Reciprocation. "How would you like it if it were done to you?" The Golden Rule. One of the most fundamental values of Western society. Fair minded. Inspiring.

And a concept both Left and Right appear to be hellbent on throwing away in favor of "collective guilt." The Left wants to tell us how one gender and one demographic is the fount of all that is wrong with society. The Right wants to tell us how a faith whose members are a tiny minority will succeed in overthrowing the entire West when the nuclear-armed Soviet Union, with all their infiltrators, spies, propaganda and armed forces failed to do so.

This is the value of being a centrist. Don't buy either side's BS. The Right is sometimes right. The Left is sometimes right. But when both abandon principles in favor of tribalism and preach "my side right no matter what" they are both wrong.

Collective guilt is always wrong. If you champion it against the groups you don't like, you destroy all moral credibility when arguing for it not to be used against groups you DO like. A person is responsible for their deeds and their deeds alone, not for the deeds of their race, their creed, their nation, their gender etc. etc. We punish those who do wrong. We do not (without undermining our own laws) punish those who MIGHT do wrong.

Each and every one of us MIGHT do wrong.

If you attempt to argue against condemning all Muslims but simultaneously condemn all white men or if you argue for banning, expelling and surveilling some populations but not your own you are merely advocating tribalism, abandoning the principles which you claim to defend and condemning yourself to a future of ideological stalemate depending on who wins the vote. (Or do you imagine that your ideological opponents will just go away and die? Why would they, when you will not? If you make it a fight to the death, why would they not respond in kind?)

What are some answers to terrorism sans collective guilt?

Terrorism has two significant axes: Military/policing realities and ideological buy-in. The latter deals with neutrals in the population who are not (yet) a threat nor inclined to aid those who are. The former addresses those who cannot be reasoned with.

To the former, increased spending and greater intelligence sharing among Western allies is mandatory. You will have to kill those who cannot be contained or stopped. We will need more dollars for infiltration and disruption. It may be time to consider an Interpol of counter-terrorism. We will have to talk freely about civil liberties and technology (especially encryption and the communication it facilitates) and what we plan to do to safeguard liberties while addressing the threat.

Terrorism is a policing problem. The FBI has already succeeded here. They have a track record of disrupting the most violent, pervasive terrorist organization in US history-- the KKK, which bombed, murdered and brutalized its way throughout America and enjoyed broad political and popular support-- by infiltrating and honey-potting would be terrorists once funding and the political will was there.

As to the latter issue, buy-in, the US won the war of hearts and minds against the Soviet Union in part by arguing a better way of life. Piping Jazz over the Iron Curtain. Inspiring defectors. Arguing human rights. Nixon and Kruschev in the kitchen. Perfect? No. Undermined by greed and lies at times? Yes. But an argument which inspired in a way which idiots promoting meme wars and green frogs seem incapable of understanding.

ISIS promises glory in the great beyond. The West needs to uphold its own ideas of prosperity and equality under the law for ALL citizens to provide a superior vision attainable right here and now. Terrorism experts have opined that the US does a better job of this than Europe, but work remains. The GOP's open assault on the right to vote, demagoguery, winking and nodding at bigotry and failure to condemn outright lying and bullying by the President of the United States (see targeting of London's mayor as the latest of countless examples) destroys this advantage.

The Left has a chance to show the way here, but must transcend its own poisonous, identity-based ideology. Integrated communities adopt the host civilization, changing it and being in turn changed by it. Their members believes in the justice system, help law enforcement, defend their adopted nation (even enlisting to serve it) and even turn in their own lawbreaking family members. All of this is undermined by a Left which believes in ideas of cultural theft, which frames dissent as existential violence and which nods and winks at political violence so long as it is aimed at undesirables (aka punch_a_nazi.jpg).

TL;DR: Collective guilt sucks. If you promote it, you have no answers.

And if you go right wing, drive the bigots out or they will overtake you.

(entire post)

Very well phrased, and I agree completely.

The Left wants to tell us how one gender and one demographic is the fount of all that is wrong with society. The Right wants to tell us how a faith whose members are a tiny minority will succeed in overthrowing the entire West when the nuclear-armed Soviet Union, with all their infiltrators, spies, propaganda and armed forces failed to do so.

Those kinds of straw-man extremist caricatures only out yourself as another kind of extremist, not a "moderate centrist" :P

The Left wants to tell us how one gender and one demographic is the fount of all that is wrong with society. The Right wants to tell us how a faith whose members are a tiny minority will succeed in overthrowing the entire West when the nuclear-armed Soviet Union, with all their infiltrators, spies, propaganda and armed forces failed to do so.

Those kinds of straw-man extremist caricatures only out yourself as another kind of extremist, not a "moderate centrist" :P

I'm confused Hodgman. Are these all caricatures?

Delete this message, please.

All this sounds like is that someone wants to become authoritarian to a group of people because another group of people that share similar traits are doing bad things. I've got bad news for you , it doesn't work out well. It might hurt to hear this, but the people with the most power , are going to take the heat for when things go bad. Males are the one's who instituted the sexist policies , just like Whites are responsible for the racist policies , just like Straights are responsible for the homophobic policies. This is coming from a straight black male (i.e 2/3 of the "demons head" that the far left talks about). That does not mean that all whites , males, etc have explicitly done something that is wrong, but it means that at worst they were complicit, and at least they stood by and let it happen. That is the fundamental truth.

Now too many bring up "slavery was far ago" to try and invalidate arguments but I will rebuttal that argument quickly. Slavery did not officially end in the South until 1890. After the abolishment of slavery , wealthy land owners in the South used a loop hole in the 13th amendment , i.e slavery via jail sentencing, to have police arrest blacks on weak charges , as in loitering, and buy them to work on plantations, which was around until 1944. Now lets take into account that the major civil rights act didn't pass until 1968. Now after that lets take into account that the U.S Government was caught pumping crack cocaine into poor black communities and robbing / murdering blacks to pay for proxy wars during the 1980s and there are thousands of instances i neglected to mention. Then take into account the fact that while all of this was happening , and still happening today , blacks were constantly told that they were lying and making things up. So while it's easy to brush off an argument because you may not see yourself as a part fighting for the maintenance of the status quo, others who are victims to it have a way harder time.

Males are the one's who instituted the sexist policies , just like Whites are responsible for the racist policies , just like Straights are responsible for the homophobic policies.

Just because i'm so called "straight" doesn't mean I'm responsible for homophobic people, I have my things in my life to sort out, I cannot think about everyone's problems, I'm not homophobic but their problems aren't directly mine, I have nothing against them, how somebody make sex isn't my business as long as it doesn't affect me. If they ask me for my signature to help them I will, Otherwise I have other thing s to do with my life. Everyone protects their own interest, and blames everyone who doesn't have time to take a side that the "fundamental truth"(and it shouldn't be that way).

I'm pretty sure that slaves around the world do not care about the slavery in ottoman empire, do not care about slavery in Asia, do not care about slavery in western Europe, do not care about slavery in northern Europe, do not care about slavery in Africa, there is too many things to care about if we think about it that way. I'm against slavery and we shouldn't support it... I can't do anything about black people in the US, the same whey they can't to anything about every other people who were/are slaves. Black people weren't the only slaves, white people aren't the only racist people in the world (actually everyone is racist, form US to EU, to Asia to Australia).

We have to respect each other. After all I'm not the one who lashed people on their backs, current Turks aren't the one who lashed my ancestors, so I shouldn't blame them. It is all history and we should learn form it, and threat each other with respect(not tolerance, not any other bullshit word, RESPECT, In both ways).

I'm confused Hodgman. Are these all caricatures?

Yes, you take a complicated and nuanced argument and slap a clickbait headline on it and pretend that represents a sizable opinion. Or take some other idiot who has already done this (whether they believe it or are straw-man attacking it), and hold them up as if they represent a sizable group of people.
Everything you've posted here just screams "I don't care to understand any kind of complex and rational argument, I just want to simplify your position until it sounds dumb"... but that is American politics in a nutshell. Take the most extreme position of the other side, or take a completely sensible-but-nuanced position from the other side and simplify it so that it sounds extreme, and then pretend that half the population actually believe it as gospel.

When you do this, when you simplify a nuanced argument to the point of it become extremist nonsense and then laugh at it, you are being dismissive of the original argument. You are dismissing well thought out logical reasoning without ever having trying to understand it. That is an incredibly offensive thing to do to someone. And seeing that you're not aware what it is that you're dismissing, you don't even know how completely stupid you sound to some people, or even who you're insulting. It is the height of hubris to engage in such sweeping arrogant review of people's honest attempt at improving the state of the world.

If you were really a moderate centrist you'd use some good faith and assume that there are rational, deep, nuanced arguments beneath all those bullshit simplifications and try to understand the actual, sane arguments that academics on both sides are putting forth...

I find it astounding that the people here, all of whom I assume to have some reasonable level of education, can lump together refugees, immigrants, and itinerant workers as if they are a faceless interchangeable "them."

If you're lumping all the Forn together and tarring them as the troublemakers with one big brush, you're part of the problem.

It's funny to hear that from someone who is from a country which very generously provided shelter to refugees after screening each of them abroad and after making sure they're exactly the kind of people that you want and that you need. Sure, you don't have a problem, they're all "doctors and engineers" (to paraphrase what our socialists hoped to get).

But we got what you get when you say "Sure, everybody come, just come, there's plenty for everybody". Of our "doctors and engineers", a third cannot even read or write, which the chamber of commerce called a "ongoing challenge for integrating them into the job market" not long ago. I'm not going too much into what else we got. Let's just say that my home town recently published that a particular group of people (which is 200 people in a 26,000 people town) is none more criminal than the others, but in fact less criminal. They are only responsible for 4.9% of all recorded crime in our county. Except, if you wonder how it can be positive if only 200 out of 26,000 have a 4.9% share, and care to calculate the per-capita, you find that the per-capita in this particular group is 6.4 times as high. But hey, who cares about math, or facts for that matter. Only 4.9%, see! That's a very small share!

(I'll grant you that maybe, even likely, within that particular group of 200 people, there's only 20-30 people doing all these crimes. But that's even more an argument for what I'm saying: Kick out the criminals. First offense and you're history.)

However, that aside, the much more astounding thing is this:

4. Online tracking and snooping: More and more of this please [...] fund more police to permanently patrol the streets. With even more real world snooping around.

I'm always surprised how easily people give up their freedom.

It's even more stunning when it comes from UK , London in particular, which apart from Jerusalem is the maybe most rigorously watched city in the world. Heck, they have a camera under every footmat, and rapid response teams patrolling day and night. Did that prevent anything? Did it even stop the knife spree quickly? Eight minutes is a darn long time when someone is stabbing with a knife at you.

The actual problem is not solved by putting up more cameras, or by watching the internet even more. The problem is not solved by watching and pursuing the innocent citizen every second of his/her life even more than is already done. The problem is not solved by having even more silly and useless laws that do nothing.

Neither is the problem solved by police patrolling and harrassing innocent people in the streets, and by "snooping" on them. Nor by having police carry machine pistols. Machine pistols fire a lot of rounds very quickly, and very inaccurately. That's a nice weapon for a guerrilla war where you don't care too much whom you hit, as long as enough bullets hit someone. It's a nice weapon for bringing down a riot quickly (ask the Mexicans). But for taking out a terrorist and not possibly hitting the 50 innocent bystanders, it's a really bad choice. Carry machine guns at a railway station or on a market place? Dude, insane?

You solve the problem by arresting and expelling the very people of whom the secret service or national security board, or whatever the respective organization is called in your country says: "Those are a present and immediate threat", and by punishing those who slip through your net as hard as possible when they commit their first crime. You solve the problem by expelling those people who claim that they are refugees, but very obviously are not (carry weapons, lead or attend hate speeches, attack people). I'm not saying expel everyone ("them", huh). But, no mercy for the bad ones.

Sadly, that's exactly what -- apart from the right-wings -- nobody is willing to do. They will rather say: "We are not scared, we will not let them win" after each incident. Note how they're looking over their left and right shoulder before saying that. You can say "We stand united" and sing pretty songs all day, but the problem isn't going to disappear magically. The people who do these atrocities just laugh when you say "We are not scared". Of course you are, stop telling lies.

Someone on here said "you buy a whole package of other ideas that aren't good" earlier, and that is correct. Most of that stuff isn't good. But sometimes the devil is a necessary thing (and as long as right-wings aren't getting an absolute majority, which is unlikely to happen, at least in the EU, you're good to go).

Politics is not about the good of the people, but about power, and about not losing power. When you vote right-wing, those people who don't like losing power realize that things are turning against their favour, and suddenly have more right-wing paroles than even the right-wings! They're not going to realize them (with is good), but maybe, with some luck, this is a means for the citizen of enforcing one or two steps in the right direction, without going over board.

On every single high-profile incident during the last year or two (in either country) you could read in the news "police had the person on radar", "secret service considered person high risk", and "person had been charged of major crime". In none of these cases, there was an arrest, in none of these cases the person was sent back to whereever they came from. The Berlin crash driver even had his criminal record sugarcoated after the fact, just so it doesn't look like police should have arrested him and could have prevented the killing by doing so (there was a warrant, only just police didn't bother).

So the question is: If nothing happens when it's well-known that someone is a bad guy... then what do we need this whole espionage stuff for?

This made me laugh, not because it's funny (it's pretty sad, but also ironical), that is just what our socialists would say, too:

And there would be a lot of psychological evaluations going on here

A week or two ago, it was revealed that the overwhelming majority of interviewers (80%) in the national migration office, that's the people who decide whether or not you are just an illegal border-crosser or a genuine refugee, had not even been trained on what they're doing, and 15% of decision makers were "without qualification" (saying "without qualification" is an euphemism for "did not finish school"). Psychological evaluation, heh. We're far from that.

Now of course, the above doesn't come as a surprise if you have seen the reports on TV where an obviously-central-African who is quite obviously 26-28 years old says he is a 17 year old Syrian, and the interviewer says: "Well, he lost his passport on the boat, so we have no other option than to take his word on it".

Yep, we need more psycho stuff, and more talking. More talking and believing, fewer facts. Definitively.

What's so wrong about demanding that someone present a valid passport (or other identification)? Heck, I must present a passport when I go to another country, too. And meanwhile, more often than I like, in my own country. No ID, no luck.

I'm confused Hodgman. Are these all caricatures?

Yes, you take a complicated and nuanced argument and slap a clickbait headline on it and pretend that represents a sizable opinion. Or take some other idiot who has already done this (whether they believe it or are straw-man attacking it), and hold them up as if they represent a sizable group of people.
Everything you've posted here just screams "I don't care to understand any kind of complex and rational argument, I just want to simplify your position until it sounds dumb"... but that is American politics in a nutshell. Take the most extreme position of the other side, or take a completely sensible-but-nuanced position from the other side and simplify it so that it sounds extreme, and then pretend that half the population actually believe it as gospel.
When you do this, when you simplify a nuanced argument to the point of it become extremist nonsense and then laugh at it, you are being dismissive of the original argument. You are dismissing well thought out logical reasoning without ever having trying to understand it. That is an incredibly offensive thing to do to someone. And seeing that you're not aware what it is that you're dismissing, you don't even know how completely stupid you sound to some people, or even who you're insulting. It is the height of hubris to engage in such sweeping arrogant review of people's honest attempt at improving the state of the world.
If you were really a moderate centrist you'd use some good faith and assume that there are rational, deep, nuanced arguments beneath all those bullshit simplifications and try to understand the actual, sane arguments that academics on both sides are putting forth...

You and I interpreted what Wavinator said in completely different ways.

I interpreted the post as saying "avoid the subset of obviously bullshit bullshit present within the Left and Right". Which to me is a perfectly sensible strategy.

From your reaction, I believe you must have interpreted the post as "let's dismiss the ENTIRE Left and Right as bullshit just because some of it is." which is not what I sensed from the post at all.