I’m sorry! The Thanksgiving/ 43rd wedding anniversary disruption of yesterday threw off my Friday-dar, and I only just now realized that I owe readers an open forum. Judging from the activity on Ethics Alarms the past two days, it’s going to be a sparsely attended event, but you all have surprised me before.
Ethics Alarms 
I’ve been reading EA. Just feeling mentally clogged by pro-Hamas rallies that have begun to take up the swastika. I had hoped the support for Hamas was plagued by ignorance.
Karine Jean-Pierre breathlessly slobbered that this Thanksgiving was one of the CHEAPEST EVAH
The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) reported that the 2023 average cost for a Thanksgiving meal for ten people was $61.17, down 4.5% from 2022’s record high.
Considering the blanket disregard for both truth and a fact-based Reality KJP specifically and the JoKe administration generally display, should we kinda, you know, like, just leave it there?
Not exactly
That same (heh!) AFBF claims that’s UP 14.7% from 2021 and a WHOPPING 25% from 2019.
Us the benighted are left to ponder: Just how stupid must they deem their target audience?
PWS
Jack; please remove the two (2) above posts
PWS
PWS
PWS
And this crap is relevant to an ethics blog exactly how?
Elected leader ethics? Transparency? Honesty? Competency as a paid liar? Misleading (or gaslighting?) the public?
You want to suggest that Biden is unethical, fine. But that’s not what this cartoon is about. This is simply partisan yammering, nothing to do with ethics.
Our host and the overwhelming majority of the commenters are far to my right politically. That’s fine, even when my positions on issues like abortion and gun control are met not just with disagreement but with accusations of being unethical. I don’t respond simply because I don’t want to waste my time arguing with people who won’t even consider anything but an absolutist position.
But I reach my breaking point when ethics are completely unrelated to the issue at hand.
Verdict: the memes are off topic, and you’re correct. Hopefully this was an isolated lapse in judgment. l-tryptophan, you know…
The cartoons were on-topic for C.G.’s comment; can’t we be allowed maybe one such every once in a while? Not that different from your opening graphics some times, are they? (Maybe he didn’t include it in his comment since he already had a link and didn’t want it lost in WordPress Purgatory.)
Oh, and a belated Happy Anniversary! One daughter has an 11-25 birthday, so sometimes she’s stuck on Thanksgiving, too.
Just for clarification and to eliminate any confusion, the Ethics Alarms position on abortion is that it’s an ethics conflict requiring a rational utilitarian balancing along with proper recognition of the value of life, and the position on the Second Amendment is that reasonable regulations are responsible and necessary, but that the most vocal and influential gun control advocates are neither honest nor trustworthy about their true agenda. Neither of those positions are absolutist.
“the Ethics Alarms position on abortion is that it’s an ethics conflict requiring a rational utilitarian balancing along with proper recognition of the value of life”
But in fairness, this utilitarian balance doesn’t seem reachable as long as there is stipulation requiring a proper recognition of the value of life.
“Life is valuable, but in the case of this particular age range of the unborn, it doesn’t matter that life is valuable compared to this other concern that in any other situation we’d never raise to the value of life” isn’t a consistent statement.
So, is the Ethics Alarms position really that “whatever each individual State decides post-Dobbs is the correct decision even if each state has wildly different conclusions”?
<i>”the position on the Second Amendment is that reasonable regulations are responsible and necessary, but that the most vocal and influential gun control advocates are neither honest nor trustworthy about their true agenda.”</i>
On this topic, there’s also the notion that we’ve got the right regulations in place as is to balance our values of public safety, individual liberty and personal security. In which case a position of “do nothing” actually isn’t an absolutist one.
Wherein lies a devious propaganda method of characterizing the preservation of status quo or of an existing policy as “radical” or “absolutist”.
No, somethings things indeed *are* fine as is or at least are close to fine as we can get without sacrificing values we consider more important.
I thought the questions/points about KPJ were relevant and germane. The political cartoons were simply a bit of holiday humor. What is the difference between a political cartoon and a “meme?” What exactly is a “meme?” (And what is a GIF? And how is it pronounced?)
It’s pronounced JIF.
[Respectful housekeeping note: many open fora on various blogs turn into meme competitions. I really don’t want that. I’ll use a meme now and then for effect, but these things absent ethics content are not consistent with the EA mission or the comment policies. Neither are knock-knock jokes.]
Knock-knock! 🚪
Who’s there? ❓
Cosh!
Cosh who? 🥴
Gesundheit! 🤧
The chocolate ration has been increased from 15 to 10, in other news we have always been at war with East Asia
Presently lurking, with little to say…
As yet.
-Jut
I stumbled across a Fox series, Legends & Lies: The Patriots this afternoon. It covers much of the events leading up to and (right now) including the American Revolution. There are quite interesting portrayals of various Founding Fathers.
I did not realize that Benjamin Franklin was viewed with much suspicion by Adams and others for all the time he spent in Britain prior to Independence, although I was aware that the British inspired him to recognize his American heritage.
It seems to be a good series so far, and is a nice reminder that our Founding Fathers were much more than the cardboard cutouts they are sometimes depicted as. It also makes what they accomplished all the more impressive, I think.
Currently reading a very interesting book about the German troops utilized by the Brits during the Revolutionary War. (I descend from a Hessian drum major who escaped from a POW camp in Hancock, MD and settled in Berkeley Springs, WV.) I know so little about the Revolutionary War. I had no idea it went on for SEVEN years from 1776 until 1783. And it was vicious. Very destructive and contentious. Not a walk in the park for the rebels. Lots of propaganda as well. The crown didn’t let go of the Colonies willingly.
I also recommend the movie “The Crossing”. It’s a superb retelling of the crossing of the Delaware and the battle of Trenton on Christmas, 1776.
Again, one valuable thing of shows like these is to humanize our ancestors. Yes, they had human feelings and flaws, but the best of these movies show also their greatness and why we justifiably honor their deeds and memory.
See Ken Burns’ excellent documentary on Ben Franklin. Franklin had spent years in England shortly before returning in time to join the Continental Congress, and had planned on moving to England permanently
Why didn’t he go through with it? I’m guessing health reasons.
No! From the Washington Post:
“Benjamin Franklin was not among them. He was in London, as he had been for the better part of two decades, serving the British Empire as deputy postmaster. As a scientist, inventor, writer and publisher, Franklin was the most famous and well-respected person ever to come from the American colonies. Plus, he was witty and fun at parties. Franklin didn’t like the taxes imposed on the colonies but at this point did not support independence, preferring instead to advocate for the colonists before the British Parliament. Then he got hold of some very private letters. a packet of letters from the Massachusetts colonial Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and his lieutenant Andrew Oliver. Historians don’t know who leaked the letters to Franklin, but what he read in them was alarming. Hutchinson and Oliver opposed colonists’ demands for equal rights with the British. They complained of the unruly Massachusetts assembly and suggested the governor be given more power over them and that more British troops be sent to put down the unrest. Franklin thought the letters mischaracterized the situation in Massachusetts, thus misleading the entire British Parliament, and that if certain members of the Massachusetts assembly knew about this, they would focus their anger more accurately on Hutchinson than on the British authorities who had been misinformed by Hutchinson. So he sent the packet of letters overseas to Thomas Cushing, the speaker of the assembly, with strict instructions about with whom the speaker could share them.At first Cushing honored Franklin’s request to share the letters with only a few specific people, though he asked Franklin whether he could publish them. Franklin said no, he could not. Unfortunately for Cushing, Samuel Adams was one of the authorized viewers, and Adams, as one of the radicals, did not care about respecting Franklin’s request. He began writing about the existence of the letters and his opinion of them. By mid-June 1773, the letters were published in full in the Boston Gazette.Demonstrations and riots ensued, with demands for the removal of the governor. The uproar also contributed to the Boston Tea Party six months later, in which a mob of radicals dumped British tea into Boston Harbor.Franklin, probably beside himself and hoping to stop further bloodshed, decided to come clean. On Christmas Day in 1773, he published a confession in a London newspaper. Yes, he leaked the letters, he wrote, but really, correspondence between these officials should have always been public anyway, and he was only trying to show the colonists and the Parliament that they had more in common than they thought. He was just trying to help!
In January, Franklin was summoned to appear before the privy council, the king’s most senior advisers. To make matters worse, a few days before his scheduled appearance, the news about the Boston Tea Party hit British shores. The solicitor general, who presided over the hearing, excoriated and insulted him at length before firing him from his post. Franklin, his reputation destroyed, returned to the colonies in March 1774. Rather than change people’s minds about the conflict between the colonies and the empire, the whole affair had changed only one mind: his own. He now supported American independence.”
I had never heard that part of Franklin’s story until I saw the Burns documentary. Franklin’s public humiliation in London was apparently one of the greatest traumas of his life!
I read about it in H.W. Brands’ “The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin”. Good book.
He was lucky. Franklin was in England, representing a rebel faction. He intercepted government communications and sent them back to the rebels. This is treason. It would have gotten anyone else a nasty execution. Franklin got a stern talking to.
Why?
Franklin’s impact on contemporary science is really not well appreciated here in America. For about 2000 years, electricity was known to Europeans. It was known that you could create static electricity by rubbing fur on an amber rod or silk on a glass rod. However, those two ‘electricities’, although they acted the same, were not the same. No one knew why or how this worked. Franklin came up with the idea that matter is made of positive and negative charges. Most matter has equal number of positive and negative charges, and is therefore neutral. If you have an excess of either charge, you get the static electric effect, and that is why there are 2 of them. With that concept, electrical research exploded in the next decades. When you look at a battery and see the + and – sign, it is there because of Benjamin Franklin.
This made Benjamin Franklin a contemporary rock star. The British couldn’t execute him, all the powers of the world would support the colonists if that happened. This is similar to Einstein. Hitler ‘tricked’ Einstein into leaving Germany so he wouldn’t be killed in the Holocaust. King George and HItler knew they couldn’t kill men like these.
Technically, though, they weren’t rebels yet: remember, this was before the Tea Party, before Lexington. Heck, the US has had more serious disputes among its states lately, and Franklin was right: typically communications from officials were considered public. So they didn’t have the law behind them, in addition to the fact that Franklin was, as you say,a rockstar.
Yes, the Legends & Lies episode covered his appearance before the Privy council. His experience during this episode changed Franklin — it seems it left him feeling that the Americans could never get what we demanded from the Brits.
The more I read and watch on the revolutionary period, the more clear it is that the Brits in charge totally misread and misunderstood the Americans and what had been and was happening in North America. They were perhaps not the total incompetents I have always thought them to be, however their policies and actions presented themselves as such.
Another commenter mentioned that this was a long, vicious war and it was. In terms that are relevant on the instant, the British were the occupiers and colonialists and we were the oppressed. So many of the things attributed to colonialists were done to us.
The British forces — Navy, army, mercenaries — burned American town, looted, pillaged, raped settlements and colonists. Once the gloves came off the British believed in suppressing a rebellion with a very heavy hand (also see the Indian mutinies).
In the case of the American colonies, it didn’t work. In some degree (we can argue how great), we were certainly helped out by European intervention. Much of Europe saw the opportunity for some revenge against Britain and took it. As an American, I think we might have eventually prevailed even lacking such. We had already won some significant victories prior to the French coming in, but it would have been much harder.
One of the things I believe Washington and Lincoln had in common was that they were bitter-enders. They refused to give up, unless and until they were forced to do so. I think the American leadership was so much superior to the British at that critical point in time, that we would have eventually prevailed.
I think there is an innately American stubbornness that comes into play and a refusal to give up. There are countless examples in our history.
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Here is one factoid from this series that left me gobsmacked — when Washington assumed command after Bunker Hill, there was no plant in America that made gunpowder. Think about that for a moment.
“1776” mentions this in the “saltpeter” exchange between John and Abigail Adams.
Here is an article worth commenting about.
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.politics.guns/c/uc6_lbpWPX8/m/YuR8KxGcAAAJ
Michael, the battle cry is, “Believe all women!” It’s not “Believe Israeli women.” As our president would say, “Come on, man!” Aren’t you paying attention.
I have to say the enthusiastic embrace of Hamas and Palestinians by young American college students who simply do not have a dog in this hunt is stunning. Are college students really that easily herded into activism? What are they thinking? Are they really so clueless? Are they thinking?
They are doing exactly what they have been trained to do by their cultural Marxist teachers. They are taking the ‘browner’ side of history. There are only the oppressed and oppressors and oppressors deserve anything they get. The oppressed must be excused when they lash out at their oppressors. That is why the college students supported the Black Lives Matter riots and murders. It is why they support professors who say they want a white genocide. It is why they support all LGBTQ++etc points, not matter how bizzare or perverse. It is why they support abortion on demand up to and possibly past birth. It is why they label a US border ‘racist’, but everyone else’s borders are OK. It is why they go along with nonsensical pronouns and gender theory that is less than one step from astrology.
Did you read this comment by Loose Cannon?
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.politics.guns/c/uc6_lbpWPX8/m/YuR8KxGcAAAJ
This article, about a woman who wrote a piece for the newspaper anonymously about how and why she shoplifts, I think is worth discussing.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/middle-class-mum-shoplifting-m-s-b2451024.html
First, there is no doubt that her actions are unethical, and while we could just analyze this as a “name the rationalizations”, I also think that a deep dive into the article can show many things about our society and make for a good discussion. There are options for discussing how she doesn’t shoplift because she has to, but does it to decrease the prices of expensive alternatives instead of paying for what she wants. However, I want to look at how I think we could combat her “how-to guide”.
This seems to me to be a great case study in “locks keep an honest man honest.” The author admits that much of her stealing is predicated on the app-shopping and self-checkout philosophy of big stores. My main proposal, after looking at this, is to somehow return to the “good old days” of customer service.
Customer service in grocery shopping seems to be dead. I recently had to run to a Giant Eagle for a few specialty items that my normal store does not carry. I like the extra variety, but dislike the higher prices, so I don’t go very often. While I was there, there were three checkers operating, and fourteen people in those lines. There were self-checkouts, but I hate using them as they screw up regularly. Only two “Register Open” lights were on, but they commonly tell you to ignore the lights because something isn’t working, so I got into the shortest line, with only four people ahead of me. The woman immediately stopped serving her current customer to yell at me and tell me that she deserves her break that should have started five minutes ago, as well as to call me names for getting into her line. As I left that line with my kids asking why the lady was so mean, she then made a crude joke about me to another customer and laughed about how I am so stupid. As more and more customers piled up, someone pled with her to open her line, since we now had eight people in each open line, and one of those two turned off her light, too. This woman then told the lady that she is overdue for her break and we need to stop being such bitches to her. All of this in front of my children. By the time I had gotten through the line, she was gone, another cashier had gone, and there were a lot of people in line to see the single cashier that checked me out (who was also very rude). The customer service desk was overrun, so I just gathered my small children and left the store, with no intention of returning.
When I grew up, my dad was an assistant manager of a grocery store that prized its customer service reputation. We, the minimum wage staff (yep, nepotism got me a job to pay for college), were trained in serving the customer and not demanding our “due.” We carried groceries to cars and rarely got or expected tips. We delayed our breaks until someone could cover us so that the customers would never be inconvenienced more than slightly because there were less people to serve them for a few minutes. Customer service was the name of the game and how we kept people from driving 30 miles to the Walmart across state lines where you didn’t have to pay taxes on groceries. We weren’t cheaper, but we were closer, knew your face, and usually remembered how you liked your groceries bagged.
This had a certain effect of reducing shoplifting. It had nothing to do with us being a Mom-and-Pop store (which the article’s author says she’d never shoplift from), but had a lot to do with us not letting people get fed up with fighting the stupid machines, or granting them unfettered access to the front door with a cart load that no employee looked at. Psychologically, it is harder to steal when you know that you’ll have to get through the register. A screenshot will not save you when someone took the time to interact with you as a human. Interacting with a self-checkout, or the “scan and go” app helps us forget that we are not stealing from a faceless organization, but reminds us who we are hurting. This woman’s “honesty goes into overdrive” because she wants the little guys to do well, and if she had to deal routinely with people who usually smiled at her, she would remember that every store has little guys that need to do well.
Another tactic this woman employs is abusing the “my kids threw it in the cart without my realizing it” excuse. There is chaos with kids, and certainly it is easy to leave something under the car seat in the basket, or miss something when your kids are throwing a fit in the store. I have been in that situation too, though never intentionally, and have gone back into stores to pay for what I accidentally walked out with.
My dad’s store took that into consideration as well. A grocery cart was never allowed out the doors of the store. There was never the worry of running into a grocery cart not properly stowed in a cart repository or having to take up parking space with a cart repository. Instead, the employees had special carts that they took your groceries out in. They bagged your groceries, under your eye, but not your hands, and loaded the groceries on special carts that they hauled to your car and loaded into your trunk. We were trained to be efficient, and to interact with the customers. This saved the store money on the cost of grocery carts and dropped the possibility of shoplifting to very small. You couldn’t leave something in your cart and sneak it out. Your cart was politely taken from you and put away properly at the end of your visit as a store employee hauled your groceries out and even loaded your car so that you could take care of your children and not worry about anything. We were sternly lectured on proper egg, bread, chip, and produce care. Of course, we also interacted with our customers, so that when they were in the store, we knew who to watch for shoplifting, and who to help because they were unable to get through without trouble.
Much of this woman’s “here’s how I shoplift” can, I believe, be fixed by the old-fashioned ideals of customer service. Having actual checkers and baggers, much less carry-outs could drastically decrease shrinkage. There were, of course, ways to shoplift back then. However, we managed to keep shrinkage very low. We do have a problem that, in our society, we have to encourage people to work that hard for minimum wage, and at the current minimum wage, is the decrease in shrinkage worth it? I would think so, but I haven’t run the numbers.
Of course, there is the concern raised that self-checkouts and “scan and go” apps are becoming so prevalent, not because it is too expensive to hire people at these obscenely high minimum wages, but because people won’t work for minimum wage, no matter how high it gets. That is a whole other can of worms that would require a much longer comment. However, if this woman is not atypical – and given the presence and tone of the article, I think she is not – then we have a serious societal problem, and it needs to be addressed soon.
I think you have an excellent point that it is much harder to steal from an actual person with whom you are speaking to and interacting with. Certainly there are some folks who can do it, but they would be somewhat of an exceptional case.
I also think that corporations such as Walmart or Food Lion would tell you that it is much more expensive to hire and train the numbers of people that would be needed. They may well be correct in terms of simple economics. They may also be considering the increased likelihood of unions attempting to organize their shops if they hire a multitude of lower wage clerks and baggers. That may also be true … but … well run shops are less likely to actually vote for unions, from all I’ve seen.
And yet, I don’t think that would be the real problem. What you suggest would be the hard solution — it is much more difficult to achieve a great customer centric work force than a surly minimum effort crew, and more difficult to maintain that kind of quality.
I think it pays off, though, if you put forth the effort. A happy, motivated work force is going to have lower turnover, less likely to succumb to unions, and generate much good will for your company. All those things are harder to quantify but they ultimately pay off financially, in my opinion.
And, considering what blog we’re commenting on, it is the more ethical path. The golden rule, etc. Are you more likely to come back to a Chik-fil-A where they thank you for coming or to a McDonald’s where they might not even speak to you when you’re at the window?