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5 outrageous reactions to stupid security scares
Our thoughts about the famous Cracked.com.
by scary-mike » Wed Apr 29, 2015 6:22 pm
http://www.cracked.com/article_22190_5- ... es_p2.html
So I read this and had feelings which are best described as a flavor of anger. But not like "grr that gets me going" anger more like "I will climb a mountain and call for the one that burns the sky." There's a lot of words in my brain that have been bumping together and forming sentences lately and reading this put some of those sentences in order. I'm concerned that every living thing on the planet might be if this continues. So I put some of those words together in a verbal tirade that Sebaba the intern who operates my computer typed up. It's equal parts rant and article reaction so if it doesn't belong here I'll have Sebaba climb into the pain bucket and move it.
None of us are safe. Seriously. The idea of safety is laughable, basic common sense says any idea you can come up with somebody smarter, better funded, or even just more flexible can work around. We have sacrificed things that were dear for us, but not for any actual safety. Set a timer for a minute and see how many ways to cause chaos or kill massive numbers of people you can think up that would meet no resistance from security measures, the police, concerned parents, watchful neighbors, or what have you. We're not safer.
The cliched response is that it's just the illusion of safety but that's a lot of bullshit too, when was the last time you felt safe in the airport? You've got constant reminders that occasionally the blind squirrel find a nut and one of the people who has the means and tools necessary to hurt people succeeds. But that can't be more than like a third of the fear. My big defense against terrorism is the fact that it's so rare that any real amount of time I spend thinking about it is totally wasted. What I am afraid of at the airport is the fact the TSA are a bunch of people with little or no education and a level of discretionary power that you generally have to somehow earn. Anyone whose even heard of psychology recognizes this as a recipe for assholes. I'm worried that some cocksucker is going to steal my laptop while his asshole coworkers pat me down because while they spent a billion trillion dollars on a machine that can spot items hidden on a person's body it's being operated by somebody who smells like corn chips despite having none on his person.
People constantly bitch that kids don't go outside anymore but we are rapidly criminalizing the act of letting them do so. Why is "free-range parenting" a thing? Why is it some kind of weird hipster trend to recognize that a kid will not cease to exist if you stop looking at it? Hell even if they get hurt or lost or something they can walk up to anybody on the street and say "hey I'm hurt or lost or something" and make a billion to one bet that this isn't one of the couple of guys who actually go around snatching raping and killing kids problem fucking solved.
While we're on the subject leave kids the fuck alone. Maybe I'm an idiot with a sandwich bag full of human toes but it's completely lost on me how severely punishing children for thinking the word "gun" too loudly is supposed to be a good thing. Poptarts chicken wings hello kitty you've heard the stories and it's all ridiculous. Again maybe I'm missing something but pretending that weapons are so powerful that even symbols of them reduce authority figures to irrational behavior while dedicating hours and hours of news coverage to propping up mass shooters like macabre idols would be exactly how I would try to convince someone who was in a bad place that they should do something crazy.
I'm a little but US-centric ,because if I approached issues from a perspective I didn't have I would be a lunatic with a half-full bag sandwich bag of human toes, but it's not this is a unique thing. Canada's debating passing a bill that grants additional powers to gather information on people and monitor their communications directly in response to two tragic terror attacks perpetrated by people who acted alone and talked to fucking nobody. Thank unrenderable runes that there are people fighting but they aren't fighting the way they need to. I think a big part of the problem is that as we've become fearful of everything and sought out more and more protection we've become less and less worried about our governments.
You should always kind of be afraid of the government. Even assuming we have total trust in the people we've elected there are going to be new leaders, there are going to be new situations, there are going to be new standards of right and wrong. I'm not going to say slippery slope for the obvious reason but moral slide is a real thing, the ratchet effect is a real thing. When we take one step in a direction we're uncomfortable with we have to understand and accept that unless we take action to stop our momentum and change direction we're probably going to keep going that way. Does anybody feel right now the same way they did after 9/11? Of course not I was ready to start glassing people and I was ready to sacrifice a few liberties if it meant I would be safe under the blanket of government protection and I being a dumbass went shopping hungry and I made some less than responsible purchases. Those rights aren't coming back and the security never really came.We will all live and die never again knowing a time when the police didn't look more frightening than actual storm troopers.
Here's the problem: It's our fault. We backed down at every oppurtunity. We've made a point of showing the Government and the TSA and the Schools and anyone else who uses our fear to keep us in line that if they push us we will back down. Back in 2002 when we weren't quite out of "shut up and take my freedom" mode wizard and almost shaved bigfoot Penn Jilette called the police on the TSA and noted how quickly they went from "I can do whatever I want to you" to "please be cool man" when he reminded them firmly that you aren't allowed to touch somebody without their permission. It was a great thing and some people deluded themselves into thinking maybe it was something other than a flash in the pan. Maybe we were going to get out of the mindset that when someone tells you how things are going to be you have to listen to them. Because otherwise what are rights? If we're willingly going along with whatever those in authority say does it really matter that we have hypothetical protections? But it didn't really work out like that. It's a sort of fun story that still pops up now and again but we're still just backing off with no prompting.
That's not even the worst of it. We earned this, not because we didn't do anything but because like always we were the vanguards of our own demise. We created a climate where unpopular ideas were punished and people who were bothered by the little changes were vilified or mocked. Whenever something awful happened we all jumped up, eager to be the most outraged person in the room and in an effort to keep that going we went along with whatever bullshit was being peddled. We freaked out about mass shootings and we let our schools turn into prisons, we worried about terrorism and now
we're being monitored in ways that someone from a less desensitized age might call Orwellian; hell, one admittedly awful murder convinced us fetal homicide laws were a good thing and now pregnant women are basically being kidnapped by the state.
Maybe I'm just some asshole with an empty sandwich bag that smells like human toes but I think that unless we get into a nice rational headspace and draw some reasonable lines and firmly declare that if we cross them for any reason whatsoever there is a serious problem we're kind of fucked.
There are a lot of bad, dangerous things and people in the world- half of them are just me wearing a different mask. They are always going to be there. There is no way to be protected from them, not completely. None of us are safe, so let's stop being such goddamned pussies.
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Re: 5 outrageous reactions to stupid security scares
by sunglasses » Wed Apr 29, 2015 7:11 pm
I fucking hate the TSA.
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by DamianaRaven » Wed Apr 29, 2015 7:16 pm
scary-mike wrote:
What I am afraid of at the airport is the fact the TSA are a bunch of people with little or no education and a level of discretionary power that you generally have to somehow earn. Anyone whose even heard of psychology recognizes this as a recipe for assholes.
I have a better one involving chicken broth and basil.
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by Matthew Notch » Wed Apr 29, 2015 11:07 pm
Whenever something awful happened we all jumped up, eager to be the most outraged person in the room
I'm not going to say "This.", because I hate it when people do that, but... that's my favorite part of that rant (I also read it to my wife, Mike, and she enjoyed it as well). People drive me nuts when they do that. They get into one-upping the other guy: who can show the most visceral reaction to a news story? We get it, this issue affects you, you were hurt by it, or at least you can shoehorn this issue into your own identity in a way that gives you leave to type in CAPS more often. It's probably the last thing, isn't it?
The woman who does our accounting and gives me my paycheck is 72 years old. She is still very vibrant, owing much of that to her healthy diet and regular exercise, which she undertook many years ago because she has diabetes. Her diabetes has caused her to have seizures, though, episodes in which she is clearly not in her right mind. She almost wrecked her car once because she drove THROUGH the roadblocks the police set down for her to stop. She came to blows with the officers because she thought they were trying to steal her money. She said that the sheriff gave her his peanut butter and jelly sandwich that his wife had packed for him so that she could get her blood sugar back up, and she fell into tears because she literally had no control for the last few minutes.
So, where am I going with this? First off, we have a school shooting. People decry the lack of security in the schools, so security is increased. With the need for more officers and no time to properly train them, one officer at another school loses his shit and chokeholds some random spitball throwing kid until he blacks out. Now people get mad at police brutality and demand cameras for all officers. And that seems to help things until one officer has to deal with the woman who does our accounting, when some kid stole her lunch and she couldn't get her blood sugar up to healthy levels in time. He is trying to help her when he gets clocked in the face by her. Now he knows he can't hit her back because he's on camera, but he can definitely make off with that footage and humiliate her on YouTube. And then what? More outrage leading to more visceral reactions leading to more bad consequences.
It might be oversimplifying things, but shit happens. The thing is, people LOSE THEIR MINDS when it does anymore. People live lives, not of action, but of reaction. Often, of OVERreaction. Sometimes it even happens on the forum; I feel like there's usually a difference when I read the post of someone who seems genuinely affected by a news story or an article on some issue and wanted to share his or her thoughts with us, and someone who read the story, was affected, and then put on the Shock & Awe 5000 Typing Gloves to give us a rant about it. Well this is my rant, I guess, about that. Apologies for verbosity.
Who am I kidding, I'll never apologize for my lengthiness ;)
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by NathanLoiselle » Wed Apr 29, 2015 11:18 pm
Matthew Notch wrote: ...that gives you leave to type in CAPS more often...
I DON'T NEED LEAVE TO EXPRESS MY FEELINGS ALL IN CAPS. I DON'T EVEN NEED LEAVE TO JUST TYPE IN CAPS. IN FACT, I YELL AT EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING!!!
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by Edgar Cabrera » Thu Apr 30, 2015 4:23 am
Well, of all the characters Cracked's comment section has given us, this is the out-of-character moment to end all out-of-character moments (and yet it still somehow fits with Scary Mike). But it's true.
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by LegionofShrooms » Thu Apr 30, 2015 11:56 am
The sad thing is that when you get down to it didn't take some grand sweeping movement of Orwellian proportions, no great imposition of power. It just took a population not willing to fight back, willing to concede. It always starts with the small sacrifices, doesn't it? You compromise on what you're willing to give up for that illusion of safety, selling off a right here, making an allowance for an increase in power there, one that would normally raise a few eyebrows but hey it's ok because it's "for the good of the people".
Maybe I haven't fought back as hard as I needed to, and maybe I failed to draw my line in the sand and hold firm. Maybe I need to. Still-and I should emphasize that this is no reason for me not to-I can't help but feel like even if I do now, I'll be drowned in a sea of voices that has submitted for far too long, voices that cling to that illusion, need it, and have gotten so used to life this way that it never occurs to them to question it simply because this is How It Is.
Bradbury was right. At the end of the day, it doesn't come from the top up. It comes from the people first.
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by FieldMarshalFry » Thu Apr 30, 2015 6:03 pm
"He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither"
-some traitor to the Crown
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by DamianaRaven » Thu Apr 30, 2015 6:35 pm
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
~Benjamin Franklin
by iMURDAu » Thu Apr 30, 2015 8:29 pm
People fear implied authority.
There's a popular scam going on in which someone calls you and tells you that the sheriff or local PD is ready to arrest you if you don't pay a mysterious overdue utility bill. When they come to my store and want to buy $5000 worth of reloadable prepaid cards it takes some convincing by me that they aren't dealing with the police and should actually try calling the police themselves to ya know, see if its actually them. :roll: All that tells me is that people have zero clue what rights they have as a citizen and are extremely gullible. Which is strange because even Wikipedia doesn't have a proper entry for gullible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullibility
And if scary-mike runs for President of These United States I'll vote for him. I plan on writing him in for both Maryland primaries.
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by OrangeEyebrows » Thu Apr 30, 2015 9:22 pm
I have little to say except that Scary Mike's rant is one of the most fabulous things I've ever read.
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by DamianaRaven » Thu Apr 30, 2015 11:09 pm
I hereby solemnly swear that if Mr. Mike is willing to trust me with his Monkeysphere designation, that is what I will put on the 2016 Presidential Election, like so. I once voted for a crude drawing of a butt - this will be slightly less wasteful and immature, I think.
by skooma » Sun May 03, 2015 12:37 am
Holy shit, dude, you just cracked a door open on what every remotely rational adult at the time of 9/11 now lives with all the time.
No it doesn't have to be this way. Everything isn't really made of bullshit, we need desperately to reject that plan. We did march, and peacefully protest, very early after that event the world's protest exceeded that against the Vietnam war at its height. Over a million went to D.C., according to its police chief. I remember the coalition of attorneys who fought, at state and city levels, against the Patriot Act, with increasing teeth in every case. We wanted the Constitution back, and to stop the last imperialism, while learning to call it corporatism. It looks like we failed, and new, better adapted ideas continue to exist, generally in smaller bites, because places in the world that are well and truly boned always work with small battles, and accomplish miracles thereby.
I mention what's just history to most here, because the fact that we failed is very informative. It wasn't just conspiracy theorists, it was everyone, and we became increasingly frightened. We may not yet be as boned we're rapidly becoming, so what kind of excuse is that anyway.
It doesn't have to be this way; this way was unimaginable, unthinkable, just as it should be. And we haven't lost as long as people who are too young to remember the difference can see it too. Thank you.
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by CatlovingJihadist » Wed May 06, 2015 7:12 am
I must admit I'm on the outside of the dome looking in, I don't deal with the us system at all but since you guys insist on acting like the centre of the world I have felt and seen some of the effects. Mainly everyone around me acting more and more paranoid about 'them' and what they can do and hear and see. This is despite hearing and seeing evidence to the contrary, since they think the Big Brother is all knowing they give it power over them.
Despite me pointing out if 'they' were all knowing and all seeing they would be getting far more in dodged taxes and there would be no free crocks, they still have this fear but like a masocist they lap it up like cream milk. It dosnt seem like a good bases for a society.
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