Couple of problems with this. First, I’m not sure it’s fair to attribute the two bombings you mention to the same, unifying reason. The two incidents are unrelated and have no ties to a single ideology. If they did, that would be helpful and make your analogy better. Second, going from your Step 1 to Step 2 is not as helpful. In my example we cut the pool from 300 million to under 2.5 million. Your example cuts it to merely 50% or so, though that is a good step if you were looking to stop an existing threat, like abortion clinic bombing, which do have a unifying ideology. Third, your final term, “radical right wingers” is more ambiguous" than the understanding we have of Muslim radicals. But if you’d like to define it some, it may work.
So, I don’t find your analogy offensive, just not as helpful. And taking the example of abortion bombers, it would make perfect sense to me if the first sieve is that of “Christian”. Religious based, but both logical and sensible as a first narrowing. If you stopped there, it would be almost useless, as this is a Christian majority country. BUt as a first step, sound right.
Unless you’d like to argue that if we started out wanting to stop the bombing of abortion clinics we should look equally as hard at Buddhists, Quakers, and Atheists. Do you?
I never said it was. You just need to be wary of the groups that generate that sort of hatred and violence and I have provided that equation based on your example. If you want to wiggle and squirm away from that position, it is fine with me.
I have said nothing about Abortion clinic bombers. Changing the threat from Right Wing bombers to Abortion clinic bombers looks like an attempt to change the game to keep your point safe.
There may be more or fewer gradations that need to be filtered for each scenario, but you have insisted that being wary of “muslims” is the first step and so being wary of people on the political Right must be the first step–unless you want to back away from that sort of claim?
How about this*: do you think we should have law enforcement agencies ask the various Tea Party groups for membership lists (kind of how you want them getting membership lists from mosques), then have them do their magical “Step 2: ???” to determine if any of them warrant watching as potential Timothy McVeighs?
*Apologies to tomndebb for stepping on his/her/their(?) toes
Not exactly. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the size of the group matters. If we’re talking about brown-haired people here in the U.S., that filter wouldn’t be helpful. The smaller the group the more helpful the exercise is. No wiggling or squirming. Check the thread for yourself.
I was improving on your analogy. I think it a safe bet to assume that if an abortion clinic is bombed, particularly as part of a pattern, that the bomber will be a Christian. I was demonstrating that it would then be more analogous to what I offered and that starting with the pool, “Christians”, would make good sense. The same way that if you start out wanting to prevent terrorist deaths by Islamic jihadists, that it makes perfect sense to assume that the perpetrators will be Muslim.
One big difference: we know that radical Islamists are targeting us. Every expert I’ve heard on TV, from both sides, and as was indicated in the 9/11 report, it’s not a matter of if, but when. Since then there have been numerous attacks and failed attacks. There seems to be no commensurate threat from Christians bombing abortion clinics or anything else. There is also the scale of the the attack to be concerned with. If a successful attack would result in a death or two at a time, I’m not sure we could do much about it. BUt we have to remember, the body count on 9/11 was MUCH lower than they thought it would be. And the body count from a dirty bomb or a suitcase nuke would be 10 to 100 times greater.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Muslim radicals are not all of one idealogy or line of practices. They strike me as pretty similar in ambiguousness.
You really want to go with those groups? Christian anti-abortionists, for example. If by “narrowly address” you mean the Catholics, Southern Baptists and a very large number of other Christians in America, I guess we can work with that, although I’m not going to say that it makes “sense” to do anything about it, since the number of members in that group alone probably numbers greater than 100 million in the U.S.
By Skinheads, do you mean people with shaved heads and tattoos, or more specifically people who look like that AND are in known neo-nazi/white-nationalist organizations?
While you’re at it, can you define “Muslim extremists” for me? Is that the Muslim equivalent of fundamentalists, or is it a Muslim with bombs strapped around his chest?
So, based on the little information you’ve given me so far, I’m not seeing much “narrowing down” going on. Define it more tightly and I might go along for fun.
A “muslim extremist” is someone who wants to cause me bodily harm because I don’t believe in their version of reality. They don’t have to be born in shitholes where the vast majority of inhabitants have no real conception of human rights and where everyone thinks subservience to Allah is the way forward, but that is usually a significant factor.
Now, I could go around telling anyone dressing in a muslim stylee that Allah is a cunt and seeing which ones react violently, but I’m sure there must be a better, less antagonistic to non-violent muslims way of doing things, although this idea would be an effective way of determining violent muslims, and we could work from there to determine the more terroristic members of the community.
Vegetarians are a small percentage of the population and they are disproportionately represented among genocidal maniacs (well not in Cambodia but Pol Pot wasn’t a Buddhist).
If you are trying to isolate rabies, not merely pit bulls with rabies. Why round up all the pit bulls and check them for foaming at the mouth. Why not jsut round uip all the dogs (and SDMB posters) that foam at the mouth.
But my point is that we are not trying to find muslim radicals, we are trying to find domestic terrorists. If we sieve for radicals we are going to get a bunch of muslim radicals, militia whackos, vegetarians, pro-life psychos and a host of other fucknuts. At that point why, I don’t see the musli radicals as any more worthy of attnetion than the other fucknuts.
Yeah this was a mistake. I forgot that the hypo assumed that the suspects were black.