Security Expert Bruce Schneier Responds to Sam Harris

I just hope Harris actually responds.

So far he’s just blown smoke and built straw men. Schneier makes the case so well and so clearly that I hope Harris will show that he’s actually listening.

What Harris makes so abundantly clear is that profiling, or indeed any of the security theater, is simply unnecessary. It’s a huge, expensive, disproportionate response to a fairly small threat from a very small segment of the population, or even of the Muslim population if you feel the need to go there, a threat that is being handled and controlled in many other ways that we often don’t even notice.

I will be sincerely surprised if Harris makes any recognition that he is wrong. Hopefully he’ll at least address the actual points made by Schneier and not merely straw-man and decry others calling him racist.

I’d also really appreciate it if he could finally explain to us what he thinks a Muslim looks like.

I note that of the three main people involved in the two recent underpants bomb plots, only one of them looks such that I would think of him as probably muslim.

Maybe he’s opened just… you know… opened a dialogue? Why does everything gotta be war of words? Right and wrong? People turning away in disgust and rage because someone suggests some things in a post? It’s not very scholarly… or rational.

“Rational community”…

I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Is this even a response to my post? Did you transpose your two replies?

damn link didn’t work.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/08/travel/stuffed-animals-gun-parts/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

 I feel the same way about torture.

There absolutely should be profiling, but not based upon narrow assumptions about Muslims or who we think is Muslim. Security should focus the bulk of its attention on those people who intelligence and experience demonstrate to be higher risks. These days, the facts demonstrate that such risks are more likely than not to be Muslims. In the past, the mix would have included many European members of extremist left-wing groups, Tamil separatists etc.  To the extent Muslims represent a disproportionate security threat, we should be profiling accordingly. But that doesn’t mean assuming every Muslim or Middle Eastern person we see at an airport is a potential terrorists. It simply means we should focus more of our attention on that subset of Muslims who are most often recruited and used by terror groups. Most will be relatively young men from a relative handful of countries and will have certain peculiarities in their travel patterns and histories, personal and professional backgrounds.  Not all of them will prove to be terrorists either, but they warrant much closer scrutiny than the random 80-year old Midwestern granny.
   
 Part of the security game is, of course, unpredictability. While unlikely, it’s not inconceivable that Al Queda will one day successfully recruit an 80-year old granny from Minnesota, and we don’t want to give an obvious free pass to anyone. That said, the current system is a very unfunny joke. It treats everyone from 2 to 90 regardless of profile, as an equal terrorism threat. Security lines are SO overcrowded and overtaxed focusing on everyone that it’s just a numbers game. A traditional Yemeni or Saudi terrorist will slip through that net sooner or later just by taking advantage of that chaos and security team fatigue etc.  We ought to take a page from the Israelis and learn to do some intelligent profiling. They learned a long time ago, and the hard way, that focused screening works.  Their system is based on the premise that the profiles of legitimate travelers – all of the details of who they are and where they are going, add up, as it were.  The big picture for shady people – potential terrorists – do not add up. There are always red flags in what’s going on with them that will always be found if you know how to read people and interview them and do a bit of background search on them. 

 Well, I’m not Muslim and wouldn’t fit the profile, and I’m already pissed off about screening. So piss off some or piss off all of them? What’s the difference?

And seriously, do you really think anyone in the TSA is not already profiling? They see someone that looks like a Muslim, or someone carrying a Koran, or wearing a hajib, and their awareness of them is heightened. They don’t need a policy to do what Harris is suggesting. It’s already being done. It’s similar to Schneier’s sheep/wolf analogy. We are designed to see predators, whether we know it or not, and will subconsciously profile those that look like a threat.

He’s hardly taken Harris to task. He’s simply explaining why profiling isn’t effective. Bruce says that Harris is wrong from an effectiveness standpoint not a moral or ethical one. “The right way to look at security is in terms of cost-benefit trade-offs. If adding profiling to airport checkpoints allowed us to detect more threats at a lower cost, than we should implement it.” I actually think this rebuttal was great for Harris. People weren’t upset because profiling might be effective. They were upset at even the notion that it should be used. Clearly Bruce isn’t against the use of profiling if/when it’s effective.

It’s incidents like this-
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-03-06/news/31129902_1_breast-milk-tsa-worker-tsa-officer
– that make people think that maybe profiling would be better.

no, it was a “rant” the second he used the meaningless phrase “political correctness”.

“Right and wrong?”

Because some things are right, and some are wrong. No amount of respect for other opinions is going to make 2+2=73.6, and nor is it going to make Sam Harris right about this.

Certainly you can appreciate the difference between:
POLICY 1: ALL PEOPLE MUST STAND ON ONE FOOT IN ORDER TO USE THE DRINKING FOUNTAIN.
POLICY 2: ALL BLACK PEOPLE MUST STAND ON ONE FOOT IN ORDER TO USE THE DRINKING FOUNTAIN.

Yes, policy 1 would certainly annoy all people of all colors.  Can you see that policy 2 might make blacks just a *tad* more annoyed, and feeling justa *tad* more alienated than policy 1?

Haven’t looked at the latest one, but it’s worth pointing out that screening didn’t catch the 1st two guys, profiled or random.

 Um, yes. Schneier points out that profiling “the class of people about to board a plane” is just as objectionable as profiling “the class of people about to board a plane who resemble Muslims”.

TSA’s body scans and pat downs should be eliminated. They’re intrusive theater which are likely to result in thousands of false positives and unlikely to result in thwarting an actual terrorist plot. They’re an expensive drain on productivity for very little benefit. Yes, I’m counting “peace of mind” placebo effect as a benefit.

I do think strip search/pat down planes could be offered by individual airlines, for those who enjoy security theater. For the rest, just go back to x-ray screening of carry on bags and a stroll through metal detectors for passengers. If planes blow up once in a while, that’s just the cost of convenience. I would much rather patronize planes with a 1 in a million chance of exploding than put up with delays and pat-downs for planes with a 1 in 2 million chance of exploding.

>Joke

>Head

No it isn’t.

In his response Bruce Schneier screws up his math.

One in 80 million is a whole lot better odds than on in 630 million.     You reduce the odds by doing more than just one search  (which is what your odds imply).   You only have to do 80 million to get the odds to certainty of searching the intended target.   No kidding most you select are innocent, and even more are innocent when you don’t profile.  You are not throwing them in jail.   You are scrutinizing them further.    Even if you only search sporadically, not searching everyone, you increase your odds by profiling.   It’s simple math, and NO the base rate fallacy does not apply in his argument because he didn’t use it properly.  

If you are going to search (randomly or otherwise) it makes sense to profile.   You are much more likely to be successful asking a white person on the beach if he has sun block to share, than a black person in a cave.   That goes even if you have some particularly rare brand of hypoallergenic sun tan lotion you need.    Does it guarantee success?  No.  It just increases your odds of success.    He writes, “The right way to look at security is in terms of cost-benefit trade-offs. ” yet he can’t even do the math to figure out the costs.

He links to articles that use Bayes theorem in completely different ways.   Some of which also make errors which one could also use erroneously to “prove” that we should never attempt to use any criteria to search for criminals.

The rest of his argument is rendered null and void by the simple expedient of using
other profiling methods also.

He’s failed to argue properly against using profiling using probability.

I don’t care about offending Muslims because their religion teaches that I deserve death and that offends me.   If they cared about not offending me then they’d abandon a religion that teaches such vile lessons about non-Muslims.  Yet, I feel NO compulsion not to help find murderers of Muslims.  

On another note the entire religion is designed to take offense with non-Muslims over trivial things and they’ll just have to live with the fact their religion endangers non-Muslims and we have a right to defend ourselves even if it offends them.   He provided no evidence that selective profiling offends, or that such offense results in less cooperation.   He merely asserts it.     People who want to find offense will find reasons for being offended, like when we burned Qur’ans being used to pass messages between prisoners (when burning Qur’ans is a legitamate way to dispose of them according to respected Muslims).

Toi(joke)let.

I guess Harris is “otherwise rational” if you subtract out his irrationalities, which include just about anything about Muslims. He once wrote an L. A. Times editorial in which he berated liberals for thinking that anger among the populations of the middle East had ANYTHING to do with U.S. foreign policy. Even Harris is human, and has his blind spots.

Looking at this together with your other comment above, Glenn, I’d say you’re a trollbot.

Seeing that requires empathy.

Suppose that TSA were shooting random passengers in the head. Would you argument that “profiling would be better”? Of course it would be, but  offering it as an argument FOR profiling is deeply, deeply irrational and intellectually dishonest.

Unlike the smoke blow and straw man Harris’s opponents have been blowing.    Like the straw man of changing the phrase “Muslims and those who look Muslim” into merely “T hose who look Muslim”, or the ad hominem of calling him a racist.

“Those who look Muslim” is meant to handle those cases where guys who are Muslim (like Osama) get false passports that list them as coming from countries other than their country of origin, or who lie about their country of origin or religion when asked.   Presumably you’d ask people to identify if they are Muslim to implement the policy, yet use other criteria for weeding out fakers.  

Currently we search everyone equally, and you dont think that is a “huge, expensive, disproprotionate response to …” in even greater proportion.    Clearly if we are overdoing it when handling 1% of the population (the muslims) then we are really over doing it when we subject 100% of the population.

He didn’t post “All Muslims are untrustworthy”.

… but again.  You, Bruce Schnider, and the rest of you are math challenged.     Harris’s argument is “don’t expend so many resources body cavity searching crippled white jewish kids, and instead reassign resources more intelligently to those whose religion advocates murder by martyrdom”.

It’s only an ad hominem to say Sam is wrong because he’s a racist.  Just saying he’s a racist is just a red herring.

Where do people get the idea that people have a right not to be “offended”.     Try arguing that they have a right not to be searched, or some other reason because being offended is just too easy.   

Sam Harris thinks he’s going to teach *Bruce Schneier* something about security?

Seriously?  Harris is getting way to big for his britches.

(Dan Geer is one of the few people in the world who is qualified to go toe-to-toe with Schneier on such matters, and they very rarely disagree.)

What a feeble attempt at misdirection.

Profiling all Muslims, and any he happens to think look Muslim, as likely to blow up a plane is inherently an expression of distrust.

One in 80 million is a whole lot better odds than on in 630 million.

That is exactly the base rate fallacy. He didn’t work through this because the base rate fallacy is well-known among security professionals.

Let’s throw out a few numbers to work this out. Suppose that there are 630 million passengers who travel by airplane. Suppose that 80 million of these are Muslim. Suppose that 21 of them are actually terrorists. Suppose, furthermore that your screening procedure is 99% accurate.

Suppose you apply your screening procedure to everyone, and it signals positive. What is the probability that the person is a terrorist?

The number of terrorists who would be signalled positive is 99% of 21, or 20.79 effective terrorists. The number of non-terrorists signalled positive is 1% of 630,000,000, or 6,300,000. So the probability that a person for whom the signal is positive is actually a terrorist is 20.79/6,300,000, or 0.00033%.

Now let’s apply the system to just Muslims. A person is signalled positive. What is the probability that the person is a terrorist?

Again, the number of terrorists who would be signalled positive is 20.79. The number of non-terrorists signalled positive is 1% of 80,000,000, or 800,000. So the probability that a Muslim for whom the signal is positive is actually a terrorist is 20.79/800,000, or 0.0026%.

The base rate fallacy is that people think that you should get an 8-fold gain (630 million divided by 80 million) from only screening Muslims, but because the probability of someone being a terrorist is so incredibly low to begin with, it’s actually an increase of only 0.0023% (0.0026-0.00033).

That’s the “benefit” side of the equation. Now consider the cost: you lose the goodwill of the Muslim community who are better placed than anyone else to spot people who are vulnerable to becoming terrorists. This is not made up by Schneier, by the way; there’s a huge pile of social science and public policy research into the role of goodwill in partnerships between law enforcement and communities where members are vulnerable to being drawn into a life of crime, and quite a bit of it is about terrorism specifically. This is an extremely well-trodden area.

By the way, even if you think there’s no moral problem with offending Muslims, you can’t escape the practical problem that it’s counter-productive. That’s assuming, of course, that your goal is to minimise the number and severity of terrorist attacks.

Right, then.

Now, can we please find a REASONABLE screening method that doesn’t involve groping small children and little old ladies?

 Well-explained!

Yes, but it means admiring to ourselves that we cannot prevent all acts of terrorism.  We can’t prevent car crashes either, but we don’t have an issue getting into a car every day.

So it pretty much comes down to, “That makes sense, and we can’t do things that MAKE SENSE”?

I was implying that groping 2-year-olds doesn’t make sense.  Nor does groping anyone really, unless you have a better reason than “they look like they could conceivably be  Muslim”.  Like, you know, the xray showed something that looks like a bomb in their bra.

But it means we have to get rid of the psychological blankie of seeing people getting groped, and feeling like the TSA must at least be preventing terrorists.  They probably are preventing terrorists, but not by randomly groping anyone, young Arab men or 2-year-old blonde blue-eyed Americans.

 Ah. K. So as long as we look like we’re doing something effective, and making people feel safer. It’s not really about security, then, is it? It’s all about making a show of “look, we haz security”?

I’d rather have screening that is actually effective, and not just for show.

No it is a recognition of what ideology motivates the behavior.

It’s not about “stereotypes”. It’s about inspecting those who support the ideology that advocates the bad behavior. I like it when people quote statistics saying 80% of American Muslims are against terrorism like that is a good thing.

You don’t have to know with certainty, no more than you have to know with certainty that your car won’t break down to drive it around. To increase the probabilities does not require perfection. We’re not taking about executing them on the spot.

Now this I agree with.

I’d hardly call an eight fold increase negligible. If your profiling consists of looking for a bomb strapped to a chest that’s eight planes saved vs. one. Profiling is highly effective, and this is why even black taxi drivers do it. Given similar assumptions they make eight times the cash.

The argument should not be that “profiling isn’t effective.” And it might be that “searching isn’t effective.” Good luck selling the idea that we shouldn’t search people for bombs, guns, and knives, boarding airplanes. The problem with that strategy is that all of the sudden it becomes way cheaper to down a plane and the rate of terrorist bombing goes up. The success of the 9/11 attack caused a worldwide spike in terrorist attacks. Just imagine if we made it so easy to down a plane.

You know Since people can also be offended by having their luggage searched or being required to board the same flight as their luggage this wouldn’t even require the terrorists to be suicide bombers. Let’s do away with all searching since the vast majority of those searched are innocent and using Bayes theorem we can show that even if there is a 99.999% odds that a TSA gent can recognize a gun there is a vanishingly small chance we’ll ever actually catch someone with a gun, with this impossibly large level of TSA agents accusing people not carrying guns of having one.

Sometime the failure in math does not reside in the formulas but in their application.

I hope you realize there is a difference between me searching random strangers on the street or in their homes, and me searching them for illegal drugs before I let them in my car, on my plane, or in my building. For all the supposed respect this Bruce guy and all the people listening to him nobody actually follows his advice. Well, except for the part where he’s got everybody believing that seating should be indiscriminate lest we offend.

Assuming all terrorists are Muslims and we’ve some accurate way of telling them apart.

Otherwise we’ve made it much more likely that a non-Muslim terrorist, or a non-Muslim-looking terrorist will succeed.

And that’s irrelevant because the decrease in likelihood of catching someone from not profiling (in the given example) is so small that you’re more likely to die from choking on the airline’s food.

I never said it had to be perfect, only that Harris’s intent was to profile based on ethnicity, and his protests to contrary used stupid criteria. As for probability, the TSA is increasing its odds from incredibly small, to incredibly small. Arguing that it is a good way to catch a terrorist, is like arguing that playing the lottery when the jackpot is small is a good investment strategy, or that a 12C homeopathic remedy is better than an 200C dilution, more chance of molecules that way.

The TSA cant keep known terrorists off planes, the underwear bomber was on the no fly list. Faisal Shahzad, who tried to blow up times square, was arrest on a plane, while he was wanted by the FBI. Personally I think that hole in security should be fixed rather than focusing harassment on a group of people based on the color of their skin, the shape of their nose, funny names, etc.

Linking ideology to a subjective judgment of appearance – especially when said ideology is erroneously conflated with a particular religion – merely exposes your motivation: not security, not rationality, just atavistic xenophobia.

Yes, I discovered your “analysis” after I posted that. Responded to.

I don’t like it when morons don’t support their claims and merely assume because their personal tastes are offended that they are correct. Who provide nothing to the conversation that ignorant strawman assumptions about the positions of others. Making you the raving bigot.

I’ve shown, using math, that profiling is less costly than searching everyone, and that is enough to dispel claims that Harris is motivated by racism.

… And you link to a case where it was not an terrorism incident, and they just let the guy walk away. What are the odds of that particular scheme, as compared to terrorist and other hijackings. Much less. So if you use the security experts math they never should have found that weapon. Yet they did depute the “vanishing remote odds”. Why? Because even vanishingly remote odds become certainties when you repeat them enough. The idiot expert calculated the odds if the TSA were only allowed to search one passenger per year. Dopey, yes?

The base rate is for one TSA agent searching one passenger. What are the odds of that? It’s also a measure of first level assessment. SO what if it nets a large number of innocents as a first assessment. You then investigate further and release them when not found to be guilty. You don’t just line them up and shoot them. I’ve had the TSA ask me to open my bag after an X-ray for further investigation. Looked like a bomb or gun on first assessment. Bruce is misusing the math.

No, reading that and assuming it is relevant requires stupidity. The above is arbitrary. There is no rational reason for asking only the blacks to stand on one foot, and precisely because there is no rationale for asking anyone to. There may be a ration reason for requiring racial differences. Like no white kids allowed out the sun without sun block, whereas black kids are allowed. Note that blacks need way more sun than whites to remain heathy so one size fits all sun block policies are bound to hurt someone. It is not always the case that racially neutral policies are rational, nor that racially unequal ones are naturally racist.

If you believe in affirmative action does that mean you lack empathy? It fits the example. Think before you start with the claims of moral turpitude on the part of those who actually think before agreeing with your shallow and ignorant examples and deductions.

“I could write a book on my moral reasoning here.”

You just did. And it’s still bullshit.

Peaceful, law-abiding Muslims do not bear responsibility for 9/11 or any other terrorist acts. Period. Your ass-backwards reasoning is the same nonsense Harris and the vile hatemongers on the far right used to smear the people behind the “Mosque” at “Ground Zero.”

Spare me your self-righteous, bloviating textwalls about how “Islam is evil and promotes blah blah blah.” Yes, Islam has a great deal of vile content, as do all religions. You aren’t talking about Islam here, you’re talking about MUSLIMS.

You are suggesting that MUSLIMS be singled out and treated differently based on the actions of others – actions which the overwhelming majority of them, as polling here in the US makes clear, do NOT support.

Your rationale amounting to nothing more than a bunch of vague, and yes, transparently handwaving rhetoric about how their “ideology” promotes this or that, as though you were somehow qualified to assess that as it applies to average Muslims.

That means that you are a bigoted ignoramus, and that nobody here needs to take you seriously.

Got it?

Ah, I think I see the problem. You appear to be confused as to what a “base rate” is.  Let me try to explain.

“Base rate” is a term that statisticians use to talk about the probability of a member of the population without reference to featural evidence.

Suppose that a homeopath tells you that 100 patients tried a homeopathic remedy and were cured of back pain.  Assuming that the experimental design was sound (which, of course, is not a given), there are several things you’d probably want to know to evaluate this statistic. For example, you’d want to know how many patients were treated who weren’t cured.  If it turns out to be 2000, the base rate of success is actually only 5%, which is far less impressive than 100.

The base rate fallacy applies to airline security because raw numbers of terrorists mean nothing without knowing how common terrorists are. They are, in fact, vanishingly rare. So rare that even small costs can be quite large compared to the benefit of screening.

Which brings us back to Schneier’s main point: You could spend 100% of GDP on airport security, and you still wouldn’t be 100% safe. All security is, therefore, a cost-benefit tradeoff. If you don’t understand that there are real costs to any security procedure, and know what they are, you cannot rationally evaluate the procedure.

We’re not just talking about time and inconvenience. To see what I mean, consider the question as to whether or not backscatter x-rays are worth it.

There’ s obviously the cost of the machines, training people on their use and so on. We’ll ignore the cost to democracy of the corruption involving Michael Chertoff. And we’ll ignore the inconvenience of a slower queue. Let’s just look at the health risks of x-ray machines, which are nonzero, and fairly well understood.

So what’s the chance of, say, getting cancer from one of these machines? Oddly enough, it’s almost exactly the same as dying in a terrorist attack.

Clearly, this means these machines are extremely safe, but that’s not the point. The probability of getting a serious disease from the machines is about the same as the probability of the risk that they’re trying to prevent. Do they, therefore, win the cost-benefit analysis?

I honestly don’t know; I’m not a public policy expert. But it would seem to me that you’d at least have to take that into account.

The costs of profiling Muslims specifically are less well-understood, obviously, but there is decades worth of research on the general area of specific communities where people are particularly vulnerable to becoming criminals, and how best to deal with that. We know that it is a far, far more effective use of resources to work with such communities to help people not enter a life of crime in the first place, than it is to treat the entire community as suspects by default.

 Or just kicked out the country…

 Harris already covered the “using other methods also issue” in his original article.   He even wrote an article about how people go insane over issues like this with regards to his position on torture.  As in not bothering to read what he wrote and attributing lack of knowledge and positions to him that should not come up if they’d just read the original articles instead of the chinese whispers version.

I’m very well aware of the odds of being killed by a terrors, lightening, or rattlesnakes.    Smart people still don’t stand under trees in lightening storms, and guess what my grandfather was killed by a rattlesnake.

Also guess what, there were more deaths in the US army under Clinton than under Bush when people were bringing up the issue.     We could go into the issues surrounding millitary deaths but thats a red herring for this discussion, as is your entire discussion of shreding rights.

You don’t have a right to go on an airplane unsearched.   Sometimes we get silly libertarians who argue that there should be no stop signs, speed limits, or mandatory drivers insurance, based on the idea that the government does not have the right to impose such.   However, were the roads privately owned it is quite clear that the owner would have such rights, and likely would require such.   So libertarians shouldn’t be all too bothered jsut because the government is doing the same on public property.     Turns out the same notions work when it comes to airports, and airplanes.   If airlines had more legal responsibility for terrorist attacks (as they should) you can be sure they would be setting up searches.   The problem is the don’t own the public spaces called airports.

I’m not sure why you are writing all this stuff.  It’s not like I don’t read and these aren’t common arguments that blow around.    It’s not responsive to my comments so it is like you are writing it because you think I live in a cave.  It’s kinda insulting.

I suggest you actually go and read Harris.    Both on torture and on this issue.   You don’t have to agree with him but it would help prevent you from needlessly covering ground that has already been covered.

Except I was for open borders until 9/11 came about.   So your theory is falsified.   That is unless you think being an anti-Nazi is also about xenophobia, which would be a different definition.  Funny thing is that using your logic I’m also xenophobic of my birth religion.

The fact that you can’t identify muslims solely by appearance was already covered by Harris in his first article.   In fact it is implicit in the sentence, “Muslims and those who look like Muslims”.    Too bad you aren’t very good at deducing why people say things.  Try reading the articl and not just the snippet “Those who look like Muslims”.

You don’t need certainty.   You only need probablity.     You need only cast your net wide enough.    Harris said “Muslim or looks like a Muslim”.    One could add or comes from a Islamic country (especially a terrorist supporting state).    Even if you cast your net so wide that it engulfed half the US population that would be a 50% savings, which is enormous.     Also, the examples he gave of searching and the text he wrote made it pretty clear that he was distinguishing different kinds of searches (random, baggage, underwear).  

We already put foriegners on different lines at the airport when coming into the country, is that “racist” or “bigoted”.   

I am not arguing for any particular mix of measures, and neither was Harris, but it is extremely stupid to have the kinds of searches being done in the videos he linked to. 

“Schneier considers the crap airport security pulls to be pointless security theater that no one should be subjected to, and supports getting rid of it.” 

If it is crap then we shouldn’t do it to anyone.  If it isn’t than it is quite clear that doing it selectively to Muslims makes sense, and that’s true even if you can’t 100% identify them because you don’t have to be perfect.     It’s doubtful anyone will sneak a bomb into your underwear.    

Manufacturers do searches for defects, we search meat, etc. and we do so using profiling.   One doesn’t need perfection because one can use probablity to save on your efforts.

If your net is wide enough to cover 95% of Muslms while excluding some large percentage of non-Muslims you get a savings while increasing your odds of catching them.

If there are 80 Million muslims traveling out of 360 million people, and only you do 80 million searches then concentrating on the muslims makes sense even if you only manage to identify 70 million of the Muslims by passport religious identification, country of origin, appearance, dress, etc.    You can treat the 10 million non-muslims as part of your random searchs of non-Muslims you would be doing anyway.  

The math is so simple here that it’s hard to fathom why there are so many who don’t get it.    I especially get angry when I do math, get the right answer, and then get accused of bigotry, or racism because of it.    I’m not changing my tune on the math because some people like to intimdate.   It is extremely impolite to assume basse motives on the part of others in a discussion when it is about differences of opinion on other things.

“You and Harris see the same thing and think it should be inflicted on teh muslims they deserve it after all.”

It’s not about “deserve”.   We aren’t doing it as a form of punishment.  If we were then we wouldn’t be doing it to our own people.    When someone says that you shouldn’t walk down a dark alley in a bad part of town that isn’t saying that you deserve to get mugged in a general sense.   No one deserves their stuff stolen.   It does mean that you are making yourself a logical target for the crime.    Muggers don’t steal becaue they are trying to met out punishment, nor do TSA agents search people for the same reason.    Muslims have placed themselves in a category of being more likely to be associate with terrorists by deciding to remain in the Islamic religion (which advocates terrorism).    Hell, the Palestinians voted in the majority for a terrorist organization (no two separate such organizations) to run their country.     So it isn’t like they don’t know what is going on here.    They can work on avoiding the alley. 

I’m not for kicking anyone out of the country.  I think however we do have the right to prevent certain types of religious activity that is criminal.   For instance defamation of non-believers.   Defamation is a crime (at least a civil one).  Unfortunately the Christians are the majority and they kinda like the fact they are allowed to do that so don’t expect any law that would allow a crackdown on such activity by Imams, because it might just apply to Christian preachers on their pulpits.

So the defamation laws are written such that it’s only a crime if you do it against a specific individual.   If you defame an entire class of people that just dandy even though the victims are many fold and one would naturally expect greater harm.

Oh, wait, I take that back.  I am for kicking illegal immigrants out.

You have no actual arguments, so you keep screaming “bigot!” at anyone who points that out; but once again, you demonstrate exactly the opposite.

I (and others) argue for treating everyone equally; you argue for discrimination; therefore, the rest of us are bigots. Such utter imbecility merits no further comment.

It’s not a question of whether your frantic numerical scribbling is correct – it’s merely irrelevant, because you start from a false premise: that only a Muslim, and only someone recognizably Muslim at that, would be carrying a bomb in an unlikely place. The stupidity of this claim is obvious to anyone who’s read about the tactics used by drug smugglers, and – even more applicable – by suicide bombers in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the usual suspects became suspect, they started using the mentally handicapped, coerced children … anyone who didn’t fit The Profile. Was that more difficult? Sure; but it’s not an easy task to get a bomb on a plane anyway, so the additional step is hardly likely to thwart it. And whether y0u’re talking bombs or hijacking, what about converts, who often become more fanatical about religion than those raised in it? Tell me John Walker Lindh, shaven and in a business suit, wouldn’t have walked right through a checkpoint manned by Sam Harris and brianmacker.

You know it’s true. But you’d rather concoct an excuse to stick your hands down a Muslim’s pants, just for the joy of seeing them humiliated.

Unless you are wrong. Let’s see, if I was a black In the antebellum south escaping from slavery and I made it a point to hide from any whites as I headed north then by your definition that would be racism. A Jew escaping from Germany hiding from German’s, that’s racism. You apparently think a religion is a cultural grouping, so profiling on a dating site to match up with a coreligionist is racism. Avoiding members of biker gangs, again racism. So on and so forth.

I don’t make the stupid assumptions you attribute to me and Harris’s original article refutes your nonsense too. You are having an argument with an imaginary straw man opponent.

A bigot is not someone who treats people differently based on their espoused ideology. You tell me you are a Nazi and of course I’m going to treat you differently. Islam is a religion who’s founder ethnically cleansed the Saudi peninsula, and then wrote a book more unabashedly bigoted than Mein Kampf. You’d be stupid not to treat the follower of such an ideology differently.

You don’t have an argument and that is why you are doing nothing but redefining words and accusing people of your equivocations so others might think they have the same meaning.

You’ve got nothing.

The religion is the ideology I was talking about. Not every person who self identifies as belonging to an ideology follows its teachings. Not all Catholics refrain from birth control. The founding document and founder of Islam teach terrorism, Jihad, suicide attacks (although they prefer to think of that as martyrdom.

Don’t bother lecturing me on Islam; got a Quran on the shelf. It also teaches love and tolerance, just as the Bible endorses murder, incest and slavery on some pages while calling for forgiveness and generosity on others. Inconsistency in both the text and its application make attempts to pin a sweeping ideology on cherry-picked verses a fool’s game.

I have a friend who’s position is that we should just take the terror hit with no response because they are like mosquito bites. That is, make zero efforts. He says between war expenditures,, homeland security waste, war deaths, TSA delays and waste, etc. We’ve inflicted more harm on ourselves than the terrorists. He’s been making it for years. It’s right depending on your assumptions. Unfortunately there no way to know what assumptions are correct.

Love and tolerance other Muslims.    The Nazis were all about fellowship, exercise, and workers rights.   But not for Jews.

Funny but all those many quotes calling Jews greedy, Idolators worthy of death, and telling Muslims to go out an murder people for their possessions are cherry picked.

 Go ahead, pull your quotes of “love and tolerance” out and I will destroy your bullshit.  Such quotes are in fact the cherry picked ones, and imbedded in the overwhelmingly violent text.   Most of them are a sentence or two away from vile nonsense.

I’m not a Christian so don’t pull that tu quoque nonsense with me.     At one time those violent quotes did inspire violence, slavery, etc.   At one time  Christians showed up on your shores you could be fairly certain bad things would happen.

Douchecake gave a Muslim money once, and therefore isn’t a bigot, even though he lumps all Muslims under the same ideological banner and supports discriminatory measures on that basis. Who do you think is buying this bullshit?
Go back to FreeRepublic.

The debris field comment was made by the asshole you support you ignorant jerk.   It doesn’t matter where it actually is.  It’s his quote.

“US Jews and Christians are twice as likely as US Muslims to find attacks on civilians acceptable.”

I knew you were a creepy scoundrel.    There is a big difference between explicitly targeting civilians for terror, and killing civilians accidentally while dealing with military targets.    There’s a difference between military action and terrorism. That question is biased because it makes no distinction, and it is perfectly moral to accidentally kill civilians when fighting a war.  And you think the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center is a credible source when all the other polls completely contradict this nonsense.   What’s disturbing are polls that discuss support for terrorism, not military action.   The 2007 pew poll put 13% of american Muslims supporting suicide bombing, and the same in the 2011.

 US muslims aren’t the only ones flying on our airplanes.  Americans Muslims poll bad enough but  foreign Muslims poll worse.  Far worse.   Also young American muslims poll twice as bad as the older generation.  The whole point of the Abu Dhabi poll is to confuse that issue.   No, American’s do not support targeting civilians with suicide bombings on planes you moron.    This is got to be your most moronic angle yet.   There is no danger that US servicemen or the people who support them are going to be boarding planes with bombs strapped to themselves.

I’d do what I want.   As long as morons like you make these stupid claims, I point out exactly how they are wrong.

How many more inaccurate posts do you plan to make.  How many more times to you plan to put words into the mouths of others.   That’s how often I’ll respond to your baloney.

.

Not what I said. I said that searching everyone costs more than just searching Muslims, for Muslim extremists. I was countering the boo hoo story of oh the Muslims might be insulted with the fact that their religion is a vile cesspool of hate, and the polling numbers show this has an effect on their beliefs (as does a ton of other evidence). I’m not supporting any “discriminatory measures” unless you mean discriminating terrorists from non-terrorists more efficiently given what we already do. Of course, you can’t have it that way. If their weren’t any Muslim suicide bombers, or if this was a issue with all religions and philosophies, then there would be no savings in using profiling, and I’d be against it, despite what a vile cesspool of hate and intolerance Islam is.

There’s nothing for anyone else to “buy”. I’m the ultimate authority on my opinions and beliefs not some moron on the Internet. This FreeRepublic nonsense is as wacky as the rest of your claims about me. you want me to mock you some more with the same ckinds of unfounded claims about you. I can do that if you haven’t caught on yet. I can tell you to go back to your favorite Al Queda site.

Giving direct unsolicited charity to a Muslim “once” is probably one more time than you have.

If abortion clinics were on planes then I’d prefer they profile Christians than everybody, but since it doesn’t actually say anything in the bible against abortion I’d restrict it to the sects that actually teach abortion is murder. So much for your assumption that I’m some kinda Christian.

You are exactly like those morons who were accusing me of being a racist for my position on the Trayvon Martin case. Unfortunately for them in that case I had a prior comment posted on a web site tha was pro-Trayvon that I was able to link to. They were oh so absolutely sure that my position was purely racist. Little did they know I had changed my mind purely on the change in reported evidence. I might just change my mind again, who knows?

Sam Harris was right though. There are certain issues where it just can’t be about the facts. No, it’s a religious issue. BTW, I don’t think you are a terrorist supporter. Just toying with you. I think you are a moron.

 You are a lying piece of shit.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2010/09/04/ground-zero-church/

“Plus McVeigh and the abortion bombers were lone nuts immediately condemned by Christians. Not like the 9/11 terrorists who have wide support throughout the Muslim world, polling quite favorably right after it happened. The number of terrorist organizations in the Islamic world is astounding and you’d be very hard pressed to name any in the Christian world, and if you did they would not be harking back to Christs teachings.”

You are running a blatant double standard and are now lying to cover it up.
American Muslims have consistently denounced terrorism and are less likely on average to support violence against civilians than members of other faiths.

Yet Christians get a pass, and they don’t. The reason being that you are a fucking bigoted hypocrite.
You are the worst kind of bigot: the type who masks his bigotry under the guise of rationality so that he might be taken seriously.

Fortunately, though, it doesn’t look like anyone here is buying it, regardless of how relentlessly you spam the comments section so that you can get the last word.

Keep digging that hole of yours, fuckstick.

Macker is a lying piece of garbage and isn’t worth your time.

 You said, and I quote:

The base rate is for one TSA agent searching one passenger.

It’s possible that I misunderstood what you were trying to say, but it appears to be something connected with the probability of a TSA agent performing a search discovering a terrorist. Whichever way you cut it, this is not the base rate.

The base rate is the number of terrorists as a proportion of the flying population. It deliberately does not take into account who is searching whom and who found what while looking. That’s because when westart talking about the proportion of finding things during searches, we need to start incorporating the error rates, both false positives and false negatives.