Don’t normally do politics here but this seems custom designed to provoke me…

UK police said the explosions could have caused “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”.

source

What’s an unimaginable scale?

the Indian ocean tsunami last year? That killed something like 250,000 people, that’s 1/32 of the population of London, probably 3 people in my office at work, I can imagine that quite well, it would be terrible obviously but it’s not unimaginable.

The holocaust? Actually I can imagine that quite well too, thanks at least in part to the excellent holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum which does a brilliant and quite upsetting job of really binging home the scale of that attrocity, resolutely and unflinchingly facing the complex issues surrounding it.

So this kind of talk of death on an unimaginable scale is rather underestimating the power of human imagination: Say 10 plane loads of people, capacity of around 400 people so 4000 people at the upper limit. Clearly 4000 people dying would be terrible but it’s certainly not unimaginable.

The thing is that by shrieking this kind of alarmist nonsense the people that are setup to protect us from terrorism are actually furthering the aims of the terrorists, spereading fear and terror in the population. The reasonable response to terrorism is to take it in as a risk in the same catagory as accidents and disease and other things like that. When you look at it like that, whilst it’s still hard to understand the psychology of a suicide bomber (surely worth trying though), its actually a tiny problem for most people in the UK (you’re more likely to die in a car crash blah blah blah), as long as the media and government and security forces continue to run around scaring everyone with ridiculous hyperbole about “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” terrorism will continue to be an effective tactic for disruption and for airing the idiotic views of tiny extremist groups.

Also: “16/8″ shrieks the front page of the Mail, or something, “that’s when the bombs were going to happen”, or something along those lines anyway. Can we stop branding terrorist attrocities? that’s how you make something unimaginable, by reducing a complex series of events and causes to an anodyne sound byte, a short hand which can be easily railed against but which surely can only hinder any chance of real understanding or progress.

[edit]Reading this back a couple of days later it just sound like some idiot on talk radio or something so that’s why I don’t normally do politics… could be my impresison of it though ‘cos I’ve been spending a lot of time surfing around LW on a little old radio recently though