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If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries…
[Leslie Stephen]
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Category: Politics
Posted on: September 30, 2006 8:44 PM, by PZ Myers
Don't you dare diss Kip Hawley! He's head of the Transportation Security Administration, and he's awfully touchy, you see. His minions also take it personally when you say unkind things about him.
P.S. Kip Hawley is an idiot. Spread the word. Let's see that phrase spread all across the blogosphere.
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Comments
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | September 30, 2006 8:49 PM
Careful- now that we're offically a police state where anybody giving vaguely defined "support" to "terrorists" can be detained on Emperor George's say-so (and with no right to redress from the courts), you're liable to find yourself strapped to a waterboard for posting stuff like that.
Posted by: Caledonian | September 30, 2006 9:01 PM
Um... your Free Speech rights don't apply while you're in privately own spaces. Despite all of the government handouts and bailouts they receive, airport terminals are owned by corporations the last time I checked, and those corporations are free to impose whatever restrictions on your communication rights they please.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | September 30, 2006 9:07 PM
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/jewsforjesus.html
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | September 30, 2006 9:09 PM
P.S. Airports are public property and TSA screeners are agents of the Federal government.
Posted by: Caledonian | September 30, 2006 9:25 PM
I stand corrected - the individual in question was within an International airport at the time, which is under local government jurisdiction. My statement was only correct for privately owned airports.
Posted by: llewelly | September 30, 2006 9:36 PM
TSA has been referred to as 'security theatre' . Today we are reminded it is more properly called 'security comedy theatre' .
Posted by: Zeno | September 30, 2006 9:53 PM
Damn, this is chilling! Plaudits to Jim Lippard for having the balls and nerves of steel to see this through, buy it makes me ill.
Personally, I don't think I would be brave enough. There's a felon with the same uncommon name as mine who lives one town over. I can easily imagine (too easily!) how the name coincidence could screw me up for hours on end, especially if a small-souled security thug decided to act maliciously in response to assertiveness on my part.
It's not fun to find out you're probably a coward.
Posted by: Claire | September 30, 2006 10:10 PM
Hah! I'm so getting to the airport early next time I fly so I can do that. Spread it around the blogosphere and have all the bloggers (and lurkers) do it.
Posted by: George | September 30, 2006 10:28 PM
Oh look! There's a "Kip Hawley is an Idiot" web site already:
http://www.kiphawleyisanidiot.com/
Posted by: Kip Manley | September 30, 2006 10:54 PM
God, I twitch every time I see this meme.
Posted by: Mr. Person | September 30, 2006 11:01 PM
This story reminds me of a scene in one of the Simpsons episodes where, I believe, Jimbo Jones breathes onto an ice cream freezer at the Kwik-E-Mart and writes "BITE ME" with his finger.
He then declares, "Dude, someone's gonna read that, and it's gonna totally blow his mind."
Lame.
Posted by: John Marley | September 30, 2006 11:54 PM
Wow,
We are apparently no longer living in "the land of the free."
This reminds me of those old spy movies where all the Soviet countries have travel restricting checkpoints ("Show me your papers") every few hundred yards.
Posted by: afarensis | October 1, 2006 12:38 AM
It reminds me of that episode of The Simpsons where Mr. Burns steals the trillion dollar bill. At the end he says "Repression and torture are a small price to pay to live in the land of the free" or something to that effect...
Posted by: Craig | October 1, 2006 12:43 AM
I was lined up for the security check at Tampa the other day, and just before the screening there was a desk with two TSA guys telling you to declare any of the newly allowed "under 3 oz. all in a 1 quart ziplock bag" personal items. On the desk was an example bag with little shampoo bottles, toothpaste, etc.
The guy in front of me pulls out a little tube of lip gloss or something to declare. The agents glared at him and confiscated it. If it had been all by itself in a 1 quart ziplock it would have complied with regulations and would have been no problem... but since it was NOT in a ziplock it was contraband and was confiscated.
They then said loudly to him and the rest of us "Anyone ELSE have aything to declare? If so this is your LAST CHANCE if you don't want to be spending spend a week in Nebraska at Camp (somethingorother)!"
Pathetic. I had to hold back a grin. The idea of actually being detained was a little appealing... would have made for a good story someday.
Posted by: John Stone | October 1, 2006 3:32 AM
It's up on my blog along with the photo that hangs in every TSA office.
Posted by: bernarda | October 1, 2006 5:42 AM
It isn't only buttwipe Kip Hawley that is an idiot. It seems that the Canadians have lost their senses too.
A traveler describes what happened to him on a flight to Canada.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11211166&pageNo=1&sid=1
Posted by: gracchus | October 1, 2006 8:13 AM
bernarda, at least the guy had actually DONE something (i.e. dropped his ipod down the loo). And apparently he thinks that the U.S. constitution applies everywhere....
llewelly, i wan't MUSICAL comedy theater. If TSA checkpoints were all singing/all dancing, I wouldn't mind waiting so much..
Posted by: Herb West | October 1, 2006 9:30 AM
Can't we agree to act like adults when passing through the security checkpoints? The checkpoints aren't there to provide a forum for name-calling!
Posted by: Jim Wynne | October 1, 2006 10:28 AM
So expressing one's opinion is not acting like an adult? The guy wasn't jumping up and down and shouting, after all. Perhaps I've misinterpreted your statements, and you're calling for the TSA people to act like adults, since no one would ever have known about this if they had.
Posted by: Chayanov | October 1, 2006 2:23 PM
Expressing one's opinion isn't necessarily acting like an adult. "Kip Hawley is an idiot" has all the erudition you might expect from any 7-year-old. I'm of two minds about this experience. It's a rather chilling example of how our basic rights are on increasingly shaky ground. On the other hand, it's rather asinine to taunt airport security, especially considering the last five years. He wrote that on the bag to provoke a reaction, which it did. TSA personnel should act like adults. But so should we.
Posted by: Joshua | October 1, 2006 3:50 PM
Oh, so it's only certain kinds of speech that's protected by the first amendment. "Adult speech", then. Grown-up talk. Kids (even adult ones) should be seen and not heard, or else we send them where they'll be neither seen nor heard! Lovely. Fucking beautiful time to live, eh?
I say we start a write-in campaign everybody mail a postcard to TSA with "Kip Hawley is an idiot" written on it. Just remember to wear gloves when you do it, eh?
Posted by: Barry | October 1, 2006 4:40 PM
Along with torture apologists, we have the 'don't criticise your republican government' scum. I wonder where they came from, because there weren't any apparent in the 1990's. Then, it was 'good americans criticise the governement'.
Must have been the fall of the Soviet Union; all of the commie bureaucrats probably came here.
Posted by: Hairhead | October 1, 2006 7:43 PM
Okay, I'm a Canadian and all, and the fact is that Canadians grow up washed in American culture, spun-dried in the "home of the brave and the land of the free" rhetoric, ironed flat to the paeans to "rugged individualism"; we have internalized American culture to the point that it is very easy for most of us to vacation and live in the U.S., and a great many of us roll around in self-loathing and give America and Americans approbation for these wonderful traits.
But we (Canadians) are having difficulties here understanding the wildly discordant words and actions of you Americans -- words of freedom and liberty, and actions worthy of amoral dictators, and petty, small, insecure dictators at that. The sheer prevalence of these incidents of petty dictatorship, of grovelling obesiance to self-declared authority is just really, really puzzling to us.
The question we have is to all of you in this thread: where did all of these brutal, paranoid little apparatchiks come from?
Posted by: bornAgainHeathen | October 1, 2006 7:58 PM
"where did all of these brutal, paranoid little apparatchiks come from?" From the fundamentalist church of atheism, of course! Oh, wait...