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posted by takyon on Tuesday March 17 2020, @05:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the have-liquid,-won't-travel dept.

TSA Admits Liquid Ban Is Security Theater

The TSA is allowing people to bring larger bottles of hand sanitizer with them on airplanes:

Passengers will now be allowed to travel with containers of liquid hand sanitizer up to 12 ounces. However, the agency cautioned that the shift could mean slightly longer waits at checkpoint because the containers may have to be screened separately when going through security.

Won't airplanes blow up as a result? Of course not.

Would they have blown up last week were the restrictions lifted back then? Of course not.

It's always been security theater.

America Is a Sham - Policy changes in reaction to the coronavirus reveal how absurd so many of our rules are to begin with:

Maybe it will be the hand sanitizer that finally exposes the sham.

The Transportation Security Administration announced Friday that due to the coronavirus outbreak, it's waiving the familiar 3.4-ounce limit for liquids and gels—for hand sanitizer only.* You may now bring a bottle of Purell as large as 12 ounces onto the plane to assist in your constant sanitizing of yourself, your family, your seat, your bag of peanuts, and everything else. All other liquids and gels, however, are still restricted to 3.4 ounces.

Among many shocks of the past week—school closures, Tom Hanks, the shuttering of one sports league after another—this rule change registers as major. The liquid restriction has been a key component of air travel ever since 2006. If people are now allowed to bring 12-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer onto planes, won't the planes blow up?

The TSA can declare this rule change because the limit was always arbitrary, just one of the countless rituals of security theater to which air passengers are subjected every day. Flights are no more dangerous today, with the hand sanitizer, than yesterday, and if the TSA allowed you to bring 12 ounces of shampoo on a flight tomorrow, flights would be no more dangerous then. The limit was bullshit. The ease with which the TSA can toss it aside makes that clear.

All over America, the coronavirus is revealing, or at least reminding us, just how much of contemporary American life is bullshit, with power structures built on punishment and fear as opposed to our best interest. Whenever the government or a corporation benevolently withdraws some punitive threat because of the coronavirus, it's a signal that there was never any good reason for that threat to exist in the first place.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2020, @08:14PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2020, @08:14PM (#972448)

    In America? They would just wildly shoot into the crowd and say they were following procedure.

    Starting Score:    0  points
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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by jasassin on Tuesday March 17 2020, @08:23PM

    by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 17 2020, @08:23PM (#972455) Homepage Journal

    In America? They would just wildly shoot into the crowd and say they were following procedure.

    If I had mod points, I'd mod you touche.

    --
    jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A