This month, August, 2024, has already broken the all-time Ethics Alarms record for banned commenters with seven, the last kicked out late last night. There are still two days to go, so the chances look good for eight or more.
Appropriately, this morning I will be holding this month’s version of my two hour, Continuing Legal Education legal ethics Zoom seminar for TRT, “Professionalism, the Key to Ethical Lawyering and Trustworthy Justice.” It was my noting in this post that I taught this seminar from my home office 90 minutes after finding my wife of 43 years dead in our living room that partially triggered the barrage, it appears.
Frequent commenter and critic here Extradimensional Cephalopod usefully pointed out that commenters who thought (or claimed to think) I was an unfeeling Mike Dukakis clone (or something) couldn’t grasp the concept of professionalism because, well, they apparently weren’t professionals. However, these now banished Ethics Alarms visitors could have enlightened themselves had they availed themselves of the EA search engine, which would have revealed that as a professional ethics specialist, I have discussed and explained the concept repeatedly.
Other banned commenters, including the previous record-setting group just two months ago, in June, may have descended on Ethics Alarms because I decided to become active on my newish Twitter/”X” account by linking to the Ethics Alarms posts that concentrated on the 2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck and related matters, and a political party whose name I will not mention (and shouldn’t need to) will try to destroy anyone who dares to offer opposition to its quest for power.
Ask Robert Kennedy, Jr.
But I digress. This is your weekly space to discuss whatever ethics issues you want to discuss, even me, as long as you haven’t been banned.
I’ll be fulfilling my professional obligations….
Ethics Alarms 
It’s very annoying for you to deal with bannable and eventually banned commenters. And I’d hate to suggest even more work on your part- but I wonder if there could be a post dedicated to banned commenters that preserves the comments and comment strings that led to the bannings. As a kind of display for visitors to understand what repetitively corrected but repetitively posted facile comments or outright inappropriate conduct leads to a banning.
Hmmm, so you’re kinda giving banned trolls a unique individualized platform on the very blog they were they were banned to display their comments that caused them to be banned? I’m not so sure that any future troll would bother to read and certainly not learn from that kind of post, heck they don’t even bother to read and learn from the already existing comment policies much less an entire blog post that shares trolling comments from banned commenters.
Trolls troll and commenters comment. Ethics Alarms has lots of good commenters, a few commenters that cross the line once in a while when they let their emotions go unchecked, but there are very few commenters that are allowed to remain on Ethics Alarms if they intentionally troll to incite or argue like babbling imbeciles. Personally, I think that (in the end) what Jack does works pretty well for his blog.
Ah, Labor Day! The figurative end of Summer for Americans. The end of vacations, camps and lemonade stands.
Or Ice cream stands.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/residents-boston-suburb-raised-20k-040647458.html
Here are my observations about the shuttering of a child’s homemade ice cream stand intended to assist his brother’s special needs hockey team.
another unfortunate factor is the amount of laws regulations and such that exist. It is practically impossible to stay abreast of them all.
police and code enforcement are not required to provide the relevant rule when they intrude on our lives. The culture of requiring government permission to live our lives is out of control.
I wholeheartedly agree that food safety regulations exist to prevent food borne illnesses. However, we do not summarily send cease and desist notices to restaurants who have been cited for issues that can lead to illness. In those cases the for profit concern is given time to correct the issue. That does not seem to be the case here. The assumption is that he cannot meet the NSF standards for dairy products.
There is also the element of Caveat Venditor for businesses whose primary purpose is to provide safe wholesome food for sale and Caveat Emptor for a street corner stand operated by a child selling unpackaged ice cream. The latter should put more of the onus of protection from food borne illness on the buyer and not the seller. Food regulations are to protect the public from asymmetric information regarding the storage and preparation of food. An adult should have better knowledge of the risks than the child.
I would like to know if soup kitchens in that jurisdiction are routinely inspected because most of those are staffed with volunteers who may not have passed “Food Safe” certification and would the city shut them down if they do not meet standards.
I would have advised the child to use prepackaged ice cream which is produced in sanitary conditions. Had that been done what the child was doing was merely selling a product without a license. At that point, he would have been able to argue that selling homemade lemonade has a higher risk of illness than his offering.
As for understanding the law and obeying it, it would take an expert to understand the letter of every law and for most the nuance between a lemonade stand that is permitted and an ice cream stand would not be a rationalization. In my opinion, it would simply be perceived as an example of permissible activity. Learning takes place by seeing what is permitted. This is why 48% of those using the NY transit system don’t pay. No punishment or even third party justification leads individuals to play the system to their advantage.
You make some very good points there about the vagueness of the law and the amount of time given to sellers to correct problems.
I would only add that it would seem the temporary nature of the ice cream stand played a factor. These pop-up ventures are here today, gone tomorrow so there’s really no opportunity to come back and inspect. Rather than look in the kid’s kitchen to make sure all regulations regarding sanitation, hygiene and storage of the product is up to code, they just shut it down. For a permanent business, such as a restaurant, it’s likely still going to be there the next day and allowing it to fix problems will keep employees on the payroll, keep payroll taxes coming in and is easier to inspect in order to address any problems.
Absolutely on the temporary status.
There is still the issue of who bears the responsibility for what is ingested. In the case of a kids pop up venture I would say the adult buyer takes the risk. I see little difference other than payment than a child’s birthday party where ice cream is dished out without regulated concern for safety.
I agree that kids must learn to obey laws but we cannot expect kids or their parents to be lawyers.
‘The assumption is that he cannot meet the NSF standards for dairy products.’
I at one time wanted to start cooking classes out of my home, and my kitchen was designed with it in mind (size and placement of an island). I know people who do it, and have attended classes in a neighbor’s home. However, when I looked into the regulations, it turns out that to teach or cater, I need a separate dedicated cooking space that is not used for family meals, if I’m going to charge money. I can teach friends for free and I’m good. At the point it becomes a business, food handling/sanitization/qualification rules come to bear. Pets, people who smoke or vape in the home, curtains, carpets and other dust and lint generating finishes, multiple people not gloved or sanitized using the same kitchen; there are too many possible contamination factors in a private home.
The fact that the ice cream was made in a family kitchen was an automatic disqualification, as well as the young man not having any training in safe food handling. Did he use a thermometer to scald the milk? Is he on point with handwashing and glove use? Likely not, and all you need is one bad batch.
I now bake and cook with interested friends, as a hobby.
It has to be tempting if one were pulled over for speeding, if you were watching cars pass you right and left, to ask the office ‘Was I the only one you could catch?’. Tempting, but dumb, stupid, and guaranteed to induce the office to give you the maximum possible ticket.
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Regarding the ice cream stand, of course one’s initial reaction is how insensitive and rigid of the town’s authorities. In some cases that might be true if it seems the town has nothing better to do than pick on kids.
However. Look back 100, 125 years ago. These laws and ordinances were enacted for a reason. When so many commercial food preparers were ignorant of or ignoring any hygiene and food safety principles, the government was impelled to act. See Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle for a historic expose. And was that one of Theodore Roosevelt’s crusades, or am I thinking of someone else? Today, though, we expect cleanliness and hygiene from our restaurants and food processing plants as a matter of course.
Lemonade stands are one thing, but ice cream seems to me to be a step up on the food chain, needing more attention to health and safety. That said, I think people could have acted better.
The person who complained — we assume (since nothing was said in the story) that he or she went straight to the city rather than talking to the kid and his parents. A gentle reminder to he or they would seem to be a good idea. Also, we don’t know if someone actually got sick from the ice cream or just decided to report him. We assume the latter but don’t really know.
As well, the city could have shown a teeny bit more initiative. Surely they knew they were not dealing with a commercial establishment — why not a quiet word with his folks as a starter?
What I don’t recall reading in the story is an acknowledgment that they were in the wrong, even unknowingly. They should be explaining to their son that these regulations exist for a reason — perhaps it would be a good learning opportunity to research.
This is a story that seems to have turned out well, but also seems to have had several good teaching opportunities that were not used.
You are correct. That was TR. He read an advanced copy of “The Jungle” and commissioned a secret investigation of the Chicago stockyards. When the report came back, he was told that, not only was Sinclair correct, but that things were much worse than even he wrote.
This is why we have the FDA.
All true — and I’d argue necessary as all get out.
But it’s still hard to think of TR and the FDA in the same thought.
TR was not a simple demagogue.
I find it interesting that Labor Day is perhaps the only holiday that is important enough to cancel work for, but isn’t discussed. Why do we celebrate Labor Day? Perhaps we should be thankful that the labor movement got some of their basic demands met.
Demands:
(1) To be paid in money, not company scrip (think Kohl’s cash).
(2) The right to live where we want to live (and not be forced to live in company housing and pay the company rent rate).
(3) The right to quit. (when we get behind on the rent to the company housing and the company grocery store, we can’t quit until we pay it off with wages that can’t keep up because they are designed that way)
Over a million rounds of ammo were fired in the Battle of Blair Mountain and the federal government used military bombers on the workers. Workers and their families were machine-gunned to death by the National Guard in Colorado. The labor movement was a great freedom movement that ended the new slavery that emerged after the Civil War and NO ONE wants us to know about it.
Thanks Michael. I knew nothing about the Battle of Blair Mountain. And I descend on my dad’s side from a West Virginia family dating back to a Hessian drum major who escaped from a POW camp in Frederick, or Hancock, MD. But from the eastern panhandle, which was mine free and just subsistence farms. There were still miner strikes in Morenci, AZ when we arrived in Arizona in the early ’80s. Even strike breakers. I saw recently that Morenci remains to this day the largest copper mining operation in North America. On my mother’s side, one of her aunts was instrumental in the early days of the Chicago Teachers Union. I’m not sure my great aunt would be too thrilled with how that project has worked out over the last hundred years.
And that holidays earned by workers back in the day are largely enjoyed by white collar or government workers today. In my corporate job, I have several paid holidays off, including Labor Day. The low-paid manufacturing and blue collar laborers of the early 20th century are the retail/restaurant workers of today. Yet I can walk into almost any restaurant or brick-and-mortar store on most holidays, including Labor Day, and get service.
I support Election Day as a federal holiday. But it won’t help the people it would be intended to help – the low-income communities that work predominately in the service industry and do not get paid federal holidays off anyway.
Thanks for mentioning that. I don’t believe I had ever heard of the Battle of Blair Mountain. Looking at the Wikipedia article is eye opening. Something like the Whiskey rebellion that Washington suppressed but on a much larger scale.
It reads like something you’d see from the labor movement in the 1870s or 1880s, but larger in scope with more modern weapons. Who knew that we had had aerial bombing of civilians by the air force and poison gas used inside the United States?
On the other hand, I remember how Douglas MacArthur suppressed the veteran’s march in the early 1930’s — this is kind of the same mindset on the part of the authorities.
And, after the Great Depression hit, this was a factor leading to the NLRB and all the modern labor laws we have today. Has the pendulum swung too far in terms of union power? Maybe so.
It should go without saying but I want to say it anyway every once in a while, this is the best and most informative blog with a fantastic commentariat ever assembled. It’s kept me coming back for 15 years and even prior, to the Ethics Scoreboard which ultimately proved that not everything on the internet is forever.
My wife was watching the CNN ‘interview’ with Harris and Walz. They flashed a ‘LIVE’ sign on the screen through the whole thing. She kept insisting it was live. I had to tell her what Harris was going to say before she said it and show her the clip I saved off X 3 hours earlier. I think it is dishonest to call it ‘LIVE’ when it is both prerecorded AND edited for content.
Ya think?
Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias.
Well, I am sure there is some hack at the Washington Post this week who will say that it is permissible to list and interview as ‘Live’ if it was filmed live or some other such ridiculous justification.
OK, off topic (except it is open forum).
I’ve been watching clips of Gettysburg (1993) this week, and I couldn’t stand it any more. I went on to Amazon and bought the darn thing.
I rented it several years ago and it was an excellent movie then.
What really struck me watching some of the clips this week was watching the columns of Union and Confederate infantry marching to (and on) the battlefield. There is just something about watching a regiment marching into battle with the Stars and Stripes waving in the center of the formation.
I will say that I recognize the Stars and Bars — but they just don’t have the same visceral impact.
Guess you folks know what I’ll be doing this weekend.
I love the movie. It’s time for me to watch it again.
Yes, I should have bought it the first time instead of renting it.
Here is an interesting question: Could this movie be made today?
One of the attractive things about the movie is that it treats both sides as human beings. That wouldn’t be a popular view in today’s Hollywood.
However, one of the other things that makes the movie so good is that they made use of hundreds or thousands of Civil War reenactors, whom they didn’t have to pay much and who brought their own, authentic uniforms and equipment.
I would say that, if the movie was portraying the Confederates as subhuman beasts, chances of getting reenactors to use in the movie would be about zilch.
So if such a movie were to be made, and it wanted a modicum of authenticity, there would have to be a level of fairness which might well preclude such a project.
On the gripping hand, Lee does not come across well in the movie, at least for those who think he was the greatest general since Julius Caesar. I think most historians would agree that Gettysburg was one of Lee’s low points. So that’s a plus about this movie for fans of The Message.
Ted Turner financed the film himself and didn’t care about whether it made any profit or not. It was an Elon Musk-like move. The movie also has my favorite film score of all time, and Tom Berenger, Jeff Daniels and Richard Jordan give Oscar-worthy performances, the best of their respective careers.
Ahhh, that would explain it.
Yes, Berenger and Daniels are great. I also really like Sam Elliott as General Buford.