Ha, I did the same thing with my SAAB 900. I could (and sometimes did) live in the back of that thing if I had to.
(Mine was a 3-door but it could have carried that.)
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The ābasic etiquetteā as the pilot of a 2-ton machine moving at, say 5 miles per hour is to NOT RUN OVER SOMEONE. He piloted his body-crushing machine in a reckless manner. Someone was understandably upset at his carelessness and voiced his opinion. Then this Executive, instead of letting such an āidle curseā roll off his back, instead got offended by words. So he escalated the situation rather than ignoring what amounts to small arms fire while heās in a main battle tank.
Irritation like that is unwarranted. Getting upset about it is childish. And we donāt let children drive for good reason. Theyāre bad at making decisions. Donāt condone a man-childās driving. If he actually were an adult he wouldnāt have gotten out of his safe and secure truck to punch another pedestrian. Heās a fucking lout and a barbaric animal. Shame him.
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It should be noted that thought is very frequently a focus in criminal trials. In the case of a homicide, for example, determining the accused state of mind is at least as important as determining whether or not they actually did anything.
The state of mind of the accused at the time of a homicide is much of the difference between diminished capacity/insanityt plea (didnāt understand what they were doing), innocent due to pure accident (no intent to harm, but also not ignoring proper safety), negligence (no intent to harm, but taking life-threatening risks without proper precautions), murder in the heat of passion (flipped out, but hadnāt really planned on it) and cold-blooded murder (fully intentional, planned killing), amongst other possible variants, each of which typically has different sentencing considerations.
[Iām not even trying to use specific legal terms here - the law varies depending on where you live and allā¦]
Self defence also often comes down to the personās intent, as the defense is predicated on the accused belief that they were at risk, and (at least in theory) this entails demonstrating that itās reasonable for them to have believed that. Part of the idea here is that a person who killed in self defence is not a threat to society. They made a reasonable, if difficult, decision under the circumstances.
Hate crime laws are, essentially, the opposite of the self-defence argument. They have made a decision to target somebody based on some factor that suggests, rather heavily, that they are likely to do so again because they are operating on an unreasonable dislike for a specific group of people.
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Flooring it on an on - ramp probably removes risk from the mergeā¦ isnāt that kind if what youāre supposed to do, at least up to the speed limit?
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Looks to be nothing more than a violent asshole.
And the article headline is needlessly inflammatory.
Of course, if youāre gay, or are percieved that way, and you live in the area, heās now a threatening asshole. not just a violent asshole.
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If he were a lower level employee Iād call it almost certain that he would be fired. I worked with a guy who one morning was called into the supervisorās office because someone with the same name had been arrested over the weekend. Since it was a different person he was off the hook, but if he had been arrested it would have meant immediate termination.
I know itās hopelessly naive to say that mailroom workers shouldnāt be any more expendable than presidents, but a case like this highlights just how absurd the double standard is.
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You make a good point about state of mind being a sentencing factor aside from hate crimes, but is someone who is likely to do more violence due to hatred of a particular group worse than someone likely to do the same violence indiscriminately, or to a non-protected group? What makes hating an ethnicity or sexual orientation special, versus hating men in three-piece suits or hippies or women? Do victims of equal-opportunity psychopaths take solace in the knowledge that their attackers werenāt overtly bigoted?
As far as day to day operations go, having nobody in the mail room is gonna have a far more immediate detrimental effect than an empty seat in the boardroom for however long it is til the boys get together over golf and find a new chairwarmer says I.
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Actually, yes.
Because if someone is only violent towards x, then they are more likely to be able to get support from people who arenāt x and hate x. And if people in power also hate x, they might block investigations of crimes against x - such as crimes against sex workers and crimes against people with ongoing lawsuits against police forces.
How about:
Unconscious Houston oil business president charged with punching gay man
does this sound more accurate?
And the basic etiquette when you are walking is to wait your turn and not randomly dart in front of drivers to force them to brake or swerve to avoid you.
I see multiple examples of pedestrians behaving badly per day, especially on weekend nights. Pedestrians who know their light says āDonāt Walkā will cross in front of drivers whose light has turned green and scream at a driver or even pound on the car if the driver dares to object. Once some guy just flipped me off when I was just doing what I was supposed to do waiting for him to cross in the crosswalk. I could never figure that out. He just flipped me off again when I asked why my perceived offense was.
On the other hand there are plenty of negligent and inconsiderate drivers who fail to yield to pedestrians when they are supposed to.
So was this a negligent driver getting defensive about criticism of his poor driving or was he reacting to taunting by pedestrians who were darting in front of him when he they should have waited to cross?
Obviously hitting someone hard enough to cause injury is wrong. Iām still unclear about whether what sparked the original conflict was the driverās fault or the pedestrianās fault.
So, yeah Fera isnāt just the president, he also owns MidStar. Itās a tiny directional drilling concern, itās not Exxon or whatever. Pretty sure he wonāt fire himself.
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It matters very much whether the driver:
Hates gay people and used a traffic dispute as a pretext to beat up a gay person.
or
Was acting on road rage either sparked by criticism of his poor driving or taunting by pedestrians who were trying to cross out of turn.
Hurting the person was wrong either way but violence motivated by the personās sexual orientation is much more reprehensible than violence due to a traffic dispute getting out of hand.
Iām going to go way out on a limb and say that hitting someone who isnāt threatening you is wrong. Even if they dickishly walked in front of him, getting out and hitting them is not the correct response. A honk and perhaps an extended finger would be not out of line. but getting into a physical altercation? Thatās 30 days. Continuing to hit them until they are unconscious? Get comfortable wearing stripes long-term.
I am still unconvinced that the attack had anything to do with the fact they are gay. Unless we find out he had a record of attacking gays, I think heād have yelled whatever insult he could think of at anyone who had the temerity to be in his way. He might very well dislike gays, but this seems to have been about the traffic altercation.
Itās hard to tell from the OP article - how do you know he targeted them as a gay couple? Or that he targeted them at all, as opposed to just being an asshole driver?
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Then significant jail time or paying damages in a civil suit will take out the companyā¦he might not get fired, but the results could be the same.
Itās impossible to tell from the information contained in the article. Iām inclined to think its more about road rage, but would his road rage have been applied in the same manner to heterosexual men?
The fact that he is reported to have multiple arrests makes me think itās road rageā¦unless those other arrests involved attacks on gays. And we so far havenāt even heard of they even happened.
