TV’s Mythbusters can’t seem to “investigate” things without blowing stuff up either. Are they guilty of the sort of thinking that led us into Iraq?

Is publically referring to them as a “hoax” a crime, one that leads to the same sort of thinking that led to the invasion of Iraq?

I did say that I had not been following this whole mess in the media. Feels like the right decision, now, too.

They didn’t just “investigate” them – the police shut down major thoroughfares and blew one of them up. They publically referred to them as a “hoax”. “Investigating them” is not what people are talking about here.

I’m not sure how investigating electronic devices placed in strategic locations thoughout a city is the same as invading a country that had nothing to do with blowing up some buildings. Seems to me that investigation of said electronic devices is a good idea that doesn’t kill people, while bombing a foreign power and destroing their government does kill people. An important distinction. Perhaps plnelson will tell me that I’m wrong again. But I won’t bother checking this thread to find out.

Actually I think it IS. I think they ARE connected, and I think that connection is found in the OTHER thread we were having here on ROS about new cities.

As I suggested there, cities make people irrational. The stress of interacting with thousands of total, complete strangers every day is something our brains were never evolved to do – throughout our entire evolution we lived in small groups of 30-80 individuals. Cities have an unnatural day/night lighting cycle. People living in cities are cut off from the cycles of nature; they don’t know where their food comes from; they don’t know where their waste goes. Many of them work at jobs in huge office building doing some tiny function in a vast enterprise so they are alienated from the product or end-result of their daily labor.

All of the above insulates people from a grasp of cause and effect. It literally makes people crazy, and this is reflected in high rates of crime, drug abuse, and mental illness. It limits their ability to make rational decisions or gain perspective. America is an increasingly urban society and is therefore increasingly incapable of responding rationally to ANYTHING – Saddam Hussein, global warming, you name it. The willingness of a teenager to kill another kid over a pair of sneakers and the over-reaction of the BPD to an advertising stunt are both the products of the same urban insanity.

And Boston has all of these ills on top of some other problems: They are largely an academic community: Students are living an artificial life while they wait for their ‘real’ one to start; professors deal in theoretics; they don’t produce anything concrete with their hands, the fruits of their labors are abstract – ideas or “educated students”. A big part of the Boston business community is finance, investment, and insurance, which in day to day work abstracts everything. Fidelity might have a mutual fund that invests in mining or manufacturing, John Hancock might insure against the loss of a Steinway piano, but the thousands of employees who work in their office buildings only know those things as numbers.

Many of the 9-11 hijackers started in Bangor, Maine, and even easier airport to slip through. I personally rode in there in a giant rented Rider truck from Philly, without being asked a question, this was back in 1995. So when I heard that many hijackers originated from them, I was not supprised. Airport security is a federal endvor, and city security is not, a case of apples and oranges. So why don’t you blame Bangor for 9-11? It really happened there as much as it happened in Boston.

as for murder rates, WHY should we compare Boston to those places and not national adverages of other nations? Boston is a city, not a country, and it makes sence to compare it to other cities in the same nation. The cities I’ve mentioned are also large American cities. They have the same “disease” as Boston. They have many of the same screwed up social problems that leads to violence and murder.

I currently live in a city with a very high murder rate that is swarming with police “protection,” I have personally seen hundreds of soldiers deployed on a single street to “secure it,” for apparently no reason at all. And it really doesn’t seem to help. The cars still seem to blow up from time to time, and every few years some sort of terrorist attach. I agree that what needs to be changes is not really “Fatherland Security,” Maybe this Boston incident may help Americans realize it’s not working. You never fix your pipes until they start to leak, hopefully it’s not really a waist afterall.

YES, Boston got fooled. not even fooled, they stepped on their own rake. The over reaction was stunning, however it isn’t a symptom or sign of why Boston is “bad.” S#*t happens.

Life’s not fair. Anyway, how is Australia any more semi-socialist than Massachusetts? Yet they have about 1/8 Boston’s murder rate.

As for the boston Murder Rate, comparing it to non gun-toting, non semi-socialist states isn’t fair. Compare it to LA, Detroit, and New York.

WHY should we compare Boston to those places – did they ALSO over-react to a silly advertising toy? My point is that Boston should focus first on the known, real threats. After they’ve taken care of those they can work on the silly threats.

though how many cartoon show marketing firm wet-dream-come-true stunts it will take?

How many will it take for WHAT? To finally convince everybody that the city authorities are clueless? I think we’re most of the way there.

don’t read my blog if you don’t like it pacifist

take off ya knob.

I think went you put something on a public blog, then you invite discussion, apparently not.

As for the boston Murder Rate, comparing it to non gun-toting, non semi-socialist states isn’t fair. Compare it to LA, Detroit, and New York. Your chances of getting murdered are less. I currently live in Moscow which logs in about 250 + murders every year, most go unsloved, so yes, I feel safer in Boston.

As for letting the terrorist on planes, it could have happened ANYWHERE security was bad everywhere.

Nonsense. It wasn’t even the same authorities. And if hypervigilance and an elevated concern for public safety are the alleged results of 9/11 in Boston how do you explain the dramaitic INCREASE in murders in Boston since then?

Wrong. That’s the same rationale that was used to invade Iraq. “Sure the evidence that Saddam has WMD’s is weak-to-nonexistent, but if he DOES have them this will seem brilliant in retrospect.” It takes a better reason that that.

Boston is full of GENUINE, KNOWN dangers – traffic, for example. And murder – Boston has been “enjoying” a big murder spree for over a year now. In 2006 Boston’s murder rate per 100,000 populatuion was 10.8. Contrast this with Canada – 2.01, France 1.64, Australia 1.28, or Germany 0.98.