Saturday’s Forum
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FILED UNDER: Open Forum
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Hypothetical ethical question:
Let’s say an intelligence/security agency in a generic liberal democracy (really, not the US specifically) engages in illegal, criminal actions. There are records that document this, including orders, deployments, purchases, etc., but of course all these records are classified.
Now, suppose someone outside this agency finds some of this out, and even obtains proof from their own records and actions. Then suppose she goes public with this info on national TV.
Naturally this constitutes divulging classified information, and illegally obtained to boot. This person could easily be charged, tried, and convicted. But would her actions be in any way immoral as well?
@Kathy:
What are you planning? 😀
@Kathy: IMHO, that depends heavily on whether or not sources and methods are compromised by the disclosure. Putting covert operators at risk of being disappeared by a disclosure of this sort can be a matter of life and death for those who had no part in making decisions about engaging in criminal activity. To put those lives at risk would, in my opinion, be immoral.
I am assuming this is for one of your short stories.
@Kathy: Isn’t this just The Pentagon Papers case?
@CSK:
It’s for a story.
The gist is a province demands something very reasonable the federal government doesn’t want to grant, so the agency does an undercover op to make the province unsympathetic to the public.
@Jen:
Now, that’s a really good point which would be easy to claim and hard to disprove.
Paul Campos has a piece at LGM that I sorta half agree with. (“liberals” acting individually or as social activists =/= Democrats acting as a bloc politically.) But in discussing a talk by a conservative law prof he has a crack I like.
We need to always keep in mind that Libertarians, actually conservatives generally and GOPs specifically, very seldom mean just what they say. Deliberate lies aside, it’s very much an intuition/reason thing. Reason requires some effort to define terms carefully. Intuition surrounds words with all sorts of associations, many emotional. And many are indeed “worship words”, as per the Star Trek Omega Glory episode, having lost meaning through ritual repetition. “Freedom” is as Lakoff said, free to do one’s duty and impose it on others. “The Market” is the invisible hand of a deity guiding us. “Preserve” means retain something called Social Security, no matter how skinflint. “Peace” means victory on our terms. “Efficiency” means profit. “Republic” means rule by people I agree with. “Religion” means tribal identity. “Come together” means drop your silly liberal beliefs and agree with what I find intuitively true. And so on. You really do need a Magic Decoder Ring.
The Florida headline of the day- Woman dies after becoming stuck in clothing donation box in Plantation
@Bill Jempty: Since plantations were forced labor camps, I think it’s a terrible name for a town.
Perhaps they should go all out and just rename it New Auschwitz.
@Gustopher: Plantation Florida was swampland until after the Civil War.
@Fortune: And?
Jesus bleeping crikey Moses!
I bought toilet paper earlier at the grocery store. No, you can’t buy just a four pack, anymore. It’s 256 rolls to a pack. It’s the size of a van.
TP only comes in packs of 4779 or more, now. If you are disappointed with your shopping experience at S-mart, please call 1-800-EAT-SHIT.
Shop smart, shop S-mart!
I spaced it was downtown farmer’s market day. I had to huck a weighty backpack and two tote bags home AND A PACKAGE OF TP the size of my torso through crowds and kids. Why do they only come in packages of 256 now? It wouldn’t / couldn’t fit into a regular grocery store sized plastic bag. Yeah, tuck it under my arm, I guess.
So I had to wedge the 144 pack under my arm and haul it home.
Buying toilet paper should not be this complicated. Everybody poops.
As Beavis says, I need tp for my bunghole.
Bring back the 4 pack. Why is it so weird now?
I blame COVID and 2020. Man, I got caught out wrong in spring 2020. I was on my last half roll. Normally, not a big deal. Easily corrected. But no. I had to rely on picnic napkins for most of a year. Non-flushable. Put your butt-wipe napkin tp substitute in this special plastic bag that stinks and won’t get disposed of until Monday.
@de stijl:
I can still buy individual rolls of toilet paper. You’re in Iowa, right? Smaller packs must be available somewhere in the state.
@CSK:
Can you buy a four pack of Charmin at you local grocery store?
It’s either 1 roll or 120.
Are you trying to state shame me?
@de stijl:
Sure, they sell the Charmin 4-packs everywhere here. I’m surprised they don’t in your neck of the woods.
Surely there are more engaging topics to discuss than the accessibility of reasonably sized toilet paper packs.
Not to interfere with Mr Jempty’s job, but here’s my candidate for headline of the day:
Bank hostage standoff: Police dangle beverage from drone to lure out man, shoot him
@CSK:
Are you sure? Check.
@de stijl: I can buy a 4 pack of generic tp (and a single roll of generic paper towels for that matter) but normally buy 12 roll pack because it’s the right size to fit in my old geezer roller cart. I only use Charmin when other people are buying it.
And I can’t say whether your state should feel shame or not. 😉
@de stijl:
That is weird. the mattress size packaging is more of a Costco thing. Here, all supermarkets sell packs of 4, some also 8 and even 12 now and then.
But then, we had no toilet paper shortage in 2020. No infant formula shortage in 2022, either.
@de stijl:I am in New Hampshire, and yes, can still purchase 4-pack of loo roll.
Does your grocery store serve primarily families? They might have decided not to bother with the smaller packages.
Drugstores and convenience stores will typically carry smaller size packages, but the per unit price will be higher.
@CSK:
How’s this? Audible may no longer be worth the subscription price.
I’ve noted a lot of books with a member price that’s less than the cost of 1 credit (you get 1 credit per monthly payment of about $15). So it feel like I’m wasting a dollar and some cents by using up a credit. But if I pay for it instead, it feels like the membership charge just entitles me to buy books cheaper than the unsubscribed masses.
I pretty much now buy books only on the 2 for 1 sales.
Over on Everand, the subscription still entitles you to download any audiobooks or ebooks in the catalogue.
Anyway, I’m looking for other options.
@de stijl:
I did check. Everyone around here sells the 4-packs: Walmart, CVS, my local grocery store.
@Kathy:
I never had a subscription to Audible, so I can’t comment.
@CSK:
I really enjoy being patronized.
That, and gate-keeping.
@Jen:
Out of neighborly nosiness, do you shop at Market Basket, or Demoula’s, as we really old-timers are wont to call it?
@de stijl:
Huh? If I seemed to patronize you, I assure you that was not my intent at all. I was only curious about why you couldn’t buy 4-packs of toilet paper in Iowa.
Gatekeeping?????
@CSK: Primarily Hannaford’s, with some Mahket Basket trips on occasion.
Orban threatened fines and jail and thousands showed up anyway.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/28/europe-latest-news-budapest-pride-march-hungary-orban-ukraine-russia-updates
Hopium
I am fine with this guy being deported.
Man kicked and injured a CBP beagle during airport baggage search
I love the comment section here. But sometimes I remember that there was a daylong, somewhat heated thread on the topic of maple syrup. Over 200 comments, I seem to recall. And I read the whole thing.
@CSK:
Did I offend you? Why the antipathy? Why so (perceived) aggressive? How did I wrong you?
Honestly curious.
And yes, yes, you are most definitely gate-keeping.
@Jen:
I see you have the local pronunciation down pat.
@Jen:
Yep. Kick a dog and you should be on a permanent shit list.
@de stijl:
I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. You seemed to take offense at my question about toilet paper. And please tell me how on earth–and exactly what–I’m gatekeeping. I am mystified at your reaction to a perfectly innocuous query.
@Franklin:
That wouldn’t work with me. I wouldn’t come out for anything less than either veal Parmesan served with linguine. Fillet mingeons cooked medium rare and lobster tails would stand a better chance.
@de stijl:
Scratch*Scott’s toilet paper is the only one I know in single rolls where I live.*- I call it scratch because the toilet paper resembles sand paper more closely than toilet paper. In the early days of the pandemic, spring 2020, DW bought 20-24 rolls of the stuff. We have at least 15 of them still around.
Anyone interested in astromy might want to check out the Vera Rubin Observatory first publicly released images.
Amazing stuff.
And the observatory has massive capability to increase our depth of knowledge about the observable.
It combines a huge capacity for automated image capture with algorithmic analysis of the images to highlight targets for closer attention.
It appears to be technological tour de force on a par with the 200 inch Hale reflector at Mt Palomar in 1948, or the Hubbble ST.
It’s automatic sky scan capability will probably make it more important than the James Webb ST.
In a few years the LSST progame at the Rubin should increase our astonomical database by orders of magnitude.
In the first year alone of full operation of the LSST, it’s expected to produce double the raw imagery data over all other optical telescopes ever.
Hats off to the US NSF for this one.
Elon Musk has attacked Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” as “utterly insane.”
My only comment on toilet paper is to note that Georgia Pacific which makes Quilted Northern and Angel Soft is part of Koch industries. G-P is also Brawny and Sparkle paper towels and Vanity napkins. Consume responsibly.
@CSK:
“Even a stopped clock …”
@Bill Jempty:
Scott’s is so sub-par. That’s like prison grade / homeless shelter grade non-functional tp. So thin and unsubstantial you can read through it.
You gotta reel off like two feet to do the same job as four squares of a reliable brand. So, it’s not even economical.
Every company I’ve ever worked for has had sub-par tp. Why would you subject your employees to awful tp? It’s foolish. One more reason a seasoned veteran jumps ship.
Were I an entrepreneur I would make sure the tp wasn’t horrible. Charmin-grade at the least.
What is the difference between Soft and Strong?
@JohnSF: “stopped clock” Ha ha ha ha ha ha! The biggest innovator of the century.
@Bill Jempty:
I have one unused pack of picnic napkins. Keeping that! It might be useful one day.
It’s crazy how your brain gets re-wired after one fairly “benevolent” incident. 1.5 million Americans died.
Mid 2020 was wild!
When things get weird people rush on things oddly. Toilet paper and water. It sorta makes sense. In and out.
If the system collapsed and their was no electricity forever, most folks would die. Trudging from cities to farms towards farms that produce basically inedible corn that outputs the makings for fructose, ethanol, and cornstarch. The remnants are processed into animal food.
A lot of the farming in the Midwest is to feed livestock or chickens. Pigs, turkeys. The output is semi-digestible to humans if push comes to shove. Inefficient input.
You wouldn’t immediately die on a corn farm, but you’d die that winter or early spring without additional food. The input would be relatively insubstantial, and then only in autumn. Maybe not insubstantial – you could gorge. It’d keep you alive, for a bit. In the right season.
A system collapse would cull 90% at least.
Let’s stop saying no taxes on tips and ot. They’re still subject to payroll taxes which are not insignificant.
@de stijl: less than 1.2 million
@CSK: I don’t think it was you. I’m the guy who snarked at him in the biggest way–virtue signaling about using generic and whether his state should be ashamed.
@Fortune:
Oh rlly?
A sucessful developmental entrepreneur, in some things; rather less so in others.
(With empasis on “mental”)
But none. that I can think of offhand, were innovations as such.
Rather, implentations of long existing concepts.
Electric cars, re-usable SSTO boosters, “swarm” satellites comms, etc.
He had the money and, to grant him, the dogged persistence, to drive them on to sucess enabled by times: European and Californian EV mandates, the need for data comms in less populated and developed regions, the growing demand for space launch capacity.
So, as an industrial entrepeneur, he scores fairly well.
Not quite up there with Ford, Carnegie, Edison, Benz, Gates, Brunel, the Shropshire Ironmasters, Wedgwood …
But fairly good.
However, more relevant to this is his spell as director of DOGE.
Which was a complete and utter farce.
The question now of course, is will Republican legislators, and the Republican base, pay more attention to Musk’s rather reasaonable criticism of a massive debt balloon, or to Trump?
And to the long-standing, despite all contrary evidence, insistence of some Republican populists that “tax cuts pay for themselves”?
aka the “Laughable Curve”.
@de stijl: I’ve used Scott’s in the past. Can’t remember why I stopped. It wasn’t over quality issues, tho.
To the degree that I grok these issues, strong is related to resistance to shredding/tearing.
Just watched Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts set at Glastonbury.
Old dude still has the chops.
@de stijl:
You don’t see it portrayed on screen. Nuclear was is about to happen, see Threads or The Day After, but nobody is hoarding toilet paper. What’s wrong with these people.
If I ever write an end of the world/dystopian fiction, I will make sure characters are stocking up on toilet paper. Maybe I will write it under the name Ann R Key. I used to joke about doing that. One of my short stories opens with a zombie apocalypse scene but it is focused on the people that are waiting to be evacuated at Boston Logan Airport. A scientist who is working on a possible cure, her husband, and their infant son. I spent few words on their actions prior to arriving at the airport.
@Daryl: “Let’s stop saying no taxes on tips and ot. They’re still subject to payroll taxes which are not insignificant.”
Agree. The Senate version of the bill appears to have a stricter caps on deductible tip and OT earnings than the House version, but doesn’t exempt payroll taxes, and of course doesn’t affect state and local income/wage taxes.
Federal tax legislation may pander to a variety of voters, but federal income tax cuts tend not to be the gift to the working class that they are to the wealthy. There were some years a decade or two ago when federal income taxes were my fourth largest tax bill, after payroll taxes, combined state/local income taxes, and property taxes.
@Bill Jempty:
I recall the Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2020 in the UK.
It was terrible!
otoh, at the time of the Big Lockdown in the UK, I was among the relatively few with an “essential work” permission.
Hardly another car to be seen on the motorways or A-roads.
I made the 15 miles to work in under 15 minutes a couple of times.
Whoo hoo!
Baby can dance, lol.
@Fortune: 1.2 million is the same as a major city reduced to ash, or the entire states of Wyoming and North Dakota experiencing complete human devastation. I know a lot of people make jokes about the western states, but what the fuck is wrong with YOU?! 1.2 million is ok? Yeah, fuck those fuckers. They deserved it, I guess?
It’s a huge loss of human life, you waste of oxygen.
And there will be more, thanks to people like you. You may not have “voted for it”, according to you, but you’re definitely carrying water for it. I refuse to wish ill on a child, but if there’s anything like karma, you’ll die of a preventable disease, and NOT your grandchildren. https://apnews.com/article/vaccines-measles-polio-whooping-cough-rubella-af4cd1aef8f408a960601df6372f9c32
The irony being that YOU have probably already been vaccinated. (so many eyerolls)
This is a really interesting piece:
There’s your moral dilemma. If Martians land and eliminate Trump, do we welcome our new insect overlords?
One of my/our characters, Marco from Animorphs said this:
“People don’t understand the word ruthless. They think it means ‘mean.’ It’s not about being mean. It’s about seeing the bright, clear line that leads from A to B. The line that goes from motive to means. Beginning to end. It’s about seeing that bright, clear line and not caring about anything but the beautiful fact that you can see the solution. Not caring about anything else but the perfection of it.”
Marco’s right, but then, after you’ve found the ruthless answer, you still have to parse the right and the wrong, and count the bodies.
@JohnSF:
I had something better: inessential work. So I stayed at home and ordered a lot of Instacart and Door Dash. Had a jacuzzi installed. And thank God in LA, where I lived then, you can get wine and weed delivered.
@Michael Reynolds:
Weed delivered?
In 202o?
Lucky sod.
Delivering tp to citizens regularly is the base adequacy of a functional government.
If they fail at that, it’s riot time. No gods, no masters.
Not just Beavis, but everybody needs tp for their bunghole. It a universal need. Pretty basic. It’s up there with water, shelter, and food. Toilet hygiene.
A system of London sewage pipes and avoiding one in particular might be the most profoundly data driven thing we’ve done as a species.
Thwart cholera with data.
Regulating London wells via heat maps of cholera incidence was not just brilliant, it made what we consider the 20th century.
@Michael Reynolds:
See the UK politics of dealing with the Soviets, and to some extent the US, in WW2.
Or the British decisions about attempting to defeat Germany by bombing and blockade.
As I have said before: WW2 could have ended up even worse than it did.
Our perceptions are somewhat biased because what might have happened did not.
And rather few people have looked hard at the “might have beens”.
The Iranian situation is perhaps a little like that of the Germans or Japanese in 1944.
Can you, in effect, surrender to those you have been conditioned for decades are intent upon your destruction?
It may not matter that the conditioning was based on irrational premises, the general effect is real.
@Michael Reynolds:
Yeah, but driving on empty motorways like some Mad Max dude in the post-acopalyse, with Placebo at high volume?
And with a certificate to present to the cops if I got stopped?
Fairly amusing.
(Only thing better would have been if I had a Triumph Rocket for the run, lol)
Unfortunately, unable to get BCU to buy me one, for “obvious work neccesity”.
🙂 🙂
@Bill Jempty:
If the worst were to happen, you’d need water, you’d need shelter, you’d need food.
I’ve got good shelter. High up and about 100 yards away from stair access. If crappy stuff would happen I would have no easy water access (a half mile away), and no food after about a week. As will everyone.
My best bet would probably be a swan dive off the 13th floor.
Or going to the river and walking south. It wouldn’t end well. 13th floor is probably the safer bet.
@Bill Jempty:
Threads kicked my ass. It was brutally honest. The US version sucked in comparison. Lame. UK tv went way harder. Way more honest.
Things would go very shitty very fast if you are alive to see it. I hope not to. There is always the 13th floor.
“In war there no winners, only widows” In a full nuclear exchange there would be no widows, either.
@de stijl:
Just noting that toilet hygiene doesn’t require TP. I don’t even have a bidet, but a recent stomach bug coerced me into taking several brief showers rather than rub myself raw with TP.
And I buy quality TP! Still causes problems if you’re going 10x a day with gastrointestinal issues. I would love a bidet and someday I’ll get one.
@Fortune: The one tesla car he was directly responsible for is the…. cybertruck. The rest were designed by others.