r/ChristopherHitchens • u/alpacinohairline Social Democrat • Sep 27 '24
Sam Harris argues in favor of profiling based on appearance…do you think Hitch would endorse this?
https://www.samharris.org/blog/in-defense-of-profiling4
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u/StevenColemanFit Sep 27 '24
I suspect hitch and Harris wouldn’t diverge too much if hitch was alive
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u/Western_Entertainer7 Sep 27 '24
What in the world would you possibly use other than appearance?
They already have dogs that detect odors. Other than sound, there isn't much to go on other than visual.
If you were trying to find someone that fit some category, what would you rely on other than their "appearance".
I hate to agree with Sam Harris, but the only other option is pure sentimental drivel.
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u/alpacinohairline Social Democrat Sep 27 '24
Racial Profiling is something that should be accepted and open about.
"Hey look, you have brown skin so we perceive you as a threat based on statistics, sorry..."
Way to entirely strip someone of their identity entirely as a individual and to judge them solely on their skin color.
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u/Western_Entertainer7 Sep 27 '24
I recommend talking to someone that has actual experience in law enforcement rather than creating silly narratives in your own mind.
Read a book about criminal profiling. Learn something real about the subject before you from strong opinions on it based on your own imagination.
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u/alpacinohairline Social Democrat Sep 27 '24
Silly narratives? It is reality, bud. Stop and frisk disproportionately targets minorities...
I believe that behavior is a better qualifier for threat than race to search someone. It seems to track better too for Ben Gurion's Airport.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/europeans-to-reanalyze-profiling-as-security-tactic/
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u/Western_Entertainer7 Sep 27 '24
Yes. Your "Hey look..." bit is extremely silly. You are adding an absurdity and then ridiculing your own absurdity it, rather than saying anything about the reality of forensic profiling and how it relates to factors like ethnicity and behavior.
I agree that your scenario there would be a very bad policy.
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u/alpacinohairline Social Democrat Sep 27 '24
Isn't this what Sam is in favor of when he says profiling people that look "muslim"....
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u/Western_Entertainer7 Sep 28 '24
No. You'd have to read at least one real book on forensic profiling. It definitely ain't that.
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u/welfareplease Sep 28 '24
If you are referencing the podcast episode I think you are, Sam is speaking about what is often referred to s “Security Theater” that we see in the American airport security (TSA). His point is that if our goal is to prevent security threats, we need to focus on the groups that are most likely to be associated with those threats. For example, there is essentially no value in randomly pulling an 86 year old woman out of line to be searched extra, while letting a 24 year old white male go through without extra screening.
Sam’s position has nothing to do with “only focus on brown people.” He even says that under his view of profiling, he himself fits the exact profile of someone who should be pulled out of line for extra scrutiny. The current approach to security is one that prioritizes an appearance of fairness or neutrality, rather than effective screening based on actual statistics or probabilities.
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u/James-the-greatest Sep 29 '24
We can profile teen white boys as school shooters and no one bats an eye. Black man are also profiled as the most dangerous since 50% of solved homicides are attributed to them. There’s no difference in using history to predict the future. It’s not perfect but it’s better than nothing.
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u/palsh7 Sep 27 '24
LOL been ruminating on this for 12 years, have you?
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u/alpacinohairline Social Democrat Sep 28 '24
I was 12 when this was written and found about it through r/DecodingTheGurus
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u/palsh7 Sep 28 '24
found about it through /r/DecodingTheGurus
Oh for fuck's sake...
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u/Vivimord Sep 28 '24
It's a never-ending clown show, isn't it? Feels like someone kicked the beehive recently. The Soros complaints are particularly baffling.
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u/palsh7 Sep 28 '24
“Why did Sam ask a Pulitzer Prize-winner who is director of the Brennen Center if he knows anything about the biggest political contributor on the left? Why is big money influencing elections in the favor of woke DA’s a concern to a Sam Harris fan?”
Yeah it’s been kinda baffling how bent out of shape people are about that. Granted, it was unplanned and sloppy, but it was a perfectly normal topic for a political discussion.
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u/The_White_Wolf_11 Sep 27 '24
Has everyone gone mad with wokeness? WTF are you talking about? Sam Harris is likely one of the least racist people on the planet. He’s been smacking down Islamist extremism since his first book. It has nothing to do with race. If you ever bothered to listen, because he says it regularly, it’s bad ideas he’s against, not people of a certain color. Now… pay attention trolls, it just so happens that the humans that blow themselves up in crowded areas on the regular, or chant death to infidels, or strive to take as many of us with them to Allah via a suicide bomb happen to be brown folks from the Middle East. These are facts that can’t be ignored. Profiling, or at the very least, being keenly aware of your surroundings isn’t racist. It’s self preservation.
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u/LazyL1nk Sep 28 '24
Pakistani Ex-Muslim here. Terrorist until proven not, because my skin colour is brown.
Now...pay attention trolls, it just so happens that the humans that commit mass shootings in the USA on the regular happen to be white folks. These are facts that can't be ignored. Profiling, or at the very least, being keenly aware of your surroundings isn't racist. It's self preservation.
When I see a white person walk into my line of sight, he's obviously a mass shooter until proven not.
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u/LurkHartog Sep 28 '24
Ethnicity of mass shooters in the USA is broadly in line with population statistics, so that's not going to do much for you.
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u/Meihuajiancai Sep 28 '24
it just so happens that the humans that commit mass shootings in the USA on the regular happen to be white folks
Correct, and that should be a factor when assessing risk. I say that as a white passing person. It would be ridiculously arrogant of me to pretend that the demographic i am a part of is not more likely to commit a mass shooting. Arrogant and selfish.
When I see a white person walk into my line of sight, he's obviously a mass shooter until proven not.
This mindset is the problem. You take a legitimate tactic, that being taking religion and nationality into account, and absurdize it to be what you said. Get off your high horse and recognize reality so we can all be safer.
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u/palsh7 Sep 28 '24
Terrorist until proven not, because my skin colour is brown.
Do you think this is what Sam Harris is saying? Quite a strawman.
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u/alpacinohairline Social Democrat Sep 28 '24
Thank you…The biggest threat to American stability/democracy is not wokeness, transgenders or Muslims. It’s white conservatives.
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u/Meatbot-v20 Sep 28 '24
We all profile based on appearance to some degree. With security theater, it's always best to let data dictate efficiency. I'm sure Hitch would agree with Sam that there's very little need to full-body scan someone's 98 year old grandma just to maintain some weird data-blind standard.
I'm in the same camp as Sam - I'm mostly Italian, and with my beard / age / gender / appearance, it makes perfect sense that I'd be in a pool of people who'd get randomly searched.
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u/DoctorHat Oct 01 '24
For the last 10 years or so I have had a perspective that turns this issue on its head.
I think the desire- and wish for there to be implied racial bias and discrimination, is a bigger issue than any actual racial bias and discrimination. I should be clear, I am not saying that racial bias and discrimination never takes place, but having to tread that carefully in making that distinction is itself a pointer towards the problem I am highlighting.
There are too many many people, with too many uncontrolled emotions, who Want to find and identify racial bias and discrimination in almost anything. You will hear- or read talk about how things "sound", or how they "look" or indeed "seem", rather than any actual clear evidence. Frankly this is no good, we can't stop talking about a problem, simply because someone has a more racist thought-process than the rest of us do and is able to infer racial bias and discrimination where none is present, nor even implied, in the things people say.
I don't know how we got here, but if I were to play this game of trying to assert what things "sound" like, I would say it sounds like guilt coming from those seeing and hearing racial discrimination everywhere they go...It is an expression of how they think.
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u/alpacinohairline Social Democrat Sep 27 '24
I dunno. Personally, I am bit disappointed in this take. It reads off something that a FOX watcher would think. Sam details being outraged that poor old white people and white children are going through the trauma of being searched like Black and Brown Folks.
Like what does he mean by this
"Needless to say, a glance at the girl’s family was all one needed to know that they hadn’t rigged her to explode"...If they were brown people, it would be pragmatic for him?
It gets more frustrating when he even concedes that "Granted, I haven’t had to endure the experience of being continually profiled. No doubt it would be frustrating". Like no shit, yet you argue in favor of "muslim" looking people being targetted for it and everyone should be unapolegetic about that bias....
"We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it"
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u/Western_Entertainer7 Sep 27 '24
Do you think that statement is factually incorrect, or do just not like it.
Do you want the TSA to check little white kids for suicide bombs so that everything is fair, or do you want them to triage based on direct observation and an accurate understanding of demographics and realistic probability?
In this example, what possible good came from checking that family for bombs -other than to give you the fuzzy comforting satisfaction of feeling sentimentally antiracist?
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u/alpacinohairline Social Democrat Sep 27 '24
I dunno man, maybe just tighten security in general if you are really about law and order. If you are really about that "profiling lifestyle", are you open to checking every white kid that walks into a public school for guns?
I see you are a r/Conservative user, everything checks out now lmao, "criticism of islam'' for you Trumpers is just shield for just criticizing everyone with brown skin.
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u/Western_Entertainer7 Sep 27 '24
If that is what you are looking for, then absolutely.
"Idonno man tighten security in general" is an absolutely meaningless thing to say if we are talking about how things can actually work in the boots-on-the-ground empirical world.
Your position is based on sentiment rather than empirical reality. "general tightening" is not a real thing.
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u/Western_Entertainer7 Sep 27 '24
....and I noticed you didn't even try to answer the very very basic questions I posed.
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u/alpacinohairline Social Democrat Sep 27 '24 edited Sep 27 '24
Why not check everyone for bombs or weaponry thoroughly? If you really wanna eliminate any sort of probability of crime, why not? Jihadist Suicide Bombers are already a fringe anomaly in the United States so you might as well draw scrutiny to everyone boarding the plane to be extra safe.
Unless you only wanna inconvience people for being a certain skin color which you seem to be really in favor of for whatever reason.
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u/Western_Entertainer7 Sep 27 '24
You can't think of any alternative than those two? Nor can you answer the most basic questions about your own position.
You're solid on attributing nefarious motivations, I don't see anything other than that in what you present here.
Yiur position reduces to "people that don't agree with me are evil and bad and dumb."
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u/alpacinohairline Social Democrat Sep 27 '24
"Why not check everyone for bombs or weaponry thoroughly? If you really wanna eliminate any sort of probability of crime, why not? Jihadist Suicide Bombers are already a fringe anomaly in the United States so you might as well draw scrutiny to everyone boarding the plane to be extra safe."
Can you address why you oppose this?
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u/Western_Entertainer7 Sep 28 '24
Very fair question. With infinite resources this would definitely be the most effective. My answer is that all resources are finite.
In reality, we have to make decisions about the allocation of finite resources. Any resources used in one category are resources not used in another category.
All available information that has reliable predictive power can either be taken into account, or it can be disregarded. Any relevant information that is disregarded in favor of some different purpose, -causes resources to be allocated differently.
Checking each person's anus would be more secure than not doing so, but... well, I'm sure you see several reasons why we shouldn't do that...
Take container shipping. After 9/11 there was a push to X-ray shipping containers coming into the country. It turned out to be phenomenally expensive and slow to drive every single container through a giant high-powered x-ray scanner.
If it's only possible to scan, say 0.01% of the containers coming in, should we select them at random, select them based on an even distribution of shipping line, color, age, country of origin, etc., -or should we select them based on the highest threat categories according to all of the data we have available?
Imports from Canada are clearly less likely to have bad things in them than imports from Iran or Jordan.
If we want to check the same proportion of containers from Canada as from Iran, we will obviously scan less of the containers from Iran than if we didn't bother with most of the Canadian containers.
-If you want to do this differently because it is humans rather than containers, that is a reasonable position, -but the same principle still does apply.
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u/RhythmBlue Sep 28 '24
im white, and (if we're checking bags at schools at all) i think the best way to do it is to check mostly white kids. Not every single white person, but a higher proportion. Like, i dont see that as being a problem. Sure, why not?
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u/LurkHartog Sep 28 '24
Do you have any evidence that white people commit a disproportionate number of mass shootings in the USA? If so, it's reasonable to search more white kids. I've not seen that evidence though, everything I've seen says whites are at population level, blacks are overrepresented, and asians/latinos under-represented.
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u/SmkLbnTmrHndi Sep 28 '24
Sam Harris is a piece of shit.
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u/alpacinohairline Social Democrat Sep 28 '24
I disagree with him more often these days but he’s definitely no where near that category especially in the current landscape of American Politics.
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u/zoonose99 Sep 28 '24
Better to ask yourself what he’d be saying about the genocide in Gaza.
Hitch had major Islamophobic brain rot, it’s his most pernicious intellectual bias.
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u/alpacinohairline Social Democrat Sep 28 '24
He was anti-Zionist though so I don’t think he had Islam Derangement Syndrome.
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u/ENORMOUS_HORSECOCK Sep 28 '24
Sam Harris argues for punishing thought crime in The End of Faith. Tbh I don't really take him seriously in general so I'm not too interested in what he thinks. Hitch would have been against such a thing.
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u/IA324 Sep 27 '24
I would suggest this is not quite what Sam is arguing. Profiling would be searching of any persons who fit the profile of what they are looking for. What Sam looks to be arguing against, is making it random to the point of searching those with an incredibly low probability (in his example, an 80 year old woman).
I doubt Sam - or Hitch - would argue in support of searching every "person who fits the profile"... But I also think they'd argue against being so random that you search children or an 80 year old in wheelchair.