They've won
Closing the barn door after the horse is dead
OK, so some nut job sets off a few bombs in London and we spend more and more resources on the off chance someone will walk past a police officer, that police officer will happen to search their bag and it will be the one bag in 20,000 that has the bomb. Here is a quote that really ticks me off:
In Hoboken, Valerie Roedel, a 30-year-old accountant, had her bag searched as she began her trip home to Bayonne on the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail system. "It wouldn't be my target of choice, but it's as vulnerable as any other transit system," she said. "Every little bit helps. Searches are just a new part of the commute."
Fuck that shit. Every little bit doesn't help. Every time we knee jerk over some random event, it makes things 10 times worse. They are called terrorists because their aim is to invoke terror and we are all completely mad with terror. We are so filled with terror that we just blindly accept this bullshit. Isn't it bad enough that our wives get felt up at the airport and we have to walk around in our socks, now we get our personal belongings searched whenever anyone feels like it.
You want the really bad news? It ain't over by a long shot. We've only seen the tip of the iceberg. 1984 is gonna look like a fairy tale before it's all over.
OK, so some nut job sets off a few bombs in London and we spend more and more resources on the off chance someone will walk past a police officer, that police officer will happen to search their bag and it will be the one bag in 20,000 that has the bomb. Here is a quote that really ticks me off:
In Hoboken, Valerie Roedel, a 30-year-old accountant, had her bag searched as she began her trip home to Bayonne on the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail system. "It wouldn't be my target of choice, but it's as vulnerable as any other transit system," she said. "Every little bit helps. Searches are just a new part of the commute."
Fuck that shit. Every little bit doesn't help. Every time we knee jerk over some random event, it makes things 10 times worse. They are called terrorists because their aim is to invoke terror and we are all completely mad with terror. We are so filled with terror that we just blindly accept this bullshit. Isn't it bad enough that our wives get felt up at the airport and we have to walk around in our socks, now we get our personal belongings searched whenever anyone feels like it.
You want the really bad news? It ain't over by a long shot. We've only seen the tip of the iceberg. 1984 is gonna look like a fairy tale before it's all over.
posted by Big Ed at 12:54 PM
13 Comments:
There is a simple answer to that statement.
Imainge the bad guys were white.
First, racial profiling is another name for racism. It assumes that one bad guy with brown skin means all people with brown skin are bad. It places a person in a different category just because of their appearance or the origin of their family name. It kind of throws the whole equal treatment under the law thing out the window don't you think? You and I don't know what it's like because we're white just like we don't know what having a baby is like because we're men.
Second, you need to remember that the second worst terrorist attack in the history of this coutry was committed by a guy named Timothy, not a guy named Osama.
I'm frankly a little surprised that you support racial discrimintation. I just never saw you as that kind of person.
I don't see it as racial discrimination. And I don't see me as a racist. I see it as protecting our country.
Man, you've got the Bush mantra down pat.
Racial profiling, by it's very difinition, is racial discrimination. It means assuming anyone of a certain race is a criminal first and innocent after they prove otherwise. It means searching the brown people because they are brown. Think about that carefully, it doesn't mean searching people because of ANY reason other than the color of their skin.
If that's not racism, I need to get a new dictionary.
Probably the most infurating thing about this discussion is that you propose shredding the Constitution in order to "protect" our country. Surely you can see how insane that concept is.
The only other option I see is to be suspicious of everyone, no matter what color, race, or creed. Is that any better?
I forgot to adress this one.
There is another option. That is to tell the terrorists to get fucked and carry on with our lives. The better option is not to react like a frightened child every time some asshole blows something up. That was the point of my post, searching all the bags on the subway doesn't fix the problem, it plays right into the hands of the people who are trying to frighten us. It says our open and free society is wrong, that closed and constrained is better.
Wake up, Dude. Come out from under the bed and enjoy the sunshine.
That was a low blow, but ok.
Sorry but the logic you are using is the same logic that was used to put us in Iraq, to keep however many people locked up in Guantanamo with no legal representation and to subject us to all kinds of indignities no one would have put up with pre 9/11. Nothing has to make sense, all anyone has to do to make us drop our pants and quack like a duck is claim they are doing it to protect us from the terrorists.
Personally, I'm sick of it.
I'm not going to argue with you about whether or not racial profiling is racist, but I will say that I think it is being used without merit.
I think the basic assumption that "most of the folks trying to kill us are Middle Eastern" is wrong. Well, that isn't quite correct. I'm sure most of them are but that doesn't mean that most of the people who might perform a terrorist action in America will be Middle Eastern.
First of all, I imagine there would be quite a bit of time and money spent on any planned terrorist attack. Why in the world would they then choose an obviously Middle Eastern person to carry out the attack, thereby increasing greatly the chances of the attack being stopped?
Check out this guy. While I personally think he is only guilty of being young, he is an example of a possible Islamic terrorist who (despite that particular photo, shave that beard and put on some 'American' clothes and you wouldn't notice him from any other kid at the mall) would not be bothered by 'racial profiling'.
Also, as Ed pointed out, it wouldn't have helped v.s. McVeigh either.
On the other hand, allowing them to start searching people on trains does get the people used to be searched like that, making it easier one day for them to really stick it to us.
In spite of this, profiling is a useful tool. Insurance companies use it to set their rates.
What if you are a safe 20 year old driver? Why exactly should you have to pay 5 times as much for insurance than a wreckless 40 year old?
Profiling simply means that everyone is a statistic. In business, that's probably one of the ways you just have to do things.
We're not talking about a business here. We're talking about frisking brown people and letting white people go.
As for letting the old white lady go, give this some thought. What group of people is the #1 target for con men and scammers? The answer is old people. How hard would it be for some nicely dressed young man to sweet talk an old lady into carrying a package to the next station for him while he detonated it remotely. Not everyone who wants to blow shit up wants to kill himself in the process.
So, are you saying that security personnel should pay special attention to old people?
No, you obviously missed the point.
It's simple, profiling doesn't work. It might be a way to set insurance rates but it sucks as a way to stop people from blowing stuff up. Ignoring old people is as bad as frisking them all. My point was that if you concentrate on one group, the group you're looking for will just change their tactics.
Profiling is a tool, it's been used for years and years and was never an issue until the PC BS started
Let me back up a minute. People who are about to knowingly blow something up and kill themselves in the process probably have a lot of the same characteristics. Knowing how those people act could probably help the cops catch them before they blew themselves up. In that way, profiling is a useful tool.
However, let's get back on track here. You said:
What I don't understand is why everyone's up in arms about racial profiling.
There is a big difference between tagging someone due to a wide range of chracteristics and tagging them solely due to race.
If you saw an old white lady wearing bulky clothes, sweating profusely and praying loudly to Allah would you react differently than if you saw a young middle eastern man doing the same thing?
When I said profiling didn't work, I was still talking about singling someone out because of their race.
As for the serial killer thing, why do so many of them wander around for years if profiling is so useful? Catching someone after he's killed 40 people over 15 years because he finally leaves a fingerprint and then saying, "Yep, he fits the profile" seems kind of backwards to me.
If profiling causes a group to change tactics, then it is working. Granted, it is not a solution, but it does make the terrorist's job a little more difficult.
This goes to Woulf's question as well.
The problem with targeting one group over another is, other than the obvious constitutional issues, that you lose perspective on what you are trying to do. If you're only looking for brown terrorists, the white ones go strolling by without a second look.
That was the gist of my original post, someone blows up a subway in London so everyone who goes into the subway gets searched now. The guys who drove the planes into the WTC were brown so every terrorist is a brown guy now. We seem to have completely forgotten Timothy McVeigh and his white bread buddies. Am I the only one who remembers when the bad guys had a Russian accent?
Stopping people from blowing shit up is not a matter of developing a profile of people who blow shit up, it's a matter of figuring out why people blow shit up and fixing it. That's hard and it takes a very long time and some very hard choices. It's a lot easier to act like you're doing something by making everyone take off their shoes and search all the brown people when you really aren't accomplishing a damm thing but pissing off all the people who we're trying to protect.
Like I said, that doesn't help, it makes things worse. We all get that funny thing in the pit of our stomach when we have to submit to a search or just see a cop standing around looking at us like we did something. It just sends us one more step down the road to a society where we are presumed guilty first and innocent only after we prove it. How would our parents have reacted to this bullshit 30 years ago? Why is it we just blindly accept walking around in our socks and start supporting profiling based on race?
Like I said, we haven't seen the worse of this by a long shot.
I doubt anyone (other than those targeted) would have batted an eye at racial profiling 30 years ago. I think it would have been expected or even demanded.
Yes, my Dad would have wanted all those damm Arabs lined up and shot. That wasn't the point of the comment. How would our parents have acted if they were subjected to random searches for no good reason?
I know how my parents would have reacted. Come to think of it, that's probably why I react the way I do.
I agree with you in principal that the true way to stop terrorism is to live in a world where other people don't want to blow you up. But we don't live in that kind of world right now, and we are not going to get there anytime soon. The suicidal terror attacks are being done for religious reasons, what more is there to understand?
First, we're not being attacked for religious reasons. Religion is being used to convince the dumb sleps who are blowing themselves up that it's the right thing to do but the underlying reasons for us being a target is not religion. I know that sounds like convoluted logic but Osama bin Laden and his buddies are pissed off at us for lots of reasons, none of them having anything to do with Allah or God or The Great Pumpkin. Religion is a convenient vehicle, nothing more.
That being said, back to the main point, when do we start? What do we accomplish by putting cops in the subways. What we accomplish, like I've already said 5 times, is scare and piss off the people we are trying to protect without actually doing anything that protects them. We do EXACTLY what "they" want and just heighten the level of fear and apprehension while lessening our basic freedoms and constitutional rights.
You don't know what you had until it's gone. 9/11 didn't change anything, we changed it. It really makes me sad to hear people just accept this kind of crap and argue that it's the right thing to do.
I don't think that putting cops in subways scares people. In fact, I think that it makes them less scared.
Well, you're just flat wrong. You can't walk in a place where there were no cops before that is now crawling with them, searching bags and looking for something to shoot and not think, (A) What's wrong!! and (B) What did I do that they can hassle me for? Maybe that's not the case in rural America but it damm sure is in Austin. I can't imagine what it's like in NYC. To my mind, that's one of the reasons most people are mildly submitting to these invasions, we're all scared to death. If you read the stories about the guy who got shot in London, that guy was running and tripped. A cop came up behind him and emptied his pistol into his head and shoulders. No warning, no attempt at restraint, just blow the guy's head off. The cop did that because that is what they were told to do. They were told that because a suicide bomber who can still move can still blow himself up.
I don't want to live in the kind of world where an innocent person panics and gets head shot for it. My point is that we don't have to live in that world, we have the power to make it different. We choose fear and head shots instead of whatever other alternatives there might be.
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