St. Petersburg's Finest

By -
"The St. Petersburg Times (Florida) reports on a 75-year-old grandmother who was arrested for "disorderly conduct" because she refused an officer's orders to move her car while she waited for coffee and fries at the drive-through window of her local McDonald's. The officer was behind her in line and (presumably) wanted to get his food but Jean Merola was parked where a McDonalds employee had told her to wait for her order and she wasn't budging. Merola wascuffed for what she estimates was an hour, searched, booked, fingerprinted, photographed and her car cost $160 to reclaim from impound. In explaining why she didn't "respect" the police officer's demand, Merola said, "I guess I felt he wasn't a police officer. He wasn't there to help me, he was there to be mean to me." If only more people reached that moment of wisdom and, then, generalized it to the entire force."

From Wendy McElroy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more