They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

My answer to some common replies:

1) "But the [left/right] is much worse": you're sorta making my point. Even if the other "side" may be worse now, if you're honest with yourself, I'm sure you can see where your partisans have crossed some lines, too. And the whole point of this piece is authoritarianism and fascism grows slowly over time, so "We're slightly further down the fascism hill right now so we're better" isn't a heartening response

2) "This is 'Both sidesism'!!!" First of all, I don't claim there are good people on both sides, I claim there are bad people on both sides. Very bad, sycophantic people who see the worst in others, assume the worst motives, and are willing to stop at nothing, including murder, to achieve their ends. Yes, for many issues there is a "right" and a "wrong" and these could theoretically be discovered through empirical testing and observation. But we're not talking about individual issues here, we're talking about national / political identities and the complex social and tribal bonds that make people even choose "a side" in the first place.

3) "You have to speak out / choose a side, or are you morally complicit in evil" Don't entirely disagree. That said, extremism is polarizing and destructive of rationality and humane discourse, regardless of where it comes from. Just because we are all sort of forced to "pick a side" when the gravitational forces are so strong, that doesn't mean that the side we pick will be right all the time or even a force for moral good, just a temporary stopgap against moral evil. That doesn't mean you don't have a responsibility to identify evil and speak against it when you see it. It's just a lot harder for those people who see much evil amongst two large constituencies that see themselves as wholly Good, than it is for those people who are wholly convinced of their Good and the absolute Evil of the other side.

And although I don't claim to be either rational or in the middle, I do believe I am right about the creeping fascist tendencies present in the polar extremes of American politics -- and there's no better evidence of the truth of my comment that it is being downvoted and commented into oblivion by partisans on both sides :)

But that said, I agree that someone saying "God is on my side" is inherently problematic in a different way than just "I have the most power to enforce my will". Of course, I don't see that as a value judgement on the existence of religion; after all, regardless of my, or society's, beliefs, the power behind the individual is still there, or not, regardless of their claim of God's support.

Actually there was no attack involving liquids. There was "chatter" indicating that someone might be thinking of combining liquids to make a bomb. We freaked and instituted the rule. Then discovered that it was a false alarm.

But, having alerted everyone that terrorists could try to make a bomb that way, we now have the liquids rule. (Though the arbitrariness of 3 ounces is made clear by the rule that now lets 12 ounce bottles of hand sanitizer through...)

The security measures need to be decently strong because we vehemently refuse to employ the more effective authoritarian technique of flagging passengers based on history and demographics like they do in places like Israel (eg, simply flag anyone with a higher probability of being a muslim because most attacks were performed by muslims). We are actually resisting the aggressive response in this case.

There are two issues at play here.

The first is that for political reasons, we don't want to do enhanced checks against the actual biggest danger - Saudi Arabia. (Half the 9/11 bombers were from there.)

Second, targeting on the basis of religion poses some major Constitutional problems in the USA. And religious affiliation is not information that we can rely on having about people coming from elsewhere in the world.

And third, the supply of potential terrorists is sufficiently large and Al Qaeda sufficiently well-organized that they could simply choose terrorists who don't appear to fit whatever our screening criteria happened to be. Israel doesn't have that problem because there aren't a supply of people from around the world who are willing to die for the Palestinian cause. However we had a British guy carrying a bomb in his shoe, a Russian (well actually Chechen) who set off a bomb in Boston, a white American shooting up an army base in Texas, and a Nigerian who carried a bomb in his underwear.

This has nothing to do with terrorism or 9/11.

To the contrary. I lived in New York when 9/11 happened. A ton of office buildings went from no security guard to security guards. Other office buildings that I later worked in in Los Angeles made the same shift at about the same time.

The timing wasn't a coincidence.