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Outside Outrage

We're not the only ones who are outraged - here are some outside outrages that caught our eye!

Boy falls from bridge, breaks back, then tasered by cops!
Teenage boy on the ground with a broken back is tased up to 19 times to "get him under control" and "keep him from getting hurt", delaying emergency surgery by two days.
Keeping America Safe from...Australians
Internet dating at its worst leads to detention and deportation.
And You Thought Tasers Were Bad...
Instead of using Taser guns, police in Nashville (and other cities) now inject "unruly" subjects with an amnesia-inducing sedative. That's legal, right?
Big Bad Texas Cop Murders Teacup Poodle
“Chill out, it’s just a dog, you can buy another one.”
NYPD's 'Operation Sentinel' To Track EVERYTHING
NYC is going to install cameras to track EVERY vehicle that enters Manhattan.
John McCain - Maverick & Spammer
Sign up to spam for John McCain and get a free red hat! Do we really need more spam...or a red hat?
Unlikely Suspect Charged With Murder
A young man is in jail for murder because he defended his home. Now the prosecutor wants to up the charges to seek the death penalty against him.
No Cancer Treatment For You!
Immigration authorities allegedly denied a man treatment for cancer saying that a biopsy is an "elective procedure."
Cut the Drama
Is our biggest problem not being able to post anything we want, anywhere we want? Honestly. I hope so.
4-Year-Olds Handcuffed
These little criminals refused to take a nap.
Petty Leaders
Is it too much to ask that our leaders act like adults?
Your Vote is Your Voice
How much weight does your vote actually carry?

Recent Outrage

Cultural Outrage

Spitzer Commentary Worse than the Scandal

Written by Tiffany Sanders
Tuesday, 25 March 2008 00:21

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned after it came to light that he'd been partaking of some very expensive local prostitutes, but the reaction and the commentary that followed that revelation was at least as disturbing as the incident itself. The prostitute in question became an overnight celebrity with more than five million hits on her web page. Discussion forums across the country buzzed with debate about whether or not Spitzer's wife should be standing by him. And, as if that weren't all enough, "experts" like Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Erica Jong appeared on camera to share their opinions with us.

The content of their statements was bad enough: Dr. Laura told us that men were bound to be susceptible to the charms of other women if their wives didn't attend to their personal and sexual needs and make them feel like men, successes and heroes. And Erica Jong followed that up by diagnosing Spitzer as a sex addict.

Dr. Laura’s statement surprised me a bit, given her reputation for insisting on fidelity and personal responsibility. Turns out those poor men just can't be expected to stay faithful if their women aren't acting right at home. Does that apply to Eliot Spitzer? Did his wife fail to make him feel like a man, leaving him vulnerable to the "charms" of another woman? I don't know. Neither does Dr. Laura, despite the prestige of her doctorate in…um…Physiology. Nor, of course, can Erica Jong possibly know whether Eliot Spitzer is a sex addict based on what's been revealed in news reports.

It would be professionally questionable for a mental health professional to reach such a conclusion (and announce it) without any firsthand knowledge or professional records on which to base her conclusion. Fortunately, Erica Jong is off the hook because she's…well…a novelist. She wrote a famous novel about sex, which apparently qualified her in the minds of a certain television station to speak on the larger meaning of Spitzer's actions.

Unfortunately, Jong's famous novel isn't as famous as it once was. What was controversial and widely reported in the seventies has become fairly standard fare today, and the world is full of people who have never heard of Erica Jong. I happened to watch her pronouncement on an airport television with several of those people, and what I witnessed was troubling: because she announced a diagnosis, they assumed that she was a psychologist or some other kind of mental health professional.

Of course, people are free (within legal bounds) to say any fool thing they want to. But wouldn't it be nice if they just…didn't? Wouldn't it be nice if people didn't make declarative statements about things they didn't really know much about, and if television stations and magazines and other media didn't hold people out as experts who just…weren't?

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One Minute Outrage - Political

Issue: We pay lip service to setting aside international differences and coming together in the spirit of healthy competition, good fun, and the common ground that makes us all human--but the way it plays out looks a lot like all of the other international power plays in the world.

Impact: Stronger, richer countries use the Olympics as one more means of demonstrating their superiority and lording it over the rest of the world and we all get wrapped up in the spirit of pride in "our team"--or the sinking feeling of knowing that our team isn't up to par--extending international tensions into yet another arena rather than bridging the gaps.

Read More: Promoting World Peace by Counting Everybody's Gold

One Minute Outrage - Earthly

Issue: A blind couple is prosecuted for employing a commonly accepted method of composting in their own garden.

Impact: Your tax dollars at work making life difficult for people with the audacity to grow vegetables--and an apparent legal preference for chemical fertilizers over organic matter that might actually help the environment.

Read More: Gardener Threatens Public Safety with Compost

One Minute Outrage - Legal

Issue: Police departments in major cities across the country aren't content to arrest self-made criminals, but have decided to hit the streets and see whether they can create some more.

Impact: Time and tax dollars poured into sting operations designed to test ordinary people and create crimes that would never have been; meanwhile, who's minding the store? Hundreds of thousands of unserved felony warrants lie inactive across the country while police experiment in subways, department stores and on streetcorners.

Read More: Make Your Own Criminal – It's So Much Easier than Chasing the Real Ones

One Minute Outrage - Cultural

Issue: Righteous indignance and the spirit of protest sweep us away for the pettiest of reasons; hundreds of thousands of complaints pour in and a dozen attorneys work for more than four years to hash out the consequences of a half-second view of a pop star's breast.

Impact: We use up our time, energy, and money on the easy battles while the ones that could change the world languish, unfought, because they weren't as spicy or as simplistic and they required that we do more than pick up the phone or dash off an email.

Read More: Janet Jackson’s Breast Eclipses World Issues

Is Clarity a Curse in 2008?

From the author of Globally Rational

2008 presidential election

Barack Obama has been criticized for being “too vague” and not providing enough details about his plans for change in America. But are we ready to listen to the details? In a culture of buzz words, sound bites, and cheap plays for emotional reactions, would a candidate who tried to tell us what he planned to do and why stand a chance—or would we tune out the details and flock back to someone who was willing to boil it down to a catchy slogan and pretend that there were easy answers?

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Rational Outrage - Fury Filtered Through Fact and Logic