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Viral Video About Body Scanners

blog.tsa.gov

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Re: Viral Video About Body Scanners

#171

Post by bootstampface »

DanBC wrote: post #131
pg wrote: post #8

There is something chillingly unconvincing about their attempts at informality. Big Brother jokey is a lot more frightening than Big Brother bureaucratic or Big Brother bombastic. Too bad this insight wasn't available to Orwell or he could have made 1984 even scarier.

If people haven't read 1984 recently they should give it another go. > But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. This appears to describe behaviour of a small[1] number of border guards and customs a…

> most people will just shrug their shoulders and think "meh, so what?"

AKA, Ipad3 is out, let's go shopping!

Re: Viral Video About Body Scanners

#172

Post by grepherder »

beagle3 wrote: post #151
grepherder wrote: post #60

OK, I will play the devil's advocate. Yes, he does not deny or dispute whether the method works as claimed. The otherwise hip language is not helping nor does it sound sincere, I agree. But, if we want to stay objective: 1) He describes the demonstration in the video as a "crude attempt", which is in certain ways true. Neither is the attempt too sophisticated, nor the documentation of it, or should I say especially t…

What you wrote is true. So is e.g. the statement that there is an infinite number of numbers. And they are almost equally relevant to the discussion here. > You can argue the body scanner is an economical disaster, dispute it on the basis of privacy or bring up health concerns, but I like to stay objective. There is nothing wrong with this post, as a response to the demonstration in the video, beyond the silly langua…

> The post does not address the main criticism in the video, which is that the body scanner does not actually help with security.

I think it is the majority here that fell for the causation-correlation fallacy. Just because you can cheat a security system with high confidence does not make it obsolete on that grounds alone. Imagine a hypothetical security system that keeps you from taking any kind of firearm, but lets knives pass through. Well, yes, then the "terrorists" can still arm themselves with katanas and wreak havoc, but it did stop them from doing the same with Uzis, which might decrease the impact of such an attack.

> The TSA's post only makes sense if you live in a world where the TSA's job is to grow, expand, gain more power, influence and budgets. And so does your analysis of it.

It is a dangerous thing to evaluate rational argumentation in a political context - sadly something we see too often - especially if you want this argumentation to hold universally, including extending it to the Congress. All I'm saying is if you base your argument against TSA on the premise presented in the video, you aren't likely to be taken seriously by the same fraction who approved of this system in the first place and continue to support it. There are many good arguments against the body scanners and the TSA in general, focusing on a hyped viral video lacking a sound rationale only weakens your cause.

Re: Viral Video About Body Scanners

#173

Post by famousactress »

Deestan wrote: post #56
famousactress wrote: post #4

Wow. This blog post makes me WAY more afraid of the TSA than the original video did. I can't wrap my head around the language used. "Things that go BOOM" ???!?!?! Are you fucking kidding me? These are the people that are supposedly acting in the interests of our safety? Disgusted. Whoever wrote or approved this post ought to be fired. Fast.

> Whoever wrote or approved this post ought to be fired. Fast. Thus solving the problem once and for all.

Of course I'm not arguing it's a complete solution.. but I would argue that a complete solution would include this. Also note that I didn't suggest that whoever wrote it be fired alone, I think anyone who had any oversight into this line of thinking should go.

It's indicative of a culture of arrogance, disrespect, poor decision-making, and anything but reverence for the value of the service that the organization is charged with.

Re: Viral Video About Body Scanners

#174

Post by mikeash »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #169
mikeash wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a TSA blogger need to be able to work effectively under pressure?

I think the fact that we're all dissecting his work in order to criticize the Agency goes a long way to demonstrating that.

How? There's no pressure in the sense being discussed here. He has plenty of time to figure out what to write and how to write it.

Re: Viral Video About Body Scanners

#175

Post by shalmanese »

pg wrote: post #8

There is something chillingly unconvincing about their attempts at informality. Big Brother jokey is a lot more frightening than Big Brother bureaucratic or Big Brother bombastic. Too bad this insight wasn't available to Orwell or he could have made 1984 even scarier.

That would be Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

Re: Viral Video About Body Scanners

#176

Post by nollidge »

temphn wrote: post #66
pg wrote: post #8

There is something chillingly unconvincing about their attempts at informality. Big Brother jokey is a lot more frightening than Big Brother bureaucratic or Big Brother bombastic. Too bad this insight wasn't available to Orwell or he could have made 1984 even scarier.

The spelling and grammatical errors tell you within 5 seconds that this person is not very intelligent. For obvious security reasons, we can’t discuss our technology's detection capability in detail, however TSA conducts extensive testing of all screening technologies in the laboratory and at airports prior to rolling them out to the entire field. This is a run-on sentence. Imaging technology has been extremely effec…

> This is a run-on sentence.

No, it's not. A run-on is when two or more independent clauses are joined without a conjunction or the like. So "I went the store I bought bread" is run-on. In your example, "however" functions as the conjunction. It may be overly long and unwieldy and could perhaps do with a few more commas, but those are style issues.

> "on down" is faulty parallelism.

"As large as...on down to..." Not sure how that's faulty, sounds fine to my ears. If anything, this sentence should be criticized for seemingly talking about "passengers as large as a gun" at first parse. Not strictly grammatically wrong, but it's painful to make sense of.

> Two ellipses in one sentence?

Also not a grammatical error.

> The phrase is "the be all and end all" or "the be-all and end-all".

Says who, the great deity of idioms? I've heard and read it as "end all be all", although I'd prefer it was rendered as something like "end-all, be-all" or "end-all/be-all".

> Leaving aside the content, it's just poorly written.

Agree 1000%: it's unbecoming, tone-deaf, and totally off-putting. But those are stylistic criticisms, not grammatical ones.

Re: Viral Video About Body Scanners

#177

Post by jlujan »

temphn wrote: post #66
pg wrote: post #8

There is something chillingly unconvincing about their attempts at informality. Big Brother jokey is a lot more frightening than Big Brother bureaucratic or Big Brother bombastic. Too bad this insight wasn't available to Orwell or he could have made 1984 even scarier.

The spelling and grammatical errors tell you within 5 seconds that this person is not very intelligent. For obvious security reasons, we can’t discuss our technology's detection capability in detail, however TSA conducts extensive testing of all screening technologies in the laboratory and at airports prior to rolling them out to the entire field. This is a run-on sentence. Imaging technology has been extremely effec…

Writing and grammar aside, I think the buddy-buddy way in which the TSA blog is written is condescending. There is a difference between trying to put a friendly face on the TSA and addressing the public in a tone of familiar conversation with pre-teens (no-offense to the youth as they probably see through this BS too). It is arguably worse than the McCarthyisms spewed by Napolitano, Pistole and countless Senators in defense of the tactics.

Re: Viral Video About Body Scanners

#179

Post by ojosilva »

To me the bad thing about the TSA, and counterterrorism in general, is that every day that goes by without an attack reinforces whatever methods and expenses they might incur.

But the worse is that only a terrible event could prove them wrong and stop the nonsense.

Re: Viral Video About Body Scanners

#180

Post by cbr »

corin_ wrote: post #93
c1sc0 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on how this is technically inaccurate? Is there something like a Flesch-Kincaid test for intelligence?

The simplest answer I can give is that spelling and grammar are basically learned facts, sometimes they are single facts (how to spell a single word), sometimes they are rules ("i" before "e"... which ironically is a mostly incorrect rule, but hey it's just an example). As such, why is Person A considered less intelligent for not knowing how to spell "there" vs. "their" than Person B who doesn't know the date on whic…

> "i" before "e"... which ironically is a mostly incorrect rule

Really?

     $ cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -c ie
     3953
     $ cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -c ei
     2650
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