Which has absolutely nothing to do with the aspect of race or ethnicity of the person carrying the bomb that was the direct point of the OP. If you want to claim that (almost) all Muslims are Arabs (or appear Arab), you are free to make that silly claim, but in a discussion of how “race” should be employed in screening airline travellers, I have already demonstrated that it would fail and that it is counter-productive.
My analogy stands: intrusive scrutiny of all sports cars and muscle cars regarding speed law traffic enforcement would still permit a lot of homicides by way of luxury cars while needlessly harrassing the owners of sports cars and muscle cars. Paying attention to the actual behavior of potential terrorists and speeders will produce better results without engaging in discriminatory actions.
So, you would support the exclusion from further scrutiny of Richard Reid, (because he did not appear to be an Arab) and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (who was clearly not Arab) before they boarded their respective planes?
In contrast, I would have supported better screening based on their behavior, along with a better efforts to identify flammable or explosive materials, regardless of who happened to be carrying it, (such as Anne Marie Murphy).
Chief Pedant, you keep decrying the lack of training or experience in the current TSA, and keep calling for “experts” to be stationed at the entrances to airports to do your profiling idea. Question: Where do we find these experts? How would we pay for them?
I’m not setting up a “strawman” and you can keep histrionically trying to pretend it all you want. The OP started this as a thread about racial profiling, and you have not only tried to ineptly cover for the OP (by claiming he/she didn’t mean racial profiling), you have also refused to give any details about your mystery screening methodology. When called on this, you simply throw out the word “histrionic” repeatedly, as if that is meaningful, because you cannot produce any screening criteria. If you are this completely unable to defend your position, then why are you in this thread?
Furthermore, you are the one who posted a link of brown people, so I didn’t create any strawman. It’s apparent that you are unable to debate your position coherently (as usual), but that doesn’t mean that I’m creating strawmen.
Finally, as to your challenge, are you going to ask each and every person in the group questions? Or are you going to select persons to ask for questions based on mystery criteria? If so, what is the mystery criteria.
I never said it was unhelpful (again a strawman). I want to know the criteria. But if the criteria is someone “brown” that is definitely going to be unhelpful, since it doesn’t identify the potential threat properly. It misses large numbers of people who are in the threat category and drags in large numbers of people who aren’t in the threat category.
I would bet your knowledge of Israeli screening practices is probably non-existent. But, why don’t you lay out for us what their screening procedure is. Of course, they are even more secretive than the TSA, but from what I’ve read of their screening procedures, referring to the Israeli screening process doesn’t help your case at all.
Again, with the word “histrionic” because you can’t defend your position. Until you lay out the criteria for screening, no one is going to buy what you are selling.
I can’t figure out why you think we should respond to someone who refuses to lay out the screening procedure he is supposedly advocating for?
No, we’re not playing this game. This isn’t a Socratic debate board, and I’m not going to waste time with 20 questions. Since you are unable to state which communities, ethnicities, religions or areas will be over or underrepresented, I have to assume that you really have no idea. If you want to state where you think over or under-representation will occur, I will respond, but until then, it appears to me that you really haven’t studied the issue in any depth.
There have already been at least two terrorists bombings on airplanes committed by women (see, 2004 Russian aircraft bombings). Why do you choose to limit it to males?
I can’t be on the boards for awhile, so I’m exiting this thread. Apparently there are people who think that all Muslims only exist in the Middle East. They refuse to believe that the majority of Muslims live outside the Middle East, because that would mean that there were a lot of Indonesian Muslims and Thai Muslims and black Muslims and white Muslims, which is very inconvenient for them.
These same people refuse to accept that there are blond-haired and blue-eyed people in the Middle East, who are indistinguishable from white people. Again, this is too inconvenient for them, so they pretend this fact does not exist.
And they absolutely refuse to believe that al Qaida routinely recruits in non-Middle Eastern places like Somalia and Nigeria. They cannot accept that not only has al Qaida recruited in these places, but it has used these recruits to carry out attacks in the US.
And they absolutely refuse to believe that al Qaida has recruited Latinos, African Americans and White people in the US and used them to carry out terrorist attacks.
Faced with all of these inconvenient facts, they will just keep trying to come up with ways to pretend that Al Qaida is solely a creature of the Middle East and that all Middle Easterners are brown. No matter what the reality is, the facts will never make a difference.
So, have fun with your mystery screening which will almost certainly be less effective than the current screening system is. You have no idea what the screening will be, only that it will cover your made-up fantasy of who and what the actual threat is.
I am always amused by people who routinely advocate for white privilege while trying to pretend they aren’t.
Well I’m absolutely sure that I don’t know the subject as well as I could. Nor do I know what a “Socratic debate” is. However, I think you want to belittle my knowledge of this area in order justify your unwillingness to deal with uncomfortable questions.
Part of my reason for posting is to take on board other views and facts. As it stands though you have yet to tell me anything I didn’t already know.
And, it isn’t a “game” as such. No one wins or loses here. The fact that you view it as such is quite illuminating. It might explain your unwillingness to concede any points at all, even those that are obvious and uncontroversial.
For example - would you concede that, in a global sweep as I outlined before, Women would be under-represented?
There is definitely a lot of “Refusal to Believe” going on, I’ll give you that.
This is quite possible the largest collection of strawmen and misrepresentations ever gathered together and I think being away from the boards might do you some good.
Perhaps before returning you might like to re-read the thread and compare and contrast what was actually said with your own sweeping generalisations above.
How many times will I have to complain that your pretense of my position is that I want to exclusively screen for only a particular profile? It’s not like you to set up strawmen, and it diminishes your credence to do so. Appearance-based profiling lets us stop wasting time on Grandmas in wheelchairs. I really think you have to fly more to see how ridiculous this practice is. I’m in airport security lines 3 to 4 times a week, and I assure you, it’s farcical. “Patting down” the naked trunk of a child neatly summarizes the TSA approach to “equality.”
I think it would take about two or three personal-interview face-to-face questions by a trained expert to dump Mr Reid right into the further-screening camp. As for Umar, I’d stick any young male Muslim Nigerian into a higher-risk profiling pool than, say, an elderly Tibetan Buddhist.
I ask again: Is it your position that the use of profiling criteria which include appearance-based characteristics is unlikely to increase the chance that the groups being selected for more careful analysis have a higher proportion of terrorists–i.e. that appearance-based profiling, among other screening criteria–is not helpful? Or are you simply continuing to pretend that I think the only way to screen the general population is to see what they look like on the outside?
I am not setting up any “dilemma” at all, false or otherwise. I have not pretended it’s an either/or.
I am simply trying to figure out which of the two are being argued. I completely agree it’s unfair to be profiled because you appear to be a member of a group only some of whom are dangerous. Life is unfair. The population into which you are born is unfair. That I’m not equipped with Tiger Woods’ genes for golf is unfair.
This is why they need to supply food on the planes again. Hand out bacon butties as we walk on, and if you refuse to eat it, they drag you off for an introduction to the rubber glove. And I get to eat a bacon butty!
It is not a straw man and until you can provide proof (or even evidence) that we will never again have an Anne Marie Murphy, the notion that the lunatics who already employ chidren as warriors and bombers will actually refrain from using wheelchair bound nonagenarians is just dumb.
I am not sure that the current TSA practices–including pat downs–are the correct approach, but using appearance to either include or exclude individuals is remarkably lacking in sense. As long as you continue to believe that we can either include or exclude people for inspection based on appearance–exclusively or not–then none of my objections to your fantasy reach the level of straw man.