[harrylove]

> Your airports have security because your leaders learned the same things on 9/11 that the US did.

I have to imagine that politics and power plays also contributed to these changes, as they did with the creation of Homeland Security, the apparent changes in surveillance, the uptick in militarization of police forces, the apparent changes in our attitudes toward incarceration, interrogation, and torture of suspected terrorists, and so on.

When irrationality takes over, people want to feel safe more than they care about being safe. So, as a politician, if I want to achieve and maintain a high approval rating, I must attend to people's beliefs more than I must attend to their needs.

Thus, if other world leaders enact hardline policies and I am a leader in a country where my constituents are innumerate, illiterate, ignorant, or civically uninvolved, then following the lead of a strongman country is a shortcut to achieving my political ends. And in these cases, if other world leaders make these changes and I choose to do nothing, even if doing nothing is the right course of action, I should probably expect my approval rating to drop.

[ethanbond]

> Thus, if other world leaders enact hardline policies and I am a leader in a country where my constituents are innumerate, illiterate, ignorant, or civically uninvolved,

And I suppose this is meant to describe pretty much every European and Asian country?