I just want to thank you as well for your willingness to engage with me, especially with how delicate the subject matter is. It gives me hope for the state of modern political discourse.<p>You&#x27;ve presented an interesting distillation, that&#x27;s for sure (on your recommendation I shall read the article). It&#x27;s worth noting that there are probably multiple lessons to this experience or event and the relevance will change from person to person, but in a way that&#x27;s nitpicking.<p>My response to the notion of looking at these risks with fatalistic acceptance, is that we shouldn&#x27;t completely evaluate the impact of things like malnutrition, disease, violence, {climate change side-effects} in terms of death. Death is a nice common impact measure, same as money, which is why they&#x27;re so popular as they make the incomparable, comparable. But they should be seen as approximate representations of what we value, rather than what we value. Even if there isn&#x27;t a whole lot we can do to gain knowledge of when people are attacked or when they die, there are still values beyond death&#x2F;money for which these events have meaning. Something could be done for those shared values even if it can&#x27;t be done for ourselves.<p>I agree with what you&#x27;re saying RE: surveillance. Two things:<p>(1) I don&#x27;t think we quite know the extent for which our military agencies are preventing harm, only the extent to which they haven&#x27;t. There could be a &quot;Red Queen&quot; effect where less surveillance is a net loss but more surveillance does nothing, or is also a net loss. Just a thought, and I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised.<p>(2) ISIS is using our compassion and our values against us: they say as much in their magazine.[0][1] If we don&#x27;t do the same to them then the fight will keep being asymmetric, but I don&#x27;t have any answers that aren&#x27;t probably wrong in some way. Already I&#x27;ve been drawing conclusions that I thought were correct, but they were expecting and wanted. Russia is the only country with the balls to fight a ground war but NATO is not on best terms with them, either, among other things.<p>(An aside: While Silicon Valley&#x27;s techno-optimism is perhaps one of the most productive, proactive and pragmatic stances one can take to the world&#x27;s flaws and inefficiencies, I try to remember that it&#x27;s probably an exception rather than the rule. SV exists in a bubble of its own and is ultimately dependent on much else being stable.)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10579975" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10579975</a>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;17&#x2F;islamic-states-goal-eliminating-the-grayzone-of-coexistence-between-muslims-and-the-west&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;17&#x2F;islamic-states-goal-elim...</a>