Originally Posted by UshuaiaHammerfest

Heh... I love sarcasm like this, especially when it's so over the top nobody would ever believe it's real. Luckily nobody on the planet is bat-s--- crazy enough to believe this sort of thing. Well done.


As to the thread at hand: It represents everything that is wrong with this forum. We have a poster whose stuff got confiscated and then asked a few questions, and another poster that answered the questions with a perfectly reasonable and well thought out "Well, right or wrong, here's what the TSO likely thought, and here's why they reacted."

Then, you have all manner of people accusing the responder of all sorts of horrible things including assuming that because the responder is a former LEO he surely must have beat prisoners on a regular basis. Wow. Really? If that's what it's come to and if every thread is going to devolve into TSA bashing and ad hominem attacks on people that just have a viewpoint, let's just dispense with all pretense of rational discussion, and cast ourselves in with Birthers, 911 Truthers, and all the other crazy conspiracy nut-jobs out there.

Or maybe, just maybe, that in the point-counterpoint give and take of ideas, that in civilly listening to people that you may not agree with and hearing how they approach viewpoints differently from you (as a small number on this thread have, thankfully, done), we might all learn something and then *actually* arm ourselves with the kinds of arguments that will get through to the 98% of Americans who don't spend the bulk of their lives on airplanes.

Sure, I'm as annoyed as every poster (including the responder) that the TSA confiscated a piece of paper. Yes, I do believe playing nice would've yielded a different outcome. And yes, I also believe that the OP should've called for a supervisor and said "Oh come on now... it's a MAP."

But, I fail to see how using every thread as a platform to call every TSO a child molester and to assume that we surely must be seeing the beginnings of a modern day SS arising serves any practical purpose.