No need for me to say much only that i mostly agree with him.

I don't get the impression that you're not understanding what I'm saying about profiling. I'm getting a sense of feeling like you think there should be something a bit grander to the whole thing in order to make it useful. There isn't really anything more to say about it that wouldn't move the topic of this thread in a direction that isn't relevant at all to the thread.

In Afghanistan we watched for people that disturbed the baseline of everyday living. If there are nothing but farmers around, and one or a couple guys aren't farming but are walking around just looking at stuff, that makes him suspect to be watched. If he's fat (yeah, as simple as that is. MAJOR disruption to the baseline in a rural area) he gets watched. If he's wearing a certain type of clothing, he gets watched. If he has a nicely trimmed beard, he gets watched. Etc, etc. All those things sound ridiculous right? Those aren't what we judged them on if we engaged or not, but those were target indicators learned through profiling the population and looking for differences. We got a lot of classes on what to look for if people are going to blow themselves up which described anything from wearing lots of clothing in the heat, to being nervous, or shouting some religious phrase.

That said, there were also foreign fighters that would come in. They would look different, so they were watched. Some of them were bad. Ethnic profiling was done with this, but not to the extent it may be useful in a place with multiple ethnicities. Religous profiling was kind of an invalid thing for the area obviously.

Are there more useful measures? Sometimes yes, but sometimes it's all you have.
 
Thanks for the explaination. It makes a lot more sense to me now. And you've sort of confirmed what I suspected all along in terms of the religious/ethnic point that we took off from, so I think it's a win-win.
 
I found it impossible to watch the first coverage of the story of that tortured girl without crying. But yes, Ero is correct. The women/child sex slave trade in industrialized nations is simply staggering. When I learned about it in sociology, I liked humans a whole lot less.
 
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