Predictions Re: The Politics Of Gene Wolfe

David Stockhoff · 02 Aug 2012, 11:45 · from 2012-August.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Thu, 02 Aug 2012 07:45:30 -0400
Subject: (urth) Predictions Re: The Politics Of Gene Wolfe
In-Reply-To: <5019F7AC.506 at clueland.com>
References: <CAMwO0gxbghmGqZNc7cWrV5uZFeqAjWBGRJ0GPe4sumkjWpqqgA at mail.gmail.com>
	<5013ED08.8020106 at colby.edu>
	<CAMwO0gw+gdkUEJz8YGhJ=TAE3e3yYcUBLHfd+hHujrDD3sNxiA at mail.gmail.com>
	<8C97F2C6-F73F-48E9-BE33-6D2603638AE0 at gmail.com>
	<50189629.2010800 at verizon.net>
	<2D12BD77-1325-4D55-A17B-0BA5DB947308 at liftingfaces.com>
	<50191BEE.6060402 at verizon.net>
	<8B488A81-86B0-42BB-B96B-80C5F251A42B at liftingfaces.com>
	<50192750.5060509 at verizon.net>
	<69B44E71-236D-4C6A-AB1D-C159CA25B380 at liftingfaces.com>
	<1343844296.27434.YahooMailNeo at web84508.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
	<A5D7705D-A98C-439E-A19C-7C1F2013708C at gmail.com>
	<1343871630.91287.YahooMailNeo at web114711.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
	<5019DE3A.5090403 at verizon.net>
	<C299C084-2576-42BB-BC2A-D62074F44132 at gmail.com>	<5019E56E.5020801 at verizon.net>
	<5019F7AC.506 at clueland.com>
Message-ID: <501A685A.7020400 at verizon.net>


On 8/1/2012 11:44 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 8/1/2012 9:26 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>>
>> On 8/1/2012 10:08 PM, Ant?nio Pedro Marques wrote:
>>> But what did you mean by it requiring a lot of work and their
>>> likeliness to be caught? Those are the bits I inquired on. Lot of work
>>> to set fires? I mean, that could apply to lots of other ideas, but 
>>> here?
>> In order to create a wildfire that is bigger than "natural" wildfires,
>> you'd have to start several fires over a wide area. If it's not bigger
>> than normal fires, what's the point?
>
> Considering how much press and FUD  just a threat like a fake bomb 
> scare can get, it wouldn't have to be even as "big" as a natural fire. 
> Natural and accidental fires happen infrequently, but if you make it 
> plain you are willing to set them on purpose, you create a perception 
> of significant risk on a daily basis.
>
> A terror org could deliberately set a fire in an area with a high 
> danger of spread to inhabited areas, then when fire fighting resources 
> are concentrated there, they set another one at another high-risk area 
> in a distant part of the same or adjacent state - now there are two 
> fires! Limited resources have to be diverted from the big established 
> one to fight the new one, they take much longer to respond than normal 
> because they are already deployed instead of at the ready and farther 
> away, and now the pols get to explain to the first fire's victims why 
> they decided the second fire was more important, to the second fire's 
> victims why help was so slow to arrive, and to the fire fighters why 
> they cut the budget last year, etc.
>
>
> Then whenever the terror org needs some publicity, they call in 
> another arson threat, and everyone running an unsanctioned weenie 
> roast gets to enjoy the half-assed security theatre "zero tolerance" 
> policies...

All true, but there's a big difference between "terror" and "media 
hysterics." I just have to assume terrorists know the difference too.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net