by not clocking them
This happened earlier today, but I had to wait to post it till now because of a ban award.
Was at the airport for thanksgiving travels, going thru security. Our story centers with the millimeter wave (MW) machine. That's the machine where you walk in, put your hands up, and the thing spins around you. When you step in, the minimum wage TSA worker hits a red button for female and a blue button for male. When I went in they hit the female button, it scanned me and then it beeped. On the screen, it put a box around my crotch. Fricking great.
The poor TSA agent then had to very invasively frisk me. I'll spare you the details. For whatever reason they're really into the frisking at O'hare, compared to other airports where they'll often just give it a single pat or wave me thru. I don't understand why these things have to be so sensitive; they've also detected one of my friend's pads too and she had to get the whole pat down. They're an egregious violation of privacy.
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This is an example of true intersectionality: the axis of oppression of the security apparatus affects everyone, but it often affects individuals in a specific fashion correlating to their idpol classification(s).
As part of my coming essay on the authoritarianism of the United States which developed in the wake of the events of 9/11/2001, there is an imposition into every human being's person which is appropriately termed fascist.
One of the complexities of our form of government is that though our society became more authoritarian in ways which arguably were overtly fascist (the Pledge of Allegiance as a ritual in schools is a prominent example that is far closer to fascism than we should have been comfortable with, though even here there are blurrings of the lines), in this academic's opinion the presidency of Bush II was not fascist nor authoritarian: even though there were irregularities in our elections in Florida which mark a true degradation in our faith in our public institutions, Bush II did not ever intimate that he would stay in office absent a mandate from the system as it was, imperfect as the 2000 election was.
Though the authoritarian nature of our society is revealed in, for instance, the decision to go to war in Iraq over the objections of the left at large, that decision was nevertheless enacted by properly elected legislators.
Our society reacted to the threat of terrorism by exerting more invasive control over every single citizen: this much is incontrovertible. But the arrival at an authoritarian police state was not precipitated by the events of 9/11, merely accelerated by it. Our society had already been a police state the 90s. Truthfully I find it difficult to pin down when the police state truly arrived, because the 60s were marred by debates and clashes between police and the assembled. (Never forget: they killed Kent State students.)
There is this tenuous argument that the invasive nature of TSA screening is part of the systems of control which keep air travel safe. This is how authoritarianism creeps in. Moderates are swayed by safety and the people sounding the warning were outnumbered.
I can say that the millennials arrived on the scene as Obama promised 'change we can believe in' culminating in the political movement known as OWS, whose impact is still being felt today in the populism and anti-elite sentiment of the grassroots right. (They listened, and agreed.)
But OWS was crushed. Arguably it collapsed internally, a movement made up of optimism without a handle on the long term viability of a political movement, but once the media moved on, the police moved in and dispersed the remainder.
You must learn from our mistakes.
The boomer stasis was recognized, you should understand, in the wake of OWS. We were not heard, and the boomers demanded the pre-recuperation of our generation, interpolating their own story and eating the change of their young to their eventual darnation.
The boomer narrative is that of the 60s: they experienced a consciousness shift in which they lived in a New Age of peace, shut down the Vietnam war (eventually), and then got jobs and modulated and moderated their idealism. Their inability to allow any form of change is a sclerotic disease which is second in line to attack.
After we handle the fascism.
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Don't talk about authoritarianism and invasive control unless you're against the civil rights act, sweetie.
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REAL libertarians support the right of trans weed farmers to defend their whites-only trans commune from black looters.
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!followers !schizos
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This but unironically.
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