Speaking of underage vices: Should parents who made their house a “safe haven” for underage drinking be penalized harshly by the law merely because what they did was illegal? What if it kind of made utilitarian sense to let them get stoned at home? Good give and take on this question over at Overlawyered (the comments — the item itself is the third bullet on the list at this link).
Archive for the ‘O Mores!’ Category
“Safe booze”
Posted by Ron Coleman on June 12, 2007
Posted in Lex scripta, O Mores! | Leave a Comment »
The Big Lie
Posted by Ron Coleman on June 8, 2007
I spend too much time in convenience stores buying drinks and snacks. But it gives me lots of opportunity to survey the two main activities that take place there.
The first is people with evidently — from the looks of them — limited disposal income buying lottery tickets, all too knowledgeably. Economists and other wags call lotteries a “tax on the stupid,” for good reason.
The second is the sale of cigarettes, at least half of which are sold to minors. I have never seen anyone asked for identification in one of these stores, which obviously make a large part of their money on illegal, open and notorious, cigarette sales to people who you can tell are underage from across the street. I’ve never seen anyone busted for selling cigarettes to kids, either. Yet these stores are festooned with “We Card” and similar warning signs.
The best one of all is the decal next to the cash register that tells you what your birthday has to be in order to buy cigs. Can you imagine someone not knowing whether he qualifies as 19 or not? The purpose of the decal, of course, is to coach kids as to how to lie to buy tobacco illegally.
Cynicism? Not a little. Does this breed a heightened disrespect, not to say contempt, for the law among a class that, by virtue of its choice to become a smoker, has already demonstrated an unhealthy disregard not only for convention but for common sense and an instinct for self-preservation? Hard not to say so.
Posted in Lex scripta, O Mores!, Sisyphus | 6 Comments »
The perils of transparency
Posted by Ron Coleman on June 7, 2007
Blogger aTypical Joe has posted a piece called “Exposing the plea bargain racket” where he contrasts his reasonable insistence that plea bargains terms be made more public — maybe there should even be a public comment period, too! (I’d like to start with this one) — with the understandable problem of a “Who’s a Rat,” a website that features information about “rats.” “Rats” are what defense lawyers, defendants, and murderous criminals call people who, for whatever reason, cooperate with legal authorities attempting to secure convictions of malfeasors.
I have never liked this terminology, whether applied to informants or people who work for a living without the permission of a union. Like Joe, I certainly understand why a criminal defense lawyer would want to know as much as possible about cooperating witnesses, especially when they have “turned” from the fellow-criminal to the (usually self-serving) friend-of-law-enforcement side. But there’s no question that it is an abuse of this transparency, and one that will inevitably dry up the well of cooperating crooks, to post such information on websites like Who’s a Rat — one of whose purposes must be to get people killed.
Joe hits the nail on the head, saying he’d be glad “for us to learn the difference and distinguish between ‘public’ as in ‘not secret’ and ‘public’ as in “made easily accessible to the world.” This applies to a lot of things — a lot of categories where public information is and should be public, but is not and “should not be” instantly and simultaneously available to everyone all the time. The largest of these categories, I would say, relates to legal proceedings. Courts and legal proceedings should be open and public, yes; but intimate and limitless? That is one reason why, unlike a friend of mine who once lobbied hard trying to lower the hurdles to the insertion of TV cameras into every courtroom, I am against it. One reason is that cameras badly distort behavior in the courtroom. But the other is that I do not believe either justice of the public good are served by making the prospect of seeking justice, civil or criminal, an utter surrender of privacy and dignity.
How do we make these distinctions?
Posted in Lex scripta, O Mores! | 6 Comments »
Serve me, or else.
Posted by Ron Coleman on May 31, 2007
Reuters says that eHarmony has been sued for running its business pursuant to its own moral — or business — compass:
The popular online dating service eHarmony was sued on Thursday for refusing to offer its services to gays, lesbians and bisexuals.
A lawsuit alleging discrimination based on sexual orientation was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of Linda Carlson, who was denied access to eHarmony because she is gay.
I am sure she was not “denied access to eHarmony.” From the sound of it, she was denied the provision of services eHarmony doesn’t provide: Homosexual dating. How does eHarmony explain itself?
eHarmony could not immediately be reached for comment. Commenting in the past on eHarmony’s gay and lesbian policy, [Dr. Neil Clark] Warren has said that he does not know the dynamics of same-sex relationships but he expects the principles to be different.
You’ve heard the commercials, probably. Dr. Warren, in his strained voice, talking about his touchy-feely personalized matchup process. You can buy into that or not; but what he sells is what he claims to know. Homosexual relationships, he says, he does not know. Tough luck, Dr. Warren. California law requires you to know.
This is particularly interesting because, again, contrary to the “denied access” claim, homosexuals have by all indications not been denied access — they just want a new division of the company started for them:
Lawyers bringing the action said they believed it was the first lawsuit of its kind against eHarmony, which has long rankled the gay community with its failure to offer a “men seeking men” or “women seeking women” option.
The plaintiffs here are actually arguing that eHarmony is obligated not just to open up its existing service to people of all sexual predilections. It is requiring eHarmony to actually provide new services that it claims neither an interest nor any degree of expertise in, and which may require an outlay of millions of dollars. Let’s not even get into the moral preferences of the owners and management, which are presumed irrelevant by laws which outlaw discrimination against homosexuals or, in this case, may mandate the provision of special services to them.
Where are the libertarian defenders of free enterprise? We’ll see.
UPDATE: The heavy lifters.
Posted in Americana, Lex scripta, O Mores! | 18 Comments »
Doctors without scruples
Posted by Ron Coleman on May 20, 2007
Duncan Mclean, head of ‘Doctors Without Borders’ in the region, told Israel Radio, “I don’t think embarrassed would be the right word. We are very sad for Bashir who has been working for us for almost six years. But we would like to make it very clear that we make a distinction between his professional work and what he does on his personal time in the sense that all our staff is hired for professional reasons and I don’t think our organization can be held liable for every aspect of their life.”
It sounds like the guy got caught in a brothel, or maybe a bar brawl. Who would know from this clueless quote that the poor young doctor in question is accused of (and has confessed to) using his DWB credentials to facilitate assassination attempts against the Prime Minister and other Israeli officials?
It’s interesting that the DWB (a/k/a “Medicins Sans Frontieres”) spokescreep is “very sad for Bashir.” Not so sad for his intended victims or the victims of others like him. Certainly not embarrassed for his own organization, which helps to perpetuate a culture in which the murder of Israelis is an understandable act of “resistance.”
So, why is it seemingly impossible for the “neutral” to be neutral?
Posted in O Mores!, Orient | 4 Comments »
Sticking out your neck
Posted by Ron Coleman on May 2, 2007
Big day for being wrong. Ara Rubyan says he was wrong, too — wrong in predicting that
the President would not go through with his veto threat. He then more than makes up for it with this very reasonable, moderate and yet politically astute post: What The Dems Should Do Next.
But you know, Ara, being wrong is no crime. Sometimes you stick your neck out and you get to be historically right. Sometimes, true, the price of doing that is a broken neck; and understandably not everyone is up for that. Hitchens (via Hydralisk):
So one day we’ll all see just how right you all were about Iraq?
No, I don’t think the argument will stop, perhaps forever. But when it does become the property of historians rather than propagandists and journalists, it’ll become plainer than it is to most people now that it was just. Most of what went wrong with it was that it was put off too long. What a lot of people wish is that the thing could have been skipped.
And we can understand how the nihilist left would rather that the Saddam problem all just went away — and can convince itself, as it always has with its powerful appetite for myth (no matter how inconsistent with other myths in the treasury), that it just would have gone away, anyway, if only we would have sent more unicorns. And too the fascist-friendly right; it’s not that Pat Buchanan is anything but a realist about the containability of Saddam Hussein; he just didn’t consider the bad outcome from letting Saddam fester all that bad.
But how do we understand people of evident good faith who say they believe the Saddam problem, and the WMD’s that everyone knew he had, was despite that not really “our problem” — “our” meaning America the hegemon — at all? Could they actually be stupid? Possibly, but I don’t think so. Is there a fine point of strategic vision, some twist of James Baker / Cyrus Vance type “realism” that explains it? It claims to constantly; yet I have never heard an actual rational explanation, but merely self-delusion and self-congratulation from that camp. They merely go home with their Nobels and leave the problems for the next guy.
So are politics, and political ambition, and the lust for power, and cynicism, really that corrosive — so much so that, as Hitchens says, people with power and responsibility would rather just stick those necks and what’s on them deep into holes along the beach despite the solemn seriousness of their obligations, and vote as the Senate and the House did for a policy as utterly bad for long run foreign policy as the vote to capitulate in Iraq?
They are, they are.
Posted in O Mores!, Orient, Stragety | 8 Comments »
Decent discourse in a virtual society
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 19, 2007
God forbid even a not-so-moderate political blogger suggests a limitation, a question, a
caveat to a valued principle of the ideological charter on the Internet. He’s not just wrong — he’s an idiot, a complete dummy, or worse, and of course in instant time. I wonder if we can do anything about this, besides choosing to maintain standards on our own blogs. Here I edit out vulgar language and try to steer discussion — when there is any; this is not a well-established blog, after all — to a focus on the issues, not the adjectives, if I can. That takes time, work and patience. And of course some people are going to hate you no matter what you do.
Now, I enjoyed, and was not surprised by, the “finding” several weeks ago suggesting that left-wing blogs are — not a little, but a lot — more vulgar than those on my side of the aisle. But as Jonah Goldberg points out, our house could, not surprisingly, be a lot cleaner:
Standing up to political correctness has become an unlimited warrant to be rude for its own sake. And if you catch flak for it, you can just say you were defending free thought. Ann Coulter, for example, justifies her cruder barbs and insults on the grounds that she’s pushing back against the liberal thought police. Sometimes she’s even right. . . . I’m all in favor of acid wit and barbed satire. But too many partisans on both sides sound like Beavis and Butt-Head, tittering over trivia. . . .
The reality is that much of political correctness — the successful part — is a necessary attempt to redefine good manners in a sexually and racially integrated society. Good manners are simply those things you do to demonstrate respect to others and contribute to social decorum. Aren’t conservatives the natural defenders of proper manners?
I’ll say, but perhaps both Goldberg and I are those offensive things, cultural conservatives, whereas the dominant right-wing non-liberal ethic in the Internet tends to be libertarian. I posit that as part of the problem, along with Internet anonymity.
That, and the fact that I am always right, and you other ninnies just can’t stand this.
UPDATE: Radioactive Liberty has this all figured out, thank God.
Posted in Americana, Blogophilia, O Mores! | 20 Comments »
Social catastrophe
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 19, 2007
ABC News — scooped by its rival NBC, which itself is playing the ultimate media whore by celebrating a mass murderer’s public tantrum — reports an interview with a psychiatrist who says, quite credibly, that showing Cho Seung-Hui’s video is a “social catastrophe”:
“If anybody cares about the victims in Blacksburg and if anybody cares about their children, stop showing this video now. Take it off the Internet. Let it be relegated to YouTube,” Welner said. “This is a social catastrophe. Showing the video is a social catastrophe.”
(Fedora tip to Mrs. Likelihood.) The blood of the victims of the “next one” is on the hands of everyone in the decision-making chain at NBC for this utterly inexcusable decision. But this is merely Son of Frankenstein, for it was the 1995 publication by the New York Times and Washington Post of the Unabomber’s nutty, blood-soaked “manifesto” that established the recent precedent of media outlets providing the most highly-sought-after reward in today’s world — fame, and a “platform” for grievances — to killers.
The Times and the Post could argue, though not convincingly, that they at least sought to assuage a killer who was still on the loose. That argument was absurd because there was no quid pro quo nor any way to enforce a “deal,” and the calculus contained no factor for the “next one,” whose incentives would now be twisted in a new way due to the media’s compliance with such demands.
Still NBC’s decision is far worse, not only because no such rationale is available, but because the Times and Post circulations were unlikely to increase meaningfully as a result of printing the neurotic “manifesto” that no one could read past the first paragraph. In contrast, the NBC move is striking in its venality. Because of the traffic that this video will get — with that cute little NBC peacock in the upper corner, it doesn’t matter if it’s on YouTube or anywhere else — NBC is simply making an ice cold, murderous money decision.
Cho was the “next one.” But, no thanks to NBC, not the last.
UPDATE: Kaus says the same thing (but doesn’t link to the videos!); now it appears that this view, though far from unanimous (see the comments below), represents a majority of public opinion. Oh, well.
Posted in Medialites, O Mores! | 46 Comments »
Rudy skootches right
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 18, 2007
“The Supreme Court reached the correct conclusion in upholding the congressional ban on partial birth abortion,” Giuliani said in a statement on the 5–4 decision. “I agree with it.”
When Giuliani ran for Senate in 2000, he said he would not vote to restrict a woman’s right to undergo the procedure.
Now, with social conservatives believed to be a major factor in the GOP primary, Giuliani joined the other top-tier Republicans in applauding the court’s ruling.
The Court made this easy for Rudy, because it is really so very incremental of a change, although it is an increment in a different direction, admittedly. It was tailor-made for Rudy to change fields, though. And, I must say, he is right.
Posted in Lex scripta, O Mores!, Politics and Poker | 3 Comments »
Common sense on Virginia Tech
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 18, 2007
Someone has gotten to the core of the issue — again.
Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced. . . .
Of course the
World Trade CenterVirginia Tech attacks are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. But we must also not lose sight of the fact that I am right on every significant moral and political issue, and everybody ought to agree with me. Please, I ask you as fellow human beings, vote for the political party which I support, and ask your legislators to support policies endorsed by me, as a matter of urgency.It would be a fitting memorial.
To disagree with this, is to let them win. Via Boing Boing.
Posted in O Mores! | Leave a Comment »
