Nickolai77 said:
Therumancer said:
The problem with engaging in religious/cultural/ethnic profiling is of course that we have established moral principles where singling out a specific group is seen as wrong. Despite some rough spots for the most part we have made this work and view it as the correct course of action. I however feel current events over the last decade or so have shown that we were wrong, and that some of the fundemental assumptions inherant in that (ie that the dangerous stereotypes are false or present very little risk... a robbed house or two compared to the oppression of potentially millions of people being a small price) are wrong.
Right now I actually think we should re-consider our position on profiling in response to international events (as opposed to purely domestic ones). I in general have no real problem with "harassing" some Muslim (arabic, black muslim, or whatever though mostly the forum) when your dealing with the lives of hundreds or even thousands of people being lot from a single act. Not only do we have to worry about losing a plane to a bomb like decades ago, but as 9/11 has shown the plane's destruction itself can be a weapon. Even with just a bomb in flight if one was to say set it off during takeoff or landing at the right time a lot of damage could be done to the ground, not to matter timing things specifically for when the plane is flying over an urban area to douse it in debris and shrapnel or whatever.
In general I feel we should basically engage in profiling for mass transit (not just planes) at least as long as the current cultural conflict lasts. It needs to be carefully labeled legally though to prevent it from snowballing into purely domestic use. If this doesn't deal with the problem, then perhaps simply banning Muslims from using mass transit (subways, trains, planes, etc..) might be reasonable, as well as making it more difficult for people to come from The Middle East to the US in general which as "wrong" as it might sound doesn't strike me as being a bad thing when I read about failed terrorist attacks and such (of course stopping someone means far less to the public than a success).
On the other hand, there are a lot of Muslims who want to move into western countries and become peaceful, law abiding and productive citizens of their respective country. The problem of treating all Muslims as terrorists is that it will alienate the vast majority of Muslims who are not terrorists, and due to this alienaton, create more terrorists.
Regarding the use of full body-scans, i think some people have correctly pointed out that it still may be possible to get bomb-material through security due to things like cavities, and ordinary items hidden in hand luggage. Dispite this, i am not against the use of full body scans. Ideally, a computor should be used to detect for any abnormalities on a body before a human looks at these images. We should protect privacy when we can. Of course, in later decades when the terror threat has declined, the use of these scanners should be withdrawn.
As an interesting side note, when i first read about this in the Daily Mail (my parents buy that paper) it suggested that the use of full-body scans could contradict child protection laws in the UK which prohibit the creation of pictures depicting naked children. That made me think, WTF lol?
When it comes to Muslims I will say that your a victim of a common misconception which seems to be promoted by the "peace at any price" crowd. One of the reasons why this is such a messed up situation is that there are no progressive "good guys" by our standards. This is why our attempts to "win the peace" diplomatically and through police actions have failed (and what was going to happen was pretty obvious, I even said so myself early on). The closest thing to a progressive faction was actually the Sunnis and they switched "sides" when the USSR offered them what they thought was a better deal many moons ago.
The thing is that we're fighting a culture. Like every culture not everyone is actively a warrior, but most people support their warriors. This is why when a terrorist fires an RPG or empties an assault rifle at an American patron, a lot of the "civilians" are willing to close ranks around them to impede progress. Sure none of those people are actually terrorists, but they support terrorism. Also the respect it garners from the general populance is why so many are willing to Martyr themselves, since it can bring prosperity to their family. People do not go out and become suicide bombers because it gets some handclapping from a tiny minority.
For obvious reasons Muslims also want to play to American perceptions, nobody is going to tell an American "oh yeah I support terrorism" for obvious reasons. However a lot of them (in The Middle East and abroad) probably login to those various 'terrorist information websites' you hear about. We've had scandals about that in the US when some university professors have been caught running them, and refused to hand over user lists and such.
It's sort of like World War II, not everyone in Germany was a Nazi, but like 99% of the people were Nazi supporters contrary to how people want to present things. This is why in the final days of the way, fighting the "Volkssturm" was such a nasty thing since you literally had unarmed civilians impeding allied troops, and throwing themselves out with a rock and a prayer. This lead to plenty of massacres and "war crimes" of our own as we pretty much killed anyone not in an allied uniform that could be found because it was nessicary. Groups like "The Hitler Youth" did not disappear when it became conveinent. As the guys who won, we get to write the history books, and decide who the war criminals are.
I think our presentation of the idea of a "good war" has hampered us in dealing with reality in the course of this threat.
I generally concede that there are doubtlessly some Muslims out there who would love to come to a Western country, become part of the culture, and live in peace. However I feel they are a tiny minority, rather than being the majority. If it was any other way, we would not be facing this sort of threat. People volunteer to die for god, and kill Americans, because their culture in general lionizes the behavior.
At any rate, as I said the first step in my opinion should be to allow profiling. Only if that does not work would we start preventing Muslims from using mass transit.
Basically I think it's wrong to make policy based on the existance of a harmless minority. Okay, sure, this might not be fair to a few people, but it's the right thing to do by the numbers.
As far as the idea of such policing "inspiring more terrorism" that's ridiculous. It's basically saying we should let them blow stuff up, for fear that they will blow more stuff up. What's more if these guys are so unstable that they could turn from "progressive" to a rabid bombing murderer because someone applies a bit of common sense with transit security (and they know the reasons)... well I'm sorry but that guy is unstable to begin with. It's like refusing the apply the law to anyone in general because of the possibility that any given person might start killing people. If a group of people are that touchy, then it is not unreasonable to treat them like the unstable wild animals that they effectively are.
If things got to the point of a full transit ban, it would be the result of things happening. As things stand now I think it's not unreasonable to focus security increases on the problem group, rather than subjecting everyone to them.
