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“Me”: The one word journalists should add to Twitter searches

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Re: “Me”: The one word journalists should add to Twitter searches

#51

Post by dwild »

chc wrote: post #47
kazinator wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's okay for you to adhere to your faith. If you ask me to move my seat, you're asking me to adhere to your faith. I say let him stand; the airline should deal with it. Finding an acceptable seat for him is their problem. I don't have a booking issue with my seat. If the airline wants me to move, they should either pay me two hundred bucks, or move me to business class, or first. They have no qualms about charging f…

He's not really asking you to adhere to his faith. He's personally trying to adhere to his faith and he's asking you for a favor that will help him. Similarly, when somebody asks you the time, they are not attempting to turn you into a watch, they're just looking for some help from a fellow human being. I'm not saying someone is necessarily wrong to consider the request unreasonable, but I think it's unfair to accuse…

> Similarly, when somebody asks you the time, they are not attempting to turn you into a watch, they're just looking for some help from a fellow human being.

First, that's not at all the same amount of effort, they chose theses seats, they made effort to get theses specific seats.

Second, you are still free to refuse to give time, if you don't feel like it. I already did when it was late, I didn't want to get my phone out for safety.

A better example would be that you wear a blue shirt because you liked that color, and then someone asked you to change it to red because he don't like blue. He even have the red shirt with him, ready to exchange it. You really like blue but not so much red. Would you?

Re: “Me”: The one word journalists should add to Twitter searches

#52

Post by DanBC »

goldbrick wrote: post #42
sib wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, then he should follow his convictions and move, not request that the woman be moved, which is what has happened in many of these situations.

Can you point to exactly what makes you think that's a particular sticking point?

First example:

> the man assigned to the adjoining window seat arrived and refused to sit down. He said his religion prevented him from sitting beside a woman who was not his wife. Irritated but eager to get underway, she eventually agreed to move.

Second example:

> She was in a middle seat — her husband had the aisle — when the man with the window seat in the same row asked if the couple would switch positions. Ms. Heywood, offended by the notion that her sex made her an unacceptable seatmate, refused.

Third example:

> “But this Hasid came on, looking very uncomfortable, and wouldn’t even talk to the woman, and there was five to eight minutes of ‘What’s going to happen?’ before the woman acquiesced and said, ‘I’ll move.’ It felt like he was being a yutz,” Mr. Newberger added, using a Yiddish word for fool.

The forth example is one where the man moves; the fifth example is ambiguous.

Re: “Me”: The one word journalists should add to Twitter searches

#53

Post by [deleted] »

goldbrick wrote: post #42
sib wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, then he should follow his convictions and move, not request that the woman be moved, which is what has happened in many of these situations.

Can you point to exactly what makes you think that's a particular sticking point?

[deleted]

Re: “Me”: The one word journalists should add to Twitter searches

#54

Post by tyingq »

gravypod wrote: post #24
tronje wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't personally experienced something like this, but I can come up with a few reasons. 1) maybe I just don't want to switch seats. Maybe I'm already settled in, maybe I like the fact that it's a window/middle/isle seat, etc. 2) imagine someone refuses to sit next to you, stating the reason as "that person is ugly" or "that person's choice of wardrobe disturbs me". If that happened to me, I'd certainly be offende…

For point 1, that does not seem evident in these tweets. They seem to move the man and woman to different seats, not the bystander passenger. One even noted that their seat was left empty. For point 2, that may have been the case for some of these tweets but I don't think that holds true for all of them. Some of these people understood that this person came from a different culture. One even said "the chasidic Jew."…

Chasidic isn't commonly used, but it's not incorrect.

Re: “Me”: The one word journalists should add to Twitter searches

#55

Post by dragonwriter »

gravypod wrote: post #14

Personally, I don't understand why the people in the first article, that this one is about, were upset that someone of another religion wanted to adhere to their faith. It seems fairly reasonable that, on air planes non-the-less, that you will encounter many cultures that seem strange to you. Why would that aggravate you?

> Personally, I don't understand why the people in the first article, that this one is about, were upset that someone of another religion wanted to adhere to their faith.

As I see it, they weren't upset that "someone of another religion wanted to adhere to their faith", they were upset that someone of another religion wanted them to take action to adhere to a prohibition of that other person's religion.

> It seems fairly reasonable that, on air planes non-the-less, that you will encounter many cultures that seem strange to you. Why would that aggravate you?

There's a substantial difference between encountering another culture and being asked to conform to that culture's taboos.

Re: “Me”: The one word journalists should add to Twitter searches

#57

Post by dragonwriter »

gravypod wrote: post #26
afandian wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have different standards of behaviour according to their social background. I think the average American or European would be unhappy if someone said "I won't sit next to this person because they're black" for whatever reason, personal, religious etc. The same people consider gender discrimination to be approximately as bad as race discrimination. The Hisidic person in question has some kind of problem with wo…

Would it be fair to say that since I am from America that I should get upset at anyone who wears a hijab for their own religious purposes? Covering women is very anti-American, specifically being prominent in the most recent generations. Yet, as civilized people, we can come to the understanding that even though I don't support something doesn't mean that I have to tell others how to live their lives or expect them t…

> Would it be fair to say that since I am from America that I should get upset at anyone who wears a hijab for their own religious purposes?

No. Nor, even if by "American" you mean "person other than a Muslim who believes that woman should where the hijab", but the former is neither equivalent to nor does it imply the latter -- there are Americans who were the hijab for their own religious reasons -- is that really parallel to the issue at hand.

Now, if you were such a person -- and a woman -- and someone asked you to wear a hijab to accommodate their religion's prohibition for women being uncovered in the presence of non-related men, then that would be more parallel to (though arguably somewhat more extreme than) the situation at issue. OTOH, an

Re: “Me”: The one word journalists should add to Twitter searches

#58

Post by natch »

gravypod wrote: post #14

Personally, I don't understand why the people in the first article, that this one is about, were upset that someone of another religion wanted to adhere to their faith. It seems fairly reasonable that, on air planes non-the-less, that you will encounter many cultures that seem strange to you. Why would that aggravate you?

I think in some of these cases the man wanted the woman to move from her original seat.

In other cases, there was an unwanted delay to travel.

In all cases, one must weigh the perceived harm (delay to 200+ passengers, versus harm to one passenger) against each other. Although to the man, the perceived harm to the man is high, to others, the perceived harm to the man is low. So any alarm over the situation can just be a matter of differing perceptions.

Then there's the question of were the people in the article even upset, or is that just your assumption? I'm not sure all of them were. They certainly thought the situation was remarkable, and they did remark on it, on twitter. That doesn't mean that every one of them was upset. But for those that were, see the reasons above.

Re: “Me”: The one word journalists should add to Twitter searches

#59

Post by chc »

dwild wrote: post #51
chc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not really asking you to adhere to his faith. He's personally trying to adhere to his faith and he's asking you for a favor that will help him. Similarly, when somebody asks you the time, they are not attempting to turn you into a watch, they're just looking for some help from a fellow human being. I'm not saying someone is necessarily wrong to consider the request unreasonable, but I think it's unfair to accuse…

> Similarly, when somebody asks you the time, they are not attempting to turn you into a watch, they're just looking for some help from a fellow human being. First, that's not at all the same amount of effort, they chose theses seats, they made effort to get theses specific seats. Second, you are still free to refuse to give time, if you don't feel like it. I already did when it was late, I didn't want to get my phon…

Where did I say you aren't free to refuse? I just said he's not asking you to adhere to his faith. That's an uncharitable and unreasonable description of somebody making a simple request for a favor. Trying to demonize people who live differently from us with alarmist exaggerations like "He's asking me to adhere to his faith" is toxic to conversation.

I've swapped seats with people tons of times. Never for this reason, but maybe they wanted to sit next to their friend or whatever, and it didn't negatively affect me. It's much more common than having to change your shirt in public. But if you don't want to, that's OK too. My point is just that this guy wasn't exactly starting a new Crusade.

Re: “Me”: The one word journalists should add to Twitter searches

#60

Post by jlarocco »

gravypod wrote: post #14

Personally, I don't understand why the people in the first article, that this one is about, were upset that someone of another religion wanted to adhere to their faith. It seems fairly reasonable that, on air planes non-the-less, that you will encounter many cultures that seem strange to you. Why would that aggravate you?

> It seems fairly reasonable that, on air planes non-the-less, that you will encounter many cultures that seem strange to you. Why would that aggravate you?

Isn't that what's going on? If a person can't sit next to another person because of their goofy religious beliefs, then it's their own responsibility. It's unreasonable to throw a tantrum and insist everybody else move around.

They should expect that on an airplane they may encounter other people that may seem strange to them or make them uncomfortable.

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