Kristof on overreaction to terrorism

I rarely read and more rarely agree with NK.

But being partly right (but also seriously wrong) about our reaction to terrorism is not the same as being in any degree right about what our reaction to global warming should be.

All the same, being a little right is better than his usual.

Overreacting to Terrorism

But isn't electing people based on notions of how their policies would affect coastlines 10,000 years from now, er, odd?

And yet, making policy choices today on that basis is what he describes in this piece, repeatedly, as rational, in contrast to our behavior regarding terrorism, which he repeatedly describes as irrational.

[The more I think of it the more astonishingly stupid this appears.

We are supposed to actually believe that NK wants us, when making today's voter choices, to concern ourselves with suppositions about how those decisions will affect coastlines ten thousand years from now.

As though it was not utterly preposterous to even pretend to have a preference as to the shape of coastlines ten thousand years from now.

As though it was not all but incomprehensibly stupid to take such a thing into account and somehow weigh those utterly incredible preferences against everything that's - er - more pressing.

How is making your vote today depend at least partly on such a thing not far, far more loony than making it depend partly on your concerns about terrorism?

The idiocy of this leaves me gasping.]

He does note, but does not take at all to heart, that the underlying reason for taking Jihad far more seriously than would seem to be justified by the risks it currently poses in the West is that Jihaders want to obtain and use, perhaps only against the West, weapons of mass destruction.

All these years after 9/11, there we have it, still simmering in the background, The Argument from The Bomb.

If and when a plot to obtain or use a radiological or nuclear weapon for a terrorist attack, or biological or chemical weapons that deserve the label "weapons of mass destruction," people will knock off driveling that torture never works and tender concern for the civil rights of those on the wrong side, or the possibly offended feelings of Muslims, will and should simply evaporate.

Update.

A despairing thought is that NK is not in any degree right.

That people freak as much as they do at Muslim terrorism because they think that if this goes on long enough one day it won't be a nail bomb, it'll be sarin, or anthrax, a dirty bomb.

Or even, God forbid, a nuke.

And that's why they insist on anti-terrorism that really, truly, and effectively prevents terrorism, God dammit.

We're talking about somebody nuking fucking New York.

And that's why this is a despairing thought.