EW! grossgrossgrossgrossgrosss… My version of musclemen is more along the lines of <thinks hard and comes up blank> William Hurt! Rob Petrie! Thierry Lhermitte!*
I was ONLY JOKING! Please make the image go away. Please. <whimpers> Those men need burkas, damn!
*Don Knotts types need not apply. A girl has some standards.
No problem, Rev. I’ll just reiterate that I was referring to no cursory, or initial, method as being foolproof. And as always, thanks for both demonstrating good sense and being being so sensible. It would do others—all of us—well to look to your example.
Of the top of my head I can only think of those groups that I easily associate with violence, like gangs. I can’t think of anyone else. I guess if there were another group associated with violence, I’d be aware of it. But maybe I’m overlooking something.
Well, I’ve only been talking about the U.S., in which I think we have about 2.5 million. Obviously, if this was a majority Muslim country (like it is Christian) looking to “Muslimness” would not be very helpful. Being wary of Muslims in Saudi Arabia would be as helpful there as being wary of whites in the U.S… I do not know where to draw a line numbers-wise. But I think one has to also take into account what is at stake. If we’re looking at a group that has some correlation with speeding say, that’s one thing. Correlating with the types of attacks radical Muslims have visited and attempt to visit upon the U.S. is quite another. Again, I consider the possibility of 9/11 killing the 30,000 it easily could have. Or ore to the point, the next attack, and the possibility of it being a WMD, nuclear or dirty. Not sure if that gets to what you were asking. Let me know if it doesn’t.
I think this might be answered by your next point, but would you say that your wariness is affected more by proportion of seemingly known bad people amongst an overall population, than of actual likelihood amongst that group to cause harm?
If we’re talking about Muslims in the U.S., though, surely however your suspicion should already be lower too? I mean, to go with one example, it wasn’t American Muslims behind 9/11. It’s true to say that there are less Muslims overall in the US than in the world at large, but it’s also true that there have been less actual attacks or otherwise by American Muslims - both populations are smaller.
As to what is at stake; there are thousands of people actually at stake. Does it make a difference if there are acts committed by many people working seperately to kill thousands rather than a few working together to kill thousands? I mean, if anything, I would argue it has the opposite effect; yes, there is a great threat, but if it only comes from a few then it is less reasonable to be wary of a population in general. 3000 murders by a group seems like a less representative action than 3000 murders by unaffiliated individuals.
Out of interest, however, i’m not entirely sure what you mean by referring to wariness of whites (or Muslims in Saudia Arabia) as being less helpful. In what sense is it less helpful? Surely it is very helpful to know which groups pose you the most risk?
It’d be even funnier if you said Pearl Harbor was when America was attacked by Shintoism. Go on, give it a try and see how far you can get with it.
And he has conveniently overlooked what the USA did to Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor (and oddly we didn’t do that German-Americans…). At least we seem to have grown a bit since that time (well, some of us have).
Shall we check off one more instance of ignorance fought? Or were you alluding to something else we did to Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor that we didn’t do to German-Americans. Leaving aside, for now, the little fact that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the Germans didn’t.
Of course, there’s the conveniently elided over part from that Wikipedia article:
“The population of alien Germans in the United States – not to mention American citizens of German birth – was far too large for a general policy of internment comparable to that used in the case of the Japanese in America.[8] Instead, Germans and German Americans in the U.S. were detained and evicted from coastal areas on an individual basis.”
(Although the policy does seem to follow magellan’s m.o. towards Muslims of “If they’re a small enough minority, let’s treat every single one of them as a target of suspicion.”)
To a degree, yes. I see no reason to discard information that might make me safer from a smaller number if it is easily served up. Even if I wish I could find similar patterns for larger threats.
True. But that number used to be zero. Post 9/11 it is not zero. So we have a pattern developing of Muslim Americans wanting to kill Americans, as cited previously. And they both point to the same religion and use the same rationale for doing so. We’d be fools to not look at the similarities.
If it were just the one event, 9/11, I’d probably agree with you. But we had incidents pre 9/11 and incidents post 9/11. It seems foolish to treat 9/11 as if it happened in a vacuum, without the incidents both preceding and following it. It is not the case that it is just the handful who acted on 9/11 who want Americans dead. It is a group that adheres to a form of radical Islam. I must admit being rather astonished that you seem unsurprised that 26% of young Muslims in the U.S. feel that killing innocent women and children in a suicide bomb attack is even rarely justified. And that you don’t seem to think that that fact is justification for concern, and consequently, wariness.
But one must be able to do something with the information. The vast, vast amount of murders in the U.S.—let’s say over 99.9%—are committed by people with ten fingers, or by non-albinos. Can you see any value in using that data point to make one safer?Even in a fantastical scenario?
The point stands, though, doesn’t it: German-Americans were, in fact, interned after WWII. Even if, due to the numbers involved, looking at the group of German-Americans proved to large a group to be useful (assuming, of course, that internment was a wise policy, as it was viewed to be at the time. Similarly, if we had been bombed by England or Ireland, I doubt they would have attempted to round up those ethnic groups, for the very same reason. Profiling is only helpful if one can hone in on a threat and act to minimize it.
So, interning the Japanese was Ok, because we interned some Germans, too. :rolleyes:
My purpose in this thread is to flirt with Gyrate. I’d rather not stick my hand in any further crazy from you, magellan. Such an ironic user name, given that you are so quick to castigate the rest of us for “ignorance” and given that you truly don’t see that one cannot identify a radical Muslim from a peace loving Muslim. Just like you can’t tell a serial killer from oh, your FIL. Enough.
But what happens when that smaller group, even if they have a higher proportional chance of causing you harm, is still relatively a small amount compared to other groups? I mean, if, say, blue eyed people have a 50% chance to cause me harm, but I only know 2 blue eyed people, then being wary of those two might help but not so much if I know 100 brown eyed people who are 10% likely to harm me in some way.
But what is the extent of that pattern? What are the numbers of those threatening American Muslims? As you say, we don’t know if there is a pattern without knowing the numbers - it may be that the pattern is such a drop in the overall bucket that that information isn’t, overall, particularly helpful. Certainly there are American Muslims that want to kill Americans; there are people with face tattoos that want to kill Americans. Are the proportions so high as to demand wariness of the whole group?
My unsurprise comes from two things; firstly that, as I say, I would agree that such a thing could rarely be justified. And secondly that I think you could likely enough get any population to agree to such a thing. Perhaps not suicide bombing in particular, but the deliberate killing of civilians as justified, rarely? Sure, I reckon you’d get similar numbers for Americans as a whole. So my lack of belief in a need for wariness is just that i’d tend to say any group would likely come up with the same approval.
Yes, but I have a good imagination. But how do you know that “Muslim”, as a piece of information, falls across the line of being useful information? Do we count the number of attacks (or foiled attacks) by American Muslims?
In my example, the only defining characteristic was black, and riding a bicycle. I use that example, sans any additional information, for that very reason.
I have been careful to not get into the specifics because they will cloud the issue. The point I’ve been arguing is: based on the attempts, successful and unsuccessful, of Muslims to kill Americans in the U.S., and the attitude of young Muslims in the U.S. concerning the acceptability of suicide bombers, it makes sense for us to be wary of that group. We don not need to determine how to define wariness at this step in the process. Once we agree that it makes sense, then we look to specific ways in which we might apply extra scrutiny and weigh each of them on a cost/benefit analysis. I have no doubt that some will fail, and some will make sense. But I am not an expert in law enforcement or fighting terrorism. I’m arguing for adopting a default position that we seek to find things that would be effective and not impose undue burden or unfairness on people. But I will say that if you look like you might be of Middle Eastern extraction and you are pulled out of an airport line for extra scrutiny, suck it the fuck up. I’m of Italian descent, and can, I guess, pass for a lighter skinned Middle Easterner and have been singled out for closer inspection more than once. I don’t whine about it one iota. Why? Because I see that as a teensy cost to pay for us to be a little safer.
So, the specifics, at this point, will just get in the way of the larger issue I’ve been trying to make. If I, with limited to expertise try to argeu for Idea A, and Idea A proves to be a poor one, the jackals who haven’t passed a course in logic (which seems to be a majority around here will then say because Idea A is flawed, your larger notion of wariness being merited is similarly flawed. And I don’t have the desire to argue against such basic poor logic.
No, that’s not what I said. I pointed out you had your facts wrong. One’s attitude when this is pointed out should be, well, shall we just say, not the one you’ve expressed in this last post of yours. So, I see your :rolleyes: and raise you a :dubious:
Your intent aside, you propagated something that was 1) wrong and 2) led you to make a point that the facts do not support. I corrected you. Your welcome. some people have to spend money on books or college to avail themselves of such facts. I gifted you with them. Such is my great magnanimity.
As far as pointing out that one cannot at first blush identify a radical Muslim from a peace loving Muslim, It is my turn to thank you. That is the foundation of everything I’ve been saying. Because if we could discern between the two groups, I would not be of the mind that we should be wary of the whole lot. Thanks for reinforcing that point.
But you have to admit that the question asked in the poll is unspecific to say the least. ‘Rarely justified’ could have many interpretations, from ‘sometimes’ to 'I’m 99.999% sure it’s not a good idea but never say never". I don’t think you can use that single reponse as an indicator for the attitude of an entire heterogeneous population.
And you can’t use it to contrast to the attitudes of Americans when the poll does not appear to ask Americans the same question in return.
Americans have historically had a tolerance for civilian casualties. Bombing campaigns in Cambodia, Vietnam, Korea, Germany, Iraq, Afghanistan etc have all had ‘collateral damage’ - innocent women and children dying simply because of where they happen to be standing that day.
I think Americans have indicated they believe the killing of civillians can be ‘rarely justified’. They just don’t like it when it happens to them.
Yes. And I think most any poll question can be problematic. But’s let’s leave “Rarely” off. That leaves you with 26%. I find that reason for concern. As I mentioned there was a similar poll cited on these boards a few times (which I can’t seem to find) that looked at Muslims worldwide. So we’ve moved zero information to a poll, which, by definition, looks to beliefs over a broad group. You seem to want to ignore it. I must say that I give this poll a little extra weight because to wasn’t done by a group anyone could say is equated with anti-Muslim sentiments. If anything, MSNBC is quite liberal.
True. But I don’t think I’m wrong when I say that American non-Muslims would show MUCH less tolerance for suicide bombings. Do you really disagree with that?
Civilian casualties, through military action, does NOT equal suicide bombings. When a U.S. bomb is dropped or sent, there is a military advantage trying to be gained, and civilian casualties are attempted tom be minimized. It goes into the “do not bomb” side of the equation. When a bunch of barbaric animals drive a truckload of explosives into a grammar school, the killing of innocents IS THE GOAL. The two are not in the same universe as far as actions, even though innocents will lose their lives in both cases. One has to look at intent. If you are walking down the street and I steer my car into you and pin you against a building causing you to lose your legs, it’s one thing if I did that because I had a heart attack at the wheel, it’s quite another if I did it because you were flirting with my girlfriend.
Again, collateral damage does NOT equal suicide bombings by terrorists. The latter is designed to terrorize, by killing innocents.
If you do not agree that there is a HUGE moral difference between bombing an enemy position and that resulting in the death of innocents and someone driving a truckload of explosives into a schoolyard intentionally killing children, then there’s no point discussing this aspect any further.
Leaving aside, for now, the little fact that the Germans preferred to sink U.S. owned or chartered ships one at a time, killing at least 243 Merchant Marines before Pearl Harbor.
CMC fnord!
Well, a lot of factors go into this, e.g., the degree of threat, they type of threat, the severity of it, etc. But let’s say that the threat posed by the 2 blue-eyed people is rape. Then you might serve yourself very well by declining to go on a date with those two individuals. Or not allowing them to join the Campus Nightwatch at your local university. Conversely, maybe the threat from the 100 is purse snatching. So, severity of type off threat is one thing that goes into it. The point is that we can craft the hypotheticals to build the threats any which way we’d like, so I really don’t know how to best answer your question. I can pose scenarios where it makes sense to more closely scrutinize either group.
First, the fact that the incidents I mentioned all stem from the same ideology is important. They are not unrelated. They are frequent enough and deadly enough to suggest that we’d want to stop them from reoccurring, if not recurring. Take serial murders. They usually are thought to be a series of unrelated murders. when a pattern can be found, police see that the threat of X (number of murders) is not distributed over X murders, but that that 1 person is responsible for all. This indicates that there is a higher likelihood that he will kill again, so more resources are put into finding him. The better we can identify threats, the better. The more tightly we can define those responsible, the better. Given the pattern we have here in the U.S. with americans being killed by Muslims, it makes sense to identify Muslims as a threat as the first step, and then try to identify the group more narrowly.
Again, I do not come near equating suicide bombings designed to kill women and children and collateral damage from a military bombing. I don’t even think that you attempt to further equate the two through your invention of the phrase “deliberate killing of civilians” works. It merely attempts through semantics to imply an equivalence that is not there. Military bombing to not deliberately kill civilians. They may do so unintentionally, or even acceptably, but not deliberately, s]as that is not the intent of the bombing.
Because we have a number of incidents in which americans were intentionally killed, just for being Americans, and the people responsible for those deaths all are Muslim. And they’ve told us why they did it.
Thank you for making me thankful for my foresight to include “Leaving aside, for now…”
emphasis added
Kayla mentioned Pearl Harbor, specifically. And that was NOT the reason we interned German-Americans. (The sinking of U.S. ships in the Atlantic and the presence of German subs off the east coast was. )
That makes sense. So, it’s possible to go either way, depending on the severity of the threat, or the active potential for the threat to be carried out, among other things.
It doesn’t, necessarily. You’ve made the point that, in cases where a group is very large, using that single point of information isn’t helpful at all. The ten fingered person situation. Now, it seems reasonable to you (and to me, really) that the fact that most crimes are committed by ten fingered persons is not reason enough to suspect all ten fingered persons. After all, there’s so many of them that really it’s just not helpful enough. And somewhere down the line we could have a group small enough that information might well be extremely helpful. But you haven’t shown that Muslims don’t fall into the ten fingered person situation. Nor have you shown that other groups do fall into it (so that it makes sense not only to treat Muslims warily, but to treat them relatively more warily).
Too, I would very strongly say that there is an extremely significant difference between the actions of one person - who is, after all, 100% proportionally representative of themselves - and a subset of a group.
Here I think you’re assuming the worst of me. I’m comparing suicide bombings to the Shock and Awe campaign, and even then only obliquely by calling both terrorism. Military bombing, when it is carried out with only military casualties, is one thing. Military bombing with unfortunate civilian collateral damage is another thing - but still not terrorism. Military bombing and other attacks designed to overwhelm not just armed opponents but civilians and civilian structural support with, well, shock and awe, seems pretty much like terrorism to me.
And i’m not sure how, as an “invented phrase”, “deliberate killing of civilians” is vastly different morally from “kill women and children”. I do not include by that collateral damage, that being not deliberate but incidental.
[/QUOTE]
Luckily for me I didn’t claim that, then.
So? We have a number - a much more vast number - of incidents in which Americans were killed by ten fingered people. The number of Americans killed by Muslims is dwarfed hugely by that number. If that number is irrelevant - as I would agree - then your point here simply is not enough. You can’t just point to incidents, you have to show that they are both representative and helpful.
I expect they would, because they are aware that they have a strong military force that will do their fighting for them. Suicide bombings are used partly for their pyschological impact (seems to be working on you!) and partly as it’s an economical way of fighting an enemy much larger and better armed than you. If they were in the underdog position? Perhaps a change of perspective may change attitudes.
In terms of whether I forgive you or not? Because I’m still without my leg all the same. The people on the ground who have lost loved ones don’t factor into the equation that the US tried not to hit more of them before deciding how angry they are. And as far as the bombers are concerned, I see that they are also trying to achieve a military advantage too, and are going for an easy target.
So it’s the suicide bombing bit that bothers you, not the killing of civilians? If they did this via a missile would that be better? The US used Shock and Awe in an attempt to terrorize the population, which was as Rumsfeld said "the force necessary to prevail, plus some’‘, and he rejected "promising … not to permit collateral damage.’’
The guys who developed Shock and Awe considered it the doctrine of rapid dominance requires the capability to disrupt “means of communication, transportation, food production, water supply, and other aspects of infrastructure”, and, in practice, “the appropriate balance of Shock and Awe must cause … the threat and fear of action that may shut down all or part of the adversary’s society or render his ability to fight useless short of complete physical destruction.”
Look, I agree that there is a difference - I agree that the school is not a legitimate target.
I don’t approve (odd word) of suicide bombings, but I also appreciate that sometimes it’s the only weapon they have, and it is very effective. As someone who was on the Tube on the morning of July 7th I just don’t share your fear that every Muslim carries the potential for significant risk to me, and that they are a possible suicide bomber. I am more concerned about actual risks rather than remote possibilities. Being raped as I walk home at night, being robbed in my home, someone molesting my baby daughter - and anyone may be the perpetrator here - not just Muslim. Why not just be wary of situations, rather than of individuals?