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CourtneyCantrell won't go back

@stevenbodzin @jk All because minutes before, I'd signalled my intentions & changed lanes into a lane with a gap of 4 or 5 car lengths behind me. Bad luck for me, I was going the speed limit and Escalade cockwomble was going about 10mph above, and the lane I entered apparently belonged to him.

After harassing me for 2 miles, he finally gunned his engine & zoomed ahead to run up on several other cars & get pushy with their lanes too.

I called the police and gave them his license plate.

2/2

7 comments
Steven Bodzin bike & subscribe

@courtcan that´s so terrifying and unpleasant. It´s good you kept your head and that you felt comfortable calling the cops. Around here I would assume it was a cop. Good luck.

Poloniousmonk

@courtcan

I'm old enough to remember when that sort of behavior was an extremely rare occurrence. In a lot of ways, I blame the surveillance state.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not encouraging the tactics that used to keep those kinds of assholes in check. It's not my job to enforce civility. But some people did enforce civility in the bad old days of no cameras. I spent a year working as a courier and one of our drivers kept a bucket of D batteries in his van. If somebody was being a flagrant asshole on the highway, he took out their windshield.

Now I know that can kill somebody, both by penetrating the windshield and by causing an accident. I would never do something like that, not even as a wild, lawless teenage vandal. But some people would. Some people don't care. My first boss gave me some good advice--don't fuck with truckers or bikers. Couriers are similar to truckers.

These days, that incident would be on camera, and the guy with the batteries would get hauled off to prison.

I also see surveillance society encouraging(?) creating(?)...we deal with a lot more mass shooters now because nobody has any smaller outlet for what is justifiable rage at the state of things. There is no halfway step a person can take--once they break bad, they know their life is over anyway so they structure the snappage to cause maximum harm on the way out.

Hell, I think the unavailability of more minor outlets is why the plague rats get off running around and making people sick. It's a way to deniably cause harm.

There always was a better way.

@courtcan

I'm old enough to remember when that sort of behavior was an extremely rare occurrence. In a lot of ways, I blame the surveillance state.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not encouraging the tactics that used to keep those kinds of assholes in check. It's not my job to enforce civility. But some people did enforce civility in the bad old days of no cameras. I spent a year working as a courier and one of our drivers kept a bucket of D batteries in his van. If somebody was being a flagrant asshole...

Cass (they/them)

@Uair @courtcan This is an interesting perspective to consider. All limitation of anti-social behavior is supposed to fall to the state now but the state does jackshit about any of it below or above a given threshold. Like you said, ways people used to discourage certain types of antisocial behavior weren't always good, but letting it go unchecked is likely worse in some ways, especially when it comes to shit like straight-up nazis feeling comfortable as hell in public now.

AnnieBuddy

@courtcan @stevenbodzin @jk

I was on a highway here recently where a guy was being dangerously aggressive. I pulled over to call the police and let him go ahead - but you have to be careful stopping when you are dealing with someone like that.

Anyway, just as I was about to turn off the highway about 20 minutes later, I saw the police had him pulled over.

Call them in. Get a dash cam. They endanger everyone on the road. Let their insurance companies deal with them.

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