the ryan king

Ok, before I even get started let me admit that I don’t know much about Nader, his politics or campaign. This blog entry is only intended to be thought provoking.

So, several days ago I was listening to an interview from ITConversations with Bruce Scneier, a security expert. He talked about a number of security related issues, but spent a good amount of time on terrorism/homeland security issues. The basic idea he was trying to get across was that we do a poor job of assessing risk.

We spend a large amount of money on homeland security. The idea is that we are trying to prevent terrorist attacks. And we’ve succeeded so far, right? No, not really. We’ve gone about 3 years since 9/11 without a major terrorist attack in the US. However, there weren’t any terrorist attacks on US soil in the 3 years previous to 9/11. So, it appears we don’t have enough data to determine whether we’re succeeding.

So, we don’t know whether we’re succeeding in stopping terrorism. However, I would suggest that homeland security is achieving its implicit goal- to make us feel safer. See, voters don’t care about and can’t really judge how safe they are. So, Bush & co. have made us feel safer.

[at this point you have to be wondering how Nader fits into this]

But have the other candidates done anything to actually make us safer? Well, Nader has. Nader has spent decades as a consumer advocate and perhaps his most notable accomplishment is getting seat-belts to be mandatory in all vehicles to the US. According to the Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety over 181,000 lives have been saved by seat-belts. I know we can’t necessarily attribute all these saved lives to Nader, we can certainly say that he has made a significant impact.

So, if its safety we care about, maybe you should look at Nader. However, this entry is not intended to convince anyone to vote for Nader. I just want people to think about their decisions and not just make them out of fear.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 20th, 2004 at 8:52 pm.