if you refuse the scanner, you can no longer just leave…or you will face fines.
New Rule TSA just came up with out of thin air…
rule of tyranny:
if they resist, come down even harder…
‘Communist’ China is much better than America in oh so many ways, and this is yet another. To quote a friend: “i flew into beijing with toothpaste and disposable razor blades in my carry on last week. security didnt bat an eyelid.”
It’s puffery. They have no basis.
Apparently this policy was in place even before John Tyner made his now-famous video and blog post.
Come into these doors…
Come to the scanner…
…I said to stand over here…now stand there…until I instruct otherwise…
Your body is under my command.
Absolutely correct. I am currently in China. While certain restrictions (on internet for example, which can be circumvented) are a bother, you never get the feeling that authorities will get on you for no reason at all. I’ve been here (to work for a year) for a month now and I found I have more freedom here in general than I had back home. Life here is also a lot less stressful for me. My Chinese friends also tell me they have the same experience of China and it’s not just because I’m a foreigner. If anything: they would be on my back much more. Unlike my home country of Canada, you don’t hear of new regulations and laws or taxes all the time. China is not perfect, but is very enjoyable for me.
Absolutely correct. I am currently in China. While certain restrictions (on internet for example, which can be circumvented) are a bother, you never get the feeling that authorities will get on you for no reason at all.
This is the advantage of the protection-racket model of the State as against the ideological-people’s state model. While it has epistemic problems present in all political orders, and has serious failings due to the lack of competition and calculation, its policies are not systemically distorted into the actual opposite of the truth as they are in democratic-republican and humanistic models of the state.
As Lewis wrote, “Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Also:
-Everyone and their grandmother seems to be running some sort of business or store (we also have WalMarts, 3D Enabled theaters with the new Harry Potter, McDonalds,KFCs,PizzaHuts and so on in my “small” city).
-Cops don’t do much from what I’ve seen and I think it is a good thing. Instead of trying to catch everyone for minor stuff they wait for someone to really screw up or drop some important ball.
I have a blog (not updated much yet, will do in 48 hours from now) http://wheresyan.blogspot.com that I will update with pictures, movies and stuff from China all year round. Feel free to send me PMs on mises.org if you have any specific questions. As a metter of fact, I’m reading mises.org from the regular Chinese internet and nothing is blocked, for those wondering.
That’s one of bureaucracy’s unwritten laws “always come up with a ridiculous interpretation of the rules”.
One of the things that got me wondering is how long it took for the Western public to start realizing exactly how ridiculous air travel safety is. Back in the '70s we had real terrorism issue: Nobel Prize for Peace winner Arafat and his cronies were hijacking or blowing up airliners on a seemingly monthly basis. Soviet and NATO funded terrorist groups were wreaking havoc in Europe. People were really getting killed while travelling for work or cashing a check at the bank. Yet we didn’t start detaining old ladies because of a prosthetic knee nor we forced people to line up at the airport shoeless and with their belongings in small plastic bags just like in prison. It would have meant the terrorists had won and we couldn’t afford that. Life had to be as normal as possible.
It took more than ten years of endless humiliations for some isolated voices to say we’ve gone a tad too far. Last time I boarded an airplane was back in 2006. It was an internal flight lasting less than 50 minutes, crowded with people travelling for work, the best kinf of travellers. But between the metal detectors, the luggage scanners, the body-frisking rent-a-cops and the drug sniffing dogs I got so nauseated I gave up air travel for good. I am surprised so many persons still willingly submit to such useless humiliations without even writing to their own MP or newspapers in protest. Perhaps they really think it’s for their safety, but the real reason is they know very well that speaking against the security apparatus is verboten, only a step removed from openly supporting “terrorists”. Better to lay low.
Body scanners and body searches are here to stay. People will get used to it. Bureaucrats will come up with more ridiculous procedures. Again a few isolated voices of dissent and again people will get used to it. You can vote politicians out of the office but you cannot vote bureaucrats out. They stay there whatever the color of present President or Prime Minister. They cannot be fired even in face of gross incompetence. They don’t even have to appease the voters to be reelected. The only thing they fear like the plague are budget cuts. Not a few millions here and there but dramatic cuts that would erode their hold on power. Ron Paul understands this. Gary North understands this. The bureaucrats themselves understand this. Only the voters don’t understand this.