{"id":456,"date":"2004-07-21T03:45:21","date_gmt":"2004-07-21T03:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:41","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:41","slug":"flt_327_the_reverend_and_eye_for_all_you_residents_fans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=456","title":{"rendered":"FLT 327: The Reverend and Eye (for all you Residents fans)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I shared<\/a> Donald Sensing’s original skepticism<\/a> about Anne Jacobsen’s Flight 327 nightmare in my post below. Today, Donald has a post up<\/a> that amplifies his skepticism in the face of people<\/a> who would take his position (and mine) as being ‘objectively pro-terrorism’.<\/p>\n

They’re wrong.<\/p>\n

They’re wrong both because we obviously aren’t (look at our oeuvre, folks, puh-leese), but because the kind of kneejerk, fact-free reactions they are encouraging in fact will make us objectively less safe<\/b> from terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n

They’re demonstrating exactly the kind of hysteria that gets used to justify bad policies – like the limit on the number of Arab flyers that can be put through secondary screening.Sensing says, quite reasonably:<\/p>\n

…what does Annie herself actually relate? Only this:<\/p>\n

# My husband and I noticed Arab men boarding the airliner and that made us scared.

\n# Before and during the flight, the Arabs did some things that made us even more scared, especially their trips to the loo. At least some of the other passengers and crew expressed or displayed concern or fear also. These fears compounded until the plane landed.

\n# There were federal air marshals aboard, but they didn’t do anything.

\n# The plane landed safely and normally. We all egressed as rapidly as possible.

\n# Agents from multiple LE organizations met the plane and detained the 14 men. They were investigated and released. FAMS identified them as a band playing a gig in a casino near LA.

\n# We were interviewed by the FBI and gave sworn statements, then went on our way.<\/p>\n

That’s pretty much it, folks. That is what is in the text about what actually occurred. Annie does a lot of dot connecting from one TSA alert or warning to another, then connects them all to the 14 men, who were in fact guilty of nothing except stupidity or inexcusable unconcern\/arrogance at how their fellow passengers were reacting to them.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As I’ve noted, a lot of narratives can be strung over that skein of fact. As someone who has a close, personal relationship with Mr. Occam, I do tend to look at the simplest possible explanation unless there’re grounds not to – and while this event is a data point that should be noted with interest, I have a hard time buying into the complex when the simple hangs together just as well.<\/p>\n

But beyond that, here’s the rub. <\/p>\n

Keith Code, an author and (great) instructor who teaches about motorcycle racing, talks about the notion of limited attention: “Each person has a fixed amount of attention while riding a motorcycle. This is represented as a $10 bill worth of attention. If you spend five dollars of it on one aspect of riding, you have only five dollars left for all the other aspects. Spend nine and you have only one dollar left, and so on.”<\/p>\n

If we’ve made up our minds that the terrorist threat is going to be from groups of Arab men, we’ve spent all of our attention in one place. What’s going on elsewhere?<\/p>\n

We will have created a single-purpose, brittle defense mechanism that is both going to wear out quickly, as the overwhelming number of false positives drains the resources and credibility of the system, and is going to keep us watching Penn’s right hand while Teller picks our pocket.<\/p>\n

So let’s not do that, OK?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If we’ve made up our minds that the terrorist threat is going to be from groups of Arab men, we’ve spent all of our attention in one place. What’s going on elsewhere? So let’s not do that, OK?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}