Well, things like coal which kill a lot more than nuclear power do it slowly and quietly. While availability has something to do with fear of nuclear power, the ability of the owners of nuclear plants to execute almost worst case scenarios probably has something to do with it also. Remember, in the early 1950s when nuclear power began it was not feared at all. Something had to change that perception.
You’ll be happy to know that there are lots of protests against black-on-black crime in places like Oakland and East Palo Alto, usually by mothers and kids. Always peaceful, gets a mention, and as you they don’t do much good. Perhaps there would be more outrage if the perps, when caught, frequently got off.
I feel we’ve lost our sense of humour somewhere. And that’s led to a lack of perspective.
In the UK we had terrorism for decades and the usual response was some form of gallows humour. Ok, some of that was based on centuries of racism against the Irish and wasn’t exactly PC. But it did help to deflate the terror.
But with Islamic terrorism it’s all taken so seriously. Maybe because of the scale of 9/11 left little room for jokes. But there have been enough minor failed incidents that we should be laughing at. The shoe bomber who couldn’t get his fuse to light for instance.
Chris Morris produced the excellent ‘Four Lions’ which depicted a bunch of inept terrorists. But I’ve seen little else that takes the piss out of the terrorists.
And it’s hard to be scared of someone when you’re laughing at them.
Maybe it’s easier for us Brits as we’ve had decades to get used to it, whereas it’s all new to Americans. I remember talking to some American tourists in 2002 and they were still shocked by 9/11 because it had happened only one state away from where they lived. I told them about the car bomb I’d walked past 10 minutes before it had exploded and they went pale.
More fierce, maybe, since almost no one intentionally causes an accident.
But I think far more money (and consumer money, not just government money) has gone into the successful effort to reduce the auto accident injury and fatality rate.
There used to be major coverage of estimates of the carnage on the highway over the Memorial Day weekend, to the extent that Mad did a spoof of a Jerry Lewis telethon where he was trying to make sure drivers hit their death numbers. You don’t hear that any more, perhaps because the rate has fallen so far. All thanks to items like airbags, seat belts and now collision avoidance systems.
Actually regarding the car accident, it should probably be 50% on you and 30% on the other drivers on the road over which are as completely out of your control as some crazy with a bomb. But even taking your numbers at face value, with terrorism being 99% governments problem while car accidents are only 10% governments problem, the 10% of the accidents that are governments problem are much much more than the 99% of terrorism. So if survival is your primary interest, you would be far better off voting for governments based on their policies on traffic accidents than voting on their terrorism policies.
It’s not just availability bias. It’s also that people fear being killed by outsiders.
This is maybe particularly acute in America, but is a general thing humans do. We don’t like being killed by outsiders and are willing to spend a huge chunk of time and money (and kill a whole lot of innocent non-Americans) to try to marginally reduce the chance of it happening.