is it the government's role to keep people safe? this is so hobbesian. it's not the function i want to assign to government, and i want to avoid this whole debate over whether the israeli government failed in some foundational purpose on oct 7th. if you want to think like that, you should at least be thinking like an actuary and recognize the idea of an act of god, poor language in context notwithstanding.
i just want to suggest that the reason the israeli secret service didn't see this coming is that it was in truth so idiotically stupid, as the response so clearly demonstrates.
this is an issue that came up in the cold war in a different manner. it didn't take long for the russians and americans to get themselves into a stalemate by playing game theory by the book. as scary as the consequences might have been, there was no real threat of actual nuclear war, except if somebody made a literal mistake, and pushed the wrong button, or got fucked up and drunk and just did something dumb. the reason is that everything was so predictable and in truth so incredibly boring. drills were run. exercises were carried out. everybody knew what everybody was doing, everything was predictable and everything was calculated and safe.
what happened to break this routine in the 80s was that the americans elected this cowboy named ronald reagan that shot military spending through the roof and began acting in ways that the russians couldn't predict. in the language of game theory, reagan was irrational; the russians could not make sense of this, and became absolutely mortified of the fact that they couldn't predict his behaviour. this was irresponsible; it was insane.
it worked.
the russians stood down. the cold war ended.
what else could they do? reagan was irrational. there was no other rational choice when faced with irrationality. they try to tell you that reagan won the cold war, but when you look into it, this is what it actually means, that he broke russian game theory strategy by refusing to behave rationally and they got so scared that they just gave up.
the reality is that the smartest minds you can assemble will never be able to combat the dumbest people you can find because the great weakness of intellect is that it cannot defeat the abjectly idiotic.
i will reiterate that i don't want to engage in this hobbesian discourse. this is not my vision of the purpose of the state. but there is no defense against such stupidity; there was no way to predict it, and no way to mobilize against it and no way to react to it but to punish it.