalists attack on Truman in 1950, etc. And should we count the KKK lynchings in the American South as terrorist killings?

    ————

    But I will admit to a double standard. I had a choice of cities to fly via on a foreign trip, planning a couple of days stopover to play tourist. I chose to fly through Paris, rather than Istanbul, and did not change those plans even though we spent time in Paris just after the late 2015 attacks there. Paris is, of course, a great city for a tourist. But Istanbul would have been a fantastic city to visit, and I wonder if even now there’s a lot of difference in the actual safety of American tourists in Istanbul versus Paris.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *