Inside Hook:

By now you’ve seen the video of the agitated man in the last row of a plane berating a woman in front of him for reclining her seat. While not shown in the viral video, the woman on the plane (Wendi Williams) later noted on Twitter that she did put her seat up while the man ate, and that the physical assault of her seatback started when she put the chair back down post-meal.

While violence is never the answer, a follow-up discussion in the InsideHook office on airline reclining seats got rather heated. Some editors were on team punchy’s side; others adamently defended the right to recline as much as they want whenever they wanted, because they paid for the seat and reclining is allowed under the airline’s rules.

As aircraft cabin designer James Lee once noted, “The question of the recline is like a zero-sum game. The gain of one person is the pain of the person behind.”

This whole “to recline or not to recline” issue has popped up again. For the record, as a guy who is 6’3″ tall with bad knees, you not only can’t recline your seat in front of me (the seat ends up slamming into my knees), I won’t let you, going so far as to physically prevent your seat from moving back. But, keep in mind, instead of blaming each other, we should get angry at the airlines who jam us into coach with seats so tiny even the average-sized person can’t fit in some of them.