philosophy

A biannual e-journal published by Humboldt State University in Aracata, California, source of some of the articles which I'll be posting about, on my homegroup.

Situations posed, with no arguments offered for resolution.

Let's try one: "You are an inmate in a concentration camp. A sadistic guard is about to hang your son who tried to escape and wants you to pull the chair from underneath him. He says that if you don't he will not only kill your son but some other innocent inmate as well. You don't have any doubt that he means what he says. What should you do?"

How about: nothing? By complying with the guard's request, one reinforces the expectation that such a cruel effort to get the inmates to harm their own loved ones will succeed, encouraging the next such guard to hear of the idea to try it himself; the victim we don't know about remains a victim nevertheless. Let the father deny the guard his satisfaction in this.

Law that is good in principle, applied without the use of common sense or basic logic.

One of the reasons why underaged teens aren't allowed to consent to model nude - without parental consent, and there are issues enough in that to justify a whole other post - is because children are believed to lack the mental capacity to fully understand the decisions that they are making. Yet now they are to prosecuted for making those very same decisions on their own, as if they were competent adults who had preyed on incompetent children, luring them into decisions their victims might later regret, leaving us with a pick and mix in which the teens are regarded as being both competent and incompetent at same time, the state they are to be viewed as being in depending on the needs of the argument under which they are to be imprisoned at each given point.

Doublethink a la Orwell being used as a basis for Law, as the underaged are put in danger of sent to prison (where they are likely to be raped) using a law designed to protect them from a form of sexual exploitation.