It’s OK: Baths Are More Dangerous Than Terrorism, The Economist Reassures Us

Don’t worry about terrorism: baths are much more dangerous.

At least I think that’s the subtext of the latest infographic from The Economist – house journal to Davos man, Euro technocrats and the rest of the globalist elite.

Terrorism is here to stay, get used to it, the Ecommunist advises:

TERRORIST attacks are fiendishly hard to prevent. Anyone can rent or steal a lorry and drive it at a crowd. Especially in America, it is all too easy to buy high-powered semi-automatic weapons that can kill scores of people in moments. Neither great planning nor great intelligence is required to carry out such attacks. Thus it seems likely that much of Europe and America will have to get used to acts of Islamist-inspired terrorism becoming, if not routine, at least fairly regular occurrences.

It goes on:

Barack Obama was correct when he said earlier this year that the danger of drowning in a bathtub is greater than that of being killed by terrorists. Baths are a one-in-a-million risk. Even if the terrorism deaths in San Bernardino and Orlando were doubled to give an annual death toll, the risk would still be about one in 2.5m.

Well yes. But so what? A bath is a soothing, relaxing experience whose charms not even that scene in A Nightmare On Elm Street has quite managed to ruin. You can read magazines; you can wallow in every variety of bubbles and scented, therapeutic oils; you can improve the dextrousness of your toes by turning the hot tap on and off with your feet; you can listen to the radio; you can think deep thoughts.

Also, baths – in the unlikely event that they are going to kill you – do not alert you to your imminent demise with a bloodcurdling scream of “Allahu Akbar”; nor do they torture you beforehand like happened to some of the victims at the Bataclan massacre in Paris; nor are they undiscriminating. If you die in the bath, chances are you’re going to be elderly or infirm and probably on your way out anyway.

But the more serious point is this: reports like this have the dangerous consequence of buoying up the liberal elite’s complacency.

You hear this argument a lot from progressive intellectuals: terrorism is not an existential threat to our society; by paying undue attention to it we are “doing what the terrorists want”; extreme security measures are counterproductive because the inconvenience they cause law-abiding people outweighs the marginal improvements in public safety; etc.

I don’t buy this for the same reason I don’t buy the baths false analogy.

Baths – and the even more dangerous cars and horses and motorbikes and guns and alcohol – are risks we willingly endure because they improve our lives and make us happy.

Terrorism is pure evil. The idea that we should just learn to shrug our shoulders – as I’m sure many Ecommunist readers would like – and just go “Yeah, well it’s one of those things” is a counsel of despair, indeed it is the counsel of the devil.

There’s stuff we can do to stop it, a lot more – especially when it comes to draining the swamp which produces it.

Silly comparisons with bath mortality don’t help. They’re just glib defeatism.