I assume you meant “massage management.”

In a perfect world, the MMORPG community management folk will meet up with government decision makers, and it’ll be glorious.

In our imperfect world, positions of power are not rewarded based off qualifications, but rather our imperfect ability to assess individuals.

yunk:

Why do people think they can push through awful policies through better message management? You can help along hard policies, but if the policy is bad to begin with all the message management in the world won’t help.

Because you can.

D506:

yunk:

Why do people think they can push through awful policies through better message management? You can help along hard policies, but if the policy is bad to begin with all the message management in the world won’t help.

Because you can.

Only to a certain extent. In some cases it has been tried and the push back has been too much. The thing is though if you follow the suggested route you don’t tick people off nearly as much even if they do push back to stop the policy. They chalk it up as ‘another hairbrained idea’ instead of ‘you’re now a nazi, pedo, rapist, perverted homosexual may you burn to death slowly’.

I am trying really hard to understand what benefit the TSA gains from people liking them. There are already people trying to work with putting forth a good appearance (http://www.tsa.gov/who_we_are/index.shtm), but in the end they are still a government program. Their Community Manager “IS” our elected officials. Having worked in the government, my guess is what you see on that TSA website is the best they are budgeted and allowed to do. Would be nice to have extra staff at tax payer expense for every government organization, but imagine our ire as voters when the politicians stopped pretending to talk to us because “that’s what the CMs are for”

What I believe the intent of her point was is very valid… but for all practical purposes we have the CMs for TSA we dream we could have in MMOs…

one’s we pick

The A Japanese show made a parody of the TSA. It was frighteningly accurate.

Iconic:

Not really. It can help, but bad policy is bad policy, and if it’s bad enough, no one will tolerate it.
The problem in TSA’s case is that they actually don’t have a bad policy. Either we’re serious about airport security or we’re not. I’d much rather get patted down and scanned at an airport than have some undefined cabal of law enforcement tapping my phone or accessing my financial records without any over site, but that’s just me.
If they’d implemented these policies immediately in the wake of 9/11 people would have been cheering and wondering why they hadn’t done it sooner, but almost 10 years removed, people have forgotten.

I’ll take false dichotomies for 5000 please Alex!

You don’t need to grope someone to make them safe.

geldonyetich:

In our imperfect world, positions of power are not rewarded based off qualifications

That explains Obama. Fortunately he is nothing more than a one-term mistake like Carter.

Not Richard Garriot:

geldonyetich:

In our imperfect world, positions of power are not rewarded based off qualifications

That explains Obama. Fortunately he is nothing more than a one-term mistake like Carter.

Technically, it explains the faults of any individual in an elected position.

Obama’s a bit tricky to criticize considering the greater fault of his presidency comes from the Republicans resisting at every turn.

Consequently, if I could fault the man at anything, it’s that he chose to try to humor his opposition instead of risk plunging the country into civil war by kicking their ass… but it’s hard to call avoiding civil war a “fault.”

I’m not convinced people want it both ways. Maybe people who are really afraid of terrorists but never fly want these measures, for security’s sake. Maybe the minority that flies a lot is willing to risk it. If you get 60% of the US supporting these kinds of searches, who’s to say it isn’t the 60% that doesn’t fly, until we get a better poll that asks that question?

Here’s the problem I have with airport security – all the measures are enacted AFTER someone has tried that tactic and, with one very notable exception, failed anyway without TSA intervention. So over the entire War on Terror, these procedures have in fact not prevented a single attack and therefore not made us any safer whatsoever.

There’s an annual competition that points out the flaws in the screening process and demonstrates that what’s keeping us safe isn’t invasive searches, but measures that prevent terrorists from turning up at the airport in the first place.

Iconic:

Let’s put it this way: There are enough people that want each thing that there’s nothing the TSA can do that will actually appease people.
In the short term, they could just say “screw it” and dial back on invasive searches, scans, etc, and that works fine until the first time a plane blows up. They can do invasive searches, and the more they prevent any thing from happening, the more convinced people are that invasive searches aren’t needed because nothing happens.
I honestly believe that most people don’t want to think about it and don’t want to be inconvenienced, but as soon as some thing happens they’ll be outraged and demand drastic over reaction. Just like they did when 9/11 happened.

9/11 and most of the subsequent attacks could have been prevented/mitigated by acting on the intelligence that had already been gathered and by better actual counter-terrorism. Not by feeling up one out of every few dozen passengers on the off-chance that the guy you’ve pulled out of the line at random could be a terrorist.

The current security theatre makes us not one whit safer. It’s not about inconvenience vs safety it’s about actual safety vs pantomime pretend safety. I begrudge the resources and attention lavished on it and it is being sold to us dishonestly.

Gx1080. Hush now, adults are talking.

Gx1080:

Many people are noticing that the price for a Multi-cultural shibboleth is a police state to keep the different tribes from killing each other.
So…why we have the Multi-cultural shibboleth in the first place?
Letting MUSLIMS get in the US is fucking retarded.

There are so many things wrong here that I don’t really know where to start, so I’ll just point out that religiously-motivated terrorists aren’t usually American, and the ones that are, are recruited online by people who aren’t in the US.

But tell me, to whom would you restrict entry to your monocultural paradise?