Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most airline passengers would trade dry flights for pre-9/11 security screenings.
Instantly. Where do I sign?
20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
491–500 of 969 posts
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It would be far more effective to do something at the gates dude to the density of humanity Maybe it is about shifting the blame. If something happens outside, it's the police failure but if something happens inside it is venue management failure. Anyway, I completely agree that we have given up way too much in the name of security. If it's not the terrorist, then it is "think of the children" scare and we are abou…
The new thing is "think of grandma". Say delta variant enough and you can get anyone to give up anything. Post covid is like post 9/11. This is the new normal. Vaccine passports and all.
Wow, I think I found the most disingenuous person on hacker news.
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
The existence of the pandemic is a very observable and testable. The ways to combat the pandemic are also well known and tested. How a person can deny the existence of something that can test it personally?
Yeah lockdowns were super well tested and worked wonders /s No, they cratered the middle class while making the rich richer. Now they know not to lock down to destroy the economy but instead push to destroy personal freedoms.
Talk to your local lockdown provider if you are not happy with the results.
Done properly, of course a lockdown would be effective. Why? Because of the Germ theory. The viruses exist and they don't teleport.
If anything, I would have much preferred if we had a month of global lockdown instead of years of slow burn battle. We wouldn't have had to convince people for vaccination too. It worked for Wuhan.
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's nothing hypothetical about it. I'm actually baffled at the fact that people here infer random motivations when Usama bin Laden gave interviews as far back as the early 90s and held multiple speeches after 9/11. The stated goal of the attacks was to show Americans that their continuous war and support for secular dictators in the Muslim world would come with high cost, and to force the American government to r…
I'd say it's been remarkably successful. The US has abandoned Syria, Iraq, Kurds. It still has some sway with Saudi Arabia and Israel, none in Egypt or Libya. The withdrawal from Afghanistan is a culmination of that. The neo-conservative response to Al Qaeda was exactly what was needed to provoke this collapse over 20 years.
Yes, but that took 20 years. Before, they got a war and permanent drone terror plus a massive amount of ground troops. I doubt 9/11 has anything to do with them retreating now; in fact, it's probably helping that the scars heal.
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
Saudi Arabia's decades long record of cultivating extremist outfits, and "influence operations" is, thought, not a conspiracy theory, but a fact. When I first seen 9/11 on TV as an 11 year old, I instantly thought that Ryadh will be turned into a crater within a few hours. I dropped my jaw out of suprise, when I heard US going to declare war on Iraq — Saudis' biggest enemy. It made zero sense. I kept on watching the…
>I dropped my jaw out of suprise, when I heard US going to declare war on Iraq — Saudis' biggest enemy. You're being more than a little disingenuous ignoring the fact that we invaded Afghanistan specifically to go after the extremist group that was responsible for 9/11 about 2yr prior to invading Iraq, which was done for different reasons and "harboring terrorists" took a back seat to WMDs on that list of reasons.
The attack in Afghanistan was initially to attack Al Quada directly. It turned into a war against the Taliban when they refused to give him up. That went on for a year or so, but the drum beat of war against Iraq started on 9/12.
There is a memo from Rumsfeld around then. [1]
The fact that all the terrorists were Saudi, that Bin Laden was Saudi, that Iraq was an enemy of the Saud regime, that Iraq was a "buffer" between the rest of the Middle East and Iran, all of that was ignored.
The war in Iraq was the US worst foreign affairs decision in the last 50 years.
All of the "WMD" and then "bringing democracy" was retconning the original desire to finish the first Iraq war, which had nothing to do with 9/11.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-...
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cockpits are now locked by default, so there's no terrorist getting in there anymore, they can threaten anything, all it would do is divert to closest landing spot.
TK1476 in 2006. Flying from an EU country to Turkey on a major airline. "Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Amato reported that the hijacker slipped into the cockpit with a package which could have been a bomb when flight attendants opened the cockpit door, and the pilots acted according to the international rules in the matter and did what the hijacker wanted."
There's procedure to leave a tray on corridor and have cabin crew protect it so people cant just jump in cabin.
Pilot also can check camera and deny the open.
So having a successful takeover depends on multiple failures at same time... chernobyl happened so its not impossible but much less likely then before.
At this point id be more worried about pilots or malware on flight computers.
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In your opinion, how important are the lives of people aged 65 and older? I think you intended that as a rhetorical question but I want to point out that in the UK the NHS has calculated the "worth" of a single quality-adjusted life year. If a treatment gives less quality-adjusted extra life years than it costs, it isn't administered. In 2014 it was £20-60k [1]. This shows the NHS definitely does consider older peo…
Understood, though I'd point out that other insurance schemes will have similar sorts of calculations (either directly or indirectly in the form of premiums/annual limits in the US), so the specificity of the NHS isn't particularly helpful here, as it's one model among many. Also, based on my casual skimming of this article: https://www.nice.org.uk/process/pmg6/chapter/assessing-cost-... , this particular model evalu…
> I've read far too much casual acceptance of the deaths of older people on HN, as if this ~15% of the population [in the US at least] are freely expendable.
I don't think most people on HN implying such things mean to say old people are freely expendable, but rather that they should not be saved at _all cost_. Our non-pharmaceutical interventions have a cost associated with them too, so we have to strike a balance that's acceptable. The debate to me is ultimately over where the line is. It's not helped that the true costs of lockdowns etc. (or indeed the true cost of not locking down) are not actually all that clear. One consequence is that debates over policies such as these have happened without reliable figures on both sides, and have therefore descended into unconstructive emotional arguments.
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where?
> Where? Are you familiar with any recent bomber story at all? All he needed was some matches and a small amount of plastique. Someone put an incendiary in his underwear. There are tons of possibilities. If you can't name 3 ways other than shoes and underwear, you might be in the group that thinks the TSA is fine.
They scan your body for bulky objects under clothing and X-ray luggage. Shoes are the only other location to hide an explosive device.
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
The new thing is "think of grandma". Say delta variant enough and you can get anyone to give up anything. Post covid is like post 9/11. This is the new normal. Vaccine passports and all.
Wow, I think I found the most disingenuous person on hacker news.
I speak my mind, unlike the echo chamber here. That's the opposite of disingenuous.
Others have agreed with me, they either get greyed out or flagged. Even in this thread, look below.
I'm sorry the majority follows blindly and can't see the similarities between the loss of freedom after 9/11 and covid.
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
The goal of terrorism is to scare people into restricting their own freedoms. It has worked amazingly well so far. To any motivated anti-society organization or person, this is huge leverage. A few deaths leading to a noticeably more authoritarian state? What's not to love? It doesn't even matter if the authorities do their job and punish those responsible, the people will still choose to restrict their own freedoms…
"Terrorism" in the broad sense of the act does not have a goal. Because it is a means to an end, not an end itself. Terrorists do what they do for many reasons. Some are political, some are due to sectarianism. Sometimes its because they are crazy and have irrational motivations. Rarely is it the goal of the terrorist to force a society into tyranny. Timothy McVeigh was seeking revenge. Bin Laden was trying to force…
Which is why the "War on Terror" never made one iota of sense. It's like having a "War on Tank Charges" or a "War on Carpet Bombing".
Terrorism is a tactic and wars on Nouns (Terror, Drugs, etc) never make sense.