Even a blind squirrel gets to nut every once in a while. Or however that saying goes, I forget.

Related interesting piece of news: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/04/18/man-strips-naked-at-oregon-airport-to-protest-tsa/

Very interesting, but is it really fair to punish the agents? I know they get leave to do messed-up things, but aren't we, in a way, responsible for giving them that power? We elect representatives and then demand from them protection. When the protection we ask for comes in a form and at a cost we don't like, should not the man in the mirror be the first on which we place blame? I don't like the practices of the TSA anymore than the next guy, but are they not the product of our own demands? Whenever someone finds a new way to blow up a plane, everyone demands something be done about it, puts the responsibility on this agency, and then blames them when we get an unsavory result. How many of you can honestly say you were concerned with civil liberties on 9/11? I was 9, I was knocking over lego towers with a toy plane. But from what I can remember of my parent's conversations, just about everyone was supportive of an agency to enforce security at airports. Noone cared what they would have to do to keep terrorists off planes. Now that this thinking has taken the country in a dark direction, is it really right to blame the guy whose first job is to touch your balls? Should we not blame ourselves instead for creating this monster?

No. It's not really. Democracy just means that individuals have a voice in the government. Incidentally, the reason we live in a democratic constitutional republic, and not a pure democracy, is that pure democracy has no limits on what the government can do, and so degenerates into mob rule, where the rights of individuals get stomped on by the authority of the 51%.


Snark*: "The liberal view, as I understand it, is that preemptive strikes against rich people are okay; but preemptive strikes against countries are not."

*I don't actually understand that liberal view that way at all, but that seems to be what you're saying.


No, you tell government officials who they can and cannot receive gifts from, while they hold office; as part of maintaining a transparent government and preventing corruption.


I mostly fixed that for you. You can do anything you want with your money, as long as it isn't an aggressive action against someone else's rights.


But until he does it, you don't have any basis to limit his freedom. Then you have tort law.

Sickening. Apparently 4-year-old children are terrorists.

Hope you voted for Ron Paul yesterday Security theater isn't going away, nor will civil liberties return, under any other candidate.


relatedly: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-tsa-screeners-20120426,0,4508192.story

Indeed, it was that story about the TSA agents moonlighting as druglords (drug cartelists?) that led me to the story that I linked.

And the country won't exist under him. He's great as a legislative voice, but as an executive he'll simply veto everything because his standards are too stringent for most of Congress to agree to. Congress already has a really hard time passing anything. Even very routine, very important things have become extremely difficult to do, passing with very slim margins at the very last minute. Ron Paul's own convictions would make it impossible for him to sign anything that hasn't been specifically tailored to his ideology. The most immediate effect would be a complete shutdown of the Federal government(since they've only avoided that by a hair the last 5 or 6 times it's come time to renew the budget). So good luck staying alive, poor and disabled people. Then there's the debt ceiling. Contrary to popular belief, the debt ceiling actually has nothing to do with what we're going to spend, it has to do with what we've already spent and need to pay for. When Ron Paul vetoes that bill, passed by a slim margin with minutes to spare, we'll default on our debt, meaning we're announcing to the world that we aren't paying what we owe them. I don't think I need to explain why that would effectively be economic Armageddon. If you don't see a problem with that, call up the bank that holds your mortgage and tell them you aren't paying anymore and see what happens to your home.

So yes, he'd bring back your civil liberties. You just have to give up the country as we know it.

Great, the country as we know it is disintegrating. And Ron Paul probably wouldn't have to veto the budget anyway, since the executive branch is responsible for actually spending the money anyway and he intends to dismantle a swath of federal agencies right of the bat.

I thought we had this constitution thing that separated the powers of government so that one guy couldn't just do that arbitrarily. Unless everything I've learned about how the government works since gradeschool is wrong, Congress would have to vote to dismantle those agencies. The only power the President actually gets is to say yes or no. Unless he's going to use a bunch of executive orders to do everything, effectively becoming an autocrat. Correct me if I'm wrong but that doesn't sound very libertarian to me. The President does have control of the Military, which is where Ron Paul would be wonderful. I'm just concerned with him being unable to compromise with anyone else in the government that doesn't follow his ideology to the letter. The main reason our country is falling apart in the first place is because of that kind of rigidity. Adding more of it isn't going to help things.

Most of it probably didn't go into enough depth to actually be right or wrong....


Even if they still technically exist, I'm pretty sure he can give them a skeleton staff and order them not to spend any money.


I agree that autocracy is disagreeable, but you're confusing "Libertarian" (minimal rule & preservation of individual liberties) with "Democrat" (mob rule/tyranny of the 51%). We live in a Constitutional Republic, and the Constitution is the highest law in the country, and Ron Paul is a constitutionalist at least as much as he's a libertarian.



Pretty much everything he has accomplished in congress is by working together with (mostly liberal) civil libertarians & pacifists who share his views on those issues and with whom he disagrees about everything else. People like Ron Wyden, Dennis Kucinich.

The next step is to get a few hundred people to all do the same thing in a flash mob, using this as their legal precedent...

Would be awesome.

http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/Fort-Worth-woman-traumatized-by-TSA-pat-down-at-Dallas-Love-Field--162983586.html

Basically another horror story with the TSA where a woman with a gastric tube was insulted by TSA agents and then had her medically required food thrown out.

Don't forget that here on Cemetech, single URLs or images with no attached text or commentary are not acceptable. All posts are required to be insightful and intelligent.

As a counterpoint to the negativity in this thread, I recently flew out of OAK, and opted out of the backscatter x-ray scan (specifically because I don't mind being patted down to make a point about my opinion on that procedure). The person who patted me down was very professional about it, and I didn't have any issue with them.

That's not to say I support the TSA (on the contrary, I think it should be dismantled because their brand of security is really just security theatre), but it's useful to keep in mind that these horror stories are still fairly rare (I'd probably argue that any such stories are too many, really).

I'm gonna restate my previous position that the FAA should be setting airport security standards and the local airports should be carrying them out(with the same group of people who check the planes and ground crews also checking security). The standards don't need to be terribly high, metal detectors and bomb sniffers(each of which take 5 minutes tops) would do the trick without any hassle. Local airports can then focus on making the lines move as quickly as possible. We also would no longer have a large agency to blame everything on when people get harassed, so local airports would take the responsibility and thus the hiring standards would be much higher.

I actually really like that idea. Having the local airport take care of it all would allow for a more streamlined system, customized for their situation. They would also take the blame if anything goes wrong.

Exactly; you get the peace of mind that comes with national security standards, without the weakness and inefficiency inherent in a large top-down system.