Now, I get as annoyed as the next guy when traffic slows down for miles at a toll plaza. Particularly in Chicagoland. But these two took things to a new extreme...
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17 comments:
there is a distinct lack of "no passing" signs located within the toll booth.
Yikes!
I agree with Coye. How was anyone supposed to know that two cars couldn't fit through there at once?
doesn't THIS deserve an "inanity" tag?
on a completely different note:
Don't taze me bro! Don't taze me!
Since Dave brought it up, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert both covered the tazer incident last night. Stewart was somewhat amusing, but Colbert's commentary on the phenomenon of Solitarity was spot on.
Solitarity, friends! Solitarity!
As long as we're talking about police over-reactions, did you see the story of the 19-year-old MIT student who was arrested at gunpoint (sub-machinegun point, actually) because she wore a sweatshirt with flashy lights on it when she went to pick up her boyfriend from Logan? Here's a bit of commentary from the Mass state police:
"Had she not followed the protocol, we might have used deadly force." He added, "She's lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue."
The protocal being, when someone brown shows up at the airport, call the cops (she is a slightly "swarthy"-looking Hawaiian). I wasn't aware that being a geek was a capital crime.
Dave:
For some reason, if you were in a position where you were about to be tazed, I picture you saying exactly what that guy said.
Agreed. Dave, please become a pop culture celebrity. I'll post the videos to YouTube myself. And even blog about how great you are.
It's totally worth it.
All you really need is an outlandish situation and a catchy phrase, after all.
so all I need is a catch phrase...
ok, Coye, how much of this had to do with race (I'll grant some, most likely, since it is rarely if ever out of the equation in American socio-activity), and how much had to do with the fact that she had a small , rectangular metal object wired to a battery and stuck on her jacket, and a colored substance all over her hands? Seriously, what would you think if you were in the airport and someone walks past you in such a gettup? "Hmmmm, crowed place, person with an electronic box strapped to them: oh, yes, of course: and art student!"?
I think I'd rather have a terrorist run by me at an airport than an art student. You can't trust those pretentious artsy types.
I'm not going to claim that she's the sharpest tack in the box or that this was the best idea she ever had, but in no way is leveling an (several?) assault rifle at someone in a public space a defensible first reaction to this situation.
Yes, it was a bad idea, but, no, she isn't "lucky" to be in jail instead of a body bag. That was an excessively violent and dangerous reaction (both for her and for the other people in the airport), and the police are lucky they didn't murder an innocent citizen whose biggest crime is a bad fashion sense.
And before we start justifying this reaction using the rhetoric of "anti-terrorism", we should remember that the term terrorism originally described state actions-- actions like threatening the lives of citizens for committing minor infractions or for doing nothing at all.
Terror was and still is primarilly a tool of the state. It wasn't apathy that kept the other people at Kerry's speech from helping the obnoxious but benign student. No one stepped in because they would have been thrown to the ground, tasered, arrested and charged with assaulting an officer or some similar crime. While that might arguably be unjustified self-interest, it is far from simply not caring.
Necessity is the tyrrant's plea. I refuse the offered dichotomy of islamist terror or state terror; both are radically opposed to peace.
And I think I agree with Aeijtzsche. I haven't dated any terrorists, but they can't be any crazier than the artists I've been seeing...
"the police are lucky they didn't murder an innocent citizen whose biggest crime is a bad fashion sense." Yes, that's the right reading; and the police statement is repugnant. I was not attempting to exonerate the statement or justify the action. I'm just curious as to how you might respond if you were in authority at an airport, a school, a marketplace, etc. and you see someone who looks like they have a bomb strapped to them. How do you respond to the potential of imminent murder on a massive scale without perpetuating the patterns of terror worked into your own authoritative/powerful position?
Excellent questions.
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