Not every interaction with authority is a fight with The Man. But if you were looking for a place where idiotic corporate rules and treating people like cattle in the name of dubiously-successful “security” reign supreme you couldn’t find somewhere better than an airport. The whole thing is an egalitarian nightmare.

This is the dichotomy of state capitalism, which favors complacency and maintenance to preserve the status quo. End result is things don’t get fixed. They get band-aided. Anything that jeapordizes margin is intolerable. This will continue to be the case until we can dispense with the notion that profit and infinite…

I used to work at a call center that received calls from all over the world. You always could tell the Americans within 2 minutes of the call beginning because Americans are generally really unpleasant. I’ve actually worked in a few call centers outside of the US and in every one there was, I shit you not, a section…

This is why we’re in constant awe around you.

Okay, that does it. We are officially living in the Onionest Timeline.

to the idiots in the greys:

Right? Like, who likes airlines? F****ing no one. They are the worst. And yet people are jumping through hoops to explain why United had no choice but to physically remove this guy (hurting him in the process).

What blows my mind are all the people saying some variation on “ok, so the paying customer was a doctor on his way to see patients in Louisville, so what, I’m sure there are other doctors in Louisville.” Yeah, and I’m equally sure there are four other United ticket-punchers available in Louisville too. Somehow that…

did you watch the video? The man’s fellow passengers were yelling in outrage at his treatment, because it was pretty clear it could be any of them. I understand wrestling off a drunk and abusive SOB for everyone’s safety and quiet travel. This was a corporation dismissing customer service for their own, easily…

In 1973 the Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Watergate.

You there - You with the nuanced understanding of this situation and its non-relation to actual resistance to actual tyranny and/or human rights abuses - You shut your whore mouth!

Every time you try to make something idiot proof, the world builds a better idiot.

Also: Chicago and St. Louis are like, 5 hours drive away from each other. Walk down to the Hertz and rent a car. Put them on a bus. Or a train. They didn’t have anything they had to do before the next morning, unlike the people who paid for a ticket, who likely had connecting flight.

This is what is so baffling to me, too (other than the obvious objective lack of humanity). What could have possibly been worth this kind of ubiquitous negative publicity?? I literally cannot imagine, from the perspective of an airline employee, why forceably removing a passenger was even an option they considered. Th…

I work in product design and I can completely concur. Half the time you feel as though you’re trying to protect people from themselves.

Real talk: for about three decades, I thought the repeat part was just a scam.

I agree with you on principle, completely. But, as HamNo points out, at that point the corporation might have decided to shoot somebody. I’m sure they would have doled out some more beatings.

what pisses me off about this is the whole employee transfer thing. that united would rather 1) offer $3200 for people to disembark to save, what, $2000 flying the employees on another airline? and very obviously 2) beat the fucking shit out of a guy and settle the inevitable multi-million dollar lawsuit that results…

A lot of that has to do with a belief in the Just World Fallacy. When faced with injustice, we blame the victim so we feel better.

I spend a lot of time in consumer research. Can confirm.