Decius wrote:
Thats not what is going here. To quote Noteworthy, they are still calling these 'hoax devices,' as if they still don't understand what happened. They are charging these people with the same crime they'd be charged with had they purposefully operated a bomb hoax. Putting a bunch of signs up that someone confuses for a bomb is not the same thing as putting a bunch devices up that are designed purposefully to be confused with a bomb.

[ This was the point i made (in a different thread... i didn't know this one existed). Using the term 'hoax' is wrong and deliberately misleading because it implies that these were intended to be mistaken as bombs, which they clearly were not.

Charge the guy with low grade vandalism and move on. I really can't see how anyone in their right mind thought this was some kind of giant Al Quaeda plot to blow up bridges.

A bit stupid? Yes. Criminal? Hardly.

I agree with Flynn32 and I've said it before : all it takes for the terrorists to win is for citizens to live with a constant sense of fear. That is the point. Not an ancillary point, not an added 'benefit', but the point of terrorism. It's to make us so afraid to live our lives as free people that we stop doing so.

It's working.

To analogize to the kind of war everyone seems to think we're still fighting, every time someone says 'Well, that's just the world we live in,' we give a little ground. Every time a politician argues for 'security' over any kind of freedom, a breach is opened in our defences. Everytime a law is passed that infringes civil liberties, our infrastructure suffers a massive blow.

This mentality of fear will destroy our society every bit as thouroughly as a global thermonuclear war, just more slowly. And in many ways, it'll be all the more painful, because we'll get to watch ourselves die. We'll get to see the cancer wreak it's havoc until the body collapses.

Fear is a cancer of the mind.

RE: cbs4boston.com - Hoax Devices Creating Gridlock In Boston