{"id":8187,"date":"2014-01-19T04:50:13","date_gmt":"2014-01-19T04:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/01\/19\/profiling-prejudice-and-discrimination-3\/"},"modified":"2014-01-19T04:50:13","modified_gmt":"2014-01-19T04:50:13","slug":"profiling-prejudice-and-discrimination-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/01\/19\/profiling-prejudice-and-discrimination-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Profiling, Prejudice, and Discrimination"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Everybody profiles.&#0160; Liberals are no exception.&#0160; Liberals reveal their prejudices by where they live, shop, send their kids to school and&#0160;with whom they associate.&#0160;&#0160;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">The word &#39;prejudice&#39; needs analysis.&#0160; It could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar.&#0160; We should all condemn blind prejudice.&#0160; It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example.&#0160;No doubt, but how many people do that?&#0160; How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their&#0160;skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns?&#0160;Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior.&#0160;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">&#39;Prejudice&#39; could also mean &#39;prejudgment.&#39;&#0160;&#0160; Although blind prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good.&#0160; We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant.&#0160; We rely upon the &#39;sedimentation&#39; of past exerience.&#0160; Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience.&#0160; The first time I &#39;serve&#39; my cats whisky they are curious.&#0160; After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam. They distill from their unpleasant olfactory experiences a well-grounded prejudice against the products of the distillery.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">My prejudgments about rattle snakes are in place and have been for a long time.&#0160; I don&#39;t need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. I do not treat each new one encountered as a &#39;unique individual,&#39; whatever that might mean.&#0160; Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true.&#0160;The adult mind is not a <em>tabula rasa<\/em>.&#0160; What experience has written, she retains, and that&#39;s all to the good.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice.&#0160; The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town&#0160;after dark.&#0160; Later the son learns that the old man was not such a bigot after all: the father&#39;s prejudice was not blind but had a <em>fundamentum in re<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">But if you stay away from certain parts of town are you not &#39;discriminating&#39; against them?&#0160; Well of course, but not all discrimination is bad. Everybody discriminates.&#0160; Liberals are especially discriminating.&#0160; The typical Scottsdale liberal would not be caught dead supping in some of the Apache Junction dives I have been found in.&#0160; Liberals discriminate in all sorts of ways.&#0160; That&#39;s why Scottsdale is Scottsdale and not Apache Junction.&#0160; <\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Is the refusal to recognize same-sex &#39;marriage&#39; as marriage discriminatory?&#0160; Of course!&#0160; But not all discrimination is bad.&#0160; Indeed, some is morally obligatory.&#0160; We discriminate against&#0160; felons when we disallow their possession of firearms.&#0160; Will you argue against that on the ground that it is discriminatory? If not, then you cannot cogently argue against the refusal to recognize same-sex &#39;marriage&#39; on the ground that it is discriminatory.&#0160; You need a better argument.&#0160; And what would that be?<br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">&#39;Profiling,&#39; like &#39;prejudice&#39; and &#39;discrimination,&#39; has come to acquire a wholly negative connotation.&#0160; Unjustly.&#0160; What&#39;s wrong with profiling?&#0160; We all do it, and we are justified in doing it.&#0160; Consider criminal profiling.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\"> 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&#39; <strong>Guide for the Perplexed<\/strong> under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty-year-old, is running from the scene.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can&#39;t answer this question, then you lack common sense.&#0160; But just to spell it out for you liberals: octogenarians are not known for their sexual prowess: the geezer is lucky if he can get it up for a five-minute romp.&#0160; Add chess playing and an interest in Maimonides and you have one harmless dude.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Or let&#39;s say you are walking down a street in Mesa, Arizona.&#0160; On one side of the street you spy some fresh-faced Mormon youths, dressed in&#0160;their 1950s attire, looking like little Romneys, exiting a Bible studies class.&#0160; On the other side of the street, Hells Angels are coming out of their club house.&#0160; Which side of the street would you feel safer on?&#0160; &#0160;On which side will&#0160;your &#0160;concealed semi-auto .45 be more likely to see some use?<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify; display: block;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Their brains are addled by the equality fetish:&#0160; everybody is equal, they think, in every way.&#0160; So the vigorous 20-year-old is not more likely than the old man to have committed the rape.&#0160; The Mormon and the Hells Angel are equally law-abiding.&#0160; And the twenty-something Egyptian Muslim is no more likely to be a terrorist than the Mormon matron from Salt Lake City.&#0160; <\/span><\/p>\n<fieldset class=\"zemanta-related\">\n<legend class=\"zemanta-related-title\">Related articles<\/legend>\n<div class=\"zemanta-article-ul zemanta-article-ul-image\" style=\"margin: 0; padding: 0; overflow: hidden;\">\n<div class=\"zemanta-article-ul-li-image zemanta-article-ul-li\" style=\"padding: 0; background: none; list-style: none; display: block; float: left; vertical-align: top; text-align: left; width: 84px; font-size: 11px; margin: 2px 10px 10px 2px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/maverick_philosopher\/2013\/04\/gasthaus-blut-und-boden.html\" style=\"box-shadow: 0px 0px 4px #999; 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<a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/01\/19\/profiling-prejudice-and-discrimination-3\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Profiling, Prejudice, and Discrimination&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment","category-race"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8187","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=8187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}