Yesterday, I brought on the wrath of the defenders of Slippery Sam. Sam Harris has an amazing talent: he can say the most awful things, and a horde of helpful apologists will rise up in righteous fury and simultaneously insist that he didn’t really say that, and yeah, he said that, but it only makes sense. And they have a battery of excuses that boil down to another contradiction: you must parse his words very carefully, one by one, and yet also his words must be understood in their greater context. They actually have a lot in common with radical Islamists: the sacred holy texts can only be understood in their original language, and the appropriate way to study them is by rote memorization.
So, in a report literally titled racial profiling, we’re told that it’s not about racial profiling at all; the new line is that it’s about anti-profiling
, that we should be able to look at a group of people and easily rule out on appearance alone a whole bunch of individuals and make security so much easier. So people who look like grandmas and little old Asian ladies and five year old Scandinavian girls are all perfectly safe, would never harm a fly, and we should just wave them through the lines at the security gates. We should just screen youngish to middle-aged men, because old people and women and children are harmless.
See? He’s not about racism at all, it’s all about ageism and sexism. Nothing to see here, folks.
But at the same time, it’s a lie. Practically the first thing he says is this:
We should be honest. We’re looking for suicidal jihadists.
It’s not anti-profiling
at all, whatever that is. He’s got some sort of vaguely undefined search image in his head for what we ought to be looking, and he’s not very clear on what it is, except that it’s suicidal jihadists
, and not Norwegian grandmas. I think it’s something like that guy on the right. I quite agree that if a wild-eyed long-bearded fellow with an AK-47 and an explosive belt shows up at the airport, you shouldn’t let him on the plane. But then, the 9/11 hijackers showed up at the airport clean shaven, nicely dressed in Western clothing, and acted professionally to get aboard. We actually aren’t looking for mad boogey men — we’re looking for rational, determined human beings with evil plans. I don’t know what they look like. I’d rather the people in charge of my safety did not have narrow preconceptions about what they look like. Slippery Sam has bigoted ideas about what they look like, and wants that implemented as policy.
In his earlier defense of profiling, he was quite clear on who he wanted singled out for special attention.
We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.
He’s very big on declaring his honesty, except when someone calls him on it, and then the familiar dodges begin.
I’m also seeing this from his defenders. How can you simultaneously say that no, this isn’t about targeting Muslims for special screening, but hey, haven’t you noticed that all the terrorism in the world is caused by Muslims? I just want to sit them all down in a special room that simply plays back their own words at them, and let them argue forever.
Their big gotcha right now is that Slippery Sam said this:
If Jerry Seinfeld goes through the airport and gets the same search as someone who looks like Osama Bin Laden does, that’s a crazy misuse of resources.
In the context (oh, that again — how dare I listen to the whole damn interview?) of a discussion of why airports need to profile people who look Muslim, I heard this as yet more special pleading for giving one class of people a pass, while holding up another class of people. It turns out that no, he literally meant Jerry Seinfeld specifically, in comparison with people who look like Osama Bin Laden generally. His whole argument is that celebrities like Jerry Seinfeld and Betty White shouldn’t be treated to the same security measures as the common people, because it’s a drain on resources.
We’ve got $10 worth of attention. If you spend a dollar here, you’ve got nine to spend elsewhere.
I had no idea such a substantial fraction of our Homeland Security budget was being thrown away on useless searches of famous celebrities, and that so much of my time standing in line was wasted because Jerry Seinfeld was getting the same treatment as the thousand other people in line.
I’m sorry, Defenders of Slippery Sam, but if that’s seriously your argument, you’ve lost it. It makes no sense. It represents a total lack of perspective on the problem. Celebrities are not a major drain on security, and I can’t imagine how you or Slippery Sam propose to deal with it: a general dictum to screeners to give preferential treatment to people who look famous? A specific list of famous people who should be allowed to cut in line? I look forward to the day when I arrive at the airport and a Homeland Security flunky has to check their list to see if I’m Tom Cruise or Betty White. That’ll save money and time, I’m sure. I’m also going to have to approve giving carte blanche to movie stars and comedians, because Lord knows every one of them is rational and stable.
Once again, the inconsistencies and pure stupidity of Sam Harris’s anti-Muslim bigotry have led his devotees to plunge even deeper into ridiculous and bogus ‘interpretations’ to support him.
I like Adam Lee’s succinct summary of the Harris problem: “That’s precisely the problem with what Harris said: either it’s racist, or it’s meaningless.”
That's precisely the problem with what Harris said: either it's racist, or it's meaningless.
— Adam Lee (@DaylightAtheism) September 15, 2015
I’m going with racist and meaningless.
But he said he shouldn’t be excluded which means that the hundreds times he has specified the kind of
brownmuslim-looking people that should be exclusively screened, are magically erased and no longer about racial profiling. Magic.It’s amazing how he manages to misdirect his followers, one platitude here, one contradiction there, and all of a sudden he is not saying what he is clearly saying, repeteadly. He should get a gig in Vegas.
Actually, the first few things he says are all concentrated contradictions dissolved in bias.
So:
1) We’re looking for jihadists in particular
2) There are people other than jihadists who may threaten airplanes
3) We’re still just looking for jihadists
4) Actually we’re looking for people like jihadists but at this point I have no idea what ‘like jihadist’ means, other than them having blown up a plane already. That’s a very slow security response.
Until there is that ‘oh dear’ moment and another stereotype has to be added to the list of risk groups to be interrogated. But who knew? All Harris did was make bad guesses as to who might be a threat. It’s hardly his fault bad methods lead to bad results.
You know, if you (or your fanboys) have to keep spending so much time explaining what you meant to people who took your words at face value, maybe you’re not as good a communicator as you think you are.
(See also: Richard Dawkins on Twitter)
It is also quite telling that Harris thinks that “muslim” and “five year old Scandinavian girls” are mutually exclusive.
Maybe SAm Harris could give us GErmans some hints how we’Re going to successfully identify the right wing white terrorists who are setting fire to refugee homes daily?
You know who “looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim”? Everybody.
I remember when I used to defend Sam Harris where I said my own baffling contradictions. But honestly, it was that whole profiling thing made me think he was just a shallow thinker in general. He didn’t want to actually look at the issue critically, but just wanted to make sweeping generalizations about this or that. It uses that “it’s just common sense” notion that conservatives always use to justify bad policy. He was practically coddled by Schneier but still was just like “but but but the muslims.”
Harris is wrong, but he’s not 100% wrong. I don’t condone his idea of more strictly enforcing security guidelines on groups of people based on gender, age, or race. I do like the idea of easing restrictions on travelers altogether. Where he argues for easing restrictions on most people, I say ease restrictions on ALL people. Most of our security at airports is for entertainment purposes only.
Anti-profiling. That’s so stupid. The moment anybody becomes aware of this tactic, they’ll simply adapt. PZ mentioned clean shaven people dressed in Western clothes: Obviously, they had already adapted back then (look like a regular tourist or businessman, albeit with a bit more melanin).
Well, even if you screen everybody based on melanin rather than garb, there are plenty of converts from Western countries available to commit terroristic acts, too, including Islamic ones. Get one of those to do the deed and – thanks to Harris’ incredibly clever plan to exclude certain groups to save money on screenings – they’ll get on board a plane with no trouble whatsoever.
They’re only looking at brown people in traditional Arabian outfits? Great! Let’s shave and wear Western clothes. They’re only looking at brown people, but in general now? Great! Then let’s have George from London do it. Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to use your old name, Ali-Al-Allison.
Oh, also? There might still be some non-Islamic terrorists around who might like to kidnap a plane or two? Perhaps even for ransom rather than to destroy it, like in the old days?
But don’t worry, we’ll never find any of those ahead of time, since we’re only looking for particular people while putting blinders on in regards to sufficiently white or rich folks.
@7 mkoormtbaalt
True, they don’t call it “security theatre” for nothing.
Sorry, can’t help you there. You see, right wing whites are, by definition, not terrorists. How can they be when Harris isn’t afraid of them? Plus, the only hijackers he and his fanboys can think of are the ones from 14 years ago. He has failed to notice that hijackers since that time have come from China, Germany, Ethiopia, and a number of other places, had extremely varied motives, and generally been not “jihadist” in their looks.
Harris even admits that it’s security theater. But he wants the theatrics all focused on Muslims, which would then make it OK.
One of my wife’s poetry group converted to islam in her late middle age when she married her muslim fella. She is 100% white anglo saxon looking. Without her veil who would know? And of course, poets are subversive.
Well, you might want to be careful about using “we.” The rest of us, not including Harris and his deranged lickspittles, are not actually looking for that.
Usually, they have a pair of eyes and ears, a nose and a mouth, four appendages, and so forth. Hmm, not specific enough yet, I guess…. They’re sort of like chimps who can walk around upright, use tools, and significantly they’re able to communicate with us (possibly in Arabic, but not necessarily). Especially in airports, you see an inordinate number of them milling about and looking more or less vaguely upset about something, pretty much all of the time. Some are penis-havers with beards — oh fuck, they look just like you, PZ! Burn the heretic!
My daughter – a tall, pale white blue-eyed girl with a Canadian accent – is Muslim. Good thing she wears that yellow crescent on her clothes, so Harris and his fanboys would know she deserves profiling.
I particularly like the old Asian ladies example. Have none of these idiots heard of Indonesia? You know, that densely populated Asian country that’s almost 90% Muslim?
Which returns me to the point that screening that is actually random is better because it doesn’t allow the terrorists to game the system. Give them boundary conditions and they’ll recruit folks as close to those boundaries as they can find. If security is waving through old Asian ladies then they’ll put their efforts into finding the oldest Asian looking woman they can to carry out the next attack.
Saganite
Except Jerry Seinfeld and Betty White…
Lofty
I can top that. One of my kid’s blue eyed blond muslim mum usually wears mini-skirts in summer.
Of the two of us, the one Harris would pick for his “muslim” profiling would be me with my dark locks, dark eyes and general preference for loose fitting clothing.
Well, they might have looked that way, but you already know things about them because they’re famous, so they don’t conceivably look that way any more. What they look like depends on the “knowledge” you already have about them. And of course people never significantly change, so we can safely rely on such old and superficial information, at least in the case of celebrities. Because they don’t change, the real question is how some people evolved to have guns in their hands and bombs strapped to their chests at birth, while mumbling various things about Allah and Mohammad and recent political events. The deity must have some really strange plans in store for us, if it designs people like that.
I hope it was clear the last thread the note being made by the Harrisites: Harris isn’t saying to profile Muslims (or “suicidal jihadists”), Harris is saying we shouldn’t profile not suicidal jihadists!
It’s all OK since he’s using a double negative, therefore it’s not really racism if you never explicitly mention what “suicidal jihadists” actually looks like, simply give the universe of discourse not included in that category!
It really speaks to their overestimation of their philosophical ability that they would attempt such a transparent logical construct.
This critique of Harris doesn’t go nearly far enough, imo.
It fails to challenge, and to some degree implicitly accepts, two key Harris premises without which his whole crusade falls apart and which also happen to be absurd:
–that non-state terror is a greater cause of violence than state terror
–that Muslims are relatively violent
If you want to explain why purple hair leads to home run hitting prowess, you first need to find a sample of purple-haired home run hitters who hit more homers than other groups. First you need a correlation. But where’s the correlation between Islam and violence? You can find a correlation between Islam and specific kinds of violence. This is true of any group. Texan violence is more likely to come by way of guns. State violence is more likely to be high-tech, etc. This is all meaningless if the question is violence generally, which it should be. And the USG, back to the first point, is the most destructive force on the planet. This is an empirical question with a conclusive answer. But USG killings don’t factor into New Atheist math. When the U.S. invades a country and kills well over a million humans, that goes down as a complete non-event. But if you really want to prevent mass killers from getting on planes, find the planes with all the missiles and bombs attached.
http://devinlenda.blogspot.jp/2014/10/no-no-i-hypothetically-love-it-when-sam.html
http://devinlenda.blogspot.jp/2015/01/charlie-dawkins-tweets.html
As a matter of fact, Sam Harris can assist you.
Take his drivel, translate it into german, and show it to every white guy you come across, asking them “Macht es Sinn?“. It may not help you identify arsonists, but it should do a decent job in identifying racist jerks.
Lotfy@12: Gotta keep those stanzas and ideas off the plane, somebody might get rhymed!
Even granting Harris the most generous assumptions, that we can accurately identify the target group, you’re still going to end up with harrassing 95% innocent people within that group, and that just isn’t acceptable in a supposedly free society. Now can I keep my damned shoes on when I board planes now?
Before I ever saw Seinfeld, if you showed me that Jerry person (without the surname) and asked me what religion he was, I’d sputter and say “new york” (after he spoke a few words) if silent I’d sputter “dunno”.
Did not know Seinfeld is an iconic embodiment of Jewdom, to thus be recognized instantly as not a jihadist, being a simple stand-up comic (with a show about cars and coffee after his ‘sitcom about nuthin’).
I’d be rather suspicious of someone who could spot a passerby and simply call out “Jew”, or {~Catholic | ~Presbyterian | ~Mormon | ~Polish ! ~gay | ~strate | … (one of the above)} And to then propose that psychic ability to identify someones religion on sight, be the focus of the TSA approach to airplane security is a bit arrogant and narrowsighted. maybe Harris has that ability to spot the jihadist on sight. good for him, nice talent. Remember, It is a special talent, not a skill that can be taught to the untalented. Better to use indiscriminate random searches to throw doubt into the plans of the jihadists who plot on knowing the patterns in use and how to work around them. Random searches will throw them into discombobulation and hesitate.
@14
Yeah – I have a friend who’s older brother is Muslim. And he is as ginger as as they come. Bright red hair, pale as can be skin, tons of freckels.
I guess he’s not a True Muslim™
Of course the discussion of who to keep off planes ignores the real terrorist threats from our home grow Fundamentalist Christians.
What most infuriates me about Sam Harris is that he makes all these unsupported claims and recommendations even though he claims to be a scientist. Is there a shred of real research that shows any of his ideas are effective? The only acknowledged expert I know of in the security field (Bruce Schneier) disagrees with pretty much all of Harris’s ideas.
Suppose we have a random selection of people scattered throughout a forest and told them to hide. If we emphasise those that look arabic by putting them in high visibility / reflective workwear, who is going to show up in a snapshot of the area? The arabic looking people. For take two, same again but instead of highlighting the arabs, we instead give everyone except the arabs ghillie suits, and take that snapshot again. Who do we see this time? Oh, arabs again.
It is utterly basic to see that intentionally focusing on [X], or intentionally ignoreing all not-[X] is the same fucking thing.
@scienceavenger #22
It’s not just “in a free society” theoreticals that makes it a bad idea. It’s the idea of trying to make us safe by treating one group of people worse than everybody else. If we’re going to fight Islamic terrorism, we’re going to need the cooperation of actual Islamists. Treating everybody who “looks Muslim” might make Sam Harris feel safer, but it’s just going to make American Muslims less likely to cooperate in uncovering the dangerous ones. It’s also going to make some of them better targets for recruitment into extremist groups. But, it’s more important to put on a show of patting down everybody in Muslim garb so Sam Harris can think we’re actually doing something.
I am surprised that Sam Harris isn’t following the lead of Israel, who doesn’t use “looks Muslim” to profile terrorists. Why? Besides the fact that most Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews are indistinguishable from Arabs. But because once you do that, the terrorists just work around whatever profile you’re using. It’s why El-Al interviews people to see who’s worth checking out further rather than just separating out everybody who requested the Halal meal. Of course, that’s not showy enough to make people feel safer, which is apparently more important than actually making them safer.
So celebrities should get a pass? How about one of the biggest celebrities in the world, whose box-office draws far surpass anything Tom Cruise or Will Smith could ever dream of?
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-17699074
In response to this, I’ll post a meme that should just about sum it up.
http://925rebellion.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/khan.jpg
What I find especially absurd about Harris’ reasoning, is that he (and others) want to claim that attacking Muslims can’t be racist because “it’s a religion!”. So, when accused of racism, radical Muslims aren’t just brown-skinned, middle-eastern people, it’s just a religious label anyone can adopt. But when profiling for radical Muslims in the airport, oh well then you definitely know what to look for…
Sorry Sam, you can’t have it both ways.
That clearly doesn’t stop him from trying to…..again…..and again……and again……
Beyond Understanding
Well, since his fans will selectively ignore either statement, it’s working fine for him
If anti-profiling is so obviously racist/classist/sexist/ageist/stupid, why is it that the TSA was able to make policy changes in the last few years to implement anti-profiling with nary a protest? As I pointed out numerous times in comments on the last post on this topic, the very young, the very old, and prescreened passengers (TSA Precheck) are now subject to a lower level of scrutiny than the general population. This is exactly what we mean by anti-profiling.
Now, I know that all you PZ sycophants think the TSA is just as racist/classist/sexist/ageist/stupid as Sam Harris. My question for you is, why is all of your outrage directed against Sam Harris and not the TSA? Where are your impassioned pleas for the TSA to go back to the days of making 2-year-olds take off their shoes?
Artor @ 29:
Hey, they did let Khan in…eventually. That’s more than they did for Yusuf Islam in ’04.
You can almost feel the tension between PZ’s disdain for Harris and his knowledge that he was wrong in his post yesterday. This post may be the most begrudging backpedaling in the history of backpedaling (calling an excerpt from an interview “a report literally titled racial profiling”? please). In any case, I’m glad PZ has admitted that he mischaracterized Harris’ words (following Greenwald’s acknowledgment that PZ was wrong).
One interesting note — many of the commenters here that purport to be against racial profiling and bigotry seem overly obsessed with characterizing Islam as a race, Muslims as “brown,” terrorists as stereotypically Muslim, etc. Perhaps your own prejudices are showing?
Eric Ross:
Oh, let’s see…I’ll start off with his insistence in repeating his bigotry, louder and louder, over and over and over and over again, thinking it will somehow make sense.
It’s like they aren’t even reading the posts or the comments.
Caine @36:
That is a complete non-sequitur. Please re-read my post and respond to what I actually said, or shut up about it.
Or for world-renowned Irani genius filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.
Eric Ross @ 38:
No, it isn’t.
There’s no problem with my reading comprehension, and seeing yet another defense (however sideways) of Harris’s persistent stupidity and bigotry makes me fucking weary. As for shutting up, I’m sure to do that at some point, however, it won’t be at your behest. Harris fans would do better in attempting to be less dense than the source of their admiration.
Like the lies you tell to yourself impress us. We look at all the data, including what is meant, and SH’s rampant bigotry via islamophobia.
Again, do we believe SH, or EXPERTS in the field. Being a scientist, I will listen to the experts, not bad philosophers.
Funny the last few terrorist attacks here in the US weren’t done by suicidal jihadists.
It must be the “I know a suicidal jihadist when I see one… wink wink nudge nudge say no more…” Amazing Kreskin – Jack Bauer TV crime show plot that can’t exist in reality.
Caine and Nerd of Redhead:
Since you insist on ignoring the context of my post (#33) and instead screaming “bigotry!”, I’ll narrow my focus to this question:
Where are your impassioned pleas for the TSA to go back to the days of making 2-year-olds take off their shoes?
Because the TSA’s job is not to increase security, but to make a very visible Rube Goldberg Machine so that the rubes can feel safe and stop nagging at the Powers That Be.
DL @ #35
If you or Harris don’t believe terrorists are stereotypical Muslims, then how can you even profile them?
The truth of the matter is the mass majority of Muslims are brown-skinned peoples. So when big-shot white dudes start attacking and vilifying Muslims (especially in the context of immigrants to Europe), it takes an obvious racist tone. As I stated above, you can’t have it both ways. Either Muslims can be anyone because it’s only a religious label, or Muslims have a distinct set of characteristic that can be profiled.
ERic Ross
Worst argument from authority EVER
Does Harris want to be a taken serious as a philosopher or not?
D L
Is that one of those superpowers like detecting muslims?
You’re thicker than seafood chowder in an Irish pub.
1. People have quoted Harris more than once. His exclusion of certain ethnicities, his own words about people who look “vaguely semitic” or who “look like Osama bin Laden”
2. People have pointed out repeatedly that you cannot actually see into somebody’s head to find out if they’Re muslim and have asked how you identify “muslims”. You can’t have your cake and eat it.
So, since you think this has nothing to do with race, tell me, how do you reliably identify all people who are muslim? Not just some people who are very likely muslim, but all people who are muslim.
Eric Ross @ 43
So you’re saying the only two options are either profiling specific “types” of people or making everyone jump through hoops? How about we do neither? Both have proven to be nothing but theater anyway.
@Giliell
What’s your source for this?
Fucking hell, Eric, you are going to hurt your back if you keep bending and twisting yourself like that so that “profile brown people” stops looking like “profile brown people”. Dishonest little deepshit…
dutchdelight
tagesschau.de
laurentweppe, Giliell, and other PZ sycophants:
I’ll pose the same question to you: Where are your impassioned pleas for the TSA to go back to the days of making 2-year-olds take off their shoes?
Sam Harris Sycophant @ 51:
Until you have something other than blind faith in Harris to offer, give it a rest. There are people in this thread who are doing sycophantic parroting, but it’s not me, nor Laurent, nor Giliell, nor others disagreeing with you.
So where does Cat Stevens fall w.r.t this argument? Does it make a difference whether his ticket says “Yusuf Islam”? Since his parents were Greek and Swedish, and he’s obviously white and speaks with an English accent, do we go entirely on his beard? His beard is smaller than most computer programmers I know…
Eric Ross @ 51
I already answered your ridiculous question. Feel free to respond.
Eric Ross
Did anybody here say that was a good policy?
Also, i see you have no fucking argument but a vague idea at how to play gotcha.
dutchdelight,
You appear to not have followed the news the last couple of months, irregardless, here some sources in your own language:
http://www.hln.be/hln/nl/960/Buitenland/article/detail/2402780/2015/07/24/Opvallend-meer-aanvallen-op-onderkomens-van-asielzoekers-in-Duitsland.dhtml
http://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/buitenland/vluchtelingen-duitsland-veel-vaker-doelwit-aanvallen
http://www.nu.nl/buitenland/4095663/vluchtelingen-in-duitsland-opnieuw-slachtoffer-van-brandstichting-.html
http://www.nujij.nl/algemeen/vluchtelingen-duitsland-veel-vaker-doelwit.33325404.lynkx
A simple Google search would have helped you.
PZ,
I think this is actually the crux. He knows it’s all bullshit–but it’s also inconvenient bullshit. Seeing as it’s bullshit anyway, why can’t we arrange it so that fine, upstanding white people don’t have to be inconvenienced by it?
@Giliell
There’s nothing on that page about daily fires set by white terrorists at refugee homes. Are you perhaps making things up to demonize people that you disagree with?
PZ’s mischaracterization of Harris’s idiotic point about Jerry Seinfeld (literally Jerry Seinfeld!) not being singled out does nothing to excuse his longstanding support for ethnic and racial profiling of people who may be Muslim.
If his position is merely that kids and old Okinawan women shouldn’t be scrutinized much, then has he written a piece apologizing for his previous bigoted views and saying he no longer holds those views? Because I totally believe children and women from Japan shouldn’t be especially scrutinized unless there’s some grounds for suspicion. I also don’t think a brown-skinned man with an Arabic name shouldn’t be especially scrutinized, again unless there’s grounds for suspicion. This is due to the simple fact that close to zero percent of brown-skinned men with Arabic names want to harm people on planes.
Eric Ross, #51
What is giving you the idea that we ever wanted TSA to make two-year old children remove their shoes to begin with?
dutchdelight,
From my first link: 202 cases in the first 6 months. That’s 1,11 attacks per day.
@zenlike
Thanks! Not much new there there though.
No mention of where the actual report is or what it actually says. From the descriptions, it doesn’t come anywhere close to Gilliell’s claims earlier.
@Eric Ross #52:
I’m not for the TSA asking anybody to remove their shoes. Heck, I’m not for the TSA at all, at least as it exists. There is no evidence of the TSA stopping a single terrorist attack. If fact, those testing airport security have been able to smuggle weapons on board pretty much at will. It’s all theater. So, if the TSA is so bad, why don’t we have planes crashing into buildings all the time now? Because, contrary to popular belief, there are very few people who are willing to die with the capability to carry out a 9/11 style attack. Quite the opposite of what you would find if all Muslims thought they’d get 72 virgins in heaven for carrying one out. That’s why almost all suicide bombings are no more complicated than “walk into that crowd of people” and “drive into that building”. Because only people with nothing, who are otherwise useless to the cause get selected for them.
Why do we have to let TSA see us naked under our clothes? Because the CEO of the company that makes those scanners went on TV (without telling anybody he ran the company) telling people we’d all die if they didn’t get to put them in all the airports. That’s why. They don’t make you safer.
I hate to break it to you but right now evil people are planning bad things and there’s nothing you can do about it. No amount of profiling is going to stop them because it’s so easy to get around. In fact the biggest terrorist threat comes from “lone wolves”, not organized Islamic terrorist cells. But, the good news is that you’ve never been safer. While there are a few high profile terrorist attacks, you’re 4X more likely to be killed by the police than a terrorist. So stop worrying and stop using fear as an excuse to attack Muslims.
dutchdelight,
Gilliell’s claim was that right wing white terrorists are setting fire to refugee homes daily. Maybe the setting fire was too narrrow. Whatever. Are attacks which do not constitute arson better then? In my book not.
What exactly about the claim do you find to be invalid?
I had to stop the second time I read Jerry Seinfeld and Betty White because I realized that I thought it first was Jerry Seinfeld and Barry White.
People like Barry White would on reality probably singled out any way or even because.
uncle frogy
If it wastes resources to treat everyone equally in America, then get more resources. Or rethink what you’re doing, but STILL treat everyone equally.
Discrimination SHOULD come with a cost.
Goodness, Dutchdelight, apologist for fascist terrorists
btw, I did a little search for you.
@zenlike
*Daily arson* *by white terrorists* seems to be completely made up for now. The most specific i saw it described was a more general “criminal actions” of some sort against refugee housing. I don’t see what warrants the assumption that every instance was arson. It could be, but doesn’t say that anywhere. Any “criminal action” against refugee housing is deplorable obviously.
Same goes for the instigators, the majority of incidents haven’t lead to convictions as far as i can tell.
Harris is starting to remind me of David Brooks or Thomas Friedman in his predilection for writing self-contradictory, self-indulgent, meandering bullshit opinion pieces.
I had no idea such a substantial fraction of our Homeland Security budget was being thrown away on useless searches of famous celebrities…
Think of all the money we could save if only we would allow famous
peoplewhite men to carry little jars of special honey onto airliners!dutchdelight displaying a classic case of hyperskepticism when a problem within white culture is brought up.
You know people behind the attacks are white supremacists and it is terrorism. You know it.
Just like people know when a suicide bomber goes off. It really is that easy to predict.
re @57:
so, Harris is making the profiling claim to illustrate the absurdity of the current TSA by proposing the impossible: waving thru all the innocent white people and closely examining the jihadists who are more probably going to suicide the plane down? some kind of parodic proposal, to force the TSA to fully examine its procedures to improve efficacy and reduce hardship on the innocent passengers?
worth considering…
hampered by Harris’ previous missives that are equally abhorrent.
hmmmm
What level of arson against refugee housing do you consider acceptable?
Eric Ross says:
Hah. I’ve known PZ in an academic setting, wherein my grade was dependent on him. I’m not a goddamned sycophant of his (you fell asleep during my presentation, PZ). I like reading PZ’s posts because he’s not a self-aggrandizing bullshit artist like Harris.
I don’t suck up to PZ. I just fucking despise Harris for the awful things he says and how he wraps them in pseudo-intellectual shit.
Sam Harris is a charismatic douchebag who never admits being wrong and cultivates a hero-worship following of atheists who want to feel superior to other people.
202 attacks on refugee homes in the first six months
2 arson attacks, 6 injured, 6.9
Arson in refugee home to be, 9.9.
Arson in refugee home to be, 3.9
Several injured in arson attack, 4.9.
Do I have to go on? MY link limit has been reached…
dutchdelight
So *daily arson* is *daily attack*. This is different or better how?
And what’s the issue with *white terrorists*? Do you doubt they are white? Do find the term terrorist to be false?
*Completely made up* my fucking arse.
Stop consuming Wilder’s garbage and try to actually think for yourself for once.
Also, if we’re gonna profile (or anti-profile), why are we saying “Muslim”? These terror attacks have come from a very specific subset of Muslims.
I have a colleague who’s from Iran, is himself a regime-hating apostate, and has told me you’ll probably never see a Shiite suicide bomber. He’s not saying Shiites can’t be terrorists, just that suicide attacks don’t fit in with Shia theology or culture. So does this mean we can wave through anyone who looks Muslim but looks particularly Shia? Does this fit into anti-profiling?
I’ll give the Harrisites this, though, so far noone has mentioned torturing suspects.
@Dreaming #77:
Oh crap, you had to go summon them!
gmacs
Never say never.
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/12/suicide-bombing-increase-shiite.html
Interestingly, when I was watching a documentary some time back about the political history of suicide bombings, the filmmakers found that one could trace endless threads back through centuries of tenuous links but that the modern rise of not just suicide attacks but suicide bombings in particular was traceable to the Iran/Iraq war in which Iran was losing ground before using young, poorly trained recruits/draftees to throw themselves at an enemy while wearing a satchel charge or wielding grenades. Others were assigned to stay behind during withdrawals to set off their explosives as the Iraqi advance reached their position so that more highly trained and/or valued troops could outrun the now-cautious pursuers.
I’d have to do some research to find the documentary again, and of course the documentary makers aren’t necessarily correct in their thesis (this isn’t a situation in which I’m knowledgeable about the situation so I can cite a source with the confidence of independent knowledge of its accuracy), but the film makers did interview people (claimed on film to be) within Iran who remembered those days and showed murals and other public remnants of the recruiting efforts from the time. On the basis of the films evidence and narrative, I’ve been thinking for quite a while now that modern suicide bombings were a shi’a development that grew out of the population advantage of Iran vis-a-vis Iraq and it’s disadvantage (in the same comparison) in certain war materiel (Tanks? Missiles? Aircraft? Wands of Fireball? I don’t remember that part.)
Zenlike,
I stand corrected.
I’m just sitting here laughing because this has fuckall to do with whether Harris’ views are defensible, and you know it.
Crip Dyke@80,
I’d heard the pioneers were the Tamil Tigers – whose ideology is/was Marxist-Leninist, and hence atheist.
SallyStrange@82,
Good to see you! Maybe we just haven’t coincided, but I don’t recall seeing comments from you for a while.
Well, one could argue that Japanese Kamikaze pilots were a form of suicide bombers as well…
Actually I’ve had a couple of discussions with my congressman about the ineffectiveness of TSA’s security theater. I didn’t mention 2-year-olds and their shoes but I did talk about a baby’s full milk bottle being confiscated. Now please explain the connection between TSA’s stupidity and Harris’ stupidity, other than they have to do with airport security and being stupid.
ER bloviating:
Where is your EVIDENCE that SH is right, and not the security experts? Philosophers aren’t use to the idea of “put up or shut up” where evidence is concerned, unlike experts in the field, but philosophers standing would jump enormously if they and their followers adopted reality based reasoning like scientists. But that requires them to acknowledge when they are wrong. I’m waiting for SH and his followers to admit they are wrong….
@Saad
I don’t doubt that a good number of these “criminal acts” were the work of white terrorists. Given the low rate of convictions, you can’t really tell who are behind it to what degree though. There are quite a few candidates with motive to interfere with refugee housing. White terrorists just happen to fit best in some peoples self serving narratives, oddly oblivious to the multicultural world around them. Whatever it takes to present themselves as the bestest saviors of those less fortunate.
@Azkyroth
Are you going to argue “arson against refugee housing” is not a criminal act?
Or maybe you were just trying to get an impression of how a quote-mining creationist feels?
@Gilliel
And… more then a few were not in use yet.
So, I think we can now safely call the 1+ arsons a day against refugee housing thing…. a big fat lie, with the rather obvious intention to demonize. Not very gutmenschlich. Or… very typical, i forget.
@zenlike
Not sure what you’re getting at, i’m not the one exaggerating to maintain a narrative. I hope you’re not really asking me to explain how arson is not the same as attack. Which, as attested to by by Gilliells links, is still not correct, since vandalism seems to be the overwhelming majority of the incidents covered in the 1+ incidents a day statistic.
Funny to read you doubling down now. Made me chuckle. Reactionist much?
Je zet jezelf voor schut maat.
SallyStrange @82:
It’s very simple, and I have explained it several times now.
(1) Sam Harris has proposed anti-profiling.
(2) TSA has implemented anti-profiling.
Therefore, if you believe that (1) is not merely unwise, but in fact a morally indefensible outrage, you should also believe that (2) is a morally indefensible outrage. However, I see no evidence of widespread belief that (2) is a morally indefensible outrage. That’s all I’m saying.
Note also that the above makes no reference to brown skin, the overall efficacy of the TSA, rates of violence among demographic or religious groups, Sam’s attitude towards Muslims, or any of the other garbage that I’m sure is coming my way.
dutchdelight
And still you have not shown what exactly we are exaggerating.
I have not said they are the same, I said I see no difference treating them as having a different impact.
Ah, so it is ‘just’ anti-migrant vandalism. Soooo much better, I’m sure.
Ahum, projecting much?
Fuck you. You right-wing racists have already misappropriated a lot of words, you are not taking this one.. It is your side who are the reactionaries.
For anyone interested, he said that I’m making a fool of myself.
Keep on spewing your racist garbage, dutchdelight. You are only making yourself look like the right-wing extremist you are.
dutchdelight
Hey, fascist apologist, did you read the rest of the links? Shall I dig you up the arson attacks for the rest of September? You’re the one lying here, for very transparent motives.
Eric Ross
Except in the post you have linked to YOURSELF in the thread yesterday.
Just keep the dishonesty coming, Eric.
Eric Ross @88
Have you seen anyone here say what a great job TSA is doing? This is a yes or no question and your final grade involves getting the answer right.
Just because your hero and the TSA supposedly are recommending or doing similar things doesn’t mean those similar things aren’t stupid and possibly racist. So it’s up to you to justify both Harris’ stupidity and TSA’s stupidity. The rest of your final grade will be determined by how well you tap-dance and hand-wave the various stupidities away.
Sam is just so dim. Maybe he’s what Dan Quayle with a science degree would sound like.
So, if TSA announced that all white people can just walk to their gates with no screening, but brown people have to go through all the regular screening we’ve been doing all this time, that would be , that would not be a , but would actually be a good, fair, forward-thinking thing for them to do, not racist at all. Because it’s . The makes it good, like magic.
Got you, Eric.
What a doofus.
Maybe, the trick was in reading my first question. I’ll lay it out for you:
Gilliell:
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/fremdenfeindliche-uebergriffe-103.html :
I hope you get it now. If not, maybe your teacher can help you find out.
A moot point since the claim made was of >1 arson incidents, and it’s nowhere near that number, but good for you. Let me know when you find out why someone chose to misrepresent that. That seemed to have your interest earlier.
I think you’re getting somehere. Clearly it didn’t meet someones purpose to be more accurate. Go Sherlock, go!
If you weren’t so intent on putting ill-informed labels on people that disagree with you, you wouldn’t have to get so mad when you find out that you were, no, *are*, without a shred of doubt, the reactionary in this topic.
Source? Oh right. Reactionary.
So, disagreeing with you makes me an extremist too. I was wrong, you are acting more like some fascist reactionary.
Regardless; whether one has complained about the TSA or not does not disqualify one from noting Harris’ incoherence and bigotry.
You know this.
Not to mention the “refugee homes” bit, “homes” implies they are being lived in, so the false impression is given that people are being burned alive daily.
I’m being fucking nice about this. I hope you fucking realize that. If you don’t you might actually be a fascist with no regard for the truth.
PZ:
I am talking about specific changes that the TSA implemented (approximately, to the best of my recollection) 2 years ago. See comment #33. These are things TSA is doing today, as I type this. If you are outraged, you’ve had 2 years to register your outrage. Where is it?
The hypothetical that you lay out would of course be an outrage on multiple levels, and there would be a huge public outcry, but it has nothing to do with what I’m talking about (although I am noting the lack of outcry over the TSA policy changes I am referencing). As I said, if your response references brown skin, the efficacy of the TSA generally (I’m looking at you, Al Dente), etc., you are simply not responding to the point I’m making.
You brandished the claim that not every crime being committed against the refugees was arson as if it were a defense against objections to the arsons. This implies that there is some amount of arson that would be unproblematic from your perspective, provided it is less than “all the arson.” What percentage is that?
Doofus, did they do it because your false hero said so, or did they do it because their own research said so? If the did it without the help of SH and you, you are both irrelevant to the discussion…..Nothing but noise.
Ask friends of James Byrd Jr what terrorist look like.
I’ll take the polite approach and assume this is a dictionary-hiccup on your end or else that you are reading the text way too closely. Because the word ‘home’ does not imply in any way that the inhabitants are present at the time, at least not in English.
Furthermore, if an empty refugee home is burned down that doesn’t make a bad situation better. It would simply be worse if the occupants were still trapped inside. Where burning houses / homes are concerned there is no better, just worse. I suggest you find another nit to pick – if you bother at all. I hate to think what kind of point you might be trying to make with this one.
@Gilliell
dutchdelight, you need a name change. You are utterly undelightful.
If Canada were to do clumsy Sam Harris style profiling it would be of Sikhs, not Muslims. After all Sikh terrorists have killed far more Canadians than Muslim terrorists. But what would an “obvious Sikh terrorist” look like? A guy wearing the tradtional Sikh turban and beard? Well, follow that line of thinking, and the people you’d end up regularly pulling out of line for more extensive checking would include Canada Border Service Agency agents, RCMP officers, and at least one Conservative Party Member of Parliament.(If you look at footage of Question Period you can regularly see the latter behind Stephen Harper.)
In a way it’s funny we don’t make it harder for white American males to get into Canada. CBSA agents regularly seize firearms from Americans crossing into Canada, and it seems like we can’t go more than a week or two without a white American male killing multiple people with firearms.
Home implies it has people living in it, or out of it, if you prefer, *presence* is unspecified, which leaves open the interpretation that people are burned every day, which is not even remotely true as demonstrated by Giliells references.
It’s part of a pattern, otherwise it would be unremarkable. Don’t worry about it though.
@timgueguen
It’s a ruse, don’t tell anyone!
#98: Whoooooosh.
Quit acting as though we’re somehow pro-TSA. It’s bullshit.
dutchdelight, 105
Um, no. In English, when someone says a home or house is burned, it does not imply that the structure was at all occupied at the time of the fire and that someone was burned to death, only that there was residential property damage due to fire/smoke/heat. Most buildings in developed countries with actual building code enforcement (that is to say: not Georgia in the USA where my house was built in the 1970s) have at least one functional smoke detector and multiple points of egress, so most fires do not result in death or physical injury.
http://www.usfa.fema.gov/data/statistics/
Eric Ross @ 98:
(shouting tearfully) “Leave Sam Harris alone!”
TSA policy sucks.
Do I now have your blessing to go ahead with a critique of Mr. Harris?
If not, please be specific about the requisite hoops.
PZ @107:
I challenge you to quote me as suggesting that any commenter (myself included) is pro-TSA. Otherwise, stop misrepresenting me. It’s bullshit.
What I have said, many times now, is that you and others have been inconsistent by expressing outrage over SH’s proposed anti-profiling (i.e. giving less scrutiny to the very old and very young, in particular), but expressing no outrage as TSA has been doing exactly that for about 2 years now. Your overall opinion of TSA is irrelevant.
Why are a couple of assholes in this thread insisting that the issue of this post is whether we like TSA’s current practices, the absence of airport scrutiny on Jerry Seinfeld, or the benevolent white supremacists who made sure homes were empty of people before they torched them?
The real point is that Sam Harris has repeatedly said he is for profiling against Muslims and anyone who looks like they may be Muslim. He has said it explicitly and has never offered an apology or a statement saying he was wrong and no longer holds that view. He has just changed his wording to avoid saying it explicitly. I guess that little bit of wordplay works on racist idiots.
Eric Ross @110
That was my challenge to you and you flunked it. You were complaining that nobody was saying anything about TSA’s policies or actions even though they appear identical to your buddy Sam’s recommended policies. Nice try on the Tu Quoque but you don’t get extra credit for trying but failing to shift the blame from Sam’s shoulders to ours.
[sniff, sniff?]
What’s that I smell?
Ah yes, sealioning hyper-sceptics, so charming.
One has a micro-millimetre focus on perceived hypocrisy, the other seems intent on a parsing so minutely that the OED’s compact version’s text would look gargantuan next to their argument.
Do you think that if we set up a big mirror on their beach they’d be able recognise the ad hominem staring back?
dutchdelight calling Gilliel a fascist reactionary is so cute!
Maybe in a year or two he’ll learn some more big words and start calling her a communist.
Dammit, I got my double-consonants wrong in Giliell. I blame bilingualism.
How many days is it acceptable to you for refugees to be burned to death on?
Considering that TSA didn’t listen to SH for what they did, he is irrelevant to what they do. Which is based on science and facts, not Islamophobic paranoia and white male privilege. Which makes you and your herowhorship even more irrelevant to a logical, factual based argument.
NEWSFLASH FOR IDIOTS:
Anti-profiling is just profiling. The ‘anti-‘ is there purely to act as a convenient guise for racists to make the pretense they aren’t racists.
The next idiot who announces that the problem is that Harris is actually defending the right of famous celebrities to go through the airport unperturbed by TSA is going to get his or her fucking stupid ass banned.
Note that bit in my first paragraph where I express exasperation with Harris fans who insist on parsing his words one by one: this is an example of that behavior. He’s arguing in favor of profiling Muslims, not that rich & famous people need more privileges…although if he’s also arguing that, he’s even dumber than I thought.
Saad @111:
Exactly.
Also, given how Harris advocates for profiling Muslims (something he hasn’t expressed much thought on since he hasn’t indicated exactly *how* one goes about profiling Muslims), I wonder if he approves of the racial profiling of Ahmed Mohamed.
Tony @ 120:
Only if he tries to board an airplane to travel to Washington DC to meet the President.
Eric Ross @110:
There’s no inconsistency, because the TSA doesn’t do “anti-profiling”.
The ACLU is even suing them to either force a scientific justification or get them to stop profiling.
Guess they should have tried “anti-profiling” instead.
Eric Ross @98:
Er, the TSA aren’t all that effective. Take that PreCheck program you keep crowing about.
There’s apparently no way to tamper with the codes, as they’re cryptographically signed, but A) you’re one private key leak away from doing so, and B) now you’ve got a pretty good idea of whether or not you’ll face extra scrutiny before you hit the airport, plus C) why the hell didn’t they encrypt the code on top of signing it?!
Also, remember those TSA-approved locks? The ones they promised would allow the government to check your bags, but not criminals? I hope you’re sitting down, because
Someone’s already made 3D printable versions and posted them publicly, so in a few hours you could recreate the entire master set of TSA keys.
Speaking of PreCheck, it’s a bit of a joke.
And you can’t have empty lines, because then people would complain. So
So as long as you show up during congested times and don’t rank high in their profiling system (the details of which have been leaked), you’ve got a decent chance of waltzing through security.
And to put a cherry on top, from that article about the leak:
So we have no science to back up the TSA’s profiling program, and every reason to think that despite never mentioning race it’ll be used to racially profile. If Eric Ross is correct in asserting the TSA is doing exactly what Sam Harris suggests, he’s admitted Harris is relying on rank pseudoscience to promote prejudice.
dutchdelight
In case they have calenders where you live: The first half of the year’S been over for quite a while. It’s no longer June. Things have changed dramatically. I see you completely ignored all the links I gave you for September (and that was not an exhaustive list).
Lying is of course not something your teacher can help you with.
It’s really interesting that you’re representing this as being my claim as well, when the quote isn’t mine and the claim isn’t mine. Shows quite clearly who’s the dishonest dipshit.
It’s a compound noun. And no, homes does not always mean “currently lived in”. Also, what’s the point here? Should we give them fucking cookies for mostly destroying property? Apart from the fact that I linked to two incidences were people were hurt. More right wing terrorism apologetics from you.
1. You’re a lot of things. Nice isn’t on the list.
2. Even if I were a pathological liar with no regard for truth it wouldn’t make me a fascist. That’s not he definition of fascism. But accusingthe everybody else of being a fascist is the current modus operandi of the far right. Throw that word around often and loudly so people probably won’t look at you too closely and/or it loses all meaning so when people rightly identify you as one you can handwave it away.
OH; and to further support my claim:
Salzhemmersdorf, 28.8.
Leipzig, 26.8
Porta Westfalica, 16.9
Minden, 15. 9
@dutchdelight:
Kan je nou effe kappen? Ik weet niet waarom jij denkt dat het iets helpt als jij hier met je grote laarzen binnen komt banjeren om op alle slakken zout te leggen. En om nou hier mensen die jou daarop wijzen voor fascisten te gaan uitmaken… het moet niet gekker worden. In Duitsland worden panden waar vluchtingelingen zijn/zulen worden ondergebracht vernield/in brand gestoken, en als ‘t niet iedere dag gebeurt, maar eens in de twee dagen, dan maakt dat nauwelijks verschil. De intentie is hetzelfde.
Re: dutchdelight (#105):
‘Unspecified’ works for me and there is nothing wrong with leaving out or simply not knowing certain details that aren’t relevant. As stated, in in this case empty house burnt = bad, occupied house burnt = worse. The bad outcome is sufficient to raise concern. Giliell made no claim one way or another with regard to casualties in the attacks. The point weren’t the attacks themselves, not their minutiae. Any implication of casualties you may see is simply not there.
If you insist on people providing precise information you should start with Sam Harris. Maybe you can coax him into telling us just what a jihadist actually is so we can tell who to avoid at the airport. That would be an example of a relevant yet unspecified detail.
——
From #110:
Can someone please explain (convincingly) why it would be wrong (?) for me to criticize Harris without also criticizing the TSA?* If I go to the supermarket to complain about spoiled goods they sold me, do they get to dismiss the complaint if I didn’t complain about world hunger as well?
*I’d be happy to multi-task: I don’t like excessive and pointless gestures in the name (and name only) of security. We have it in Europe, too, although it’s not as bad as in the US – I think. Either way It remains pointless and bad ideas about profiling just add insult to injury.
Maybe instead of spending bucks on searching people the TSA could just give out vouchers for the airport shops. They’d be much more popular and, for all we know, an actual terrorist who gets a free coffee from the government will reconsider blowing up those nice infidels. It’s about as likely to work as picking out jihadist lookalikes (description pending) out of the queue.
@Gilliell
dutchdelight
Goodness, your intellect is truely represented by your ability to blockquote
Yeah, I said “right wing white terrorists who are setting fire to refugee homes daily”. I did not say “I said I see no difference treating them as having a different impact” or the rest of the stuff you quoted following that.
I did not make the claim arson >1. I said daily wich means something like “every day”, but not even every single day (a “daily paper” does not necessarily have a Sunday issue nor does your “daily commute” cease existing when you’re on a holiday).
I gave you a list of 5 attacks in 7 days, which is non-exhaustive and then some more for September. I could dig up more, but what’s the point?
*Sad laughter*
Yeah, because the worst thing about Hitler was that he never told the truth
Ehm, you’re still addressing ME as if I were several people. You know, when several native speakers explain to me that a word doesn’t mean what I thought it means I tend to listen and don’t insist that MY personal definition is the right one.
How else do you call somebody who sets fire to a designated (if you prefer that) refugee home?
Yes, I know in your world noticing that there are white supremacists is racist, but pray tell me, whom am I demonizing? The arsonists? Or the poor white terrorists who didn’t set fire to that particular refugee home? How exactly does one demonize terrorists? Sure you can demonize people as terrorist, but the other way round?
dutchdelight,
Now you are just being cute. You are not new here. You have already spewed your garbage before on other threads, in which you spewed the same talking points as Wilders, who you have defended.
Wilders is the one who wants to destroy religious liberty. Wilders is the one who wants to destroy freedom of speech. Wilders is the one who wants to destroy freedom of conscience.
Wilders is the fascist. Wilders is the reactionary. Just accusing your opponents with the same terms doesn’t magically make it so.
@komarov
Thanks for your opinion.
In other news, the wording allows for maximum demonization. That is what the problem is with the rhetoric. Demonizing is effectively delayed incitement to violence which can get people killed. Besides that it is a big fat self serving lie, as i’ve shown many times already.
What makes you think i care about Sam Harris and his opinions? Where i live there domestic trips by airplane are pretty much non-existent, so there is no argument about their security. All other flights get the security checks they warrant as far as i’m aware, and Harris is no consultant to any customs agency near me.
dutchdelight,
You haven’t showed jack shit. The fact that you are worried white supremacists are being demonized says enough about you.
It’s also funny you admit demonizing people is a bad thing because it can cause violence in the long term. Maybe you should inform your white supremacist friends and your political heroes to stop demonizing immigrants and muslims?
@Giliell
If you’re trying to say typos are indicative of intellect, you might want to reread your own posts. Nice own goal though.
In your desperate race to the finish, it seems you forgot about the “white terrorists” in your claim. You might want to address that.
Seem you’ve run into a dead end here.
I combining it eh. It’s efficiency, don’t take it personally.
All explanations you refer to are missing the mark, so i’m perfectly fine pointing that out.
Breaking the law makes you a criminal. It’s not complicated.
Don’t kid yourself. Accusing a particular ethnic group being solely responsible for setting fire to refugee houses, when barely any perpetrators have been caught and many groups with motive could be behind it… that’s plain bigoted racism. Nothing to do with “noticing” people. That’s just another lie to try and minimize the extent of your bigoted remark.
Pretty much everyone who disagrees with you on immigration policy, pretty standard fare. Using the “white terrorists” dogwhistle. Don’t be coy now, just let it out.
@zenlike
Then it should be easy to support your naked assertions. Yet you don’t.
Get a blog, people who care will find you eventually.
@zenlike
Don’t have any of those. White supremacists have barely any presence where i’m from, and don’t pose much of a serious violent threat, unlike the unhinged left, they’ve been known to brutally murder politicians they don’t like. Usually when the news here talks about “extremists” from Wilders corner, the camera will pan across a group of desperate low-educated ordinary people (far from all white fyi) clinging to low-paying jobs who are just afraid of ending up forgotten and taking the brunt of our sad excuse of an immigration policy *again*.
Divisive, inaccurate and incendiary rhetoric from the left is pretty much the status quo here.
Don’t have any friends who do that. If you find that i did so, point me to it.
Facts are not demonization attemps btw, they are critical to understanding and forming sensible humane policies. Trying to ignore facts leads to things like violent riots, religiously based fascism, and rape sprees in refugee housing centers for example. Guess how many of those perpetrators are going to get convicted.
I think we’ll agree those things are not in the best interest of human wellbeing. Currently they happen under the watchful eyes of the self-appointed bestest saviors in Europe.
dutchdelight
You’re boring. You’re constantly wiggling around, incoherently, redefine things, quote sloppily and incorrectly so you’re missrepresenting people and then accuse them of lying and so on and so on.
I suppose you think yourself clever.
I also suppose you will claim that this post by me means you won.
I don’t care, people can read for themselves. I’ve made my claim, I’ve supported my claim, I’m done here.
This is not a game. It’s about peoples lives. It’s just sad you are to ideologically invested to care beyond superficial attempts to help out in a crisis. Maybe bringing some more toothbrushes to a refugee center will make you feel better again.
Do I win a cookie?
Ask the judges.
Hj Hornbeck, #122-125
Awesome posts. Thanks for all that information.
dutchdelight, #129
When we heard about the murders at the black church in Charleston recently, everybody who isn’t a racist asshole said “white supremacist” with near 100% certainty.
When we hear people are attacking refugees and/or their houses in Europe, everybody who isn’t a racist asshole can safely say white terrorism. We can call it white supremacy if you’re that uncomfortable with whitey being called a terrorist.
But…but….it could have been gnomes!!
And yet dutchdelight, even though you don’t know white supremacist, don’t support white supremacist, don’t even want to be associated with white supremacists, you are still soooo concerned with us demonizing those bad white supremacists by saying they commit horrible acts towards immigrants.
Just keep repeating to yourself you are on the right side. And keep voting for the actual fascist.
Dreaming
My favourite one is “the refugees themselves!” Especially in the cases where the refugees weren’t even living there (which apparently means this was just some randomn crime unconnected to the fact that those were designated refugee homes). They somehow managed to get to a place they didn’t know without having any means of transport and set fire to a place that would have alleviated the horrible conditions in the overcrowded already lived in refugee homes. Makes total sense.
Without having money to buy accelerant or even matches. Yet this must be the answer because obviously it can’t be white terrorists because there are no white terrorists.
dianne
Stop maligning white terrorists!
Dutchdelight:
You are welcome, even though I have no idea where that paragraph about demonisation came from.
No. The average person, when told that “Homes have been burnt down”, will not automatically assume that people are still inside, much less deliberately trapped to be killed. If it were otherwise, someone reporting the fact would probably find it worth mentioning from the get go, especially if it served their purported agenda. As far as any rhetoric may be concerned it’s too much of a stretch. People just don’t think that way. You’d have to come up with something a lot cleverer to guide people to the assumptions you want them to make.
As is the listener might ask if someone was hurt. However, eople are perfectly capable of not knowing something without jumping to the worst possible conclusion and forming ye olde pitchforke-and-torch mobbe.
The implication is not there. Nor was it in any of Giliell’s statements. If it cropped up in the sources you’d have to take it up with them.
Dutchdelight at various:
Once again, it seems you need to be told that this thread is not about you. The topic here is the latest incarnation of Sam Harris’s ongoing bigotry, so address that, rather than using this thread as a platform for your usual repugnant idiocy.
If you have to resort to “they didn’t burn down housing with occupants, just non-occupied housing”, you have pretty much lost the argument in my book.
First of all, how sure are those people that the residence is unoccupied? Maybe there are squatters. Maybe people were moved in ahead of schedule. Maybe some workers were present to prepare the residence.
Second of all, fires tend to spread. Yes, the house may be unoccupied, but the neighboring houses might not be.
This is not some cudgel to attack my ideological opponents either. When left-wingers were burning down fast-food restaurants I also condemned them, without hesitation. Their excuse was also that the restaurants were empty because it was deep in the night. Until that one time when they burned down a restaurant in which a manager was working late. Luckily he managed to escape.
komarov #128:
Like virtually everyone else here, you insist on misrepresenting me and refusing to engage with what I’ve actually said.
That is a terrible analogy. Here is a more apt one:
You shop at SmallFoodsCo and buy what you judge to be spoiled goods. You complain vociferously on a popular blog, with many others piling on, that SmallFoodsCo is a horrible company that needs to go out of business. You say that anyone who thinks that SmallFoodsCo is anything other than rotten to its core is a doofus/idiot/whatever.
Meanwhile, for the past 2 years, LargeFoodCo has been selling substantially the same spoiled goods, with no noticeable protest. LargeFoodsCo is a much larger company than SmallFoodsCo, so you and most of the other commenters have surely bought their spoiled goods, but said nothing. When another commenter on the blog points out this whopping inconsistency, the only even remotely on-topic response is “we never said we liked LargeFoodsCo”.
And since I can already smell the distortions coming: I am not saying that I think Sam Harris is proposing the equivalent of “spoiled goods”; I am merely acknowledging that you think that. At any rate, I am doing responding to misrepresentations. Going forward, I will only respond to thoughtful responses to what I have actually said. Thus, I expect this will be my last post on this topic.
Eric Ross
Well, at least you have declared yourself the winner of the debate.
Congratulations I guess.
… and therefore … ? Again, and perhaps it will help if it put it in broader terms: what’s wrong with focusing on a specific topic?
The topic of this / these threads is that Sam Harris is wrong about profiling and insists on his views despite all the people, experts included, trying to tell him otherwise. For this discussion the TSA doesn’t even have to be involved. We could easily substitute every mention of the TSA with SecuriCo, a fictional airport security agency in the Reunited Duchy of Manerica, whose security protocol starts and ends with a stern look. Impact on this topic? None.
Harris’s ideas remain the same, regardless of what the TSA is actually doing. The TSA could profile the heck out of old asian ladies and toddlers whose shoes won’t stay on anyway. They could give out free coffee at random or poison passengers and harvest their organs. It wouldn’t matter – it would be a separate issue. Harris’s ideas are still the same and deserves to be criticised accordingly.
As for the food analogy, I’m apparently already putting quite a lot of time to get SFCo to change their liberal approach to freshness and edibility. Why must I divert my attention to deal with LFCo at the same time? That’s still missing from your version.
Komarov @ 152:
You do realize you’re going to get the same fucking response from Eric, right? Eric will find fault with every word, and go on repeating the same bullshit over and over and over, like a certain person with the name Sam.
I did a CTRL+F for “suicidal jihadist” but oddly enough I don’t see a definition from Eric Ross yet.
If we’re to continue the definition of anti-profiling by providing the negating characteristics, at what point are we left with young brown men?
Remember that game Guess Who from Milton Bradley? I feel like this is the game being played with this “anti-profiling” rhetorical cow-pie.
If you want to know what Sam really thinks, listen to the most recent episode of his “Waking Up” podcast, titled “What I Really Think About Profiling”.
And yes, I am ignoring, and will continue to ignore, those who address me but do not engage (thoughtfully) with what I have actually said.
In which Eric Ross defines ‘thoughtfully engage’ as ‘agrees with me’.
*science documentary whisper*
Fascinating
What an arrogant and utterly wrong asshole you are. Hero worship diminishes you to a non-entity.
One day you might mature intellectually, and realize you are far from the smartest person in the room. As you so aptly show with every post.
Eric Ross
Bless your heart.
You definitely know you have a winning argument when your entire “defense” consists on trying to point at somebody else as a bigger wrong. Well done Eric.
Look! Look at the shiny, shiny! It’s got extra sparkles in it!
Clearly, Harris’ boring, monotone delivery is like a siren’s call that mesmerises you and leads you into a trance where you become able to ignore the fact that he is absolutely arguing for racial profiling.
Fair is fair, Eric is a true Harrisite, he has embraced misdirection, obtuseness, intellectual dishonesty and a complete inability to recognise when they are wrong.
Ok, Eric Ross, I’m willing to play your game a bit.
Eric Ross @ 33:
Speaking personally, it’s because I was unaware of the change. I don’t fly much, and don’t pay much attention to the specifics of security theater unless I’m planning on a walk-on myself.
So, unless you propose that the overall level of security be reduced, that means that the attention freed up by this policy goes…
where again?
To put it another way, how do you define a category of people as ‘lower risk’ without defining the other category as ‘higher risk’?
Outrage has been directed at the TSA on this blog.
The fact that it hasn’t been over this particular issue previously might very well be because we understand that the decision-making at the TSA is riddled with bigotry and a pandering to the lowest common denominator of human nature. (In my case, as noted above, it was simple ignorance).
Now, if you’d like us to lump Sam Harris into the same level of thinking as the TSA planning staff, we can probably accommodate you. On the other hand, if you’d like us to think Mr. Harris is (unlike the TSA planning staff) a deep, important, largely correct thinker, well, then, you might expect to see some push back.
If you’re telling us that what Mr. Harris says is irrelevant, I can accept that.
If you’re telling us it’s relevant, but that we shouldn’t discuss it, well, sorry, no free pass.
If you’re telling us it’s relevant, and we should discuss it… well, here we are.
@zenlike
I’ve just pointed out the inaccuracy, go ask the misinformer why they were inaccurate in this way. Since i’ve told you that many times now, and you haven’t even tried that once. I can only conclude you are just faking the interest in order to achieve some other goal.
@Caine
I should just let people make shit up and ignore it as they attack the messenger?
Fuck you, your arrogant bias, and the horse you rode in on Caine.
dutchdelight
Where exactly did you learn English? If the default response to “there was a fire at the house down the street” is “have they been able to identify the bodies pulled from the rubble?”, then it is a place with shittier construction habits than Georgia and I want to know where that place is so that I will never be tempted to visit.
Given your continued denial of the high probability of white involvement in attacks against refugee housing, let’s ask a simple question: in any given country, who is most likely to be railing against immigrants? Answer: The majority and/or ‘native’ ethnicity that ‘owns’ that country (aka, the most recent population to seize control of that bit of land by hook or by crook). In much of Europe, the ‘natives’ consists of what most people would consider to be ‘white’ with a very long history of tribalism and violence against ‘the other’ (whether the distinction is based on language, region, religion, economics, etc.).
Even if there were not a single refugee casualty, just burning their housing and forcing them onto the street or crowded temporary housing is an act of terrorism. People like my mom keep complaining about how we need to be doing so many more checks on the people coming in because they could be terrorists, yet those same lily white assholes refuse to accept the plain fact that most of the terrorists are already in the countries the refugees are fleeing to; that people of color are not themselves terrorists, but have been the targets of those terrorists for centuries. Show me video of anti-refugee protests in Europe filled with people of color screaming about invaders from Syria, then I’ll reconsider my quite reliable default assumption that when terrorism targeting people of color occurs in Europe or North America, it is most likely being committed by white authoritarians.
dutchdelight:
You’re the one making shit up (like new definitions for home and house), and attacking everyone who disagrees with you. This is standard behaviour on your part. One more time – this thread is not about you.
Nerd, 117
The TSA seems a lot like much of congress in being a meat-space version of conservapedia. Wishful thinking and bias of the willfully ignorant/greedy presented as the one twu way instead of anything approximating evidence-based, well-reasoned policy. It’s been two or three years since I last flew, but last time I was at ATL airport there was almost no line at the metal detector (compared to the sizable line at the scanners) so I just plopped my carry-on bag (still had bags of liquids and electronics inside) and effects tray onto the conveyor belt and strolled my pasty ass through the metal detector as most of the TSA kept sitting there talking to each other behind the conveyor scanner while bored out of their skulls and barely bothering to glance at me. Then, of course, there was the somewhat recent gun smuggling by airport employees… TSA is not even a marginally convincing theater group; I’ve seen more authentic acting from actual robots.
MattP
As I pointed out early in this thread, Isis doesn’t need to put their terrorists on risky boats not knowing where they’ll end up with no moey and resources. They have enough fighters with EU passports, a considerable amount of them being lilly white.
@MattP
I’ve been pretty clear. If you prefer to misunderstand people, then beat up strawmen, good for you.
A house is a building
A home is a place where people live
Where did you learn English?
@Caine
One more time, fuck you.
@MattP
The strawman union will be sending you a letter soon about quotas. You’ll do better when you refrain from lying about my statements.
dutchdelight
Bless your heart, too.
White xenophobic terrorists attacked several refugee houses.
They did it because they’re white supremacists and want Europe to be all white and for brown children to die.
Dutchdelight:
The English language is more subtle than you give it credit for. Next time you have to fill in an English form take a close look: Does it say ‘home’ address or ‘house’ address? Just to kill the suspense, it’ll be the former because it’s still your home even when you’re sitting in someone’s office filling out forms.
It’ll still be your home address if it burns down, in fact, and all the newspapers will report that a home was destroyed in a fire. They’ll probably elaborate by saying that noone was hurt as the house was empty at the time. The house which was a home that burned down. I’m not sure if this is more or less confusing but it probably won’t make a difference anyway, so I might as well have some fun with it.
But honestly, it makes not a blind bit of difference whether you say “A house was burnt down” or “A home was burnt down”. At most people seeing the latter will think someone lost their home, which is terrible, but that’s all the conclusion-jumping they will do. Neither phrase says anything at all about casualties and neither carries a strong implication for or against loss of life.
Re: Caine (#164): Thanks, saved me the trouble of pointing that out…
And a house, which is just a building, of course exists in a vacuum, with no neighboring buildings which can catch fire, and the arsonists of course have 100% certainty in knowing that the house is indeed a house and not occupied in any way.
Fuck you too dutchdelight, you dishonest scumbag.
@komarov
Very good. So a home definitely has people living in it, present or not, and in the case of a house it’s optional. Now try explaining that to the budding linguists here.
@zenlike
When you’re done talking to what i can only assume are random people passing by, let me know if you found out why the person making the 1 arson a day claim used the words they used to make that claim.
There are times when i kinda miss the old porcupine.
dutchdelight,
A retirement home is a retirement home even if it’s just got its license and it’s still empty. Is someone sets fire to it a week before grand opening no reasonable person would complain that saying fire was set to a retirement home is false because no one has moved in yet.
Cut the fucking word games.
chigau,
I miss the ability to send the off topic quasilinguistic bullshit to the Thunderdome.
Word games are all he has. I have to admit it’s reached a point where it would almost be funny where it not for the fact that it’s pretty sick…..
Beatrice
That, too.
I am in awe, well done. This whole house / home sideshow was for your benefit, dutchdelight, because of this:
which is wrong, plain and simple. And now you somehow try to turn it all around and point it at .. what, a sarcastic post by zenlike? The above quote is wrong. You are wrong when you claim that Giliell implied any human casualties. however vaguely. In short:
You are wrong.
[I’d link to a definition of every word but wouldn’t want to run into any filters. Try google.]
Hey, dutchdelight, you are the asshole who is playing word-games with house/home, as if it makes any difference. Just keep the dishonesty coming.
Beatrice:
That’s all the bigoted asswipe has, and no one is going to take them away, oh no!
House: 1. a building in which people live; residence for human beings.
Home: 1. a house, apartment, or other shelter that is the usual residence of a person, family, or household.
Residence: 1. the place, especially the house, in which a person lives or resides; dwelling place; home
Abode: 1. a place in which a person resides; residence; dwelling; habitation; home.
Dwelling: 1. a building or place of shelter to live in; place of residence; abode; home.
Arson: 1. Law. the malicious burning of another’s house or property, or in some statutes, the burning of one’s own house or property, as to collect insurance.
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-, 166
Indeed. When I first read your comment at the start of ‘hasn’t learned a thing’ I had a flashback to the conversation with my mom and sorely wished I had the wits to give that same response. But I was not really thinking about european recruits for IS as I live in banjo-land, so my conception of terrorist is still dominated by the racist, sexist, anti-muslim, anti-LGBTQIA, and/or anti-helpful/useful-government assholes that so many people refuse to call terrorists simply because they are white and/or government employees. I know it’s been said many times already, but one more voice to the choir: IS is dangerous in Syria and Iraq, but it’s generally a tiny threat elsewhere compared to the multitude of homegrown terrorists that no one wants to actually call terrorists because they may not be muslim or brown.
dutchdelight:
At any given time, either can lack people inside. Because they mean the same fucking thing, and that refers to a building/place. It does not make reference to a person or a group of people, because if you point at a home/house, you’re pointing at the building or the place where that building is.
My house, since birth. A house is a place where people live, specifically the place where there is a building used for the purpose of shelter, which happens to be the same thing as a home. Perhaps there is no one in my childhood home right now, but nevertheless, it continues to be a home/house. It’s similar to the way a factory does not cease to be what it is, even when or if no one is working there. It is not the sort of thing which has essential properties like that. Or it’s like the way your brain still exists inside your head, even when you fail to use it appropriately. Your skull is not empty, and we could use other methods to tell if it were, independently of how (or whether) you are currently using your brain in a coherent fashion (which indeed you are not, as a bigoted asswipe). I suppose it’s like a lot of things, in the sense that pretty much nothing actually works the way you think it does.
Anri @161:
Thank you. Although I think you are off-base for reasons I will explain, I appreciate that you made a real effort.
Fair enough, but it’s not just you. For the specific changes I’m talking about (to review: the very young, the very old, and prescreened passengers are now subject to a lower level of scrutiny than the general population; these people compose the “anti-profile”) it appears that essentially no one is protesting.
… to the general population, i.e. everyone not included in the anti-profile. The less wasted attention, the better. I think that point should be uncontroversial.
You don’t. That was never the point.
Very well, but as I’ve said, your overall take on the TSA is not relevant. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m willing to stipulate that the TSA, TSA decision making, and TSA policy, are awful. But even an awful agency can make changes for the better. So, are the specific changes that I have highlighted changes for the better or changes for the worse? If they’re for the worse, are they morally indefensible outrages? Because if they’re anything short of morally indefensible outrages, I don’t see how you can call Sam Harris’ advocacy of essentially those same changes a morally indefensible outrage.
Eric Ross, all posts:
Litany, recurrence, reiteration, repeat, chant, chorus, copy, echo, encore, iteration, paraphrase, perseveration, periodicity, reappearance, recapitulation, recital, redundancy, renewal, repetitiousness, replication, restatement, return, rote, tautology, broken record, ingemination. All you have is repetition, which is: boring, dull, monotonous, stale, stupid, tedious, irksome, interminable, threadbare, vapid, wearisome, unvaried.
Eric Ross, #185
Who is not included in the anti-profile?
We can come up with people included in the anti-profile (old woman from Okinawa, 2-year old girl, Jerry Seinfeld).
What Harris and you are failing to do is list groups of people who are not in the anti-profile.
Harris has said he would not be in the anti-profile. So Is it all men roughly between the age of 18 and 65?
Eric Ross:
Sam Harris is a prominent atheist (one of the “four horsemen” even), and I don’t want people like him speaking for people like me when they say things like that. That’s why his comments (sometimes) warrant my attention and my response. Besides myself, you’re in the atheist blogosphere when you’re surfing through pharyngula, and there is no general assumption to push back against, about how well the TSA does or does not represent the atheist community, because it’s just a public agency which is not in any way associated with the primary purposes this blog exists and what it is about. It’s also about cephalopods, as well as other random junk according to PZ’s entirely arbitrary and malignant will. So, I figure that if Harris (or the TSA) were cephalopodian, that could very well count as an additional reason for coverage focusing on him.
But, aside from that… Have a significant number people been complaining about the uselessness and idiocy of the TSA, in general and in particular cases, for many years now? Yes, in fact, a significant number have been doing that very thing. Maybe there’s not much focus on the TSA here, but as a general matter, as I implied, it is none of your business (or mine) what PZ is interested in writing about, nor should it be surprising to anyone why the focus is where it is. In any case, it is not as if your hero Harris is the only one who has to defend himself on this account. You implicitly assumed that, but it is not so. Besides, whatever you assume, if he’s going to seriously argue for it, whatever it happens to be, then being criticized comes with the territory. It is simply not relevant what the TSA does or doesn’t do. The only double standard here is the one you seem to want: to have all the criticism pushed somewhere else, away from the direction of Harris. I can’t ascertain anything else you have to complain about. So, he is making the claim, thus there is no reason why others shouldn’t be able to criticize it. What else would you expect?
Then what is the point? Is it not about categorizing according to levels of risk — and if not, then what? Or is there some special kind of logic I don’t know about, according to which this could actually makes sense somehow?
He doesn’t simply claim he wants them to be less of a nuisance toward 2 year old children, by making them remove their shoes and so forth. He thinks the problem to be corrected lies with jihadists or those who “look Muslim” (…conceivably, whatever that’s supposed to add to the meaning). But 2 year olds are not the only ones in the world who are not jihadists, or do not “look Muslim” in the usefully-informative-but-totally-not-racist way that Harris supposedly wants to mean can’t articulate coherently.
It’s outrageous and indefensible that he doesn’t give any intelligible reason for his version of profiling or “anti-profiling.” That’s what he would need to do, but he isn’t in the business of doing that. None of the other crap you’re so worried about has anything to do with whether or not it’s outrageous and indefensible. Are you actually interested in the latter, or are you only interested in the bullshit you’ve actually focused on so far?
Keep on flogging that dead horse, Eric. It’s been pointed out that no one has defended the TSA’s previous or current practices, and several people have now intentionally criticised them. That the TSA is doing some of the things that Sam proposes doesn’t make them good ideas.
Airport screening is never going to be good at catching those who want to do destructive things. It may have some small psychological benefit for air travellers, and a deterrent value, but the deterrent value is severely compromised if people can game the system. Most would-be terrorists are caught far more effectively using old fashioned police work, or by catching them in some part of the act and stopping them at this point.
Eric Ross@155:
I’d just like to point out that Eric Ross does not think have thoughtfully engaged with him.
Eric Ross@185:
We’re nearly 200 comments in, and you haven’t highlighted any specific changes by the TSA. Do you mean PreCheck, their program which is currently facing a lawsuit from the ACLU over potential racial profiling and that former employees have said is discriminatory, or some other program? Name names, please.
To the rest of you, I’m surprised I haven’t seen the words “Dear Muslima” yet. Or did I miss it?
I didn’t?! Huh, I’m still a bit shocked.
Anyway, I didn’t just pop back in say that. It turns out that shortly after the ACLU filed the above lawsuit, they earned a settlement from an earlier action.
Maybe black women’s hair is magic, after all?
Sam Harris’s anti-profile
I guess that just leaves that 80-year old Okinawan lady and Jerry Seinfeld.