The problem with that logic is everybody has pretty damned good reasons to be upset. If you have sympathy for Muslim terrorists then surely you sympathize with people who commit hate crimes against Muslims. After all, think of their world-view, wherein for their whole lives they've seen acts of terrorism against their countries in the name of the Muslim religion.

The 15-25 year old Muslims living in 3rd world countries like you're talking about don't have the means or motivation to attack the West. Many of these 3rd world terrorists are bought and paid for as young children and brainwashed to be used as weapons. If you want to read something heart wrenching, look into the stories of the Mumbai attackers from a few years ago. These guys, who genuinely deserve pity (though they still need to be put down.. they are thoroughly broken and cannot be fixed), are not well liked by Muslims unless they carry out their attacks on non-Muslim targets (e.g. India, Kashmir, Southern Nigeria, etc). There is very little support among Muslims for terrorists attacking other Muslims. They are not at all the same as the terrorists in the polls I mentioned, which were about Muslim terrorists attacking the West. I guess you have not heard about these polls.

The Western Muslim terrorists are pretty much the opposite of what you appear to think. They are often university students or graduates. They often have engineering degrees. They often come from wealth and well-connected families.

Do you honestly have sympathy/empathy for, say, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the Underwear Bomber), who was the son of the "former Chairman of First Bank of Nigeria and former Nigerian Federal Commissioner for Economic Development" described as "one of the richest men in Africa" ? What is it about his situation that evokes sympathy in you?

Or more to the point of the article, look at the Tsarnaev brothers. They came here as refugees and were welcomed, given a new life. The younger brother was a student in a US university. He was a citizen. The older brother married an American girl who converted to Islam on his behalf.

I mean... you must be insane to think these guys were somehow forced into terrorism by the unfairness of the world. They were given opportunities on a silver platter. Even their own uncle called them losers and said they brought shame to their family and community. But YOU have sympathy for them? Why?

Okay so you claim whites have "far more opportunity" to own cars. And yet, according to this study in Scotland: "The Scottish Government (2012) reports that Indian, Pakistani and Chinese households are the ethnic groups most likely to have access to a car."

But according to the stats in OP's link, white applicants in Scottish cities have far higher pass rates than Chinese and Asian/Asian British (mostly Pakistani and Indian) applicants.

So... basically you are making stuff up, you think it sounds good, you do no research to confirm your guess, and you state it authoritatively. And then your "out" is to accuse others of being hellbent on backing up their racism, which is merely a ploy to excuse your own incompetence. Yeah, if the other guy is an evil racist, then of course you're not going to waste your time doing research and vetting your hypotheses... who would waste their time on a racist...

Of course, you're wrong about pretty much everything you said, so there's that...

Since almost everything we do involves other people, there are very few protective regulations that would be illegitimate by that principle. But a nanny-state isn't just when regulations transgress into illegitimate areas, it's when they're "overprotective" (which is subjective).

A regulation affecting 15 million people per year to save 13 people per year is overprotective to me. Though I wonder where that number came from... is it 13 people in the first year (and accelerating as more cars are sold), or 13 people per year assuming all cars have been replaced? The latter seems like a real low-ball estimate considering there are 210 deaths per year currently.

Nope. But I know how to read, do you?

http://www.todayszaman.com/new...

If you are the security guard at a Pfizer animal testing facility, you probably wouldn't look twice at the 2 Muslim guys who recently got hired, but the hippy-looking chick with the angry boyfriend? Yeah you're following them on the security cameras.

Profiling. It makes sense. It actually makes more sense the more specific the target you're looking for. Your error is lumping all terrorists in as one group, which is silly. The terrorists who attack tax buildings are completely different from the terrorists who want complete independence for Puerto Rico and still different from the terrorists who want to impose sharia law everywhere... etc.

Each of those groups is easy to profile. Lumping them all together serves no purpose except to cloud the issue. Are you doing that on purpose?

And that plane will rightfully have greater scrutiny than others.

Haven't you seen the polls in the last decade about how many "perfectly regular" Muslims actually support or sympathize with terrorists? Sure, virtually all Muslims are not terrorists. But with limited resources to investigate and stop terrorists, it makes sense to concentrate on populations where they're likely to have connections. That's why the FBI and police forces are infiltrating mosques... not because "all Muslims must be terrorists" but because the one-in-a-million Muslim terrorist in Toronto is probably going to one of a handful of mosques that the police know about with radical clerics and frequent trips and communications with foreign Muslim groups. And around that one-in-a-million terrorist, there's a network of 100 people who know him and pretty much support what he's doing even though they wouldn't do it themselves, and many of them are undoubtedly at the more radical mosques as well.

So if 3 of those guys gets on the same plane with a 4th guy who is not even on the radar but looks really radical, maybe we should check them all out thoroughly. Who cares if they're inconvenienced?

Well, if your name phonetically matches a known Muslim terrorist and you are a Muslim, then you need to be pretty heavily scrutinized whenever you travel.

If your name phonetically matches a known Muslim terrorist, but you are a 70 year old Mexican grandma, then you do not need to be heavily scrutinized whenever you travel.

That's how profiling helps. We know more about terrorists than their name -- we know physical and cultural characteristics. If we have that extra information about passengers as well, then it can be used to dramatically reduce false positives.

That would be a problem if US airport security somehow was based in the Middle East, but it's not.

Pretty much every country on Earth subjects foreigners to increased scrutiny. It's common sense.

That's unlikely.. there are already stupid things like not being allowed to bring shampoo on the plane. Border agents are not ignoring that stuff, and it's a lot less stupid to profile young Muslim men than to profile "everybody carrying more than 3oz of fluid" etc.

So less than 1%.

Cat Stevens changed his name to Yusuf Islam.

No you don't have to blindly agree, nor agree to everything. Blaming the GOP for 9/11 is really dumb though. Are you seriously defending that argument?

What if you're a devout Muslim who believes Twitter should be blocked since it's a tool of Western agents to defame and slander your leader, a true lion of Islam, who wants to restore the caliphate?

Yeah, there are more people like that in Turkey than people like you...

Hi anon, you are an idiot.

You better alert states like New Hampshire, which don't require you to wear a seatbelt.

Bunkering up at home is not the only alternative to vaccination. How about, for instance, breast feeding your baby so that the baby has the advantage of the mother's immunities before he can be vaccinated himself? Should that be a legal requirement since it's a pretty reasonable thing to do? If a woman chooses not to breastfeed, should she be criminally liable if the baby gets sick?

I don't think you read the post I was responding to.

Hmm the big difference is that Mubarak suppressed Islamist groups and Erdogan works with them. Who do you think was the muscle behind the protests in Egypt? Who is going to topple Erdogan? How are they going to do against the hardcore Muslims who support Turkey's fall into Islamism? I'm reminded of the hilarious naivete of Iranian intellectuals and communists who thought that allying with radical Muslims was a great idea to get rid of the shah. "Hey we'll let the Muslims do the fighting, and then they'll let us rule over them and impose a secular system that they hate to the core! What a simple and elegant solution! I wonder why other Muslim countries didn't think of that??"

Tangential point... why do you think the Arab spring began in Egypt instead of Tunisia? Tunisia has been oddly forgotten in the last few years, not just by you but the mainstream press as well. God only knows how many times NPR has linked Tahrir Square to the start of the Arab spring.

What if it's not pure bullshit? More to the point, the danger with limiting political speech based on libel and slander is that the government decides what libel and slander is. If Country X has a law that what politicians do in private is private, and that revealing those private actions is a form of libel/slander, then do you support the ban?

How far off am I? According to CNN Erdogan said the leaked material he's apparently trying to suppress was "immorally edited." He also said "Freedom is not invading someone's privacy."

What I don't get is why anyone outside of Turkey gives a crap if they block twitter. I get that some people are sad to see this so-called Islamic democracy turning into a failed state, but that's been going on for years. Twitter was the final straw?? Okay..

Looser name matching would increase false positives, but profiling would probably balance that out. Of course that would entail further invasion of privacy etc. If the authorities do it correctly, it would be pretty minor though. You have nothing to fear unless you start going to a mosque, etc.