{"id":12524,"date":"2009-07-23T13:08:55","date_gmt":"2009-07-23T13:08:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2009\/07\/23\/on-profiling\/"},"modified":"2009-07-23T13:08:55","modified_gmt":"2009-07-23T13:08:55","slug":"on-profiling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2009\/07\/23\/on-profiling\/","title":{"rendered":"On Profiling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do all liberals lack common sense? No, but many of them do. If you are a liberal and oppose criminal profiling, then I say you lack common sense.<\/font><\/p>\n

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It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed<\/strong> under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty year old, is running from the scene.<\/font><\/p>\n

Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can't answer this question, then you lack common sense.<\/font><\/p>\n

The problem is not so much that liberals are stupid, as that they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by that cognitive aberration known as political correctness. I'll let <\/font>Charles Krauthammer<\/font><\/a> finish this post for me (emphases<\/strong> added):<\/font><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

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The American response to tightening up after London has been reflexive and idiotic: random bag checks in the New York subways. Random meaning that the people stopped are to be chosen numerically. One in every five or 10 or 20. <\/font><\/p>\n

This is an obvious absurdity and everyone knows it. It recapitulates the appalling waste of effort and resources we see at airports every day when, for reasons of political correctness, 83-year-old grandmothers from Poughkeepsie are required to remove their shoes in the search for jihadists hungering for paradise. <\/font><\/p>\n

The only good thing to be said for this ridiculous policy is that it testifies to the tolerance and goodwill of Americans, so intent on assuaging the feelings of minority fellow citizens that they are willing to undergo useless indignities and tolerate massive public waste. <\/font><\/p>\n

Assuaging feelings is a good thing, but hunting for terrorists this way is simply nuts.<\/strong> The fact is that jihadist terrorism has been carried out from Bali to Casablanca to Madrid to London to New York to Washington by young Muslim men of North African, Middle Eastern and South Asian origin. This is not a stereotype. It is a simple statistical fact.<\/strong> Yes, you have your shoe-bomber, a mixed-race Muslim convert, who would not fit the profile. But the overwhelming odds are that the guy bent on blowing up your train traces his origins to the Islamic belt stretching from Mauritania to Indonesia. <\/font><\/p>\n

Yet we recoil from concentrating bag checks on men who might fit this description. Well, if that is impossible for us to do, then let's work backward. Eliminate classes of people who are obviously not suspects. <\/font><\/p>\n

We could start with a little age pruning \u2014 no one under, say, 13, and no one over, say, 60. Then we could exempt whole ethnic populations, a list that could immediately start with Hispanics, Scandinavians and East Asians. Then we could have a huge saving, a 50 percent elimination of waste, by giving a pass to women, except perhaps the most fidgety, sweaty, suspicious-looking, overcoat-wearing, knapsack-bearing young woman, to be identified by the presiding officer. <\/font><\/p>\n

You object that with these shortcuts, we might not catch everybody. True. But how many do we catch now with the billions spent patting down grandmothers from Poughkeepsie? <\/font><\/p>\n

You object that either plan \u2014 giving special scrutiny to young Islamic men, or, more sensitively, just eliminating certain demographic categories from scrutiny \u2014 will simply encourage the jihadists to start recruiting elderly Norwegian women. <\/font><\/p>\n

Okay. We can handle that. Let them try recruiting converts, women and non-usual suspects for suicide missions. That will require a huge new wasteful effort on their part. And, more important, by reducing the pool of possible terrorists from the hundreds of millions to, at most, the tens of thousands, we will have reduced the probability of an attack by a factor of 10,000. Those are far better odds at far less cost to us in money and effort. And infinitely less stupid. <\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do all liberals lack common sense? No, but many of them do. If you are a liberal and oppose criminal profiling, then I say you lack common sense.   It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. … Continue reading “On Profiling”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,163],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-affairs","category-leftism-and-political-correctness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12524\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}