Sometimes there are fights where one group says “iterative progress” and the other says “no, it’s all or nothing” (my interpretation). For example, people that don’t like GiveDirectly because it reinforces capitalism, or whale treadmills because the whales need to be in the wild, or humaneness standards for farmed meat because it reinforces eating meat.
Twice now I’ve gone through airport security while they were in express mode, which means you get an x-ray rather than the pornoscanner, you can leave your shoes on your feet and your laptop in its bag, and there’s a k9 unit, which I assume is looking for bombs. This is great because it’s faster and more convenient and spares me my usual protest groping*. As an incrementalist, I should be happy about this, but I’m not.
My ultimate goal is not just “not get groped or irradiated”, it’s “stop spending billions of dollars to waste people’s time with absolutely zero compensating benefits”, and beyond that “not have a government for which this kind of toxicity is standard.” However much I’m enjoying not taking my shoes off, this change does not get us any closer to the latter two goals. I suspect this is what the [people I previously categorized as anti-incrementalist] felt about the incremental improvements I approved of: that they were harm mitigation at best but did not move them closer to their goals. So I’m a lot more sympathetic to them now.
*I don’t know if the pornoscanners are actually dangerous or not, but I do know the TSA doesn’t know either and I will punish them for their decision however I can.
Aceso Under Glass 