Watch this little sketch first, and think about it.

I am relieved to say that skulls are not an official motif in US military uniforms, although some units do use them. However, we instead have Nazi-like minds at work in our military. Here’s an excerpt from a presentation at the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College, composed by Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley as a proposed model for how to deal with Islam.

It’s a little worse than decorative skulls.

When I hear the phrase “politically correct”, I’m afraid my knee tends to jerk, usually in the direction of some jerk’s groin. It is the tired excuse of the fanatic trying to rationalize the unforgivable. “Oh, excuse me, I’m going to talk about incinerating civilians in a nuclear holocaust, take your ‘politically correct’ objections out of the room.”

And that’s exactly what he’s discussing. Let’s forget civilized accords limiting the conduct of war, and frankly discuss nuking Mecca and Medina. It’s OK, we’re going to remove protections for those caught fighting out of uniform, and pretend that every inhabitant of those two cities is a spy, a terrorist, or a criminal.

You can download the whole presentation; it’s an awful mess of jargon and pointlessly busy military diagrams that say pretty much nothing at all, and it’s main point is to redefine every Muslim in the world as a military combatant who deserves everything we do to them.

It closes with this message:

It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated, Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction. Let it be known that the United States remains, and will forever be, a beacon of freedom, self-determination, hope, and representative democracy. The American people will not be converted. We will not submit. We will not be intimidated, and we will not be driven from this earth.”

That is remarkably tin-eared and hypocritical. It accuses the other side of being a barbaric ideology while planning to nuke the civilian population centers of the Muslim world…oh, wait, “facilitating their self-destruction.” So we’re going to drop a bomb on them and then innocently declare that it was their own fault?

It rather deflates the grand ideals of “freedom, self-determination, hope, and representative democracy” when you use them as buzzwords to justify the murder of millions.

But perhaps that scale of terror is too immense for your brain to absorb. How about this little morsel, instead?

The American military claimed responsibility and expressed regret for an airstrike that mistakenly killed six members of a family in southwestern Afghanistan, Afghan and American military officials confirmed Monday.

…

The victims were the family’s mother and five of her children, three girls and two boys, according to Afghan officials.

This family was just quietly living in this house in Afghanistan, when the full weight of American freedom, self-determination, hope, and representative democracy dropped into their living room in the form of a military airstrike.

I think we’re the baddies.

But at least we apologized nicely. I’m sure that made it all better.

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)

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?

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”?