Logic and Political Science and Terrorism
Leftist rhetoric about "underlying causes" has always been an annoying pebble in the shoe for the Bird Dog. Always has seemed like an excuse for not acting with confidence and force in the face of ugly stuff. Makes it sound as if life were nothing but one big psychotherapy session.
Therefore the discussions on the causes of terrorism are wearying to the Bird Dog. They are based on the assumption that terrorism is like a disease, and the assumption that political behavior can be explained, in a cause and effect manner, as if Political Science and Sociology were hard sciences. Furthermore, since few in those fields ever took hard sciences in college, they may have an illusion that Science has certainty and rock-solid truths. Even in medicine, simple "causes" are rarely found, and predictive powers are poor when it comes to an individual case.
War, terrorism, crime, the Jim Jones mass suicide - other sorts of society-disrupting behaviors are really just as difficult to predict or to explain as is their absence. These things are rooted in individual psychology and group psychology as much as they are rooted in history and social conditions. Destructive people tend to do destructive things, and even a small number of power-seeking people without inner restraints can do a heck of a lot of damage. That's why even the civilized US needs laws and cops and morals and values. Civilization always hangs on a slender thread
And this is why, for example, Bin Ladin does not need understanding or psychotherapy, but needs to be killed. The causes of cancer are literally academic - but the solution is often the knife.
