{"id":4800,"date":"2014-12-13T12:29:02","date_gmt":"2014-12-13T17:29:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4800"},"modified":"2014-12-13T12:29:02","modified_gmt":"2014-12-13T17:29:02","slug":"bring-out-the-big-guns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4800","title":{"rendered":"Bring out the big guns"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/c\/c8\/Karl6.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"347\" \/>Perhaps some of you have heard of the Harvard Business Professor, Ben Edelman, who went to war over a four dollar overcharge. \u00c2\u00a0If not, here&#8217;s the story (from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/food-dining\/restaurants\/2014\/12\/09\/harvard-business-school-professor-goes-war-over-worth-chinese-food\/KfMaEhab6uUY1COCnTbrXP\/story.html\">Boston.com<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"content-text__text\">Last week, Edelman ordered what he thought was $53.35 worth of Chinese food from\u00c2\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.yelp.com\/biz\/sichuan-garden-brookline\" target=\"_blank\">Sichuan Garden\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Brookline Village location<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"content-text__text\">Edelman soon came to the horrifying realization that he had been overcharged. By a total of $4.<\/p>\n<p class=\"content-text__text\">If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve ever wondered what happens when a Harvard Business School professor thinks a family-run Chinese restaurant screwed him out of $4, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re about to find out.<\/p>\n<p class=\"content-text__text\"><em>(Hint: It involves invocation of the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Statute and multiple threats of legal action.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"content-text__text\">Read the rest, it&#8217;s hilarious (and not the first time this guy did this).<\/p>\n<p class=\"content-text__text\">This raises a lot of questions, one of which is whether he needed all of that argument to make that point. \u00c2\u00a0Let&#8217;s presume, for the sake of our own \u00c2\u00a0argument, that he&#8217;s not wrong. \u00c2\u00a0It&#8217;s clearly not worth his time to complain. \u00c2\u00a0But maybe a word or two to point out the restaurant&#8217;s error.<\/p>\n<p class=\"content-text__text\">Nonetheless, even granted the correctness of his claim, the over sized argument (again, however correct) makes me wonder what the nature of the injustice of argumentative disproportionality is. \u00c2\u00a0He just doesn&#8217;t need that much argument to make his case.<\/p>\n<p class=\"content-text__text\">This reminds me of a talk I once saw where the speaker brought out the theoretical big guns in order to explain (and reject I guess) the garden variety racism of some local politician. \u00c2\u00a0Yes, you can use Foucault to do that, but do you really need that much?<\/p>\n<p class=\"content-text__text\">\n<p class=\"content-text__text\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Perhaps some of you have heard of the Harvard Business Professor, Ben Edelman, who went to war over a four dollar overcharge. \u00c2\u00a0If not, here&#8217;s the story (from Boston.com): Last week, Edelman ordered what he thought was $53.35 worth of Chinese food from\u00c2\u00a0Sichuan Garden\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Brookline Village location. Edelman soon came to the horrifying realization that &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4800\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Bring out the big guns<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1657,1914,1913],"class_list":["post-4800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-argumentation","tag-ben-edelman","tag-proportionality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4800"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4801,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4800\/revisions\/4801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}