"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Nov 19, 2010

Catching the Rub

 Justin @ Americana:

"In my view, one of the most damning details in the story of John Tyner, the man who refused to submit to an unlawful search or walk through an x-ray machine, is the civil suit and $10,000 fine. If these measures were solely to do with airport security, then these sorts of legal measures make no sense. Terrorists who are presumably willing to die in a plane hijacking are not cowed by such threats. These measures are all aimed in the same direction, to instill fear, deference to authority, and erode a sense of personal rights as the default position of the citizenry using tools of humiliation and coercion. Partially disrobing, submitting to groping or naked body and throwing away your water scans have nothing to do with security."

(emphasis mine)

Addendum: On the tele right now (7:09am), George Clintonopolous referred to the Israeli airline profiling standards as the "common sense approach" because it weeds out people who "are clearly not" threats.

2 comments:

Randal Graves said...

Most terrorists are poor, of course such threats would work. It's just common sense.

Jack Crow said...

No doubt. An explosion of jihad and a quiet homeland are separated by the awesome power of the civil suit...