The NYTimes “staff ethicist” discusses how to react to other people expressing bigoted statements.
I didn’t see anything about responding to someone saying their politician was acting “in your best interests – as if you’re not perfectly aware of them, and somehow retarded by dint of not living in Manhattan or DC.
I’ll keep looking.
The moment I read “small independent bookstore in a small Pacific Northwest town”, I couldn’t think of anything else besides the bookstore ladies in Portlandia.
Which, I’m told, is actually modeled after the Amazon Bookstore in Minneapolis, which Fred Armison apparently visited when in Minneapolis, and is one of a few Minneapolis characters that turn up in Portlandia.
Which should tell you something.
Appiah is not an ethicist. He is a philosopher:
http://appiah.net/
The Times has a history of putting people with no education in ethics in charge of its “Ask the Ethicist” column. The previous “Ethicist” was a humor writer named Randy Cohen. Cohen was regularly slammed by real ethicists (there are such things), basically because he made it up as he went along.
I stopped reading after I saw this line…
.’ I work as a bookseller-manager at an independent bookstore.’
That means that he got a worthless college degree and is either living off his parents trust fund or married someone rich. If doing that is all you are qualified to do you are not worthwhile to society and bring nothing to the table except white guilt, liberal arrogance, and ‘tolerance’
OK, bookseller must sell about $1000 in books per day–say at least 100 books to at least 50 customers–just to pay the rent and his salary, no? So in two instances out of how many, he encounters customers who say things that are strictly speaking insensitive to the inhabitants of the inner city, but are not racially driven as far as he can prove.
Sounds like a community that, even by liberal standards, is quite open minded, and quite frankly if one wants to point out that not all people from Ferguson are “like that”, well, isn’t that what you do? Per POD’s comment, is the precious little snowflake too timid to make his case?
I’ve only seen Portlandia a few times, but as Mitch says, you see an awful lot of Minneapolis (and St Paul) in it. The bumper sticker episode. You have to see it.
The NYT article….does it tell us how to react to Trump haters?
I generally laugh and tell them that their attitude and behavior is why Trump got elected. It only further enraged them. I’m hoping to piss one off enough so they’ll assault me and I’ll sue. Plus I’ll have the bonus of telling everyone I got a black eye from a tolerant, loving, SJW, liberal. It will so be worth it.