Zephyr Teachout has to be the early front runner for name of the year, right?

Because mass transit serves a public good, making profitability and popularity entirely unimportant. Do fire stations make a profit? Look at that valuable land they’re taking up! All that inefficient sitting around the workers do!

That’s not what trespassing is and fine print on an airplane ticket is not a law.

Um...Citizens United was a Supreme Court decision. The hobby lobby case (which decided corporations were people) was a court case. Money defined as speech was the result of a Supreme Court case. Dude what?

The man did not scream in protest of the airline’s decision to remove him from the plane. He screamed in reaction to being phsyically accosted. He peacefully resisted the airline’s order to deplane. As a result, he was physically removed. I don’t think this is fucking cool, because I am an average human, and I am…

Why should laws that are wrong be followed? What law are you even referring to?

Does it occur to you that blind subservience to laws and regulations that are in need of change is exactly what reinfornces them? The cops and corporations the size of United are terrifying behemoths of instituational power against which we as individual civilians have absolutely no chance in almost any situation.

You’re a fool if you think the current airlines aren’t lavishly subsidized by taxpayers.

If the position is wrong and shouldn’t even be legal, why are you defending state actors violently implementing its enforcement?

And the supposedly lawful order from a cop who’s been taken off duty for some mysterious reason that couldn’t have anything to do with him doing something wrong wouldn’t have been issued if the airline hadn’t tried to eject a paying customer. Doesn’t that seem like a good and decent solution? Let people who have paid…

- He didn’t initiate or try to win a physical altercation with law enforcement. He gave no indication whatsoever that he thought he could win a physical altercation with law enforcement. It was the fucking police who wanted to show everyone that he could not win a physical altercation with them.

To all the people who argue that United could remove this man for any reason at anytime, read the Contract of Carriage very carefully. It’s right here:

I mean, I can only see what’s shown on the video, not what’s leading up to it; but it looks to me like the guy started screaming when the cops physically bore down on him and started to rip him out of the seat with force. It doesn’t appear that they removed him like that BECAUSE he started screaming.
 
You’re basically…

You don’t have any dignity to start out with if you’re just going to do whatever someone tells you to do.

That the US tends to suck at basic public services isn’t really an argument against basic public services, but an argument against the American way of thinking about these things.

He was screaming because he was being popped in the face, not the other way around. That you’d sit there and take it makes you the loon.

Its the same with marijuana laws. Republicans should be for abolishing them, because they are very much the definition of big government. Libertarians should be against them, for obvious reasons. Democrtats should be against them because they prop up the for-profit prison system, and tend to disproportionately…

I maintain these airlines have no idea how boned they are once self-driving cars are the norm and at least as safe as driving, which WILL happen. Any traveling less than 12 hours I bet most people will happily let the cars drive.

The frustrating thing about the response to this situation is the refusal of groups with normally opposing political ideologies to find common ground on this one situation (at least on my Twitter feed, which I will of course assume is a completely representative sample of collective attitudes).…

Voting is for suckers. No one pays you to do that. Writing nonsense screeds on the interwebs, on the other hand, pays the fucking bills.