He wasn’t making a joke about terrorism, he was wearing the buttom to make a point about the incredibly fucked up priorities of our security process. To wit, we’ve got a laser beam focus on superficial and meaningless bullshit, but have massive gaping holes that any potential terrorist could exploit - and have done nothing about them since 9/11, and show no sign of doing anything about them, because it would be expensive.
As for my father, there’s no way in hell he’d eject someone from his aircraft for wearing a button. Because, amazingly enough, he’s a rational human being able to figure out what the fuck is a threat and what isn’t.
And you know, for that matter, Jason, if his fellow passengers had used physical force or the threat of physical force in an attempt to intimidate him into changing his behavior, opinion, or beliefs, what, exactly, would that have made them?
It would have made them paying passengers who had had enough of a selfish prick who had decided for himself that the point he was making was more important than everyone else on the plane.
Look, actually, I’m glad the passengers let the thing be handled properly. Which was what the pilot did, btw. You seem to suggest that your Dad is more rational than the British Airways captain in question. But remember all we have here is the take from the EFF guy’s side, and even that says that he wasn’t kicked off the plane until after he refused the requests of both the flight attendant and the captain that he remove it. In other words, he wasn’t kick off for wearing the button, he was kicked off for refusing to obey the captain’s lawful order.
Now let’s say that one of your father’s flight attendants comes to him and says, “that passenger with the “suspected terrorist” button is making me nervous and he refuses to remove it.” Does your father back up his flight attendant or blow her off in favor of the passenger’s free speech rights? Is this as simple as you suggest?
Both federal and international law regard the pilot as equivalent to the captain of a ship at sea, meaning his discretion is almost absolute;
When you purchase an airline ticket (or purchase travel through ticketless travel) you’re entering into a contract with the airline. That contract includes the “Conditions of Carriage.”
Planes are not public property. Not ‘sort-of’, They dont have FAA stamped on the side so anything the company and their representatives say goes. Whats so hard to understand about these rules? If you don’t like it, don’t fly BA. It’s pointless to argue property rights with people who don’t believe in private property to begin with.
Personally I would have snatched that friggin pin and destroyed it in front of him as long as he didn’t have 19" guns. They could arrest me for assault when I touched down at Heathrow.
When I made my earlier post regarding the 1 st Amendment, I knew the "yelling fire in a theater” argument would be raised. It really doesn’t hold up here, as some of you have stated.
In fact everyone has made pretty good points regarding the whole “majority rules, minority rights” issue. Would this have happened if he was wearing a pin for the National Socialist party or a KKK pin? How about a pin with the Hydra symbol on it? (Hydra was SHIELD’s nemesis in the Nick Fury, Agent of Shield comics.) Would these symbols have made people nervous as well? But then what real terrorist would advertise the fact.
How far do we go with this rule of fear by proxy?
Actually Jason’s points hold true, he was removed for refusing to obey the Captain’s order and once the door is closed the Captain’s word is law. Good thing this didn’t happen on a ship
I would say probably not. However much a stretch it is, you can make a credible argument that a button which essentially announces that you’re a terrorist is threatening. There’s no implied threat in the Bush t-shirt. However, if it caused any commotion in the cabin, I could see the pilot demanding that he remove it or cover it up as disruptive, and I think the pilot’s actions would be upheld.[/quote]
That we have to have this asinine arguments points out the fundamental problem with this.[/quote]
I side with the airline on this. If you have a passenger who has refused to do what a flight attendant has requested, that’s reason enough to boot a passenger. The request that he remove the button wasn’t unreasonable.
You guys have to remember that airlines have had problems with passengers becoming unruly during flights. If you have a passenger who’s already ignoring flight attendants while the plane is on the ground, why would you want to take off with that passenger and risk him going wacko in the air? Frankly, if I was a passenger, I think I’d want the guy off my plane too. I’m willing to surrender all my free expression rights for the duration of a flight. I want them to land my ass gently on the ground.
Even if you think he had a reasonable right to wear the pin, the fact remains that the “non-assholish” thing to do would have been to register a protest, remove the pin, and complain to British Airways upon reaching his destination.
But the two flaws to this theory are:
You can tell from reading his email about the whole thing that “non-assholish” isn’t his nature, and
If he’d done that, he wouldn’t have gotten all the attention and publicity.
I emailed Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy about this. His comment:
So, while we may argue about whether or not this guy should be beaten up, whether or not he’s an asshole, and whether or not the FAA rules are stupid or not, the upshot is – its British Airway’s plane and they can ban whatever speech they want on it.
XPav, I just followed your link. Interesting. Brief me please. Who is this Volokh and what is this site for really? And is that a real name because it’s pretty damn cool.
The Volokh Conspiracy is a group blog with mainly libertarian/conservative law professor writers. They’re rather smart, and don’t do the liberal-bashing smarmy thing like say, Instapundit has fallen into recently.
Eugene Volokh appears to be the smartest man on the face of the planet, as he got his CompSci BS at age 15 from UCLA and then after that got a law degree, and clerked for the Supreme Court before taking on his teaching position at UCLA.
So basically, he appears to be one of the few bloggers that actually knows what the hell they’re talking about. The other conspirators are also very rather good at what they do.
Yeah Cramer was a nutbag – one day after he started posting I emailed Eugene and said “this guy drags you down”. Next day he was out. I don’t think I was the only one that commented on him.
Christ, you need to totally get over this “quasi-governmental” bullshit. We all abide by government regulations, obey federal laws and pay taxes. That doesn’t make everything and everyone “quasi-governmental”. My parents pay property taxes on their house, but they don’t have to let someone hold a pro-choice rally in the living room if they don’t want to.
Brad’s “strawman” aside, the fact that you have to abide by common carrier rules does not make you a quasi-governmental entity, and nothing in those rules requires you to become a forum for public speech, anymore than any workplace that has to follow OSHA rules has to allow free speech. The fact that government regulates your industry doesn’t make you part of the government.
They do in the sense that they apply to airlines, but they don’t in the sense that they have nothing to do with free speech. Common carriers are simply regulated in not being able to refuse passage based on prohibited reasons (race, gender, disability/illness). They’re certainly allowed to refuse passage for non-prohibited reasons, such as disfavored speech, disruption, or refusal to obey lawful requests.
In other words–and hopefully you won’t consider this a “strawman” and then refuse to respond to it–BA could kick the guy off for loudly proclaiming that Osama is right and all Western planes should be hijacked or blown out of the sky. The guy has every right to say that on public property, but an airliner is not public property and if the airline doesn’t like the content of your speech they can tell you to either shut up or get off the airplane. You might think they were wrong to object to the button, but they certainly had the right to object to it.
The strawman I was complaining about was was Brad’s ridiculous “pro-choice rally in your house” example.
Thanks for the CC clarification.
And does the reasoning they gave to the guy matter, legally? If they flat out stated that it was “due to the government security policy,” rather than “reserve right to refuse service to anyone”?
