Well, besides the part where HE told the world he got kicked off a plane for being too fat and made a big deal about it to the world.
I know when something embarrasses me I make a point of telling the world about it.
Yes, the blog where he is blowing up his cheeks. You can compare his general facial features including his neck to the other picture.
He doesn’t understand why the flight attendant put 2 large people in a 3 seat arrangement? Really? He doesn’t understand that on a flight that is almost full that they are trying to accommodate everybody on the plane by only burning 1 empty seat between 2 people who are too big for 1 seat?
Or you vent to your friends about it online, or you rant on the Dope. He happened to do that onto Twitter. It’s just when you’ve got 1.6million followers you gotta realize that your rant’s gonna be heard by more than just your fan base there…
As much as I loath paparazzi, he brought the tent city of photo nazi’s down on his own head. Maybe there’s a new word in there somewhere… paparnazis?
Kevin Smith is the type of guy who writes about his explosive diarreha and having sex with his wife. He’s not someone who has a concept of not sharing personal details. He also lets criticism get to him really deeply.
I think that’s the reason he can not let this go. It’s not a crusade against SWA, it’s that after he made the Twitter post, he read all these things where people called him fat and took SWA’s side. And that’s Smith can’t let this go. He has to make Twitter posts and blog entires, and podcasts and Youtube videos until people stop saying he is too fat.
I was thinking of that aspect of this the other day.
Lets say someone accusses you of something pretty bad that would really offend you. Your a thief or lier or cheater. And its about a specific event, not a generalization of your lifestyle. Baring all those kind of “special” circumstances that philosophers and dopers love to argue about, its generally either true or not.
If it IS true you are rightfully embarrassed and still probably angry at the accuser. If it is NOT true you are really angry at the accusser and try will desperately to show it to not be the case.
I think someone in his position defaults to that kind of thinking. The problem is, him being “fat” is not really a binary question. Yeah, maybe he is not mega fat, but he is STILL fat. He may not think he is THAT fat and maybe he is just borderline or a bit under when it comes to airline seating, and that may be true. The problem is someone hasnt “accussed” him of some that can be shown to be false or even declared for that matter to be either true or false for a large range of values.
IMO thats why he is so upset about it. He can’t really show it to be blatantly wrong and in combination with the binary mindset of its either true or not its just gonna be a mental upset no matter what.
Only for people who don’t see anything wrong with publicly humiliating and shaming people based upon policing of their bodies. For those of us who do, the wrong here is plain on its face.
I was talking about the fact that it is blatantly obvious he is not skinny. He aint gonna convince anybody of that one (baring the possiblity he has really slimmed down since the pictures that have been shown here).
Yeah, there are better and worse ways to tell someone they are fat. But it doesnt change the fact that they are.
The same goes for many other measures of a person in life. It also sucks to be told you arent tall enough, or smart enough, or strong enough or rich enough or whatever it is…but thats life. We dont pretend those things dont matter one iota for some things. I dont see why being too fat to be on a plane without an extra seat should get an exemption either.
And his whole “I dont get why they tried to stick two fat people next to each other with an empty seat between em” thing is just plain stupid. Makes me question his intelligence, his objectivity, and IMO hints at a case of denial as to his actual condition.
The issue isn’t how many seats, it’s the crappy and insulting customer service. I listened to the first smodcast, and am listening to the second one now. Both Kevin Smith and this chick have flown many times on this airline. Their customer service is atrocious. I’m not gonna try to paraphrase, the links to first person sources are already posted. It’s not how many seats, it’s how they were treated. I’d be mad too.
I listened but I have to admit I was a bit distracted.
No snarking or sarcasm here, I really want to see if I’m getting it from someone else who listened: It seemed to me that Kevin Smith was on the aisle seat and they put her in the window seat in his row so there was a seat between them. Then (if I’m getting this right) they took her off the plane and told her that she couldn’t sit there because she needed two seats and since he paid for the aisle and center (that no one was using) that she couldn’t stay where she was.
Is that right or where did I mess up?
If that’s what really happened, that is *truly *fucked up.
Why is that?
He paid for that seat. She did not. Not everyone likes being asked to share something they paid for themselves, nor do they like people assuming that they would automatically share something they paid for. Kinda like all the skinny people that would like to be able to use the narrow 20 inches or so of airline seat width they paid for.
They put her in the seat. Then told her that she shouldn’t be allowed to sit in the seat. Then tried to get her to ask permission from Smith to sit in the seat – her seat, not his seat, and only her seat because she was made to sit there, when she wanted to be in another row altogether, where she sits on every flight she takes.
And all of this occurred under the assumption made on one gate agent’s part that she also needed two seats, which she hasn’t on countless previous flights on Southwest and other airlines, including a recent flight to Maui.
The young woman, Natali, had just come off of the first leg of her trip, Boise -> Oakland. Smith had flown up to Oakland from Burbank the morning of that same day. Both had done so in one seat. So either there was some kind of anomaly in the force of gravity in Oakland that evening that was making people magically fatter than they’d been on planes mere hours before, or someone at that airport on that evening was having a major problem and an extremely poor ability to determine how big people actually are in comparison to the seats.
And that is the biggest problem with Southwest’s implementation of their policy. A regular passenger who flies with the airline multiple times in a year, even in a month, runs into a single gate agent somewhere who has a twitchy eye about fat people and all of a sudden they’re being yanked off of a plane like a freaking terrorist. Random gate agents shouldn’t have that power. If there’s a determination to be made it needs to happen before people are on the planes, surrounded by other passengers, and it needs to be done by one key person on each shift in each airport, someone with special training for the purpose and a position of authority, like the customer service supervisor on the shift. And if you flew into an airport in one seat, then you fly out of that airport in one seat, whether it was an hour before, a day before or a week before.
Maybe I’m not understanding. I’m picturing something like this:
[Window][Fat woman][-------------][Kevin Smith]-Aisle-
And they kicked her off because she would spill over into the empty seat? Seems like that would be the ideal solution for this exact problem: Two fat people with the middle empty. Consolidates the wasted space and no one gets squished.