This in combination with some other stuff that I also read awhile back via Boing Boing made me wonder:
Would it be more useful to put armed, uniformed, trained, well-paid, highly visible, scary looking security people on planes instead of just adding more elaborate routines to the whole "security theatre" song-and-dance?
Obviously, you'd have to train such people to not be assholes to every brown person who comes on the plane, but the racist issue aside I increasingly think that this might legitimately be a good idea. I mean, if nothing else, personally I'd feel that the presence of someone like that would contribute more to my personal sense of security than not being allowed to have a blanket or use the washroom for the last hour. Or, for that matter, naked scanners run by bored, underpaid, undertrained lackeys. (You know that's just going to lead eventually to some terrorist hiding explosives internally, and thus literally blowing up his own ass.)
However, it's probably one of many ideas (like euthanasia, or selective breeding, or even certain types of optimization toward efficiency) that has been ruined by the Nazis. i.e. "oooh, that sounds like something the Nazis did, therefore it is automatically bad in all future circumstances ever-ever!!" Not that the Nazis didn't do awful things, obviously, but I hate when people use that connection to seemingly turn off their critical thinking skills in preference for moral black-and-white. "Nazis were organized, therefore organization is bad!" = that's the kind of idiocy I expect from people on this front.
I could also go into a tangent here about how in my experience, the people most often whining about something turning into a "police state" are big guys more capable of protecting themselves than I am of protecting myself, and how I thus fail to see why an extreme anarchist/libertarian situation in which I potentially get pushed around by random big guys is in any way an improvement over the current situation of potentially getting pushed around by police officers, but I won't.
Nor will I have a go at the, in my opinion, stupid hippies who either don't think about, or don't care about, the likelihood of someone like me having to worry 100x as much about getting raped in their unrealistic happy-happy law-free paradise wherein the bestial side of human nature has magically disappeared all by itself. (Or does that count as "having a go at"? 
)
Returning to the point though: Now, I do grasp that most people these days have a fucked-up view of how likely or not terrorism actually is, i.e. your odds of getting killed by a lightning strike are higher. From that perspective more security is a waste of resources. Yet at the same time, it seems hard to avoid the argument that the less security there is, the more likely there would be more terrorist attacks than there already are.
Last thought on this subject: "we should stop fucking up those other countries with Western imperialism and pissing them off, and then terrorism would go away." I hate this kind of naive crap from my fellow university-goers. To me, this is like the pro-life feminists who say "well, instead of letting women have abortions we should fix all the poverty issues in the world and then women wouldn't want to have abortions because they'd have enough resources to have all the kids they want." To which two responses come to mind:
1) it doesn't address the fact that some women just don't want kids
(compare: there are ideological motivations for terrorism - e.g. issues with "infidels" and the very existence of Israel - that I don't think will go away even if the economic ones do), and
2) you can't do that overnight, so what the fuck is the point of making women suffer in the meantime by "making" them have children they can't support?
(compare: you can't fix the Middle East overnight - if ever - so as long as it's not fixed, isn't it wise to anticipate extremist behavior in order to protect your own citizens?)
Comments
>> Chris wrote:
I'm somewhat conflicted, because on one hand I don't think anarchy is possible (it's a not insignificant hurdle to coordinate a military that doesn't recognize authority, so they are unable to defend themselves and the fascists simply steamroll them, just like the Spanish Civil War), but I empathize more with social anarchists than any other political ideology and I like to at least make sure their views are not misrepresented or misunderstood, so that what is being criticized is at least actually what they believe.
"in their unrealistic happy-happy law-free paradise"
I'd just point out that what most social anarchists/libertarians I've encountered propose is by no means "law-free" and that anarchy, despite popular usage, does not necessarily imply lacking in organization.
The ones I know just tend to be focused on acting locally, instead of trusting/relying on a top-down authority-wielding police structure, they would argue for something akin to a beefed up neighbourhood watch with rotating membership, democratic and directly accountable to the neighbourhood in which they operate.
Which is about as far as you can get from the covering each other's asses, abuse-ridden, suspended-with-pay police departments of almost every city on Earth.
Don't particularly have an opinion on the terrorism stuff. I think it's pretty clear that whatever form the next major attack takes it won't involve planes. So this is all largely going through the motions.Friday, January 08 03:13 AM>> Stoo wrote:
I don't know, I think such Neighbourhood Watch schemes could end up being the vigilante rule of whoever has the biggest gun. Until it comes up against major organised crime with even bigger guns...Friday, January 08 04:56 AM>> subdermal wrote:
I wouldn't call any of the libertarians I know particularly "hippy-happy". The idea isn't "total anarchy where everyone is pleasant and fair to each other because deep down we're all good people" it's more like "let's have a reasonable number of laws and actually enforce them rather than making everything illegal by default, propping up an arbitrary and corrupt legal industry, and then still not being able to keep people from fucking each other over".
Israeli-style airport security is the <i>only</i> reasonable and effective approach so far to actually fighting air terrorism. Now, of course if you only want to make it look like you're trying, and if you want to constantly remind people that they are dependent on the state for their safety, you need to strip people of their legal possessions and take naked pictures of them through their clothes.
Terrorism will not go away while we have both bombs and churches. No amount of hippy "can't we all just give everyone our money and then get along" will fix either.Friday, January 08 09:27 AM>> Thiyavat wrote:
Hey guys, I just wanted to clarify that I didn't mean to imply, at all (especially with subdermal reading :P) that the anarchist types I had in mind were identical with the hippie types I had in mind. I really meant to identify two separate groups, one of which seems (to me) to want to take law into their own hands and the other of which thinks law itself causes crime. Upon reflection I can see those shading into one another, but still: sorry if the use of "anarchist" where I put it in was confusing on this front, because I don't think that anarchists and hippies are "the same" group.
My worries about "neighbourhood watch" -type stuff are basically the same as Stoo's. I'm not saying that police are perfect, I'm just saying that they make me feel safer than random peopple trying to fulfill the same function. Also, I think you can have police without having the suspended-with-pay bullshit, which I agree with Chris is indeed stupid.Friday, January 08 10:21 AM>> Thiyavat wrote:
Oh, and another thought: Chris: I'm not convinced it will necessarily involve planes either. That's where I think though that the Israeli "concentrate on finding people instead of finding stuff" approach may well make sense whether in or out of airports. Certainly it seems obvious to me that so long as security focuses on finding stuff instead of finding people, terrorists are just going to keep looking for and finding different stuff that they can use for terror.Friday, January 08 10:35 AM>> subdermal wrote:
Haha no offense taken whatsoever. There is some crossover in ideals between the two, but typically with radically different interpretations ;)
I'm not "for" random people taking on the role of the police either, but I am all for random people having the right to defend themselves and their families/loved ones should the need arise.
On the air security topic, I got one of the promo images the airport security industry is showing of 'nonobtrusive' images taken by the body scanner. One click in MSPaint turned it into a porn-quality picture. These images will be viewed by minimum-wage workers with cell cams and internet access... Not that I'm terribly concerned about my own fat ass showing up on the intertubes, but it's a privacy violation in every sense of the term and should not be tolerated by anyone.
Israeli air security agents are well-trained, decently paid, and even without having nekkid pics of anyone have manged to allow not one successful terrorist air attack in the most terrorist-targeted country on earth. Hmm.Friday, January 08 10:50 AM>> Stoo wrote:
I'm not seeing a large market for people fapping it to whatever comes out of these security scanners.
If it's actually helpful (and I don;t know if that's the case) then I can live with it.Friday, January 08 05:42 PM>> subdermal wrote:
I don't expect it to actually be used as porn, I'm just saying that regardless of the airline security industry's claims to the contrary, the images leave nothing to the imagination. And some people will be okay with it; I realize that. I have to travel for my job, and given the choice between unemployment or some disgruntled monkey that I don't know or trust having naked photos of me, I'll probably choose the option that continues paying my bills :(
Wow I never thought I'd have to accept nude modeling as part of a job description :DFriday, January 08 05:45 PM>> Chris wrote:
Now, that's not necessarily what *I* believe, just what the anarchists I know have suggested.
*Personally*, recognizing that compromise is necessary, I just want every single fucking cop on the planet to wear a camera and microphone to record every single arrest and intervention they make.
The technology is there now to make that possible.Friday, January 08 06:48 PM>> Thiyavat wrote:
Subdermal & Stoo: As someone who has actually had to worry about naked pictures being circulated on the Internet against my will, I actually find the prospect of misuse of the scanners in that way to be pretty upsetting. If it's that easy to return the images to porn quality, than that really does bother me. It wouldn't make me not fly, but it would make it so that I don't want to fly unless I expect really, really good payoff from the trip or something. (e.g. seeing someone I haven't seen in ages or going to another awesome conference like last time). I'm not saying that you're being unsympathetic when I point this out, but just stating as what I see as a fact: that if you're an attractive woman and are acquainted with people acting like they're entitled to treat you as a piece of meat, it's hard not to get really fucking angry about a concrete potential for having to worry about that even more often, even if it is unlikely.
Chris: I totally agree with the camera-and-microphone idea. That is one of the few circumstances where I think the concept of "if you're not doing anything wrong, being under surveillance shouldn't be a problem for you" that actually makes sense.Saturday, January 09 01:46 PM>> amalthea wrote:
When I arrived in Malaysia and had to go through customs at the train station, there was a board posted on the wall which basically stated that hippies would be denied entry. I wish I could have taken a picture..Monday, January 25 09:47 AM
Add Comments
Notes:
This is NOT xanga - despite what you may see in MY posts, any code that YOU type will NOT automatically turn into a graphic smiley.
In order to limit spam, any comments on entries more than 7 days old are automatically moderated.
