Originally Posted by
ringpriest
On this, I agree with you 100% - I think it's an effect of how our brains are wired by evolution: if you're a hunter-gather, that 0.001% chance that there's a panther lurking by the waterhole means that your genetic legacy dies with you, so you can't take it. As (theoretically) intelligent beings who are part of a globe-spanning society, we need to use different math, not the ones our brains are hard-wired for, but as a society (particularly but by no means exclusively in the American right-wing) the opposite seems to happen instead: the lessons of literally thousands of years of civilization are abandoned in favor of unthinking instinct.
I think there are some real problems with just accepting the TSA "as is", though - it has multiple hidden costs: it detracts from other, more useful options (opportunity cost); it externalizes much of its impact in ways that aren't readily visible; and it aids and abets in misinforming the public about terrorism.
First, it detracts from some good arguments to spend more on more generally useful and resilient infrastructure - the TSA is basically worthless in an emergency; it can't do much of anything but screen mass transit traffic (and it's doing the usual bureaucratic growth thing there, too, attempting to expand to rail and even road traffic). The TSA tends to mask that more general-purpose emergency personnel can be far more cost effective.
We need to not allow terrorism to have an outside impact, but instead of minimizing the cost of terrorism, the TSA effectively aids and abets terror, particularly with handling false alarms. Every false alarm that shuts an airport down for hours has a large cost, a cost that is no less real for being "hidden" because its distributed and not accounted for on a simple balance sheet. Ever man-hour needlessly lost to the TSA is a win for terrorism in general, because its a cost they're succeeded in imposing on our society - we need a real, objective cost-benefit analysis on security, and the TSA acts to actively prevent that.
In fact, the TSA seems to actively support the fear-driven, irrational response to terrorist boogeymen; talk to a TSA agent (or most law-enforcement types in general) and you'll hear stories about all the "dangerous" threats they stop all the time - threats that have no objective, statistical existence, even among people with the appropriate clearances; they're fairy stories, not reality. Terrorists, with extremely rare exceptions, are incompetent idiots - if they weren't, they wouldn't be terrorists in the first place; the idea that there is some massive terrorist threat directed at the United States threatening our way of life, is utter nonsense. But TSA officials love to hype the threat, and their very presence reinforces the idea of terrorism as a high-probability threat.
Also, the TSA's wide-spread, unthinking order-following presence is a very bad precedent - it's poor civic hygiene; I'm not saying that the TSA is the Gestapo (it isn't, except maybe from Hogan's Heroes) but letting organizations like the TSA sprout in your society, well.. that's how you get ants the Gestapo.