RE: Tauchain: The Automated Webslueth? The Sherlock Holmes Bot concept for discussion
Given the acts of violence that the church has done, it's no wonder some crazy dude would want to attack churches, irrationally seeking justice. I'm not endorsing violence in any way, I think that a different approach can be taken if the goal is to reduce violence to a minimum other than trying to predict these attacks.
Tauchain can have some serious use cases in crime investigation but terrorism chasing is just witch hunting an artificially crafted enemy and mostly pointless as no punishment will ever achieve justice.
From Wikileaks:
Many parts of Africa have become little more than rubbish dumps for the growing waste of Western countries. Lawless Somalia was one of the first. As it descended into chaos in the 1990s after the overthrow of the Cold War dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, Italian multinational companies dumped nuclear and other hazardous waste there. During heavy floods it reportedly seeped into the water table and was later blamed for depleted fish stocks — a reason often cited by Somalis for moving into piracy. “Pirates in Somalia are seen almost as Robin Hood figures, taking from the West in return for the harm it is doing,” said Abdirahman Aden Ibrahim, a Somali political analyst.
So there you have it. Piracy is bad, but diminishing it is not only a matter of punishing pirates. You have to see the whole picture. Justifying mass surveillance because of this is crazy.
I never put emphasis on piracy nor did I form any sort of moral opinion on it. What I formed a moral opinion on is based on my view of the tactic called terrorism. Terrorism results in destruction, in loss of life. I think it is good to preserve and protect people's lives.
Under ethics you can classify me as a consequentialist. I also have some utilitarian tendencies. As a consequentialist I would require some evidence that mass surveillance is actually an effective tactic where the benefits of it are out weighing the risks that come from it. I've never actually endorsed mass surveillance so not sure why you connected that to anything I had to say in my posts.
Terrorism can result in loss of life. There has to be a cost or there will be no deterrent effect or at least this is the justification for punishment. I'm not saying punishment is effective for crime or terrorism but if you have an environment where a society puts no cost on loss of life then what exactly in society will protect the lives of it's members? Society loses with every innocent life lost. Families are disrupted, destroyed, by terrorist attacks. 9/11 attacks took thousands of innocent lives away from people who loved them.
My stance isn't based on "achieving justice" because I don't really know what that means. My stance is on defending lives. If there are people whom you care about then you'll relate to this stance above any political concern, any ideological concern, any religion concern.
I don't personally believe in collective reputation or collective punishment. You're referring to the mosque not the church. It's never justice in my opinion to target innocent civilians who had nothing to do with any of the injustice. That kind of attack only puts more innocent civilians at risk in the future as unlawful combatants may now seek to target more innocent people to pursue their sense of justice/revenge.
Whatever was done in the name of Islam, was done by specific people, specific mosques, sects, families, and to go outside of that to target completely random Muslims who had nothing to do with terrorism in my opinion only does harm to legitimate attempts to prevent loss of life, at least that is my current take on it.
I'm for reducing violence to a minimum. I'm not really convinced yet that you can predict attacks but I would say if society is going to try to predict attacks it should be done in the most intelligent way possible. No racial profiling, no religious profiling, no "you look like a terrorist so we are going to search you", but rather instead an intelligent approach. I would rather be selected by a computer to be searched than to have some potentially biased human being search me because they feel like it. So in a way it is true that I think it's a lesser evil to have an intelligent prediction mechanism with greater chances of accuracy over time than to have what we have now which is human beings profiling other human beings based on very limited data.