Pilant’s Business Ethics CBS NewsOur author here believes that we can draw parallels and lessons from popular literature. So do I. I tell my students that literature tells you how people think, relate and improve themselves. It makes the reader subtle and develops insights.
Read to understand, read for knowledge, read to build judgment. Read so that you live at least a little while in your life in the company of others that you can have real insight into. Because very seldom in our lives do we bother to spend a few minutes understanding another.
Follow the writer’s thinking and see what you think.
James Pilant
The book sounds interesting; I will have to have a look at it.
I can be found here at Amazon. com.
James Pilant
via rumimibofyt
Here we discuss police lying and the legal fictions that figure so much in the language and practice of criminal justice. I like this paragraph -
My own belief is we are scared of transparency, partly because all our cupboards hide skeletons. When the ‘red witch’ placed at the heart of the hacking scandal admitted she knew her organization had paid police officers, this was seen as a blunder and admission of ‘criminality’. This is not the right approach and seems to be putting people we want to tell the truth in the same position as the police officer having to ‘game’ in the legal system.
I agree we do not value the truth so much as we value playing some strange kind of game designed to elude responsibility and honor.
James Pilant
The author has an excellent observation – this scandal, this pain for so many people, would never have happened if those tapped communications could not have been tapped. This is what he says in the key paragraphs of the article -
The point is that this should never have been allowed to happen in the first place. A virtual, mobile firewall or encrypted voice tech with unique access ID should always have been in place – as part of these corporations’ license obligations. And given that they have failed to ensure that this was the case, they too should be the focus of the media and political, regulatory scrum.
This whole sorry saga should be thrown before the courts and the regulators with the telcos in the dock alongside the greedy, opportunist perpetrators of these heinous anti-privacy protagonists. Privacy must be sacrosant under the British constitution, its common law upheld irrespective of who has the most money to bribe police officers to pass on private information.
It was cruel of these companies to have saved money and time and compassion by refusing to secure their networks privacy. I appreciate the author’s perceptiveness.
James Pilant
No. they don’t.
The right to practice or not practice a religion is enshrined in the Constitution.
Here’s Herman: “Our Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state,” Cain said in an interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” “Islam combines church and state. They’re using the church part of our First Amendment to infuse their morals in that community, and the people of that community do not like it. They disagree with it.”
Don’t any number of American churches, for instance, Christian Reconstructionists, combine those elements, if you accept and it’s a big acceptance, that Islam is how he describes it.
As for infusing their morals into the community. I live in a dry county – enough said; there is plenty of infusion going on right now with the Christian religion.
If you watch Fox News for an hour, you might get his view point that Islam is a combination of church and state, a Sharia time bomb waiting to put all of our women in burkas and all of our men wearing unmarred beards with a little hand chopping for theft thrown in. However, the actual religion of Islam, not the comedic version on Fox, is the religion of more than one and one-half billion people. They range from deep into the South Pacific – Indonesia and Malaysia, all the way across the world to Surinam in South America. They have a wide range of laws and belief systems about those laws. As an attorney, I assure you I have seen nothing that would in any way suggest any attempt to make Sharia law part of American law, further it cannot creep on us anymore than any other set of laws.
Muslims are being painted as part of world wide campaign of subversion. I say to you with complete confidence, that if one and one-half billion followers of Islam were on the warpath, we would know about it. In that kind of conflict our deaths would be in the thousand per day with the toll mounting by the hour. There are estimated to be around twenty thousand members of Al Queda. Those are our principle enemies, they and other small groups angry at American actions in the Middle East. That’s it. There is no evidence that American Muslims are anything but patriots barring the occasional violent individual we can find in every religious sect.
This is the politics of fear, of unreason, of moral cowardice. Please don’t let yourself or anyone you know be led on a “moral” crusade to destroy a threat that does not exist while destroying a critical component of American Democracy. If you cannot build a mosque in America, if popular opinion is enough to stop it, who else’s church can we stop? I know of no church in the United States, – not one – that is not controversial.
They start here by claiming to defend religion while setting a precedent that can limit or eliminate building any church anywhere in the nation.
If we believe in the Bill of Rights, then the mosque should be built. If we believe in toleration of different religions and ideas, the mosque must go up. If we believe in allowing patriotic Americans who happen to have a different faith to exercise their rights, the mosque must go up.
Americans are a great people, this is one of those opportunities to demonstrate that.
James Pilant
