If you'd like to see a society destabilized by drug abuse, visit some of the... Less well-off reservations. Or these days, anywhere in Appalachia.
Oh? Drugs are not the source of their problems? Well, neither is terrorism. It doesn't happen in a vaccum. The kind of terrorism that destabilizes societies takes place in the middle of civil wars. If you are in the middle of a civil war, terrorism is not your problem.
You are more likely to be struck by lightning, then killed by a terrorist. That doesn't mean that we should spend billions of dollars on outfitting every man, woman, and child, with a Faraday cage.
If you do insist on spending billions of dollars to deal with terrorism, though, perhaps you could look at dealing with the root causes that breed dejected, anti-social, and radicalized young men (Who tend to either join terror cells, or an army.) As a bonus, you'll also probably save quite a lot of people from opiates.
First thing is, people worried about terrorism aren't really worried about terrorism as it is now. They're really worried about what terrorism and ethnic conflict will be like in a few decades when, for example, Muslims are majority in some European countries. Muslim majorities are predicted in several major European countries, using basic conservative demographic projections, this century. How will that be to live in? For a prototype of that, you can look to Lebanon, or how Christians have been faring in Egypt in recent decades.
Here you have to make the distinction between the steady problem and the unlimited-growth problem.
The steady problem is "homegrown" terrorism. While there is always some level of terrorism coming from all groups, that should be addressed with the usual deradicalization and politics programs. Those approaches solved the issue with, for example, IRA terrorism. Which is a good thing, because we have to live with our own people.
The real issue is the one that will grow without limit due to ongoing demographic replacement in the West by Muslims. That's what people are worried about, because people understand that unlike homegrown terrorism, the Islamic terrorism problem can become infinitely bad, and you can end up like the Christians in Egypt. No magical historical force prevents French or Germans or British from ending up living under such deadly tyranny. Sadly, the only real way to stop this is to cease Muslim immigration until some of these data [1] start looking a lot more promising (which will take a century at least). There's certainly no shortage of people wanting to move West from places like India and China, so I see no problem with choosing immigrants who will create better outcomes (and we do that anyway).
If we're willing to discriminate on age and education, we can discriminate on religion - especially when a religion's core beliefs, as interpreted in all its mainstream schools of thought, explicitly opposes the basic egalatarian democratic values of our society.
What does a Muslim majority population have to do with terrorism? I've lived in many Muslim majority neighbourhoods and the closest I've gotten to terrorism is watching it on the news. In fact there was far more terrorism (daily almost) on the news as i was growing up in Ireland. 'Christians' blowing the shit out of each other.
Practically all of the recent Muslim immigrants in Europe are running away from terrorists not becoming them. Fear of a Muslim majority is completely irrational.
It's not. Muslim majority countries worldwide have an appalling human rights record.
Many (most?) have criminal punishment for blasphemy, apostasy and homosexuality. Capital punishment for any of the above is common, and legal in many majority-Muslim states.
There are clear examples of social regression to point to as well. Both Iran and Turkey used to be far more secular and liberal.
True, it's not terrorism. The oppression is usually legal, and at the behest of the majority of the population. But it's reasonable to fear it, especially if you happen to be kuffar, female, or gay.
Europe is not going to introduce Sharia law or anything remotely similar. Pretty sure the gay Muslims I met in Berlin moved there to escape persecution, not mete it out.
Do you know many muslims? I happen to live in a muslim majority area of a major European city. No problems. They're people just like me and you and like most religious people they keep their views to themselves and get on with their lives.
Oh and the area I live in has a muslim politician in charge (and their closest competitor is a Imam) - both have very liberal policies.
Your reasoning seems to be: muslim majority == now they have the power to implement strict religious laws via the democratic process. Well that's absolute nonsense when it's only a tiny minority of them that have these extremist views. I could very easily look at some fundamentalist Christian groups and come to the same conclusions you have but I know that not all Christians believe the crazy crap that some fundamentalists do.
I'm actually terrified reading your comment because you've taken the uneducated bullshit arguments given by people and political parties on the verge of racism/sectarianism and polished it to look like it's intellectual and backed by evidence when that's clearly not the case.
I live in a European city/country with a lot of muslims and they are nothing but a problem - generally speaking (this one cool muslim guy you know is not a rebuttal), they refuse to assimilate, are an enormous burden on the welfare state and are overrepresented in crime. Demanding similar anecdotes from the OP however is an appeal to authority.
You only have to take off your rose tinted blinders and look at the state of affairs in muslim majority countries to see what happens when they are significant in numbers. Even in a "moderate" muslim country like Indonesia gays get arrested. Do you think these societies are a result of their geographic location or the culture/religion? What do you think happens if you only change the location of the people and they keep their culture/religion?
It's far from a "tiny minority" that holds extremist views - there are plenty of polls (check out those from Pew Research Center) that attest to that. You are gravely mistaken if you believe all religions are the same and equally compatible with western ideals.
I do generally agree that terrorism isn't a threat worth changing our lifestyles over.
However, I wonder if it's a little unfair to average out the probabilities and compare to something closer to an actual random event, like falling vending machines; surely, a terrorist attack is significantly more likely to occur in a place like New York than Middle America, no?
I'd really like to see something like what's the probability of being killed by a "falling vending machine" IN NEW YORK vs a terrorist attack IN NEW YORK, than something country wide.
FYI, getting killed by falling vending machines isn't a random event. It happens because people are rocking vending machines back and forth, either to knock loose a stuck purchased product or just to try to steal from them. If you get killed by a falling vending machine it's because you were doing something stupid.
So long as you never rock vending machines, and you shouldn't!!, you are way more likely to be killed by a terrorist, even though the odds of that are incredibly low (one in many, many millions).
Are you talking about successful destabilization efforts by terrorists, or societies destabilizing themselves as a reaction to threats of terrorism? Maybe they're the same?
I'm no expert but isn't China known for having suffered from opium for a long time? If so it's quite relevant here since we're precisely talking about opioids.
You're not entirely wrong. Opium reversed the flows of silver specie that was the lifeblood of the China Trade. Before opium, most of the European trade was Mexican or Peruvian silver for tea, or china, or what have you. After opium, it was those Chinese products, or silver, for opium.
Opium addiction ravaged China (although by the point it really became a public health problem, domestic opium production had exploded). But the wild swings in the price of silver fucked the Qing economy, that had a bimetallic currency between silver taels and copper cash.
The point was reaching destabilization through drug use, which seems to have happened in China, despite the reason. i.e. Chinese are not more susceptible to being drug addicts than any other grouping, so it's noteworthy that policies resulted in such widespread addiction. Therefore, the policies are worth studying as they serve as a red flag for all future generations.
There are pretty ample examples of societies destabilized by drug abuse. See eg. the Opium Wars in China or the usage of methamphetamines in Nazi Germany.
But what destabilizes it, if it remains a statistical anomaly, is irrational, disproportionate terror. Putting other threats in perspective helps prevent that.
