I think you missed Drachen Jaeger's point - Uber drivers shouldn't be treated as taxi drivers; Uber should be legislated as though they were providing a taxi service. Until that's the case, you can either lower your expectations, or refuse on principle to use Uber.

As for your other rebuttal, Newt already covered it. You don't get to mix up "staying in the car as protest" with "staying in the car because you don't know where you are". The first scenario is unacceptable and shitty; the second could be excused except in this case it obviously isn't. She's at the right hospital, and the Emergency Admission is just a walk away from the car - and she's clearly not in a hurry. She's not in an 'unfamiliar place' and you know it - the driver references the hospital sign, and she readily accepts the hospital personnel saying that it's just a short walk away. That's the specific case we're dealing with - I wouldn't judge her half as harshly if she really was in an unfamiliar place... but why are you bringing it up, when it's not the case here?

She didn't stay in his car because she was legitimately confused about where she was, she stayed in his car to hold him hostage while she lodged her complaint about the service she received. That's not ok, regardless of whether it's Uber, McDonald's, or some super-friendly mom and pop store. You disengage (which he didn't have the luxury of doing) and you figure out how to get justice later.

Crikey, that's a bit harsh - he(?) had already apologised and killed the vid!

From a reddit (fwtw) on the topic :

"I'm very curious as to how you got this video, i was under the impression it never left the airfield.
This happened in April 2014, this past year. The weather is absolute crap here, especially for soaring. Well... we get good weather sometimes. Anyway, it's not uncommon for those TG-16A's to go up with a 25 knot gust... But i digress.
The cadets were pushing in because winds were out of limits and the weather was getting worse... and BAM! Microburst.
This microburst hit right next to the airfield. The tower spotted it early, gave a verbal warning "look out..." and cadets are trained to do the following: grab a wing (glider) and turn broadside into the wind and put the spoilers out. The tows were not so easy... nor lucky. Their takeoff speed is about 50 knots, and none of them were powered up when they lifted off the ground, to give you an idea of how bad the wind was. Their only maneuver is to face into the wind and pray they dont actually take off. The tows that took off left for COS airport... it took another 30 minutes of holding gliders before the tower let the cadets start moving the gliders.
As for taking off... 55 kt gusts are the highest the Academy has had in a long time. Considering there were a half-dozen other aircraft within 100 ft of the tows, along with people (i.e. cadets around/in the gliders) if he was moving too far from his position in the queue, the safest action is to get some altitude and try and leave the microburst. Or at the very least put some altitude and distance in between himself and the cadets and aircraft. You saw how slow the tows in the air were moving relative to the ground... those were HARSH winds.
At about 0:20, you can see a cadet hanging onto the wing of a glider on the bottom of a screen. This wind was scary. I don't know if anyone was up at the time, but full tempo ops can be up to 5 tows and 8 gliders... on a standard afternoon training day 3 tows and 4 or 5 gliders is normal. It looks like they were already pushing the gliders to the hangar..."

He's got a nice, calming voice. He managed to make German sound less than harsh.
This needs a translation. Those of us that don't speak German have no idea, he might be singing about raping children and eating them. I just can't vote either way until I know. ;-)

@ChaosEngine

i do not see anyone here defending anything.

now maybe we can view stephen's commentary "dismissive and belittling" as @entr0py pointed out,but i think the deeper issue was prefaced quite succinctly by stephen in his characterization of american,and western societies,as being "infantilized".

where words have become the final bastion of totality in communication and are judged strictly on a word by word basis.so much so that some on the left have been pushing harder and harder to have certain words removed from our lexicon,because they represent negative thoughts/feelings/actions or they may represent a trauma,or horrific violent memory for some people.

but this is the wrong approach.
excising words will not erase those feelings/thoughts/emotions.this will just force people to come up or use different terminology to express those feelings/thoughts.actions that once had words to at least to attempt to express those horrors and/or offenses.

which will just equate to a whole new slew of verbiage being found offensive and in dire need of being castrated from our collective vocabulary.

yet the left (extreme left i grant) appears hell bent on not only attempting to control speech but to also judge those who DO use speech that they find offensive.

this is censorship with prejudice and to claim otherwise is the lie.

just look at your first comment.
you "used" to like stephen fry's opinion,until he became callous and dismissive with what?

words.

but do you REALLY think his attitude and compassion towards those who have suffered emotional trauma is truly dismissive?

well..i do not think so.i have spoken to you enough times to have a modicum of understandings in regards to you,as a person,that you have far more depth of character.

yet it is the WORDS that have hung you up.

look man,words are inert.they are things that are only given life,meaning and context when we add our own subjectivity to them.

words are inadequate.they will ALWAYS be inadequate.
which is why we admire and praise those of us who have a command of words that can reach into our own understandings and extract meaning in a way that blossoms like a spring flower and can create worlds in which we can play,and even share with other people.

i am intimately aware of this deficiency.i do not have an economy of words,and only on rare occasions can i relay,convey and express with ANY form of reductionism.

i struggle to express not only my opinion,but the intent,humanity and compassion of my opinion.

if the extreme left gets their way,the tools we have to express ourselves becomes lesser.

and in the process,WE become lesser.because the tools for dissent,debate,discussion and even..ironically..to expose the more venal and bigoted of our society,will have been reduced to words that offend nobody.

there is danger here,and no good will come from it.no matter if the intent sounds just and the goal compassionate.

freedom of speech is the right to speak freely.
to espouse our opinions,philosophy and yes,our bigotry and prejudice,with legal immunity,but NOT social impunity.

so while we have a right to free speech.
we do not have a right to not be offended,and maybe we need to be offended sometimes.to shake us from our own self-induced apathy and our adoration of digital hallucinations.

so when the westboro baptist church says the most hateful,vitriolic and disgusting admonishments,all in the name of god.
we can be offended by them,and then ridicule them relentlessly.

would stripping words from the english language prevent this group from espousing their own brand of hate?

of course not.they would just find new words.

so what do we do then?
make words illegal?
criminally libel?

so don't judge mr fry too harshly.
he is just pointing to the dangers of controlling speech and the new trend of the perpetually offended.

the extreme right attempts to control morality,and there is serious danger in that practice.
the extreme left attempts to control how we communicate,and hence how we interact,and there is great danger in that as well.

The way one choose to wear their hair is not lame. Judging others for the way they choose to wear their hair is SUPER lame.

I find it funny you think the guy minding his own business is obnoxious, but have nothing to say about the fuck that accosted him with her cultural appropriation nonsense(imo).

I do feel kinda sorry for her as she's probably gonna take an overwhelming amount of heat for her behavior. Guessing it will be a harsh lesson learned.

If I believed it would have that effect, I could support that.
Unfortunately, I don't believe Americans would ever get off our swollen asses, turn off our TVs, and actually DO SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE, even while our country disintegrates around us.
And even if we could manage it, we are so fractured as a society, the end result at best would be somewhere between 4 and 50 new countries, most of them with despotic leaders and draconian theocracies, and all born from a devastating civil war. There no way in hell we could manage to have a revolution that ends with a single, unified country.

In reality, what's more likely to happen if he's elected is a few large protests that get broken up violently with many protesters 'disappearing', new harsh anti-protesting laws, and President for Life Trump will become the richest man in the world while we become a third world country, bringing the world economy into the toilet with us, which is what the Economist warned against when they just listed him in the top 15 most pressing dangers to the world, ranking a Trump presidency just as dangerous to the planet as fundamentalist terrorism.

Harsh...but necessary to preserve the calm of the many.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Gee, that's a bit harsh. Look, I completely disagree with what this guy is saying too. But you have to admit he represents the views of a sizeable portion of the American public.

Is it really better to chuck him out and risk becoming a groupthink choir? I know we've done it before, and there is definitely a line that can be crossed - but I'd rather not ban someone out just because he's saying what 60% of the US South thinks too.

Wait...there's going to be free food?!? I'm in!


A special mention goes to Blue's News for turning me on to Videosift in the first place. Like many, I lurked here a while before starting an account, and then went even longer without contributing much. The last few years, this site has been my main outlet for being social (pretty sad, huh?) and I've enjoyed many a wasted evening perusing the comments ranging from hilarious to outrageous, but always a good time.

Thanks to @dag and @lucky760 for keeping it going. It's quite an accomplishment, keeping our rag tag group of misfits in line and out of serious trouble. You two are a great pair of internet dads, we couldn't ask for better.
Also a special mention for uncle @eric3579 , who's turned me on to many a great video, and been there as a friend or just friendly ear when I needed one more times than I can count, and been there to tell me when I'm going overboard or being too harsh, like a real friend does. He's also done quite a lot to make this site feel like a second home to me.

People forget, Hillary scammed tons of money with the Whitewater scandal for decades until it was leaked in 1992, but they protected Hillary by everyone else in the partnership taking the heat but her, then very quickly almost without media catching it Bill Clinton as lame duck end of term pardoned everyone involved in Whitewater, in 1994 Hillary was stealing money "again", her law firm partner "fell on his sword" accepting the blame keeping Hillary safe, 1996 democrat fundraising head "fell on his sword" receiving 17 count indictment for money again.

there's ton of stuff even back to her youth with money scams and always wiggling out of it.


“In 1997, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, along with several other groups, filed a lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and Donna Shalala over closed-door meetings related to the health care plan. The AAPS sued to gain access to the list of members of the task force. Judge Royce C. Lamberth found in favor of the plaintiffs and awarded $285,864 to the AAPS for legal costs; Lamberth also harshly criticized the unethical tactics especially as she was a partner in a lawfirm, at least before it was shut down due to her partner "falling on his sword for theft and scamming clients".


“In the weeks before the inauguration, he [Vince Foster] had worked intensively with another Arkansas lawyer to expunge Bill and Hillary’s financial records of a shady land deal – a scandal later known as the Whitewater affair… One of his [Vince Foster’s] first jobs in the White House was to try to make sense of the Clintons’ false tax returns concerning the Whitewater land investment. A note in his hand-writing, found much later, warned that Whitewater was “a can of worms you shouldn’t open.”

Vince Foster was assassinated 1993.

Heh, I made a similar argument years ago to a friend of mine but I wasn't so harsh on the common people.

I don't think it is so much that people are sheep as it is the fact that the system is designed to keep people as preoccupied as possible with their own survival so that they simply can't afford to be truly political activists.

Think about it--in the U.S. you can be legally fired from your job, for example, for expressing political opinions your boss disagrees with. It isn't a freedom of speech issue because freedom of speech only prevents the government from censoring your speech--not private business. Hell, it doesn't even have to be a political opinion. When someone wears an ostensibly "offensive" Halloween outfit and pictures of it show up on the Internet, they can be fired without having any kind of recourse.

Now you add on top of that how the middle class has been eroded away. A lot of families need dual incomes just to survive. That means you also need to pay for childcare if you have kids. Prices have increased but wages haven't kept pace. Now add debts on top of all this, whether it be from college loans, credit cards, car payments, mortgages, or whatever.

What you get from all this is a society where, as bad as things are in Washington, it's not bad enough for people to risk their already precarious circumstances by boycotting work to attend protests or engaging in some other form of extreme activism that would probably be required to effect real changes. A lot of people are one bad circumstance away from, if not bankruptcy, then at least a drastic lifestyle shift where they'll lose most of their personal belongings and possibly dreams (like having their kids go to college).

So things plod along pretty much the way they always have, with those in power continuing to consolidate that power and see how far they can push it. Barring college students with pretty much nothing to lose (they have both the free time and probably economic freedom to protest and engage in political activism), the best most people can do is gripe about things on the Internet.