[Tim Lee]
A couple of commenters suggest I'm questioning the motives of adoption officials and pet shelter volunteers. Take Freddie, for example:
The natural thing to assume, of course, is that these employees genuinely think that what they are doing helps the animals, and are perhaps misled in thinking that. Ah, but that doesn't get you approving links from libertarian bloggers; that doesn't "take someone down a notch"; that doesn't, in short, ridicule and condemn.
Look, every time I go to the airport, I have to stand in a long line, take off my shoes, empty out my pockets, dump out any bottles of liquid I might have, put any small containers of liquid in a 1-quart "zip-top" bag, and have my ID checked against my boarding pass. There is, in fact, precious little reason to think that most of these rituals make anyone safer. For example, as Bruce Schneier put it to TSA head Kip Hawley in an interview:
You don't have a responsibility to screen shoes; you have one to protect air travel from terrorism to the best of your ability. You're picking and choosing. We know the Chechnyan terrorists who downed two Russian planes in 2004 got through security partly because different people carried the explosive and the detonator. Why doesn't this count as a continued, active attack method?I don't want to even think about how much C4 I can strap to my legs and walk through your magnetometers. Or search the Internet for "BeerBelly." It's a device you can strap to your chest to smuggle beer into stadiums, but you can also use it smuggle 40 ounces of dangerous liquid explosive onto planes. The magnetometer won't detect it. Your secondary screening wandings won't detect it. Why aren't you making us all take our shirts off? Will you have to find a printout of the webpage in some terrorist safe house? Or will someone actually have to try it? If that doesn't bother you, search the Internet for "cell phone gun."
Now, I have no doubt that virtually all TSA officials sincerely believe that relieving me of my bottle of water is crucial to preventing the next September 11 attack. Part of this is that they aren't very smart. Part of it is that they're trained to follow instructions without engaging in a lot of critical thought. But in any event, I have no doubt that they're sincere.
That doesn't change the fact that most of what happens in an airport screening line is a waste of everyone's time. An enormous amount of time is being wasted for little to no increase in security. Bruce Schneier coined the apt phrase "security theater" to describe the process: the goal isn't to make people safer; the goal is to make people feel safer.
I think much the same thing is happening in the adoption process and at the local animal shelter. It's not that adoption case-workers or pet shelter volunteers are consciously wasting peoples' time to make themselves feel more powerful. I'm sure they sincerely believe that their efforts are helping kids and cats, respectively. But I think they're wrong.
A big part of the problem is that people have a natural tendency to over-estimate their own importance. Nobody takes a job he believes is a waste of time, and people self-select into professions they happen to think make a big difference in society. So TSA security screeners believe they're making air travel safer, even when the evidence says they're not. Patent attorneys believe they're promoting innovation, even in industries where the evidence says otherwise. And adoption officials naturally believe that they play a vital role in ensuring kids get placed in loving homes.
Now, I'm sure that adoption officials do a lot of good. But it's possible to do too much as well as too little. Virtually every profession that involves an element of coercion needs a version of the Hippocratic Oath. In the case of adoption, that means that adoption agencies should err on the side of permitting adoptions unless they have good reason to think the home will be abusive or neglectful. Adoption workers should approach their jobs with an attitude of humility, recognizing that the vast majority of adoptive parents will do a better job than the foster care system.
This isn't about questioning adoption officials' motives. I have no doubt adoption workers sincerely believe they're acting in the best interest of children. But the fact that they believe it doesn't make it true, and it's precisely because adoption professionals have a tendency to pursue sincere but misguided policies that we need to constrain their discretion. The ban on race-conscious adoption decisions in one such constraint.
Photo courtesy of adjustafresh
The first thing I thought about when I heard the news about greater restrictions on white parents adopting African-American kids: well, guess that means fewer kids are going to have homes with two loving parents.
But who cares about that, as long as we're keeping it real, right? Isn't that the important thing in Obama's post-racial America?
"I'm sure they sincerely believe that their efforts are helping kids and cats, respectively. But I think they're wrong."
Two paragraphs later,
"Now, I'm sure that adoption officials do a lot of good."
then,
"I have no doubt adoption workers sincerely believe they're acting in the best interest of children. But the fact that they believe it doesn't make it true"
This is wrong in so many ways, I am at a loss for where to start.
Maybe with the part that is correct, which is the attack on current airport security policies. But those policies are not set by the people manning the lines. Whether those people are smart or not is irrelevant, because the centerpiece and central flaw of the whole system is that they are given no discretion whatever to apply common sense to the application of the routine.
(Anecdote: The nadir of my personal experience with the system was waiting an extra three minutes at O'Hare while an Indian couple wrestled the bangle bracelets off the arms of their screaming two-year-old daughter so she would not set off the metal detector.)
So your beef against the TSA people is that they are not exercising discretion; your beef against adoption agencies is that they are.
Now, I'm sure that adoption officials do a lot of good. But it's possible to do too much as well as too little.
Certainly it is possible. Maybe some or even all adoption agencies are deny adoptions to perfectly suitable parents. But I would prefer to see some evidence that this is a problem. All that is in this record is an extrapolation from kittens.
Adoption workers should approach their jobs with an attitude of humility, recognizing that the vast majority of adoptive parents will do a better job than the foster care system.
Certainly they will. The vast majority of parents do a far, far better job of raising their biological children than any foster care system possibly could. But examples of horrifying abuse of a number of kinds are not lacking. The consequences of such abuse are so terrible that adoption agencies are naturally going to be hyper-alert to warning signs. I submit that it is society's collective judgment that they should be.
Poking fun at the TSA and the rest of the "security establishment" is very disrespectful to the memories of the Americans who have died in terrorist attacks from September 12, 2001 to today, and ... oh wait.
So wait a minute, the point here is that sometimes you don't agree with the standards imposed by another group or agency? I mean, I agree with your point about the carry-on restrictions but what larger philosophical point are you getting at? That's a real non-rhetorical question by the way.
While I don't have time to write out all the gory details, it was the ridiculously self-important adoption coordinators who sent me and my almost infertile husband running and screaming from adoption -- an option we had been quite happy and settled with otherwise -- and onto IVF (which worked out just fine).
Just as an example, the big non-religious agency in our area made you send out 100 letters -- 100! -- to friends and family asking if they, you know, just happened to know someone who had a child to place for adoption. They called this "networking", the idea being that if you weren't really to send out a letter about your family planning to 100 people, you were clearly ashamed and embarassed about adoption. Which was especially insulting to us, given that unlike most of the other couples there -- older, with failed infertility treatments behind them -- we were a couple who (initially) happily skipped right past IVF and onto adoption. There are a lot of things people are simultaneously not ashamed of and uncomfortable with discussing in a letter sent to your old next door neighbor back from when you were 10 and lived in Kentucky.
I think the larger philosophical point here is that you have to be leary of gate-keepers' rationals for manning the gates. Whatever the true optimum amount of passage may be, the fact is that they will experience their job as the task to keep people out -- for if there were no gatekeepers, everyone would just pass through. The more people they keep out, the more important their job will come to seem to be to them, even if they're originally hired just to keep a few bad apples away.
But when it comes to kittens, for chissake you can get a cat off Craigslist and if you want a breed there are breed-specific rescue organizations (for both dogs and cats) in every city. The only reason to adopt from the humane society is so that you can get cheap vet care going forward. Volunteer-run rescue operations are much better because they know the animals' personality and can get you the lapcat or the independent mouser or the Siamese you really want.
thank you Diana.
As much as it pains me to do so, I must hold my nose and defend TSA. The 1-qt ziploc bags actually do serve a purpose: to ensure a limit on the total quantity of fluids carried by each person. Would Tim Lee prefer to have each TSA goon manually add the volumes of each individual vessel on each passenger? You think that'll speed-up lines?
Just buy the damn bags and save your whining for things that actually matter.
The problem, like most things in life, is lawyers. Common sense (and a perusal of the literature on explosive devices, chemistry, etc) will tell you there is no security procedure that can accomplish these two goals at the same time:
1. Get people onto planes without waiting all day
2. Prevent dangerous materials getting on board
In a rational world a procedure is chosen which balances these two factors in an efficient manner. But this would involve applying un-PC methods like profiling (surprise, 80 year old white women are not the key terrorist demographic!). So to make sure the procedure offends no one, they come up with one that pleases no one, and is grossly inefficient at achieving both goals.
As someone mentioned above, that is not the fault of the front-line TSA grunts.
The 1-qt ziploc bags actually do serve a purpose: to ensure a limit on the total quantity of fluids carried by each person.
But that rationale crumbles when applied to someone (such as me) with one 3-ounce tube of toothpaste in his carryon, and no other liquids whatever. The rule, as stated and applied, is that the toothpaste will pass muster if it is in a ziploc bag of the proper size, but not if it is sitting there by its naked self. (And presumably not if it is in, say, a 4-ounce ziploc bag, but I haven't tested that one.)
There are not enough chemical engineers in the USA so that making them all TSA screeners would be of any help. So a few of these highly trained specialists write the rules and the folks they hire need to follow them. They simply don't have the training to be allowed a great deal of latitude in their threat assessments. Current TSA policies have kept us safe and have intercepted attempts to bring down aircraft. If you don't like the security procedures keeping us all safe, you are welcome to drive.
Current TSA policies have kept us safe and have intercepted attempts to bring down aircraft.
As for instance?
For instance, .
For instance, .
That's what I thought.
Whether those people are smart or not is irrelevant, because the centerpiece and central flaw of the whole system is that they are given no discretion whatever to apply common sense to the application of the routine.
Considering how much damage can be done through social engineering, some would argue that this is a feature, not a bug. Someone who has discretion is someone who can potentially be manipulated. It also divides up the burden of compliance by making one person's effects the responsibility of one person: the owner. If one person cannot take responsibility for packing hygiene materials of types and quantities that match the compliance requirements, and then sticking them in the requisite bag, why should TSA be better equipped to do it for 10, 20, or 30,000 people daily in addition to all of the other potential warning signs they have to watch for?
I tried twice to post a response to M. roac, but the Atlantic board won't take the URL for some reason. So I'll write this out. Try googling '2006 transatlantic aircraft plot'. It's on wikipedia
But that rationale crumbles when applied to someone (such as me) with one 3-ounce tube of toothpaste in his carryon, and no other liquids whatever.
True. But that's a limiting case, and obviously not represented by the oh-so-witty graphic in the original post.
wGraves, I was not living in a cave on August 10, 2006, thank you very much. You asserted that subsequent to that time, (at least two) attempts have been made to smuggle ingredients for liquid explosives onto airplanes in the US, and have been intercepted by the TSA. Still waiting for documentation on that one.
As I read aMouseforallSeasons' post, his point is that no matter how silly a rule is, the duty of a citizen is to comply and not complain. As in, if the TSA decides I need to wear red polka-dotted underwear on my head to board a plane, and I show up with green checkered underwear on my head, I have nobody to blame but myself. For the record, I know what a one-quart ziploc is and where to find one in the grocery store. I find it easier to buy a little tube of toothpaste at my destination and leave it at the hotel when I check out.
A few of these highly trained specialists write the rules and the folks they hire need to follow them.
I don't believe there are "highly trained specialists" who have airtight reasons for all of these rules that the rest of us just can't figure out. My suspicion is that the people higher up the chain of command are just as dumb as the baggage checkers. Certainly the interview of Kip Hawley that I linked to above suggests that's true of the guy at the very top.
TSA had nothing to do with breaking up that plot, a plot. I'll add that the planners had no idea how they'd do it, just that they wanted to do it. Read the whole wikipedia article and you'll see that there are doubts that it could even be done. Remember that many things are only explosive if constructed into a bomb. Just because a liquid is volatile or flammable doesn't mean it will explode and take down a plane.
As I read aMouseforallSeasons' post, his point is that no matter how silly a rule is, the duty of a citizen is to comply and not complain. As in, if the TSA decides I need to wear red polka-dotted underwear on my head to board a plane, and I show up with green checkered underwear on my head, I have nobody to blame but myself.
No, if that happens, I'll join in agreeing that the original rule is silly, particularly since a non-trival quantity of the male population might have trouble distinguishing between the two colors.
For the record, I know what a one-quart ziploc is and where to find one in the grocery store. I find it easier to buy a little tube of toothpaste at my destination and leave it at the hotel when I check out.
Well, then do that if you must. It's not that YOUR particular case is so unreasonable -- it's that there's no way to classify it that doesn't open the door to 10,000 other exceptions or an increased risk of a terrorist bypass through social engineering.
Seeing as how it is possible to smuggle bomb-making materials through security by disgusing them as personal effects --- the 2006 plot failed, but for a more exotic and succcessful test case by Ramzi Yousef, Google "Philippine Airlines Flight 434" -- it hardly seems unreasonable to just demand both the quantity restrictions and the facilitating clear plastic bag, and be done with it. Shoot, when I traveled last Christmas, TSA in Denver was handing them out at the back end of the security line just to make things go as smoothly as possible at the screening stations.
Thank God the TSA screenings have been protecting us from bus bombings as well. There hasn't been a successful attack on an American bus since 9/11.
Seriously, if terrorists had two brain cells to rub together, they wouldn't always go after the freaking airplanes. Or they'd use stinger missiles or similar rather than trying to sneak bombs onto airplanes.
I'm very confused here, Tim-- David Friedman explicitly was questioning the motivations of the people at that particular shelter, saying that their reason for having such a vigorous screening process was to feel important, not for the well being of the animals. And I cry foul on that, because the far simpler and more mundane possibility is that they really think it will help-- though they may be wrong. Then I did to Friedman's argument precisely what he does to those animal shelter employees, proposing a hypothetical motivation for him to write what he did that is contrary to the obvious or stated reason. And here's the thing: there's no way for him to prove otherwise. Both his assertion about animal shelter employees and mine about his pundit career are baseless, essentially mind-reading, but as no one can "show" their intentions and motives, they can't really be refuted. And I happen to think making a stink about such a thing when your argument relies on that kind of non-falsifiable, irrefutable conjecture is frankly bullshit.
I think you are misattributing some of the restrictions families encounter in adoption as restrictions imposed by the agency. But it's more complicated then that. Every country has their own distinct ever changing rules and policy's. And American agencies must work with each one and role with the constant changes in the process to keep international adoptions open. Unfortunately the rare and extreme cases of abuse by adoptive parents are the ones that get lots of media coverage and that can make the officials in foreign countries who already may feel a certain stigma about the need to allow people from other countries, with different cultural and racial heritage to adopt children their own country can't provide families for due to poor economic conditions. Many of these countries do not have access to as much information and may be limited to big over blown headlines, there are fears that in American's adopt their children for slavery, and that children may be used for sexual exploitation.
You said,
"In the case of adoption, that means that adoption agencies should err on the side of permitting adoptions unless they have good reason to think the home will be abusive or neglectful. Adoption workers should approach their jobs with an attitude of humility, recognizing that the vast majority of adoptive parents will do a better job than the foster care system."
I think reputable agencies certainly do operate this way. And I think it's damaging to assume otherwise.
Families chose the agency they will work with based on many things costs for certain services, legal fees, religious preferences, etc. No one forces you to deal with a certain agency who only does Christian adoptions.
Of course there are less reputable agencies like anythings else.
A reputable agency is not looking reasons to say "Oh no you can't adopt, you're not good enough." Really unless a person has a history as a violent unreformed criminal or has been charged as a sex offender it's unlikely the person can't find an agency that will help them become a parent.
There are many imperfections in the system like with anything but it is one where committed people work to improve the system and find families for children.
You said, "The ban on race-conscious adoption decisions in one such constraint." My husband and I are in the process of adopting through Children's Home Society in MN, I have never heard of this ban where are you getting this from?
I find your comparing the red tape involved in the adoption of children to pets or TSA security extremely frustrating. I'm not saying there are not obvious problems within each of those, but it is demeaning to compare screening pet owners to adoptive parents, or security theater (though all have their own set of frustrations) to making adoption placements that will be in the best interest of children and families.
You are making a huge generalization about adoption workers based on what? The notion that volunteers at the humane society won't work their if they have to hand out pets to just anyone? You are comparing animal shelter volunteers to trained and licenced social workers which strikes me as inadequate comparison. Please educate yourself on adoption, the adoption of children not cats. http://www.chsfs.org/
Freddie, I think this is the key passage:
"When pressed on the fact that the real effect of her shelter's policy was to discourage adoptions and thus kill animals that might otherwise have lived, she responded that if they followed the alternative policy nobody would be willing to work for the shelter, since employees would feel they were treating the animals irresponsibly."
Here she's not disputing Friedman's factual claim that it would be better for the kittens to forego the screening process. Rather, she's saying that if they tried to follow the policy that would otherwise be best for the kittens (giving them out on a first-come-first-serve basis) they wouldn't get enough volunteers to run the shelter. This isn't questioning peoples motives, it's just pointing out that the volunteers' sincere but erroneous beliefs lead to unnecessary kitten deaths.
There's a difference between questioning peoples' motives and arguing that their sincerely held beliefs are mistaken.
Every time this comes up on this blog, I say the same thing:
You can say you want TSA screeners to "exercise discretion" all you want, but if they choose to exercise discretion against you, you will scream about it. Even if their decision made perfect sense at the time.
The entire conception of what Americans consider "fair" pushes against exercising broad discretion, in favor of pro forma rules. For example, take the Miranda warning. Now, if the cops arrest a rich CEO for killing his wife, the odds are very, very good that he knows his rights, and he already has the lawyer he's going to call in mind before the police get the words "You have" out of their mouths. However, the courts will still throw out anything that was said if the cops skip it.
Now, obviously, there is very little time wasted in giving a Miranda warning, so this is a fairly trivial example. However, I think it illustrates my point that there is a strong component to "its fair if everybody is subjected to this exact rule" in society. We just don't think of it like that when it benefits us (or we call it "due process"). Ultimately, the TSA security process is an assembly line that ensures that the vast majority of people do hot have: (1) a large amount of fluid (2) no uninspected metal items on their person (3) suspicious items in their shoes or bags. And, it does this while providing legal protection to the screeners involved, because it makes it easy for them to defend their decisions to a hostile courtroom.
Now, you can argue with any of the three goals above. I personally think that the fluids one is silly, and should be dropped. But, if the decisionmaker who set the policy decides that he's going to restrict fluids, the current method works pretty well. You have an upper limit defined by a standard bag that just about everybody in the country can recognize on sight, the rule can be articulated, remembered, and enforced easily (3/3/1), and if some jackass accidentally leaves one of his bottles open when he takes it out, it will be contained in a baggie instead of shutting down a line for an hour while someone tries to clean up shampoo.
personally think that the fluids one is silly, and should be dropped.
Again, not as silly as it seems on first site; smart terrorists can readily disguise a chemistry set. Google "Philippine Airlines Flight 434". That was merely a test bomb using small quantities of fabricated materiel and it still managed to destroy a seat and rend a passenger's body in two. Taking down an aircraft using the quantities that could be housed in conventional bottles and tubes is a real possibility.
Tim Lee, the thing is, you still, after numerous posts on this, appear to have done absolutely zero research into what adoption officials do -- the human kind, not the animal kind. You're just airily hypothesizing that maybe they don't do anything worthwhile. Tell you what: what if I said I don't think currency traders do anything worthwhile? That I think their jobs could easily be performed by computers with a few algorithms and the rest is just profiteering and should be banned? You'd think that was a ridiculous claim because it's not backed up by any research or knowledge of currency traders' jobs.
See?
You're just airily hypothesizing that maybe they don't do anything worthwhile.
BS. Read the post.
Joe Bingham: Tim Lee's posts on this issue contain no information about who adoption interviewers are, what they do, or what their rate of success is in ensuring that children are not adopted by unqualified parents. They also contain no information on how market incentives currently play out in the adoption world that would allow one to draw inferences about whether more of a market for babies would be a good idea. They do contain an anecdote about a pet shelter.
Mouse:
The problem is that you can combine the quantities for two or more passengers. I don't discount the danger of liquid explosives, I just think that the time spent chasing it is not the best use of everybody's time. I understand why the TSA is wound up about it. As I commented in an earlier post on this topic, I think most bureaucratic hassles can be explained by ass-covering. Here, if a plane got downed by liquid explosives, you'd never here the end of it about how the TSA didn't protect us from a threat that had been tried before. The same thing for great discretion by TSA screeners: I wish they could have it, but I recognize it's politically impossible in modern America.
"Part of this is that they aren't very smart. Part of it is that they're trained to follow instructions without engaging in a lot of critical thought."
From the author's comment, it is apparent she never did time in the military, or worked a regular (ie: manufacturing/service) job. In real life, the maverick who runs the "Dirty Harry" line (to put critical thought into another context) to his superiors ends up in the welfare line.
After re-reading the article, it occurs to me that the main topic is supposed to be animal adoption. Starting off and peppering the article with swipes at TSA reflects poor jounalism. Trying to take literary revenge on the system for a less than pleasant experience at the airport?
I suggest Megan drive herself back to school -- I wouldn't want her attitude in the next seat to mine on the flight.