5 ms·

You understand how bayesian reasoning works, right? There are probably between three and six million muslims in France alone. Whatever monitoring you're doing,

by pfooti 11y ago

You understand how bayesian reasoning works, right? There are probably between three and six million muslims in France alone. Whatever monitoring you're doing, you're proposing to find on the order of a few hundred people, if that. False positives (which, remember: we cannot distinguish from actual positives) would end up targeting orders of magnitude more innocent people than guilty. Worse, by breaking the compact of a free and just society with respect to a single religious group (cough), you're basically doing the terrorists' jobs for them - you end up marginalizing and disenfranchising huge swaths of your population (remember again: millions of people in France alone). Even if one is not not ethically and morally appalled by your proposal, the problem remains: your proposal would probably contribute more to radicalization than any other single action the terrorists themselves could take. It is at a time like this when we most need to stick to the principles of a free, just, and open society. We need to re-affirm those, and I say that as an American who has lived through the post-911 transition into a security society. Learn from our mistakes: we've gone and made people more radical, spent more civilian and military lives, because as a nation we somehow thought we could fix the "muslim problem" through fighting and surveillance. Neither worked. What will (eventually) work is working toward a nation and a world where all people are free and equal. Sure, there may still be attacks against such a nation, but that's what police are for (when the police are also just and equal). Furthermore, it's a lot harder to radicalize people when they live in a safe and just society that pays attention to them. I'm not surprised at all, given how non-muslim westerners have treated the religion and people, that we are seeing radicalized people. And aaaaalso, this bears mentioning although it's kind of tangential. Not all muslims are brown. Not all muslims speak bad english / french. Consider all the work Imperial Japan did to wipe out christianity (you can't tell a religion by looking at someone), and all they did was make it stronger and drive it underground. Consider: in the US, actually, the biggest terrorist threats come from white people. White people of the white-supremacy and militant-anti-abortion camps are responsible for far more terrorist attacks on US soil than ISIS and al-qaeda combined. We, as a nation, just don't really like to talk about surveiling all white people. It'd be ridiculous, a fact we understand instinctively because the white narrative is the non-marginalized one.

hodgesrm 11y ago
Not to disagree with your point about Bayesian reasoning but would you care to cite some source for your assertion about the relative dangers of white-supremacy groups and their ilk versus Islamic terror groups? 9/11 alone killed 2996 people [1] including hijackers and there's little question Al Qaeda/ISIS adherents would have killed many more if they could have. It was certainly not for lack of trying. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks
- shkkmo 11y ago
  Not the parent, but I suspect his statement was drawn from coverage of this report: http://www.globalresearch.ca/non-muslims-carried-out-more-than-90-of-all-terrorist-attacks-in-america/5333619 http://www.globalresearch.ca/non-muslims-carried-out-more-th...
- pfooti 11y ago
  Sorry for the delay, I've been AFK all day. My assertion (which it, for the most part is) is not based necessarily on body count (which is an important statistic, but not the totality of terrorist goals, which are to assert dominance and terrorize). Consider the number of mass shootings that have occurred in the US this year (294 as of 10/1)[0]. Not all of them are acts of terror, but a surprising number could be considered as such. High-profile mass killings (like the Umpqua college one) are often carried out by young white men who wish to assert their dominance over a culture they feel doesn't respect them. As a rule, I'm probably better off being wary of young white men than young black or brown men (gets to the prior probability problem in GPs post). Consider the broad response to the recent college student protests at Mizzou and across the country. I know of threedifferent arrests for making death threats on yikyak - these are also terrorist acts. They are acts carried out by people aiming to inspire terror in their victims. [1], [2]. While we're on that subject, take a look at what happens to anyone targeted by gamergate activists. I haven't compiled the statistics on death threats targeting people like Randi Lee Harper and Anita Sarkeesian, but I'm sure we can call that terrorism as well. Consider attacks made against abortion clinics. I'll just leave the wikipedia article here. [3] Again: violence enacted with the intent to suppress behavior with which the perpetrators disagree. Terrorism. Think about the astounding number of racial hate crimes committed in the US. Not all of them are specifically terrorist, but a large percentage of them are committed in order to suppress and terrorize a people. I mean, just google black church bombings, or for that matter look to our not-so-distant history of lynchings. We do ourselves a disservice as a people if we only consider as terrorism the big-bomb, large-attack events. There's more to terrorism, and our homegrown terrorism which (speaking perhaps over-broadly here) grows out of sense of white, male, christian entitlement and superiority being perpetuated through violence is something to which we (as USians) often turn a blind eye. We should own our past and do better in the future. 0: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/01/2015-274-days-294-mass-shootings-hundreds-dead/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/01/2015-... 1: http://www.michigansthumb.com/news/article_a8145fb0-8af3-11e5-8a08-0b35faaf166a.html http://www.michigansthumb.com/news/article_a8145fb0-8af3-11e... 2: http://www.themaneater.com/stories/2015/11/11/suspect-arrested-yik-yak-threats/ http://www.themaneater.com/stories/2015/11/11/suspect-arrest... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence

by pfooti 11y ago

hodgesrm 11y ago

Not to disagree with your point about Bayesian reasoning but would you care to cite some source for your assertion about the relative dangers of white-supremacy groups and their ilk versus Islamic terror groups? 9/11 alone killed 2996 people [1] including hijackers and there's little question Al Qaeda/ISIS adherents would have killed many more if they could have. It was certainly not for lack of trying. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks

shkkmo 11y ago
Not the parent, but I suspect his statement was drawn from coverage of this report: http://www.globalresearch.ca/non-muslims-carried-out-more-than-90-of-all-terrorist-attacks-in-america/5333619 http://www.globalresearch.ca/non-muslims-carried-out-more-th...
pfooti 11y ago
Sorry for the delay, I've been AFK all day. My assertion (which it, for the most part is) is not based necessarily on body count (which is an important statistic, but not the totality of terrorist goals, which are to assert dominance and terrorize). Consider the number of mass shootings that have occurred in the US this year (294 as of 10/1)[0]. Not all of them are acts of terror, but a surprising number could be considered as such. High-profile mass killings (like the Umpqua college one) are often carried out by young white men who wish to assert their dominance over a culture they feel doesn't respect them. As a rule, I'm probably better off being wary of young white men than young black or brown men (gets to the prior probability problem in GPs post). Consider the broad response to the recent college student protests at Mizzou and across the country. I know of threedifferent arrests for making death threats on yikyak - these are also terrorist acts. They are acts carried out by people aiming to inspire terror in their victims. [1], [2]. While we're on that subject, take a look at what happens to anyone targeted by gamergate activists. I haven't compiled the statistics on death threats targeting people like Randi Lee Harper and Anita Sarkeesian, but I'm sure we can call that terrorism as well. Consider attacks made against abortion clinics. I'll just leave the wikipedia article here. [3] Again: violence enacted with the intent to suppress behavior with which the perpetrators disagree. Terrorism. Think about the astounding number of racial hate crimes committed in the US. Not all of them are specifically terrorist, but a large percentage of them are committed in order to suppress and terrorize a people. I mean, just google black church bombings, or for that matter look to our not-so-distant history of lynchings. We do ourselves a disservice as a people if we only consider as terrorism the big-bomb, large-attack events. There's more to terrorism, and our homegrown terrorism which (speaking perhaps over-broadly here) grows out of sense of white, male, christian entitlement and superiority being perpetuated through violence is something to which we (as USians) often turn a blind eye. We should own our past and do better in the future. 0: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/01/2015-274-days-294-mass-shootings-hundreds-dead/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/01/2015-... 1: http://www.michigansthumb.com/news/article_a8145fb0-8af3-11e5-8a08-0b35faaf166a.html http://www.michigansthumb.com/news/article_a8145fb0-8af3-11e... 2: http://www.themaneater.com/stories/2015/11/11/suspect-arrested-yik-yak-threats/ http://www.themaneater.com/stories/2015/11/11/suspect-arrest... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence