The intimation that the Trump travel bam, is somehow evidence of how airports embody a national psychosis is a silly jab. Throwing out absurd comparisons...what about the different classes of tickets at Disneyland? This article is devoid of intellect and filled with musings.
What is confusing about it? It is an attempt to hear any assertion about how the people support the process rather than the process (the tsa or travel ban) being PRIMARILY about us govt self serving, regardless of the citizen interests. Sheesh
Banning a whole class of people because some of them might do (or even have done) bad things is an extraordinarily dangerous idea that can cause some serious problems if it becomes considered fully acceptable.
It's also a perfect example of where this "psychosis" is leading us and how its a much bigger problem than an extra hour at the airport spent playing pretend.
You don’t want them in America anyway because their religion is largely incompatible with western ideals and culture. Their treatment of women, lgbt groups, free speech, for example are conflict with a harmonious western society.
People don’t hate them for believing in their religion, the problem is that they believe in a religion that openly calls for the death of cartoonists, gays and jews or anyone that insults it. If you are one religion that interferes with other people’s ability to practice their faith then that one religion is the problem.
>You don’t want them in America anyway because their religion is largely incompatible with western ideals and culture. Their treatment of women, lgbt groups, free speech, for example are conflict with a harmonious western society.
Responding to a religious flamewar comment with another religious flamewar comment is exactly the wrong thing to do here, and will get your account banned as well—regardless of how wrong and provocative any other user was. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this again. If you do, you'll see that the guidelines say exactly what to do, and not to do, in cases like this.
Muslims, just like Christians, range from so-secular-they-don't-even-pray to fundamentalists eg Wahhabism. So regardless of the blatant unconstitutionality of such a law, it's also just laughably ignorant to suggest that all Muslims believe the same thing and have the same attitude about "western ideals and culture" (whatever that means).
Hard to take politicians arguing for that seriously when they also attack LGBT or women's rights, free speech and press, and let Christian theocrats trample the separation of church and state.
Not to mention the unwillingness to acknowledge, much less address the huge domestic right wing, white supremacist and Christian terrorism movements here.
The religion is calling for nothing, it's the people who are dogmatic about the religion and take their interpretations to hateful extremes who are calling for something.
The harmonious western society, in the US in particular but not alone, is still pretty discordant for black people, poor people, and immigrants. It goes far beyond women and sexuality, and shifting blame onto other religions and immigrants who can check some anti-diversity boxes is a great way to avoid the essence of the problem that has existed at home for a really long time.
But have you not noticed that among people of any religion, there is more often these days a tendency to "pick and choose" the best part of the traditional teachings. For example, across different Christian faiths, you're more likely to hear about love and acceptance than being dammed to hell. Nobody wants to hear that second part, so it got dropped.
Religious flamewar is not allowed on Hacker News. If you post like this again we will ban you.
More generally, it's an abuse of HN to use it for ideological or political battle and we ban accounts that primarily do that. I wouldn't say your history is primarily doing that, but having taken a quick look, there have been clear stretches of it, plus some evidence that you've abused the site quite badly with throwaway accounts. Would you please not do those things? We're trying to have a place for thoughtful conversation and intellectual curiosity. That means everyone here has to exercise some discipline in response to divisive topics and not head straight for the bottoms of the barrel.
I am a muslim from India(one of the largest muslim countries in the world), i've travelled 2 times into Chicago since the ban.
I think you are using some sort of slippery slope argument,
"banning class of people" is not true today, we should just be assuming that is true based on intent? Intent is truth?
I understand, I am not saying those are not his intents. I am saying why should we assume that its already the case when its clearly not. "banning whole class of people" is a false statement, right? Its really weird to say something bogus and say its true.
Its like me saying "America has achieved complete energy independence" today because trump campaign promised it.
When we say Muslim ban, it's clear the policy was not a complete ban on Muslims entering the country, but we are talking about major travel ban specifically for countries for the sole reason they are Muslim majority. The basis of this ban is on religion - note that the initial order didn't permit the admittance of permanent residents and green card holders!
Intent and words are crucial to determining the legality of the order. The Trump campaign ran on the specific idea of trying to ban Muslims from entering the country, despite their gaslighting attempts to argue otherwise.
Isn't that a bit pedantic though? You argue using "intent" below but I think its pretty clear I'm intending to present the idea that once you believe it to be OK to punish an entire group of people for the actions of some small minority of that group, you're steering straight into Godwin territory.
You can split the hair of identifying them by nationality, religion, race, hair color, or shoe size all day long but it doesn't change the argument.
I remember when flying as a little kid from Munich to London that little me was allowed to sit on the pilot's chair - I believe my parents even have a photo of it. Note, this was before 9/11.
I have seen a child sitting in the pilot's seat on a U.S. domestic flight while boarding a plane a few months ago. Before the plane is away from the gate, there is probably no restriction.
Disallowing passengers access to the cockpit is likely the most meaningful post-9/11 change to preventing aircraft hijackings.
Security theater at its finest. The TSA is failing 90% of the security reviews for smuggling in weapons. How many of us would still have a job if we were failing that often?
If your job is to prevent very rare events (the number of people willing or capable to take down a passenger jet is apparently very small) then I guess you could get away with it for a long time
The irony is that if there were a terrorist looking to create a maximum loss-of-life event they would now only have to target the security screening line and wound't even have to bother with getting on the plane.
Am I the only one who finds vanishing leg room a larger disturbance than TSA lines?
The big airport crybabies are usually those who expect weather or mechanical problems to vanish by voice command. Unless you fly Spirit, I've seen minimal problems with airline staff or TSA agents. Most are fairly friendly.. of course this may vary by airport. I usually fly in and out of the same handful.
Last time I flew in the US (3 weeks ago) I didn't have to remove my shoes. The security process was actually quite streamlined. The biggest indignity was provided by Alaska Airlines, where one self check kiosk had run out of receipt paper, causing a massive deluge of people to line up at the only human agent available. (Other kiosks claimed you were already checked in and couldn't reprint your boarding pass.) I, and I'm sure many others, alerted the agent to the problem, but she was too busy servicing the growing line of increasingly late passengers to do anything about the root cause. It wasn't even clear if replacing the tape was her responsibility.
> Last time I flew in the US (3 weeks ago) I didn't have to remove my shoes.
That means either someone was not following protocol, they were running an experiment or you were in business class. Shoes need to come off in standard screening (1). Such anecdotal evidence means nothing. I for one had to take off my shoes a month ago (a long with all other passengers) but I never had to remove my shoes when flying inside the EU.
I don't know if it was an experiment but there were signs prominently posted advising all travelers to keep their shoes on. My companion also did not have to remove her laptop before screening, but they did pull her aside to look at it after the X-ray. There were no bins, passengers were expected to put their phones and loose change into a pocket of their carry on, then I just walked through a metal detector and it was done. The line was very long but moved extremely quickly. There was a dog working the line, so perhaps it was an instance of this: https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-06-24/shoes-on-fee...
I had the same experience at about the same time (3-4 weeks ago) on a transfer after an inbound flight: no need to remove shoes, no need to pull out laptop.
That was however not the case for my outbound flight.
That's just a website of things they recommend you do. It doesn't look like any kind of official policy document or protocol. I mean it also says 'give yourself enough time to arrive at the airport early' but that's an official protocol is it?
Leg room can be purchased, if you're willing to spend more. Airlines attempt to satisfy both those who prefer leg room (premium economy), and those who prefer cost savings (economy).
In my experience, the TSA experience is consistently inefficient, with (occasionally severe) bottlenecks. But more frustrating than inefficiency is a sense of apathy radiated by many TSA agents.
Whereas the airlines compete to serve us, the TSA feels vaguely like a slaughterhouse, in which we are the livestock.
I thought of this quote while reading the article:
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport." Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only exception of this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
I, too, have noticed the decline in airports. Both status and comfort are severely lacking from even the 1980s when, as a child, my family and I spent many a flight delay waiting for my father to return from a business trip. But something the article fails to mention: this seems to be a uniquely American phenomenon. The airports I've interacted with elsewhere in the world have been head-and-shoulders above anything in the US.
> The airports I've interacted with elsewhere in the world have been head-and-shoulders above anything in the US.
Which ones have that been, and when?
The most hilarious things are the lithium ion conundrum. 1) People being required to hand over their mobile electronic devices, to have Customs logging in and 2) the thing where they were illegal to be carried in hand bagage forcing them to non-hand bagage where its arguably less safe.
The other funny hysteria (for a non-NT) I remember is the liquid/water hysteria. But that one was active in EU as well!
I feel like EU isn't that far behind US in these matters.
However, I'm unsure if the VWP for US people coming to EU also asks whether the person was an enemy combatant in WWII. The questionnaires on the VWP are... peculiar, to say the least.
Just in the past year alone for me: TPE, BKK, NRT, HND, FRA, CTS. All have much better layouts, more clever controls of in-terminal foot traffic, and better amenities than most US airports.
The international airports that were closest to US airports in terms of quality were DUB, WAW and ITM.
I actually find SFO to be a really nice airport, especially Terminal 2. It's compact, which makes it easy to navigate, yet as a major hub has direct flights to a lot of domestic/Asian/European destinations. It's also relatively easy to get to from SF (~20m), which is a major plus for me.
One of the worst things about living in NYC is getting to JFK, which can take 90m+ by train or 60m+ w/ traffic by taxi. Even w/o traffic it's very expensive to take an Uber/taxi to/from JFK into Manhattan (at least ~$55-$70 one way).
Especially painful after just coming back from a trip to Austin, where you can take a clean public bus from the airport to downtown for $1.25 each way arriving in about 20 minutes!
Personally, I find Zurich and Munich do a great job of isolating the slog of security from the rest of the airport experience. Yes, you still have to deal with much of the same security theater as in US airports, but once you're past that you can relax in a nicely apportioned environment.
As for overall feel, though, I like Turkish airports the best. Unlike the US and EU, the security there is more than theater. They actually scan your bags before you enter the terminal (and, you know, stand in crowded queues with everyone else and their bags). Ataturk's domestic terminal is something straight out of the 80s, and its age shows, but somehow it's still more relaxed and better laid out than most US airports. The Ataturk international airport, on the other hand, and especially the Star Alliance lounge, is a stunning environment.
Travel hacks I live by: TSA Precheck/Global Entry (a must!), Amex Platinum Card/Priority Pass for Amex Centurion Lounge/airport lounge access, T-mobile for free unlimited international data/1 hour free Gogo in-flight WiFi, and usually co-branded credit card for airline I fly with for priority boarding and free checked bag when I need it.
Side note: Pre-check is getting more popular and hear Clear might be even faster now.
Something really rubs me the wrong way about paying the government to mistreat me less. It really seems to me like it was created to make sure that wealthy, and therefore politically influential travelers don't get too upset about the TSA and demand reform.
I don't think it's necessarily intended to discriminate by income, but I do think the intent is to avoid political pressure to back off on general screening procedures.
Most people don't have TSA precheck because they don't fly enough to bother doing it or don't know anything about it so don't research it further.
If you are rich you're flying in business/first class or have elite airline status as it is, so you'll get priority screening regardless of whether you have precheck or not. If anything the biggest cheerleaders for TSA precheck are the airlines because speedier security means fewer people missing their flight due to long security lines.
Priority lines gets you a shorter line. Precheck gets you a less invasive screening procedure.
Priority lines exist because the airport, rather than the TSA controls the lines. The airport tries to do what the airlines want, and the airlines want people who pay them extra to have a better experience. This is arguably broken, but it's not really the TSA's fault.
Knowledge of statistics is severely lacking, and airports are just a prominent example of this (people freaking out over what is an incredibly unlikely threat). Another example would be, leaning way too heavily into what a handful of people say in comments, when there’s no way you could ever read enough comments to form a statistically significant sample of what “people think” of you.
The incredible rarity of these events should have shut down most spending from the beginning, and a new government department should never have been allowed to form around it (any more than we should have allowed a “Department of Lightning Safety” to be created). Then they compound the problem by allowing rare events within rare events (such as “shoes may kill us!!!”) to drive entire policies and waste even more time and money.
Heck, if we understood statistics we’d be marching in the streets demanding a far larger number of representatives, since having approximately one million people “represented” by a member of the house means they could never possibly know what their constituents want even if they spent every free hour trying to find out.
What I want is for people to be educated enough about statistics to not be fooled, and not to overreact to things based on what a few poor samples tell them.
You’re talking about data driven decision making as opposed to fear based decision making. If we are so smart, we would have hired psychometricians to advice every aspect of our government.
I remember reading that Ross Perot wanted to do this if he became president. He also wanted direct voting at electronic voting stations so people could vote on specific laws.
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