4 ms·

Don't we read the same stories about CBP and TSA every 2 or 3 weeks? Does anybody know if this happens so frequently in other democratic countries? I can't im

by dudul 8y ago

Don't we read the same stories about CBP and TSA every 2 or 3 weeks? Does anybody know if this happens so frequently in other democratic countries? I can't imagine that a story like that would surface in Finland, Spain or Canada without shocking the entire population, who would immediately demand that the problem be addressed. Assuming I'm correct, what is so different about the US that we can't seem to be able to fix this?

adventured 8y ago
Reduce the power and reach of the state. Stop giving it more social territory and more power. Start taking things away from it aggressively, remove its regulation of our personal and business lives. You either let the bear stick its nose into the basket or you don't. The US Government involves itself in every single aspect of our lives, and that has to stop if you want to reduce their bad behavior. They have to be taught that there are things that are off limits and there are behaviors that are unacceptable. In short, the American public has allowed the monster in DC to sprawl entirely out of control, for roughly 70 years. The US military is half the size of the entire Russian economy now. The US Government is the size of Germany's entire economy. Who could possibly hold that thing to account? It's too big. The US isn't a small soft cuddly bunny like Finland. WW2 and forward it's a rolling war machine that was built to defeat the monsters of Europe and Asia. That's what the military industrial complex was created to do. More recently, for 40 years it held the Soviet Empire - another European monster - in check in Europe and Asia. The genie has never been put back into the box, it roams the streets daily as the military industrial complex, and it spills into every aspect of daily American life. From the spy agencies, to homeland security & border control, to defense contractors, to foreign military adventurism or nation building, to our police militization, to how we interact with our allies. Both political sides are overwhelmingly guilty of kowtowing to it and expanding it, and using it as a stick when it's convenient. Who wants to give up that much power? And the $200 billion plus we'd save by putting that WW2 genie back into the box, can go toward more important priorities. The problem? It requires a dramatic increase in US isolationism. The US must pull entirely back from trying to police every corner of the planet both militarily and politically, which every globalist in DC is yelling at the top of their lungs trying to prevent from happening. We can't have it both ways. We can be the WW2 global juggernaut that polices all, acting as a shield for Europe and Asia. Or we can shut that all down, demilitarize across the board and redirect our priorities to domestic social welfare. In short, we can start behaving like a normal nation again. We either do it voluntarily (sparing ourselves immense pain and treasure), or eventually the cost gets high enough ($21 trillion and counting) that we'll be forced to do it regardless.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  I agree with what you're saying but the problem is nobody wants the government out of things they personally want it involved in. Go in other threads and people will be arguing for more government involvement in X or Y with obvious potential for scope creep into the business of individuals.
  - adventured 8y ago
    I agree. The US Government is large enough to act as a thing that each person can say: hey, I want you to get involved into this thing and fix it for me (and fix it in the way I want you to). There should be a law! And now we're choking to death on the world's biggest pile of laws and regulations. What are they doing regulating marriage for example? It's a contract between consenting adults. Why can't I get married to three people if I want to (not joking)? The notion that we have this giant sprawling thing so deep into our personal lives that it's regulating social behavior in that way, is disgusting and absurd. The marriage thing is one example, however it applies to nearly everything today. The same reason they're knee deep into marriage, is the same reason they're knee deep into drug regulation, etc. This quote seems to have no parent (it's incorrectly attributed to Jefferson), however I happen to agree with it: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have." You can be certain a government that big, will routinely over-step, as it's pervasive. Hungry bears do not have a healthy respect for boundaries.
GW150914 8y ago
On a dispassionate level there is a sense that the country is still in its eternal war on terrorism, and sacrifices must be made. By powerless, generally poor and marginal people of course. Poor kids need to enlist and die in a dessert, poor people need submit to indignities and abuse from police, airport security, and prisons. It’s the same playbook from the war on drugs, and every other American “war” for a very long time. A lot of the country is also poorly educated, very religious, and has strong ideas about what proper patriotism entails, and overbearing security theater is a good thing in that regime. Half of the US falls into the crowd that wants more prisons, tougher laws, kill dem turrurists, and fuck the socialists. It is an ironic truth that a majority of those people are adversely affected by their own positions. If you go back in back and study their history, the US has been divided this way as a means to control poor whites by pitting them against (primarily) blacks, and more recently non-whites in general. Not much has changed except the window dressing. Wealthy people need to keep people distracted and at each other’s throats, because otherwise those people tend to work together for better conditions and that hurts the bottom line. Racism exists elsewhere of course, but in the US it’s woven into the culture in a very specific way, and even after the racism itself departs, the poisonous politics remain ossified. Where racism fails, wars are used. Wars on drugs, wars on terror, gang wars, etc. anyone who’s against getting groped for freedom obviously hates the troops, blah blah. You get the idea. As a result you get liberals calling for reforms and regulations to an extreme, and libertarians calling for dismantling the government to a massive degree. Since both ideas are fundamentally half-baked and unlikely to succeed in the unnuanced and ideologically loaded forms they take, they’re ignored by centrists just trying to hold on to some vision of the middle class. The result is social and political gridlock, which is acceptable when there’s so much money to be made by the relatively small group in power. Any time people look like cooperating it’s just a matter of a new war on something or actual war, and then it’s business as usual. People are struggling, but business is good.
- mythrwy 8y ago
  If you have to die, a dessert isn't a bad place to do it though :)
Gustomaximus 8y ago
> what is so different about the US that we can't seem to be able to fix this? While this is massively oversimplified in something that has many variables, as an outsider, I see a significant variable as a preoccupation with money in the US. We all love money no doubt, but US seems to have turned it into a quasi religion. This behaviour would much less likely happen to rich people because the person doing it doesnt want to loose their job and get sued (so money). And poor people struggle to get justice because they cant afford it, money again. Further I think the bad actors in this space behave this way because money is so important e.g I was only following orders is classic thinking of people that want to keep jobs over their morals. My other view is that the world is being increasingly run by what I call 'one step thinkers'. They are people that can be smart but tend to see the world around them in singular cause/effect only. In this articles case all they can see is their job to stop drug transport.. Meanwhile if you step back and consider you have to shove your fingers up a bunch of innocent womens vaginas against their will, so essentially rape women, to find the occasional drug mule, you'd probably reconsider how important it is to catch that drug mule in this method.
- wmeredith 8y ago
  Critical thinking is what your "one step thinkers" are missing. It's an academic tangent to the grotesque topic at hand, but I think there's a dearth of critical thinking in modern society because all our brains are being DDOS'd with smartphones, social media, 24 hour news, etc...
  - kungtotte 8y ago
    Critical thinking was never common. Smartphones might exacerbate the issues but the core problem exists independent of smartphones and social media. We don't have a culture of teaching and promoting critical thinking, and I don't think we've ever had that.
ufo 8y ago
It's anecdotal evidence, but I recently traveled to the US and was sadly reminded by how the "war on terror" is still very much alive in the American public conscious. I don't see the TSA situation improving until that happens. * The first thing I needed to do was get a visa. All my papers are stamped by the Department of Homeland Security, whose name reflects the post 9/11 mentality of the war on terror. * When dispatching my baggage, I noticed that Delta airlines offers a special discount for active U.S. military personnel. "You serve us, and we’re delighted to serve you", as they said. This reflects a country that has been constantly at war for a century. * After I board my flight I read Delta's in-flight magazine. They have an article about how Google is using targeted advertisements to fight "terrorists" and "extremists". Back home, the in flight magazine is full of vapid travel articles but here in the American airline we find an article bringing fear to light and suggesting a multinational corporation's information harvesting product as the solution. * After I land in the US I almost miss my connecting flight because of the enormous customs and TSA lines. What a way to feel welcome... * In my connecting flight, I get a quick refresher of what right-wing media can be in the US, as the passenger next to me has brought a newspaper and tuned the in-flight entertainment system to Fox News. * The newspaper has articles about a new 900 billion dollar defense bill and an article about new scanner technology being investigated by the TSA, which would allow laptops to stay inside the bag. The article suggested that this was the only way to speed up the lines. * I thought I already knew what Fox News was about, but it still managed to surprise me: * The Westminster car crash that injured 3 people was covered as a full blown attack. News insertions every 5 minutes. "Alert!" "Alert!" * One of the talk show hosts went on a product-placement segment about ancesty.com and how she could trace the ethnicity of her ancestors. The 5 white show hosts then spent a couple of minutes discussing her European ethnicity. In these times of racial tension and rising nationalism, things like this make me a little nervous. * After the ancestry.com segment, they jumped to a musical segment about the Camp4Heroes charity. Another reminder of the constant state of war that the US goes through, the large number of wounded veterans that are victims of it, and the special euphemisms that american english uses for these things: "heroes", "veterans", "serving the country", etc. * Fox news also aired news about Facebook excusing themselves that their surveilance network failed to stop fake news spread by terrorists. (As if the Google article from earlier wasn't enough).

by dudul 8y ago

adventured 8y ago

Reduce the power and reach of the state. Stop giving it more social territory and more power. Start taking things away from it aggressively, remove its regulation of our personal and business lives. You either let the bear stick its nose into the basket or you don't. The US Government involves itself in every single aspect of our lives, and that has to stop if you want to reduce their bad behavior. They have to be taught that there are things that are off limits and there are behaviors that are unacceptable. In short, the American public has allowed the monster in DC to sprawl entirely out of control, for roughly 70 years. The US military is half the size of the entire Russian economy now. The US Government is the size of Germany's entire economy. Who could possibly hold that thing to account? It's too big. The US isn't a small soft cuddly bunny like Finland. WW2 and forward it's a rolling war machine that was built to defeat the monsters of Europe and Asia. That's what the military industrial complex was created to do. More recently, for 40 years it held the Soviet Empire - another European monster - in check in Europe and Asia. The genie has never been put back into the box, it roams the streets daily as the military industrial complex, and it spills into every aspect of daily American life. From the spy agencies, to homeland security & border control, to defense contractors, to foreign military adventurism or nation building, to our police militization, to how we interact with our allies. Both political sides are overwhelmingly guilty of kowtowing to it and expanding it, and using it as a stick when it's convenient. Who wants to give up that much power? And the $200 billion plus we'd save by putting that WW2 genie back into the box, can go toward more important priorities. The problem? It requires a dramatic increase in US isolationism. The US must pull entirely back from trying to police every corner of the planet both militarily and politically, which every globalist in DC is yelling at the top of their lungs trying to prevent from happening. We can't have it both ways. We can be the WW2 global juggernaut that polices all, acting as a shield for Europe and Asia. Or we can shut that all down, demilitarize across the board and redirect our priorities to domestic social welfare. In short, we can start behaving like a normal nation again. We either do it voluntarily (sparing ourselves immense pain and treasure), or eventually the cost gets high enough ($21 trillion and counting) that we'll be forced to do it regardless.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
I agree with what you're saying but the problem is nobody wants the government out of things they personally want it involved in. Go in other threads and people will be arguing for more government involvement in X or Y with obvious potential for scope creep into the business of individuals.
- adventured 8y ago
  I agree. The US Government is large enough to act as a thing that each person can say: hey, I want you to get involved into this thing and fix it for me (and fix it in the way I want you to). There should be a law! And now we're choking to death on the world's biggest pile of laws and regulations. What are they doing regulating marriage for example? It's a contract between consenting adults. Why can't I get married to three people if I want to (not joking)? The notion that we have this giant sprawling thing so deep into our personal lives that it's regulating social behavior in that way, is disgusting and absurd. The marriage thing is one example, however it applies to nearly everything today. The same reason they're knee deep into marriage, is the same reason they're knee deep into drug regulation, etc. This quote seems to have no parent (it's incorrectly attributed to Jefferson), however I happen to agree with it: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have." You can be certain a government that big, will routinely over-step, as it's pervasive. Hungry bears do not have a healthy respect for boundaries.

GW150914 8y ago

On a dispassionate level there is a sense that the country is still in its eternal war on terrorism, and sacrifices must be made. By powerless, generally poor and marginal people of course. Poor kids need to enlist and die in a dessert, poor people need submit to indignities and abuse from police, airport security, and prisons. It’s the same playbook from the war on drugs, and every other American “war” for a very long time. A lot of the country is also poorly educated, very religious, and has strong ideas about what proper patriotism entails, and overbearing security theater is a good thing in that regime. Half of the US falls into the crowd that wants more prisons, tougher laws, kill dem turrurists, and fuck the socialists. It is an ironic truth that a majority of those people are adversely affected by their own positions. If you go back in back and study their history, the US has been divided this way as a means to control poor whites by pitting them against (primarily) blacks, and more recently non-whites in general. Not much has changed except the window dressing. Wealthy people need to keep people distracted and at each other’s throats, because otherwise those people tend to work together for better conditions and that hurts the bottom line. Racism exists elsewhere of course, but in the US it’s woven into the culture in a very specific way, and even after the racism itself departs, the poisonous politics remain ossified. Where racism fails, wars are used. Wars on drugs, wars on terror, gang wars, etc. anyone who’s against getting groped for freedom obviously hates the troops, blah blah. You get the idea. As a result you get liberals calling for reforms and regulations to an extreme, and libertarians calling for dismantling the government to a massive degree. Since both ideas are fundamentally half-baked and unlikely to succeed in the unnuanced and ideologically loaded forms they take, they’re ignored by centrists just trying to hold on to some vision of the middle class. The result is social and political gridlock, which is acceptable when there’s so much money to be made by the relatively small group in power. Any time people look like cooperating it’s just a matter of a new war on something or actual war, and then it’s business as usual. People are struggling, but business is good.

mythrwy 8y ago
If you have to die, a dessert isn't a bad place to do it though :)

Gustomaximus 8y ago

> what is so different about the US that we can't seem to be able to fix this? While this is massively oversimplified in something that has many variables, as an outsider, I see a significant variable as a preoccupation with money in the US. We all love money no doubt, but US seems to have turned it into a quasi religion. This behaviour would much less likely happen to rich people because the person doing it doesnt want to loose their job and get sued (so money). And poor people struggle to get justice because they cant afford it, money again. Further I think the bad actors in this space behave this way because money is so important e.g I was only following orders is classic thinking of people that want to keep jobs over their morals. My other view is that the world is being increasingly run by what I call 'one step thinkers'. They are people that can be smart but tend to see the world around them in singular cause/effect only. In this articles case all they can see is their job to stop drug transport.. Meanwhile if you step back and consider you have to shove your fingers up a bunch of innocent womens vaginas against their will, so essentially rape women, to find the occasional drug mule, you'd probably reconsider how important it is to catch that drug mule in this method.

wmeredith 8y ago
Critical thinking is what your "one step thinkers" are missing. It's an academic tangent to the grotesque topic at hand, but I think there's a dearth of critical thinking in modern society because all our brains are being DDOS'd with smartphones, social media, 24 hour news, etc...
- kungtotte 8y ago
  Critical thinking was never common. Smartphones might exacerbate the issues but the core problem exists independent of smartphones and social media. We don't have a culture of teaching and promoting critical thinking, and I don't think we've ever had that.

ufo 8y ago

It's anecdotal evidence, but I recently traveled to the US and was sadly reminded by how the "war on terror" is still very much alive in the American public conscious. I don't see the TSA situation improving until that happens. * The first thing I needed to do was get a visa. All my papers are stamped by the Department of Homeland Security, whose name reflects the post 9/11 mentality of the war on terror. * When dispatching my baggage, I noticed that Delta airlines offers a special discount for active U.S. military personnel. "You serve us, and we’re delighted to serve you", as they said. This reflects a country that has been constantly at war for a century. * After I board my flight I read Delta's in-flight magazine. They have an article about how Google is using targeted advertisements to fight "terrorists" and "extremists". Back home, the in flight magazine is full of vapid travel articles but here in the American airline we find an article bringing fear to light and suggesting a multinational corporation's information harvesting product as the solution. * After I land in the US I almost miss my connecting flight because of the enormous customs and TSA lines. What a way to feel welcome... * In my connecting flight, I get a quick refresher of what right-wing media can be in the US, as the passenger next to me has brought a newspaper and tuned the in-flight entertainment system to Fox News. * The newspaper has articles about a new 900 billion dollar defense bill and an article about new scanner technology being investigated by the TSA, which would allow laptops to stay inside the bag. The article suggested that this was the only way to speed up the lines. * I thought I already knew what Fox News was about, but it still managed to surprise me: * The Westminster car crash that injured 3 people was covered as a full blown attack. News insertions every 5 minutes. "Alert!" "Alert!" * One of the talk show hosts went on a product-placement segment about ancesty.com and how she could trace the ethnicity of her ancestors. The 5 white show hosts then spent a couple of minutes discussing her European ethnicity. In these times of racial tension and rising nationalism, things like this make me a little nervous. * After the ancestry.com segment, they jumped to a musical segment about the Camp4Heroes charity. Another reminder of the constant state of war that the US goes through, the large number of wounded veterans that are victims of it, and the special euphemisms that american english uses for these things: "heroes", "veterans", "serving the country", etc. * Fox news also aired news about Facebook excusing themselves that their surveilance network failed to stop fake news spread by terrorists. (As if the Google article from earlier wasn't enough).