More data that we have become a fundamentally unserious country. The last time I checked, when America was real rather than a progressive fever dream, bashing someone in the head and biting people would earn you a beating and a visit to a courtroom and a judge, with a reasonable expectation of some jail time.
The Federal Aviation Administration announced Wednesday it will make its “zero tolerance” policy for addressing unruly passengers aboard flights permanent after violent outbursts spiked during the pandemic.
And what is that “zero tolerance?” Big fines. Wow. So what. Violence is now punished with financial penalties? So wealthy people for whom a high five figure fine is manageable can now bash flight attendants over the head and bite their fellow passengers?
This is a passive and childish response to a very simple problem. Smack a flight attendant? Go. To. Jail. Bite a fellow passenger? Go. To. Jail. Provide flight crews with the training and means with which to deal with violent passengers, then back them up with a guarantee of significant criminal proceedings against the miscreants, and watch how the problems go away.
I am no fan of the attitudes of flight attendants on American air lines. They are officious, obnoxious, and love them some mask mandates. But the idea that assaulting them (or other passengers) them is a reasonable response to the unpleasantness of flying is just nuts, and penalizing that behavior without jail time is also nuts. It is avoiding the stark differences between violent and simply obnoxious behavior, and is a symptom of a societal disconnect.
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Speaking of unserious…here is our favorite Enron advisor with an amazingly stupid and unaware take on the return to some semblance of freedom and control over our health choices. Far from provoking a violent response, my guess is that the vast majority of normals who encounter mask-wearing karens and kens in the wild will do nothing more than ignore them, and the rest of us will point and laugh.
Where does Krugman get these idiotic ideas? I realize he is an economist and therefore has only a tenuous grip on reality, but he really needs to get out more, and not just around The NYT building and the upper west side.
Unfortunately his pontifications are taken seriously by his fellow idiots who get their news and talking points from the pages of the worst and most partisan newspaper in America. Luckily for us, those people shudder at the thought of crossing the Hudson, so we are mostly insulated from ever having to interact with them. But Krugman has 4.6 million followers on Twitter, some of whom are real, and some of whom are lazy reporters trolling for stories, so this sort of bilge leaks out into the wider world.
Unlike Krugman, I and many of us are familiar with typical Americans, and I can say with a great degree of confidence that Krugman is absolutely full of shit, and that his inane squawking is illustrative of his own fears of real America, rather than any reality.
