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What you're suggesting is idiotic. These are not dignified, middle-class jobs held by people who have much choice in life. It's work given to people whose entir

by alexqgb 16y ago

What you're suggesting is idiotic. These are not dignified, middle-class jobs held by people who have much choice in life. It's work given to people whose entire lives have been defined by bad systems. Schooling, health care, criminal justice - at the low end of the scale they're all maliciously self-serving in a way that middle class people struggle to imagine. If you think being a dick to people whose entire lives have been shaped by a series of collective 'f* yous' form society, then you deserve whatever 'secondary screening' they elect to give you. You really do. And if you genuinely believe that every job is a matter of choice, that people are free to quit if they're at all unaligned with their employer, then you've lived your entire life in an amazingly sheltered and privileged bubble. This makes the image of you (essentially) spitting on the much less fortunate even more appalling. All you're doing is making them even meaner and more defensive - something that's likely to make life harder for everyone else having to deal with them as screeners. I'm not defending what the TSA is doing. It's clearly stupid and awful, and I strongly suspect it's a product of corrupt back-scatter purchasing deals made by craven congressmen in exchange for campaign money and mindless votes. But taking out your anger on the luckless human fodder that these people have insulated themselves with is galacticly uninformed. If this is honestly your approach, just stop.

tomjen3 16y ago
They can go and get an honest job at McDonalds or Wallmart, and I will respect them.
- alexqgb 16y ago
  Or they can work for the TSA and get access to health care. If your 'respect' for them as humans is conditional on them acquiescing to life at the absolute lowest (legal) tier, I suspect they can live without it. What I'm really saying here is that a decent sense of situational awareness would indicate that being a jerk at the airport is too little too late. As in individual, you've already been socially isolated, so the effort is going to be exceedingly counterproductive, in that you're only going to prompt further hardening. If you're one of the many many people for whom air travel is essential, you're going to find more effective routes to common cause long before you get to the departure gate. I can't honestly say where they are. I suspect something will need to be created before any real leverage exists. I just know that if I were looking for a place to develop this, the least viable option would be by myself, at the gate, doing something that's far more likely to harm me and the people who are depending on me to get somewhere that the people who are practically looking for a fight.
philwelch 16y ago
All you're doing is making them even meaner and more defensive - something that's likely to make life harder for everyone else having to deal with them as screeners. That's exactly how nonviolent resistance is supposed to work. You have to amplify conflicts to the breaking point before they get resolved. That means making things uncomfortable for a lot of people. Of course, I don't think it's going to be effective, for reasons similar to what you mention--most people who are affluent enough to care about this issue are pretty unlikely to socialize with the class of people the TSA recruits from anyway. All of that having been said, your moral defense of these people is pretty questionable. "I'm just following orders and trying to make a living" isn't a moral defense for the actual human beings who are out there violating people's bodily privacy. I'm sympathetic to your argument, but quite frankly it leads in a pretty terrifying direction that's directly counter to what the Western world collectively agreed on after the Second World War. More worryingly, it gives governments an incentive to use these people for their dirty work, secure in the knowledge that the actual decision makers are remote enough, and the people doing the dirty work are poor enough, that neither group will face any resistance.
loewenskind 16y ago
So what is your non-idiotic proposed solution? Do nothing? At this point stirring the pot is exactly what's called for. Make this awful process even worse for everyone involved until it finally blows. And the sooner the better. People like you get to sit on the high horse and point out how you're morally superior to everyone. Meanwhile it's the unreasonable who keep on changing the world. EDIT: Further, these jobs didn't exist at all not so long ago. You can't claim the people doing them now are somehow "trapped" there. What the hell were they doing before?

by alexqgb 16y ago

tomjen3 16y ago

They can go and get an honest job at McDonalds or Wallmart, and I will respect them.

alexqgb 16y ago
Or they can work for the TSA and get access to health care. If your 'respect' for them as humans is conditional on them acquiescing to life at the absolute lowest (legal) tier, I suspect they can live without it. What I'm really saying here is that a decent sense of situational awareness would indicate that being a jerk at the airport is too little too late. As in individual, you've already been socially isolated, so the effort is going to be exceedingly counterproductive, in that you're only going to prompt further hardening. If you're one of the many many people for whom air travel is essential, you're going to find more effective routes to common cause long before you get to the departure gate. I can't honestly say where they are. I suspect something will need to be created before any real leverage exists. I just know that if I were looking for a place to develop this, the least viable option would be by myself, at the gate, doing something that's far more likely to harm me and the people who are depending on me to get somewhere that the people who are practically looking for a fight.

philwelch 16y ago

All you're doing is making them even meaner and more defensive - something that's likely to make life harder for everyone else having to deal with them as screeners. That's exactly how nonviolent resistance is supposed to work. You have to amplify conflicts to the breaking point before they get resolved. That means making things uncomfortable for a lot of people. Of course, I don't think it's going to be effective, for reasons similar to what you mention--most people who are affluent enough to care about this issue are pretty unlikely to socialize with the class of people the TSA recruits from anyway. All of that having been said, your moral defense of these people is pretty questionable. "I'm just following orders and trying to make a living" isn't a moral defense for the actual human beings who are out there violating people's bodily privacy. I'm sympathetic to your argument, but quite frankly it leads in a pretty terrifying direction that's directly counter to what the Western world collectively agreed on after the Second World War. More worryingly, it gives governments an incentive to use these people for their dirty work, secure in the knowledge that the actual decision makers are remote enough, and the people doing the dirty work are poor enough, that neither group will face any resistance.

loewenskind 16y ago

So what is your non-idiotic proposed solution? Do nothing? At this point stirring the pot is exactly what's called for. Make this awful process even worse for everyone involved until it finally blows. And the sooner the better. People like you get to sit on the high horse and point out how you're morally superior to everyone. Meanwhile it's the unreasonable who keep on changing the world. EDIT: Further, these jobs didn't exist at all not so long ago. You can't claim the people doing them now are somehow "trapped" there. What the hell were they doing before?