Is terrorism getting worse?

[Zkuq]

CaptainExplosion said:

Zkuq said:
It kind of seems like it, at least here in the west. I don't know if it's very different in other regions, such as the Middle East, though. Could be a sign of weakness. They've been losing ground in their stupid war, so they attack innocent people for attention and deeper division between cultures, which could both potentially benefit them.

Well how do we fix this? All else we've been able to do is kill them, and yet still they breed like cockroaches.

Well, it would probably be a good start to stop with the ridiculous amounts of collateral damage that paints the west as the enemy. Demonizing Islam probably doesn't help either. In general, we need to ease up the tensions to prevent the creation of new terrorists. We can deal with the existing ones, painful though it might be, the problem is the recruitment of new people into terrorism. There's probaly not very much we can do about existing terrorists, although it doesn't mean we should stop fighting terrorism. What we can do something about is people getting recruited into terrorism, and that'll be the long-term solution.

Ideally, we'd stabilize the unstable regions, but I don't think anyone's going to commit to that. It's probably ridiculously expensive, not that helpful aside from easening the terrorism situation, and could require painful compromises/decisions (e.g. supporting al-Assad to stabilize Syria). I don't think the ones pulling the strings see terrorism as enough of a threat to really make those compromises and really, terrorism isn't a huge problem. It's really visible, it's bad, it's wrong, but it's also much, much less lethal than a lot of other things (e.g. traffic). Obviously we should try to act against terrorism, but considering its relatively limited effects, there's only so much we can afford to do about it.