Comment Re:Just California? (Score 1) 277
I remember telling a friend on 9-11 that we would do way more damage to OURSELVES with our response to 9-11 than 9-11 or any other terrorist attack would ever do directly. That's the whole point of terrorism, really.
That's not the "point of terrorism" at all. All you have to do around here is spout some sort of line about how "what the government has done is far worse than terrorism" and you get modded up by the morons who agree with you. The point of terrorism is most assuredly not to make you do bad things for yourself. The point of terrorism is to gain a political objective you cannot get through the ballot box or through legal and normal means of working within the system by killing so many people that you make the price of maintaining the status quo higher than those who maintain the status quo are willing to pay. The 9/11 attacks were in part to get US infidel troops out of holy Saudi Arabia, in part to punish the US for it's support for "evil" Israel, and in part to unite the Arab world under a caliph who would just happen to be Osama Bin Laden. I can assure you that Osama and his buddies did not sit around the campfire some months before September 2001 and say "You know, if we pull this off it will make air travel within the US extremely inconvenient, which is, of course, our ultimate goal". The IRA killed people to try to force the non-Catholics to leave Northern Ireland so it could be joined with the Irish Republic. The PLO and similar groups wanted to kill so many Jews that they could either get an independent state for Palestinians or drive all the Jews out of Israel. The Chechen terrorists want to make so many non-Muslim Russians die that those who survive will give them complete independence. The Tamil Tigers tried to kill their way into an independent nation. Those are the point of terrorism, to take by force what cannot be gained without it.