The nerd outrage over this is just retarded.
Short version of the story:
A MIT nerd went to pick up a friend at the airport. She went wearing a hoodie that had been modified to have a bunch of LED screens and wires and such sticking out of it while carrying a bunch of clay shaped into a rose. The TSA twigged it for being a bomb and arrested her.
Cue nerd outrage.
Okay. Here’s my problem: this was a stupid, stupid thing to do. This is akin to walking up to a police officer on the street, shouting, “YO! COPPER!” and faking like you’re reaching for a gun.
You. Are going. To get. Shot.
It’s a cut and dried case of Stupid Person Rattling A Cage That Should Not Be Rattled. Sure, it sucks that airports are police states right now.
The best part is that there is surprise that the cops are carrying machine guns. No shit? You think that the tigers in the zoo don’t have claws, maybe?
I don’t have to read Boing Boing articles anymore. I can just skim the headline and know what Cory or Xeni or the other Clones are going to say about it. You’d think they’d have run out of Outrage Points by now.
Apparently they do not teach common sense at MIT. ;>
Egan
I’m not so sure. The problem is there’s (at least) two levels to this stuff now:
1. Given where our culture is now, this was a really stupid thing to do. Now, she’s 20, and wasn’t thinking, and people do stupid things — I’m more annoyed that MIT didn’t back her up better than at the cops, who were doing what they’re currently supposed to do. From this perspective the BB outrage is overdone.
2. Where our culture is now is REALLY STUPID. It needs to be changed. There’s this mish-mash of accepting authoritarian over-reach in the name of security, accepting security theater over actions which would actually make us safer, and generally being suspicious of the odd, the weird, the prankish, and the tinkerey. This is unhealthy, it makes us *less* secure, *less* free, and it feeds in with the anti-science culture we seem to have developed. That snowball story you told the other day? There are parts of the country where you’d be in jail on adult charges, possibly terrorism related, for less than that.
From this perspective, as overreact-ey as they can seem, I think BB is most often on the side of good. We need to shift the culture *hard*, and doing that takes a fair amount of riling up.
Off topic, but did you read my comments on Anathem? I’m curious as to your response.
right, i was totally going to, and then didn’t! will do so now.
In Europe also, we have given up some rights in the name of protecting us from terrorism. It is control of the citizens, pure and simple. They are not controlling terrorists.
I’ve got plenty OPs left!
Stupid thing to do, but you’re still BLAMING THE VICTIM.
Also, the “nerd outrage” I have seen is over how far this was taken, not that the Boston police thought her shirt might have been suspicious (I don’t remember TSA being involved, I don’t know where you got that from). Sure, the proper reaction by the police was clearly to put her in cuffs and cart her off somewhere quiet where they could question her, I’ll grant that; but once a cursory examination was made of her OMG WIRES why wasn’t she sent home? Why was she kept in chains, dragged off to a court house, then kept in the system by the DA even though there was no apparent crime, and it seems she plea-bargained to something just to get this farce over with (trials that go on forever combined with legal and civic harassment are exhasuting, vide Dr. Ferrell’s guilty plea in the Critical Art Ensemble case)? How did sentencing her make the world safer? Why was this a long drawn-out case, why are people spitting on her in the street, why are you invested in belittling her experience? And you say it’s the nerds who are overly invested in this incident?
The fact is, I’ve been wanting to visit the US for the last 6 years and my wife refuses to cross the border. The more she reads shit like this the more she tells me she is never going to risk speaking with any American with a badge, because they’re all apparently big fucking morons and she’s a brown-skinned Moslem with a mouth on her. It pisses me off because I really miss my American friends, but I see her point. There is no excess of state power, no level of legal absurdity that some seemingly sensible Americans won’t defend as reasonable, as something that’s a normal part of life in their country now that Everything Has Changed. So, no; it’s not obvious or self-evident that wearing a shirt with blinky lights on it should have to end with cops with machine-guns pointed at your head and a year-long criminal trial, and if you think it is, there’s something wrong with you. If it sucks that your airports are police states right now, you’ve got to push back or at least support those who do, or they will be police states forever. The cage that is being rattled is not a cage that some dangerous animal lives in, it’s the cage you complacent American civilians have been put in. It’s not a tiger you should be comparing those cops to, a tiger is a product of evolution, not policy — how about “You think that zookeepers in the zoo don’t have tranquilizer guns?”; or “You think the people working in the slaughterhouse don’t have sledgehammers?”. There, fixed. Enjoy your “rights”, citizen.
Re: I’ve got plenty OPs left!
No, I’d expect the guns and the arrest even on September 10, 2001.
I’m blaming the victim because she was fucking stupid and people are throwing nerd outrage at police doing their jobs.
I’m totally the wrong person to be throwing the nerd outrage at here.
Re: I’ve got plenty OPs left!
We’ve all done fucking stupid things. Most of us have been lucky to not have been in the vicinity of a bully with a badge at the time. It is nice that you have this sense of loyalty to your cop friends and defend them but it is being naive when you are faced with the bigger picture.
Re: I’ve got plenty OPs left!
Okay, so, first, I’m not sure where, if anywhere I said that I was happy with living in a police state (in fact, I think my statement “yeah, it sucks that we live in a police state” kind of makes that statement for me), but let me disabuse you of that notion *right the fuck now*.
My irritation has nothing to do with the police state thing (which is a whole separate issue). It has to do with people focusing all their energy on what amounts to someone being monumentally stupid and getting outraged over it when there are much better ways to handle the same problem.
If a white kid from Alabama threw on a Ku Klux Klan outfit and then walked into the middle of South Compton, would you be surprised if he got shot or beaten? No. No you wouldn’t. Because you’re not fucking stupid. Knowing that walking into black gang territory while wearing a racist outfit is going to get you beaten does not in any way support gang or racial violence. But that’s pretty much what I’m being accused of here, I guess.
It’s like PETA and their trying to get Ben and Jerry’s to use human breast milk in ice cream. Never mind that it is illegal to sell human fluids in the USA, we’ll spend a lot of outrage points on something that means nothing and just makes us look stupid.
As far as the implication that this says “It is nice that you have this sense of loyalty to your cop friends and defend them” – well. That reads as if you are accusing me of being some sort of traitor to the left wing cause, or a supporter of oppression, or whatever, because several of my friends happen to be police officers.
Please let me know if that interpretation is true or not.
Wires and clay in an airport is shouting fire in a crowded theater.