Tag Archives: ethics

Good, and Bad

Posted on by
Reply

The 6th Circuit, in a case involving an assault on an Amish man by various members of his community because he didn’t conform to their standards, came to the right answer, but then it did the wrong thing with its answer.

The assaulters were convicted of their assault, with the crime and the conviction treated by the prosecutor and the trial court as a hate crime. The Circuit Court ruled, though,

Personal conflict, not religion, was the driving motive behind beard- and hair-cutting attacks targeting Amish, an appeals court panel ruled Wednesday in overturning the hate-crime convictions of 16 men and women.

This is good, because our crimes don’t need to be gussied up with froo-froo, and adding “hate” to the definition of a crime in order to create a new crime is such froo-froo. When we criminalize hate, we criminalize the contents of a man’s mind—and that’s no thing a government should be involved with. Full stop. All that needs criminalization—if anything—is the actual deed done. Our thoughts must be beyond government’s reach, no matter the good intentions in trying to go that far.

But the ruling is bad because it overturned the convictions altogether, rather than remanding the case for resentencing. That the men were convicted of a crime with a motivation means the men were convicted of a crime.

Now the victims must consider reliving those events in a new trial, and that’s also bad.

The 6th Circuit’s opinion can be read here.

And So It Begins

Posted on by
Reply

The crumbling of the Afghan polity is under way.

A reporter wrote a news reporting/opinion piece about the Afghan government that didn’t comport with that government’s approved view of itself. As a result,

Afghanistan’s attorney general has banned a New York Times reporter from leaving the country after he wrote a story about unnamed officials seeking to take power if the country’s presidential election deadlock persists.

The reporter’s…error?

Attorney General Basir Azizi said the story…could “create fear and confusion among the people” and that [reporter Matthew] Rosenberg will not be allowed to leave the country until it has been investigated by officials.

Of course.

“Climate” Again

Posted on by
Reply

Texas and California are in the middle of droughts. This is, of course, due to man-caused climate change. Or is it? Watts Up With That has a couple of graphs that bear on the matter.

This one gives one idea of the history of droughts and wet periods over the last, oh, say, 1,200 years:NorthAmericaDroughtGrid

The dots in the upper part of the figure give the locations at which measurements were taken. The lower part gives the time history of wet vs dry for the time frame indicated; the dotted lines flanking the solid black line give the error range for the measurements. The shaded yellow area to the right indicates the (limited) time frame of interest to our climate panic mongers. The average dryness for an earlier period (notice that it’s outside the time of interest to our mongers) is shown by the solid red line, and the average wetness is shown by the blue line that’s partially obscured by the yellow shading.

This graph gives a clearer indication of wet and dry periods, including that long time frame so studiously ignored by our mongers. The graph points up California’s strait because Watt’s article was centered on all the nonsense California’s Democrats are spouting about their drought. It pretty much speaks for itself.200YrCaliforniaDrought

The graph’s small text may be hard to read; it says

Evidence from tree rings shows that drought was historically much more widespread in the American West than now, while the 20th century was wetter than normal. Percentage of the West affected by drought from 800 AD to 2000.

Hmm….

Press Mindset

Posted on by
Reply

This is from an AP article, but I suggest it’s typical of the press generally. The AP is reporting on a case involving the drunk driver-involved deaths of two children and the immediately subsequent shooting death of the drunk driver. The father of the two children is accused of

killing a drunk driver in a fit of rage after his two sons were fatally struck in 2012 on a rural road in Southeast Texas.

His defense attorney says [the father] is a good man, a grieving father, and not a murderer. At the same time, his defense hasn’t publicly suggested who else might be responsible for [the drunk driver]’s shooting death.

Notice that last. According to the press, the father must, if not outright prove his innocence, at least offer plausible alternatives.

No. The press’…misunderstanding…notwithstanding, no such defense obligation exists. It’s on the prosecution—the government—to prove any defendant’s guilt; no police work, no investigative work at all, is required of the defense. Full stop.

The White House as Tax-Writing Authority

Posted on by
Reply

Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew originally (originally: three weeks ago, in mid-July) acknowledged he had no authority to alter the tax implications of US businesses reincorporating overseas in order to reduce their US tax burden.

Now he’s looking at (not for) ways to “meaningfully reduce the tax benefits after inversions take place” because reducing a company’s cost structure, the legally and fiscally required behavior of any company’s managers, by making use of this “unpatriotic tax loophole” is unpatriotic. I’ll ignore the fact that what’s unpatriotic here is the usurious tax rates charged American companies and the zeal with which this administration attacks American companies for worrying about their bottom line more than they worry about government imperatives in order to get to a different point. As The Wall Street Journal put it,

So now we have a President in an election year looking for a way to raise taxes on corporations after he couldn’t get Congress to agree. Has anyone asked Treasury’s career lawyers or the Office of Legal Counsel? Someone should. And when the next President arrives in 2017, one of his first acts should be to release publicly all of the OLC memos making the legal case for Mr Obama’s many illegal acts, assuming there are any.

And if there are not, the next President should release far and wide the empty file folder that would be this administration’s lack of consultation with the law or with any government lawyers.