Care to explain, you liar, how other people in this thread have come to the very same conclusion I have, based on your own posts (maybe the number 1197 will give you a clue)?
It’d be great if your banning were to happen today. Maybe even better if it were to happen on a Sunday. What irony that would be!
I think you have succinctly giiven a complete picture of your opinions on this. One might say you’ve given us the full… No. I can’t, I just can’t. It would be so very, very wrong.
: D
Typically, a politically defined group will have a certain percentage of extremists, and of those, a certain percentage will be terrorists. This is true for 60s antiwar activists, Christian fundamentalists, gun rights activists, environmentalists, etc.
It’s true for Middle Easter Muslims as well, but what I’m not clear on is how much of an extremist Islamic movement there is in the US. Those few Muslim-American terrorists, did they get their influence directly from the Middle East, or did they take root in the fertile soil of a significant home-grown jihadist movement?
“Shyah”? Sorry, don’t have my California to English phrasebook handy…
Has it anything to do with hovercraft?
Sorry, my spelling skills deserted me for a moment. It’s supposed to be a scoffing sound effect. Tcha!
Hmm. Still doesn’t look right. Little help?
Pffft…?
Pshaw!
Pfuckin-ay!
If the estimates are that variable, how do you know you got all the Muslims?
And how do you know you got all the muslims? Secretly surveil all 7 million muslims (after all women and children are terrorists too) long enough to determine that they aren’t terrorists? How do you know you haven’t missed a few muslims here or there?
Or you could do what we are doing right now and targetting ANYONE who has affiliations with terrorists and radical groups or have visited places where these radical groups exist in large numbers.
Besides, what about the Muslilms who are definitely on the right side here? Like that street vendor guy who turned in the bombers? Remember?
The couldn’t identify him at first and Obama said “Who was that mosqued man, I wanted to thank him”?
GROAN Actually, in your joke, you’ve managed to identify an important point. Treating Muslims with suspicion encourages them to distrust you right back — which reduces the help you’ll get in having people turned in, not to mention alienate the group and potentially convince more people to become terrorists (although, at the numbers we’re talking, there aren’t enough new terrorists to matter much.)
Actually, straight man was the one who caught my misinterpretation first, as I acknowledged back in post #1157. But that error doesn’t actually change the (valid) point of my argument, which is that it’s ineffective and short-sighted to focus on using Islam per se as a screening mechanism for finding radical-extremist Islamist terrorists, rather than focus on the specific category of radical-extremist Islamism.
So, the claim I made that you refuted and provided a site to show I was wrong was actually 100% correct? Right? A Muslim in America is more likely to be a terrorist than a non’Muslim? 49 times more likely! And this new (to you) and quite astounding piece of evidence—this fact—does not cause you to rethink your position one iota? Do I have that right? Nor to allow that my position may, in light of this new evidence be reasonable?
No, it’s not astounding, and it doesn’t in fact contradict my position.
My position, if you recall, is that it doesn’t make sense to focus on Muslim identity per se as a filter for identifying radical Islamist extremists.
What we should do instead is focus on the specific characteristics associated with radical extremist Islamism.
The fact that a Muslim in America is more likely to be a terrorist than a non-Muslim is far less significant than the fact that Muslims in America are overwhelmingly more likely to be non-terrorists than terrorists. Consequently, if you want to have an effective and practical policy for catching radical Islamist terrorists, you need to focus on characteristics other than the mere and not-very-helpful fact that they’re Muslim.
Since the vast majority of Muslims aren’t terrorists, filtering out possible suspects by Muslim identity per se, when you can skip directly to filtering them out by characteristics associated specifically with radical-Islamist identity, is a waste of time.
And if you agree with that common-sense principle, and yet you still insist on speaking about radical-extremist Islamism and Islam as a whole as though they were interchangeable, then you naturally come across as irrational and/or bigoted against Muslims.
I know what you’r position is, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But you told me that my position didn’t make sense, in part because you said my claim was false. But the very cite you provided not only showed I was correct, but correct by a very large degree. I assume you provided that piece of evidence to show that my position was based on incorrect assumptions, and that I should reevaluate my position based on the new evidence. But now that the new evidence that you thought was important enough to provide a cite for supports my position, one would think that it wold make my position more defensible. Not that you wold automatically agree with it, but that it is much more reasonable than you previously thought. If not, I don’t think there’s much point in you providing cites.
This makes zero sense, as we know that radical Muslims will, in fact, be Muslim. However, I would agree with the position that it probably doesn’t make sense to focus on Muslim identity as THE ONLY filter for identifying radical Islamist extremists.
And one characteristic of those who are radical Islamic extremists is that they are Muslim. Tell me this: how does it make sense that you would look for characteristics that correlate with radical Muslim extremism, but consciously and stubbornly avoid looking at Muslim-ness? Please answer that for me.
Also, not only does it make sense to use Muslimness as a filter, it makes sense to use it as the first filter. Now, I think that a filter like having traveled to certain parts of the world is a good tool, but if that is the primary filter you’ll miss any Islamist extremist would-be terrorist who has not traveled to those areas (like, I believe, Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood Shooter). So right off the bat you’re missing some potential Islamic terrorists. Conversely, if you use Muslimness as the first filter, you have a much greater likelihood that your first filter includes all who might seek to do us harm in the name if Islam. So I would use my filter first, “Muslim” then the others. Why, because the more primary the filter the greater assurance you want to have that all the suspects are included in your subset. And, obviously, the more filters the better.
Your conflating to different things here. Yes, the evidence shows that if you pick any Muslim in America at random, including the one who lives next door to you, the odds overwhelmingly favor that that person is NOT a terrorist. We agree on that. And that comports perfectly with what I’ve been saying all along—there is a small subset of Muslims that are terrorists. But, if you are tasked with stopping Islamic extremist terrorism in the U.S., the odds are 100% that that person will be found in the subset of the American population who identify as Muslim. Now, I do agree with your last sentence, that one would need to focus on things other than just the fact that one is Muslim. I’ve never claimed otherwise.
Nope. As I said above, it assures that your first filtering captures all possible Islamic terrorists. As I also mentioned above, even what we both view as probably a very good filter—travel to the Middle East—would miss those who haven’t traveled there.
:rolleyes: Do you really think tossing out ad hominems is helpful to your argument? Wrong or right, at the very least I have demonstrated that I have reason backing my position. In fact, my position is more scientifically valid than yours, as my first filtering has a greater likelihood of capturing all those we seek to identify in the subset.
Now if you did it to get a cheer from the cheap seats, I’m sure that will happen, so, well done!:rolleyes:
magellan’s complaining about ad hominem? That’s hilarious!
Not if you’ve got a limited amount of time and resources. Using a filter that’s so coarse that only a tiny percentage of the people it applies to are actually in the subset of people you’re looking for is not an efficient search strategy.
Like I said, for example, if you’re looking for a beautiful female model, you don’t start by compiling a list of all females and then applying further filters to it. You skip the superfluous first filter and go straight to looking for the much smaller subset of people who have the specific characteristics you’re interested in.
Yes, if you started out by compiling a list of all females and then filtering that list for beautiful models, you could be theoretically more certain that you couldn’t possibly miss any of your potential search targets. But no sane person would actually conduct the search that way, because it’s so grossly inefficient.
Likewise, if you’re looking for radical-extremist Islamist terrorists, it just doesn’t make practical sense to start with a top-level search filter as broad and vague as “Muslim”. Such a tiny proportion of Muslims are terrorists that applying such a broad filter is going to waste much more time in your search than it saves.
AFAICT, there are only two reasons to defend such an inefficient practice: either because one is obsessed with the abstract ideal of a completely infallible filter to the point of ignoring all practical considerations of efficiency and resource limitations, or else because one is looking for an excuse to express negative sentiments about Islam as a whole, rather than just about particular radical violent subcategories of Islam.
As you’ve seen from my earlier posts, I’m not in any hurry to assume you’re bigoted, and I’ve explicitly resisted suggestions to that effect. But if you go on advocating a critical stance towards Islam as a whole that simply makes no practical sense in the context in which you advocate it (i.e., terrorism prevention), then you can’t be surprised if people start trying to explain your puzzling and apparently irrational behavior by inferring ulterior motives on your part.
I looked for eeevil Muslims under my bed last night. No luck but I performed my anti-ta’rrorist duty & slept much better.
I’d recommend everyone do the same and report back to this thread.
