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20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

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Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#551

Post by selimthegrim »

pessimizer wrote: post #507
itchyjunk wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it under your control? Say you do have the vaccines but get to the airport and find out you are on a no fly list. Is that issue trivially easy to fix? From some of the post I've read here, it's a black box system with very little standard process to help you get out of it. Filing law suite isn't easy[0]. [0] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/michigan-father-wrongly-...

It certainly may be, but it doesn't inherently have to be. Kids need vaccinations to go to school (I mean pre-Wakefield and that blond lady from Playboy who married a Backstreet Boy whose name escapes me), the way you proved it was to show your documents that you got from your doctor.

Jenny McCarthy?

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#552

Post by zucked »

hunterb123 wrote: post #489
duxup wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Thinking that you need everyone to get a vaccine to live a normal life is a strange bar. I don't understand what that means. What happened to thinking of other people? When I think of getting a vaccine... I just do it as a part of normal life. It doesn't change my life at all, outside of added immunity.

> When I think of getting a vaccine... I just do it as a part of normal life That's exactly my point. You aren't thinking, you're just following. > What happened to thinking of other people? My point as well. It's the same "think of the children" argument that was being discussed above. That itself is not a reason. People have immunity. The curve is flattened, the goal posts have been moved out of the stadium.

> The curve is flattened, the goal posts have been moved out of the stadium.

How are you quantifying that? The original intent of flattening the curve was to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system and here we are... overwhelming the healthcare system(s) again. A quick check of capacity of ICU beds in the SE USA shows that on average, hospitals are running 92% capacity(1). Obviously you want right-sized ICU capacity, but I doubt 92% is a comfortable margin.

(1)https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-...

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#553

Post by void_mint »

boldlybold wrote: post #442
hunterb123 wrote: post #396

Earlier 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.

Funny how HN is so willing to agree with the absurdity of security theater at airports, yet so resistant to calling out the pandemic theater we're living every day.

> Funny how HN is so willing to agree with the absurdity of security theater at airports, yet so resistant to calling out the pandemic theater we're living every day.

Take a peek at a hospital if you have some time.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#554

Post by titzer »

chitowneats wrote: post #391
titzer wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The parallels between COVID and our post-9/11 reaction are eerie. I don't see the same parallels. After 9/11 the US was extraordinarily united and committed to vengeance. Thousands joined the military. After COVID we're more divided than ever and people are not even willing put a piece of cloth on their faces. Widespread denial and resistance to anything inconveniencing them. Whereas after 9/11 people were willing…

Most people in 2021 would agree that the overzealous response to 9/11 caused untold suffering and misery. At the time though, either you were with us or against us. Good or evil. Are you sure that's the parallel you want to be drawing here? Might you have a different opinion about this event in, oh, say, a decade or two? By then of course the damage will have been done.

They are pretty different things, at pretty different times. We could make bad analogies all day long and end up at some very weird places. Like imagine that COVID was invisible Arab terrorists armed with a gas who killed 600,000+ Americans. I think the response and fear level would be very different. But it's a silly analogy and a real digression from thinking about 9/11 in its own context.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#555

Post by gelotar »

quelsolaar wrote: post #407

I used to think security theater (like taking off your shoes) was the dumbest thing ever. Then I realized that Terrorism is "Insecurity theater". Its designed to make you feel unsafe. It is statistically not at likely to hurt you, and the people who do it are rare, you but its designed to scare you in to thinking you are under some massive threat by an army of people who can and do strike at anytime. Its psychologica…

Who is empowered when the masses are swallowed by fear? It is not some hooded maniac rubbing his hands together in his basement. It is the state, which maintains control. Control is maintained by fear; fear is engineered through psychological warfare. When did the state ever insruct us to stop fearing "terror"? Machiavelli wrote all about this.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#556

Post by jaywalk »

rootusrootus wrote: post #541
spamizbad wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it gets expensive and annoying if you're traveling with your family.

Most of the time (100% for me so far) you just have to have pre-check for whomever is buying the tickets. As long as they're all on the same reservation ID, the pre-check will get applied to the entire group. That's how I got my first taste of pre-check, when my sister-in-law bought tickets for our entire family. I ended up buying it for myself, and now my wife & kids get the stamp as well when we're traveling togeth…

They'll tell you it's not guaranteed (and it's technically not even guaranteed that you'll get PreCheck even if you've got PreCheck yourself) but I've also had a 100% success rate with buying tickets and having PreCheck applied to all of them.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#557

Post by modzu »

jjeaff wrote: post #471
boldlybold wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how HN is so willing to agree with the absurdity of security theater at airports, yet so resistant to calling out the pandemic theater we're living every day.

I live in a pretty liberal area, so I assume we are taking stronger measures than your average area, and I have to say that nothing surrounding any covid precautions even approaches what it takes to get on a flight. Wear a mask indoors? Get the jab that most people wanted anyway? I'm just not seeing this Orwellian oppression that some people seem to be suffering under right now. NYC is the most strict, but they are a…

your comment sounds like what someone who doesnt fly might have said after 9/11. its not hard to think of some examples that apply to the covid security theatre. for example, there are fundamental freedoms, like the freedom of movement, that turn out not to be so fundamental after all. safety first.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#558

Post by ziml77 »

gruturo wrote: post #199
stoolpigeon wrote: post #18

The US is the only place I think I've had to remove shoes for flight security in years. But in Europe taking off a belt is often required while in the US it is not. In Budapest they stopped having us remove laptops from bags a bit ago. My biggest challenge over the years was remembering what to do in each place as the security people at the airports had a tendency to get upset if you didn't do it their preferred way.

The belt thing is supposedly because metal buckles will trigger the metal detector... but they insist I take off mine even though I bought one with a plastic buckle on purpose. So yeah, it now became "a rule" which is followed without much reasoning.

It's a rule because it makes it easier to keep things flowing. You don't have to trust that the person is right about their belt not being able to set off the metal detector.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#559

Post by hunterb123 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #547
hunterb123 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The last state lockdown orders expired in June 2020. Most lasted on the order of a few weeks. The economy is not destroyed. Assets are appreciating, GDP is growing faster than it has in a decade and employers are desperate to find workers. The unemployment rate is near 5%. If there is a weak spot in the economy, it is that rising case numbers of the Delta variant are causing people to voluntarily limit their in-perso…

When I ask small business leaders that they say to stop paying people to stay home.

I said middle class. Small business was destroyed. The corporations got richer.

How does your neighborhood look? All businesses still intact?

Not talking about the stock market.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#560

Post by dragonwriter »

rswail wrote: post #481
bakuninsbart wrote: post #405

Earlier 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.

> The US has abandoned Syria, Iraq, Kurds.

It wasn’t much involved in any of those (and indeed had already abandoned the Kurds after the conflict which motivated the formation of al-Qaeda) when al-Qaeda actually got organized. It got reinvolved with them largely enabled by the political fallout from 9/11.

> The withdrawal from Afghanistan is a culmination of that.

Again, that's mostly a reversion to the status quo ante.

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