🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1992Jul24.141352.17358@scott.skidmore.edu>, 
datkatz@scott.skidmore.edu (david atkatz) quotes dean@vexcel.com (dean 
alaska) and carl@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU (Carl J Lydick) on the general 
subject of terrorism, noting that previous posters had argued

[long section deleted here}

>>In each of these examples, ecoterrorists misrepresent things in order
>>to scare the uninformed, in order to force their policies through.

and arguing

>"pointing to," "grossly overstating," and "confusing,"
>are being equated to, e.g., bombing civilian
>airliners, machine gunning passengers at airports, beating 
>airline passengers to death, shooting crippled cruise
>ship passengers, etc.

>Make much sense to you?  I think there is a little 
>problem of scale here.

There is a problem of scale here, but it is more a problem of 
economics.  The ecoterrorist Luddites in question here have acted to 
drive up the cost of resources, and to divert resources that might 
have been spent elsewise.  Those resources might have been spent on 
making rail grade crossings safer, on paying workers better (thereby
dropping stress-related heart attacks), on installing better highway 
guard rails, on innoculating children against potentially fatal 
diseases, and on dozens of unromantic but cost-effective approaches to 
improving our society, in its quality of life and its culture.

The people who died because resources were incrementally not available 
for other uses are just as dead as people who were machine gunned at 
airports (in my case, airport deaths include the 10 year old friend of 
the 12 year old daughter of a close friend), had the airplanes blown 
up in midair, etc. etc.  Their causes of death are less photogenic, 
less likely to be seen on the six o'clock  'if it bleeds it leads' TV 
headline news, but the people are just as dead as if an ecoterrorist 
had laid into them with a chain saw.  Thus, I maintain, the 
antinuclear and other ecoextremists, however ghandiesque their 
posings, however untraceable the detailed consequences, by escalating 
the cost of nuclear electricity by tends of billions of dollars, have 
in fact caused the deaths of people by the hundreds and thousands, 
potentially in numbers far larger than the number of people killed by 
the airline bombers.  

George Phillies
phillies@wpi.wpi.edu