Judging cultures is not the same as judging races. One’s race is unchosen; no-one can be condemned for membership of a racial group. However, culture is chosen, so a person can be condemned for their acceptance of an immoral culture. The equivocation of culture with race is one of the commonest forms of racism today: it is based on the racist view that one’s race determines one’s ideas and outlook.
– Andrew Medworth
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Samizdata slogan of the dayAugust 28th, 2003 |
 20 comments to Samizdata slogan of the day |
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Almost spot on, brothers!
That’s why ‘Islamophobia’ is normally rational, since you can choose your religion, and Islam is basically a religion of hate. So ‘Islamophobia’ is as rational as ‘Naziphobia’, since a birth Muslim can always opt out the day he realises that the Koran sucks as much as Mein Kampf.
On the other hand, ‘Arabophobia’ normally isn’t rational, since (a) you can’t choose to be or not to be an Arab and (b) not all Arabs have asshole opinions and worldviews.
And yet, and yet … at least we are entitled to judge Arabs on a kind of statistical basis. So Andrew Methworth’s claim that “[t]he equivocation of culture with race is one of the commonest forms of racism today: it is based on the racist view that one’s race determines one’s ideas and outlook.” isn’t quite accurate.
Let’s do a logic text:
“All Arabs are assholes.
Hussein is an Arab.
Therefore, Hussein is an asshole.”
Logical – but incorrect, since not all Arabs are assholes.
Now try this one:
“In the real existing world, an Arab is more likely to be an asshole and blow up a civilian airplane than a European is likely to be an asshole and blow up a civilian airplane.
Hussein is an Arab.
Hussein is more likely to be an asshole and blow up a civilian airline than Brian, who is not an Arab.
I’m gonna frisk Hussein more thoroughly than Brian before Hussein gets on the plane.”
That’s logical. That’s empirically correct. Arabs are more likely to be assholes and Islamists and blow up civilian planes than the rest of us.
That’s a justification for racial and facial profiling.
We need more racial and facial profiling. It’s rational. It’s logical. It’s common sense.
I would hope that fellow libertarians out there would chew Charles’ comments to shreds….. I haven’t the strength at the moment. Only to add:
“Among football fans a disproportionate number of Englishmen are hooligans …..” You can take it from there if you like.
The real question here is: “Does one chose his/her culture?” Certainly one can (or at least should be able to) change one’s opinions on certain things, but cultural beliefs and dispositions are fairly well ingrained….
And I wonder if your average security person can really tell the difference between various well-tanned persons, assuming that there is no obvious native dress involved. Terrorists could simply learn to wear suits and shave prior to attack.
Just wait until Asia’s Muslim population gets into the game…. Then we will see if profiling works in the slightest……
Sorry that Garth hasn’t any strength at the moment.
Let me therefore help him:
“In the real existing world, an English football fan is more likely to be an asshole and puke on the pavement than a French football fan is likely to be an asshole and puke on the pavement.
Garth is an English football fan.
Garth is therefore more likely to be an asshole and puke on the pavement than Pierre, who is a French football fan.
I’m gonna frisk Garth more thoroughly than Pierre before we let them into the football stadium.”
That’s logical. That’s empirically correct. English football fans are more likely to be assholes and puke on the pavement than French football fans.
That’s a justification for linguistic profiling (“Parles vous francais, salaud?”)
We need more linguistic profiling. It’s rational. It’s logical. It’s common sense.
BTW, Garth seems to underestimate the ability of the average security officer — though of course it is a fact that many Arabs physically resemble Southern Europeans. However, many of them have passports from Arab countries, which few non-Arabs do.
Profiling doesn’t always work — but it often does. It certainly works with young males of Sub-Saharan origin, who are pretty distinguishable from other young males. Since their crime rate is at least five times that of young white males (and probably ten times that of young Chinese males and 20 times that of young Ultraorthodox Jewish males), profiling is just what the doctor ordered — if he’s a race-realist doctor, I mean, not a ‘doctor in denial’, like Garth.
And the above reasoning is not based on prejudice — it’s bast on postjudice.
Get real, Garth.
Hmmm
So all you have to do is get your beard shaved, buy a false passport (as you would imagined a terrorist to do) so that you can sail past the racial-profile armed security guard and have a laugh while he hassles some aging suntanned hippie behind you in the queue.
Get real yourself Charles.
Eamon
“In the real existing world, an Arab is more likely to be an asshole and blow up a civilian airplane than a European is likely to be an asshole and blow up a civilian airplane.
While I agree that treating 80-year old nuns from Norway and 25-year old Saudi men as equal security risks is absurd, I think its important to choose the high-risk group on the most narrowly defined parameters that still encompass that group. For example, instead of “Arab”, how about “young to middle-aged Arab men”?
Eamon’s point is valid also. It is important not to focus exclusively on profiling; otherwise terrorists could have women or children sneak weapons onto planes for them. What is needed is a mixture: random searches, weighted more heavily toward “high-risk” groups (Middle Eastern men).
The goal is to reduce the threat of terrorism. If the goal were to reduce the threat of puking in a football stadium, wouldnt it make sense to focus on the group(s) most likely to engage in that behavior?
Eamonn, a chara
Do you understand what ‘probability’ means? Because that’s what profiling is based on. Of course it doesn’t always work. But it works some of the time.
Put it in terms of Economics 101:
Cost of profiling: X euro
Cost of non-profiling: Y euro.
When Y > X, profile.
When X > Y, don’t profile.
Let me give another example of profiling which you may find easier to grasp. It concerns Travellers – with a capital T, it’s the squeaky-clean term for what the Irish used to call ‘tinkers’ or ‘itinerants’. They’re the wonderful people who have four kids every three years and believe they’re a race apart. The Irish don’t like them very much because they’re more like the Irish than the Irish themselves.
You live in a house between two camping sites.
One site is full of Travellers.
The other site is full of Dutch people.
Your cottage is burglarised and you suspect that the burglars may be local residents.
Which site do you think the Gardai (Irish police) should search first? The Traveller site, or the Dutch site?
To ask that question is to answer it.
You’re a profiler just like myself.
“…they’re more like the Irish than the Irish themselves.”
… And how ought we to stereotype the Norwegians, while we’re at it? As trolls?
It’s a question of modeling and prediction. I suspect that in any halfway decent predictive model the variables outlining racial or even cultural traits would be far outweighed by variables mapping behavior, such as “no return ticket,” “nervous,” “sweating” etc. (Naive examples, but you get the point…)
And, as noted in previous comments, the tagging of suspects is hardly a static task, since nothing prevens the baddies from adapting. Now whether we should explicitly ban models including racial or cultural factors, is another question. There are a lot of potentially useful things that could fall afoul of the PC test (as well as legitimate concerns regarding curtailment of individual liberty).
Anyway, the real empirical question would be to compare different models, and see which of them work best, in focusing screening efforts at airports, for example.
As resources for security screening etc are likely to remain relatively scarce in any tolerable society, we may indeed need to resort to focusing the efforts by trying to guess out the potential terroristas. This is also a cue to bring in computers to do all sorts of learning, data-mining and prediction tasks, which raises another class of moral problems altogether: robo-cops dishing out body cavity search appointments based on skull contours… (ok, maybe that’s close to the worst case 😉 All sorts of automated biometrics aren’t really far off, especially if racial profiling becomes entirely uncontroversial.
I would oppose carte-blanche racial profiling in most-heck-probably-all situations, based on:
1) conduct of your character… & NOT who your father was.
2) coupled with automated surveillance (and it’s a-comin’) you
get into seriously creepy dystopian eugenics scenarios, at least with a bit of imagination
3) coupled with human screeners… heck, go to point 2, just without the sci-fi.
I’ve just read Andre Medworth’s blogtext from which the quotation of the day was taken.
Fine stuff — with one exception, namely the title ‘He had a dream’ and the idolization of Martin Luther King.
I have a dream: that libertarians and conservatives stop quoting this plagiarist and demagogue and treating him like a bit of colorblind window-dressing. It’s true – we should judge people by the content of their character not by the color of their skin. But King was simply lying: that was his propaganda, not his goal. He was in reality an affirmative action pussy, full stop. Anyway, he probably copied the whole text from somebody else. Intellectually, he was a forger and a fraud.
Try the Lew Rockwell site – there you’ll find the dirt on this pathetic, duplicitous racist bigot:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/epstein9.html
I have another dream: dump MLK into the rubbish bin of history.
Charles,
Richard Reed (and that’s some Arabic sounding name isn’t it!!) was travelling under a British Passport. And Zacharias Moussani (sp?) does not look particularly Arabic himself does he?
I wholeheartedly agree that in practice security agents would do well to pay more attention to those who, by appearence, look more like a terrorist would be expected to, but I am not certain I would feel comfortable if the government were to make such a thing public policy.
And I wanted to make a certain point that not all terrorists will have similar appearance. Now we have young women blowing themselves up in Irael, Chechnya and Moscow – do we start searching them? (and if so, who is taking applications?). Eventually we may have more Asians committing such acts as well…..
I was in London just two blocks from where that bomb went off on the bus in Aldwych in 1996. I doubt profiling could have stopped that one…. Thankfully it was Sunday night.
Driving home, radio news ran a soundbite from the guy who’s head of the Transportation Security Administration. Didn’t catch his name. It was part of a press conference or something about hightened security this weekend (bank holiday in the US). He said something like
It was one of those stare-at-the-radio-with-open-mouth moments. I thought sure he was going to deny shaking down grandma, but no — he assures us grandma was really dangerous and deserved everything she got.
Knowing how airport security has harassed my elderly parents, I have to say I think the point of the exercise — at least for the guys at the checkpoints — is less about security from terrorism and more about some minimum-wage guy’s class warfare revenge fantasies.
So all you have to do is get your beard shaved, buy a false passport (as you would imagined a terrorist to do) so that you can sail past the racial-profile armed security guard and have a laugh while he hassles some aging suntanned hippie behind you in the queue.
This postulates a game-theoretic shift that has not yet been observed. If the criminals/terrorists are smart enough to change their strategy, we will be smart enough to change ours and respond accordingly.
But in the meantime, *before* they’ve changed their strategy, we are remiss in our current useless security procedures.
So all you have to do is get your beard shaved, buy a false passport (as you would imagined a terrorist to do) so that you can sail past the racial-profile armed security guard and have a laugh while he hassles some aging suntanned hippie behind you in the queue.
This postulates a game-theoretic shift that has not yet been observed. If the criminals/terrorists are smart enough to change their strategy, we will be smart enough to change ours and respond accordingly.
But in the meantime, *before* they’ve changed their strategy, we are employing probabilistically inefficient security procedures.
Also, Charles: not all Muslims are bad guys, though quite a few are.
Do i walk through bad areas at night? Do i pass the traveller halting site more quickly as i afraid of the dogs? Do i warn children of not speaking to strangers especially those offering sweeties?
Libertarians seem to believe that everyone should be judged individually, like all utopianists they fail to recognise a particular part of human nature. People make prejudices judgements, they stereotype because it is useful to everyday existence. It can protect from terrorists and criminals in the same way it pretects children from harmful adults or protects me in the pub from getting in arguments with certain dare i say it ‘types’ of people. get real.
This quote of the front page also implies i cant say in my opinion that I think chinese culture is inferior to the wests. Is this ok fo you then?
Culture and race are not inseperable but they are highly linked. A Culture revolving around tea ceremonies and extreme politeness may not be suitable for the inhabitants of the congo rainforest for instance.
People cant always ditch thier culture, especially in societies who practise the shariah. Culture is not always chosen, ergo this quote is stupid.
Charles writes
Eamonn, a chara
Another one who can’t read. This double-n syndrome is getting out of hand. Nor am I your “friend”.
Do you understand what ‘probability’ means? Because that’s what profiling is based on. Of course it doesn’t always work. But it works some of the time.
Ahh, a patronising tone allied to complete nonsense. Profiling only works when it is based on some kind of science. Your idea that targetting ‘Young arab males’ is so broad as to be irrelevant. My limited understanding of probability tells me that a young Arab male is infinitely more likely to be a peaceful traveller than a terrorist, so therefore I am not going to waste resources.
Put it in terms of Economics 101:
Cost of profiling: X euro
Cost of non-profiling: Y euro.
When Y > X, profile.
When X > Y, don’t profile.
Cost benefit analysis for idiocy. That’s novel. So your reasoning follows.
“Poking myself repeatedly in the eye costs nothing. So here goes.”
Let me give another example of profiling which you may find easier to grasp.
Now there’s one of the pseudo debaters favorite fall backs. The claim that you are trying to think down to his level. Sad.
It concerns Travellers – with a capital T, it’s the squeaky-clean term for what the Irish used to call ‘tinkers’ or ‘itinerants’.
I don’t know of whom you speak. Do you mean the Knackers (with a capital K).
They’re the wonderful people who have four kids every three years and believe they’re a race apart. The Irish don’t like them very much because they’re more like the Irish than the Irish themselves.
Absolutely. Living by the side of the road and making a complete pig-sty of everywhere you go is quintessentailly Irish.
You live in a house between two camping sites.
One site is full of Travellers.
The other site is full of Dutch people.
Your cottage is burglarised and you suspect that the burglars may be local residents.
Which site do you think the Gardai (Irish police) should search first? The Traveller site, or the Dutch site?
To ask that question is to answer it.
You’re a profiler just like myself.
Tortured logic but lets see if I understand you. You think that if I believe that the Police are prejudiced against the travelling community in Ireland then that makes me a profiler a well. Odd.
Charles
Let me put it this way. You’re a racist. Now I know that word usually elicits a shudder of revulsion on this site because of its PC connotations, however, you are a genuine racist for the following reason.
You are far to ready to identify any group with its scummiest elements.
Blacks are hulking muggers in hoods.
Jews are grasping usurers.
Americans are fat bastards in bad trousers.
For the record I have no problem with profiling. However, even those who advocate it for appropriate circumstances, like serial killers (who can be profiled because they tend to have numerous identifiable trait) admit that it is very limited in its effectiveness.
Yours in disgust.
Eamon
Eamonne,
I’ll refrain from correcting your own spelling — it’s hardly to the point. Unlike you, I don’t go in for ad hominem attacks.
You claim I am racist of the grounds that I am “far too ready to identify any group with its scummiest elements”.
That is preposterous. I simply argue that certain groups (human breeding populations, cultures, nations) clearly have a higher proportion of scummy elements than others, and that statistical discrimination is justified on those grounds.
Example:
Groups of young black males are more likely to mug you than groups of young white males.
In other words:
A young black male is more likely to be a scumbag than a young white male.
That is why sensible people avoid walking through black ghettos at night. That is why ‘white flight’ is the normal reaction to black entry into a neighbourhood. That is why we ‘stereotype’ or ‘profile’ certain groups.
Let’s have more stereotyping, more profiling, and therefore less crime.
Charles
Go check your facts. There are two accepted spellings for my name. Mine is with the single n.
If you are foolish enough to beleive that I managed to get all the way through life without being able to spell my own name then I think the Ad Hominem attacks are warranted.
As to your statistics above. You are also more likely to be burgaled by a white man. Does that mean I should leave Chelsea at the first sign of a pale skinned figure.
I simply argue that certain groups (human breeding populations, cultures, nations) clearly have a higher proportion of scummy elements than others, and that statistical discrimination is justified on those grounds.
Condemned out of your own mouth.
Eamon
Eamona!
Sure you’re not a girl? Menstrual problems? Boyfriend dumped you and changed his mobile phone number? Now stop crying all your way to the blogsite and I’ll lay off the ad feminam approach.
As to your statement : “You are also more likely to be burgaled by a white man”, I presume you’re referring to London or UK – not Zimbabwe. Yes, that is true, but trivial: 90% of the population of London is white, and you would only be more likely to be burglarized by a black man if blacks were burglarizing at over 10 times the rate of whites, which is not the case.
According to a recent newspaper report on crime in the London area “Black people accounted for 26.4 per cent of those accused of thefts other than robberies. The percentage for burglary was also 26.4 per cent; for vehicle crime, 26 per cent; for violence against the person, 29.9 per cent; and for fraud, 38.2 per cent.”
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2000/10/25/nfig25.xml)
That means that — assuming 10% of the London population are black, they are burglarizing at 2.6 times the non-black rate. Therefore, one should be 2.6 times as wary of blacks as of non-blacks even in respect of burgarly — though to give you your due I don’t think profiling would be much good here.
Still, it makes more sense for the police to frisk black males wandering through the streets late at night with suspicious bags of tools (flashlights, gloves, chisels, small sledgehammers etc.) than it does to frisk Chinese males doing the same thing.
BTW, I was myself a ‘victim’ of profiling during the late seventies — at a time when the IRA scumbags made every decent person ashamed to be Irish — because of my Irish passport and the remote possibility that I might be involved in that criminal organisation. But I was very happy that the border police in Europe did check me so thoroughly. And if the IRA scumbags start repeating their terror campaigns, I’ll be happy to be ‘discriminated’ against again.
Oh yeah, and completely beside the point — one final tip for sweet Eamona:
A girl’s best friend is her sugar daddy.
Charles
Is that your idea of not indulging in Ad Hominem attacks. Now I can’t remember the last time someone accused me of being a girl. However, seeing as I wouldn’t regard being of the female gender as something to be ashamed of, who cares.
As to your quoting of figures. You might be interested to know that the Metropolitan Police has no way of knowing hat the crime figures for London are. Although all crime is logged, there is no central database and no means of quantifying all the info collected on a day to day basis. So the figures quoted tend to be of the “off the top of my head” variety.
As for the IRA. I’ve never had any reason to be ashamed to be Irish. In the same way that I don’t hold your average Muslim on the street to be responsible for his brothers behaviour, at the same time I don’t expect to be held responsible for the doings of my countrymen.
But it’s obvious that you do.
Eamon
I would like to thank the Samizdata team for making this “quote of the day”. I do not have room here for everything I want to say, so I would like to point you to
this post on my own blog responding to some of the
comments above and clarifying my original post.
Many thanks.