There’s nothing like visiting a foreign country like China to get an appreciation of what it’s like to live under an authoritarian regime. I was reminded of this when I arrived home and found that the TSA had rifled through my baggage.
Authoritarian Regimes
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Maybe they saw your nose hair trimmer on X-ray and it looked like a box cutter.
You were lucky. They could have seized your laptop.
WASHINGTON – Bill Hogan was returning home from Germany in February when a customs agent at Washington Dulles International Airport pulled him aside. He could re-enter the country, she told him. But his laptop could not.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents said he had been chosen for “random inspection of electronic media,” and kept his computer for about two weeks . . .
Full news item here:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/investing/bal-bz.ml.laptops29jun29,0,3324276.story
The U.S. is under an authoritarian regime also. The TSA goes through bags; the government is allowed to tap phones without permission; Hurricane Katrina victims still haven’t received full help; and I could go on and on.
From, a U.S. citizen living under the U.S. authoritarian regime.
Imagine you work at a widget factory. Some contamination gets into a few of the widgets making them bad widgets. Maybe the bad widgets tear easily. We’ll call them tear-a-widgets.
You know when they were made. You know what line they come from. These particular widgets are brown and not all are.
Now, how much sense does it make to test all the widgets randomly to find the bad ones?
How much would you have to spend to test enough to find a good number of the bad ones?
Could this money rather be spent on ways to find all the bad ones?
Have we EVER found a bad widget with random searching?
Wow, Andrew, how subtle.
The point of random searches is not to find something. Indeed, if they never find anything, they will have beeen successful. The presence of the random search is designed to change behavior before the fact, just like sending people to prison does not undo a crime, but (theoretically) reduces the frequency of commitment of that crime in the future by others.
The random search is also there to give the people the illusion that “the authotrities are doing something.”
So, bottom line, don’t complain about authoritarianism until you can’t. Nice.
Not trying to be subtle. I’ve learned you can pound otherwise intelligent people over the head with the blaringly obvious asininity of what we are doing in the name of closing the barn door after the horses have left and the best you’ll get is the occasional “you make an interesting point, but we have to do it this way.”
“The random search is also there to give the people the illusion that “the authotrities are doing something.”"
That’s all they exist for. Well, that and patronage now that they’ve created a bureaucracy.
“The point of random searches is not to find something. Indeed, if they never find anything, they will have beeen successful.” How convenient. Failure is impossible.
So, to extend your logic from random TSA searches to crime in general, we should randomly investigate innocent people. I agree, random searches will ensure that people who weren’t going to hijack planes board them with contraband chopsticks and hairspray. Beyond that, it’s a bad analogy.
Well, you DO write a blog called Marginal Revolution. I would search your bags too. lol
If the TSA searched his bag because he blogs at Marginal Revolution, they were surely disappointed when they didn’t find a huge cache of margarine.
It’s kind of sad to see people defending the authoritarianism that has overtaken the US. A country that was always the example to the rest of the world for rule of law, individual’s rights, etc has turned into one indistinguishable from the rest. Where a comparison to some aspects of China merits a knowing nod, rather than a laugh.
And you don’t seem to care. Really sad.
A curious irony on this discussion is that it has just been reported
that the “interrogation techniques” the US has been using at Gitmo and
elsewhere are drawn directly from those used by the Chinese during the
Korean War to elicit false confessions from US POWs.
For anyone who has not traveled abroad much recently, in large parts of
the world the image of the US these days is of a guy in a black KKK type
outfit standing on a box with a bunch of wires coming off him. Maybe that
is unfair, but it is going to be a long time before that image is changed.
I suppose you might say it could be rational to test chickens for mad cow disease.
Foo, if you can’t laugh about this nonsense, you’d cry.
So which candidate is going to abolish the TSA? OK. which one is going to cut their deployment and send them home as soon as possible? Do we have a choice?
China is more free on everyday issues, , the U.S. has greater political freedom. The difference is, freedom is increasing in China, decreasing in the U.S… China will overtake the U.S. very soon.
If you are going to compare the U.S. to Europe, both are very quickly losing freedom and will probably be worse than China in a generation or two. However, they are losing freedom in different ways (Americans are harassed at the airport, Europeans have abolished freedom of speech, for example). The difference is, restrictions on freedom happening in Europe are widely popular (i.e. censorship, gun-control, etc.) and don’t really effect foreign visitors, where as restrictions in the U.S. are wildly unpopular (the TSA) and effect foreign visitors more than anyone. But it is fair to say that the West has abandoned liberal democracy and is becoming more of a popular dictatorship, although the European dictatorships are more popular in Europe than the U.S. dictatorship is in the U.S., as the average person doesn’t exercise much freedom to be restricted but the average person flies in airplanes every once in a while.
In 20 years, Americans and Europeans will be emigrating to Asia for political freedom.
Rex,
China is more free on everyday issues
Maybe, or perhaps that just applies to wealthy travellers at a time when the Chinese government is going to be very sensitive to its image abroad.
As far as emigration, I would bet on economic opportunities over political ones.
The US is a ploice state in the sense that it is obsessed with controlling their citizens and getting information from them. In most countries, the government leaves you alone unless you are creating serious problems. The US treats everybody with suspicion and hostility, including their own citizens. Lap tops should not be searched without a court order, period.
Rex Rhino, is there any evidence for your assertion that TSA security measures are unpopular? E.g., candidates campaigning against them? Demonstrations against them? Help me out here. Personally, I travel a lot, and I don’t have a problem with the TSA; it’s a lot better than the thought of my wife explaining to my daughter that I won’t be coming home from that business trip, as some moms had to do.
I was going to remark that Tyler’s comment was trite even for a Sinophile. But….
But then I thought about it, and reminded myself that left-liberals have a point here. There have been many laws and expansion of executive/agency powers under Bush which right-libertarians like myself also find morally repulsive. The TSA is particularly eregorous. Just because I support Bush on the main thrust of foreign policy doesn’t mean he should get a free pass on all the details or domestic policy.
So what I’m trying to say is, I kinda agree with him. Sigh.
That said, let us not exaggerate to the point of hyperbole, even if it is amusing. The US remains substantially more free that Europe and my own residence in the UK. Rex Rhino made a good point about the differing incursions of freedom in both of them. I particularly miss my liberty to call members of a certain Religion-of-Peace fundamentalists a bunch of women-hating sh*ts in public, or own a firearm to protect myself against rampant knife crime.
And, pace Barkley, international attitudes to the US have nudged up a bit in recent years; but don’t count on getting too many free drinks brought for you
I am surprised to see complaints of TSA search cards. They have never felt like a great violation to me.
These laptops search and seizures at customs, which are becoming more and more common, on the other hand, seem to me a gross breach of personal privacy. And the implications go beyond personal privacy: What business man, scientist and so forth, for instance, wants a TSA worker reading confidential documents? Read more here:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-laptops26-2008jun26,0,4415017.story
China is more free on everyday issues, , the U.S. has greater political freedom.
China is less free on both counts**. As for the US, don’t confuse a nation’s defense of its own interests as being “less free”. Another part of that is defining violations of law and tax evasion as a warped sense of freedom.
If you didn’t antagonize the US government so much, you wouldn’t get searched. The US government is doing its job fine enough – it’s business that needs to leave government alone.
**: There’s a loophole in which you could build the Three Rivers Gorge Dam:
Article 51. The exercise by citizens of the People’s Republic of China of their freedoms and rights may not infringe upon the interests of the state, of society and of the collective, or upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens.
The difference is, freedom is increasing in China, decreasing in the U.S… China will overtake the U.S. very soon.
Simply not going to happen. Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz will be publicly pardoned with full compensation before that country comes within sight.
I have news for everybody. If you are black, then this country was authoritarian from the beginning, long before Bush. If you were an ordinary citizen, then it became truly authoritarian under Hoover and Roosevelt. Bush just inherited this mess. Whatever missteps he or his subordinates have made pale compared to slavery, the internment of the Japanese in WW2, the economic fascism of the New Deal, etc.
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Travel is not necessarily a good indicator of how “authoritarian” a country is. I’ve never been to China although everything I’ve heard suggests it’s a reasonably pleasant place to visit. The same could be said of many different countries. As a short-term visitor, though, much of the hassle of living in a country will be invisible to you. Plus, your perspective will inevitably be different by virtue of having a wonderful insurance policy: your foreign passport.
Unless you get a driver’s license, get a local phone connection in a new apartment, get married or divorced, start up a business, pay your taxes, serve (or not) what is in many countries mandatory military service, have dealings with the local police etc., your perspective is going to be pretty skewed. I’ve heard on several occasions from people who’ve visited places like Cuba and Iran about how wonderful these countries are and how they are unfairly demonized by ignorant Americans. Well, of course people there are hospitable of foreigners and, as a foreign visitor, you may very well be allowed leeway compared to locals. That doesn’t indicate very much about the quality of the government or the quality of life for the average person.
Bartman,
Of course it’s not a dichotomy. In fact, both those statements are wrong in the case of the TSA. Of course “random” testing can be subverted, both by the government and by the terrorists. It is subverted in order to change behavior. But not the behavior that they advertise. Taking laptops prevents planes from being hijacked? Do you get it?
I sympathize with those who couldn’t tell which TWOT to vote against: Bush and The War on Terror or Gore and The War on Technology. Granted, neither of them found their religions until after the election.
One neocon down, so many left to go.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808?currentPage=1
Are we buying all our waterboards from China now? Is that why they come with Chinese instructions?
Only an idiot/someone living in a cave would argue that the US hasn’t become more authoritarian since 9/11.
The move from freedom to authoritarianism isn’t usually/always a binary one. It’s the gradual erosion of our freedoms that we should be concerned about as part of a larger trend.
Nobody is saying here that our government is as authoritarian as China’s. Yet.
The United States IS an authoritarian country, and IS more authoritarian than China. Have you BEEN to China? That aside, here’s some FACTS. In the United States, 1 in 99.1 adults is in prison. We have over 2.5 million prisoners. That is more than any other country in the world. China with over a billion people has 1.5 million people in prison. Now are we clear on which country is more authoritarian or will people keep arguing vague unprovable points?
I almost feel ashamed for having to point this out, Matt, but it kinda matters why they put you in prison. I’d rather live in a country where they put 5% of people in prison because they stole than in a country that puts 1% of people in jail because they said the wrong joke.
Oh, and I almost forgot, China really doesn’t worry too much about foreigners in China, except perhaps missionaries and long-term stayers (who must report to the local police) but they do worry about ethnic Chinese people much more.
I know of Taiwanese factory owners who have had their luggage searched and offending reading materials removed.
But hey, TSA checked your luggage, so I guess its the same thing.
Andrew, these are Arabs:
http://s281.photobucket.com/albums/kk205/caricederaad/?action=view¤t=muslimsyria.jpg
There are many blond-haired, blue-eyed Arabs. And Persians. And Afghans. And Uzbeks.
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have a good trip have a good feeling
Is it realistic?
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