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sophiaserpentiaJihadist tip of the day: Don't order your "Killing Infidels for Dummies" DVDs at Circuit City.
Lucky for us at least one guy in this cell was dumb, eh? (Insert "innocent until proven guilty" disclaimer here.)
... Hmm, you know, this makes me wonder. Do we want the police to have a list of materials which flag people for surveillance if they try to procure them?
IMO we can safely define a standard by which to identify troublesome materials, even while maintaining freedom of speech and dissent. For example, it's entirely possible to state just about any political, religious, scientific, or ideological position imaginable without instructing people in the fine details of how to kill other people, how to make bombs and where to place them, and so on.
That's not the hard part of this. The hard part is, if we establish an apparatus to identify troublesome materials and monitor folks who publish or purchase them, how do we ensure that apparatus is not abused? How do we know this mission won't creep into stiffling dissent, into a tool for witch-hunters and totalitarians? So a reasonable case can be made that we are better off without any such apparatus, even if that means that one can freely buy training materials for terrorists, even if that means sometimes people are killed by folks who get ahold of them. (It's pretty easy to hold a political position on such a thing when you're not dead.)
A counter-point to the counter-point suggests that maybe having an apparatus of surveillance is better than having no apparatus at all, because without it we get a free-for-all. At least an apparatus runs on a methodology for assessing threats. Without such a methodology... well, does anyone here need a primer on how witch-hunts work? Would it surprise you to hear that even in the present day people are killed by their neighbors as suspected witches?
It's a case of competing freedoms: the freedom to not be killed by meme-crazed whackos, vs. the freedom to read or publish dissenting materials, vs. the freedom to not be hunted as a suspected witch. And as is the case with any ethical dilemma, the solution is not a steady state.
I kind of hate to think that perhaps the meta-solution is not to ever be content with a solution, but then, i'm kinda glad our descendents will have to stay on their toes.
ETA. In dynamics, an "attractor" is the state towards which a system will tend if we watch it over the long term. A rock sitting on the ground has a pretty simple attractor: sitting there. When a system is complex, non-linear, and dynamic, though, it can have a "strange attractor", a solution which shifts sometimes in ways we can't predict or study.
We're not accustomed to think of political questions as problems which could have a dynamic answer, or in other words, an answer which changes depending on the circumstances. But maybe this is appropriate, especially when two principles collide. Maybe the starting conditions are the character of people in the society at time of observation, the prevailing ideological climate, recent events, etc. If most people are scrupulous and just and fair, one solution makes more sense; if most people are scoundrels, then a different solution makes more sense.
Lucky for us at least one guy in this cell was dumb, eh? (Insert "innocent until proven guilty" disclaimer here.)
... Hmm, you know, this makes me wonder. Do we want the police to have a list of materials which flag people for surveillance if they try to procure them?
IMO we can safely define a standard by which to identify troublesome materials, even while maintaining freedom of speech and dissent. For example, it's entirely possible to state just about any political, religious, scientific, or ideological position imaginable without instructing people in the fine details of how to kill other people, how to make bombs and where to place them, and so on.
That's not the hard part of this. The hard part is, if we establish an apparatus to identify troublesome materials and monitor folks who publish or purchase them, how do we ensure that apparatus is not abused? How do we know this mission won't creep into stiffling dissent, into a tool for witch-hunters and totalitarians? So a reasonable case can be made that we are better off without any such apparatus, even if that means that one can freely buy training materials for terrorists, even if that means sometimes people are killed by folks who get ahold of them. (It's pretty easy to hold a political position on such a thing when you're not dead.)
A counter-point to the counter-point suggests that maybe having an apparatus of surveillance is better than having no apparatus at all, because without it we get a free-for-all. At least an apparatus runs on a methodology for assessing threats. Without such a methodology... well, does anyone here need a primer on how witch-hunts work? Would it surprise you to hear that even in the present day people are killed by their neighbors as suspected witches?
It's a case of competing freedoms: the freedom to not be killed by meme-crazed whackos, vs. the freedom to read or publish dissenting materials, vs. the freedom to not be hunted as a suspected witch. And as is the case with any ethical dilemma, the solution is not a steady state.
I kind of hate to think that perhaps the meta-solution is not to ever be content with a solution, but then, i'm kinda glad our descendents will have to stay on their toes.
ETA. In dynamics, an "attractor" is the state towards which a system will tend if we watch it over the long term. A rock sitting on the ground has a pretty simple attractor: sitting there. When a system is complex, non-linear, and dynamic, though, it can have a "strange attractor", a solution which shifts sometimes in ways we can't predict or study.
We're not accustomed to think of political questions as problems which could have a dynamic answer, or in other words, an answer which changes depending on the circumstances. But maybe this is appropriate, especially when two principles collide. Maybe the starting conditions are the character of people in the society at time of observation, the prevailing ideological climate, recent events, etc. If most people are scrupulous and just and fair, one solution makes more sense; if most people are scoundrels, then a different solution makes more sense.
