a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
kleinbl00  ·  4328 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Say goodbye to "naked image" body scanners

Nope. At some point "fuck you, you're invading my privacy no matter what you do" is entirely valid. When I have to take off my flip-flops and pour out my coffee, we're not being pragmatic or safe, we're cracking skulls because it's fun.

The TSA exists so that we don't have to normalize foreign policy. The TSA exists as a giant pork-barrel project. The TSA exists so that people with no control and no understanding will worry less because they feel if their rights are being trampled they must be safer.

I don't fucking fly El Al. I fly Virgin. If you can't determine whether or not a lethal quantity of explosives isn't on my person without resorting to a strip search, you need to check your foreign policy. Entrusting knuckle-dragging bean counters with the task of keeping me safe isn't helping a fucking thing. Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer, wrote the two books that became SYRIANA. He opens one of them by pointing out that despite the massive intelligence apparatus at our disposal, what crashed a hijacked passenger jet into a field in Pennsylvania wasn't the CIA, NSA, State Dept or any other agency, it was concerned citizens doing the right thing. He could have gone on to point out that the same was true for the Shoe Bomber, the Underwear Bomber and those guys who make us all pour out our coffee now.

Just because you're cool with it does NOT mean I have to be. Your canard about 60 people in a tube simply illustrates that you have a surface-level understanding of the situation and don't want to understand any deeper.