Ram asks: > Thanks for articulating something so clearly that I have incoherently > been trying to get across to people for a while.
Thanks for the compliment. I think Amartya Sen's new book "Identity and Violence" explains it better, and in a less incendiary manner, though. > Do you mind if I forward to your mail to a few people? Go ahead. I hereby renounce copyright thereupon and dedicate that email message to the public domain. Sastry writes: > Linking the BJP with mass murder falls into this category [of the > Biased Sample Fallacy]. I didn't make any statistical arguments at all, fallacious or not. Actually I didn't support that link at all; it didn't occur to me that it might be debatable. Can we debate that some other time? Maybe I don't have all the facts. > My choice is based on what I see as the truth. The "truth" as far as I > can tell is that I am being forced to make a choice between two sets > of violent people, and I am choosing one of these sets, and that > choice is not being made because they are gentle or non violent. My > choices may change with time. I have reasons for making my choice as > you have reasons for making yours. Yes, I understood that; I didn't think you were basing your choice on things you thought were false. The point of my post is that you are not, in fact, being forced to choose between unquestioning support of whoever claims to be protecting you from terrorism and support for terrorism itself; and that unquestioning support for whatever the police do is likely to encourage terrorism, not control it. You can support particular things the police do, oppose others, and also simultaneously support other non-police policies that will reduce future terrorism. A few concrete examples: if you support the police lying about evidence, you weaken the people inside the police force opposing the lying; if you support the police in arbitrary detention of innocent Muslims, you strengthen Muslim support for political violence, including terrorism; and if you support the police failing to investigate certain serious crimes, you strengthen police corruption, which strengthens criminal organizations (terrorist or not). Just as with my previous post about denial of due process of law, part of the problem is that the cure can be worse than the disease, even if the police do cure the disease without help from public accountability, the result may be worse.
