Pajamas Media has a long list of notable and obvious terrorists, who, as moderate Muslims, were invited into the highest reaches of the US government.
They only tell stories of high terrorists in the bosom of authority, simultaneously in authority in the US government, and in authority in Al Quaeda, neglecting to mention lowlier foot terrorists who actually carry out the killing, for example Hasan: the first terrorist to give an academic lecture with Power Point – to an Army audience – explaining his intention to commit a terrorist attack against his audience for the glory of God and the destruction of the infidel.
Pajamas media piously tells us that it does not want to see Muslims profiled – oh no, heaven forbid, the horror, the horror – merely held to the same standards as normal people.
But, of course, that is exactly the problem. Because profiling is such a horrible sin, because making generalizations on the basis of available evidence is such a horrible horrible horrible sin, people are bending over backwards to avoid drawing the conclusion that a particular Muslim is a terrorist when it is glaringly obvious that the particular Muslim is a terrorist.
Fear of profiling not only means we strip search and grope three year old girls from Pasadena. It means that we wave through people covered in a Burkha. There is no middle ground. If you allow people to use all available evidence, they are profiling. If you don’t allow them to use all available evidence, there is no limit to what evidence they are required to ignore.
PC is to the west, what Communism was to the Soviet Union – a State religion.
All religion seeks one thing – perpetuating itself.
Religion is a consciously organized memetic disease. Inevitably it harnesses authority to propagate itself, since, being a memetic disease, evidence will not work. Thus religions become theocracies if they can. Some, like Christianity are less prone to this,, others, like Islam and PC are more prone to it, since ruling others is their central doctrine, whereas Jesus told his followers “My Kingdom is not of this world”.
It’s not simply a lack of profiling; it’s a case of reverse profiling. Using a visible, credible randomizer to determine which unlucky passengers get enhanced gropings would be an improvement. Of course, that could be said about a lot of possible changes to the current system.
Now this assumes that the purpose of the TSA is to prevent terrorist acts. But my own working theory is that the TSA isn’t there to stop terrorism, but rather to stop acts of self-defense against terrorism. The authorities know they can’t go back to the days of “in the event of a hijacking, remain in your seats, with your hands folded in your laps, and wait for the Proper Authorized Government Agents to deal with the situtation.” Even so, they are desperate to do anything – anything at all – that will let them avoid admitting that sometimes the best solution is for ordinary persons to rise up and use violence in self-defense. Thus the TSA rules, scans, and gropes, aimed at removing both the means and the will to do so.
The purpose isn’t to prevent another Twin Towers. It’s to prevent another Flight 93.
Similarly, the great tragedy of the Fort Hood shooting was supposedly that it made affirmative action/anti profiling of Muslims look bad.
By and large, a lot of actions of the holy church of political correctness have as their primary motivation maintaining faith in the holy political correctness.
I think the type-I vs. type-II error model reversed between known and unknown threats describes the TSA better. Letting a known threat through would be catastrophic to the organization, but letting a new threat through would be no big deal. It’s all well and good that the passengers attack the terrorists, but the TSA can’t let the same threat through twice. The problem is the unsophisticated views of the public. Of course, because the TSA’s roles are federalized, the public has no motivation for expending the effort to have a nuanced view of security. Ergo, theater rules.
If the airports and airlines had to post bonds against terrorist acts (ultimately funded by ticket prices) but then were free to devise their own security strategies, we might see the best thinking applied to airline security instead of avoiding the wrath of the booboisie.
Of course, sophisticated security would be un-PC, and thus some federal politician could make hay by meddling, and ultimately we’re back to where we are today. Unfortunately, the decision as to whether something is or isn’t a federal matter is up to the feds, so everything becomes a federal matter, lest the politicians be accused of crimes of omission.
“I think the type-I vs. type-II error model reversed between known and unknown threats describes the TSA better. Letting a known threat through would be catastrophic to the organization, but letting a new threat through would be no big deal.”
This account, while undoubtedly true, is not the main truth, for it fails to explain them touching up the genitals of nine year old girls from Pasadena, while waving through burqa clad persons of indeterminate age and sex from the middle east.