Personally, I don't consider his behavior to be absurd. His form of non-violent protest to this situation helped bring to light some rather absurd policies. And

Personally, I don't consider his behavior to be absurd. His form of non-violent protest to this situation helped bring to light some rather absurd policies. And as a customer who has been on some awful United flights, alongside the experience of waiting in airports and commuting for hours, I absolutely sympathize with his position. Why should this man be forced off the plane when he bought a ticket, passed all the security check points, segmented a portion of his day for this trip, and was mostly a compliant customer? The fault of this is squarely on United who had many options available to them and opted to escalate it into the situation that it became. This isn't a situation where only one seat was available on a plane and the only solution was to bump this one person off so that someone more important could take it. This is a situation where United could've easily upped the compensation to look for someone among dozens of passengers to give up their seat. Honestly, most consumers are not going to look at this story and sympathize with United.