Category Archives: ethics

Starbucks Fail

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A Starbucks in Tempe, AZ, had one of its baristas ask five police officers who were having a pre-shift coffee either go sit somewhere else or leave altogether because one customer felt “threatened” over their being where the customer could see them.

In the hoo-raw ensuing, Starbucks spokesman Reggie Borges said

We have a deep respect for the Tempe Police and their service to the community.

That’s plainly not true. If Starbucks really cared, if it had any actual respect for the police—much less a shred of self-respect—it would have had a better-trained crew of baristas who wouldn’t knee-jerk insult cops over a snowflake’s made-up beef.

A day after the story broke, Rossann Williams, Executive Vice President and President, US Retail for Starbucks said this:

On behalf of Starbucks, I want to sincerely apologize to you all for the experience that six of your officers had in our store on July 4. When those officers entered the store and a customer raised a concern over their presence, they should have been welcomed and treated with dignity and the utmost respect by our partners (employees). Instead they were made to feel unwelcome and disrespected, which is completely unacceptable.

These are empty words, whether sincerely offered or just marketing damage control. What’s necessary is actual, visible changed behavior over a sustained period of time.

It’s also sad that no one else spoke up and told this barista to seat the cops with him.

Aside from the simple courtesy of such a gesture, it might also be the case that other patrons wouldn’t feel safe without the cops around. Especially with someone possessed of so little respect for law and order so close by.

A Bit on the Citizenship Question

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The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued Commerce and the Census Bureau in Federal court over the inclusion of a citizenship question in the upcoming census.  EPIC centered its case on the premise that these agencies must explain the impact on privacy of such a question prior to

initiating a collection of new information

when that collection involves electronically stored, personally identifiable information.

The DC Circuit correctly tossed the case on the grounds that EPIC had suffered no harm, so it had no standing to sue.

That’s too bad, though, because EPIC also was wrong on the facts.  Between 1970 and 2010, the Census Bureau, in addition to a short-form census form sent to everyone present in the US, sent a long-form census form to a significant subset of that population, and that long-form version contained the citizenship question.  As recently as 1950, the census included the citizenship question on every form sent out.  As recently as 1960, the census asked after place of birth—which clearly is a citizenship question, since being born under US jurisdiction (vis., in the US, on a US military installation on foreign soil, etc) makes one a citizen.

The conclusion is obvious.  Nor Commerce nor the Census Bureau have any obligation to conduct a “privacy impact” assessment and publish any statement of that impact: Census isn’t collecting new information; it’s merely attempting to resume collecting information it routinely had collected in the recent past.

Separately, I won’t go far into how the 14th Amendment makes the question an absolute necessity, except to point out the following.  Section 2 of the 14th says this [emphasis added]:

But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

While representation is apportioned according to the number of persons present in each State, the sanction for abridging the right to vote is based on citizenship, not mere presence.  (Lest anyone get their panties in a bunch over that “male citizens” part, the 19th Amendment cleared that.)  It’s impossible to carry out that sanction without knowing the number of actual citizens in each State.

And with Progressive-Democrats constantly bleating about voter suppression, the ability to apply that sanction clearly is necessary.

Free Speech

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…Progressive-Democrat style.  Here’s Congresswoman Frederica Wilson (D, FL):

people who are “making fun of members of Congress” online “should be prosecuted”

Because, she went on, making fun of Congress intimidates Congressmen.  In fact, she went on in that vein for more than 40 seconds, just in the recording.

Wow.

Hong Kong Protests

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And the People’s Republic of China threatens.  Hong Kong citizens have been protesting a PRC-endorsed law proposal that would allow Hong Kongese and others resident in or visiting Hong Kong to be extradited to the mainland for trial in the PRC’s government-run court system.

[The PRC’s] government signaled its fraying patience with protesters in Hong Kong after they stormed the city’s legislature, calling the violent turn a direct challenge to Beijing’s authority and suggesting it would have to be answered.
Public statements from Beijing marked a shift in Chinese leaders’ attitude toward the crisis in the semiautonomous territory, indicating they may be forced to step in….

Consistent with that, the PLA’s Hong Kong garrison has begun “emergency handling” exercises.

And this:

The [PRC] government’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office called the protests a “blatant challenge to the bottom line of ‘one country, two systems’….”

Hardly.  The PRC’s proposed extradition law for Hong Kong is a deliberate threat to the two systems part.  Yet, here’s Zhang Jian, Associate Research Fellow at the Shanghai Institute of International Studies:

The suspension of the bill is tantamount to a withdrawal. There is no more room for backing down, no more ground for retreating.

This, of course, is nonsense. Suspension is not withdrawal, it’s a deliberate attempt to keep the extradition bill alive for later, quieter reconsideration and for enactment out of site of the peasantry. There’s plenty of room for continued action: the actual withdrawal of the bill.

Beijing has often appeared tolerant in the face of mass protests in mainland China and Hong Kong—and when passions and attention fade, authorities detain, attack, or otherwise punish ringleaders to prevent a recurrence.

To be sure, that’s a faux patience, and the tanks may well roll across the bridges, just as they rolled into Tiananmen Square not so very long ago when another bunch of uppity peasants demanded freedom.

Misunderstanding

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This one regards the rescue of those escaping from northern Africa and their disposition on arrival on European shores.  The particular case concerns Italy’s arrest of a German national who is the captain of an NGO ship that had rescued a number of refugees whose ship was in danger in international waters in the middle of the Mediterranean. Carola Rakete, captain of the Sea-Watch 3, was arrested after she docked her ship at Italy’s Lampedusa, an island in the southern Med—and closer to Tunisia than to any land of Italy’s.

UK [and UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres] spokeswoman Stephane Dujarric said in a daily press briefing that “no vessel or ship master should be at risk of being fined for coming to the aid of boats in distress, where loss of life is imminent.”
“Sea rescue is a longstanding humanitarian imperative. It’s also an obligation under international law.”

Dujarric went on:

the UN was “concerned by the recent decree from the government regarding NGO vessels.”
She was referring to Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini’s successful implementation of legislation to fine ships that flout orders to stay out of Italian waters.

Dujarric is mischaracterizing the situation, and a part of the incident that matters has been omitted by Deutsche Welle in its piece at the link.  Italy has not criminalized rescue on the high seas.  Italy has only responded to the illegal entry into Italian waters, compounded by the illegal entry into an Italian port, by a captain and her vessel that not only had no permission to enter either, she had been explicitly denied that permission.

Furthermore, that denial had been enforced by an Italian police vessel that Rakete rammed and forced her way past as she docked at Lampedusa.  That was elided by the DW article.

Foreign Minister Heiko Maas is upset over the arrest of the German national for her criminal act.

Haggling over refugee distribution is undignified and must stop. We urgently need a European solution—one that is also in line with our European values.

Indeed, the haggling must stop.  The EU must respect the European value of territorial integrity of its member nations.

In the end, regardless of what we might think of Italian actions in the present incident, such…confusion…reduces the credibility of those favoring the transfer of rescuees from the rescuing ships to a nation’s shore regardless of that nation’s expressed wishes and of that nation’s laws. And of that nation’s sovereignty.