To be fair, though, I’m not sure you can divorce the two. ISTM to be a pretty strong feedback loop.
Yes, I agree with this distinction, and did try to frame the OP to avoid arguments over whether it is nevertheless good policy to fight terrorists abroad.
I do wonder how many Americans would support bombing ISIL out of good will towards the innocent non-American people of Syria and Iraq (and Yemen, Libya, etc.).
Ironically, this would mean that xenophobia is enabling a policy with the principal goal of helping foreigners. Right?
You know, I think I would largely agree with this if I replaced “government” with “military-industrial complex.”
Absolutely! For many people,of course it’s scarier.
Let’s try an analogy: You’re a perfectly average person, in an average middle class American neighborhood.
And you happen to be black
Imagine two situations:
- you wake up one night and find an armed burglar in your house.
- you wake up one morning, look out the window, and see a noose tied to a tree on your street, with the words “niggers go home” spray-painted on the sidewalk nearby.
In the first case, you were personally threatened and could have died. (but luckily the robber fled).
In the second case, you personally aren’t threatened at all.
But which is scarier?
Which story would get more news coverage?
It may be irrational, but human beings are not rational creatures. Some things scare us more than others…So it is not fair to dismiss fear of terrorism with a disdainful attitude, and label it Xenophobia.
I don’t see why your final sentence follows from the previous ones. Why isn’t it fair to criticize irrational fears?
I’m sure that’s right. But I think the implicit point made by these critics is that if only the media made different choices then we wouldn’t have this problem. My point is that so long as the media is for-profit then this feedback loop will exist. If that’s so, in a free society the problem is really the media-viewers and not the media.
Yes, not because they are particularly guilty, but because that is the news channel that I typically watch.
I suspect it is the same reason people are afraid of shark attacks when swimming. Shark attacks are a trifling danger, but there have been movies and TV specials made about them, and they occasionally appear on the news, so people far overrate them as a danger.
See also: child abduction by strangers.
I don’t think this sort of thing necessarily requires “xenophobia”, just a lot of public consciousness devoted to it. Terrorist attacks are newsworthy because they are startling and frightening if they happen; the public is constantly reminded of them, because they make the news. Once they are imprinted into the news cycle, people devote more worry to them than is rational, because people’s threat responses are like that: more rationally significant threats are familiar and so contemptible.
Your “citation” offers little, if any, support for your position. Indeed, the title of the article explicitly references the lack of reliable numbers.
Being “How Many Mass Shootings This Year? There’s No Consensus.”
A brief scanning of the article does not turn up even a reference to jihadi terrorism. Can you point out for us the wording that supports your thesis?
I address this in the OP. If it were merely the same set of biases that make people fear shark attacks, then you’d expect fear of mass shooting to be on par with fear of terrorism. But it isn’t. People fear foreign terrorism roughly twice as much. Do you think the difference is entirely accounted for in the level of media coverage of the two kinds of events? And if it is, what is the underlying cause of that greater coverage, in your estimation, if not the greater salience of foreign dangers?
I don’t believe it is entirely due to irrational xenophobia. Terrorism, for better or worse, is in the news lately. Plus, we have the added problem of greater immigration and the rise of militant Islam. The conseuence of these latter two problems we don’t yet fully know. It’s therefore next to worthless to point out past numbers of deaths caused by terrorism in the US and come to any firm conclusion over future attacks.
So your thesis is that fears of terrorism aren’t irrational because they could be based on future predictions of thousand-fold increases in the likelihood of being a victim of terrorism?
Not at all: in fact this supports my theory.
Mass shootings in the US in particular are now simply too common to summon up the “shark attack” fear/fascination reaction.
They are so common, the smaller ones have ceased to be newsworthy, except locally.
I’m not the only one to have noted this:
In short, mass-shootings (non foreign terrorist variety) have simply joined car accidents and the like as aspects of modern life in America that are somewhat dangerous, but not surprising or startling any more.
One may as well ask why stranger abductions of children are more frightening that abductions of children by family members (which are far, far more common). Both are “abductions”, yet the far rarer one is the far scarier to the general public.
Seems like a hypothesis we could test. According to your theory, fear of mass shootings should have decreased over the last two decades, right?
Haven’t read the entire thread - but while xenophobia is often used as an excuse and definitely is a piece of it for some - the real reason we fear both of these items to the extent we do is it makes us fully realize just how “not in control” of our surroundings we are - its losing the ability to ‘walk down the streets safe in the good part of town’.
We hear in the media about car bombings and explosions in “foreign countries” - we wonder how people live in that type of society all the time - we get a few events like that in ‘our safe country’ and it causes us to fear it even more so.
Its no longer ‘just them’ - its also ‘us’ - and that is pretty fucking scary.
It doesn’t help that fear is an easy thing to sell - it does a wonder for religion.
Well done for subtly changing the parameters of the issue. The issue is not only about myself, but also my family, and if you are being sympathetic to my fears then you can also add fear for my friends. That’s a whole lot of people to fear over; some of whom will no doubt spend substantial time abroad.
Heck, im not even American, but what scares me will likely scare your average American, German, Brit and Australian.
If I’ve done so, it wasn’t intentional. Perhaps you can clarify. Are you not claiming that the fears are rational because in the future there may be dramatically more terrorism to the point that it becomes rational for an individual to fear it?
Nothing scares Australians, they live in a place where butterflies are venomous.
It would certainly be interesting to see. I would have predicted it to go down over time, yes.
I’m not finding any trendlines in quick googling. I’ll keep looking.
Based on your theory, what do you make of the stark partisan divides on fear of terrorism that persist regardless of who is in power? I don’t believe the same divides exist as to, say, shark attacks.