Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Defending the Hitch Bot "Killer"? Seriously?

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Even after a probing column by Stephen Carter in the Denver Post on Sunday, basically asserting that anyone who'd wreak violence on a robot would also inflict it on a fellow human - the demise of the Canadian social experiment is still being examined. As we know, hitchBot met its end in Philadelphia after being carried through Canada to various new destinations, then through Europe (Netherlands and Germany) and at least 300 miles of the U.S. before being kicked to pieces by a numbskull Philly Eagles fan, e.g.

Image for the news result

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/08/now-hitchbot-becomes-hunted-as-moron.html

As I also noted, echoing Carter's take:

Seems only a sore loser Philadelphia Eagles fan could be such a bottom feeding a-hole as to carry out this senseless property crime..  Maybe the guy's chick ditched him. Maybe she knew if he expressed the desire to beat up on a non-ambulatory mechanical man he could beat up on a live human female too, or even a quadriplegic human.

I also quoted one demented Luddite who yelped on his blog, not exactly sympathetic :

It traveled across Canada and Europe for some reason, experiencing nothing, doing nothing, being all the while nothing more than a loudmouthed freak thing.

But as I responded,

Hey, Igor. You could have just ignored it. Besides, no one left the hitchBOT "for strangers to take care of". There was no taking care of, only transporting limited distances in response to its appeals. Got the difference? Or is that too difficult to process, say like a fetus not being a baby for Right wing twits?

I would not have believed any other knuckle dragger would defend the sick, angry clown who took his impotence out on an inanimate robot - but one did! A WSJ hack named Joe Queenan and former Philly native. After delivering the usual BS excuses for Philly natives', i.e. it wasn't a real Santa we booed years ago, but a fake, people should know better than to ask for sliced cheese on a Philly cheese steak sandwich.  He also insisted the whole city shouldn't be blamed as it was "just one guy". But we know when one guy would do it, dozens of others also would (they just missed the opportunity). Just as if  there's one wife beater after a football game his team lost, there are usually hundreds of others.

Queenan then delivered this gem concerning hitchBot's end:

"A robot wandering around the streets of Philadelphia at night is an idiot. A robot that dumb deserves to get his head handed to him".

Really? Seriously? That is your response? Hate to have to break this to you, Sparky, but the robot was non-ambulatory so wasn't "wandering". Nor was it conscious of human clock time so wouldn't have known whether it was midnight or dawn. It simply asked for assistance to get to its next destination via hitchhiking.  Humans, flesh and blood people - presumably like you and me - accommodated it in dozens of other cities, and moved it further to its ultimate destination, San Francisco.

Similarly, in those other towns and cities, when it was spotted at night - anywhere - it was quickly taken care of, protected, then transported to its next place at the earliest opportunity. This conveyed a fundamental respect for property not one's own. But not in Philly, where your nutty freak loser dolt in a Cunningham jersey clearly took it for an easy mark and spent his frustrations and energy in wrecking it.

A really, really tough little turd  - able to beat the crap out of a three and a half foot high vocal robot.  One wonders if this mutt would've been as tough against one of the "corners" my Peace Corps training group met in Philly while there in June of 1971. I suspect he'd have tossed them his jersey then took off running for mommy.

Big,  tough guy, he can beat up on a pint-sized metal man in the middle of the night. And you can defend it? I'd suppose you'd defend beating up on a quadriplegic lost in Philly in the middle of the night too, eh?

Carter was right that this robot-human interaction, dismissed as trivial by so many - again shows something peculiarly degenerate in our character that it could have happened in our country and no other. Maybe, just maybe, it's the same difference that drives us to kill 88 people a day with gun violence while defending an amendment that was never intended to cover automatic or semi-automatic weapons, nor to extend gun possession to those not belonging to a formal militia.

As for Philly cheese steaks sandwiches, I will be having no more until that little bot is repaired - by those in Philly- and send on his way to SF again!


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