thelastpsychiatrist.com - Another Man Gets Harassed At An Airport, This Time On Purpose. Adnotated.

ma'am, this isn't the elevator

The story: man doesn't want to be full body scanned, checks the San Diego airport website to make sure they don't have them, they don't, gets there and -- surprise -- they do. Don't they update their facebook? They tell him he has to either have the porno shots taken or submit to a physical search of his "junk" (that would be penis), he refuses and asks to leave, and they threaten to fine/imprison him for leaving the terminal without getting naked.

The other part of the story: he appears to be on the right of Tea Party and he had a secret video camera running, which makes some think that he did this all just to provoke the TSA/get publicity.ⁱ

After you pick a side and start yelling, take a moment and look at the big picture: an angry citizenry provoking a perceived oppressive government, manned on both sides by self-indulgent idiots who couldn't care less about the big picture. Yikes. If San Diego bloggers are driven to this kind of madness, you have to wonder what the Montana Militia is up to. It sure ain't blogging.ⁱⁱ

II.

Go back and read about how power is applied, top down, and protected, bottom upⁱⁱⁱ, and you'll be able to see that far from this guy making any dent in the TSA's monopoly on power, he helped them solidify it. He thinks this is civil disobedience, but it's not, his actions don't affect the workings of the PowersThatBe. What he doesn't understand is that the TSA didn't do this to him, a couple of guys who happen to be wearing TSA uniforms did it.

Back in the day, you were supposed to subsume your personal identity under the larger one represented by the uniform. The tradeoff was that anything you did in that uniform was the uniform's fault^iv, not necessarily yours. Your superior took the fall; hell, he resigned immediately on principle.

But not in 21st century Narcissist America. Personal identity matters more than anything, even money and certainly more than honor ("huh? like shoguns?") The uniform is just something you add to your character sheet. "What, you think I'm going to let my job define me? Only TV and music gets to do that."

Well, if you're going to play it that way the government will, too, so that when uniformed people do something wrong it's the fault of a few bad apples, the system is otherwise ok. That's why uniforms have name badges: so we can identify the scapegoat.

So whether these TSA guys did everything by the book, or under the direction of a supervisor, or totally under the influence of drugs and spite, it will be a contained problem that will have nothing to do with the "good work" the rest of the TSA does every single day.^v Heck, give them slightly more power, look at the kind of nonsense they have to put up with. Can we just make it a federal law that you have to submit to full body cavity search? Not because terrorists are wiley -- still no breast implant bombs? -- but because Americans are annoying. You know they are, right? Thanks.

Bonus: tighter enforcement of inconvenient laws always leads to an underground economy based on bribes. Thanks for the idea, Russia! We could really use the money.^vi

1. How fucking endearing is he, that he actually says this as if anyone will think it a bad thing. "And then you know what that slut did ? She lifted her skirt up, just so as to get some penis!!!" What are you, in third grade ?! Getting some penis and stomping the fiat government / posers & wannabes into the ground are physiological functions of the not-yet-braindead, wtf. [↩]
2. Same thing the Mexican "Cartels" are up to : taking over the land. [↩]
3. While this is true, it also has no bearing. The author wants it to be true, but his childish attempt at forcing will upon world reads very much like any other pantsuit blogger's : ineffectually interchangeable. What he's precisely saying, taking for instance that opening scene of The Professor (where some guy who reads was just told he has cancer) goes like "oh, go back and read about how organisms work, doc, how hurt comes to them, from outside, and how they defend themselves, from inside!" This theory works well enough, of course... except, of course, for cancer. Which is the point.

   In reality, the "United States Government" is powerless ; all the decoration barely disguising the railroading process towards its necessary eventual fate. Have you ever seen what primitive societies eventually do to those goats they picked to decorate and worship for no apparent reason ?

   Here's a simple heuristic to help solidify this point : criminals are stupid (if they weren't, they'd find better things to do with their time). When criminals flock to somewhere, whatever that somewhere is, it is not a good sign. Just like women are the social indicator of decay, and their bulking up a field is the exact equivalent of loose collagen bulking up a gash in the skin, just so criminals are the social indicator of change. Like cockroaches, you know ? If, as an alien, you were to observe cockroaches concentrating in that one black box, would you thereby think "the black box is powerful" or would you thereby think "the black box is about to be thrown out" ?

   It's a cockroach trap, for chrissakes, it's not taking anything over. Nobody cares, nobody even pays that much attention. The societal role of the scapegoat is to assuage everyone's existential dread, but its immediate function is to throw out some human misery -- which is why a job working for the government doesn't appeal to you, yet it's what every scumbag you know does "for a living". [↩]

4. This is a... naive, let's call it, recount of the backday. [↩]
5. In whose book ?

   You can be sure Qntra will report it correctly. Who reads anything else, and why do they ? What do people who misread Qntra (by reading supposed news outlets other than Qntra) want to be true ? And what happens to them ? [↩]

6. The one point these den-daytraders always forget in their glib statements of this sort of thing is that an underground economy is always backed by teen cunt. Not that I mind. [↩]