Imagine a society where your every step is watched.
Imagine that there are law enforcement officers and government officials everywhere, and that they can stop, frisk, and detain you virtually at will.
Imagine that you can be strip-searched without a warrant, and that any word of dissent or criticism is considered suspicious enough to trigger that kind of treatment.
Imagine having no privacy at all, with cameras and policemen on every corner.
Imagine not being able to carry anything that might be useful for self-defense, or anything that even remotely looks like a weapon.
Imagine a laundry list of things you are not allowed to carry on your person, and an even longer list of things you’re not allowed to do under pain of instant arrest and incarceration.
Imagine that you have to have a full set of identity papers on your person at all times, and that you must present them without question to any government agent who demands to see them.
Imagine that free speech doesn’t exist, and that there are words so forbidden that speaking them even in jest will have you arrested on the spot.
Imagine having no choice in services and goods, because the only shops open to you are government-approved and provided with a monopoly, which means they all charge the same exorbitant prices for the same kinds of mediocre goods.
Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Sort of like North Korea or the Cold War-era Soviet Union? Who in their right mind would tolerate such heavy-handed totalitarian treatment?
Well, now you know why I don’t fly commercial airlines anymore.
22 Comments
May 22, 2008 at 8:37 am
Wow. I don’t fly anymore, either, and for the same reasons. Never thought of it in quite this way before. Very nicely put, sir.
May 22, 2008 at 8:50 am
It’s been 3 years since I’ve been on a plane. I’ve had to turn down jobs–really well paying jobs–because they would involve flying. (Lots and lots of flying.)
I have bad luck with … authority figures. It’s like they have a sixth sense for my disdain and contempt of them, even when I’m intentionally on my best behaviour. (Not wearing political t-shirts, or talking about how the world would be a better place without governments, for example.) And as a consequence, I get stopped and “chatted up” by cops. I have a very real fear of going to the airport, where the power of authority figures is so absolute and subject to almost no restraint at all.
There’s a bunch of friends I’d like to see again. It used to be ok, I like driving long distances, but now that the government has managed to devalue the dollar enough to double the price of fuel, that’s not much of an option for me.
Heh. I’m reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time, right now. The parallels to current reality are rather shocking.
May 22, 2008 at 10:23 am
Right up until you said “Government Approved Shops”, I thought you were talking about the UK Then I realised that the government here isn’t directly controlling who can and can’t do business.
Ahhhhh, shit – I just saw my business license on the wall. Is it booze-o-clock, yet?
May 22, 2008 at 11:25 am
Heh. I too thought you were talking about the UK at first.
May 22, 2008 at 11:27 am
Give Orwell his due, he saw what was coming…. he was just off a little on the date.
I HATE Big Brother!
May 22, 2008 at 12:06 pm
But we’re all safer now, right?… Right?
Aw crap.
Mr. Franklin! Where are you?!
Turkish Prawn
http://foxandmaus.wordpress.com/
May 22, 2008 at 2:57 pm
“Heh. I too thought you were talking about the UK at first.”
Same here. The government controlled shops threw me off a bit, though. I don’t think the UK has quite gotten that bad, but who knows…
May 22, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Until you got to the shops part, I thought you were referring to William Golding Memorial Junior High School.
May 22, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Hey! Those kids are SAFE! It’s a firearms-free zone!
May 22, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Nice one. If only it were confined to the airport…
May 23, 2008 at 7:41 am
When you put it this way, it does sound frightening, I’ll give you that.
But an honest question here: does anyone else have any other solid, concrete ideas as an alternate that prevents another 9-11??
I got nothing.
May 23, 2008 at 7:51 am
I fly all the time. Having to show people my passport three times before being allowed on the plane is agony; the horror of it all will haunt me to my dying day. Truly, we live in a hyper-conformist nightmare world.
May 23, 2008 at 8:12 am
Rob V. How about letting people carry guns on planes? You think 9/11 would have happened as it did if 5 or 6 civilians and the pilots were packing on each plane? One thing that the recent accidental discharge by a pilot proved is that a bullet hole in an airliner won’t bring it down — sort of a fortuitous accident, in that regard.
May 23, 2008 at 8:41 am
I don’t think I’d be very comfortable sitting in a confined space for several hours knowing that a few of the people around me were ‘packing’. Hell, I wouldn’t want someone in my house carrying a gun.
May 23, 2008 at 8:58 am
[...] Related links: Orwell was an optimist [...]
May 23, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Take a look at American public education, where students are denied the right to dissent when being taught about freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech. Then observe the myriad of ways school administrators cover up student misbehavior in an atempt to protect their political south flank. Amazing, isn’t it? Can you imagine the education bright students subjected to such actually gain? What kind of morals do students learn when school administrators persistently exhibit behavior that shouts “the end justifies the means”, even while more and more students fail to gain the education needed for success in today’s society?
May 23, 2008 at 2:17 pm
I’m just testing this function
May 23, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Rob V;
Chasing after contraband is a chump’s game. There is no such thing as a dangerous object, only dangerous people.
The trick is to affirmatively know that everyone who has access to high-value potential targets is worthy of the trust. To do that, you do not need to strip search them or humiliate them or any of that. You only need to require that they show dispositive proof that they are trustworthy.
On 9/12/01, there was a proposal put forth to combine off-the-shelf technologies to do exactly that. It does not require that the government agent even know your name. He only needs to be able to match an encrypted iris scan to a database of results of a relatively simple EEG-like test.
The whole security kabuki isn’t about security, it’s about control. If you have any sense, you won’t fly. It’s not safe.
M
May 23, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Rob V.: Pull out three rows of seating from the front of the plane. Add a second exterior door and galley and bathroom. Place a solid bulkhead between the passenger cabin and the cockpit, such that anyone wishing to travel from one to the other must exit the airplane first.
The end.
May 23, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Big Brother is employing you.
May 24, 2008 at 1:36 pm
I quit flying myself after being threatened by a TSA agent with arrest because of my horrible crime of..laughing at him. I worked in airport security in Frankfurt, and I find it very hard to watch the TSA and keep a straight face. A dog and pony show designed to make the sheeple FEEL safe, but does little if anything to actually bolster security.
Besides, getting 35mpg in my car, it’s still cheaper to drive. and with the delays, anything under 1000 miles is usually faster
May 25, 2008 at 7:30 am
Oh, planes. I thought you had meant the UK.