Skeptic Project

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-safety-security/1176421-tsa-dhs-columbus-pd-bus-stop-m-3.html#post15751737</p>

This is a forum that I mainly lurk on but I do post there. This is FlyerTalk's Travel Safety & Security subforum and the discussion was about how the TSA, DHS were at some bus station and of course most of the people on there are vehemently anti-TSA, going over the boarder into conspiracy realms at times. A thorough read of this subforum will show that these people often post about the TSA with the most vitriol and derision seen amongst those that are anti-government.

Anyways, I posted on there in that thread and I got this response from one of the posters.

"Actually, it's quite logical, if you think about it.

1. TSA is created to replace Argenbright at the airport for screening checks. Rationale: Fear.
2. TSA is named Transportation Security Administration, not Aviation Security Agency or Airline Security Agency. Implicit in the name is the opportunity for mission expansion.
3. TSA screens baggage and passengers at airports. This is the acclimatization phase.
4. Fancy new uniforms and shiny tin badges replace traditional attire. Rationale: pax will respect the "authority," and be submissive to authority figures.
5. TSA begins encroachment into non-regulated areas such as private aviation through regulatory channels only to be shut down by substantial threat of congressional rebuke. (LASP)
6. TSA finds alternative means of harassing private aviation through SD-08F (now 08G) as an expensive and unworkable and unknowable regulation (SSI).
7. When that fails, and actually creates severe hazards to aviation due to TSA's comprehensive lack of understanding of the aviation industry, it gets rebuked by Congress and altered. The only way it was clearly understood is wikiLeaks.
8. TSA creates TWIC and insists that mule skinners are "transportation workers", under their jurisdiction.
9. TSA creates VIPR and expands to the Greyhound stations, train stations, Interstate Highways and now commuter rail. (Further acclimatization).
10. [Future plans] TSA is responsible for "transportation." Since transportation is a means of conveying persons or objects from one place to another (ie from one airport to another or one train station to another or one port to another), TSA asserts authority over the place where objects or persons might be originating or terminating conveyance.
11. [Future plans] TSA, now being recognized as Transportation Security Administration with authority over the origin, destination and means of conveyance, recognizes Malls and Stadiums as origins and destinations, thus come within the meaning of terminals and therefore under their authority and no one may enter/depart without TSA's permission after an "administrative search," including electronic strip search or physical grope searches, inspection of personal possessions for cash, credit instruments, business correspondence, personal letters or anything subversive.

By this time, TSA authority has been expanded by a 21st Century version of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which , as you might recall was originally passed and signed into law by John Adams because the government thought war with France was imminent and wanted to disallow any US citizen from criticizing the government. Since we are on the verge of war with "terrorists" the New Alien and Sedition Acts will be passed to outlaw the possession of, or dissemination of seditious material critical of any act or action of any government agency, including FTers passing out literature critical of the TSA.

See where this could potentially go if we don't act to stop it? "

This to me seems to be a slippery slope argument that is very much along the lines of conspiracy theory thinking.

Tell me, is this rationally reasonable or is this another fallacy?

I were thinking recently about the people who go on about losing freedom and so on (like people who watch Glenn Beck for example, or even more extreme Alex Jones..) and I wonder if their whole "gubbermint takin away my freedom" nonsense doesn't stem from the fact that alot of them are influenced by evangelical christian ideas about the antichrist and so forth, which they consider as something that will inevitability happen.

So even though they havn't actually got any real examples of how anyones freedom is being taken away, they believe in the whole slippery slope concept and think that eventually they will lose their freedom because of their belief in the evangelical christian/pat robertson kind of stuff.