Thursday, July 14, 2011

Verbally insult TSA "officers"

Via Oleg Volk




Barron suggests people show the TSA some verbal disrespect if you happen to meet them when they are not in a position of power over you.

I can’t find much fault with what he suggests. Perhaps it is just a waste of time. What I wonder is how much of this it would take before it would cause the turnover rate to noticeably increase. Beyond that how much would it take before the TSA would be shut down? And how many people would it take to accomplish this? This question can be generalized to other disliked organizations (not even restricted to governmental organizations).

If you say there are some organizations that can’t be eliminated this way then you don’t have enough imagination. Hypothetically the level of force can be scaled up to any level so in the extreme case this would be deadly force. And for small enough organizations, say a few dozen, one could imagine that a single “activist” could eliminate the entire organization and not get caught. Hence, in this extreme case one person could rid the planet of one hated organization by themselves.

At the other extreme you have one individual frowning at a single member of the hated organization composed of millions. The effect of which could not possibly be measured.

In between these two extremes there must be some level of force and number of applications of that force that results in the organization being disbanded. Could it be possible to determine what the minimum force and minimum required number of applications without going up against the TSA? Surely there is data that could be extrapolated from. If nothing else interviewing people that divorced their spouses or quit their jobs would provide some hints.

Suppose we had the numbers and we knew, for example, that the organization would disband if one of the following were true:

  • 50% of the organization were verbally abused every day for one month
  • 10% of the organization were physically assaulted at least once every month
  • 1% of the organization were murdered each month.
Now we look at the problem from a different perspective, the moral acceptability of the actions.

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