Posted by
Steve Smith on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/TSA-security-technology-and-opting-out-tp5759060p5759925.html
Nick -
Nah, Steve. I am going to rain on this parade.
Sorry.
I wondered what that splashing/drizzling was all about! Thanks a
lot!
For years we all had our inseams measured without
accusing tailors of homophilia. There is nothing inherently
undignified in the search except that perception makes it
so.
So, my barber who keeps dropping his comb into my lap *isn't* making
a pass at me? Shoots, I'll be needing to find another barber I
guess! And you might not be surprised, but I've never had a tailor
handle my junk while measuring my inseams... but then, that
salesgirl at the store where I buy my jeans is welcome to measure my
inseams... but every time I ask, she declines the opportunity.
All of this “keep your mitts off my junk”
(“JUNK!” WHERE THE HELL DID THAT COME FROM?) is a juvenile
distraction from two EXTREMELY important issues.
(1) Are the back scatter scanners safe?
(2) Is security based on high cost machinery (rather
than intelligence) effective.
It does give me pause that Michael Chertoff was,
I understand, a serious investor in the company that makes
the machines. No I don’t have any proof.
I don't suppose I disagree that these are potentially important
issues. But I don't agree that submitting to escalating levels of
invasive and highly questionable measures based on induced hysteria
is a "good and necessary thing".
I'm still of the strong belief that one of the errant memes amok in
our culture is the meme of fascism. The meme that insists that the
good of the whole is entirely dependent on and subservient to the
whim of the bureaucracy in place (and expanding). It is my firmly
held opinion that the majority of the response to 9/11 has been an
opportunistic one, feeding those who would feed this particular
meme. Fascism positively loves fear!
I'm also completely in tune with the theme.... "just because you are
paranoid, doesn't mean they are *not* out to get you". Yes, the
great and wonderful America the Beautiful has ENEMIES and they "Hate
our Freedoms" (What?) and they *will* hijack our planes and fly them
into our tallest buildings if given the chance...
But I contend that there is also a rot within the souls of our own
people who "Hate our Freedoms" in an entirely different way. They
hate our freedom from fear, from administrative picayune control of
everything. Just go dump your wallet out on the table and look
through *that junk* and tell me that you are not being harried by a
dozen or more trivial systems which require you to step and fetch...
driver's license (aka Universal ID), Insurance card(s), credit
cards, Social Security Card, Loyalty Shopping Cards... the rest I'm
not sure I wanna know! Then go check the file cabinet, and the glove
box of your car... or your stack of unopened (my case) or recently
opened (more likely) mail. The quantity and complexity of the
systems designed around keeping YOU in line is amazing. Dial up a
right wing talk radio station and listen to the rhetoric in the
*advertising* on identity theft (guard), it is positively
disgusting!
Yes, someone hates our freedoms, but I don't think it is the 12 year
old boys and girls spread across a great deal of the world strapping
bombs onto their chests to blow up our tanks (those not busy
stepping on our errant landmines)... *they* have something
seriously sad going on in *their* (short and likely miserable) lives
as do our young men and women stuck in the "stop-loss" war that is
consuming their prime years, but the threat is as much from within
(all forms of paranoid hysteria and the fascist systems and
behaviour it can fuel) as from without.
Ooops, I think I got off on a rant there! <grin>
- Steve
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