Complementary medicine. Alternative medicine. CAM. These names have been floating around for a while now. What do they refer to?
Broadly, they refer to anything that calls itself medicine that isn’t medicine. Anything that has been demonstrated to have some actual effect on disease, illness, or injury is medicine. Anything that hasn’t been shown to work or has been shown not to work is not medicine. Doctors aren’t allowed to use or recommend things that haven’t been shown to work, or that have been shown not to work, because that’s what’s known as “medical malpractice”, which can get you sued for millions of dollars and cost you your medical career. Or get you a spot on Oprah then your own TV show.
Anyone who shills this sort of thing (ie. things that aren’t medicine) aren’t allowed to call it medicine or say that it cures or heals you (nevertheless, they very often do, until they get caught and go to prison). So they like to talk about “wellness” and “health” and “holistic” a lot, and they call themselves “alternative medicine”, or “complementary medicine”. That way they can pretend like they’re doing something real while maintaining enough distance that they might not get sued or go to prison.
In short, anyone selling complementary or alternative medicine (CAM) is a fraud, a quack, a piece of shit in a white coat pretending to be a doctor.
Now, that might be a little bit mean. Many people honestly do buy into the shit they’re selling. They really believe. Hell, I’ll go so far as to say that it’s the overwhelming majority. They honestly believe and think they’re helping people. This is true for CAM quacks as much as it is for fortune tellers, psychics, and so on. I’ve a friend who practices acupuncture, as well as cupping and burning roots and other pseudoscientific mystical nonsense. He’s not a bad person, but he has dedicated years of his life to a lie that he honestly believes. He really thinks he’s helping people.
But they’re not helping people. I want that to be absolutely clear. They are. Not. Helping.
CAM quacks sell things that either haven’t been shown to work (random ass injection of stem cells, or wierd herbal concoctions) or that have been shown not to work (acupuncture, chiropractic, reiki, basically anything with a name). The best you can hope for is that whatever nonsense they’re selling you will do absolutely nothing. Very likely, it will have an effect, and it won’t be good.
“Herbal” and “natural” are not synonymous with “healthy”. Tobacco is an entirely natural product; nicotine is a pesticide. Plants are full of chemical compounds, usually intended to keep other things from eating those plants. That those chemicals can, in rare cases, have positive medicinal uses doesn’t mean that all of them always do. Aspirin is based on the chemical salicylic acid, extracted from the bark of the willow tree. It can be used to soothe pain, but it’s also used to remove skin (it’s an acid).
People recommending CAM shams don’t necessarily have … Okay, they necessarily don’t have good education in biology and chemistry generally nor medicine specifically. If they did, they wouldn’t be quacks, not honestly anyway. Regardless, they cannot have a good education in this stuff, and thus can’t know if what they’re recommending will help you at all or if it’ll just ruin the lining of your stomach, or destroy your kidneys. They don’t know, and neither do you.
Of course, not every Cam quack gives you things to eat or drink, right? Acupuncture is strictly topical, and chiropractic, too, right?
Again, nothing would be the best you could hope for, there. Are the acupuncture needles clean? Is the chiropractor going to dislocate something? But more than that, quacks almost never limit themselves to one form of woowoo. An acupuncturist isn’t only going to offer to poke you with needles, but will also offer other things like burning herbs on your skin, or cupping. Chemicals can have effects without being ingested; ever had poison ivy? And cupping .... it comes in a lot of varieties, and they’re range from mildly bad to holy shit.
All your woowoo blends together; a psychic will also sell themself as a mystic, a medium, and a fortune teller, because why not? Your chiropractor will offer reflexology and kinesiology and aromatherapy and all sorts of shit. Anything to get you to part with a few more bucks, and all with a clean conscience because they honestly believe in the crap they’re selling (most of the time).
And sometimes things can go horribly wrong, even or especially if the quack is doing exactly what they were taught to do. There’s a new craze in acupuncture called apipuncture, where instead of poking you with needles they sting you with live bees. Yes. People have died. Chiropractic involves manipulating joints… beginning with the spine. Not only does the spine house the spinal cord, it also houses a number of incredibly important blood vessels. Again, people have died as a result of chiropractic manipulations.
Quacks will treat any damn thing, but they love to target cancer. It’s the disease everyone will get eventually, and it’s the hardest to treat. Britt Marie Hermes is an excellent resource; I recommend her site naturopathicdiaries.com. Naturopathy is a broad, deliberately non-specific brand of woowoo that, like chiropractic, can occasionally bill itself as actual medicine thanks to asshole politicians in Arizona and Oregon. Hermes was driven out because her cancer patients weren’t able to get their medicine because it had been seized by customs… because it’s illegal.
A weekend of research later and Hermes was devastated to realize her boss had been lying to her and she had been lying to her patients. She had spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars earning a degree that was completely worthless, and had dedicated two more years to helping kill desperate people. She now lives in Germany, studying evolutionary biology at the University of Kiel. She’ll never be able to pay off the loans that paid for her worthless degree, which means she’ll probably never be able to return to the United States. She, like her patients, was a victim of a system that in absolutely no way intended to help people.
CAM is not medicine. CAM is not science. CAM does not help people. CAM kills. The people who practice this shit usually have the best of intentions. They honestly believe that what they’re doing is for the best.
They’re wrong.
In many ways, CAM practitioners are like preachers. They’re caught in a terrible trap, one baited with their own good intentions. They thought they were on the path to making the world a better place, and now they’re stuck, with no knowledge or skills, with no path toward a new career. Their degrees are garbage, their skills are garbage, all they have is the ability to make people feel better without actually helping them. Like a preacher becoming an atheist, a quack learning they’re peddling bullshit and lies might not see any way out.
I feel for them. Honestly, I do. Being stuck in a situation like that? Terrible. Even the ones who still believe are trapped; their situation encourages them, forces them, to continue believing, to ignore evidence, to dig their heels in and keep going. The only way out is to abandon their identity, to walk away from their community. At least, unlike preachers, they probably won’t lose family. Maybe. Still, I imagine it’s a lot like contemplating suicide.
But as much sympathy as I have for the quacks, I have far more for the victims they make in the surrounding community. The quacks are making a living off their foolishness; their victims aren’t. Their victims are coming to them for help and receiving none. Worse, they’re going to them instead of real doctors. Worse still, the quacks might even hurt or kill them in their pig-ignorant foolishness.
So, just as I’ll always advocate against religion for the harm it causes, despite the earnest beliefs of the pastors trapped in the pulpit, so I’ll always advocate against CAM. So-called complementary or alternative medicines kill.
This may surprise and upset you. What could you possibly have done that someone might be afraid of you? You’re a good person, leading a good life, and you don’t want to hurt anyone.
But how would your neighbors know that?
What they know is what they can see, the things you choose to show the world and the things you can’t hide. They can see your haircut and your car, your clothes and whether you wave at them when you leave for work. And they can see your religion.
They can see it in the decorations you put up around the holidays, the cross you wear, and your habit of attending services once or twice a week. And that makes them afraid, because they can’t see beneath the surface.
They don’t know if you’re a quiet, gentle person who feeds the homeless, who builds houses for the poor, who visits lonely seniors. They don’t know if you’re a loud, angry person who screams at strangers for holding hands, who throws trash at girls for dressing “wrong”, who nods in approval at the man throwing the stiff-armed salute. They don’t know if you’re the very quiet, very angry person who mails bombs to strangers around the city, who fires a rifle from a van on the freeway, who shoots a doctor in a church on Sunday.
There are many kinds of Christians. You might want to say that those others aren’t real Christians, but they say they are. And how are we supposed to tell? You all look the same until the shooting starts.
Or until the voting starts.
Because in the end, it’s not just the openly violent Christians who kill people. The Christians who support bigoted bakers, who want to force trans people out of the military, who enact racist laws, who kidnap children from the “wrong sorts of parents”… those Christians kill people, too.
They kill people in small ways, by making life harder, by adding burden after burden, simple stress that steals a day of your life for every week you survive. Until every day begins with dread and ends with dull exhaustion.
They kill people in larger ways, by isolating them from friends and family, forcing them to live alone, unloved, afraid. They don’t get to have the same jobs, they don’t get to shop at the same stores, they don’t get the protection of the police, they don’t get to go to the hospital. Because the hospitals are run by churches, and the police have crosses on their necks, too. The shops, the bakeries, the businesses, those have religious beliefs now, too.
And they kill them in the big ways, by encouraging the “very fine people” who vandalize Jewish cemeteries, drive cars into crowds, mail bombs to strangers, or open fire in newspaper offices. By voting for people who assault journalists, who use slurs against Jews, Mexicans, or black folk, who promise to ban ethnic groups and minorities.
Is this Christianity? You say it’s not. They say it is. You each quote scripture and revelation to support you. How can we say what’s right?
How is anyone supposed to decide?
And, until you do figure it out, how can we tell the difference between you?
Afterlife
This skeptical topic isn’t in the skeptic’s dictionary, oddly enough. I mean, it’s one of the most popular woo beliefs in the world; why wouldn’t they cover it? A lot of skeptics restrict themselves to “non-religious woo”. Things like obvious pseudoscience, pseudohistory, so-called “alternative medicine”, ghosts, aliens… those are all fair game. Anything that’s “supernatural”, or “ spiritual” or New Age, but not mainstream religion. They do have Christian ultrafundamentalism (or CUF). I haven’t read that yet, but, judging by the name, it’s restricted to the extreme fringes of Christianity.
This fear of discussing popular religion and religious beliefs is common in skeptic movements. They’ll go after ghosthunters and cryptozoologists, chiropractors and homeopaths, but not preachers or prayers. Faith healing is a popular target, faith itself is not.
There’s probably a complex interplay of reasons for this. Among them, I suspect it’s… prudence. Discretion. Rank cowardice. The majority of the public will leave you alone if you’re only attacking the fringes of society, but if you turn your skepticism on the popular beliefs of the majority, they’ll turn their rage on you. So, an instinct for self-preservation will probably drive most skeptical organizations to refrain from attacking religion. It will limit conflict (conflict will of course be unavoidable).
Another major reason, I think, is that a lot of skeptics are going to be religious. That’s inconsistent; if you seek to apply skepticism to your beliefs, then you should end up rejecting religion. However, expecting complete consistency in people’s beliefs is expecting a bit too much. I think it may even be impossible. The human brain isn’t a homogeneous entity, but a collection of regions with different functions, that are interconnected and communicating in various ways. And those regions, having different functions, will often be in conflict. We should expect people not to be consistent in their desires and beliefs.
So all of this is to say that, yes, the afterlife and all associated concepts are fully deserving of skeptical analysis.
What is the afterlife? People believe (or want to believe) that, after a person dies, some “essence” of the person continues to exist in another form. This essence can be more or less coherent, more or less related to the person who died. For example, here in the US, we’re most familiar with the protestant and Catholic Christian belief that a human being has a soul that, after death, will have all of that person’s memories and beliefs, and which will be punished or rewarded for the person’s actions in life.
South Asian beliefs such as Buddhism and Hinduism can be very similar in their belief in reincarnation. Though Buddhism states that a person is in a constant state of growth and development, always changing, and that this process of change continues after death so that the person at reincarnation is different from the person who died, there is nevertheless a thread of continuity that can be traced from one to the other.
You can also get a New Age belief in spiritual energy that returns to the universe as a whole. When a person is born, they get some portion of this energy that returns after death. It plays on the theme of reincarnation, in that a person can be reborn with spirit energy from someone else, but, like pouring water into the ocean and scooping water back out, you’re simply not going to get all of the same spirit energy from a person who has died.
Note my use of the word “energy” right there. That’s not limited to discussing New Age beliefs. It’s incredibly popular with them, as it’s a cultural movement that arose in the west in the wake of the development of mass media and popular awareness of physics. “Energy” is a term that is vital for understanding physics, chemistry… any kind of physical science. However, it’s also a slippery concept, difficult to understand, and thus is subject to abuse by mystics who want scientistic support for their beliefs.
However, it absolutely is not limited to New Age hippies. Anyone who wants to argue in favor of the soul is perfectly free to adopt the term, and they frequently do. Whether you’re talking to Christians, Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists, it is likely that they’ll at some point say, “Energy is neither created nor destroyed; where does a person’s energy go when they die?”
The first part of that, the statement, is true. That’s the first law of thermodynamics. To the best of our ability to determine, the energy of the universe is constant, it can never be created nor destroyed, but can only change forms.
The second part is a lie.
It’s a lie because it assumes that there is some energy that has gone somewhere. It can more charitably be called a fallacy of equivocation, where a term is introduced using one definition, but is then used to make or support an argument under a different definition. “Energy” is introduced into the argument by noting what is clearly true, that people are made of matter and that every process of the human body is driven by chemical energy derived from the food we eat.
However, the equivocation arises when they start talking about a soul or spirit as some form of energy and saying it has gone somewhere. This introduces two new assumptions that have not been granted, but are instead the subject of discussion. The soul, whether physical or supernatural or “some kind of energy” has not been demonstrated to even exist. The other assumption is that some energy was present in the body which is now absent.
Physicist Sean M. Carroll (to more clearly differentiate him from the biologist Sean B. Carroll) once, while discussing this subject, brought up something like a Zen Koan “Where does the flame go when the candle is out?”.
The answer is that it doesn’t. It doesn’t go anywhere. It isn’t a thing and doesn’t do anything.
A candle’s flame, like a human being, is a process and the result of a process. Heat melts the wax, draws it up the candle’s wick, boils it, and ignites it. The burning of the wax releases more heat, which melts more wax. The heat of the burning wax also causes the resulting gases to move outward and upward, away from the source of the heat, while the pressure from the cold air around the candle pushes it inward, producing the characteristic shape of the flame. The heat also strips electrons away from the gases, producing a translucent plasma, which releases light in its efforts to return to a stable, low-energy state. All of this is the candle’s flame.
When you extinguish the candle, you have ended the process. The candle’s flame is no more. The flame itself was an illusion. It was an illusion in the same way that all objects are illusions. Every physical “thing” you see is a collection of atoms and molecules, held together by forces that can be overcome by outside intervention. Every object, no matter how stable, is only temporary. The candle’s flame is exceptional only in that the temporary and conditional nature of its existence is so obvious.
When you extinguish the flame, nothing has gone anywhere. The matter of the candle is still there. The chemical energy stored in the wax is still there. You can easily re-ignite the candle, restart the process. The potential for the flame exists within the candle, the flame is produced by the candle, the flame is not a thing that exists.
You are likewise an illusion. You are a process and the result of a process. The many, many complex processes that produce that process likewise produce the “you” that we all acknowledge. Every cell within you is a city, every organ a nation, you are an ecosystem. When you die, the process stops, the processes stop, the ecosystem is shattered. The matter is still there, the energy is still there, but the illusion of “you” is no longer being sustained.
A candle can be reignited. Sometimes a person can as well. If knowledgeable people with the right equipment can get to the body in time, the process can be restarted. The window for that is very short, because the processes that make up a human being are magnitudes more complex than a candle.
A candle in its entirety can be described in a few words. The process of the candle likewise. The systems that make up a living being cannot. We have dedicated centuries to the study of life and have come to understand much. What we know can fill books, does fill books. What we don’t yet know will fill many more.
One of the things we know is that there is no soul. The energy that would have been used for the process of the human being is still there after the process has stopped. Nothing has gone anywhere. The reason you have only a short window to reignite the person is because the matter and energy will very quickly be used by other processes. By the many organisms that live in your body that do not share your DNA, and that, at best, only incidentally help to keep you alive.
As soon as a person dies, they will begin to transform the matter and energy of that body into matter and energy for their own lives, their own processes. When the process that is a person stops, the flesh immediately becomes food, and starts turning into bacteria shit.
There is no afterlife, because there is no soul. You will not continue to exist after your death except in the memories of those who loved you. You will not be punished, you will not be rewarded. You will not know or experience anything, because there will be no you. Like the candle’s flame, your body’s life will cease, and the illusion will end.
If any of that is upsetting to you, then I’m not sure what to tell you. If you demand reward and punishment, you will have to work to create that here and now. If you demand an afterlife, you will have to take copious notes here and now. Here and now is all you have. Here and now is what matters.
Intersectionality
Intersectionality is a concept that is often misunderstood, often deliberately distorted and misused. Since it’s central to the modern struggle for social justice in the US, I think it’d be a good thing for people to understand, generally.
The term originates with Kimberlé Crenshaw, civil rights advocate, leading scholar of critical race theory, and professor at the UCLA and Columbia schools of law. It appears that she was the first person to use the term in the context of social justice back in 1989, in a paper titled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics”, published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum.
In the paper, she discussed a legal case brought against General Motors in the mid-70s, suing the company for not hiring black women. The company argued in court, and the courts agreed, that they weren’t racist and they weren’t sexist. Their evidence that they weren’t racist was that they had hired black employees, and their evidence that they weren’t sexist was that they had hired female employees. The problem with theirs and the court’s analysis was that they failed to note that the company had only hired black men and white women.
In her discussion, Crenshaw stated that the experiences of black women cannot be understood simply as the experience of blackness and the experience of femaleness. That is to say, they are not just black in a white world and women in a man’s world. They experience racism, and they experience sexism, and they experience the world as black women. The combination of blackness and womanness creates new situations, new obstacles for them to navigate, experiences that neither black men nor white women will ever face.
For example, women have always been sexualized and treated as objects and black people have always been hypersexualized and treated as objects. However, black women experience the combination of these objectifications in a fashion that is different, sometimes horrifyingly so, from black men and white women.
The hypersexualization and objectification of black men has, since the 1600s, positioned them as an imminent threat, as violent beasts always one wrong move away from breaking free and injuring white people, specifically white women. The racist propaganda of black men as violent rapists is thus a century older than even the United States. It was used to justify slavery and to fight against abolition, and the end of Jim Crow, and the end of the War on Drugs.
The objectification of white women sees them as objects, as property to be transferred from the control of their fathers to the control of their husbands. They are thus subject to sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and sexual assault as a normal part of their everyday lives. Some men are simply convinced that women are available for all of those things at all times, and that they have no right to object because they’re not fully human.
Black women meanwhile are subject to the objectification of black people as being hypersexual and naturally violent and to the objectification of women as being always available for the sexual use of men, particularly of white men. Because of the white supremacist belief that black people always want sex, it was simply a fact of law that black women could not be raped. The courts believed that black women always wanted sex, and that saying no was just playing, and fighting back was just their natural violence.
Whereas if a white woman accused a black man of rape it was automatically believed and the man immediately murdered, a black woman accusing a black man of rape was greeted with a shrug because they were both believed to be violent animals, and she really wanted it anyway. Her accusation of rape was transformed in white eyes as just another expression of black violence.
And if her rapist was white? Fighting back probably wasn’t even an option. A white man could kill her and walk away with the public having no doubt that he had done so. Women, in the face of present violent assault, always face the difficulty of knowing that fighting back could get them killed and not fighting back means their later claim of rape won’t be believed. Black women face the certainty that both options are dialed up to 11 because of racial stereotypes.
Thus the world a black woman interacts with is racialized in a way white women don’t experience and sexualized in a way black men don’t experience. Racism alters the misogyny they face, and misogyny alters the racism they face. Neither one can be studied in isolation.
All of this is to say that the world is a complicated place, and culture creates a difficult interaction of different forms of oppression and bigotry. A disabled black woman’s experience of oppression simply cannot be compared to the experiences of a gay white woman.
Which brings us to the myth of the oppression olympics. Right wing douches love to claim that you can only participate in a discussion about oppression if you are yourself oppressed in some way (thus straight white men are ignored… and oppressed!!), and the more oppressed you are, the more social justice cachet you have. According to assholes like Paul Joseph Watson and Ben Shapiro, the god of social justice is a gay black muslim jew native american left-handed red-headed immigrant transwoman victim of rape in a wheelchair.
Nope.
Oppression olympics was first brought up by Social Justice Warriors, noting the importance of not trying to rank oppression. My suffering isn’t greater or less than yours, it’s different. Trying to compare oppression, to compete over who has it worse would only be a distraction from the end goal of trying to end suffering and oppression.
It’s not that white men have nothing to say, nothing to contribute, the problem is that they don’t have the lived experience of most forms of oppression. They don’t have the native understanding of racism or sexism. Straight people don’t live every day with homophobia, nor cis people with transphobia, nor abled people with ablism.
A straight white man can indeed have knowledge of and insight into the oppression experienced by queer folk or black folk or women, but it’s something that has to come with study and effort on his part, and that’s the kind of thing that needs to be actively demonstrated, not assumed. And even the most knowledgeable, caring, and dedicated ally can put their foot in their mouth, talk over someone, or take offense where it’s neither intended, needed, nor helpful. When you’re talking about oppression you don’t experience, you’re always going to be speaking in a foreign language, and there’s always going to be mistakes and misunderstandings… and a lot of disingenuous assholes take advantage of that to abuse oppressed people.
Trolls and abusers abound, and any oppressed person who takes an active role in the fight against it suffers from those assholes constantly. Anyone who’s on the privileged side of multiple axes will always, necessarily, be viewed with some suspicion, because there are just so damned many neonazis, sealions, and Fox News dipshits of every stripe just aching derail every conversation and attack decent social justice warriors.
Anywho, that’s oppression and that’s why you need to be calm and respectful in a conversation that isn’t about you. Also, don’t make the conversation about you.
Sam Harris and Bruce Schneier went back and forth on the issue of profiling. First they published a few articles on Harris's website, then they took it to email and published the full, final dialog. At 13000+ words, it's a novella. I responded to the first piece by Harris, but not Schneier's response, nor Harris's response to that. Now I'm going to do so. The whole thing's worth a read, but I'll provide very short summaries.
Harris's First Piece: In Defense of Profiling
Summary: Modern security screenings at airports are ridiculous. An infirm, elderly couple shouldn't go through an invasive search while a guy who could "play a Bollywood villain" lounges innocuously behind me. We should only screen people who are Muslims. Or look like Muslims. Or look like they could be Muslims.
My response: Dude, what the fuck. That wouldn't work because terrorists aren't stupid. As soon as you start focusing on a certain kind of target, they'll start planting bombs on other people. Also, it would really, really piss people off. Long story short, it would make us less safe by making more people want to hurt us and make it easier for them to do so.
Harris's Second Piece: On Knowing Your Enemy
Summary: This one isn't so amenable to summary because it's a broad response to the many, many responses that he got. So, I'm not going to summarize and respond succinctly and separately, but together and at length. A big part of it is trying to defend himself from charges of racism.
Unfortunately, Harris pulls all of those responses together and posits them as a representative whole. For example, in his list of eight points people raised, number two is that there's no link between Islam and suicide terrorism. Number four is that there's no way to "look Muslim", because the religion spans most of the continents and racial groups, from whites, to Semites, to blacks, to Asians. Number six is that racial profiling would let Muslim terrorists game the system and recruit people outside the profile. He then turns around and points out that four conflicts with number six, because if there's no way to "look Muslim", Muslim profiling wouldn't be the same as racial profiling. Number seven is that profiling would be incredibly offensive to Muslims, raising support for anti-American sentiment (and hence terrorism), which he then points out conflicts with number two, that there's no link between Islam and suicide terror.
Positing all the points that his thousands of readers made as a whole renders that whole incoherent, and I think that turns it into a Straw Man. The principles of honest argument (rather than political or popular debate) demand that you attack the strongest possible interpretation of your opponent's argument, not the weakest.
For example, point two, which he writes as "Furthermore, there is no link between Islam and suicidal terrorism." His interpretation is to take this literally, that his critics mean that there is no link between the two and therefore profiling Muslims would be useless. The charitable interpretation is that there's no necessary link between Islam and suicide terror. In fact, the vast majority of Muslims don't practice terrorism and are appalled by it. It's easy to argue that there is a correlative link between the two, as it's easy to read from the Koran that dying killing infidels is a good thing. The exact same thing can be garnered from Christian and Jewish texts, and both have strong traditions of murdering and dying for God. I believe there's a causative link between Islam and suicide terror, but it's not a universal causation. To put it another way, you won't die of cancer within minutes of smoking a cigarette. There are other factors at play.
Another reason Harris's approach in this article is flawed is because points two and seven are only in conflict if you take the uncharitable interpretations of each and assume that everyone making either argument is also in agreement with the other.
He then takes these arguments further and, to my eye, conflates them without justification with other events. Number seven, which is about offense given to Muslims and creating a culture that would lead to further terror, he links to the sort of appeasement that has been offered in response to Draw Mohammed Day. Cartoonists drew Mohammed, a portion of the Arab world went insane and burned, pillaged, and murdered. Some people responded by drawing Mohammed more, and were criticized by others, some of whom said, "That's just going to make them burn, pillage, and murder more." Those critics were in turn criticized for giving in to fear, and we need to stand up to them, etc. Does point seven necessarily link to that? No. Again, uncharitable.
The stronger interpretation of seven is that treating Muslims in that fashion as a group and without justification would necessarily anger them. Not only would we be creating a Muslim Malcolm X1, but we'd be creating support and sympathy for that type of individual among the Muslim population at home and abroad. It wouldn't drive all Muslims to angry, anti-American sentiment, and it wouldn't drive all of them to violence, but it would drive some, and the rest would find it harder to criticize them.
After other things like that which, I feel, don't get at the heart of the matter (that profiling would be counterproductive and dangerous), he segues into a discussion of Islamophobia that's somewhat relevant to the attacks he's facing but that aren't too interesting to me. I agree with him that Islam needs to be criticized on the grounds that, like all religions, it's factually wrong2 and that culturally a significant portion of the Islamic world represents a very serious threat to the non-Islamic world. I'm just disagreeing with him on the practical issue of racial profiling at airports.
Schneier's Response: The Trouble With Profiling
Summary: John Brockman is really smart. He sure hit the nail on the head, but I'm going to do a better job of explaining it with some simple analogies. Also, I'm going to point out a few things he missed, such as how randomized security cannot catch all possible threats and isn't intended to, but is intended to make the cost of trying high enough that terrorists don't even bother.
My response: Be smug, but not obviously so, after all I didn't fully anticipate what the nationally recognized expert on security would have to say on the subject. Only, you know, a lot of it.
The Full Dialog
The thing is that Schneier really is an expert about this and he answers all of Harris's points clearly and succinctly, and better than any amateur (me) could hope to. It's long, but well worth the read. Be aware that every time you think Harris is making a serious mistake, Schneier will point it out. I strongly recommend reading the full novella, because it's a short primer on security procedures and will explain how a proposed deviation like Harris's is a non-starter for simple, practical reasons as well as broader, ethical concerns.
1 - I'm aware that Malcolm X was a member of the Nation of Islam, but the radical differences between its doctrines and those of the rest of Islam make them related, but not the same religion. Sort of like a Messianic Jewish cult that's also racist in two different directions.
2 - Among many other things, there is no god, so Muhammed couldn't have been his prophet. Also, pig is delicious, fasting is stupid, meteors are for study, not prayer. Scientific study. Making study carrel's out of it would be silly.
A few weeks back, Sam Harris wrote some articles in defense of profiling (TLDR; we should stop random screenings at airports and focus on people who are obviously Muslim) that, predictably, generated a shitstorm in response, including a post from me, which I'm absolutely certain he read.
Another result was a 13,000+ word dialog between Harris and Bruce Schneier, a security expert who disagrees with Harris. I quite look forward to reading it, though it'll take a while. I wonder if and how it'll change my position. (TLDR; I think profiling is a useful forward defense, but will fail utterly to predict who actually carries the bomb through the gate)
Sam Harris wrote "In Defense of Profiling" last week in which he makes the point that, in searching for people who are going to put bombs on planes, the TSA should focus on people who are likely to put bombs on planes. What it came out as was "start searching Muslims".
Profiling is usually just racism as far as most people are concerned. This is justified, because that's how it was used and defended for a long time. Pull over someone for driving while black. Actual profiling isn't like that. It's a long list of characteristics that help identify potential suspects. It's a forward defense, a way of seeking out potential offenders for deeper investigation. It's not going to tell you who's carrying a bomb or who robbed a bank, just what kind of person might have.
And it's a forward defense; it's not what you run when the enemies are at your gate, or might be. And that's because terrorists aren't stupid. When the guards start searching every unmarried, bearded Semite between fourteen and forty, the terrorists hand a rocket launcher to grandma Aisha, a bomb to pregnant Muslima, and a grenade to baby Ahmed.
Profiling specifically seeks out the usual suspects. Unfortunately, those guys aren't stupid, and they sure aren't going to come to you. Profiling deliberately does not seek out unusual suspects. It's not going to find the person who doesn't fit the profile, and that's who the usual suspect is going to recruit to actually carry the bomb onto the bus.
Finally, profiling based on race is pointlessly stupid. The vast majority of Muslims aren't terrorists. Frisking every last obvious Muslim isn't going to net any positive results; it'll waste a lot of time and money, and it will make a lot of people angry, and with good justification. I'm going to show you a picture of the typical American terrorist. Get ready, because it might set off a lot of alarm bells.
That's the sort of guy who's going to bomb a clinic or shoot a doctor. What, are you going to get the TSA to put checkpoints at the door of every church in Kansas and tell them to look for a clean-cut white guy whose severely plain shirt is tucked securely into his khaki pants? Because that's racial profiling.
Actual profiling would tell them to look for clean cut Christians who protest at clinics, who hand out leaflets advocating violence, who harass doctor's families and neighbors, who harass the women walking into clinics. That's how you catch an American terrorist. Profile the Christians. But if you want to prevent a terrorist from boarding a plane, profiling will only take you so far. You also need the exhaustive and annoying procedures that piss off everyone.
