Category: General

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The Ethics of the Unethical

When Martin Shkreli raised the price of Retrophin, a pharmaceutical used to treat AIDS, from $13.50 to $750.00 per dose, there was outrage.  Shkreli, who has since been arrested for fraud unrelated to the price increase, insisted that this was free enterprise.  There was no moral issue.  If anything, it was morally right for him to maximize the profits of his company.

I thought, what if I broke into Shkreli’s home in the middle of the night and stole his laptop computer, watches, and cameras.

Shkreli would probably think I had robbed him.  He would probably– I can’t quote him on it– call the police, if he could, and have me arrested for trespassing and burglary.  And I would look him in the eye, in court, and say, “What’s your problem?  What’s wrong with taking your stuff?  You don’t even really own it.”   Even better, if I could say that from afar, some other country, which did not have any kind of extradition treaty with the U.S.   And I would say, “what is your definition of moral”?

He might say, “it’s wrong to steal”.  And I would ask, “how do you know?”  Maybe he believes in the bible.  Maybe he believes that one should always treat others the way one would want to be treated.  Maybe he believes something like “always treat others the way you yourself would like to be treated”.

Or maybe he believes it’s a dog-eat-dog world and you just take whatever you can whenever you can because that’s what everybody else would do if they could.

No, that’s not possible, is it?

He might believe that such miracles as Retrophin are only possible thanks to our wonderful capitalist system which holds that the owner of a particular item has absolute control over its use and distribution and price.  Of course, the makers and sellers of Retrophin were already doing quite well before he jacked up the price, and it had been developed under a system with the built-in expectation of a certain cost to the drug, and that had worked, and it has been shown that most pharmaceutical companies spend more money on advertising and marketing than they do on developing drugs, so they can’t be serious about argument that the high price is the cost of developing advanced drugs.

More likely a tax-payer funded university research lab developed the basics of the drug and then a drug company bought in somewhat later.

But if we were all in a wagon training headed west in 1871 and we were crossing a desert and Mr.  Shkreli happened to own the only bottle of water left and everyone else was about to die, would it be his “right” to sell it for the exclusive use of the highest bidder, and let everyone else die?

I dislike these allegories.  What Mr. Shkreli is doing is already essentially the same thing: AIDS patients need Retrophin to survive: Mr. Shkreli is extorting a wonderful price.  It is extortion.  Extortion is wrong.

[whohit]The Ethics of the Unethical: Martin Shkreli[/whohit]

 

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Anthony Weiner

I was and am a huge admirer of Jon Stewart.   His most remarkable and indispensable achievement was the way he called out political absurdities, corruption, and idiocies exactly as he saw them, without the traditional hedging and restraint required by serious newscasts or columnists.  I don’t need to go on: he was great.  He was probably at his best during the Republican presidential primaries of 2012, when America was offered a revolving door of unqualified, bombastic, self-promoting wannabes, along with Mitt Romney, as their next leader.

There was however– you knew it was coming– a few exceptions.  One sequence of episodes I found disquieting and annoying: his relentless attacks on the unfortunately named Democratic U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner.

Representative Anthony Weiner did not have any remarkable accomplishments to his record: he advocated granting “O-visas” to foreign fashion models and he liked to point out that many U.S. diplomats didn’t pay their parking tickets.

But he also advocated vigorously for an amendment offering a Medicare-like government plan as an option to Obamacare, which endangered the deal with the devil Obama had made with the insurance industry.  He also– like Stewart– was an enthusiastic supporter of legislation providing funds for health care for first-responders to the 9/11 attacks.  He  opposed the lavish military and financial aid the U.S. has provided to Saudi Arabia, home of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers.

According to some of his staff, he was also given to tantrums and was known to scream at employees and toss furniture.

In May, 2011, it was discovered that Weiner had sent sexually explicit photos of himself — on Twitter(!)– to a female supporter.   He at first denied it, but as the evidence mounted he had to resign his seat in Congress in disgrace.

In May, 2013, he announced that he was running for mayor of New York, and would be asking voters to give him a second chance.  It looked, at first, like they might, but in July of that year, it emerged that he had continued sexting other women after he had resigned from Congress.  He had lied again.  He showed judgement that was so bad it would be overly generous to label it as stupid.

Stewart, for reasons that escape me, chose to ridicule Weiner on The Daily Show night after night after night.  And yes, to me, it reached a point where it was no longer political: it was personal, and it was cruel.  The jerk made a serious mistake.  He repeated the mistake.  He lied about it.  He probably destroyed his marriage.  He definitely destroyed his political career (which was quite promising at the time).

But he was also a classic example of how America’s hysterical attitude towards sex distorts the politics and culture of our society.  Not one of the hedge fund managers or bankers responsible for the financial crisis that drained America’s pocketbooks and catastrophically devalued their mortgages resigned in disgrace.  None of the politicians responsible for the lax regulations that allowed this catastrophe to unfold had to resign from office in disgrace.  None of the government officials responsible for the disaster in Iraq had to resign in disgrace.

But America rose up in righteous fury and decreed that it could countenance a man of importunate sexual inclinations in office.  He must go.  And he did.

In fairness, Stewart also took on the bankers and government officials and hedge fund managers, and that made sense.  And Weiner deserved the initial round or two of ridicule.

But Stewart became relentless, night after night, essentially repeating the same joke over and over again beyond all reason.

The only possible explanation is that Stewart wanted to make a great big point about going after someone who was politically congenial to himself, to prove that he could be “objective”, and an equal-opportunity satirist.  I suspect he was worried that the folks at Fox News would be able to label him as an ideologue.  Here was a chance to prove he wasn’t by savagely skewering a liberal New York Democrat.

It was a rare example of Stewart misjudging an issue.  He should have made his point once, maybe twice, and then left it alone: it was not all that consequential.  It was humiliating and embarrassing, but it was not all that consequential to anyone other than his wife (and infant son).

There’s a second aspect to the Weiner story that I’ve thought about.  Donald Trump is currently stomping over every moderate Republican’s presidential ambitious like a t-rex, even though he has said and done things in the past that might, under the right circumstances, be considered scandalous.  He cheated on his wife, he cheated business partners, and he went bankrupt several times, leaving guileless creditors in his dust.  Why is he getting away with it?  Because he doesn’t care.  His “screw you” attitude makes it all rather uninteresting.  “Did you cheat on your first wife?”   What are you a moron?

It’s a magical ability.  You wanna go after to me?  Go ahead– I don’t care.

Weiner looked defeated and deflated.  He reacted as if he himself really believed that his behavior had been abominable.  You can’t survive that kind of scandal if you look like you really, really care if people know about it, and it brings the sharks circling.  Bill Clinton made the same mistake.  We do know now that he had weighed what I would now call “the Trump Option”: screw you, it’s none of your business.  They (Clinton and his lawyers and wife) decided against it because they believed the courts would rule against them.  And that the courts would matter.

Didn’t they know that justice is not what comes from the courts: it’s what comes from force.  Didn’t Bill Clinton know that in a few short years, the  President of the United States would direct American officials to torture people, bomb the shit out of a country that had nothing to do with anything about 9/11, and initiate extensive illegal surveillance of American citizens.

He was not arrested.

[whohit]The Unfortunate Fate of Anthony Weiner[/whohit]

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The “Best” Pro-Life Argument Ever

I recently saw a post on Facebook said to be “the best pro-life argument I have ever seen”.  I was curious, so I checked it out.   I’m always suspicious of articles on controversial subjects that start out with something like “I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student…”   And then I saw the light!  I saw the truth.  From an article in Esquire– of all places– written in 1976(!).  So, Frederica Matthewes-Green insists, I’m not one of those dim-witted automatons merely spouting the ravings of my pro-gun, pro-war, patriotic right-wing church.

These writers always seem to feel that it’s a compelling trope.  I used to be like you.  But she doesn’t follow up with a list of other positions she has now adopted because she knows that that list would undermine her seductive introduction.  Is she still opposed to war?  Is she opposed to capital punishment?  Is she in favor of universal health care?  Does she support parental leave?  Maternity leave?  Did she ever?  Really?

After reading her list of the things she supported back in the old folkie days, it becomes clear that whatever she thought she was in favor of back then, in her “hippie days”, it wasn’t what other people of her generation thought they were in favor of.  In her coy estimation, it seems that women back then didn’t think much at all, and expected ridiculous things in the future.

That becomes evident when  she proceeds to create a straw-man, the kind of person she believes believes in a woman’s right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.  This prop of hers thinks embryos are just a blob, and that abortion would only ever be used in emergencies, as a last, desperate measure, and that there is nothing violent or distasteful about it all– beliefs that kind of cancel each other out, when you think about it.

And then the big slide.   Having described in detail the painful, awful experience of an abortion at 20 weeks, she then proceeds to draw conclusions that makes no sense given her claimed pedigree of enlightenment and intelligence:

The usual justification for abortion is that the unborn is not a “person.” It’s said that “Nobody knows when life begins.” But that’s not true; everybody knows when life — a new individual human life — gets started. It’s when the sperm dissolves in the egg.

Oh, everybody “knows that”?   So, the enlightened progressive who rationally concluded that abortion is horrible suddenly leaps, magically, to the belief that life begins right at the instant of conception, all without a single reference to any religious belief.

She does not provide, of course, any logic or reason or analysis that would lead anyone to conclude that because a 20-week old fetus seems very human and perhaps entitled to the protection of the law, therefore the first two cells together must also be entitled the same recognition.

So why not, at the beginning of the article, acknowledge that your beliefs are grounded in your religion, not in your reason?   Why are you pretending to reason your way to a conclusion that really doesn’t follow any of your arguments?  Well, we know why: because nobody would take her arguments seriously.  Believers will have already agreed with her, and non-believers will find her irrelevant.

Frederica Mathewes-Green is not unaware of the problem.  From her website:

I have seen so much effort to produce publications, books, music, movies, and so on that can stand in the public square as quality material, and attract unbelievers. But look back at # 3; that only works as long as the material does not point to Christian faith. Once the mask slips and they realize we have been trying all along to bring them to Christ, they get angry. They feel duped.

Yes.  Well.  Try as you might to present an anti-abortion argument that seems rational and geared towards the general, public interest, your mask slipped, when you magically arrived at the point that life begins at conception.   That is a religious belief and the argument that because an embryo has the complete DNA of an individual human being it is entitled to equal protection falls apart because brain-dead humans also have the complete DNA of an individual human being, as well as a complete body.

[whohit]The Best “Pro-Life Argument Ever[/whohit]

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Trump vs. Sanders

It’s not unimaginable.

Something unexpected happens that causes Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race, and suddenly it’s Bernie Sanders for the Democrats.   Bush gets no traction.  Rubio stumbles badly in explaining his incoherent stand on immigration reform and under-developed ideas about tax reform,  and Ted Cruz is simply repellent.  Come to think of it, Fiorina is kind of repellent as well.  She is better prepared for the debates than the others (she actually knew the name of the head of the Republican Guard in Iran: Qassam Suleimani), but she has a dismal record at HP.

Ben Carson has no intention of winning the nomination.  He would find it as ridiculous as I would if he won.  He’s there to get $500 million worth of free advertising for his books and motivational speeches.  He is a one-man industry, selling the American myth that it doesn’t matter where you are born or what colour your skin is because if you work hard– like him– you can eventually become a world-famous surgeon and run for president.

Trump is also in it for the free advertising and is probably only willing to ride it out as long as he is in contention.

However, with the other candidates failing to make inroads, it is entirely possible that one of them could prevail and end up as the Republican nominee.

So it might be Trump or Carson against Bernie Sanders.

I would pay to attend those debates.

[whohit]Trump vs. Sanders[/whohit]

 

 

 

 

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Mean and Stupid

And here is another news story about a 30-year-old female teacher who made a 17-year-old male student’s dreams come true.  She has been sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Twenty-two years.

How long do you think 22 years is?

What kind of a person are you?  Ask yourself that– what kind of a person are you?  What kind of a heart do you have?  What kind of mind?  What are your ethics?  What is your religion?  What is your philosophy?  Do you have any values?  Do other people exist?  Do they have lives outside of your apprehension of their lives?  Do you have feelings, or just a series of poses attuned to any momentary perception of social values and attitudes?  Any feelings at all?

And then consider, is only 22 years enough?  Why not life?   Why not make this young woman really pay for her horrible crime?  Why not flog her?

But then, if it is not uncommon for a person convicted of manslaughter to receive 20 or 25 years, would you honestly rate this crime as just slightly less serious?

In Japan, in 1936, a woman, Sada Abe, was sentenced to six years in prison for murdering her lover, Kichizo Ishida by strangulation, and then cutting off his testicles with a kitchen knife (after he was dead).  Six years.  (Want to read a really interesting story?  Google her.)  How did they know six years was the right amount of time, for such a heinous crime?  (In fairness, it was kind of a suicide pact.  But, in fairness, the teacher’s relationship with the student was consensual.)

Should she be lashed, perhaps, as well?  Or buried up to her neck and stoned to death?  Why not?  Why the hell not?  What do you have against a good lashing or stoning?  What keeps you from demanding a proper punishment suitable for the horrors of the crime she committed?  She had sex with a 17-year-old boy.  She did it 20-30 times.  Why are you such a pussy about the punishment?  Why not pour acid on her face, or just kick her to death?  What’s holding you back?  Where did you get the idea that some punishments might be too harsh?

That poor 17-year-old boy.  He was probably a mere 5′ 10″ tall, maybe 150 pounds.  The teacher looked to be around 110, maybe.  Quite a threat to the helpless lad.

What do you feel for this teacher?  Is she a human being?  Does she have emotions, thoughts, dreams?  Is there some reason you should care about the fact that her life is now a rotting carcass of dashed hopes and crushed ambitions?  That she may never get another good job?  That she may never marry or have children.  That she will live the rest of her life in shame and poverty?

Twenty-two years.

It is clear from the news accounts that the 17-year-old boy, who cannot be identified because he is a waif, an innocent, an infant, a victim, did not blow the whistle on the escapade.  He did not go to the police in desperation and plead for help because this horrible attractive teacher was having sex with him.  No, it was his mother, wondering where he had been one night.  She looked at his cell phone and found messages from the teacher.  She called the authorities.  Why not just talk to your son?   For all I know, she might be just as appalled at the outcome here as I am.

So, what kind of a person are you?

I’ll bet you would tell me, if we were face-to-face right now, that you are not the kind of person who enjoys seeing people suffer.  And you would say that you are not the kind of person who snoops.  Oh no.  But then, you might say  that if the boy were your son, you bet you’d snoop.  It would be for his own good.  To protect him from the worldly influences of evil-doers, perverts, drug-dealers, jihadists, and Islamic fundamentalists who might seek to impose Sharia low on us.  Oh the horror!  Twenty-two years is more than reasonable.  She’ll only be 50 or so when she gets out.  She will have learned her lesson.  She will be a good person by then, whom you could befriend, even hire– except that she would be a convicted felon.  You’ll know, because she’ll be required by law to tell you.  She won’t be allowed to live within several blocks of a school, lest she find some other poor, vulnerable, delicate, weak 17-year-old boy to exploit.  Some cities will try to prevent her from living there at all: she will prey upon our vulnerable 17-year-olds!  Let her sleep under a bridge.

She deserves it.  After what she did, she deserves it.  She deserves to be punished, as brutally as we can without getting the Supreme Court involved: cruel and unusual?  Who the hell do you think you are?

You see the problem.  Any red-blooded male reading this story realizes right away that a 17-year-old boy having sex with an attractive 30-year-old teacher is not traumatized and will not be emotionally scarred for life, and probably won’t even really be sad about it, and will have bragged about it, and may even have already forgotten about it, if it hadn’t been splashed all over the news.

Well, no– he will never forget it.  But not for the reasons you might think.

Did you read the story?  Why?  Was there something about the story that excited you?  Did the word “sex” in the headline win you over?  Did you feel bad after reading it because you found the substance of the story horrifying or dispiriting or depressing?  Or because you like reading about sex?  And then you enjoy savoring the brutal punishment doled out to this young woman because, after all, unlike her, you are a good and decent person who only likes to read stories that lead off with the word “sex”?

And you realize that the authorities will do everything they can to make everyone feel good about crushing this teacher– about absolutely brutally destroying her life– by trying to persuade the boys (yes, there were three, apparently) to be “victims”.  I would not be surprised if the boys were even threatened with legal consequences or suspension from school or spankings if they did not play their parts correctly.  I’m serious: that has happened.  The authorities would have been desperate to vindicate their hysterical reactions.  They would not have stopped at charging the boys if they had refused to cooperate.

After all, it’s for their own good.

If we don’t create the theatrical impression that the boys were harmed, than we look mean and petty and ridiculous putting a 22-year sentence on a 30-year-old woman for having consensual sex.

Here’s the other problem: if men and women are equal– how dare you even wonder?– it is believed that the consequences must be the same.  This is a kind of sideways logic that is the result of confusing “equal” and “the same”.  So if the consequences of this teacher’s actions don’t seem reasonable, then you might have to admit that a 30-year-old male teacher having consensual sex with a 17-year-old girl might not be so, so awful either.  And that cannot be permitted, so poor Mrs. Fichter must pay the consequences, if it really doesn’t make any sense.

When I was kid, I enjoyed music and poetry and films that suggested that society was a kind of madhouse and that people were fundamentally mean and stupid, and that only the outliers, the strangers, the rogues, really understand what is going on.  I don’t enjoy the reality nearly as much.

[whohit]Mean and Stupid[/whohit]

 

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Putative Putin

It has become apparent that America would prefer Putin the boogeyman to Putin the leader of the Russian nation.  It is convenient to sell yourself as a formidable guy who can stand up to those wascally wussians and ….  what?  What exactly?  Kick them out of the Ukraine?  Take away their only naval base in the Mediterranean?  Force them to stop arresting opposition politicians and punk girl bands?

Do many Americans have the slightest idea of just how weak Russia is right now, militarily?  How much of their relatively formidable navies and air force is gone?

The U.S. is not going to go to war with Russia over the Ukraine.   And the U.S. is not going to do much about Putin assisting Assad in Syria because deep down in their tiny black hearts, America’s political elite know that Putin is in Syria because the U.S. just couldn’t figure out a single bloody thing to do about ISIL and Assad so somebody had to step in, especially since there many of the “independent” states around Russia have substantial Moslem populations.

The real boogeyman out there is China, which, in a few decades, will begin to surpass the U.S. in economic might if not military might.  The U.S. does not have a good record of thinking ahead.  It is thinking behind right now, to the “glory days” of the Cold War, and Republicans just get warm all over and pleasantly moist at the thought of reviving the grand old strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction.

[whohit]Putative Putin[/whohit]

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We Will Never See Another Valerie Bertinelli

I’m a little sad about this: we will probably never see another Valerie Bertinelli.

Valerie Bertinelli was one of the stars of “One Day at a Time”, along with Mackenzie Phillips, Bonnie Franklin and Pat Harrington as “Schneider”.

She did not have large breasts.

There you go.  That’s what you probably won’t see ever again: a major television actress with small boobs.  She was 15 at the start of the show and was supposed to be a kind of tom-boyish character.  In the next season, according to Wikipedia, her character was revised to “be more appealing to a traditional male demographic [citation needed]”.   This is how television, contrary to the fundamental purpose of all artistic endeavors, seeks to affirm what you already are: stupid.

I have no end of disgust for media companies that decide that that the illiterate public should tell them how to write or act or direct.  You like titillating jokes?  Add more and more and more.  You like cleavage?  Let’s increase cleavage 200%.  You like poop jokes?  More poop jokes!  Say, why don’t you write and create your own sitcom?  Oh– you don’t know how?  You can’t?  You’re too illiterate and clueless to do it?  When why are we listening to you?

Valerie Bertinelli married Eddie Van Halen when she was 21.   Do you even have to ask?  They divorced in 2005, probably long after the marriage had actually failed.

She wasn’t much of an actress but she was very cute.  That’s all that’s necessary.

Do a search, I know you want to.  Images.  There she is: she struggled with weight issues all her life but she seems to have had a few victories.  Lately, there are pictures of her looking very svelte in a bikini.  But notice the boobs: they look ample.  They look generous.   They look lavish.

It is easy and cheap to get your breasts augmented nowadays.  And it has a clearly measurable impact on profit.  Even if you are a very good actress if you are competing for a spot on a tv series or movie with numerous actresses (there are millions of them) with ample bosoms, you will not get to do what Valerie Bertinelli did with her remarkably reasonably sized breasts: star in a tv sitcom (which, let’s face it, is the lowest form of drama there is).

In future, I fully expect that the studio that owns the “One Day at a Time” franchise will hire a digital effects company to go back in time and enhance Valerie Bertinelli’s breasts.  It’s inevitable.  It will produce more viewers, more profits, more rebroadcasts!

Enhanced.  Augmented.

In the meantime, I actually enjoyed the rerun.  The characters looked more real then they will ever look again, probably.

[whohit]Valerie Bertinelli[/whohit]

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Self-Identity: the Gluten of Sexual Politics

Students at a high school, Hillsboro, in Missouri, walked out today to protest the school board’s decision to allow Lila Perry, a boy who “self-identifies” as a girl, to use the girls’ washrooms and change-rooms.

Not everyone was against.  Apparently some protested the protest.

I have very mixed feelings.  Firstly, the whole transgender thing is getting goofy and ridiculous.  There are a very, very small number of people who genuinely possess ambiguous genitalia, or who might possess a genuinely ambiguous sexual identity.  They have a genuine need and a right to make choices about their sexual identity, however complicated that might be.   And there are a very, very small number of people who, anomalously, really do have the wrong genitalia.  I think this is a very small number.  Very small.

And then there are a lot of people– not really that many, but a lot– who take it into their heads that they would really rather be the other gender.  And a lot of people out there associate this with homosexuality, which everyone knows is something you are born with, and therefore decide to be as tolerant as possible and announce that from now on people should be treated as whatever gender they wish to be.

Here’s some facts: the vast majority of these people are males wishing to “identify” as female.  The vast majority of these people maintain their sexual orientation after they have transitioned.  If they were sexually attracted to girls before the surgeries and injections they remain sexually attracted to girls after.  If they were sexually attracted to boys before the surgeries, they remain attracted to boys.

So Lila, now permitted to change in the girls’ locker room, should enjoy herself tremendously.  Unless, Lila, as a boy, was already attracted to boys.  In other words, gay.  In which case, he probably should be in the girls’ locker room anyway.  But why would he want to do that, if he was attracted to boys?

It is totally predictable that the opinion of the psycho-social establishment will favor the idea that many people really are the wrong gender and need to be helped and supported in transitioning to their “real” gender.   It is predictable not because it is likely to be true but because it is likely to be “psychological” in the sense that it is something that can be uncovered and analyzed and tested and diagnosed and packaged and sold to the public as privileged information that only experts can provide.

It is something that can never be disproved because it can never be proven.  How would you go about proving that a boy is a boy?  What standards would you use?  Would it not be enough, given the assumptions in the field of psychology, for the boy say he wants to be a girl?  If you want to investigate it further, see if he has an array of “symptoms”, all of which might also be indications of a troubled, confused child who is obsessed with a really strange idea.

 

[whohit]Gluten of Sexual Politics[/whohit]

 

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The State Solemnly Requests That you Die: it is your duty.

 To preserve one’s life is generally speaking a duty, but it may be the plainest and the highest duty to sacrifice it.  War is full of  instances in which it is a man’s duty not to live, but to die.  The duty, in case of shipwreck, of a captain to his crew, of the crew to the passengers, of soldiers to women and children, as in the noble case of the Birkenhead; these duties impose on men the moral necessity, not of the preservations but of the sacrifice of their lives for others, from which in no country, least of all, it is to be hoped, in England, will men ever shrink as indeed, they have not shrunk.  It is not correct, therefore, to say that there is any absolute or unqualified necessity to preserve one’s life.  “Necesse est ut eam, non ut vivam,” is a saying of a Roman officer quoted by Lord Bacon himself with high eulogy in the very chapter on necessity to which so much reference has been made.  It would be a very easy and cheap display of commonplace learning to quote from Greek and Latin authors, from Horace, from Juvenal, from Cicero, from Euripides, passage after passages, in which the duty of dying for others has been laid down in glowing and emphatic language as resulting from the principles of heathen ethics; it is enough in a Christian country to remind ourselves of the Great Example whom we profess to follow.  It is not needful to point out the awful danger of admitting the principle which has been contended for.  Who is to be the judge of this sort of necessity?  By what measure is the comparative value of lives to be measured?  Is it to be strength, or intellect, or what ? It is plain that the principle leaves to him who is to profit by it to determine the necessity which will justify him in deliberately taking another’s life to save his own.  In this case the weakest, the youngest, the most unresisting, was chosen.  Was it more [p. 288] necessary to kill him than one of the grown men?  The answer must be “No” –

“So spake the Fiend, and with necessity,
The tyrant’s plea, excused his devilish deeds.”
It is not suggested that in this particular case the deeds were devilish, but it is quite plain that such a principle once admitted might be made the legal cloak for unbridled passion and atrocious crime.  There is no safe path for judges to tread but to ascertain the law to the best of their ability and to declare it according to their judgment; and if in any case the law appears to be too severe on individuals, to leave it to the Sovereign to exercise that prerogative of mercy which the Constitution has intrusted to the hands fittest to dispense it.

It must not be supposed that in refusing to admit temptation to be an excuse for crime it is forgotten how terrible the temptation was; how awful the suffering; how hard in such trials to keep the judgment straight and the conduct pure.  We are often compelled to set up standards we cannot reach ourselves, and to lay down rules which we could not ourselves satisfy.  But a man has no right to declare temptation to be an excuse, though he might himself have yielded to it, nor allow compassion for the criminal to change or weaken in any manner the legal definition of the crime.  It is therefore our duty to declare that the prisoners’ act in this case was wilful murder, that the facts as stated in the verdict are no legal justification of the homicide; and to say that in our unanimous opinion the prisoners are upon this special verdict guilty, of murder. [n. 1]

THE COURT then proceeded to pass sentence of death upon the prisoners. [n. 2]

The above statement is from the court ruling on the case of The Queen Vs. Dudley and Stevens (1884).  It’s a very famous ruling, and taught in law school.  At issue is the question of whether a person, confronted by inevitable death, may break the law in order to save his own life.

No one disputes the basic facts: the men in the lifeboat were all going to die if they did not eat.   There was nothing to eat, except a man, and they choose the weakest and most vulnerable to kill and eat.  Richard Parker, the cabin boy, had fallen into a coma, partly, probably, from drinking sea water.   Euphemisms abound in the retelling of this case, but let’s dispense with them: they killed and ate Richard Parker to save their own lives.

The men, Captain Tom Dudley, Edwin Stephens; and Edmund Brooks, were saved by a German ship and returned to England where they, believing themselves to be fully justified, made no effort to hide what they had done.  It is safe to say that they assumed everyone would understand and sympathize with their motivations.  I doubt they would have formulated it so carefully, but they essentially argued that a man’s first duty is to save his own life.  They professed horror, but, well it had to be done.  You can see that, can’t you?

In a world full of people determined to get other people to kill for them, they could not have imagined how utterly subversive the idea was.

They were arrested and tried for murder, and sentenced to death.  That lengthy quote at the beginning of this post is from the ruling by a panel of judges who heard the case after what can only be described a series of shenanigans by Baron Huddleston who was determined to get convictions, though public opinion was decidedly in favor of the sailors.

It appears to me that he tricked the jurors into believing they were finding the defendants not guilty, by forcing them to make no ruling.  Instead, through a technicality, they inadvertently allowed the judge to make whatever ruling he wanted.

Richard Parker, 17-years-old, was the cabin boy, and had no experience sailing.

There something obscene about this idea, that it is a honor to give up your own life for others.  The obscenity lies in the fact that this is not a selfless gesture: it would be really great if you would die for me.

A devout Christian with a certain orientation might buy it: your reward will be in heaven so the person asking you to die for them is not really as selfish as all that.

I leave aside the issue of Richard Parker, for a moment.  Huddleston had one legitimate point: by what principle do the men select someone in a coma to die for their benefit?  There have been similar situations in which all of the men agreed to a procedure by which one of them is selected to die and be eaten.   But I want to go back to the judge’s speech in which he insists it might be a man’s duty to die for his country.

By what right does anyone ask someone else to give up everything– and I mean everything– for someone else?  What is the point?  If you no longer exist, you can’t possibly obtain anything in exchange for giving up the most valuable thing you have: your own life.  When a soldier is asked to do that, the person asking it is a criminal in the most universal and absolute and uncompromising sense.  How can anyone possibly gain anything by giving up his life?  Unless he is deceived?

Willful ignorance (it’s for your country, it’s for honor, it’s for Jesus, whatever) is no excuse.  Asking someone to die for you is a criminal act, whether it is committed by a mafioso or a president.

But how, the exasperated citizen exclaims, could we ever have a war if people believed that?   Yes, exactly.

Where would we be without young men willing to do it?  It’s really not all that different, when you think about it, from demanding that people kill for you.  Either way, you want someone else to die as a favor to you.  Thank you very much and good bye.  The monument we erect is not for you– you’ll never know a thing about it.  You will never, ever know a thing about it.  That monument is our way of trying to persuade the next victims.

Back to Richard Parker, one of the men had proposed– in unimaginable desperation– that they cast lots to see who would make the sacrifice.  It would have been interesting if they had– what then could the court have ruled?  Surely, that court, would have still ruled murder?   In their unique circumstances, they made a perfectly rational, if appalling, choice (except that one of them, Brooks, wouldn’t go along with it).  Either we do this appalling thing or we will all die.  Life is better than death.  It is better for three families to have their loved ones return to them and one mourn a death, than for four families to mourn four deaths (and destitution, probably).   You can’t run and hide from this equation and say, oh, it’s just too awful to think about.  It really happened– not just in this case in 1884– but in many other instances.

The judges, in this case, asserted, vehemently, that all four of you men in that boat should have died, rather than choose to kill Richard Parker.

It is not unimaginable that the judges would have ruled otherwise if one of the men had volunteered to die for the others (or if they had cast lots, in which sense one of them “volunteers”).  In fact, there was an earlier case from the 17th century, near Saint Christopher, in which lots were cast, and the victim (who happened to be the one who suggested lots) consented, and was eaten, and no legal action was taken.

[whohit]Richard Parker[/whohit]

 

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Processing Amy Schumer

I am trying to process an aspect of Amy Schumer’s comedy that perplexes me.  She ridicules men who find her fat and unattractive.  In the words of New York Times Reviewer Manohla Dargis, “she stops haters dead”.  I don’t know what that means.  That she shuts them up?  Heckles them back?  Humiliates them?  She just will not have it.  She just will not have you find her fat and unattractive.  Not like Lena Dunham?

I don’t know of any external physical attribute that can be changed by ridicule, though our attitudes certainly can.  So, are we men to straighten out our attitudes and learn to regard women like Amy Schumer as attractive?  Smarten up!  Attention!  Look at this body and desire it, or else!  Again, Manohla Dargis:

“Think she’s not thin enough or pretty enough?  She intercepts hateful slurs like those and turns them into ferocious comedy gold that exposes chauvinism as the absurdity it is.”

Now, I am about 167cm tall and would love to be about 180 or 185.  I suppose what I should do is become a smart-ass and ridicule people who have the nerve to find me short, exposing feminine bias for what it is: ridiculous.  Don’t you realize how much better I am than a tall person?  How much more desirable?  How amazing I am at basketball?  All you haters can just got to hell.  You will damn well desire me!

Because, I am going to put you in my movie and I will make your character fall in love with me because you realize that I am not really very short at all.  I am actually very, very tall.  And this sudden apprehension makes you ridiculously, helpless vulnerable to my sexual charms, and will really prove to all the haters out there that I am, in fact, incredibly sexy and desirable, as well as witty and funny and charming, and not at all annoying as only a hater would think I am.

And Manohla Dargis will assert that my sophisticated insights have “eviscerated” the “gauzy romanticism” of “Hoop Dreams”.

But we can extend this strategy to everything: art, music, poetry.  How dare you find my music lame?  I will write a movie in which the character you play will watch me with adoration and astonishment as I perform my song, and I will have the entire crowd stand up and applaud at the end, screaming, shaking their heads in wonder, as if I was Maryl Streep singing it myself.  How dare you not like my painting?  How dare you find my blog boring?  How dare you not like me?

We know that Schumer can write just as good as any man because another story by a woman about how sexy and desirable this particular woman is, once our hero comes to his senses, drives home the point that women can write just as good as any man.

The get out of jail free card here is the usual one: exploiting sexuality for a cheap laugh is actually female empowerment, and liberation.  This isn’t a lesbian film: those short skirts and long cleavages are directed at men.  I am liberated and empowered because you want to have sex with me.  Ha!  Told you!

[whohit]Amy Schumer[/whohit]