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Don't Fly During Ramadan

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Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#901

Post by Filligree »

jellicle wrote: post #501
corresation wrote: post #72

It is a terrible ordeal, but for all of the other factors brought up the critical factor is that he set off an explosion detector (and clearly it doesn't get false positives often given the response they showed). Everything else (about Ramadan, being Hindi, the color of one's skin, etc) may be nothing more than decorations, and no one here knows what would happen if John Smith Anglosaxon set off the same detector in…

The explosive detectors give false positives all the time. Any kind of lotion or hand soap contains glycerin - beep! Any kind of preserved meat product contains nitrates - beep! Fertilizer? Beep! Fireworks? Beep! Heart medication? Beep! The tests they use are intentionally cheap and fast. Accuracy is not the primary criteria. For white people you get an extra 30 second pat down. For brown people you get detained and…

Ammonia?

I'm starting to worry about the plane ride on Sunday. I've been handling concentrated ammonia (25%) lately.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#902

Post by Confusion »

nitrogen wrote: post #821
jrockway wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but you're the one misinterpreting what I wrote with hyperbole. Show me the line of the Constitution that lets you travel by air.

Show me the line of the Constitution that lets you travel by air. Show me the line that says it has to have such a line. Article the eleventh .... The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. Article the twelfth ... The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to…

  Show me the line that says it has to have such a line.
This! I may be an atheist European very fond of our socialist democrat government, but the bottom line is: the government should regulate what the population thinks should be regulated and not a bit more.

If I want to fly and apply myself fulltime, I can have my flying license in a month, being free to roam most of the national airspace (as long as I tell some people where I'm going, so they can help me prevent collisions).

I would surely expect it to be the same in the US: everyone has the right to travel by air, provided they adhere to a minimal set of guidelines to prevent them from endangering themselves or others in ways obviously directly related to the 'flying' itself (and not to e.g. the suspicion that someone might have a 1% higher change of using the plane for a terrorist attach).

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#903

Post by madaxe »

Confusion wrote: post #900
madaxe wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homeland == vaterland. You did not have this term until the DHS came about.

If 'vaterland' is intended to be the German translation of Homeland, then Homeland == Heimat. And although usually an innocuous word, in certain contexts some Nazi connontations cling to it. The word 'Homeland' actually creeps me out more than 'Heimat'.

Vaterland is "Fatherland". It's the same semantic meaning - although I now note that the NSDAP didn't actually ever use it, and it was allied propaganda that set this in perpetuity in the non-german world. Did not know.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#904

Post by Confusion »

This story seems at odds with the idea that the NSA collects massive amounts of data about everyone, or at least with the idea that it is capable of making use of that data, by sorting and qualifying it properly.

If the NSA needs to know so much about people to protect us from terrorists, why did the TSA, NYPD and FBI have to ask this guy these questions? Shouldn't one telephone call to the NSA have resulted in 'no known risks'?

Of course, putting on my tinfoil hat, this may be on purpose. A few such incidents may be necessary to give us the idea that they are in the dark. The entire thing may have been a charade, caused by the 'telephone call' not helping out.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#905

Post by Confusion »

corresation wrote: post #72

It is a terrible ordeal, but for all of the other factors brought up the critical factor is that he set off an explosion detector (and clearly it doesn't get false positives often given the response they showed). Everything else (about Ramadan, being Hindi, the color of one's skin, etc) may be nothing more than decorations, and no one here knows what would happen if John Smith Anglosaxon set off the same detector in…

If you do the math, it becomes obvious they cannot treat everyone that sets of the explosives detectors in this way, given how many ways there are to trigger false positives. They just don't have, and could not possibly have, the manpower.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#906

Post by jnbiche »

turar wrote: post #481
jnbiche wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ex-soviet central Asian republics are packed full of secret police -- until 2006, Turkmenistan boasted one of the world's most famous totalitarian regimes under his Amazingself-for-life President Niyazov, and although his successor has made some reforms, things haven't gotten much better since Niyazov's death. The other republics share the same kind of government to a greater or lesser extent. IWPR at http://iwpr…

Kazakhstan is nothing like Turkmenistan in this regard. In fact, it's nothing like Uzbekistan even. In terms of personal freedoms, average life in Kazakhstan is on par with the US, if not "freer" than the US. It's certainly no police state.

I agree, and shouldn't have painted all the Central Asian republics with the same broad brush (that wasn't really my intent, but I see how it came out).

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#907

Post by gsnedders »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #717
gsnedders wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4 hour? Wow. Longest I've ever had at Heathrow Terminal 5 was 15 minutes or so (it's been a decade or more since I last went to any other Heathrow terminal) — and I fly through both there and Amsterdam a fair bit. Typically quicker than Amsterdam, in my experience.

What terminal do you fly into? T4 is quite bad since it seems to handle all the flights from Asia. It really was 4 hours, but this was also before the Olympics while they were also busy doing renovations. If you are European, the experience is obviously faster (different lines), though being American doesn't seem to help. Schiphol was still 30+ minutes (was in line behind a flight from...Iran), but not incredibly ann…

Terminal 5, as I said — nowadays all BA flights go there, so there are flights from all over the world there (the distinction between the other terminals is basically that of airline, the fact a lot of Asian airlines happen to be in T4 is coincidence rather than explicit planning, AFAIK).

I am British — which helps somewhat — but I've known them to throw us on the back of the "All Passports" queue when it's been relatively busy, and never noticed it take any longer than otherwise. That all said, I more often than not pass through the passport control used for domestic transfers, rather than that for leaving the airport (though my experience is that that tends to have shorter queues than the one for transfers).

And no, I wouldn't expect being from the US to help, except for not requiring a visa.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#909

Post by gngeal »

cefarix wrote: post #816
genericresponse wrote: post #107

Look at it from the TSA/Police/FBI perspective: Someone goes to the airport on the first day of Ramadan, refuses the scan, sets off the chemical detectors, then asks to leave. During further interview he indicates that he hasn't eaten yet that day, is travelling for religious purposes, has just moved and is travelling alone. This further investigation doesn't seem insane to me. In fact if there was a clear profile fo…

I'm a religious American Muslim who fasts every day of Ramadan every year. So, what you're saying is that if I am Muslim, it's Ramadan, I'm fasting, and I'm traveling for religious purposes - that's suspicious? What your religion or ethnicity is, or how religious you are, or what your specific religious practices are - none of these should even be a factor to consider in security to the TSA/police/FBI/etc. I find thi…

who fasts every day of Ramadan every year

Muslims calling Ramadan "a fasting month" is a serious devaluation of the word "fasting". It's not actual fasting if you only eat at night. It's fasting if you don't eat for at least full day. Say, eating once or twice only every other day.

Also, doing this for one month in a year is another sham. How very useful!

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#910

Post by xtracto »

yarou wrote: post #810
jrockway wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because I'm not hysterical about the TSA doesn't mean I can't comment here. When you travel by air, you are cramming yourself into a small metal tube with 300 other people. The other 299 people want everyone there to be checked for weapons, so the government does this. If you want to be able to travel without being screened, there are tons of options available to you. But the reality is, you have no right in the…

"This is not the Holocaust." yet . "This is not the end of the world." yet . I'm sure many Germans and Italians (or any society on the brink of autocratic rule) felt as you do now. But the end result is strikingly similar. Small erosion of liberties leads to escalation until it becomes the status quo of not having those liberties in the first place. Funny how this world works, labor is restricted yet capital can flow…

Indeed. A lot of the dismissers should have a walk through the Holocaust Memorial ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_to_the_Murdered_Jews_o... ) to "understand" how does it feel to enter an autocratic regime: When you just start walking, everything seems OK, columns all look the same height and you can easily see the other side. But suddenly you are in the middle of a huge maze with very tall walls, which does not seem to have an end in sight.

People won't realize the problem until it is too late.

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