Yeah, I know what you were doing daycruz. Very naughty and clever. The guy who complained about profiling may be a profiler himself. I was making it more obvious for the other Mutineers.

But for the record, my heart goes out to Ali. Whoever called the cops was hysterical. The cops acted more or less reasonably (except for the unfortunate “what country is he from” question) as one must err on the the side of caution. I don’t trust Ali because of his riduculous opposition to all war and he does seem a bit preoccupyed with ROTC in his statement. Probably he has an agenda, especially since he hysterically grabs for the F-word like Joe McCarthy grabbed the C-word.

Now, did he profile the ROTC dude? Assuming he did (meaning he has no other info), I don’t blame him. Unlike the profiling of him, he has a resonable case. The guy was staring and ROTCs are probably more likely to be informants (though the military can be much more liberal than meets the eye, especially people from west point).

So I sympathize with Ali but cannot completely reject profiling. After all, if I knew the klan was planning an attack, I wouldn’t keep an eye out for loner Korean dudes.

Wow… so all of this is based on the fact that this guy thinks the ROTC guy called him in? The rotc guy has had no chance to defend himself and we are just taking this poet’s perspective? All this rush to judgment based on that? It is really interesting how this guy who obviously has been hurt by SOMEONE else’s profiling is so quick to profile…

Thank you .Your comment reminds us all once again why it is so important to stand up against discrimination – however mild.

By posting your ill-intentioned, malicious and offensive comment , you have just validated this entire discussion.

I commend all the other mutineers here for rising above and not responding.Alas , I am not as patient.

I’m brown too and am on the receiving end as well. As long as the United States wages wars with Middle-Eastern countries with brown people , and the faces of the ‘enemy’ is constantly brown, we will be under suspicion here. Hopefully the wars will end soon and peace will ensue … While I am definitely against blatant,hyper suspicion to the point of ‘recycling when brown’ , I believe that the absolute denial of the role ethnicity has to play is too extreme as well.

There have been a few here and there.

But ultimately, the fact is that we live in a multiracial society which RELIES on the presumption that all people have equal rights. If you’re willing to throw out that presumption for purely utilitarian (though, again, unproven) reasons of safety, you need to realize we’ll be discarding that functional multiracial society again. To proclaim one skin color a danger while another is “safe” (even though members of both “color groups” have committed horrific acts of violence both in and out of the United States) would mean dumping us back into segregration.

Note, I’m not saying what happened to this professor was “segregation”. But I do think incidents like this are a probable first step down that road.

Thanks for sharing your views. Well, since you disagree with my first premise – you are discounting many events that happened in the last 10 years:

• The emergence of Al-Qaeda and its power
• The war in Iraq by the US
• The war in Afghanistan by the US
• 9/11
• The Israel conflict which is clearly supported by US and thus gives the US many more middle-eastern enemies

You say that extremism in all religions is equally a threat to the US … does the US have extremist Christian enemies or extremist hindu enemies who have in the last 10 years committed terrorist acts here in the US ? If so, I am unaware of them

As for the NRA, chechens, etc – The current context is the United States … so bringing up local terrorist elements is not very relevant in this debate. For instance, the LTTE in sri lanka doesn’t belong to this debate. If we were talking about prejudice in Sri Lanka, maybe, but not here.

My fear is that arguments like Randomizer’s imply that the answer is “always.” We are always supposed to be under suspicion. As are our kids. And our grandkids. And so on. No matter what we do, what we believe, how well we adjust, or even how culturally “white” we become, our skin color is entirely enough to condemn us to quasi-criminal status forever (or at least until we all interbreed with white people).

That’s a pretty awful view of the future, isn’t it? Especially when profiling has no proven impact, and relies solely on inductive, untested reasoning as its basis.

Sorry to jump into your conversation but I wanted to question some of the assumptions you have made with your premises.

(1) Do you accept that currently, extremist Islam is the biggest threat to America in terms of terrorist acts?

Firstly I don’t accept your first premise, I think fundamentalist religion as a whole may be damaging to the US, not just from Muslims but also from Christians (I’m looking at it from a complete outsider’s point of view). I take it however that you mean if a terrorist act is commited, you believe that the odds will be higher that it is a fundamentalist Muslim rather than not (please correct me if I’m wrong) – I strongly disagree with you there as it makes a lot of assumptions about the likely hood of an attack.

(2) If yes, do you agree that strictly statistically speaking , it is more probable that people from majority Islamic countries are *more* likely to be of this Islamist subset than people from other Christian/Buddhist countries ? eg. you are more likely to find islamic extremists in Iraq/Iran/Pakistan/Afghanistan than say China ?

Well, you’ve assumed that I agree with you on the first premise, but I don’t so for starters the second premise fails. Without all that however, you’re second premise makes the assumption that Islam breeds extremists, particularly in countries where that is the chief faith. I don’t think you’re ever going to find out that statistic which will tell you “more people believe that blowing other people up is a good act of faith live in X and believe in X” (again please correct me if I’ve misrepresented your point of view).

You have just, to me, made to many jumps in your assumptions for your argument to be sound. In fact I don’t think there’s any point in going through your third and fourth premise because, again, they rely on accepting the first two premises.

Your final conclusion:

If you agreed from 1-4, you will support this statement – ‘Statistically/Mathematically speaking, the probability P of a brown middle eastern man being a terrorist is greater than that of any other race’.

Er, no I don’t, I didn’t need the argument before hand to do that too, nor do I need to be American as your conclusion does not require me to be. I’m a NZer in the UK, the IRA used to be “the terrorists” here not even decade ago, in Spain it’s the ETA, in Russia they would probably say the Chechens.

I want to see your statistics that support these statements.

I admit that both of you have provided valid information about terrorists being of other races as well, and proved me ignorant on several statements. Thank you for providing me with the information. But I find that you are on the other extreme of this argument, when actually the other extreme is equally as dangerous. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be supporting the complete denial of the race of this extremism. And I would like to see how far this denial goes. So help me out here :

(1) Do you accept that currently, extremist Islam is the biggest threat to America in terms of terrorist acts?

(2) If yes, do you agree that strictly statistically speaking , it is more probable that people from majority Islamic countries are more likely to be of this Islamist subset than people from other Christian/Buddhist countries ? eg. you are more likely to find islamic extremists in Iraq/Iran/Pakistan/Afghanistan than say China ?

(3) If statistically speaking, you agreed on 1 and 2, and I show you a map of the world labeled by their majority religion, would you agree that by sheer probability it is more likely that people of the areas marked Green are more likely to be extremists than the others? Statistically speaking only

(4) If you agreed on 3 as well, then do you deny a connection between area of origin and ethnicity ? eg. do you deny that middle-eastern will be predominantly brown.. whereas European/Western will be predominantly caucasian?

If you agreed from 1-4, you will support this statement – ‘Statistically/Mathematically speaking, the probability P of a brown middle eastern man being a terrorist is greater than that of any other race’. If you did not agree , I want to know which of the 4 points you disagree on and why.

Thanks for the engaging debate, plz be civil.