Right. He was sitting down against a bad law.
One law professor points out that United may not have been following the law at all. The rules for denying access to the plane are not the same as those for removing someone who has already boarded. [url=http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/united-cites-wrong-rule-for-illegally-de-boarding-passenger/
United is worse than Hitler!
Pretty sure “if I don’t get there, people might die” is *actually *more important than some other passenger’s super urgent marketing meeting or Easter vacation.
There is no good to come from airlines evaluating passengers’ personal lives and bumping the person they deem to be the least important to their community. It would cause ten more scandals by the end of the year.
Also, the idea that this is extra-scandalous because the guy is a doctor justifies gross dirt-digging like this.
The passenger missed a bet by not yelling “Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I’m being oppressed!”
Regards,
Shodan
Thank you Sean Spicer. You can leave the podium now.
Wrong. The essence of civil disobedience is to not cooperate with the arresting officials. Folks who participate in CD specifically do not resist arrest. They go limp, which is not the same thing at at all.
I didn’t see enough of the video in this case to judge what the guy on the plane did, but “resisting arrest” is absolutely not part of Civil Disobedience. Perhaps you were thinking of Uncivil Disobedience.
Yup. Exactly this. Accepting punishment after breaking a law is what gives civil disobedience its moral force. Cases like this are borderline, of course, because there’s no law broken unless there’s some resistence to the enforcing/arresting authority.
True - and I knew that, too.
That said, based on my reading of the video, the guy in fact did not resist arrest, but rather refused to cooperate, so my point still stands. Refusing to comply with the police while at the same time not actively resisting their actions is legitimate civil disobedience.
OK. It’s just that CD has such an elevated position in the pantheon of political action, I wanted to make sure it was not tarnished. Thanks for accepting the correction.
Like I said, I didn’t see enough of the video to tell one way or the other, but what I did see seemed like he was not resisting, but being passive and forcing the cops to do all the work. Of course, this wasn’t exactly Selma, Alabama in the 1950s either.
Not sure the restaurant example helps you because typically a restaurant will try and do something for the patron ie comp their meal, free drinks, gift certificate if there’s some sort of blowup, just like United tried ti do.
My point is it’s not like the patron was told to get out and no compensation for his inconvenience was offered.
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It reminds me so much of Rosa Parks-Remember when they picked her at random,offered her several hundred dollars, a meal and nice hotel room, and she told them to take someone else because she was more important, then started screaming as loud as she could when they tried to remove her?
The similarities are absolutely astonishing!
Or they could <drumroll> stop the greedy-ass practice of overbooking and avoid these issues altogether.
Not that many similarities.
The only one that I can really see is that the carrier resorted to calling the police to employ violence rather than figure a way to settle the issue themselves.
Have you or your relatives ever have occasion to call the police? If so, did you tell them to employ violence or intend for them to employ violence?
I don’t believe it was actually overbooking. It was a flight crew that was deadheading.
Someone, or ones, really dropped the ball in not alerting the gate agents that the crew would be bumping people. If they had, 4 passengers would have been bumped before getting on the plane. Still pretty crappy IMHO, but not nearly as bad as letting someone on and THEN bumping them.
I have called the police on a few occasions.
I was a manger at a fast food restaurant, and sometimes there were unruly customers.
But, I did not call them because someone was taking up a table without eating, or refusing to leave at closing time, I only called them when a customer was creating an unsafe environment, with either threats of, or actual violence. In those cases, responding by asking for force to be employed on my behalf is reasonable.
I most especially did not call the police because of a mistake that I or my company made, and were expecting a customer to make up for.
Now, to be fair, there were occasions when people called the police on themselves, but that was because they were stupid.
I’m arguing against the point that if someone is offered any compensation they should be happy about it. Clearly he did not value the compensation more than his seat (if any was offered…I haven’t heard that mentioned in the reports I read).
In terms of the restaurant, the restaurant can throw any person out any time without any compensation, just like on a plane. But you’d be rightly pissed if you’re enjoying a meal and for no apparent reason they want you out. And that’s a situation where there is no real inconvenience to you.
If someone refused to leave, did you offer them enough money to leave, or did you just sit there until he rambled off on his own? If it was the former then that was your decision to make(although I doubt most restaurateurs have followed this magnanimous route), but if it was the former, if you decided to just wait the customer out, then you must realize that airlines absolutely do not have this option.