Friday morning roundup

Why are small children dieting?

Hilarious dude live-tweets in-flight encounter with woman who thinks Thanksgiving is all about her.

Careful whom you butt-dial.

Yesterday's hilarious Speed Bump (Coverly).

There is so much that's interesting in this post about ending professional harassment by exposing it to light, some of which are broader than the issue itself. Here are just a few points:

I’d read Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals in college, and some of it stuck: treat people not as means to an end, but as ends in themselves. Don’t use them.

Later, however, I thought that the job of editors is to use writers to get stories, and the job of writers is to use editor to publish stories. Kant’s rule needs — and for all I know, has — a rider that says professionally, ok, use other people to get jobs done that you both want done. But personally, don’t use other people only to offset your loneliness and depression – she didn’t like me all that much either – and to fulfill your private necessities.

And I think this is the immorality of sexual harassment. Some idiot gets preoccupied with his private necessities, mixes up the personal and the professional, and forgets that other people aren’t there as a means to his own end.  Moral idiocy explains the feeling I’ve always had when being hit on, that the person is talking to himself, not me; that he’s seeing only his needs in a mirror.  He forgets that people have their own intentions and motivations and desires, that they are their very own selves, that they are to be respected as their own ends in themselves.  This moral idiot, Kant would hate him.