@blatham,
blatham wrote:
Quote:The odds of being the victim of a shark attack are 1 in 11.5 million worldwide. Although there are 65 annual shark attacks each year, only a handful are fatal. Compared to this, a person is 3 times more likely to drown and 30 times more likely to be hit by lightning.
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The chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are about 1 in 20 million. A person is as likely to be killed by his or her own furniture, and more likely to die in a car accident, drown in a bathtub, or in a building fire than from a terrorist attack.
The chances a person will be killed by an asteroid are 1 in 200,000, which is much higher than the odds of being killed by hail, which is 1 in 734,400,000.
Each year, 1 out of 100,000 people die in a skydiving accident, which is 17 times lower than the risk of dying in a car accident.
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The lifetime probability of dying in a car accident is 1 in 100, which is 200 times higher than the probability of dying in a plane crash.
While 1 out of 5 people fear the possibility of being murdered, the odds that a person will be murdered in any given year are about 1 in 18,690. According to the FBI, violent crime is now at a near-historic low.
According to the CDC, the infant mortality rate is about 6 for every 1,000 live births, which is more than 10 times higher than the mortality rate of the county with the highest vehicle mortality rate—San Bernardino, California—in the country..............
Anyone worried about being killed by terrorists is someone who has been made irrationally fearful.
The odds of being kiled in a terrorist attack appear to be rising daily, and that is a central issue here. The correlation between recent terror attacks in Europe and recent immigration of Moslem immigrsants & refugees in Europe is unmistakeably high.
The odds of being killed in a nuclear reactor accident are far more favorable than those you cited for terrorism. Despite that there is serious resistence in the U.S and Europe to the construction of more of them.
The core issue here, which the piece you pasted here ignores completely, is the relationship between risk and the outrage of those subject to it. Risks that are the result of our own choices are far better tolerated than those imposed on us by others . Risks that are readily understandable based on regular experience are far better tolerated than those arising from things we don't understand or cant see or visualize easily. These are simply elements among the facts of human nature. I recognize the "right thinking progressives" often ignore these facts ( Ezekiel Emmanuel is still indignant that those "swtupid" healthy young people didn't buy the health insurance policies designed for them by himself and Prof. (ahem!) Jonathan Gruber.)
It will be interesting to observe the domestic political reaction in Germany to the latest attack at Christmas market in Berlin. The fact is these terrorist acts and deliberate murders are being dione by radicalized Moslems carrying out the struggle (jihad) mandated in the Koran against unbelievers. Their chosen targets include western secular civilization, Christians, Jews, and other identifiable religious minorities in the Middle East. These actions and the beliefs that drive them are clear violations of the principles outlined in the UN Declaration of Human rights. Despite that the Western World is nearly paralyzed by the dilemma this poses with respect to their own now much inflated and elaborated "values".
There are many examples in History of such dilemmas. The results are mixed but the odds indicated there aren't very good either.
