More flying 'security' mega-idiocy

[Nekojin]

Looks like the TSA realized they should do some damage control... So Henry Kissinger came out and said he's been patted down by TSA and he " praised agents of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration for both their "professionalism" and "courtesy" while performing what he called "an important job.""

Of course they're going to be professional and courteous when they know they're dealing with someone with enough political clout to make their lives miserable if he so chose. Granted, Kissinger isn't exactly the vindictive sort, but the fact remains that he could be.

[AdminAssistant]

Kissinger isn't exactly the vindictive sort, but the fact remains that he could be.

Cambodia and Laos would like a word with you.

[Nekojin]

Cambodia and Laos would like a word with you.

Well, personally vindictive.

[wolfie]

This, on the other hand, cannot be let go. Inferring other mistakes from one mistake is bad argumentation. It's a form of poisoning the well. If I've made mistakes, feel free to address them directly.

It's a form of human nature - a claim is made containing some statistics which I either know, or suspect (and can with a minimum of effort check up on) is false, and other statistics where I would need to do extensive research to verify or refute. The easily refuted statistics poison the credibility of the source from my point of view. It doesn't matter if someone is sloppy in their fact checking, or deliberately misleading - a factual error in something I'm familiar with leads me to question the accuracy in areas where I'm not familiar.

One of the local newspapers (no, not the Sun - the Star) dropped several notches a few years back, based on the captions on a photo (the same photo in both cases) accompanying stories in the Business section about HBC Outfitters (one when it opened, the other when it closed roughly a year later). The photo depicted a plane (probably a mockup) being pulled down the street to the store, and the captions identified it as a Beaver. Slight problem - the DHC-2 Beaver is a monoplane, and the plane in the photograph is a biplane. When the photo first appeared, I phoned the paper's Ombudsman (handles issues dealing with accuracy) and explained how it could easily be verified that the caption was factually incorrect, the effect it can have on a newspaper's credibility, and suggested an alternative (more generic) that they could have used. When the same factual error showed up a year later (clearly no note attached to the file copy of the photo saying "this plane is NOT a Beaver, but we don't know which model it is), so far as I was concerned it showed that the Star was sloppy with fact checking, and that anything it presented as fact should be taken with enough salt to rust a hole in the fender of a Corvette. Yes, I know about Corvette body panels - and that is why it would be FAR more than the proverbial "grain of salt".

[Nekojin]

Attack each claim separately. A debate is not a newspaper, and using one mistake to imply that a poster makes many mistakes and therefore isn't worth listening to is extremely disingenuous debating.

[tropicsgoddess]

There's A LOT that can be done to improve TSA. The no fly list definitely is one of them among other things.