Because it is my personal experience. Because I have colleagues, friends, and rivals who have it in their personal experiences.
Well, all righty then. You should consider being a fiction writer. The best of those, it seems to me, have been people with a rich and unusual panoply of life experiences.
My personal life experience can beat up your personal life experience.
The fact of the matter is that the newspapers don’t want a story that begins, “American white-appearing man was removed from a flight today for talking about how Evander Holyfield got his ass whupped. When he became confrontational and irate a warrant check revealed that he had an unpaid parking ticket and was turned over to a neighboring jurisdiction.” There is no fun there.
A better story is, “Hardworking American of mideastern descent was wrongfully detained from making his flight today even though he is a doctor, the head of a charity, and midwives puppies in his spare time.”
One doesn’t have to work too long safeguarding public safety before one realizes that the press is not about disseminating truth, they are about selling advertisements. One way that happens is to get people to read and become outraged. On a national level and a local level the truth is always a casualty of the press.
I am not dogging the press any more than they dog me and my colleagues. I am sure they see what I do as necessary, just as I think that they are a necessary check against the abuse of power, but the fact remains that the press are often wrong and sometimes even (gasp!) deliberately or negligently so.
It is part of the game. Agencies that protect the public are by definition institutions. Every story you read in the paper will be about how some institution wronged some individual. That resonates. That sells. That never gets old.
I spent a few weeks with an Egyptian colleague last Summer. So here is my challenge – go to any African, mideastern or South Asian nation and have a discussion about the integrity or safety of the airplane while waiting in line. Report back about how you were treated while investigated or detained. It should make for some enlightening reading.
I accept, but only if I can wear my “Mohammed cartoon” t-shirt and pack my rectum tightly with hashish first.
Infidel uniform and hashish aren’t necessary, but don’t be too surprised if you read that in the paper the next day.
One good thing about US newspapers is that they seldom cooperate in framing a suspect.
Last time I checked, we’re always hearing stories about schools banning kids for wearing certain types of clothing and such. It’s not exactly “uncommon to hear of”, or what nonsense.
But you just keep on telling yourself that.
Out of curiosity, are these white people then refused service by the airline even after the FBI clears them? Since that element seems to be really fuelling much of the outrage over the incident under discussion in this thread.
Thanks, eduardo.
Right. Got it. People get nervous and report anything and everything in the immediate aftermath of disasters or terrorist attacks or shooting sprees.
Now, how many people do you think were calling in to report black men driving white Broncos seven years after the OJ chase?
I’ve visited a dozen Middle Eastern nations and have yet to meet any security personnel who spoke English.
You’ve never been to Dubai?
WTC is not the sole inspiration for fear and anxiety. That singular event happened seven years ago, but that wasn’t the last we heard of jihadism. There have been repeated arrests and convictions of terrorists and fellow travelers since 2001. I can think of arrests in Michigan, NYC, Texas, South Carolina and Florida – that’s just off the top of my head in the last year alone.
But hey, this is America, two things we do really well here are outrage and sanctimony.
DSeid, you are an idiotic tool. You got your ass completely handed to you, and you try to respond with this weaselly goal-post moving bullshit. I hope from now on no one on the SDMB takes anything you say at face value or ever gives you the benefit of the doubt–whatever you are saying could be just another figment of your fevered imagination that you will then fail to give up when presented with direct evidence to the contrary.
Also, if you haven’t seen my posts before, you should know I’m no great defender of Barack Obama or Liberal, so I really am responding to the substance of you being a dumbass and am not using this post as a proxy for the defense of either of them.
(I haven’t been reading this thread and I haven’t read any posts after this, so sorry if this has been covered.)
Oh I’ve seen your posts before Rand Rover. That’s why I don’t give a shit what you think.
Similarly I’ve seen Lib’s posts before. In his case I have reason to have some respect for his thoughts and opinions which why honestly I feel so dumbfounded and flabbergasted by the vehemence of his response. I still do not understand why he interprets my difference of opinion with him as such a severe and underhanded attack on Obama. But so be it.
Yes, but only overland. I can tell you the airport staff in Abu Dhabi don’t speak English though; only the airline staff do.
What widely reported arrests and/or convictions are these?
It’s as I explained. There’s just no point in it even if it were true, but on top of that it isn’t. I don’t think there is anyone more critical of Obama than I. But I think bigotry is an extremely serious charge. Before leveling it, you should have not just a suspicion or a gut feeling, but a mound of evidence. The man has monumentally critical things to tackle, and sniping at him for something you had perceived way back during the campaign just seems so… petty. Don’t you understand that?
If it helps, AirTran says (Source, 880 AM) they paid for the flight they miss and the flight they took.
But I didn’t call Obama a bigot! I barely even really sniped at him.
My point was not even really directed at Obama. It was an aside comment of how pervasive Islamophobia is that good people really have little choice but to make concessions to it. Actually more subdued than the aside comment I made when Powell first came out with his endorsement of Obama and (to my ear) used that pulpit to attack Islamophobia strongly. (post # 36)Now again, you are entitled to see things differently than I do, and to have experienced the campaign differently than I did. Maybe I imagined all those times of him responding to the “charge” or implication of his being a Muslim with responses that amounted to merely “No, I am a good Christian man” and not much more, and just missed all the many times he took on the clear implicit Islamophobia attached to the charge - I don’t watch Larry King much. But your reaction of calling me a troll (in another thread), a liar (including doing so in GD in an apparently acceptable manner by merely saying that I “made stuff up”), and the extremity of your response throughout, that this mild aside comment buried in an internet backwater somehow threatens Obama’s ability to govern (who knew I had such power?) is surprising to me to say the least.
No I don’t understand that. And there’s no more point going in circles about it. I’ll just stay confused as to why you got so pissed off about this.
From this outside perspective, I think you guys are closer together than you realize, and arguing past one another.
Basically, Obama did as much as is realistically possible for someone in his position to have done to condemn the Islamophobic point of view. Liberal is applauding him for maxing out the “realistically possible action” meter (after all, he certainly could have done a lot less; look at McCain). DSeid is observing, with sadness, just how low that “maximum on the realistically possible action” meter is.
Is that fair?
Thanks for re-starting a particularly uninteresting argument that was pretty well settled. Maybe next time, actually read the thread before dropping your pearls on us.