So I was talking to bizarro-Zeeshan last night about how he thought racial profiling was a good idea. I, being a sound-minded young liberal, told him that I disagreed with this radical assertion. I did, however, realize that (as bizarro-Zeeshan reminded me) that many liberals absentmindedly dismiss racial profiling as a racist policy with no good qualities. The problem with this approach is that it fails to rationally address the pros and cons of racial profiling. Now, the classic arguement in favor of racial profiling (I'm going to just address racial profiling of black people for now) is that black people are more prone to commit a crime than any other race, so it makes sense to use race as a factor in suspect profiling and determining guilt. The first problem with this arguement is that there are no statistics about how prone black people are to commit crimes. The statistics are about how many black people have been convicted of committing crimes. Many people will claim that these are the same thing, but there are a few subtle differences. First of all, just because you've been convicted of a crime doesn't mean you actually committed said crime. Second of all, just because a higher percentage of black people have committed a crime than any other race, doesn't mean that any given black person is more likely to have committed a crime than any given white person. However, it is true that, given the truthfulness the above assertion, if you pick a completely random black person and a completely random white person, then it is more likely that the black person has committed a crime, but it is virtually impossible to "randomly" pick a person, especially in the context of law enforcement. Now even if you ignore all that, there are still more reasons not to employ racial profiling. If racial profiling is used in any stage of the criminal justice system, it will necesarily increase the incarceration rate of black people with regard to other races. This will skew the statistics even more towards black people as criminals, creating the mentality of the black criminal, not only in the minds of the country at large, but in black males. This, along with the effects of putting thousands of children's fathers behind bars drastically increases the likelihood of these people committing a crime. It will also increase poverty rates among black people, making it more necesary to resort to crime. To deny these points is rejecting the effects of environment on one's actions, and implies that one believes that race is the main reason that black people "commit more crime" than any other race, which I believe to be invalid.

Here's an article that covers black crime much better than I did in the above article. I think it was very interesting: The Truth About Black Crime

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

- excerpt from The Common Good, by Noam Chomsky

I was talking to Zeeshan the other day about my experience watching The O'Reilly Factor while on hallucinagenic drugs, and I remarked at how ridiculous the whole show seemed to me. I was dumbfounded that people actually took it seriously. But then i started to realize that the ideas being espoused were really not all that different from those of the liberal media. The difference between liberal propaganda and conservative propaganda is almost enitrely rhetorical. Obviously there are some relatively important actual differences between the Democrans and Republicrats, but ultimately they both support the same social structures, ideologies, and institutions. They just do a very good job of covering up the obvious similiarities by advocating slightly different approaches to politics and by constantly expressing distain for the other party. After watching The O'Reilly Factor again while completely sober, I realized just how important that particular strategy is. It wasn't that I was so much more put off by Bill O'Reilly's viewpoints than, say, those of my parents, it was that I was completely put off by his semantics and unflinching hatred for "the other side". And this phenomenon is not exclusive to Bill O'Reilly or even conservatives. Almost all of mainstream political thought is governed by these two main principles. And my good friend Noam has artfully illustrated this point in the above quote.

In this country, we have freedom of speech. But just because we're allowed to think and say anything doesn't mean we can.

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