I remember reading a 2002 news article that the highest number of Osama sightings had been reported in Utah…

And yet the 7/7 attackers weren’t Arabs, they were Pakistanis and then Africans. Do you feel equally apprehensive when you see a bunch of desi men together speaking in Punjabi? Or how about the Africans on the train?

The guys on the trains were black arabs meaning they weren’t desi looking brown arabs. I’ve traveled in and out of the middle east for 20 years and am aware that “potential” terrorists can be from anywhere. I understand the difference between African, middle eastern, far eastern and south asian muslims.

I’m not accusing you of being a bit. I am pointing out that your fears of a train attack are not triggered by the people who attack trains and I’m wondering why not?

My fears were just general behavior I feel like I’ve been bombarded emotionally to believe as being suspicous. It isn’t about planes or trains. I didn’t act on it. I justified it as normal behavior but my first instinct was otherwise. I went thru Sept 11 and lost two friends and nearly lost my brother. It is what has shaped me. It isn’t some excuse, it is simply the truth.

What will change things for you, JOAT, is when you’ve been on the other side or known somebody who has. When you’ve had somebody call the police on you for completely innocuous behavior, and you realize that you’re guilty until proven innocent, and that these days due process can be circumvented, and you can vanish without habeas corpus for an extended period of time.

I have been slightly on the other side. I was attacked by two women on the LIRR as a matter of fact in the spring of 2002. They were acting out on spite and hate and prejudice and I was told to go back to my country and stop bombing America! My crime? I was speaking in gujarati with another friend on the train and I look about as non traditional as one can be. My ear was nearly torn off and I suffered a concussion. When the train pulled up at the next stop there were about 100 cops waiting for us. It was ugly and it freaked me out. I only didn’t hit the woman back because she was as old as my mother and I believe very strongly that my anger was enough to have ended her in the hospital severely injured. I did not act on it. I defended myself, I did not attack her back.

Another friend’s father was deported back to Ludhiana after living in this country for over a decade. He was at the immigration detention center for 3 months. His crime was that he was careless in renewing his GC and it had recently expired. He was treated as a terrorist. It was very painful for many of us.

My point is I didn’t act on these fears and know better and I have not acted on it but I have experienced the initial apprehension that I feel upon seeing certain kinds of people. But if I a brown woman can feel this I can only imagine what it is like for someone culturally unaware. I am not trying to justify the behavior but trying to speak to the “dismissing it as biggotted behavior”.

no. there is variance around the expectation (i’m not thinking deterministically).

you seem to be saying in that set-up — culture(mind(individual)) — that the reaction of fear is too strong to behave in a way other than how the airline stewardess in this story behaves. That’s the issue I have with your statement, not that people don’t act based on the most likely probabilities. That seems relatively not controversial.

Anyway, SM has been getting a bit harsh and I’d like to see the mood lighten

culture(individual) = set of behaviors

i think we benefit from:

culture(mind(individual)) = set of behaviors

in other words, culture operates upon the preexistent biases of the human mind to generate a set of probable behaviors. to scale a mountain or construct a bridge across a canyon you need to know the lay of the land and the general topography. viewing everything to a purely culturalist lens is like using a political map only, when you need a physical relief map as well, because the political boundaries tend to follow and be constrained by physical features.

not true. the problem is that humans have intuitive probability which doesn’t really gel with mathematical probability, eg., “the gambler’s fallacy” and the “law of small numbers.” see inevitable illusions: how mistakes of reason rule our minds or judgment under uncertainty : heuristics and biases. contrary to a previous poster, rats can tell us a lot of human ways of thinking, skinnerian behaviorism was in fact overthrown in large part via a series of surprising experiments with rats.

holy crap, this would have been the best way for any one to do harm, dress scary to the bigots, get urself, but not ur luggage thrown off, and heck, u dont even have to risk ur own hide.

my point is, this talk of probablilities have little to do with most peoples everyday lives.