Sand in the Gears of a Corrupt Machine
November 24 -- the day before Thanksgiving -- is National Opt-Out Day (though opting out should ideally be done every day): anyone unfortunate enough to fly in American airspace should refuse to submit to the TSA's virtual strip-search scanner, and insist the molestation-style patdown be done not the some "back room," but in full view of all other witnesses in the airport. Let everyone see how law-abiding citizens are treated in the Land of the Free!
In other news, there's been a small improvement on the economic front; the McDonald's down the street from me is hiring. They require a high school diploma. If you don't have one but still need a job, you can work for the TSA, which does allow high school dropouts to join its ranks. That's how vital TSA is to national security: burger flippers are held to higher standards of intelligence and education than they are.
But in the interest of fairness, I must admit the TSA has done one good thing: if not for the sartorial stylings of its agents, the three-inch-long fake-fingernail industry would've gone out of business years ago.
In other news, there's been a small improvement on the economic front; the McDonald's down the street from me is hiring. They require a high school diploma. If you don't have one but still need a job, you can work for the TSA, which does allow high school dropouts to join its ranks. That's how vital TSA is to national security: burger flippers are held to higher standards of intelligence and education than they are.
But in the interest of fairness, I must admit the TSA has done one good thing: if not for the sartorial stylings of its agents, the three-inch-long fake-fingernail industry would've gone out of business years ago.
posted by Jennifer Abel at 7:10 PM
6 Comments:
Two important links:
1) A former agent of Die Ministerium Fur Staatsicherheit wants you to know what she thinks of you:
http://www.momversus.com/2010/11/03/shut-up-get-scanned/
2) To help your kids understand what they're opting out of:
http://www.boingboing.net/201011111141.jpg
I'm aware of that odious woman's link, Thoreau; that's what inspired this post.
I flew through JFK a few days ago. The Middle Eastern guy in front of me was objecting to how the TSA guy talked to his wife, so the TSA guy called for a physical search of the whole family because of the guy's "argumentative attitude." He then turned and grinned at one of the other TSA agents. It seemed clear to me that he was just using his authority as a means to punish the passenger for not being a docile sheep. It pissed me off, but I was trying to get back home to my kids after a two-week international trip, so what did I do? I acted like a docile sheep. Sigh.
I am in complete shock at the callousness of the author of "Shut Up And Get In The Scanner". If I read it correctly, her augment is that the TSA is already composed almost entirely of assholes who enjoy nothing more than judging us. Therefor allowing them to look at us naked anonymously just isn't a big deal. She has provided me the perfect article to forward to TSA apologist friends.
Furthermore, her submission that flying is a privilege not a right grates on me. Is any form of transportation in the United States still a right? At what point will it be a privilege to walk out the front door?
Paul, the author, Melissa Hammett, is a craven woman so utterly lacking in useful job skills that she was reduced to working for the TSA to keep her worthless bullying ass housed and fed. If this were East Germany, she'd work for the Stasi. She is clearly an unintelligent woman, as evidenced by the non-sequiturs in her essay: "Some passengers dress kinda trashy, therefor nobody should complain about the nude scanners", etc.
But that is to be expected; TSA's sole job function is to trample the constitutional rights of American citizens, and the only people who would voluntarily take such a job are people with either no morals or no intelligence.
There's a cognitive disconnect even talking about the TSA because they seem like an improbable mashup of keystone cop nincompoops and 3rd world "my-word-is-law" enforcers. My question for these security fetishists is this: what would they *not* do in the name of safety? What would they consider to be the ethical and legal boundaries of the pursuit of "security?"
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