Not at all.

They two pedestrians should have moved over for the car in the first place.

Why didn't they? Can't be sure.

Was there a giant puddle they were avoiding? That's not clear. It looks like there was a sidewalk, but still no bike lane for the cyclists who starts the video avoiding other traffic on a narrow road.

One thing that is clear is that it's not the pedestrians who started yelling. Even if the pedestrians were in the wrong for not yielding to the vehicle (they should have moved over) it was the driver who escalated the situation. This makes the driver the biggest jerk.

(I still think it looks staged.)

"contempt of cop"? Is that a thing?

Anyway, I agree with @eric3579, they handled it well. Didn't let the situation escalate.

I can't for the life of me understand why you would post this video on youtube though.

It's not a joke. It's hypocritical, but quite serious. Because they focus on the fact that he appears to be under Putin's control does not mean they ignore his myriad of other faults....proven by the near weekly protests against his policies.

Jesus Christ...they aren't upset the he wants to normalize relations with Russia, they're upset that he seems to be a Russian agent, as do many of his cabinet, and they fear he'll do things to benefit them instead of actually working for America.
People are upset at his people illegally, treasonously 'talking' to the Russians about removing sanctions and other subversions of established federal policy and law before they were in power and bold faced lying about it under oath and publicly uncountable times, not for having normal or legal diplomatic discussions. They won't accept it when the next president takes control on Nov. 8 and reverses their policies before taking office.

The emails themselves had no new information, it was the implication that they did, and that the investigation was still actively under way that hurt her. The media absolutely covered that, what are they talking about?

It's not about escalating tensions between the U.S. and Russia, it's about abandoning normal policy and giving Russia what they want, carte Blanche to expand and reform the USSR.

I guess they forgot that Russia is building it's military on it's borders and expanding it's territories into our allies countries, and that's why NATO moved, to protect our allies, not to provoke poor little innocent Russia. Just fucking duh.

They aren't necessarily shills for Russia, they are, however, being shills for Trump, and Chomsky now seems to be moving in that direction based on this video. This is the most idiotic thing I've heard from Chomsky, as it completely ignores reality and reason to lambast people for being worried their president may be (as all evidence indicates he is) an agent for one of our worst enemies.

Sorry Chomsky, big fail.

There are a lot of parallels between advertising and copyright. Buy wholeheartedly in to either, and you end up sort of failing to accept the reality of their flaws.

Advertisers think they have a big problem whenever someone circumvents their ads. They panicked when VCRs came around and allowed people to record shows and fast-forward through ads. They panicked when DVRs came out and let people digitally skip through ads. And they are panicking now, with more and more people getting fed up and putting ad-blocking software on their computers or devices.

Copyright holders think they have a big problem when someone tries to circumvent their system, too. They worried about libraries giving people free access to books; but at least a physical book is pretty much limited to one person at a time. They freaked out about cassette tapes being easily copied with a dual cassette deck. They freaked out about people sharing MP3 music over the internet. They freaked out when DVDs came out with CSS protection which was circumvented almost immediately. They continue to freak out by pushing for ever more and more drastic DRM schemes, that are generally circumvented quite rapidly.

The general theme in both advertising and copyright is escalation; a sort of arms race. The problem is that that solution doesn't actually improve things for anyone, in either case. Ads get more and more offensive and annoying, more and more people block/skip them. Copyright gets more and more locked-down, more and more people circumvent it. In both cases, as the "legitimate" side squeezes harder, it ends up making the user experience better for those who circumvent it "illegitimately". See, for example, this good old comic from The Oatmeal:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

The web with adblock software is a massively better experience than the web without it. A pirated 1080p movie or TV show lets you skip the previews/commercials that are often unskippable on a DVD. And on and on.

This arms race doesn't have a good future. Creators and distributors must start wracking their brains to come up with whole new ideas, or at least variants of the old ones, that break that cycle and ensure that "illegitimate" users/viewers don't have a better experience than legitimate ones. I'm sure not holding my breath though.

"If you think that fossil fuels aren't harming the environment, why don't you go kill yourself."

Well, that escalated quickly.

*promote

I think this is similar to many victim blaming conversations. You are trying to offer practical advice to avoid confrontation with police. However, you have to admit that even if you are polite and respectful, escalations happen, particularly for people of color. When your expectation is that no matter your behavior, this encounter is likely to lead to you taking a ride in a cruiser, frustration and defiance are at least as natural a response as the officer's nerves. The man certainly had more available evidence that his day was going to end badly than the officer had evidence of imminent threat and justification for the use of force.

My point is that we have become accustomed to these dangerous escalations because of bad training, so much so that they are getting predictable, not justifiable. Even so, I still think there are elements we can't see about the situation from this single point of view video.

Pardon me for trying to have some nuance. Next time I'll rant about crooked cops and avoid implying that the issue might not always be perfectly clear.

Here is the thing, he could have taken another path in escalation. At the start of the video he already has his weapon drawn, not his taser, his 9mm handgun. He refused to do anything to de-escalate the situation, such as step back and call for backup and a watch commander. He instead escalated by placing hands on the driver and refused to call in a supervisor. When the driver moved, he escalated again with the weapon and after confirming the driver was no longer moving, continued to keep him in shooting position. After backup arrived with a taser drawn and ready, he still did not go to a guard position with his weapon. He became confrontational and even continued to draw down on the PI after there were multiple police on the scene.

In any case, watch the longer video @littledragon_79 posted. They go over the actual policy and training that the Deputy should have followed per the department's rules, which he did none of. This is either a case of a poorly trained Deputy or a hothead that shouldn't be a law enforcement officer.

Look, I hate that this shit happens. Absolutely hate it, and I think that way too many cops are undertrained and/or improperly trained.

That being said, we can't see the driver's face. If you want to set a cop off, ignore his commands and glare and talk back. We got two out of three right on the video, and I bet you anything that if we could see the face of the guy talking we'd have the third.

It's still not right for the cop to escalate so dramatically and quickly, but as a viewer we have to not put ourselves in the driver's place and assume he was being a perfect respectful citizen off camera. Instead imagine the situation objectively and consider what other things the cop might have seen that were warning signs to him.

Escalators don't stop, but this one was going way too fast, so was then stopped. There must have been some serious injuries because who holds a press conference for a busted escalator?

*quality de-escalation.

Well, Steve was an odd duck. He was a huge asshole, but when it came to people coming up with new and innovative ideas, he would support you into either success or failure (god help you if it was failure though). Once he died, there was a noticeable shift in direction towards conformity and the bottom line.

As an example, one of the managers I worked with had a team that was breaking customer satisfaction records because he had them actually caring about the customer. Unfortunately, it also meant they weren't pulling in the same amount of profit because they weren't trying to ram Applecare contracts down customer's throats, they were also supporting some customers that were just outside their free support, and finally they were using the internal program put in place under Steve that allowed escalation reps to go beyond the norm. Like helping a smaller school set up a mac mini server network without forcing them to go to server support and paying 300 bucks for a one time call. Yeah, bottom line wise, Apple lost a 300 dollar support call fee. But they later sold quite a few macbooks to the students who were used to hearing how good Apple was.

Anyway, after some of the other groups started complaining, that manager was quietly removed and put over a non support team. This pattern continued to grow worse right up until the time I left, whatever brought in the most money was king and thinking outside the box was verboten. It certainly influenced my decision to retire early, as it did others who went on to other jobs.

I agree with all of that, and there definitely are reasonable limits to completely "free" speech -- like the fire in a crowded theater staple example.

"Harm" seems like a good place to start when defining those limits. It works in the "fire in a theater" base case really well; by making that out of bounds you avoid trample / stampede injuries.

But what about "trauma or deep internalized concepts where we might see words leading to genuine harm of an individual", as you suggest? I'd agree that cases like that can exist. But to me, the question then becomes "how easily can you avoid those words?"

Offended / "harmed" (perhaps genuinely) by something you see/hear on TV? Very easily solved -- change the channel. Publish "trigger warnings" recommending like-minded individuals also avoid that channel/program/whatever if you like; people who do not agree can also easily avoid those.


Offended / "harmed" (perhaps genuinely) by something your professor said in a University? A bit harder to avoid. Someone in that situation can drop the class and try to take it with a different professor (which may not be possible), avoid taking the class entirely (although it may be a requirement for graduation), or contemplate moving to a different university (which is likely an uneconomical overreaction).

There are arguably better options available for such a person. I'd encourage them to reflect on the phrase "choose your battles wisely", and decide if this particular "harm" (giving all benefit of the doubt that it does actually exist) is worth escalating.


Offended / "harmed" by something your boss says at work? "Choose your battles" still applies, but perhaps also consider asking people who have had a job and who have had to work for a living for advice. When (trigger warning) 99.9% of them say something like "welcome to the real world", maybe -- just maybe -- it is time to look within and re-evaluate your own offense / "harm" threshold.

Riding with a sword is a bit like an escalation of running with scissors.

Every single movie by PTA wow i'm just weirded out -- it's like there's a broken metronome of pacing that feels almost on beat and always escalating like Willy Wonka in that damn tunnel creeping me out about the rowers rowing.