Apparently, he looks like a drunk balding white man drinking a Bud Lime-A-Rita and yelling racial epithets on a train. You learn something new every day.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Apparently, he looks like a drunk balding white man drinking a Bud Lime-A-Rita and yelling racial epithets on a train. You learn something new every day.
Hopefully he will get to argue his free speech case to his employer.
What bothers me about this it this is that it could just as easily have been a drunk liberal being forced off a subway by a alt-right group.
that legal scholar I think may just be a racist, the article does not say he said he was a member if the bar but was a graduate of NYU law and therefor he was a lawyer. I do not know anything about him though but I do know that he does have the right to free speech and there is no law against talking on the sub-way but the other passengers are not a government. I had to look fighting words up just to make sure my impression was correct and got this first time.
it might apply here but it sure as hell not much of a surprise that he got the reaction he got and it could have been worse he could have been just knocked unconscious and dumped off the train.
uncle frogy
What must an illegal scholar look like?
I really couldn’t say. On the other hand, an undocumented scholar might be an erudite person paralyzed by writer’s block…however that would look!
martincohen (#2)
And? Are you trying to say that scenario would somehow be equivalent to this? Because if you are, you can knock it the fuck off right now.
A noyd:
It is an argument against mob mentality, dumbass, which I can clearly see you have eloquently refuted with “knock it the fuck off”. Throwing someone off a train like that by a normal civilian is assault and he has every right to sue.
martincohen #2:
How? Just how would that happen? I’m trying to picture the scene…
A drunk liberal starts what? Getting up in some people’s faces and treating them with respect? Help me out here…
What an arsehole, a lot of it is to do with being pissed, but it is the lack of inhibition which that engenders which allows the true persona to emerge. Having said that they should heve just chucked his bag on the platform straight away and so flushed the turd away as soon as possible.
Oh, and Bud Light Lime-A-Rita – what the fuck is that ? Bad enough to drink such shite, but in public ?
Molesworth (@ # 8)
“I’m trying to picture the scene…”
The liberal has just started the third verse of a rather off-key rendition of Blowin’ in the Wind?
lotharloo (#7)
Uh huh. So, when did you grow so protective of concern trolls again? I mean, martincohen’s comment isn’t even an argument—it’s a fallacy if it’s anything. It reeks of the sort of useless hand-wringing that elevates form over substance and pretends to claim the moral high ground through blatant false equivalences. That disinterest in context? That flattening of nuance? It’s worse than useless; it’s outright harmful. So don’t even go there.
@richardelguru #10:
Off-key? I’d de-train myself if I ever sang that badly in public.
ajbjasus (#9)
I thought that at first, too. But then I thought maybe whoever has the bag is making sure there are no weapons in it. That would be prudent given the way things have been going lately when racists feel emboldened to start shit in public.
Hope for the future: Edina high school junior calls out racist conservative talking points
Well I’m not a legal scholar, and the guy is clearly a drunken asshole and I have no sympathy for him and I’m not gonna try to excuse him. But having said that, it looks to me like one, maybe two, of the folks who got rid of him may be guilty of battery. The fat guy wearing black and a red hat (almost) certainly is, and the woman in the yellow dress may be as well. Open the link and look at the video, starting one minute and fifty seconds in. Additionally, the soup in the face (around one minute and forty seconds in) may also be a crime, depending on how hot the soup was at the time.
These two are lucky that their faces cannot be seen in the video.
See, for instance, here. http://www.hochheiser.com/Violent-Crimes/Battery.aspx
A. Noyd #13
That’s a nice thought – not sure I ‘d be cool headed enough to think of that though with that wanker winding everyone up !
Remember the days whenever a crazy drunk guy would rant and act like an idiot on the train, everyone else would either ignore him or call the driver to come kick him off? Those were the days.
Remember the days when you didn’t have to worry that the raving drunk might pull out a gun and start shooting up the train?
I don’t either.
“What a legal scholar looks like.” Probably not the most statistically reliable sampling.
Yes, the people who shoved him off committed battery. But I belong to the “it’s never wrong to punch a Nazi” school of jurisprudence, so, were I the judge in their criminal case, I’d give them court supervision and the smallest possible fine.
Yes. The problem is that station staffing budget has been cut way back, so it’s not easy to find someone to kick him off the train. We’ve been moving towards a self-service security model in recent years. Cell phone cameras help a lot.
But that’s the great thing about New York – it’s just so *dynamic*. Everybody’s fighting to be on top. It’s not enough just to be an average run-of-the-mill bigot; you have to prove that you’re the *very dumbest* bigot. It’s a bit too high-energy for some people, but I wouldn’t dream of living anywhere else.
(It’s no coincidence that Trump is from New York. Can you imagine him living in someplace like Alabama or Mississippi? He’d last maybe two weeks, and then a group of his fellow White Supremacists would come up to him and say, “No offense, but you’re a little bit *too* racist, and it’s bringing down the tone of the neighborhood. We’ve taken up a collection for you, just in case you ever think about moving. We hear that New York is lovely this time of year.” There would also be a couple more White Supremacists standing silently in the background, holding socks with bars of soap in them, just in case the subtext wasn’t clear enough.)
@lotharloo in #7:
We’re well aware of how the American legal system can be used to protect racists and punish any sort of anti-racist action. Remember that Joe Arpaio let prisoners die from the heat in his Arizona desert internment camps, and he was pardoned by the President.
We’re gonna stand together and fight back anyway.
“Concern trolls”, “false equivalences”, yes, you have memorized a bunch of buzzwords but it would be even better if you could actually think and give an argument.
Unfortunately, this whole thread is a fine example of liberal hypocrisy and exercise in dumbassery, “mob violence is okay if we do it”. Sorry but there is no place in a civilized society for such attitudes and the reason is pretty obvious: Once you allow for blatant violent physical assault from one group, then you have opened the floodgate for violence from everyone. That’s why there is “concern trolling” on alt-right groups doing this in retaliation.
I probably should not mention this because this is a complicated argument and I don’t have the patience to go over it here but one last thing that really really really pisses me off about liberals with this attitude (as someone coming from a shitty country in middle east) is how they are fucking annoyingly pacifists about atrocities in other countries when nothing seems to be motivate them to do anything anywhere and how they will delve into useless lectures about how “violence is never the answer to anything” and but poke them a little bit in their own home and suddenly they are almost like raving lunatics screaming for heads on the spikes.
there is something about this event that seems to be ignored in the criticism of it as mob violence and comparing it to a hypothetical action by some alt-right people.
In this incident the “legal scholar” was being deliberately insulting and antagonistic. he was using racial insults against the other passengers. He was using what could easily be considered fighting words, He was daring a confrontation and all that happened was he was removed from the train. He did not need to go to an emergency room to seek help,
In what world do “alt-right” assholes skinheads and bigots act like that when in a group, when do they need to be provoked by one lone black guy who gets up in there face. They seem to be provoked by other people just being black no action required.
uncle frogy
I’ve seen something analogous done. London underground, one of the late trains. Five people in the carriage, me, a couple, and two loud arseholes throwing a Frisbee up and down the corridor. The lady catches it (or it lands near her? — don’t recall now), and sits on it. Arseholes demand it back, but her partner meaningfully gestures with his umbrella. Stalemate.
The train pulls into the next stop. The lady makes to throw the Frisbee out the ventilation window onto the platform. Her partner confirms she should do it, but to wait for the doors to close. She accepts his advice, and — more significantly — the arseholes take the hint and detrain. Doors close, Frisbee goes out the window, and that’s that.
“In this incident the “legal scholar” was being deliberately insulting and antagonistic. he was using racial insults against the other passengers. He was using what could easily be considered fighting words, He was daring a confrontation and all that happened was he was removed from the train. He did not need to go to an emergency room to seek help.”
What he said. Yes, shoving said schmuck off the train was probably illegal (even with fighting words), but it wasn’t what most of us would usually understand as “mob action.” I would add that it wasn’t necessarily immoral either, though I get it that others might disagree. Are we on a slippery slope from hustling an obnoxious person out the door to beating the stuffing out of him? There are doubtless some who can’t distinguish one action from the other, but the folks on the train who pushed him out don’t seem to have fallen into that category. I’m really not seeing this as some gateway to mob rule.
lotharloo = another asshole
– another “fucking annoyingly pacifist” liberal.
lotharloo@#22:
Unfortunately, this whole thread is a fine example of liberal hypocrisy
What is a “liberal”?
lotharloo (#22)
Who needs an argument to point out that fallacies are fallacies and that they are bad? That shouldn’t be controversial. I am objecting to the idea that we can inform ourselves morally by simply imagining the political affiliations of the people in the incident have been swapped. (As if we even know the political affiliations of the others on the train, but whatever.) It doesn’t work because liberal and conservative violence do not happen for the same reasons, take the same form, or have the same effects.
As for why it’s harmful to tie one’s opprobrium to a false equivalence, that argument has already been had here several times in the last few months.
Ah, I wondered when the slippery slope would be brought out in full rather than sitting there in the background.
You shouldn’t mention it because it’s a total strawman. And no one is saying “mob violence is okay if we do it” either. Seriously, I thought you were better than this.
If you think any kind of mob violence against belligerent racists deserves condemnation equal to mob violence against liberals, then at least come up with some justification more substantial than a passel of fallacies that reveal nothing other than the shallowness of your understanding of the relevant matters. I’m not the one with a missing argument. You are.
aaronbaker (#25)
And notice there was that one guy who was trying to stay between everyone else and the racist asshole to help keep shit from escalating, too.
lotharloo @22
Society on that train car stopped being “civilized” the moment that racist yahoo opened his mouth and tried to start something. It became civilized again once he was ejected.
Civilization is not a suicide pact.
You fucking pond scum troll.
Aren’t you the asswipe who was pretending a few threads ago that throwing objects at someone wasn’t “battery?”
See “suicide pact” above. What, we’re just supposed to grab our ankles forever?
You fucking pond scum troll.
RE:
No sir, that must have been someone else. I have never in my life expressed any opinion on whether or not throwing things is or is not battery.
Best wishes, –HMT.
Let’s not forget that it wasn’t too long ago where people tried being a chill with someone making a similar rant, and that ended up with folks being stabbed to death on a bus.