Also, stop being such a fucking coward.  Airplanes are not going to fall on your god damn head.  You are going to die of heart disease or cancer.  Maybe if you are very lucky, you will die of something exciting, like a car accident.  The fucking terrorist are not going to kill.  Your fat American ass is going to die of something boring and mundane in a hospital bed with a catheter shoved up your dick.

Your coward delusion that you are going to die anything but a boring and normal death isn’t a reason why I should have to give up my liberty.  Afraid of airplanes hitting you on the head, go live out in the countryside.  Even a coward must realize that the terrorist are not going to steal a 747 to hit your shitty cabin in the woods.

Cowards don’t get to set the standards by which we live.

It strikes a cord because it lays out the truth of the matter in stark terms. Are you afraid of one of the most rare ways to die (while you stuff a Big Mac in your face) and want to give up your liberty over your stupid and childish fears, or do you want to see this system dismantled? I have yet to see a person survive a few minutes of arguing for cowardice before conceding.

No, tactful drawn is the method used when you have already surrendered and decided to treat people like scared children. Calling people cowards to their face is the method to restore sanity. If it becomes a common meme that people who want this kind of bullshit security are cowards, I think you could see this crap dismantled shockingly quick.

Save the ‘tactful draw down’ bullshit for asshole politicians. It is 10+ years since 9/11 and security has only gotten stupider. As a citizen, it is your responsibility to help be the change by being loud and vocal. If you pass along the idea that only cowards will piss themselves in terror unless they get a good thorough “freedom fondle” before boarding an airplane to just a handful of people, and they do the same, it can effect a massive change.

We have this entire thing backwards.  We shouldn’t be fucking the entire population because a few people are chicken shit assholes afraid of a method of dying that ranks right up there with shark attacks.  We should be telling the cowards to suck it up or not fly, not telling everyone else to bend over to accept freedom fondles and robbing the tax coffers to pay for cowards.

Surely they need to search *everyone she may have come in contact with* after passing through security if they want to maintain the illusion of knowing what they do.

No manners, no brains, no security.

You would have to look at something like, say, how the British security forces were about enforcing blackouts during a raid, or maybe evacuation procedures. I don’t know.

My point is that you have to make some comparison of how the security forces tried to address the potential “Enemy” within the actual citizenry. I still don’t see much potential for a good analogy there.

 But it seems that everything has been removed.

Weird.

And yet somehow Britain didn’t devolve into having the government inspect its children’s genitals for explosives. Ending the TSA is not so much asking people to accept more risk as it is scaling back the insane paranoia that “protects” freedom by obliterating it.

Never under any circumstances is it OK for a TSA agent to scream and curse at a parent for documenting the TSAs bad conduct. Nor is it OK to pass a family through screening, then wait an hour, then claim they need to be screened again, causing them to miss their flight.

This is the part that’s more than a little bit hard to sell – essentially “they might bag a few planes, but man up, bitches.”

There are areas where the compromise between preventative measures and risk have been made, but they’ve been *tacit* decisions.  I ride the NYC subways knowing that attacks in Europe have firebombed trains and allegedly multiple plots to do so have been hatched here.  The city has made some efforts to “protect” the trains but they (for the most part) stop short of hassling people and are obviously inadequate to stop an attack.  They’ve dialed back the bag searches and pretty much stopped parading around with machine guns as a “show of force.”   (Big exception is that they surveil all Muslims in the area, but I’m just focusing on acting as a physical goalkeeper in ways analogous to the TSA.)

How did this drawdown happen?  Not by some overt announcement.  No politician asked people to vote for him because he was going to end bag searches.  It just happened.  And yes, New Yorkers decided it was acceptable – nobody’s calling for more security.

That’s how it needs to happen with the TSA.  You are never going to get people to endorse the end of specific tactics – let’s just stop screening shoes, let’s let liquids back on the planes, let’s stop patting people down.  It has to happen quietly, or they have to figure out how to couch changes in a way that sounds like they aren’t increasing risk.

Also, the reforms would have to be *bipartisan*.  That’s another huge factor, the fear of politicians that they are going to get blamed for not preventing the next attack.

So, you are not wrong.  People are cowards.  They are fearful and inordinately so.  BUT explicitly telling them they should accept more risk is a losing argument, IMO.

People like you seriously annoy the piss out of me.

The answer shouldn’t be, “Just don’t fly!!”  How lazy can you get??

We should work to actually FIX the problem, not put our collective heads in the sand.