I am not at all surprised to learn what Mitt Romney was like as a kid: the pampered, cheerful bully.
It does suggest he’s well-qualified to represent America.
(via Camels With Hammers)
Jebus Teetotalin’ Christ. That’s the best we’ve got from Obama? Seriously? It’s taken him this long to “evolve” to the point where he can take a personal (not even a political) stand on civil rights?
I am not impressed.
Those few words were the bare minimum I’d have expected from a Democratic candidate running for office last century — they are so self-evident, so clear and obvious to any decent human being that I’m appalled that anyone thinks this is a remarkable achievement. Our standards are apparently so low for our politicians that we clap and applaud when they make even a token declaration against bigotry.
Hey, maybe if he’d taken a stand a few years ago, we wouldn’t have had debacles like the recent anti-gay ballot in North Carolina.
He might as well have. In response to that tepid and qualified and ineffectual statement, American hate groups like the American Patriarchy Association, the Patriarchy Research Council, and the Catholic League are already denouncing him furiously. In for a penny, in for a pound, I say — I dare Obama to now stand up and fight for this right. None of this pussy-footing around — he’s going to get screwed by the haters already — so he might as well take a strong stand and earn the goddamned liberal/progressive vote.
He might earn a little respect, too.
I have to commend Sam Harris for featuring a guest post by security expert Bruce Schneier on profiling, especially since he backs up everything I’ve said so far. 1) Profiling people who “look Muslim” will have a high false positive rate, 2) “looking Muslim” is a hopelessly indefinable criterion, 3) terrorists will use profiling to avoid detection, and 4) it’s a strategy to alienate those who could be on our side.
I do recommend his blog, Schneier on Security, for your regular reading (also because he has Friday Squid Blogging — he’s a man of excellent taste).
I’m also going to recommend this paper that Brownian mentioned in the comments here: Strong profiling is not mathematically optimal for discovering rare malfeasors. Profiling doesn’t add up; the numbers don’t work.
Are we done now?
Kentucky just launched a tourism campaign to tout the wonderful landmarks in their state — and Governor Beshear includes Ken Ham’s creationist “museum” as one of them. He has just slapped the whole state with a gross insult.
Really, Governor Beshear? You’re so desperate for tourist attractions that you pad your list with a shameful institution dedicated to lies and miseducation? They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel; next on the list is a garbage dump, or a sewage treatment plant, or a polluted lake.
Of course Ken Ham is laughing happily. Not only did he get the state seal of approval on his madhouse, but the state has committed $2 million to road work to improve access, with $9 million more on the way.
Man, the University of Kentucky must be rolling in cash if the state has so much to spare that they can waste it on roadbuilding to an attraction that doesn’t exist.
There is a trial going on right now of 5 men who plotted the 9/11 attacks (now? What happened to the idea of a speedy trial?) The lawyer for Walid bin Attash has done something I have mixed feelings about. She’s wearing a hijab.
Attorney Cheryl Bormann, 52, who is from Chicago and is not Muslim, said she wore the modest garment that revealed only her face to show respect for the religious sensitivities of her client, Yemeni terror suspect Walid bin Attash.
These men must get fair representation in the court, and she’s going beyond the call of duty to work with her client…although letting them dictate how the lawyer dresses goes too far. If she were defending a sexist asshole like Tucker Max, would she let him make her do her appearances in a bikini? She’s there as a professional, not as a slave to the suspects.
But alright, let that one slide…let’s assume she’s doing what needs to be done to represent a slimebag. This, though, is not forgivable.
Bormann asked the court to order the other women present at the hearing to dress more modestly so as not to distract the defendants, who would be "committing a sin under their faith" by looking at them.
What an astonishing demand. According to the article, the chief prosecutor “deemed the request not worthy of a response.” Seems about right.
But now I’m wondering…Bormann has to know that this kind of behavior and request in the environment of that courtroom has to be highly prejudicial. Is she trying to subtly sabotage Walid bin Attash’s case? Because I don’t know much about him, and I’ve already decided that he’s an arrogant, contemptible jerk.
The argument goes on. Sam Harris has reacted to my post on profiling.
One line in my article raised a tsunami of contempt for me in liberal and secular circles:
We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.
Once again, I included myself in this profile—but that did almost nothing to stem the accusations of racism.
He keeps saying that. I don’t know why. The objection isn’t that Sam Harris wants to discriminate against people who don’t look like him, it’s that Sam Harris wants to discriminate against people on the basis of their appearance. The fact that his search criteria are so broad that they include him isn’t a point in his favor, either — it means he favors criteria that produce many false positives.
I really don’t understand why he’s finding that so hard to grasp.
Then he offers an example of how his version of profiling would work. I’ve highlighted a few words that I think are important.
Imagine that you work for the TSA and are executing a hand search of a traveler’s bag. He is a young man in his twenties and seems nervous. You notice that he is carrying a hardcover copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You pick up the book and ask him if he likes it. He now appears even more nervous than before. You notice something odd about the book—the dust jacket doesn’t seem to fit. Your remove it and find a different book underneath. How do you feel about this traveler’s demeanor, and the likelihood of his being a terrorist, if the book is:
A. The Qur’an (in Arabic)
B. The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide
C. Overcoming Impotence: A Leading Urologist Tells You Everything You Need to Know
D. Dianetics
If you care more about A than B, C, or D, as I think you should, you are guilty of religious profiling (and calling it “behavioral profiling” doesn’t change this fact).
I have no problem at all with that kind of profiling. The matter that raises concerns isn’t that the young man looks Muslim: it’s that he looks nervous, and that he’s hiding something. TSA, please do notice when people’s behavior is peculiar!
But now I’m curious. Change the story a bit. What if the young man were confidently and openly carrying his Qur’an? Should we stop and search everyone with a Muslim holy book?
What if he were nervous, and it was a Christian bible hidden away? Should we then ignore his odd behavior and wave him on to the plane?
What if he were openly carrying that bible? Does proudly carrying a Bible give you a free pass through the screening? He could wear a cross and a flag pin on his lapel, and no longer Look Muslim, I guess.
Harris doesn’t seem to understand that his critics are not saying TSA should be blind and deaf to the people passing through security checkpoints…but that there should be some intelligence behind it, and that the criterion of “looking Muslim” is stupid and useless.
Then he raises a series of strawmen — that we think there is no link between Islam and suicidal terrorism, that we have some pious fantasy of Israeli egalitarianism in their security procedures, and implies that we have no problem with TSA searching toddlers. I said precisely the opposite about Islamic terror tactics; I have no sympathy for Israel’s convergence on fascism; I think most of what TSA does in those security lines is a waste of time and bad security policy.
My fundamental issue with his whole proposal is the shocking innumeracy of it all. Here’s the perfect example: he asks, what percentage of the people who would murder the children boarding a plane, and all who accompany them, are Muslim? And here’s his strange answer.
Some readers might think that this question would be difficult or impossible to answer. Let’s try another, then: What percentage of porn stars are also theoretical physicists? Is this a hard question for which to give a ballpark answer? No. In fact, I would be willing to bet my life that I could get within 10 percentage points of the exact figure without doing any research—and the same holds for the question about using children as bombs on airplanes in the year 2012.
Wow. He gives himself a very broad 10% window for his answer.
So the percentage of porn stars who are also theoretical physicists? I guess 0%. I’m sure I’m within 10% of the correct answer. I won’t go searching porn studios for answers to cosmology questions.
The likelihood of a toddler being used to smuggle a terrorist bomb on board a plane? 0%, again. I’m confident — we aren’t seeing 1 in 5 kids being plucked out of line so the dynamite in their diapers can be thrown away.
But then his peculiar question — what percentage of suicidal terrorists boarding a plane are Muslim — I’d answer with 100% (OK, 90%, so my guess covers a broader range), and I suspect he would, too. But it’s the wrong question. It’s a completely bizarre twisting of what the appropriate question should be. We aren’t screening the guys who look like terrorists at the airport to find out which are Muslim; he wants us to screen the people at the airport who look like Muslims to find the terrorists.
The right question is what percentage of the people who “look Muslim” (whatever that means; Harris hasn’t yet defined it), his screening criterion, are terrorists? And again, the answer is 0%±10%, the same as the percentage of physicist porn stars, or bomb lobbing toddlers. I would agree that just screening Muslims would increase the likelihood of finding a terrorist by some small amount, but it has the problem that I still don’t know what a Muslim looks like, so that pre-selection is going to be awfully leaky, and you’re going to generate such a huge number of false positives that your more rigorous secondary screening is going to get swamped, and you’re going to open the door to even more false negatives as your real terrorists avoid “looking Muslim” in line.
So once again, we sacrifice civil liberties and real effective security for TSA showmanship, as people who “look Muslim” to uniformed low-wage security guards with a GED get thoroughly frisked. I don’t get it. Sam Harris is a scientist; how can he so blithely overlook type I and II errors in a statistical sampling protocol? How can he ignore the ambiguity of his sloppy definition of his primary measure, “looking Muslim”?
You fill in the blank. Greta Christina interviews Edwina Rogers.
Did you know 70% of Republicans are pro-choice? And that there is no Republican party position on abortion? It’s only a few elected officials who are anti-gay, not the majority. You shouldn’t stereotype Republicans! Republicans believe in the separation of church and state, too. But not a majority now (she’s backed down on this one). Republicans at the federal level have not been promoting creationism and intelligent design. It was OK that she donated money to Rick Perry because a) he used to be a Democrat, b) he was head of the Republican Governor’s Association, and c) she was interested in promoting health care. And we all know what a friend to health care Rick Perry has been. She joined the Republican party along with everyone else in the South because she like Ronald Reagan’s message, which was about working hard.
I learned many Surprising Facts™ about America in this interview. I haven’t been thrilled with the Democrats for some time, but apparently the Republicans have an agenda more in tune with my views (!), and I ought to have been voting for them.
Just so I could keep Republicans in it!
This is a new argument to me. Representative Emanuel Cleaver (Democrat, Missouri) was discussing the possibility of atheists getting elected to office, and while saying he thinks we’d have a difficult time, he also says we don’t exist.
Actually, I don’t believe that there is such thing as an atheist because no respectable atheist would walk around with something in his pocket that said ‘In God We Trust.’
Oooh, ooh, I can do that, too!
I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a Christian, because no respectable follower of Jesus would have any money at all — he or she would have handed it all over to the poor.
Man, it’s going to be really hard to run for office in this country when we’re not allowed to have any money without being accused of hypocrisy. And couldn’t Rep. Cleaver’s argument be turned around to show that the inclusion of the religious motto is a clear violation of the separation of church and state? I presume he’s behind the campaign to have god references removed from our currency, then.
I have to return to Same Harris’ defense of profiling, because he’s added an addendum, and although it tells us more about why Harris is focused on this issue, it doesn’t actually address my objections, and thinking about it, it does expose some deep differences between me and Harris.
The problem is this assertion:
We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.
Let me change that around a bit, not just to make a point for me, but also to try and move the debate away from race.
We should profile Republicans, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Republican, and we should be honest about it.
If you step back and look at the world today, the major source of death and strife and terrorism isn’t Islam, it’s America — the country with hands down the largest arsenal and the will to use it. A few cunning Islamic terrorists did manage to murder several thousand Americans in a stunning attack, it is true; but in retaliation, we killed a hundred thousand or more Iraqis (a nation not involved in that attack!) and have wrecked two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and threaten to wreak similar havoc on a third, Iran. We have drones flying over Afghanistan right now, ready to blow up any small group of people seen gathering in public. You cannot call those drones anything but state-sponsored terrorism.
Of all the people lined up behind the security barrier at the airport, it’s those American voters who are currently the most dangerous. The only reasonable objection to my claim that we should profile Republicans is that everyone who voted for the Democrat Obama is also culpable.
I will agree with Harris, though, that frisking little old Republican ladies at the checkpoint is ridiculous, because suicidal terrorism isn’t their game — that’s the desperate tactic of the otherwise powerless, and as he points out, it’s almost entirely perpetrated by Muslims.
Many readers found this blog post stunning for its lack of sensitivity. The article has been called “racist,” “dreadful,” “sickening,” “appalling,” “frighteningly ignorant,” etc. by (former) fans who profess to have loved everything I’ve written until this moment. I find this reaction difficult to understand. Of course, anyone who imagines that there is no link between Islam and suicidal terrorism might object to what I’ve written here, but I say far more offensive things about Islam in The End of Faith and in many of my essays and lectures.
In any case, it is simply a fact that, in the year 2012, suicidal terrorism is overwhelmingly a Muslim phenomenon. If you grant this, it follows that applying equal scrutiny to Mennonites would be a dangerous waste of time.
This is true. Republicans would never make the self-sacrifice of smuggling explosives on a plane to kill themselves and the other passengers — it’s not their thing. So if we’re focused on just stopping this one strategy of disrupting our economy and politics, I agree that after the fact we’re likely to discover that the perpetrator was a Muslim. It’s also true that some vocal Muslims are likely to express credible death threats against individuals — like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Salman Rushdie — using Islam as a justification, and those people certainly have good cause to fear Islam.
But that does not make “Muslim” a useful criterion for preventing terror attacks. The majority of Muslims are just as harmless as the elderly woman featured in Harris’ article (probably more harmless: they aren’t voting Republican). When you single out the 30 year old traveling Pakistani engineer with a family and a career for specially invasive inspection, you are committing just as much of an outrage as when you pull out the 70 year old white grandma.
When I speak of profiling “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim,” I am not narrowly focused on people with dark skin. In fact, I included myself in the description of the type of person I think should be profiled (twice). To say that ethnicity, gender, age, nationality, dress, traveling companions, behavior in the terminal, and other outward appearances offer no indication of a person’s beliefs or terrorist potential is either quite crazy or totally dishonest. It is the charm of political correctness that it blends these sins against reasonableness so seamlessly. We are paying a very high price for this obscurantism—and the price could grow much higher in an instant. We have limited resources, and every moment spent searching a woman like the one pictured above, or the children seen in the linked videos, is a moment in which someone or something else goes unobserved.
This logic simply doesn’t work. It’s not political correctness: it’s basic numeracy. Since terrorists are extremely rare in airports, you could also argue that the whole strategy of randomly frisking individuals is a waste of limited resources: since the probability of any of those people, either Muslim or non-Muslim, being a terrorist is so ridiculously low, each search is a waste of time that could allow the real problem people to go unobserved. The numbers just don’t work. I agree with Harris that special screening for white-haired old ladies is absurd, but it’s also absurd for brown-skinned young men with an accent.
Another reason it’s ridiculous: we keep fighting the last terrorist. They aren’t going to keep doing the same thing, over and over; 9/11 was a one-shot event, airlines have made other changes in their protocols that will prevent that. Yet TSA keeps following one step behind. Some guy smuggles explosives aboard in the soles of his shoes, so now we have to take off our shoes for inspection before boarding; it doesn’t matter that the shoe bomb didn’t work. I thoroughly sympathize with frustration at the mindless, pointless security theater we go through all the time. I don’t think it helps us at all, though, to turn it into an opportunity to selectively punish people who “look Muslim”. That’s theater that adds a fresh new layer of pointless othering and tribalism to the pointless pretense of security.
“Political correctness” is a phrase too often used to justify racism and oppression; you can’t just defuse criticisms of poor policies of discrimination by claiming political correctness. It’s really about recognizing the fact that religious affiliation is not a good indicator of a propensity for violence.
Step into any mosque, church, or synagogue, and what you’ll find is a congregation of people who are typically more concerned with getting along with their neighbors than in blowing stuff up. Sure, you’ll find a scattering of people who want do destroy Great Satan America, or shoot abortion doctors, or overthrow ZOG, but they’re a minority, and they also tend to segregate themselves off to more reactionary cells in more radical religious groups. I think it’s a huge mistake for atheists to repeat this claim that religion makes you fly planes into buildings; it’s simply not true, and the overwhelming majority of religious people who gather on holy days to pray are looking at us like we’re insane and deluded for suggesting it. That isn’t “political correctness”, that’s truth, and that’s what the people of reason should be focused on. Not damning the whole for the crimes of a few. Not equating Muslim with terrorist.
I really think the atheist movement ought to be focusing instead on one general truth: almost all of the people in that mosque, church, or synagogue believe in stupid ideas. They aren’t evil, they’re wrong, and their credulous beliefs make them more gullible and susceptible to exploitation. I’m not in the least bit interested in punishing the religious for their beliefs in any way; they’re victims of bad tradition and poor education, and if you want to end religious terrorism the best strategy isn’t to make bodies bounce in the rubble or isolate and suppress, but to educate, educate, educate. Open up economic opportunities, increase the security of people’s lives (not just privileged wealthy white people’s lives, but everyone’s), and teach people how to think and learn.
At the end of his addendum, Harris offers to open up his blog to an expert on airline security to discuss the topic. The good news is that he’s willing to learn: he’s now promising to publish something from Bruce Schneier, which I find very encouraging.
