this article gets it exactly right: unless the us overcomes its safety fetish, the decline will be terminal. people are confused about risk and falsely believe 0 risk is either desirable or achievable. the result is a nation of terrified babies who can’t get anything done.

Welcome to the generation of what I have come to call “securitarians.” No more calculation of risk, they. Risk itself is conclusive. They are the products of a post-9/11 mentality in which the practice of prudential judgment did not merely atrophy. It collapsed. A new rhetorical form emerged, a sort of reductio ad absurdum in reverse—a reductio ad extremis—epitomized by the warning that deliberation over the war in Iraq was risky since the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud. In this era, risk has been escalated in such a way as not merely to reconfigure but to obliterate judgment.

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