I've been playing catch-up all week on TiVo stuff. This afternoon, I had the Sunday and Tuesday episodes of "24" queued up for background while working.
The end of Sunday's episode, with Chapelle taking a bullet (literally) for the team, sent chills down my spine. Also the silent clock (instead of the normal beeping one) made it all the more ... creepy.
However, Chapelle's face was remarkably "intact" for someone who got a 10mm plugged to the back of their head. "Face? What face?!" would have been far more accurate than "fake blood drizzled over his head" that we got. I'm not implying they should have shown that, but avoiding showing the face entirely would have been better.
I've decided what my disaster-response will be, though, when I become President. If you attack us with a biological agent, we will intentionally infect agents of the government and send them all over the freaking place. The response protocol to a biological agent, right now, is basically "shut everything down, prevent travel, stop the spread of the virus at all costs."
That's completely the wrong way to go about it. A foreign national, who knows the infection is unlikely to spread to their country, can attack with impunity.
The strategy needs to be "If you infect us, your friends, your neighbors, everyone you hold dear is going to be infected as well, we'll spread the disease everywhere that humans can reach. You may be able to protect your closest friends and family, but bear in mind that when it's all over, it's going to be just the dozen or so of you left on the planet, reigning supreme over a corpse of a planet."
It's the biological-agent version of Mutually Assured Destruction. Say what you want about the insanity of M.A.D. -- and you can say plenty -- it worked. It kept two countries who hated each others' guts from eliminating each other. If a religious radical from some third world country knows "if you infect us, that same infection is guaranteed to come right back at you, harder than ever," it's much more likely to dissuade them from doing it.
The really sad thing is that the vast majority of folks that would use such an agent if they could get one would be very happy to be the last remaining dozen people left on the planet.
MAD worked because neither side wanted to die.
Agreed with jr, people that want to exterminate the human race don't care if you kill their hired help. It just saves them the trouble later on.
That kind of consequence won't affect the judgement of country where suicide bombing for Allah are so popular.
I don't think the average "suicide bomber" type is going to be willing to accept the "Death Of All Humanity, Including Allah's Chosen People".
There's a world of difference between them accepting "themselves dying as a single death of a soldier in Allah's battle" and "We'll eliminate every man woman and child in the world if you mess with us"
You think?
Sometimes you scare me. If your cat scratches you, do you pull out its claws in retaliation? Seems overly agressive to me. Maybe the response should be less violence, not more.
Ange
It's not "your cat scratches you"... analogies like that are really poor.
First, the act is far closer to "you cat is going to slice you and your entire family open and leave you to die a painful death" than it is "scratches you"
Second, the cat has no concept of cause and effect, which is what the principle I describe is predicated upon... convincing the "cat" that if the cat decides to eviscerate you and your entire family that you're going to ensure the cat doesn't have anywhere to play afterwards.
Some people only understand violence. I'm not at all claiming that violence is the solution to all problems, but that for some folks that's all they understand and the only way to prevent them doing violence to YOU is that they readily acknowledge and understand that any violence they do unto you will be wreaked back upon them and theirs tenfold or a hundredfold harder.