ANOTHER POLITICAL RANT

This one I decided to preserve in case it gets removed from CBR, though the incident that provoked it is pretty nugatory. After I expressed the opinion that the two guys in the Philadelphia Starbucks incident were "troublemakers," one poster asked me my reasons:

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they came into the shop, asked to use the restroom, and were told they couldn't without being customers.

You would think that if they REALLY needed to use the restroom, and REALLY planned in advance to wait for a friend as they later claimed, they would have bought some lousy low-priced item so that they could wait in comfort. Instead, they decided to sit around and buy nothing, which indicates that they got their dander up because the manager didn't defer to their sense of entitlement.

Some little details I bet none of the esteemed news media will cover: did the friend of these poor, offended individuals ever show up to verify their story?

Did they really just sit them holding their water for the entire time that it took for (a) the manager to ask them to leave, (b) for her to get through to the cops, (c) and for the cops to arrive? Wow, such a testament to fortitude. Right up there with Rosa Parks.:p

edit: Okay, now I've come across a news item in which the guys' names are given, and they said they were there to keep a meeting for a "real deal"-- and in THIS item, the "friend"/investor IS named-- but the early versions of the news items were negligent with these details, and I doubt most readers cared anyway. Then the question once more becomes, "If you're going to meet at a public place for a business deal, why the hell wouldn't you buy a damn cuppa coffee to smooth things over?"

No mention in the above CBS news piece of the allegation that they asked to use the bathroom first, but until I see something further, I tend to suspect CBS elided that detail to make a better story.

SECOND EDIT:

Yeah, TIME does mention the bathroom allegation here, so CBS is crap.


ADDENDUM, addressing to a CBR guy:

I didn't bother to respond to [your post] at the time, but an interesting detail caught my eye when I looked at several of the news summaries:

[QUOTE]Nelson and Robinson, black men who became best friends in the fourth grade, were taken in handcuffs from the Starbucks in Philadelphia's tony Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, where Robinson has been a customer since he was 15.[/QUOTE]

So one has to presume that Robinson was the source for this indirect quote, and also that he's telling the absolute truth, due to the principle of AVANTAL: Alleged Victims Absolutely Never Tell Any Lies.

But the question then becomes, for me at least:

If Robinson had been frequenting that Starbucks shop during the year or so that the alleged racist served as manager--

Does that mean that he was a PAYING customer?

Or was he just a THEORETICAL customer. who has been observed by said manager on other occasions to sit around and not buy anything?

But no, such a scenario is clearly impossible, since we all known that only white people commit so-called "racial microaggressions."