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Coming Together to Ban Lube on Airline Flights
by Jason Roth
Well, it looks like it's natural lubrication only for the mile high club. Fortunately for me, I have less hair these days that would benefit from hair gel. I have no doubt that I could smuggle a two- or three-day-sized gob onto an airplane inside a secret compartment in my cell phone. But I can see it now. All the hotel administration websites will be raging with discussions about how to handle the overwhelming number of requests for toothpaste. If I owned a convenience store, I'd send someone immediately to every nearby hotel to set up a mega-liquid toiletry distribution deal.
People will be complaining about their lost "rights" to possess liquids on airplanes. Gone are those beloved bottles of lube, Listerine, and Poland Spring. For the time being, anyway, these things have gone the way of those dearly beheld rights to buy books on Planning Your First Suicide Plot, Non-Metal Explosive Devices for Dummies and Islamofascists, and that big book of hot, naked, Muslim chicks with guns. It's been a real bummer amongst the "privacy advocacy" community that a government at war knows about some of their trips to the library.
Let's look at the implications of their reasoning:
- You have a "right" to commit acts which, when viewed in aggregate with other similar acts, make it difficult or impossible for terrorists to be apprehended. Sure, your book on Islamic porn is perfectly legitimate, albeit embarrassing, but you're not a threat to anybody. Who the fuck says you can't buy a book on Islamic porn in privacy?
- You have a "right" to commit acts which obstruct government's ability to protect its citizens' lives.
- Your "rights" will magically be protected without a government that can protect them.
- Your "rights" to commit acts while you're alive are more important than your existence, which enables you do any fucking thing.
- You're going to buy the goddamn Islamic porn, and you're going to curse off every motherfucker who tells you they want to know what you've bought.
Congratulations, you're living in your own impossible dreamland, you want everybody else to move in, too, and you're going to make it impossible for everybody else to live in this lowly, shitty, materialistic place we like to call "reality". You call yourself an advocate of privacy? Here's a little something public: Fuck you and the pretty, little unicorn you rode in on. Hopefully, your next jump over the rainbow in that dreamland of yours will send you off a fucking waterfall and splattered all over the goddamn rocks. Try not to land on the pot of gold, will you?
If "privacy advocates" could see people shooting guns outside their own windows, they'd probably keep their rarely private mouths shut. If the government should impose a curfew under such conditions of war, there would be relatively few complaints. The reason for the complaints we hear today is that today's war requires some small level of abstraction which these truly anti-rights assholes are incapable of achieving.
It's easier to ignore the fundamental issues and focus on water bottles and library books when there's no annoying rocket's red glare in your eyes. All rights depend upon the fundamental right, the right to life. During a war, an emergency situation by definition, government must take action that it would not normally fucking take. But it must take these extraordinary actions for the purpose of protecting that thing which makes all rights possible. Yes, we need standards, even if different, for how government should act in such circumstances. Yes, it's plausible that government can assume tyrannical powers in such circumstances. But it's irrational and fucking idiotic to assume that the same standards of legal conduct would apply in war time as they do in peace. The fact that people don't get this boggles my fucking mind. (The only reasonable disagreement against "no liquids on airplanes" is that "it's fucking stupid and won't work, asshole".)
To be an "advocate" for the protection of secondary, conditional rights, without advocating the need to protect man's fundamental right, his right to life, is to be an advocate for the destruction of all rights. It's to be a little, crying baby, whining that you "just want" your rights, mommy, because your stomach says so. Left to your own devices, you would suck the proverbial teat until your fucking stomach exploded.
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