Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2003 18:27:10 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: "f.johan.beisser" <jan@caustic.org> Cc: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>, JacobRhoden <jrhoden@unimelb.edu.au>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: oh my god the nasa shuttle blewup Message-ID: <3E3F24FE.CB214F38@mindspring.com> References: <20030203173729.U63914-100000@pogo.caustic.org>
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"f.johan.beisser" wrote: [ ... 11 September ... ] > > It was an incredibly ineffective act. > > no, it was remarkably effective. > > if you're not going for the underlying systems (a difficult target to hurt > in any real meaningful way), you end up going for media coverage. > terrorism is effective because it creates FUD, and the WTC attacks were > just that. > > if you want to create FUD in an entire country, you have to create > something unbelievable. it's not dropping bombs on people, it's creating > something so mediagenic that it can't be ignored. it has to look good on > camera. > > i'm fairly convinced the timing of the impacts was intentional, designed > to get live media coverage over as much of the world as possible. > > in that regard, it worked very, very well. Except that the media coverage didn't have and causative value. An event that "looks good on camera" only works as well as your ability to associate yourself with the event, so that the media spotlight is on you/your issue/whatever. If they had called in and claimed credit, or told us what we should stop doing to avoid it happening again, or what we should do that we weren't doing, to avoid it happening again, then I might agree with you. As it is, it didn't. They apparently got some funding out of it, by shorting the stocks of the airlines involved, through a stock exchange in Germany, and that's about it. The shorting they did doesn't touch the assets frozen as a result of the act, so it was a *big* net loss for them. So what was the payoff? -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the messagehelp
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