No, he was claiming that they were the kind of tough guy psychos with inflated egos who take themselves too seriously to be yukking it up. And I agree he was wrong, but I think his point was misunderstood (and perhaps not well expressed).
Maybe you should’ve put it in Great Debates.
Yeah, it’s appearing so!
-FrL-
Ok, I get what you’re saying, yet I’m astounded that THIS is what triggered the “outing” of your theories. Seriously, all this searching at the airport gates has been the norm for 30 years now. About the only real changes have been the volume, the list of things you can’t carry with you, and how long the whole circus takes.
Did the Patriot Act fly by under your radar? Warantless searches and seizures, snooping emails and phone calls, prisoners without access to attorneys, and other things too numerous to list… all this was ok but more searches at the airport gates are the trigger?
Ha-ha. Seriously.
Fly on El Al sometime if you think the TSA is bad.
Where do you get “all this was ok” from? Where have I said or implied that?
-FrL-
well, no. from that other thread: (emphasis mine) (cut and pasted his entire posts, misspellings are his)
Post #46 **It is unbelievable that the TSA agents would have been snickering at her while she was removing the piercings. I can not believe that to be true. **However, I don’t take this to be evidence that she’s lying, because **I can easily imagine she heard them snickering about something else entirely and misinterpreted it as them snickering at her situation. ** (clarification by wring: (he later backed away from the “unbelievable” but here he clearly talks about them NOT snickering at her, but possibly at something else.[/clarification, back to direct quotes of his w/emphasis by me)
Post 56 It’s just… not like that.
(My wife was a TSA for a couple of years recently, BTW.)
That’s just not the attitude they display towards things.
I mean, as someone said, there could be a “couple of idiots” hired by the TSA, but openly snickering at someone while they’re removing their piercings is just completely counter to the TSA culture. It’s really suprising if even a “couple of idiots” could get away with it.
Post 57: It’s believable that an idiot would think this was what TSA’s rules required him to do. It’s hardly believable that he’d be snickering about it, esp. w/in hearing of the person.
Post 63 But my point isn’t that there are “rules” against snickering at passengers. My point is that it’s just not what it’s like. It’s just not what’s done.
I don’t know. I don’t know how to put it any better than that, sorry.
Post 64 Yeahbut, that’s a “most people” the vast majority of which have no basis for claiming to know whether TSAs would generally behave this way. I, on the other hand, do have some basis for making a claim like that. Sure, I’ve seen plenty of sort of angrily rude TSAs. Even amongst my wife’s peers. (And it was partly because of the stress induced by the constant effort of not slipping into this attitude that my wife finally quit.) I’m pretty sure it will basically bear out. I think some stupid newbie did the wrong thing, I think the lady was correctly upset about this, and I think she heard people laughing and felt like they were laughing at her. But I can’t imagine any TSA was actually laughing at her. I know I sound very “faithful” so to speak, but it’s just, I know these people.
(The TSA agents, by the way, generally hate these stupid rules as much as we do. That’s another reason it’s so hard for me to believe any group of them would laugh at a lady in such a position.)
Post 91 Ok I know what I sound like.
I’ll just post two more relevant comments.
I mentioned the snickering story to my wife yesterday. Her response was, first, to roll her eyes. Next she sighed, and said “Nobody’s talking about you” or something to that effect. She then went on to tell me that it was very, very common for them to be accused of things like this, when there was no basis for these accusations. She said people are really paranoid about this stuff. And she reiterated the fact that when they had to have people do things like remove piercings, laughing was the last thing on anyone’s mind. I asked her if it could just be that her and her friends amongst the TSAs were the “good ones” so to speak, and she seemed to think this was a very strange suggestion. In the end, she was reduced, as I have been, to inarticulately stammering phrases like “It’s just… it’s just not what it’s like. We don’t think of it that way.” Etc. So take that for whatever you think its worth.
Second comment: I worked in fast food as a kid, with a bunch of other kids. Customer’s sometimes accused us of things like laughing at them from the kitchen, etc. We never did that though. (Maybe, sometimes, after we thought they were gone, in the breakroom.) And we were a bunch of stupid kids who didn’t give a shit about these guys. We just knew it wasn’t worth the grief.
Pst 98 No, I can imagine them being rude, short, going nuts and yelling, being smart-alec, those sort of things.** What I can’t see is laughing. **
In other words, I can imagine anger at passengers, but not levity towards their situation. The former matches the kinds of feelings I sometimes saw expressed after work. The latter does not.
Pst 99 You know, it occurs to me this doesn’t just have to be a war of intuitions.
Do you think it’s possible, esp. in a crowded area, for someone to hear laughing and think it’s directed at them when it’s not?
Which is more likely, objectively speaking? That a couple of TSAs were laughing at this lady within her hearing, or rather, that she heard laughing, and thought it was TSAs laughing at her.
Which do you expect happens more times per day? Isn’t the mistaken attribution likely to be far more common? And if that’s the case, shouldn’t we assume the lady was probably mistaken in this case?
So I’ve been using phraseology suggesting it’s somehow “inconcievable” that TSAs would be laughing at her. I know that’s probably too strong. But what I’m trying to get across just how incredibly unlikely this is.
Without knowing anything about what it’s like to be a TSA, I think it’s already safe to judge that it’s more likely that the lady was mistaken than that the people were laughing at her. My own experience, and the reported experience of others, attests to the fact that this kind of thing is relatively common.
Then add in what I do know about what it’s like to be a TSA, and it just becomes that much more likely that the lady was mistaken. Not only is it very plausible to think someone in that situation would hear laughing and mistakenly think its directed toward her, and not only is it very plausible that people who are just tired and trying to do their jobs would in general find little to laugh at here, and would generally be more interested in avoiding grief (and so would avoid laughing), also what I know about TSAs reinforces the likelihoods involved here.
Post 112 Does anyone other than that woman corroborate the laughing detail? (Because, well, yeah, I do find it kind of unbelievable.)
To be clear, my claim has not been that TSAs are particularly good people or driven by professionalism. Rather, my claim is that in the TSA working environment, stuff like what this lady had to do just isn’t the kind of thing that is funny.
Post 131 I’ve also argued that human nature in general (forgetting the question of TSAs specifically) is such that it is much more likely that the lady was mistaken than that people were laughing at her. Knowing what its like being in customer service in general, and knowing that it is human nature in general to avoid trouble and bide one’s time until one can go on break, I am led to believe that it is, in general, more likely that people are mistaken about being laughed at in situations like this at than that they were actually laughed at. That’s just a general fact about situations like this, abstracted from the TSA angle. It’s not impossible, it’s just much morelikely that someone who reports something like this has made a mistake. And given what I know about what it’s like to be a TSA, it’s all the more likely (again, this is not the language of “impossibility”) in this situation that the woman is mistaken.
And frankly that’s more of that thread than I want to re-live, thanks just the same. I still say it’s more than ironic that the same poster who strongly held to the belief that the TSA agents wouldn’t be laughing inappropriately at a passenger (for whatever reason, including ‘their culture’, ‘their professionalism/training’ and/or ‘their fear of getting fired’), should at the same time express concern that these same TSA agents might act inappropriately (and even illegally) in some other aspect of their job.
All I’m saying is that this thread seems a few years late, given that vast totalitarian powers the Federal government has assumed since 911. And that of all the Big Brotherish things they’ve been doing, more airport searches seems (to me) among the least problematic things.
Perhaps I’ve missed some earlier paranoid threads by you about other aspects of our new Big Brother goverment, and I’m mistaken that this is a new realization on your part. If so, I apologize.
Holy crap, man.
As I noted more than once in the thread you’re pasting from, I considered my earlier language in that thread to be far too polarized and exaggerated. Later posts should be given more weight if you’re trying to document what my position “really was.” And you didn’t get up to post number 147 (understandably–you re-read more of my posts than I myself would be willing to) which is the closest I come in that thread to a definitive pulling-it-all-together of what I’m trying to say (and to a definitive correction of several misunderstandings of my position).
As to the claim there’s tension between what I say there and what I say here: Speculation about what an organization’s policies amount to and could lead to is a very different thing than speculation about the character or motivations of its employees, esp. its low-level employees. It is easy to imagine an organization whose low-level employee’s every motivation is morally unquestionable, but which has policies and procedures which can be directly blamed for great moral evil.
And to address the content of your final paragraph more directly: In that other thread, the issue has already been discussed how it could be that I would think it more plausible that TSAs would act inappropriately in certain ways than in others.
-FrL-
I don’t know if I’ve ever posted about this kind of thing before, but you would indeed be mistaken in thinking is all some new realization on my part. But no apologies are necessary. 
-FrL-
I don’t know what to say, wring. Your quotes over and over again support my point. He specifically said that it wasn’t that they were too professional as you first claimed – he said he could see them acting in all kinds of unprofessional ways which he specifically listed, as you’ve quoted. So your first claim in this thread that he said they were just too professional was obviously wrong by your own research.
I don’t see anything but a semantic difference between the concepts of “professionalism/trainnig” and the “culture” of the occupation. A difference w/o a distinction. And by focusing on the triviality of the semantics, you (and he) overlook the essence of my point - that if in the one thread he was absolutely unconvinced that the employees would laugh at a traveler (one of his points was that they’d not do it 'cause of fear of being fired/reprimanded on the job - which again is the whole ‘professionalism’ concept, of course), why on earth would that same person be concerned that they’d abuse other aspects of their job. IOW - it’s like claiming that a bookkeeper wouldn’t steal money 'cause of fear of being caught but we should, however, be concerned that they’d abuse their position by stealing identities. It’s internally inconsistent to suggest that the same employees would be unlikely to abuse their positions in one situation ('cause of fear of being fired) yet be likely to abuse their position in another situation (potentially breaking the law).
Not to mention the whole idiotic position that some how or 'nother humans aren’t subject to their internal flaws once they don the jacket of their occupation.
Have you said anything here not already addressed by the following?
Sure, speculation about the official policies is a different theme. However, since the person in question already seemed ready to believe that the low level employees would act in certain ways despite eye witness accounts to the contrary, I still find it odd that they ever even get to the point where the official policies matter. YMMV.
“It couldn’t possibly be a few bad apples!”
Wow, quite the change from the typical official claims.
-Joe
I was prevented from boarding a city bus because the bus driver said I had to allow her to look inside my luggage. Slippery slope anyone?
Well, that’s what you get for transporting your clothes in a shotgun case.
I joked when they came for the …
Did you report the driver to the bus company?
The TSA exists for the sole purpose of annoying and aggravating the paying passengers. They don’t do a goddam thing that makes us safer.