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Entries in Ethics (70)

Saturday

06Mar2010

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Your honor, my client pleads guilty to being an alpine Ibex…

If I were taking the bar exam next week, I’d probably pass (even though I have absolutely no law training whatsoever) and I’d probably become the nation’s foremost attorney for pets:

Swiss voters will go to the polls on Sunday to decide on a proposal to appoint state-funded lawyers across the country to represent animals in court.

Supporters of the initiative say such lawyers would help deter cases of animal cruelty and neglect, by making sure that those who did abuse or neglect animals would be properly punished.

Opponents however claim that Switzerland, which already has strict animal protection laws, does not need any more legislation.

The canton of Zurich has in fact had its own animal lawyer for a number of years; the current incumbent, Antoine Goetschel, is the only state-funded lawyer in Switzerland who goes to court to speak on behalf of animals.

America is the home of zany animal advocacy antics. We need animal lawyers now in the worst way, since we already put the needs of animals above those of kids and other human beings in many situations. Attorneys who are out of work, too incompetent to do anything difficult, or have been fired because their client forgot to show up for court could thrive as animal lawyers. I smell the makings of a show on NBC here. As far as I know, Kelsey Grammer is still desperately looking for work.

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Thursday

04Mar2010

A Weak and Failing Society Resorts to Litigation

Thursday, March 4, 2010

As the father of a daughter, I can tell you unequivocally—sexual harassment has no place in the workplace. I’m extremely proud of the fact that no one ever filed those charges against me, even during the early 1990s when women were filing lawsuits every three or four minutes, on average. I’m also proud of being a blogger who solves problems, rather than just sitting around complaining about them with one hand on the snark button and the other end up my nose. I bring it and I leave it when I tackle a serious problem. I am not afraid to howl and stomp after difficult answers. I don’t take the easy way out. The easy way is where things always go wrong.

With that in mind, let me solve some problems and sort things out. Here’s what you do when a woman sexually harasses you—give in! Have glorious sex with her! Make her woof and pant and and beg for more, sir. Make her use nonsensical words and saran wrap-covered gouache drawings to explain what she wants. Make her switch from Catholic to Episcopalian and then back again if she doesn’t do it fast enough. Make her clip coupons and purchase lubricants online.

Then, when the dust settles and when she’s a cooing, rapturous puddle at your feet, tell her you quit and go find another job. Tell her that, as she protests and grabs your ankles, that the best sex of her life is walking out the door, dignity intact, manliness firmly in hand. Don’t even bother putting on your clothes. When they see you walking naked through the hotel, flex your biceps and say something Bruce Campbell would be proud of.

Now, I don’t know what you’re supposed to do if it’s a same-sex situation and your barn door won’t swing that way. I guess you would have to go to court, then. But, if you’re a man, and a woman is sexually harassing you, do what I outlined above. Don’t go to court.

Here, see what you think of this:

Jonathan Pilkington’s boss wouldn’t take no for an answer.

During more than two years as a food runner at an upscale steakhouse in Scottsdale, Ariz., Pilkington says his male supervisor groped, fondled and otherwise sexually harassed him more than a dozen times.

“It was very embarrassing,” Pilkington said. “I felt like I had to do something because the situation was just so bad.”

I agree—Mr. Pilkington had to go to court. He had to do something. Giving in? Not an option. This is why women should never give in to the advances of men. How piggish we are as a society to think that we once counseled women to do just that.

In the event of something like this:

Cases involving women making unwanted advances toward men may also be rising as women make up a growing part of the work force. Last year, the Regal Entertainment Group, which operates a national chain of movie theaters, agreed to pay $175,000 to settle a lawsuit by a male employee who claimed a female co-worker repeatedly grabbed his crotch at work.

When the employee complained to his supervisor and the theater’s then-general manager, he claims, she failed to stop the harassment and instead retaliated against the victim with unfair discipline and lower performance evaluations.

That’s where you leave her a hot mess on shaky bedrails and quit then and there. Nothing cools a situation like a little old-fashioned moral supremacy and honest-to-goodness testosterone. Remember to tell your wife you did it because America demanded it of you; she’ll understand that the needs of the country have to come before all other considerations. Yes, you took your female superior to a Motel 6 and threw her ankles over her head and left the impression of one of your butt cheeks firmly embedded in the sheetrock over the bed because those low ceilings got in the way. You did it for your country, though. That absolves you of guilt, you see.

Every law suit that doesn’t get filed allows America to grow stronger and happier. Every lawyer that sits idle is a blessing from Heaven. To keep us from failing as a society, the likes of you are going out and doing the likes of her, and you’re not even bothering to put on your tighty-whiteys when you’re done saving America. And, your various bloggers like myself thank you for your sacrifices. God speed to you, sir. You laid some pipe in a fusty tunnel, and then you dumped that frump in her own wet spot in order to maintain your dignity. You’re like an old salty dog, you.

I can’t wait to buy you a beer. America owes you a beer, in fact. Make sure that you let the boys down at the American Legion know you took one for the team. Just say it was in the war. Half of those bastards have never heard a shot fired in anger anyway.

Norman Rogers | tagged

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Tuesday

02Mar2010

Your Privacy is a Joke to Them

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

This really deserves a post of its own:

When President Bush two years ago failed to name members to a federal board to monitor the protection of civil liberties, Democrats and activist groups were duly outraged, seeing it as one more example of his administration’s indifference to the subject.

But more than a year into a new presidency, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board—created by Congress in 2007—remains as much a cipher under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The White House has yet to nominate a single person to sit on the five-person board. It has no members, no staff, and no office.

Until now, the reaction to all this from the same civil-liberties groups and Democrats that bashed Bush has been largely muted. But that is starting to change. “I’m appalled,” said Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel of the Constitution Project, a legal-affairs advocacy group that has usually been aligned with the Obama administration.

Unless and until the American people decide to stand up and demand a return to the kind of privacy rights that should be comprehensive for all Americans, this is exactly what both parties are going to do—they’re going to forget about the issue and go on their merry way.

Beware of the weasels and their need to have access to your secrets and your information. Don’t be surprised when there’s nothing private anymore and, it turns out, they’re giving away everything about you to make a buck. How else is the government going to pay for perpetual wars and permanent occupation of countries that cannot run themselves? Consider it another tax on what you thought was valuable. It turns out, nothing about you is really all that valuable, you see. Not when it comes to keeping shoeless ninjas from shadowboxing into the foodcourt at the mall.

You know who ought to be the next President? Whoever can explain why giving up privacy rights doesn’t keep us safe from terrorists.

Norman Rogers | tagged

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Tuesday

02Mar2010

The Magic Number is 96

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Put this down as the beginning of the next phase of insanity in the NCAA:

The calendar turned to March this week, which means one of our nation’s most celebrated sporting events is just around the corner. Two Sundays from now, CBS studio host Greg Gumbel will read off the names of 65 college basketball teams. Millions of fans around the country will race to fill out their brackets. Many will find excuses to skip work or take long lunch breaks the following Thursday and Friday, as another NCAA tournament tips off.

But behind the scenes, executives in charge of this multibillion-dollar event are holding discussions that could drastically alter the future of March Madness. On the eve of potential network television renegotiations, committees and panels representing the NCAA and its members must soon decide whether to implement the first major expansion of the tourney’s field in 25 years.

“There is any variety of future possibilities being considered,” said Greg Shaheen, the NCAA’s senior VP of basketball and business strategies. “The options, trust me, are endless.”

Last month, the popular blogger SportsByBrooks reported that unnamed ESPN sources claimed the NCAA’s move to a 96-team men’s basketball tournament was a “done deal.” Nothing involving the NCAA happens that quickly, but it’s clear that expansion — long dismissed as a far-fetched possibility — is a distinct possibility. The SportsBusiness Journal obtained a copy of a request-for-proposal the NCAA issued late last year to numerous media entities gauging interest in a possible 68- or 96-team field.

That’s six brackets, rather than four, in my estimation, meaning that it will be the Final Six, not the Final Four. Well, does that make sense?

There aren’t enough teams in Division I worth consideration for a 96 team bracket. Yes, there really are 347 Division I teams. How many of them, year to year, are worthy of tournament play? Fewer than 64, sir. Fewer than 64.

Let’s think about what the first round in the NCAA tournament is like. You have a lot of clunkers.

Expand it? Well, let me tell you what you’d have. You’d eliminate the NIT, which is fine by me. You’d have a lot of clunkers. You’d have games that would make a grown man cry in his sleeve for the boredom and the missed shots. You’d have at least 30 teams or more that would make it by default every single year, regardless of merit. You’d have the entire Big East and the ACC in every tournament, practically. You’d have coaches being fired for failing to win barely enough games to qualify. If you can’t get your team to a 96 team NCAA Tournament Bracket, yes, you probably deserve to be fired.

More importantly, more games and more students playing means less academics. Anyone considered that? Of course not. It’s all about cash money, sir. Diluting your product won’t do the trick, though. If anything, go back to a 32 team bracket and make the big schools really fight for a spot. Make it harder to get to the Final Four, not easier. Fewer games would mean more people would watch the ones that are telecast on cable or the Internet. Fewer games would mean everyone would be more likely to see every single game and the advertisers could turn around and soak everyone even more.

Anything that gets between the schools and their money is going to be run over like a frog on the freeway. No one cares what a blogger thinks, and the only thing that matters is if a school like Georgia Tech or Washington State can get a boost from getting to the tournament.

Norman Rogers | tagged

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Sunday

28Feb2010

Nothing So Banal as the Evil Spread by Incompetents

Sunday, February 28, 2010

I cannot read this without laughing, even though the subject is no laughing matter:

There’s nothing unusual about partisans of the Bush administration defending waterboarding as a useful form of “enhanced interrogation.” Others will go even further, calling the technique “torture,” but saying it may be a necessary evil. What is a bit unusual is the case being made by Marc A. Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

In “Courting Disaster: How the C.I.A. Kept America Safe and How Barack ObamaIs Inviting the Next Attack,” Mr. Thiessen, a practicing Roman Catholic, says that waterboarding suspected terrorists was not only useful and desirable, but permitted by the teachings of the Catholic Church.

This does not square, to put it mildly, with the common understanding of Catholic teaching. In the past month, Catholic bloggers and writers from across the political spectrum have united to attack his views, and to defend their own: that waterboarding is torture, and that Roman Catholics are not supposed to do it.

Mr. Thiessen makes two basic arguments. First, he says that waterboarding, the simulated drowning technique used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, and others, is not torture. “I didn’t get into the Catholic theological stuff of it until I sat down to write the book,” Mr. Thiessen said in a phone interview. So when Mr. Bush asked him, in 2006, to write a speechexplaining the C.I.A.’s interrogation program, Mr. Thiessen asked himself other kinds of questions.

“There’s a standard of torture in civil law,” he said, “which is severe mental pain and suffering. I also have a common-sense definition, which is, ‘If you’re willing to try it, it’s not torture.’ ”

Thousands of American soldiers have been willing to undergo waterboarding as part of their resistance training, Mr. Thiessen notes; therefore, it stands to reason that it is not torture.

Well, that may be true, but there is a difference between a controlled training environment where someone can simply raise their hand and have the practice stopped as opposed to having the practice continue at the whim of the person in control. Our troops are subjected to it in order to show them what others may do; they are not subjected to it because that’s what we do.

When you have some control over your fate, it’s not torture, now is it? When you have no control over what is being done to you, then it is torture. A child can grasp the difference. Mr. Thiessen cannot.

Second, he invokes Catholic teaching to defend what he calls “coercive interrogation.”

The catechism states, “the defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to do harm,” and Catholic tradition accepts that this might involve killing. And, Mr. Thiessen writes: “If this principle applies to taking human life, it must certainly apply to coercive interrogation as well. A captured terrorist is an unjust aggressor who retains the power to kill many thousands by withholding information about planned attacks.”

To justify killing in self-defense, Catholics point to Thomas Aquinas’s principle of double-effect: the intended effect is to save your own life; killing is the unintended effect. By the same logic, Mr. Thiessen argues, “the intent of the interrogator is not to cause harm to the detainee; rather, it is to render the aggressor unable to cause harm to society.”

Mr. Thiessen must wonder why we don’t willingly live in the Middle Ages anymore; things were easier then. The infallibility of a Church that could destroy anyone it wished must have been so much more pleasant to swallow. This is the perversion of religion, writ large. Religion is not about torturing or destroying people; religion has gone wrong when it delves into such things.

As a conservative and now an Independent who remembers the Cold War, and voted for Reagan, I can tell you that these intellectually dishonest leaps of fancy are hilarious. This is what happens when the Bushies try to run things, I’m afraid to say. I’m ashamed to also add that I voted for them; had I known, no, I would never have voted for them or raised money for them. There is nothing conservative about them. A republic cannot torture without becoming a dictatorship. This nation stands for everything that opposes the torture of people; that’s why so many Soviet dissidents looked to the United States for some sort of help.

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Tuesday

23Feb2010

Killing Admiral Yamamoto Was Not an Assassination

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Admiral Yamamoto on the Cover of Time, December 22, 1941

George Friedman is an excellent thinker, but I have to take exception to his piece at Stratfor and refute some of what he is saying. I don’t know why, but this bothers me to no end:

We should begin by defining what we mean by assassination. It is the killing of a particular individual for political purposes. It differs from the killing of a spouse’s lover because it is political. It differs from the killing of a soldier on the battlefield in that the soldier is anonymous and is not killed because of who he is but because of the army he is serving in.

The question of assassination, in the current jargon “targeted killing,” raises the issue of its purpose. Apart from malice and revenge, as in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the purpose of assassination is to achieve a particular political end by weakening an enemy in some way. Thus, the killing of Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto by the Americans in World War II was a targeted killing, an assassination. His movements were known, and the Americans had the opportunity to kill him. Killing an incompetent commander would be counterproductive, but Yamamoto was a superb strategist, without peer in the Japanese navy. Killing him would weaken Japan’s war effort, or at least have a reasonable chance of doing so. With all the others dying around him in the midst of war, the moral choice did not seem complex then, nor does it seem complex now.

Such occasions rarely occur on the battlefield. There are few commanders who could not readily be replaced, and perhaps even replaced by someone more able. In any event, it is difficult to locate enemy commanders, meaning the opportunity to kill them rarely arises. And as commanders ask their troops to risk their lives, they have no moral claim to immunity from danger.

Since when is shooting down an enemy transport plane in a theater of war dominated by the strategy of interdicting air and sea transport an “assassination?” In the South Pacific, virtually every battle combined the need to stop the enemy on air, land, and at sea by any means possible. Every aircraft, every ship, and every soldier was a target and was “fair game.” For the American military, to simply allow an enemy transport plane to fly from one place to another without trying to shoot it down would be a tragic neglect of the need to stop the enemy at all costs.

The killing of a man in the uniform of his country on the battlefield is legitimate. To call it “political” is to ignore the fact of the uniform and the reality of the conflict at hand.

The intercepted intelligence that gave the Americans the chance to intercept the plane carrying Yamamoto was an advantage we held and used whenever possible; someone had to calculate the risks involved. If we had missed killing Yamamoto, that might have tipped off the Japanese military that we were reading their communications traffic. If we had passed up the chance to take out the plane, we would have been guilty of negligence. Suppose that transport had vital intelligence on it, or some other vital piece of weaponry. Suppose it had chemical weapons on it, designed to allow the last few defenders on an island the ability to kill hundreds of attacking Americans. Absolutely, we should have shot down that plane, and any other plane we could reach.

Generals died regularly during the war; they died in plane crashes and they were killed on the battlefield. They were, and have always been, the target of sharpshooters and artillery and whatever other weapon can be brought to bear. To kill Yamamoto meant utilizing a complicated strategy of deciding whether or not we could project enough airpower into the flight path of his transport plane. Risks were taken, and men were put in danger to accomplish this mission. It wasn’t an assassination. It was war. Period. End of story.

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