7 ms·

I used to have a Sikh manager who wore a turban. Whenever we traveled together, he would get "randomly" stopped. While they were patting him down, he would in

by chaboud 8mo ago

I used to have a Sikh manager who wore a turban. Whenever we traveled together, he would get "randomly" stopped. While they were patting him down, he would inevitably chuckle and say something like "So what are the odds of being 'randomly' selected 27 times in a row?" I don't know the specifics of the process for selection, but I can confidently say that the process is bigoted.

defrost 8mo ago
In proper English usage it would only be a bigoted (obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group) check if it was unreasonable to suspect a Sikh of carrying a Kirpan. The Rehat Maryada would suggest that is in no way whatsoever an unreasonable suspicion. Sure, your manager likely didn't carry one on airplanes .. but that still falls short of being an unreasonable check.
- noduerme 8mo ago
  As a white guy who was caught accidentally carrying a large knife once through security, at the bottom of a carry-on backpack I'd had since high school, I don't think it's in any way essential to use racial or ethnic markers to figure out whether someone is taking something dangerous onto a plane. I didn't even know I was trying to bring a knife onto a plane at a regional airport. There's no reason to think that Sikhs are explicitly going out of their way to hide something.
  - defrost 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - noduerme 8mo ago
      Honestly, I would just give them a pass to carry a ceremonial knife, if they could prove they were Sikhs and not someone pretending to be. But I guess that's why we can't have nice things and why the same rules have to apply to everyone. I think most reasonable people understand that they can't preserve every aspect of their personal beliefs or pride in a situation involving the safety of millions of people flying daily. Carrying a weapon is certainly a bit unusual as a pillar of faith, but there are plenty of others that could also be deemed antipathetic to the well functioning order of a modern society trying to move people safely from A to B. And the same way I would consider trained and licensed gun owners to be a relatively low threat and a rule-abiding group of citizens, that's how I would view Sikhs with their blades (or even more so). So if you're Amish, take a horse. If it's Shabbat, wait til Sunday. If you're the TSA and you want to be more efficient by discriminating, look at people who have no discrenable ideology, or those whose ideology actively conflicts with your mission of preventing attacks.
      - defrost 8mo ago
        Sikh's carrying a knife, a bracelet, a comb, etc. has never bothered me in the slightest in all the decades I've known about this - the Khalistan movement in a particular location during a particular time aside, they're not exactly actual postcards for terrorism (despite what some might think when faced with people and turbans). They always had a pass here in Australia for many years until things tightened up. Not that I'm a fan, but in general Rules are Rules and making exceptions while fair in some senses will be unfair in others <shrug>. Circling back to my initial comment- it is the case that there is an actual reason rather than a made up bit of bullshit, to reasonably suspect that a Sikh might be carrying a knife ... if they are they're almost certain to also have a comb .. so that's handy.
        noduerme 8mo ago
        okee yeah, and rules are rules, and there's a reason to think that. It would be nice if we lived in a world where rules could be bent in some cases for individuals if they actually posed no theeat, but we all have to deal with the lowest common denominator wanting to cause the most damage, so here we are. I must say, one thing that this reminds me of is what happens if you board an El Al flight. They don't racially profile you, they just ask you some fairly innocuous questions and watch your responses. I assume they have some way of monitoring your blood pressure, heart rate, and pupil dilation at a distance... but this hasn't really changed since the 1980s, when those things had to be read or guessed in realtime by a trained human. They have a phenomenally safe record, for a country under constant terror attacks. My takeaway from flying El Al is that there is a much better way to deal with security, that analyzes and addresses the potentially bad individual motives of anyone getting on a plane, and mostly lets everyone else pass. Which is to say that security in its best form should be almost transparent to people without malicious intentions. Having good intelligence coupled with treating each person as their own potential bomb threat is far superior to superficially treating everyone as a threat and having no real security, and far better than just creating security theater around certain people because they're of one race or ethnicity. But El Al's methods probably don't scale well to the size of US or European air travel, because you need highly trained people to stand there in the airport make those calls on the fly for every single passenger. If I were to guess - I'd guess El Al would let a Sikh bring a blade if they looked him in the eye for 10 seconds and decided he was okay.
  - notamario 8mo ago
    A Sikh is far more likely to be carrying a little sword than the average population.
    - noduerme 8mo ago
      And far less likely to stab someone than the general population. It's not a great analogy, but the same applies to registered concealed carry gun owners. They're not the people who shoot people.
  - K0balt 8mo ago
    Welcome to the club. I inadvertently traveled with not one, but two large box cutters in my carryon satchel for at least 20 flights before I discovered them while searching for some swag. I put them in there for a booth setup in Vegas years prior. Sent a completely calm, even sympathetic report to the powers that be, got put on the DNF list for my troubles. Still screened and detained 100 percent of the time, sometimes for hours, sometimes having to surrender personal devices, decades later. The message is very clear.
    - thinkingemote 8mo ago
      You sent a report saying you were not searched for 20 times and now you are searched all the time? Has it been over 20 times that you have been searched?
      - K0balt 8mo ago
        lol. No, I’m definitely winning the search transaction! I got way more than I paid for!
    - ralferoo 8mo ago
      > Sent a completely calm, even sympathetic report to the powers that be, got put on the DNF list for my troubles. What were you hoping to achieve by sending that report? Most people would have just thought "wow, lucky I wasn't caught with that", taken it out of the bag so it didn't happen again and carried on with their lives. Deviating from that normal response makes it look like you're just trying to cause trouble.
      - ghaff 8mo ago
        Yeah, if I had a "Crap, what was that doing in there?" I'd be very quiet about it. As I wrote in a very different thread, I avoid putting anything in baggage that I might carryon that is even marginally prohibited. I used to do a lot more travel and it's inevitable that knives and the like would inevitable get left in a pocket.
  - 542354234235 8mo ago
    Interesting that none of these comments seem to be questioning why we can’t just carry a small pocketknife on the plane. We used to be able to before 9/11. The 9/11 hijackings only worked because the policy was comply, land, and let the negotiators do their work. Suicide attacks using commercial airlines just wasn’t a thing. We now have armored locking cockpit doors and no airplane would give up control to hijackers anymore. United Flight 93 was already taken over and heard about the World Trade Center and they revolted. Now, knives could only be used to commit a crime i.e. assaulting another passenger or crew. Banning liquids does more to prevent terrorists than banning knives. I can see banning them for the same reason concerts ban them, that it is a lot of people in a small space, but that is very different than “national security” or “preventing terrorism”.
    - xxs 8mo ago
      it's still allowed across the EU (Mostly all of it)- up to 6cm blades are permitted in the cabin luggage.
- Ar-Curunir 8mo ago
  Isn’t that what the scanners are for? To find large metallic objects? Why do you need additional “random” screenings behind that? Or are you saying the scanners don’t work to find even obvious weapons? If so, we should get rid of the scanners.
  - defrost 8mo ago
    To address all the questions you addressed to me. > Isn’t that what the scanners are for? Err, not that I know of, I generally use the OED to look up the various recorded uses of words. > To find large metallic objects? The OED is for finding words, "scanners" that I've used or made are for mapping background geological structures via seismic waves, gravitational waves, magnetic waves, gamma waves. Medical scanners I've worked with have generally not bee used for finding large metallic objects and some should not be used if a patient has large metal objects attached or within. > Why do you need additional “random” screenings behind that? In 40+ years of scanning things there's not been a single time I've needed an additioan "random" scan - a few times scans have been repeated due to various failures to save data. > Or are you saying the scanners don’t work to find even obvious weapons? In the comment you responded to I said that it is not unreasonable to think that a Sikh you meet, anywhere, might be carrying a knife, a comb, a bracelet, etc. I did not mention anything about scanners. No, seriously, go and recheck the comment. > If so, we should get rid of the scanners. We? All scanners? Okay, well, thanks for sharing that opinion. I figure various groups of scanner users will want to keep using them, of course. I personally am in favour of scanners for exploration and medical work.
diblasio 8mo ago
Same thing used to happen to me when I had dreadlocks. Made the same joke too. "what are the odds I'd get randomly selected 100% of the time I go through a checkpoint..."
- jackjeff 8mo ago
  Besides being racist this is kind of dumb. If you’re going to bring down the plane you’re defo not going to look like someone who gets randomly selected 100% of the time. Even the 9/11 terrorists knew this and shaved their beard instead of looking like the fundamentalists scumbags they were.
  - lazide 8mo ago
    Just because it’s dumb doesn’t mean people won’t do it. I mean TSA, but it also applies to other groups too.
- mapt 8mo ago
  Rastafarian hijackers are rampant.

by chaboud 8mo ago

defrost 8mo ago

In proper English usage it would only be a bigoted (obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group) check if it was unreasonable to suspect a Sikh of carrying a Kirpan. The Rehat Maryada would suggest that is in no way whatsoever an unreasonable suspicion. Sure, your manager likely didn't carry one on airplanes .. but that still falls short of being an unreasonable check.

noduerme 8mo ago
As a white guy who was caught accidentally carrying a large knife once through security, at the bottom of a carry-on backpack I'd had since high school, I don't think it's in any way essential to use racial or ethnic markers to figure out whether someone is taking something dangerous onto a plane. I didn't even know I was trying to bring a knife onto a plane at a regional airport. There's no reason to think that Sikhs are explicitly going out of their way to hide something.
- defrost 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - noduerme 8mo ago
    Honestly, I would just give them a pass to carry a ceremonial knife, if they could prove they were Sikhs and not someone pretending to be. But I guess that's why we can't have nice things and why the same rules have to apply to everyone. I think most reasonable people understand that they can't preserve every aspect of their personal beliefs or pride in a situation involving the safety of millions of people flying daily. Carrying a weapon is certainly a bit unusual as a pillar of faith, but there are plenty of others that could also be deemed antipathetic to the well functioning order of a modern society trying to move people safely from A to B. And the same way I would consider trained and licensed gun owners to be a relatively low threat and a rule-abiding group of citizens, that's how I would view Sikhs with their blades (or even more so). So if you're Amish, take a horse. If it's Shabbat, wait til Sunday. If you're the TSA and you want to be more efficient by discriminating, look at people who have no discrenable ideology, or those whose ideology actively conflicts with your mission of preventing attacks.
    - defrost 8mo ago
      Sikh's carrying a knife, a bracelet, a comb, etc. has never bothered me in the slightest in all the decades I've known about this - the Khalistan movement in a particular location during a particular time aside, they're not exactly actual postcards for terrorism (despite what some might think when faced with people and turbans). They always had a pass here in Australia for many years until things tightened up. Not that I'm a fan, but in general Rules are Rules and making exceptions while fair in some senses will be unfair in others <shrug>. Circling back to my initial comment- it is the case that there is an actual reason rather than a made up bit of bullshit, to reasonably suspect that a Sikh might be carrying a knife ... if they are they're almost certain to also have a comb .. so that's handy.
      - noduerme 8mo ago
        okee yeah, and rules are rules, and there's a reason to think that. It would be nice if we lived in a world where rules could be bent in some cases for individuals if they actually posed no theeat, but we all have to deal with the lowest common denominator wanting to cause the most damage, so here we are. I must say, one thing that this reminds me of is what happens if you board an El Al flight. They don't racially profile you, they just ask you some fairly innocuous questions and watch your responses. I assume they have some way of monitoring your blood pressure, heart rate, and pupil dilation at a distance... but this hasn't really changed since the 1980s, when those things had to be read or guessed in realtime by a trained human. They have a phenomenally safe record, for a country under constant terror attacks. My takeaway from flying El Al is that there is a much better way to deal with security, that analyzes and addresses the potentially bad individual motives of anyone getting on a plane, and mostly lets everyone else pass. Which is to say that security in its best form should be almost transparent to people without malicious intentions. Having good intelligence coupled with treating each person as their own potential bomb threat is far superior to superficially treating everyone as a threat and having no real security, and far better than just creating security theater around certain people because they're of one race or ethnicity. But El Al's methods probably don't scale well to the size of US or European air travel, because you need highly trained people to stand there in the airport make those calls on the fly for every single passenger. If I were to guess - I'd guess El Al would let a Sikh bring a blade if they looked him in the eye for 10 seconds and decided he was okay.
- notamario 8mo ago
  A Sikh is far more likely to be carrying a little sword than the average population.
  - noduerme 8mo ago
    And far less likely to stab someone than the general population. It's not a great analogy, but the same applies to registered concealed carry gun owners. They're not the people who shoot people.
- K0balt 8mo ago
  Welcome to the club. I inadvertently traveled with not one, but two large box cutters in my carryon satchel for at least 20 flights before I discovered them while searching for some swag. I put them in there for a booth setup in Vegas years prior. Sent a completely calm, even sympathetic report to the powers that be, got put on the DNF list for my troubles. Still screened and detained 100 percent of the time, sometimes for hours, sometimes having to surrender personal devices, decades later. The message is very clear.
  - thinkingemote 8mo ago
    You sent a report saying you were not searched for 20 times and now you are searched all the time? Has it been over 20 times that you have been searched?
    - K0balt 8mo ago
      lol. No, I’m definitely winning the search transaction! I got way more than I paid for!
  - ralferoo 8mo ago
    > Sent a completely calm, even sympathetic report to the powers that be, got put on the DNF list for my troubles. What were you hoping to achieve by sending that report? Most people would have just thought "wow, lucky I wasn't caught with that", taken it out of the bag so it didn't happen again and carried on with their lives. Deviating from that normal response makes it look like you're just trying to cause trouble.
    - ghaff 8mo ago
      Yeah, if I had a "Crap, what was that doing in there?" I'd be very quiet about it. As I wrote in a very different thread, I avoid putting anything in baggage that I might carryon that is even marginally prohibited. I used to do a lot more travel and it's inevitable that knives and the like would inevitable get left in a pocket.
- 542354234235 8mo ago
  Interesting that none of these comments seem to be questioning why we can’t just carry a small pocketknife on the plane. We used to be able to before 9/11. The 9/11 hijackings only worked because the policy was comply, land, and let the negotiators do their work. Suicide attacks using commercial airlines just wasn’t a thing. We now have armored locking cockpit doors and no airplane would give up control to hijackers anymore. United Flight 93 was already taken over and heard about the World Trade Center and they revolted. Now, knives could only be used to commit a crime i.e. assaulting another passenger or crew. Banning liquids does more to prevent terrorists than banning knives. I can see banning them for the same reason concerts ban them, that it is a lot of people in a small space, but that is very different than “national security” or “preventing terrorism”.
  - xxs 8mo ago
    it's still allowed across the EU (Mostly all of it)- up to 6cm blades are permitted in the cabin luggage.
Ar-Curunir 8mo ago
Isn’t that what the scanners are for? To find large metallic objects? Why do you need additional “random” screenings behind that? Or are you saying the scanners don’t work to find even obvious weapons? If so, we should get rid of the scanners.
- defrost 8mo ago
  To address all the questions you addressed to me. > Isn’t that what the scanners are for? Err, not that I know of, I generally use the OED to look up the various recorded uses of words. > To find large metallic objects? The OED is for finding words, "scanners" that I've used or made are for mapping background geological structures via seismic waves, gravitational waves, magnetic waves, gamma waves. Medical scanners I've worked with have generally not bee used for finding large metallic objects and some should not be used if a patient has large metal objects attached or within. > Why do you need additional “random” screenings behind that? In 40+ years of scanning things there's not been a single time I've needed an additioan "random" scan - a few times scans have been repeated due to various failures to save data. > Or are you saying the scanners don’t work to find even obvious weapons? In the comment you responded to I said that it is not unreasonable to think that a Sikh you meet, anywhere, might be carrying a knife, a comb, a bracelet, etc. I did not mention anything about scanners. No, seriously, go and recheck the comment. > If so, we should get rid of the scanners. We? All scanners? Okay, well, thanks for sharing that opinion. I figure various groups of scanner users will want to keep using them, of course. I personally am in favour of scanners for exploration and medical work.

diblasio 8mo ago

Same thing used to happen to me when I had dreadlocks. Made the same joke too. "what are the odds I'd get randomly selected 100% of the time I go through a checkpoint..."

jackjeff 8mo ago
Besides being racist this is kind of dumb. If you’re going to bring down the plane you’re defo not going to look like someone who gets randomly selected 100% of the time. Even the 9/11 terrorists knew this and shaved their beard instead of looking like the fundamentalists scumbags they were.
- lazide 8mo ago
  Just because it’s dumb doesn’t mean people won’t do it. I mean TSA, but it also applies to other groups too.
mapt 8mo ago
Rastafarian hijackers are rampant.