> "Hate to be Mr. Cyncial Guy, but I think it's important to look at the problems with the system that led to the creation of the TSA."
The problems with the system that led to the creation of the TSA is that voters vote for theatre. They do it with drug laws, they do it with drunk driving laws, they do it to "protect the children" and they do it with anti-terror nonsense.
The parties' motives for going along with it are almost irrelevant. Opposing these laws is career suicide for American politicians.
I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said except for the part about drunk driving laws. Could you please elaborate on this part?
It's also worth noting that there are two types of career suicide here: 1. Acting against the population's wishes, and 2. Acing against what is deemed acceptable by the ruling establishment. I think the "war on drugs" is an example where the general population might be very receptive to an unorthodox (i.e. decriminalization) candidate, but such candidates are filtered out of the process.
You can be arrested for drunk driving if your caught sleeping in the back seat of your car.
You can be arrested for drunk driving a segway or a horse.
The drunk driving threshold in most states is so low they can't do physical tests to determine that level of impairment. They can only test your 'impairment' by testing directly for alcohol as many people preform better on reflex tests etc with that much alcohol in their system.
There is some impairment at that level but it's well below other accepted thresholds like being sleepy or talking on a cellphone. Still even sober people cause accidents so there are plenty of accidents caused by people with that level of impairment, which helps keep threshold set that low.
PS: Much of the world is much worse though with .02 being the limit in China, Estonia, Poland, Sweden.
I think you can sleep it off in the back seat only as long as you aren't in control of the keys (for a very loose definition of "control"). If the engine is off, and if you unlock the doors with keyless entry, and then throw the keys away (perhaps somewhere in the bushes where you can perhaps find them later), then I think it's possible to sleep it off. Try it out and let me know if it works. ;)
BTW, I live in Sweden. You don't drink even a glass of wine for dinner and plan to drive that night. On the other hand, there's great mass transit so less need to drive if you want to drink. It's also fine to drink beer in public, unlike several places I've lived in the US.
I can't imagine where you might have lived in the US where a beer in public would have even raised an eyebrow, let alone be frowned upon.
Aside from highly religious towns with strict licensing like, say, Salt Lake City, and aside from lunch during the work day, alcohol consumption is pretty well accepted.
Ohhhh, in public-public. Like, on the street. Yeah, that's only legal in a handful of places in the US.
I misunderstood and thought they were talking about drinking at a restaurant or something. I figured the likely cultural miscommunication was over the European position on having a beer with lunch.
While it's possible to get beer in Sweden at the company cafeteria, it's "lättöl", max 2.25% by volume. By comparison, Budweiser is 5%. There's actually no age limit for lättöl, but many stores require 18+.
It's not the same as Germany. There was a strong sobriety movement here for decades to reduce the amount of drinking. Back in the 50s there was a maximum limit of the amount of liquor you could by. You were allotted a maximum of 3L of vodka per month (1 liter if you were an unmarried woman), and the government store didn't sell wine. You had a book, which was stamped with your alcohol purchases so they could keep track.
It's been effective. The drinking level is now about average for the rest of Europe, but there's still the international impression of hard-drinking Swedes.
Regarding the impairment, keep in mind that alcoholics will show little impairment even at very high intoxication levels (2 per million and above). At the same time, alcoholics probably shouldn't be allowed to drive, generally speaking, so testable impairment is a bad measure.
I kind of think the 0.0 laws in the Scandinavian countries make a lot of sense, if you plan to drive, just don't drink anything, full stop.
And there's definitely something to be said about established party powers holding sway over policy. But as we've seen recently with the Tea Party: the established power in a political party can find itself very quickly out of power, should it ignore the policy preferences of a motivated voting bloc.
You find that article persuasive? I find the essays from Reason to be, well, not well-reasoned.
Consider this quote: "Once the 0.08 standard took effect nationwide in 2000, a curious thing happened: Alcohol-related traffic fatalities increased, following a 20-year decline. Critics of the 0.08 standard predicted this would happen." It has a link for you to verify, but that's to a Cato ("libertarian think tank") essay from 2005. The Cato publication in turn refers to an increase in overall deaths, but doesn't say how large the increase is, nor if there are any other reasons which might cause the increase.
Since the Reason article was written in 2010, you'd think they would see if the predicted upward trend was more than a statistical anomaly. Go to http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811402.pdf and look at Figure 1 in Chapter 1. You'll see the trend went up, until 2005, and then dropped. The number of deaths in 2009 is about 4,000 less than the pre-2000 low of 34,942.
This means the trend hasn't continued, and the critics' prediction is wrong, so the foundation of this aspect of the argument does not exist.
This was pretty simple research (I think I spent 10 minutes to find that publication), so it's poor scholarship to use an outdated, secondary source, especially if it can appear that you've cherry picked that source.
Or take this example of what's considered a legitimate behavior: "Imagine a driver pulled over or stopped at a checkpoint after having "one for the road," knowing his house is a short drive away and the last drink won't kick in until he's sitting on his couch." That makes little sense to me. (Okay, the concept of "one for the road" doesn't make sense to me either.)
You've got, what, 5 minutes until the alcohol starts to affect you and 30 minutes until the BAC is at its max? Since "one for the road" happened when that person was inside, who needs to say goodbye, get out to the car, etc. then I'll call it 15 minutes until the alcohol starts to impair driving. There's very little margin of error: what do you do if you get a flat or you get out to the car to discover you've left the lights on and it needs a jump start? What about road construction, or if the lights are against you?
(Of course if you're less than a mile away I would say to just walk home.)
So I just don't see that as being a reasonable counter-argument.
To be clear, I'm not wild about Reason and my position wasn't made or particularly aligned with the argument in that article.
But I didn't feel like typing a three-thousand word essay and that article covers many of the problems and was fairly easy to find.
I'm also not out to persuade anyone. If you're not convinced, cheers. But at least be aware of the technical limitations of the breathalyzer, the liberties being infringed by drunk driving checkpoints and mandatory breathalyzer and blood tests and the punishments that begin at accusation or assertion of your rights, rather than after due process.
I agree with many of those points. The problem I have is that article contains enough suspicious information that it's easy for a reader to assume the other points are cherry-picked in order to justify a specific political viewpoint.
In other words, it isn't convincing and I don't think it's a good link for this context. Others might be:
The problems with the system that led to the creation of the TSA is that voters vote for theatre. They do it with drug laws, they do it with drunk driving laws, they do it to "protect the children" and they do it with anti-terror nonsense.
The parties' motives for going along with it are almost irrelevant. Opposing these laws is career suicide for American politicians.