Making Sense - Sam Harris - #17 — What I Really Think About Profiling

I just got back from my event with Majid Nawaz at the Kennedy Forum, and I ve just reaped the whirlwind on social media. It s amazing to me the level of cynicism and ill will this is bringing out in people, and the amount of ill will that it s bringing out. I m going to try to suck the poison from the wound as quickly as possible, but the pushback against Majid and I merely having a conversation, the malice we have both received, in particular Majid s in particular, has really been flabbergasting, and it s amazing how close-minded and psychologically and ethically confused some of the people are. I ve got a theory that if a celebrity like Jerry Seinfeld shows up at security and gets the same sort of pat-down that anyone else does, we know that is a waste of time, and that makes us all less safe. Well, P.Z. Myers is a biologist, and he summarized my views as being one where if you look like Jerry, you should not receive scrutiny at the airport, which is to say if you're white and/or Jewish looking, you shouldn t receive scrutiny. And when responding to Glenn's attack on Glenn, I could have just as well used Denzel Washington, it's telling you that you picked Seinfeld, not Denzel. And he would have been the same point, right? Well, so this is Glenn's point, isn t it? And he's a racist? Well, let me just spell it out for you in my blog post, and let me tell you that I didn't know that. I didn t know that, I just a few years ago, but now I do know that it's not a good point. And I'm sorry if it's a bad point, but I'm here to remind you that it is a point that can be pointed out by someone who has a good sense of humor, not a bad one, and a good one. . Thank you for listening to this episode. -Eugene Vellian -The Dark Side of the Dark Side Of by Glenn Greenwald by Cenk Uygur and Jamie Foxx by David Frum by Kevin McLeod by John Rocha in this episode of his new book, The Dark Side by the excellent blog post on the New York Times Magazine, "The Devil Next Door

00:00:00.000 I just got back from Boston, where I had my event at the Kennedy Forum with Majid Nawaz,

00:00:26.540 and I've just reaped the whirlwind on social media.

00:00:30.480 It has been really amazing, kind of the perfect storm of political correctness and intellectual dishonesty.

00:00:37.780 So I'm going to do a little bit of housekeeping.

00:00:41.800 Hopefully this won't be too painful. 0.96

00:00:43.660 I'm just going to try to suck the poison from the wound as quickly as possible.

00:00:47.780 But the pushback against Majid and I merely having a conversation, the malice we have both received,

00:00:56.040 Majid in particular, has really been flabbergasting. 0.85

00:00:59.400 Nathan Lean, an employee of Reza Aslan's, called Majid my lapdog. 0.59

00:01:04.500 Murtaza Hussein, an employee of Glenn Greenwald's, got on Twitter and called him a talking monkey,

00:01:10.600 a porch monkey, a native informant.

00:01:14.160 This is all after viewing the video of our conversation at Harvard.

00:01:18.160 And that video is online.

00:01:19.440 You can see that on my blog.

00:01:21.240 Watch that video.

00:01:23.760 And then contemplate how close-minded and psychologically and ethically confused you have to be

00:01:31.760 to think that Majid was functioning as my lackey there.

00:01:37.520 As I said on that panel, if anything, my views were more modified by our dialogue than his were.

00:01:45.220 And if you read the book, you'll just see how that conversation evolved.

00:01:49.520 It's just amazing to me the level of cynicism and ill will this is bringing out in people.

00:01:56.480 But I suppose I shouldn't be amazed.

00:01:58.660 Last week I did an interview with Dave Rubin.

00:02:01.280 And Dave is a really nice guy, incredibly supportive, and had the bright idea of trying to inoculate the world against misrepresentations of my views

00:02:12.040 by just going through the most controversial positions on profiling and nuclear war and all the rest.

00:02:18.880 And he thought we would do five minutes on each over the course of this interview.

00:02:22.920 And then he would put up those separate chapters as a point of reference for anyone who wanted to be clear about what my views actually are.

00:02:29.820 Well, we did this, and then people distorted this very conversation.

00:02:35.660 So, for instance, I said, with respect to my views on profiling at airports,

00:02:41.820 I said, if Jerry Seinfeld shows up at security and gets the same sort of pat-down that anyone else does,

00:02:48.580 we know that is a waste of time.

00:02:50.700 We know that Jerry Seinfeld, famous celebrity, is very unlikely to have been successfully recruited by the forces of global jihad while no one was watching.

00:03:02.420 So any time spent patting down his body or selecting him for special attention based on some notion that it's only decent and fair to do so,

00:03:13.760 that is security theater, and that makes us all less safe.

00:03:16.780 Well, P.Z. Myers excerpted that.

00:03:20.720 If you've forgotten who P.Z. Myers is, you could be forgiven, perhaps.

00:03:24.760 But in any case, he's a biologist who's a blogger who I now never interact with.

00:03:29.480 But I'm mentioning him because he kicked this whole thing off.

00:03:32.340 He summarized my view as being one where if you look like Jerry Seinfeld,

00:03:39.160 you should not receive scrutiny at the airport, which is to say if you're white and or Jewish looking, you should not receive scrutiny.

00:03:49.140 And Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan reacted to this, spread this around to millions of people.

00:03:56.160 And Cenk Uygur did the same, I believe. 0.99

00:03:58.560 So in any case, my Twitter feed was just a tsunami of stupidity when I got back from Boston. 0.97

00:04:06.260 The point, as is obvious in the video and should be obvious, is that I'm saying if you're a famous celebrity, 0.98

00:04:12.820 I mean, it was really, it's just not a, nothing turns on this.

00:04:15.280 How many celebrities go through the TSA and hold up the line because they're being patted down?

00:04:20.580 It was a joke.

00:04:21.200 I was simply pointing out that we, that there are people at the airport who we know are very unlikely to have been recruited by ISIS.

00:04:28.660 I put 80-year-old Okinawan women in there and little girls from Norway. 0.99

00:04:32.440 But my point was that if Jerry Seinfeld himself is going through, we know he's not a member of ISIS.

00:04:38.440 And when responding to Glenn Greenwald's attack on me on Twitter, I said,

00:04:43.400 Glenn, I could have just as well used Denzel Washington.

00:04:46.740 It would have been the same point.

00:04:48.040 And he said, it's very telling that you picked Seinfeld and not Denzel Washington.

00:04:54.700 Right, so this is Glenn Greenwald in his beloved capacity as a mind reader.

00:04:59.260 He's detecting in me the bigotry and racism that I didn't know I harbored or have imperfectly concealed.

00:05:07.960 Well, let me just spell it out for the deliberately obtuse.

00:05:10.280 If you are Denzel Washington or Jamie Foxx or any other celebrity of color

00:05:15.760 who doesn't stand the slightest chance of having been recruited by al-Qaeda or the Islamic State,

00:05:21.740 well, then I think you should get the same treatment at security that Jerry Seinfeld gets or Betty White,

00:05:27.140 which is the other example I used in that interview.

00:05:29.960 And this is why I describe my view as anti-profiling.

00:05:32.640 It's not a matter of singling out people from the Middle East or people with dark skin.

00:05:37.740 It's a matter of not obviously wasting time and scarce attentional resources.

00:05:43.720 It's a matter of paying less attention to people who we know are extraordinarily unlikely to be jihadists.

00:05:51.480 Unfortunately, this very public and, I think, calculated distortion of my views about profiling

00:05:59.000 has coincided with a 14-year-old boy's arrest in his school in Texas, this boy Ahmed,

00:06:07.960 who brought what he described as a clock to school.

00:06:11.320 And he is a Muslim boy who is very interested in engineering, it seems, and is a tinkerer, an inventor.

00:06:18.780 And he brought some tangle of circuitry to school, which he said was a clock,

00:06:24.420 but his teachers thought it was a bomb, or might be a bomb,

00:06:28.820 and brought him to the principal's office, and he wound up arrested as a result of this.

00:06:34.680 Now, who knows what happened?

00:06:37.180 This story is only breaking today, but now I'm getting hammered

00:06:41.300 for this being the outcome of my views on profiling.

00:06:47.020 So, I should say a few brief things about this.

00:06:50.520 First of all, everything I've said about profiling relates to what I think should happen at airports,

00:06:55.500 which is a unique circumstance.

00:06:57.300 Why are airports unique?

00:06:58.640 Well, because when you're talking about a terrorist getting on a plane,

00:07:03.220 you're talking about someone who is willing to die, right?

00:07:06.360 You're talking about someone who is, by definition, suicidal.

00:07:10.260 If you're talking about bringing down a plane with a bomb or by some other means.

00:07:14.660 So, if someone's getting on with his or her kids,

00:07:19.020 you have to then think that this is a person who is willing to sacrifice his kids for this cause.

00:07:25.600 Now, that is a rare breed of person, right?

00:07:29.640 And we should be using all available cues to determine how likely someone is to fit that profile.

00:07:36.880 And, as I argue and maintain, smart, well-trained people can, at a glance,

00:07:43.880 exercise very educated intuitions about these things.

00:07:48.020 And not everyone is equally likely to be a jihadist, much less a suicidal one at the airport.

00:07:55.660 But again, I don't think I fall outside of that profile, right?

00:08:00.080 If I'm wandering through the airport alone, and I'm not recognized to be the vociferous critic of jihadism that I am,

00:08:09.860 hey, I'm as likely as almost anyone, based on surface appearance, to be the next suicide bomber.

00:08:16.980 But Betty White isn't. 1.00

00:08:18.960 And no one who looks like Betty White, frankly, is.

00:08:22.220 And until ISIS and Al-Qaeda successfully recruit people who look like Betty White, 0.56

00:08:29.140 I think gradations of suspicion are perfectly appropriate here.

00:08:33.480 But things change when you're talking about schools.

00:08:36.120 Now, we're not necessarily talking about suicidal terrorism.

00:08:39.320 We're talking about incidents that more resemble the kinds of things we have learned, unfortunately, to worry about at schools.

00:08:47.180 We're worried about mass shootings, for the most part, of students and teachers by students, rather often.

00:08:54.200 And rather often by white students.

00:08:56.280 I think probably most often by white students, judging from the news coverage.

00:09:00.620 So, if you're worried about the next Columbine massacre,

00:09:03.780 if a kid shows up at school with something that looks like a bomb,

00:09:07.720 I should hope that the teachers and the administration will exercise the same degree of caution,

00:09:16.080 whether the child is white or Arab or Muslim or Christian.

00:09:20.520 The background of the person is totally irrelevant.

00:09:23.560 We're talking about the object they brought with them, which has provoked suspicion.

00:09:28.640 Now, again, I don't know anything about Ahmed, apart from the video that I saw of him online.

00:09:33.000 He looks like a perfectly wonderful kid whose interest in science is to be celebrated.

00:09:39.060 But if he brought something to school that looked terrifying to his teachers

00:09:43.320 and he couldn't give an adequate account of what it was,

00:09:45.960 well, then caution was totally warranted, whatever his religious background or color of his skin.

00:09:51.460 And if it looked like a clock, well, then not.

00:09:54.440 I've seen some photos that purport to be the thing he brought.

00:09:57.280 It didn't look much like a clock.

00:09:58.880 But in any case, the idea that racism or bigotry or xenophobia was giving some topspin to this episode,

00:10:07.860 that is, if true, to be totally deplored, right?

00:10:12.240 Again, I don't know the specifics of what happened to Ahmed.

00:10:15.440 It looks on its surface to be reprehensible.

00:10:19.560 But the way in which Glenn Greenwald and the usual suspects are demagoguing this issue

00:10:25.720 and holding it up as an example of Islamophobia or as a straightforward implementation of my views,

00:10:34.360 well, that should come as no surprise, it's totally dishonest.

00:10:38.480 And it's quite damaging to our conversation about very hard issues.

00:10:42.380 How we deal with our security concerns going forward is a very difficult issue.

00:10:48.960 It's difficult politically, it's difficult ethically, it's difficult practically.

00:10:53.740 And it is only made more difficult by this kind of obscurantism.

00:10:59.220 So, I think that's all I have to say about that.

00:11:02.960 Of course, I'm painfully aware that many of you find this incredibly boring.

00:11:07.480 You can't believe how boring I find this.

00:11:10.700 And I'm aware that many of you think it's totally counterproductive for me to defend myself.

00:11:15.180 I wish I believed that.

00:11:16.460 But it's not clear to me what to do, but it's pretty clear that silence on my part

00:11:23.540 and just trying to rise above it doesn't work.

00:11:27.460 So, you know, up to the limit of my tolerance and yours,

00:11:31.100 I'm going to have to address these things occasionally.

00:11:34.820 However, on my next podcast, you will learn that we very likely live in a universe

00:11:38.960 where there are infinite numbers of beings listening to podcasts,

00:11:42.920 just like this one where we didn't talk about any of these things.

00:11:46.040 Though, that would also entail a universe where there are infinite numbers of beings,

00:11:51.340 just like us, listening to this exact podcast an infinite number of times.

00:11:56.960 I don't know about you, but I consider that a problem.

00:11:59.520 Let's try to fix that going forward.

00:12:01.380 I don't know about you.

00:12:14.900 I do not know about you.

00:12:16.760 No one has to be with you.

00:12:18.020 Amen.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - September 16, 2015

#17 — What I Really Think About Profiling

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