8 lines
2.0 KiB
Plaintext
8 lines
2.0 KiB
Plaintext
I join the not-flying list
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<p>Count me with those who will not be flying until the TSA procedures requiring either a full-body X-ray scan or a grope are rescinded. This is meaningless security theater taken to a Kafkaesque extreme, and I won’t consent to it even passively. When the airlines feel enough pain from refuseniks, they’ll push back faster than we can.</p>
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<p><span id="more-2749"></span></p>
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<p>The whole gallimaufry of escalating “security” restrictions since 9/11 has been a bad joke out of Monty Python parody, achieving nothing; tiger-team tests reveal that the ridiculous ease with which weapons and bombs can be slipped through has changed <em>not one bit</em>. </p>
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<p>The Israelis, targeted by terrorists more ferociously than any country on earth, have never had a single hijacking or bombing and rightly laugh at our “security”. It’s all Kabuki theater, a ritual intended to pantomime seriousness in the absence of any actual seriousness. If we actually cared about security we’d arm the air crew, and if we <em>really</em> cared we’d <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=11">arm the passengers</a>. </p>
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<p>It was always bound to come to this. Once “security” was based on the premise that only planes full of disarmed sheep are safe, the full-body scanners and genital-groping were as inevitable as night following day – and, in the future, so will be body-cavity searches. But perhaps scanning and groping will prove to have been the reductio ad absurdum of that strategy; there are signs that the revolt against it might become serious enough to inflict damage on revenue that the airlines can’t tolerate.</p>
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<p>Causing enough pain to the airlines that the TSA buckles is only the first step, though. It’s not just the regulations that are broken, it’s the pervasive sick-think behind them. I will know <em>that</em> illness has been cured only when I am not only permitted but encouraged to wear my personal weapons onto an airplane.</p>
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