I’ve been through the horror of being on the receiving end of that on a 2.5 hour ski bus trip, behind someone who would not understand that it was physically impossible to recline their seat any further without causing injury. (Wearing ski boots, there was no way to slide my legs under the reclining seat. No room for man-speading either.) Every 10-15 minutes, they’d throw the seat back, with their weight and leverage, onto my knees. My only options were to sit with my arm braced against the back of the seat, or wait for the painful impact. Ramping up the force that I punched the seat off of my knees eventually worked. (Unlike airline seats, they didn’t lock in place.) Of course, I could have been a quiet victim and accepted assault and injury without causing a fuss…
Recording Boarder Patrol and Customs agents is not recommended. While you can publicly record public actions, the majority of these interactions are not considered public. You can be detained or denied entry into the United States for failure to comply with requests of these agents.
Hey … look what Trump is doing with border agents.
I guess we are not supposed to look them in the eyes, either.
And you’d fail. Straight up. The officer(s) would ask, “Why were you punching their seat?” Once I told them, all that self-righteousness wouldn’t do you a damn bit of good. It’s even money on whether or not they’d arrest you.\
In my case, it would be because I suffer sever gout, and sitting in one place for too long is agonizing. Why does your pain trump mine, hmm?
The police are not some sort of magical wand, that you can wave to justify your actions.
Once again: you do not have sufficient evidence from the information at hand to make the judgment(s) you are making. Doubling down won’t drag you out of this.
I’d say you assaulted me. I’d go to court to say so under oath. The cops like cases where people will take the stand. I can explain that I experienced pain when you punched the seat. You could explain your side to a judge.
Oh right, blame the victim. You think this bus had fancy overhead luggage racks, or space to put the ski boots when not wearing them? (And the floor was a cold wet swamp.)
Ah, bummer. I guess that makes sense though. If there’s an emergency and someone is unable to quickly raise a tray table due to the clamped-on knee defenders, that would be a serious problem.
In this situation, the people who were definitely jerks, no more evidence required, were the airline execs who cheerfully maximized profits by shaving the 8" space behind the last seats, preventing them from reclining.
Try rereading what I actually said: no one here knows, from the 35 second video and the lady’s account, enough details to justify the assumptions you are leaping to. Nor is this particularly arguable; we have NOTHING from any other party.
Stop pretending what you would prefer to be true, must be true. That my problem with the main narrative here.
Edit - > Not sure what happened to your response; it was there when I started this reply. I promise I didn’t report you or anything like that.
You article confirms my point: It’s not illegal to photograph. It may be a contract violation, but it’s not against the law. You’re not going to be arrested for it nor can you be compelled to delete the images or footage. You may lose your ticket, but that’s just a civil contracts matter between you and the airline.
The problem is, your comments do not exist in a vacuum. “We don’t have enough information so we shouldn’t assume the asshole didn’t have a reason to be an asshole" is the victim blaming / apologist 101 textbook. And that’s the problem.
Saying “we don’t have all the info so we shouldn’t assume” has the same issue. Information is rarely complete and total and definitive. Sometimes the asshole is just being an asshole. In fact, I would suggest that in the vast majority of cases the asshole is just being an asshole. Not because someone else deserved it.
But that doesn’t exist outside the reality that women are so often on the receiving end of this shit, and so often the argument of imperfect information is used to diminish the impact of what is done to them.
It comes down to this: IMHO, the likelihood that the victim here did something sufficient to warrant having their seat aggressively and repeatedly punched is so small as to nearly make the action indefensible - therefore, if one chooses to persist in trying to determine if that “something” occurred or not in a case like this is, in inference if not in fact, saying “I will not believe the victim because there is an tiny chance that the may have deserved this action”, which, yes, is a position women are subjected to vastly more than men.
If, instead, you are of the opinion, as many are, that there is almost certainly no action taken that justifies this sort of aggressive behaviour, then the specifics become irrelevant. The man is in the wrong. Full stop.
And you’re right, there is no nuance there. Either one can feel that the chance that “she deserved it” is great enough to not accept the situation as seen, or not. But choosing to stand on that hill and take the opinion one way or the other definitely makes ones opinion fair game for criticism.
You wanted to know what source @anon61833566 was citing. I googled the text he put in quotes and found and provided the source. There’s law pertaining to it, and that prohibitions within that law doesn’t appear (IANAL) to apply to this case. Ergo, whether out of ignorance or malice, the flight attendant was wrong.
After reading through +300 comments why am I even watching this. Why is this on the internet? IMHO the guy is being a childish asshole. Maybe there’s more to this don’t know, don’t really fucking care. If anything I feel like this woman is putting this video out there as some type of attention seeking. Oh, you’ve dealt with a shitty human being today? Guess what, at some point everyone has. Am I suppose to feel sorry for her? Was adulting too hard for her today? If this is the low point of your week I think you’re ahead of a lot of people out there.
Next time I get on a plane I’m going to loudly announce, “My disability is having to deal with all you assholes.” Then sit down and recline as far back as possible while giving everyone the finger. /s
No I wouldn’t do that, I’m a reasonable human being. I get it, not everyone is. But I’m not going to waste energy on people I’m never going to see again, life’s too short.
It’s a useless article (with bad Knee Defender advice) except for two paragraphs and one tweet:
While public opinion is mixed, the data decidedly isn’t: legroom has almost disappeared entirely from flights over the last two decades. “In the early 2000s, rows in economy used to be 34 inches (86 centimeters) to 35 inches apart; now 30 to 31 inches is typical, though 28 inches can be found on short flights,” Timereported in 2019. “Seats have narrowed, too, from about 18.5 inches to 17 inches on average.” And it’s getting worse, as individual airlines begin refitting airplanes with more seats than even their manufacturers recommend.
If 31 inches is the high end (gulp) of typical range, let’s say the seatback is about four inches thick. The average American man is 5-foot-9, and let’s estimate his inseam length is about 32 inches. Our thighs are generally longer than our calves, so let’s say 17 inches and 15 inches. When seated, there’s probably another 8 inches of folded torso (your butt). If we start with 31 inches and then subtract 4 inches of seat, 17 inches of leg length, and 8 inches of torso, that leaves just 2 precious inches of “legroom.” That’s for an average man with an average inseam, sitting totally upright—without considering the seat width at all, or what happens if someone has to get by to use the restroom.
Yeah I don’t understand why the seat has to be 10cm thick. The back of my desk chair isn’t that thick. It would be great if airlines could install thinner seats and give us more legroom.
Though obviously that would just lead to the seat pitch being reduced by 10cm.
I never said he had a reason to be an asshole. All I was trying to express was my feeling that this situation was a case where two people overacted to a stupid situation that would never have escalated to seat punching and TMZ interviews if they could communicate with each other. you state “We don’t have enough information so we shouldn’t assume the asshole didn’t have a reason to be an asshole is literally the victim blaming / Apologist 101 textbook”. I literally stated that there was no excuse for his behavior.
I think this douche would have done this to a 200 pound dude. I have been in a similar situation on a train from NY Penn Station to Secacus. Some guy decided on a crowded train with standing room only that he needed a seat just for his bag of shopping. I was squeezed into the aisle next to his seat and any time he thought I was impinging on his personal space he elbowed me in the back. sometimes douchbags are going to douchebag. On a recent flight the person in the seat in front of me repeatedly slammed her seat into my knees which I could not move back any further it was unpleasant but somehow we managed not ending up in an internet controversy. Maybe this colored my opinion of the situation?
You seem to be inferring that I think she somehow deserved or caused what happened that was not my intention. Sure my opinion is open to criticism but I don’t think your criticism was fair at all think you are trying to paint me as a misogynist your comments that " “I will not believe the victim because there is an tiny chance that the may have deserved this action”, which, yes, is a position women are subjected to vastly more than men." and “men overpowering perceptively weaker women.” are more than a little patronizing…
