Racism is still widely prevalent in America. The only thing that has changed is that instead of thinking it's OK to be racist, Americans now think that they're not racist. All the while actually continuing to be racist.
That is a bold statement. Having lived in many different locations (India, middle east, europe, canada and the US) as a brown guy, the only place I experienced less racism than the US was Canada.
Not really. w1ntermute said "racism is still widely prevalent in America" which to me means "racism commonly occurs in America". But vowelless said "the only place I experienced less racism than the US was Canada" which to me means "of all the places I've been, America is the second least racist place... second only to Canada".
I'm pretty sure the two said very different things... possibly even totally opposite things.
I think it's more of a stereotype then racism. In the DC sniper saga, everyone assumed it was a white male. Basically stereotypes:
Spree shooter/sniper = white male,
Bomber = arab male, Drive-by = african american male, Poisoning = kgb?
None of these are true all of the time, but my point is they are stereotypes. If it were purely racism, people would jump to the conclusion of non-whites for spree shootings and snipings.
Kind of a joke, but certainly during the cold war that's probably what we would have suspected. We haven't had any assassinations in a long time, but I think people would assume a national enemy if we did.
IIRC, It's pretty common for the Israelis to use poisoning for assassination these days, but you can't say anything negative about the Israelis lest you get Godwin'd.
That may be true, though to be fair KGB poisoning incidents have probably gotten more news (particularly the Alexander Litvinenko polonium poisoning.) Stereotypes are all about perception, so the incidents that get the news shape the stereotypes.
It's unfortunate, but has to happen. The statistical likelihood of him being suspect were greater than others at that instance. The cops did what is expected of them, just like a software developer would perform a check for most likely condition first before the flow moves forwards.
I don't see anything wrong, my skin color is similar to him and I wouldn't mind them checking me out first, I would gladly cooperate so that they can move on and find the real bad guy.
Repeat after me: skin color is not probable cause.
Setting aside all ethical issues, using ethnicity alone to determine probable cause is a violation of the law. If you would like to see it be acceptable to use skin color as the sole determinant for probable cause, that's fine. Just change the law. But until then, it is not allowed.
no need to repeat 'politically correct' statements, skin color, just like sex and age, are part of vectors that you would have to mathematically use to narrow down suspects.
Plus there is a high probability that he had a thick saudi accent (based on the accent of his roommate). A saudi descent american with a bostonian accent probably would not have been an immediate suspect.
> no need to repeat 'politically correct' statements
It's not a "'politically correct' statement", it's part of the law. If you think that it's OK to search someone's apartment based on their ethnicity alone, I can only assume that you have no respect for the rule of law.
And from TFA, I could not see any other distinguishing factors that were used to determine probable cause to search this guy's apartment, instead of any of the other people at the scene. The only factor was his ethnicity.
Did you not read the article? They showed up with "a phalanx of officers from the FBI, ATF and Boston". They wouldn't have done that if they were just hoping the roommate would let them in. They likely had a search warrant.
And like I said, this is speaking purely legally. Even if they didn't have a search warrant, the fact that they targeted this guy for his ethnicity alone was unethical.
While you could say that there is an elevated chance that the terrorist is of Arabic descent (and frankly, the odds there are not that strong. Maybe better than 50%, but I wouldn't put my money even on that...) that is only a small part of the picture. You must also consider the possibility that any given person of Arabic descent is a terrorist (an absurdly small probability). When you combine these two factors then you can decide how probable it is that he is the terrorist, given his descent.
If you actually work out the numbers here, you will undoubtedly discover that the probability he is responsible falls well below any rational standard for harassing the man.
Edit: To get a grip on what sort of standard you would usually demand: consider a murder in a small isolated town. With no clues at all, lets say the murderer could be anyone. In a town with 3 people, each person could be said to have a 50/50 chance of being the murderer. Is that enough for search warrants for both (not under our legal system, but just ethically/morally)? Sure, I'd accept that. If there were a hundred people in that town? No way. So, does "terrorist, given arabic descent" go over 1%? I HIGHLY doubt it.
I don't know much about Bayesian statistics, but wouldn't it be "terrorist, given Arabic descent AND participation in the targeted event AND proximity to the explosion AND high probability of a follow up explosion (judging from past events) AND ..."?
> wouldn't it be "terrorist, given Arabic descent AND participation in the targeted event AND proximity to the explosion AND high probability of a follow up explosion (judging from past events) AND ..."
The only thing that man has over the likely thousands of others that in some way participated in the event is his skin color. Everyone else there had those same properties. So if we are considering the population of people in the general area at the time, then no. They used only his descent. They, and djanogo[edited], used P(arabic|terrorist) to justify a search. In order to justify a search you need a reasonable P(terrorist|arabic).
Assign some reasonable numbers to each factor off the top of your head, work it out on a napkin, and come back to me with whatever figures work out to be over whatever a reasonable threshold might be.
Given that the coordinated way the two bombs exploded indicates that they probably didn't malfunction, it seems like proximity to the explosion should be a negative indicator, no?
It's probably a tossup. How much time can you usually put on a kitchen timer, an hour? Cut off the few minutes the timer would have had to be set early (since the timer presumably was not started when the bombs were placed, since that would be pretty conspicuous). That puts the guy at most an hours distance away, which granted, could be many miles.
If the bombs were really placed in backpacks that were left sitting on the ground, I would further suspect that the bomber placed them much later an hour before. Wouldn't want someone to steal your bomb...
Furthermore, maybe the sick fuck wanted to watch so he stuck around at a short distance instead of booking it.
I think that the point was less about the cops questioning him and more about the mainstream media jumping to unwarranted conclusions and the 'talking heads' on 24/7 news stations making even more wild speculation about him based little to no information (i.e. "He has to be the bomber, why else would they be questioning him").
That problem is with the media and it exists regardless of skin color. Today's "always on" Media likes to report first, fact check later. Can't let anyone scoop you. And if you make a mistake... retract, apologize and move on.
What data are you basing this on exactly? Is there peer-reviewed work somewhere that shows that people with darker skin colors are significantly more likely to commit such bombings in the US?
Because if there isn't than this is plain old racism.
When it actually happens to you, then i would like you to think about how you feel and whether you still think this is a just approach. It's very easy to rationalize racial profiling by using statistics but it doesn't make it right as we are not just a nation made up of statistics, when you profile people it changes their behavior in public, it makes them guarded, it makes other people feel it is ok to discriminate against them. This creates many side effects in everyday society life that is not easily traceable back to discrimination.
I don't think you understand what "checking me out first" implies.
This person is now labelled across the United States as a potential terrorist. Even if he is exonerated, the damage would have been done.
It will likely have a great impact on his future. We also don't know at this point how he has been treated.
You state that the "likelihood of him being suspect were greater than others". Who decides this? If there were 1000 runners with a heavy middle eastern accent, would they all have been arrested? Do you put all middle eastern people in camps (as was done to the Japanese in US and Canada during WW2)?
I don't have answer to these questions, I do object to your notion that there is nothing wrong with this.
It's probably worth remembering Richard Jewell and the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics:
According to Wikipedia:
> Despite never being charged, he underwent a "trial by media" with great toll on his personal and professional life. Eventually he was completely exonerated; Eric Robert Rudolph was later found to have been the bomber.
If we voted every story about every injustice in the news to the top of the site, we'd have /r/politics, not Hacker News. Not every important story belongs on this site; in fact, a lot of important stories need to be kept off the site, because they generate discussions that end up damaging the community. So, like most political stories on HN, I flagged this one, and you should too.
Individual voters decide what belongs at the top. If it has enough votes, it belongs. HNer's should stop complaining about what belongs or does not belong on top because it would not change anything.
I understand that Paul Graham doesn't want people commenting about whether stories are germane or not, probably to avoid exactly the repetitive discussion we're having now, but I disagree with him and think it can't hurt to remind people:
The site has guidelines. The belief you have about the importance of votes is simply not true. Votes are one of the mechanism by which stories are selected for the sites, but not the only one.
Why should anyone listen to you when you're clearly not following the guidelines either though?
From the guidelines: Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
I don't much care, since early flags knocked this story out of the top 100 stories on the site within minutes of me leaving the comment you're replying to.
But since my comment mostly related facts, I'd assume people would want to listen so they can collect additional facts about how the site works, independent of what they thought about me.
A possible point of interest for you - I use http://hckrnews.com/ to get to these stories and I think a lot of other people do to. So, even when you flag things we'll still see them.
I think you'll find that software and analytical thinking can come into play with many of these articles you don't think should be on HN. While many others believe societally minded hackers are needed now more than ever.
On the contrary: virtually every story can be framed in terms of opportunities for "analytical thinking", and the only purpose served by hashing most of those stories here is to spark pointless incivility.
If we're going to have debates on these stories, I prefer the meta-debate about which stories are relevant to HN over the fight over who hates racism more punctuated by the person complaining about the unfairness of it all.
I wonder if spinoff forums like subreddits could work for HN? Could be a cool project for someone, although it might not get enough community participation unless it was done officially.
It could possibly help to ease the disagreements over these issues.
I think the startup/IT focus of this site makes it very unattractive for the kind of people that usually make political discussion on pages like r/politics so annoying. That is the main reason I like talking about politics here occasionally. If we make a separate HN for politics, that advantage is gone and we will have just another r/politics.
It's not racism, it's not xenophobia, it's not Islamophobia. It's just bogeymen. All governments invent different bogeymen at different time to keep masses under control and push them towards seeing, hearing, and feeling what they want. It's nothing new, it has been happening from the very start of organized governance.
(Okay let's scan the crowd... Found 7 _______ looking men/women. Hmmm... eeny, meeny, miny, moe. There you go get that ____ fella with ______ looking face.)
As the world gets smaller the likelihood of any profiling being accurate diminishes. I for one would like to see them practice more intellectually honest investigative techniques. For example, when there is a roadside attack in a prominently arab region, do you round up all of the arabs? No, you survey the scene, find the bomb, look for trigger points, etc. The fact that we jump to profiling I think is an action that not only taints the nation's perceived objectivity, but detracts from a proper investigation...
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