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Originally Posted by Buster
It is an uncomfortable truth that Islamism is the root cause of a tremendous amount of terrorism.
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It's not an uncomfortable truth, it's just the truth. But that doesn't justify jumping to any sort of biased assumption in favour of religious terrorism before you have any sort of evidence to do so. In other words, until you have more than the person's name, the colour of their skin and their religion, it's a fool's errand to start presuming what their motivations must have been. You've just got to wait for more facts.
This is the definition of a bigoted response: "because of the ethnicity their names imply I'm going to assume they're muslims and from that, I'll conclude that this was religious terrorism". Not only is that quintessential bigotry, it's illogical. C doesn't follow from B and B doesn't follow from A.
Now, if they'd been shouting "Allahu Akbar", you'd have something to go on.
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This activity follows a profile seen in other acts of Islamist terrorism in the US and France. The probability that this is Islamist terror therefor is above zero percent to a degree that is worth considering.
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The possibility that they're deranged cult members who believe in aliens is above zero percent. What's the arbitrary line you've set for "possibility" where it's worth considering, and how can you tell when we've reached it?
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The current form is this: "should the TSA bother screening airline passengers if they are 70 year old ladies with walkers, from Nebraska." The idea is that the likelihood of this person being a terrorist is so close to zero that it is not a useful exercise to screen them.
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This, I'm with you on - this is inverted profiling. Rather than looking for something in particular, you're ruling OUT certain people who are obviously not a threat in order to focus your resources on the remaining large subset. I think this makes good sense.