PS: Chinese airports: Infrastructure is being built like mad, as you have heard. One place that had only 4-5 gates about 20 years ago, now has not just 10 x that many, but THREE TERMINALS!

The Shanghai and Peking big airports (each city has also a smaller airport for more domestic service) are very shiny and new. However, the layers of security are even more frustrating now. They weren't 20 years back. Is it a good experience for people? I suppose if you're completely down with, or past worrying about, the constant picture taking, tracking, paying with your tele(?)phone, you may think it's just great. I don't.

This doesn't preclude Chinese people from doing their usual wedging themselves into the lines, or getting a word in while the agent was still supposed to be helping you.

However, and this is a big one, fist-fights, real shoving, and weave pulling ("Weave pulling"? Hell, we make the weaves. That's our hair!) There are no fights over Kung Pao chicken, much less Bojangles...

PS: Mr. Hail, I left a few long comments on TUR iSteve threeads, but nobody seemed to care too much. I'm not sure if I wrote much about the big hub airports though.

Though things are getting shoddier in general, and that's what we see, that's not just an American thing. I can't compare to too many places around the world, as, for one thing, I'm usually in a hurry and can't take the time to look around. London Heathrow. I was not particularly impressed, and the shitshow that was the security line there was quite the scene for me - not as bad as that story from past Christmas though.

That's the thing - it's the security theater, sorry, theatre (in London) that's the most miserably aspect of flying for most people. You may miss a flight if things don't go right. You don't have your boarding pass, the line is extremely long, one of the machines breaks down, who knows? It's stressful. (You ask the average passenger though what he thinks of the whole thing - or I'll make a direct statement - and it's almost always "Yeah, well, we have to do this, all because of some few bad people, you know ...")

Also, BTW, Mr. Kennan was dead wrong about the arab thing. It sounds like he wrote that just around (might be before) the 2nd "Oil Crisis". Nope, instead of being controlled by OPEC, Americans developed some innovative ways to get oil out of our lands and seas. Then, we just started letting Arabs in by the (eventually) millions. Kennan obviously didn't see the latter coming. Predictions are hard. If you don't make them, you're not putting your "money where your mouth is".

PS

You think flying in the USA is bad, you should look into brawls that repeatedly break out on or in conjunction with cruise ships.

Yes, the frequency corresponds to the degree of diversity.

🕉

PS

I don't think I ever had the (dis)pleasure of flying Spirit Airlines.

I am interested in how they'd fit into the bigger "decline of quality of air travel" story, discussed more-or-less often here at PS. People often point to U.S. air travel in recent decades as a symbol of decline.

I'; copy my Sailer comment on this subject from a few weeks ago:

Quote (omitting direct discussion of Arkansas "XNA" airport)

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It’s funny how major US airports in major metropolitan areas tend to be centers (and “vectors”) of racial chaos and dysfunction, even if “just” in controlled ways. Not many “planes drop out of the sky,” but very many small things are made worse.

The US news-cycle now has “airport/air-travel dysfunction” as a regular staple item. The latest is CNN and these guys began “rolling TSA wait-time averages” at top airports. (Houston was by far the worst with wait times well into the hours, not minutes.)

Airport/air-travel dysfunction is an irony given the high-trust, high-organizational, high-technology culture that built (was able to build and sustain) an air-travel system at all.

A symbol of Western retreat before Diversity. What is Diversity? One thing that it is, is a lowering of standards, kind of across the board, by everyone.

Everyone knows that most big US airports are terrible by world standards, especially adjusting for the US’ high per-capita GDP. It’s starting with difficulties in getting to the airport, in many cases. Lots of other countries seem to have “making access to the airport simple, straightforward, and fast” a priority, but the US generally doesn’t.

The decline of standards; the competency crisis in small, often- or generally-overlookable ways; things not quite working; things not looking nice; a lack of convenient facilities indicating poor planning; things never getting around to getting modernized, even in doable ways that wouldn’t necessarily require major overhauls or funding. US airports today are signs of Multicultacracy, and the low standards that come with it.

Whites tend to make “a lot with a little.” Lower-standard Diversity tends to male “a little with a lot.”

The first person I’m aware of to make such these observations specifically and directly about major US airports was George Kennan. I believe he was writing about LAX as eastly as ca.1979. offer this, too, as a data-point for people’s mental-map timelines of Wokeness and decline (with the caveat that Kennan (1904-2005) was by then an older man from an all-White America, and even as a younger man was on the crotchety side). (...)

I think Edward Abbey (1927-1989), the environmentalist who became a pro-White racialist in later life, said similar things in the 1980s about big US airports.

(end quote)

Originally published at:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/isteve-open-thread-21/#comment-7572704

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The commenter "res" found this from the published excerpts from the Kennan diary:

(quote, George Kennan)

April 24, 1978

I sit, in the plane, next to an oriental woman, with a sweet, well-behaved child. I am waited on, or at least offered things, by one colored girl and two or three white ones. I remember that I am to visit, day after tomorrow, the Los Angeles area, where the majority of the births are to people of Latin origin, and where people of British origin, from whose forefathers the constitutional structure and political ideals of the early America once emerged, are not only a dwindling but a disintegrating minority. They are of course lost, as a cultural element and as a source of tradition and identity, but they are no more lost, in this sense, than anyone else. The Latin, Levantine, African, and Oriental elements that now make up so large a part of this population: they, too, are destined, for the most part, to lose their character, their traditions, their unique coloration, and to melt into a vast polyglot mass, devoid of all three things: a sea of helpless, colorless humanity, as barren of originality as it is of nationality, as uninteresting as it is unoriginal—one huge pool of indistinguishable mediocracy and drabness. Exceptions may be only the Jews and the Chinese, who tend to avoid intermarriage, and, for a time, the Negroes as well. Could this mean that these three minorities are destined to subjugate and dominate all as an uneasy but unavoidable triumvirate the rest of society—the Chinese by their combination of intelligence, ruthlessness, and ant-like industriousness; the Jews by their sheer determination to survive as a culture; the Negroes by their ineradicable bitterness and hatred of the whites?

… On the movie screen, as I write this, a “short” is in progress, a documentary entitled: “The Arabs are Coming.” A misleading title, this. Very few of them will come. They will give orders to us—Chinese, Jews and Negroes included—from afar, in all matters that seriously affect their interests, and we will shut our big mouths and meekly obey, because we are the victims of an addiction (the automobile), and they are the people who control the means by which that addiction can be satisfied. They will not come to us. They will merely own us, and prescribe the limits within which our lives are permitted to operate.

(end quote, Kennan, 1978)

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PS

https://i0.wp.com/www.barnhardtmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/img_3421.jpg

https://i0.wp.com/www.barnhardtmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/img_3420.jpg

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PS: Indeed. They are a spirited bunch, those passengers. Vibrant, almost...

PS

That’s the Spirit!

☯️