Or they could just pass a rule that stated everybody had to carry the same size cake knife. Keep a careful watch of this for other fines. Shakedown comes to mind.
Since this rant is mostly about the TSA, here’s a related question: When’s the last time Israel had one of its commercial flights hijacked?
Another question: in the U.S., how many fellow passengers are delayed and inconvenienced by unthinking people who, having been fully warned about security measures, attempt to board planes with knives, guns and other such forbidden objects on their persons, or continue to make jokes about hijacking?
No, I’m not worrying about this idiot being fined. It’s just another example of the hazards of stupidity, and a convenient platform for those who can’t resist ranting at every juncture about the decline and fall of the American Ideal.
Are people kidding? Everyone in this thread is kidding, right? Do people seriously have a problem with fining people $150 for trying to smuggle a knife aboard a commercial airliner?
“Oh, it wasn’t a knife, it was a cake slicer.” You don’t know what kind – and you do know that they come in a variety. You show that it was of the type that a reasonable person wouldn’t interpret as a knife.
“She didn’t mean to, she forgot.” Too bad. In this day and age, any person who doesn’t think to check their bags before going to the airport to get on an aluminum fuel tank which will be flying over my apartment at a few hundred miles per hour richly deserves a fine. Speaking of which, the Rep. DeFazio in the cited story should be jailed as a repeat offender. People of Oregon – please be aware that one of your elected representatives is so detatched from what’s going on in the world that he has brought his moustache scissors to the airport multiple times, even after getting busted with them once.
There are a couple of legitimate concerns here. The first is not citing people at the time of infraction. My understanding is that that’s because the size of the infraction is determined afterwards. If that’s the case, the TSA should still have a little “you’ve been busted” handout which explains the infraction and the range of fines. In fact, that would increase the deterrent effect – since the actual fines are so much less than the statutory maximums, the offenders can spend a few weeks fearing the huge fines which Congress has provided for. Dread is a good deterrent.
The second is uneven application. That’s always a concern when government gets an enforcement tool. If it’s just happening because the program is starting at BWI and rolling out across the country, fine. But if it’s otherwise, TSA’s got to get on the stick and apply this evenly. It’s not a teensy fine for a horrendous infraction that’s a problem – but unfair application of that fine could be.
And we are still a country where two people in a loving, life-long publicly commited relationship can not have the same rights of inheritance if they happen to have the same sexaul apparatus as each other.
And during GWII, we interned citizens and immigrants of Arab descent, out of a paranoid delusion that they might be spies for Al Qaeda.
And, based on your examples, what progress would that be, exactly?
Really? I did not know that.
Not that I don’t find merit with your rant but you are 100% wrong on this point. There has been, is, a full court press to use airliners for additional acts of terrorism.
IMO, $150 is not an unreasonable fine for such an item but I’m sure something on the list would make me cranky. Unfortunately, it is impossible to use common sense in these situations. You’d have Ed Bradley wielding a cake knife on TV like a samurai sword.
Gannon London - im on your side man !
sin
I find it helps if I think of fines like this, not so much as fines, as a “Stupid Tax”.
No kidding. The only reason for TSA and, even worse, the Homeland Security Department is to provide more Civil Service jobs that will further back whichever party did the most to give them jobs.
What should have been done, on 9/12, was have the government point out to the American public that our choices were trying to make the concept of a police state work around the liberties we have, or to make some minor changes (I have no objection to the actual increase of scrutiny at airports, nor the items being banned.) to already existing security measures, and admit that our liberties are worth more than the increased political power to prevent this sort of nonsense.
Alas, BOTH parties have been working on raising the hysteria to allow themselves to get more power. I’m pretty fed up with both sides of the aisle, here.
I didn’t mean to imply that we were done. Just like a person, the character of our nation grows and changes. We’ve made some terrible mistakes, and will probably do so in the future, but at least we’re trying. Many countries aren’t.
I’ll admit, I’m a little embarassed to live in an age when a Constitutional amendment is proposed which will * forbid* rights to a certian segment of people. To my (admittedly small) knowledge, this is the first time it has ever happened. I just imagine, 100 years from now, how people will look back in puzzlement at this, just as I look back at Jim Crow, Comstockery and Prohibition and wonder “What the hell were they thinking?”
But, there’s a certain comfort in that thought: 100 years from now, ammendment or no, gay marriage will be legal. Just as our country evolved past witch hunts, Victorian prudery, and institutionalized racism, it will evolve past this nonsense. I don’t know if I will see it in my lifetime. I hope I will, but even if I don’t, I have complete confidence that it will happen.
As I said, America still makes mistakes, and probably always will. No one, or no country, is perfect. I deplore what was done, and shudder when I hear the name of a certain camp in Cuba, but these cases are admittedly different than the wholesale roundups of persons of Japanese and German descent during WWII. (The internment camps held thousands and thousands of people. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still awful, but not quite as awful as what happened back then.
The Bush administration has been a step backwards in our country’s progress towards the ideals of liberty and justice, but I don’t think, in the long run, that it will have that great of an effect on our overall progress.
I tend not to think of the short-term, but the long-term. Our society seems to have alternating waves of conservatism and liberalism. There will be a liberal backlash to the Bush administration, and then there will be a backlash to that backlash. But on the whole, we have slowly become more open and dedicated to the ideals on which our nation was founded.
You can’t see it? Look back one hundred, even two hundred years ago, and see from what we came. We have evolved from a place in which not being of the proper religion could get you banished from the colony, or if you were particularly eccentric, hanged as a witch. We’ve come from the era of Comstockery, in which sending a birth control information pamphlet through the mail could get you arrested. We no longer ban books from entering the country, or being sold to adult readers because of their content. We no longer have laws which forbid a black man from entering a resturant.
Our tolerance, our efforts toward equalisty and justice have steadily increased. I wish so much that I could see us two hundred years from now. I think it will be wonderful.
Eagerly awaiting answers to these…
We did not intern Germans at all. Which made the internment of Japanese Americans that much worse.
From this site:
Here is a map of where the internment camps for Germans were located.
Italian-Americans were also interned, as well as the Aleutian people of Alaska.
Lissa, your illustration of the back-and-forth pendulum of U.S. political sentiment is astute, but it doesn’t address the fundamental question of what is “right” (not political right, I mean correct right).
You say gay marriage will be legal in 100 years, just like 100 years after the Civil War we had the success of the Civil Rights movement. A good observation of history, but what about the suffering endured in the intervening century, all as a result of conservative opposition to something that was inevitable? Furthermore, the reason it was inevitable was because it was right! Does it not stand to reason that at this moment in time, with an example like civil rights to learn from, we could take that one extra step to avoid a century of inequality and make the “right” decision right now?
The danger of the pendulum effect of history is that there are times when extreme forces affect the arc of the pendulum too violently in one direction. NOW is one of those times. Over and over again, what is generally accepted as “progress” in society turns out to be exactly what the “liberal” or “left” political persuasion was arguing all along. Women’s suffrage. Civil rights. Americans with Disabilities Act. Reproductive choice. Gay marriage. These are all almost exclusively defined as “left” positions, yet they ALL either did or will come to pass. Explain to me then how it is reasonable, acceptable, or productive for the political right to continually contest these notions of “progress”? All that results is conflict, and these things end up happening anyway. We should all save ourselves the trouble and rededicate the nation to the ideals of justice and equality upon which it was actually founded.
That said, the TSA should set standards of enforcement and apply them equally. A baggage inspector with a GED is not in a position to appropriately judge “intent” when running across contraband.
Note to OtakuLoki - TSA and Homeland Security employees are not civil service employees in the way you might believe. One of the Democrats’ objections to the creation of HSA in the first place was the specific provision in the legislation that employees would NOT have the same benefits as all other Federal employees (like, for example, the custodians at the EPA where my wife works). TSA and HSA workers have less job protection and workplace rights than do you and I.
IIRC, that’s a provision only for the screeners, who are still employed by third party contractors. They work under the supervision of the TSA, not HSA, and are not federal employees at all. Whether that’s proper or not, is beyond the scope of what I’d meant to get into. It doesn’t change my belief that those people actually working for HSA are Federal Civil Service employees.
P.S. As for the job protection, explain to me then what protections I have as an unemployable person? Don’t assume - you know what it leads to.
Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to do what is right. In this case, you are fighting not only against the mighty forces of predjudice, but also the religious convictions of a multitude of people. Just as I said in my first post in this thread, politicians are afraid to rock the boat too much. Public opinion must be solidly on their side before they will take any serious action. There are few “activists” in politics who are willing to throw themselves upon the sword for what is right but unpopular.
Politics is all about the now. Politicians rarely think about how history will regard them-- they think about the next election. I’m sure many politicians at the time hated Jim Crow, but were afraid to speak against it, or introduce counter legislation for fear of what it would do to their career.
I’m not excusing this mind-set by any means. It’s cowardly, it’s despicable, and it’s wrong, but that’s the way it is. A true leader would do what he/she knew was right, even if it were political suicide, declaring, “Damn the torpedos! Full speed ahead!” but we haven’t had a leader in a very long time. We have politicians.
Who is to blame? The American people, of course. Wasn’t it Plato who said that a people get the government that they deserve? The problem is that we’re all too content to get too riled up. Most Americans don’t care about an issue unless it will directly affect their lives. Hell, a good portion of Americans don’t even know about them. They don’t watch the news, or read the paper, and they don’t vote.
You’re right. But public sentiment doesn’t always translate into votes. The people who are content with the way things are going are not necessarily galvanized into going to the polls. There are a lot of people, however, who are moved by discontent into voting when they normally would not have done so. Outrage is a powerful motivator. I have a suspicion that the next presidential election will see an increase in voter turn-out.
I still don’t get too alarmed by these things. We have taken a step back, but it’s a very long road. We’re looking at an inch of pavement, when a mile stretches behind us, and thousands stretch before us. I don’t credit George Bush with enough power to truly infulence the course of our progress. In the grand scheme of things, he is just a pothole in that road.
“Reasonable” always depends on one’s point of view. People have the remarkable ability to justify any viewpoint, as long as its their own.
The Right has many supporters who are religious, and see political issues through the lens of their faith. For many fundamentalist Christians, for example, what is “right” is defined by the Bible’s teachings, and thus what is “right” is impervious to social change.
Some Christians have told me that they believe that the reason why America is so prosperous is that God is pleased with our nation because it was founded on Bibilcal principals. However, if we allow too many changes which are displeasing to God, such as gay marriage, He will remove his blessing, and the nation will go to hell in a handbasket. Thus, they will fight to keep our nation in line with Biblical morality.
The Right also has many supporters who are business/corporation owners. They have economic reasons for objecting to some social changes. The ADA, for example, was objectionable to many of them because it meant they would have to pay money in order to accomodate disabled people. (Ramps, handicapped bathrooms, elevators, etc.) Some business owners object to gay marriage because it will mean that they have to extend health insurance benefits to spouses of gay employees.
Social change is never easy, and it never will be. There will always be conflict, because there will always be people who have different opinions. And I think that’s great. I wish there were more of it. Controversy makes people think.
Argument is good for a society. Every piece of legislation should be hotly debated, scrutinized, and tinkered-with. Ideas from all sides need to be discussed, because we need to examine things from all sides before we can make an educated decision. No idea or proposal should ever go unchallenged, no matter how good it seems.
One of the reasons we have so much political apathy is because there’s not enough controversy. Government has become almost automated. An elected official can’t be counted on to make any changes, despite his campaign promises. Once in office, most politicians decide it’s wiser to maintain the status quo so as not to offend one side or the other.
For this reason, the Bush administration has had at least a little bit of a positive effect. He got the college kids marching in the streets again. He got people to debate our nation’s decisions around the dinner table again. For a moment, America woke from its doze. Will we roll over and go back to sleep? I don’t know. We’ll see come election day.
You say we’re trying, and yet you yourself point out that our acknowledged leader wishes to deny these rights to people. Considering that neither you nor I have any generally recognized authority to grant or deny legitimacy to these unions, but a person with considerable authority wants to put an end to them, how is this TRYING, as a country?
This reminds me what the people I’ve met who work regularly with Holocaust survivors refer to as “Victim Olympics”: “The WWII Japanese had it much worse, what are you complaining about?”
Of what possible comfort is it to someone, innocent of any wrongdoing, who has been or is currently held in Guantanamo, that their plight is shared by only hundreds instead of thousands? If it is of no comfort to them, why on Earth should it be of any comfort to me?
You call these reduced numbers progress. What I would call progress would be the complete absence of any such actions on the part of our government, and the complete inability of the electorate to even conceive of voting for someone capable of them.
So we founded our nation on a set of ideals, and we are slowly becoming dedicated to them? This is your definition of progress?
But we DO live in a country frighteningly close to a situation where being of the wrong religion could deny funding to your organization. When the constitution bars the congress from passing laws respecting one religion over another, but the president feels free to engage in the funding of “faith-based initiatives”, I can’t see that we’ve made as much progress from these dark times as you would like me to believe. The witch trials were 350 years ago! this is as far as we’ve come?
But we have recently repealed laws and practices that sought to equalize opportunity without strengthening anti-discriminatory laws that would make Affirmative Action and its ilk unnecessary.
If you are a business, you may routinely, without serious fear of punishment, pay your black workers less than your white workers, promote them less often, or have an employee base way out of whack in terms of diversity with the demographic of your commutable surroundings, with the result that the black neighborhoods have no tax base or extra donable income for their schools.
If you are a college, however, who wishes to recognize the efforts of a student, from one of these rotten schools, who shows dedication and promise in spite of scores that aren’t quite as high as some white kid, you better believe the authorities are going come down hard on your ass.
At least the defeated Admissions rep can console themselves in the fact that any restaurant the thwarted student might wish to go to can not deny them entry, if they had been of a mind to do so, but must resign themselves to offering slow, sub-standard service and spitting in their food.
Ahh, progress!
Again, short term, versus long term. There will be setbacks, but the march of human progress will not be stopped by an insignificant little man like George Bush.
It shouldn’t be a comfort. I’m not saying that it should be. What’s going on is disgutsing, embarassing and flat-out wrong. And in fifty years, you and I will decry something else that is unjust and sickening. But we will have made overall progress. Things will be better.
You cannot push the electorate beyond where they’re willing to go, nor can you reasonably expect our “leaders” to do it. That’s not the way things are. In a perfect world, yes, these people would be cast down from the high places, and run out of town on a rail for their viewpoints, but this isn’t a perfect world. Politicians will not go against the mores of the day to the detriment of their own careers, nor, in some cases, can they.
That’s the drawback of democracy: you have to go with the majority, even if the majority is wrong. Right now, if gay marriage was put to a vote, do you think it would pass? Some polls are showing only 30% in favor of legalization. If a politician were to go against the decision of the people in this case, wouldn’t he be technically subverting the process, even if what he stands for is right?
As much as we may wish to at times, you cannot force enlightenment. You cannot force a man to give up his predjudices. You can only try to gently persuade him over time. Sometimes, you just have to hope that the next generation will be wiser. It’s not government at fault here-- it’s human nature. Change is often slow, but, as I will adress later, it has been astonishingly rapid in the last few decades, if you look at the overall picture.
Frankly, yes. Rome was not built in a day, nor is a perfect democracy. It’s taken us over two hundred years to get this far, and we’re arguably the ones most dedicated to the process.
When the witch trials took place, there had been only one major change in society-- the Reformation. Before that, for over a thousand years things had been much the same. The Catholic Church had been in control of almost every aspect of life, and their views of what was right and just had changed very little in the entire time. The Reformation was the first major upset.
Then came the Reformation and the Protestant churches. The US was founded after these changes, but those various churches still held power over the people’s lives. You could be thrown from the colony for practicing the wrong faith, or punished by the courts for violating its moral standards.
In less than * two hundred years*-- a mere speck of time, we have thrown off the church’s dominance over our lives. For the first time in human history we are free to do pretty much as we wish. Our laws are no longer based in religion. For the first time in human history we are concerned about the rights of all men, whether or not they are of our faith, or skin color, or nationality.
In just the last century, things have changed to the point where I could marry a black man if I chose, or live openly with a partner of the same sex. I could have a baby as a single woman if I wished, or chose not to have a baby at all. I could worship Satan in the park if I wanted to, or go see a “dirty” movie. I can buy any book I want to, and I can do it without the approval of my father or husband. I can vote.
I’m actually amazed at what we have done in the last two centuries. What we have done in the last fifty years is even more incredible. Yes, I call it progress. And I marvel at its rapidity.
This is just a minor setback-- very minor in the grand scheme of things. We cannot change everything overnight. It’s sad, it’s wrong, and it’s dissapointing, but sometimes, all we can do is wait.
I, too, wish to God things were different. I wish I could could be proud when I look at the paper tomorrow. All I can do is console myself that these things are just minor setbacks, and that this will seem as a bad dream in a few decades. Not that we won’t make mistakes in the future, mind you, but the whole world will be different. I think it will be beautiful.
And where has it gotten them? Each side keeps killing. Israel with all their power, has not “won”.
Vote Kucinich for President.
Firstoff, if one is worried about civil liberties, characterizing the USA in hyperbolic, scare-mongering terms is such a bad idea that one must wonder if the person actually wants more civil liberty restrictions to be imposed. We are turning down the wrong path, but saying that the USA has utterly abandoned all civil liberties, completely (not said in this thread but said many times elsewhere on SDMB) is counter-productive. It’s like telling somebody who buys a bottle of whiskey that he has become a drunken reprobate, destroyed his health, and will murder his family in a drunken rage. It’s not true. It might become true, but exaggerated claims right at the moment only harden his heart against you.
We have, in the name of “security” overstepped what should have been done. Orrin Hatch (US Senator from Utah, Republican, more conservative than Bush and all his cronies combined with the legislative chops to prove it.) wants Patriot Act to not be extended and completely opposes Patriot II. That should tell us something, right there. However, the thing is that, at least in theory, Congress CAN refuse to extend Patriot and CAN refuse to pass Patriot II. If we already were a fascist nightmare, there would be no bother with the niceties of consulting Congress on these matters–they would simply be blandly implemented, without even bothering to pretend to legal niceties. So, things are not beyond hope. Of course, there is the unreasonable response to this of once again indulging in counterproductive, hostile hyperbole–daring to claim that the USA is not worse than the Third Reich would trigger a tirade of sarcasm in such a case, accusing the speaker of hiding his head in the sand and thinking that everything is perfect.
Believe it or not, in the real world, situations can be neither idyllic nor infernal.