Government & Fear
Posted: Mon Jan 20, 2014 8:09 pm
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Very excellent.
It *did* tick up towards red near elections.TrollFromDownBelow wrote:I'm gonna play devil's advocate here - since 2004... the threat meter was typically at "yellow" not bouncing between "orange and red" as the author suggests.
But as always, goofballs at the screening areas with no sense of discretion or discernment managed to generate sensational violations of Americans' right to privacy at check-in. We are not stupid. We can see that a frightened child does not need to be virtually stripped searched AND patted down, Ted Kennedy really was Ted Kennedy, and getting a little too friskily felt up by roving hands is not cool. I think most of us are willing to subject ourselves to a proper high tech scan of our persons and belongings for the security of feeling like we might make it to our destinations.TrollFromDownBelow wrote: Do I feel 'threatened' by the TSA? Better yet, do I feel they are 'invading my privacy' by scanning my luggage and myself? Um, no.
You are not a member of the "profiled" group. That may make your airport visits more "pleasant". I don't think we had red alerts but once.TrollFromDownBelow wrote:I honestly don't remember a 'red' when I was going through the airports - I'm sure it did; just don't recall it...remember a lot of yellow and an occasional orange. And I'm sure/know that there have been TSA agents that have taken things too far in their searches....just saying the nearly 400 times I've been through an airport (minimum 4 airport visits a month times 8 years) they've always been professional.
What I'd like to see is for folks to chime in as to how to STRENGTHEN his argument - if we were to have collectively written his article, what could we have added to it to make it stronger?
Strengthen his argument, or augment his argument?Yet ultimately we are not powerless. We can resist the impulse to be afraid. We may not at the moment have answers to the very real dangers that we face in this world, but we can begin to identify those dangers and seek solutions once we overcome our fear. Or as Bertrand Russell rather more elegantly put it, as World War II was drawing to a close, “to conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
Error number 1, and I get that this is superficial, but need to point it out:Amskeptic wrote:
What about the linked article needs to be strengthened? I don't get it.
Colin
Ah yes, an exploding thesis . . . . got it. Perhaps his example of work place deaths was in service of declaring that we sure do get excited about deaths caused by people outside of our borders but seem to cast a blind eye to the carnage we generate amongst ourselves each and every day? That if we spend a trillion dollars to avenge 2990 lives at World Trade Center, perhaps we could spend a bit to reduce the TEN 9/11s every year from car accidents or gun deaths? That we use fear to unleash the dollars in the former example? Whaddyathink? I don't know.TrollFromDownBelow wrote:I agreed with everything you wrote, but this last line....Amskeptic wrote:What about the linked article needs to be strengthened? I don't get it.
Colin
If his thesis is about how gov'ts use fear, then I don't see how the below applies to his argument:
"But the problem is not limited to workplace deaths. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. estimates another 50,000 die every year from occupational diseases. And none of this accounts for the thousands of workers who are permanently disabled each year."