Rand Paul and the TSA
Over at the Guardian I discuss the brouhaha over Rand Paul's refusal to let TSA touch his junk. The White House, of course, has spoken in support of the TSA.
posted by Jennifer Abel at 3:21 PM
Monday, January 23, 2012
About Me
- Name: Jennifer Abel
Jennifer Abel is an American writer who began her career in print media three minutes before the Internet killed the industry. After starting at a small Connecticut daily she moved to the Hartford Advocate, an alt-weekly where her journalistic coups included infiltrating a Furries convention and working on a phone sex line (which fired her six hours later). Since then she’s written for, or been reprinted in, dozens of print and web outlets, including Playboy, the Guardian, Salon, AlterNet, Mashable, the Daily Dot and pretty much every website with the words "cannabis" or "legalize it" in the title. Once, when she was young and naïve and needed the money, she unwittingly edited SEO copy for a spammer. However, in light of the spambot comments she’s deleted from her own blogs since then, she figures she’s more than repaid that particular karmic debt. Jennifer is currently looking for professional, non-spam writing jobs; interested editors are enthusiastically invited to e-mail her.
Links
- Jennifer's Eponymous Professional Website
- Jennifer's Online Clip File
- Jennifer's Columns for the Guardian
- Jennifer's Articles for the Daily Dot
- Windypundit
- Unqualified Offerings
- Gravity Lens
- The New England Curmudgeon
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Previous Posts
- Fiddling While Rome Burns
- Dammit, GOP, Get Your Act Together
- Eek, It's A Living
- TSA's True Concern: Everything Except Security
- 2012: An Inauspicious Start
- Even If We Win, We Still Lose
- Only Terrorists Have Seven Day’s Worth Of Food
- TSA Paved The Way For The NDAA
- Game Over
- Constitutional Amendments Four Through Eight, R.I.P.
7 Comments:
Ugh, as usual, the comments are painful. In fact, this may be the stupidest comment to I've ever seen on one of your posts:
"what's so bad about being briefly touched by another person? what is so special about your body that you are desperate that no one sees it? the searches many only make travelling a tiny bit safer but you lose absolutely nothing by submitting to them. flying is not a right.
"i think a lot of this comes downs to class. people are happy for doctors or nurses to see them naked and touch them. i'm the author has been measured for a dress or enjoyed a spa day where she will have been touched by a stranger. the problem here seems to be that people don't want uniformed security guards touching them."
Then again, I never can read all the comments to your articles, so I've probably missed a few.
I don't think that will change once TSA expands to all forms of transport, as they've promised.
@Windypundit -
I saw that comment, too. The attitude inherent in it is about the same as someone telling a prospective rape victim to "just lie back and enjoy it, baby, cuz it's inevitable and anyway, it won't hurt you to put out a little." What a contemptible ass. But frankly I find most of the commenters at that lefty limey rag to be contemptible asses - which is why I seldom bother reading them. Many sound a good deal like "Tony" over at Hit and Run. Only good for raising one's blood pressure.
Went back to the linked article and there are nearly two hundred comments now, as opposed to only about twenty yesterday when it was published. Fortunately some of the comments come down on the same side as Jennifer's view. That's heartening.
I still -- STILL! -- cannot find the words to adequately convey how utterly dumbfounded I am by everyone's reaction to these odious laws. Some things, I expect controversy, say when writing on the theme "legalize prostitution and drugs." Or if someone wrote either "abolish minimum wage" or "establish a mandatory minimum income everyone is entitled to," of course those will generate controversy from t=either the left- or right-wing part of the political spectrum. But "people have the right to not be photographed naked, and not have their genitals groped?" How the hell did THAT become controversial? Pre-9/11, that was one of those things everyone agreed with, on par with "If every city on earth got nuked, 'twould be very, very bad."
I still -- STILL! -- cannot find the words to adequately convey how utterly dumbfounded I am by everyone's reaction to these odious laws.
I wonder what people's reactions would be if one was subject to this stuff anytime one left home or entered a public place? What's next - cavity searches before entering a courthouse or a shopping mall?
BTW, I gotta say your anti-spambot thing is coming up with some interesting word verification examples. This latest one is equidead. The previous was coppe.
I wish I could undo the stupid security-word requirement, as I did the first couple years of this blog, but every time I try I get spambotted. Even now I get them from time to time, but nowhere near as much as without the verification.
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