1-Aug-12 Can assassination missions be justified?

This Wednesday, we will be discussing assassination missions.

Can it ever be justified?

If so, under what criteria?

Do dictators who do not respect democracy and the fair judicial system also forfeit their rights to a free trial?

Can we afford waiting for the slow gears of due process while there is great humanitarian suffering under dictatorships?

Bin Laden, Saddam Huessain, Gadaffi; would the world be better off if they were assassinated? Is that the criteria for deciding?

Who decides?

Did Saddam have a fair trial?  Is it possible to have a fair trial under the mob mentality so prevalent when years of dictatorship change?

Can we reason with dictators or should we join their value systems of might is right and fight it out?

How do we justify the continual suffering of the victims while we try to have due process?

Or are assassinations just a simple act of revenge?

Bring your ideas for our discussion this Wednesday!

25-Jul-12 Equal opportunity for all, should the gifted be overlooked so that we can help those in need?

This Wednesday at the Ideas Cafe,  we are discussing more issues about competing choices.

We all feel for those who need help, whether it is someone encountering a spell of bad fortune, a student who is lagging behind the average, or just the down trotted in out society.  It will be a very cold and impersonate community if we don't.

Who knows, we may be among them some day by sheer stroke of bad luck.

We can see and feel for their suffering and difficulty.

How about the brilliant students who excels in class without any help at all.  Surely they can manage on their own while we take care of the ones in need.  They are already so far ahead of the class average.

But how much better still will these good students be if we do spend some attention on them instead of leaving them alone.  Or worse, will these bright minds get bored while we are tending to those lagging behind?  Is a program for gifted children the answer and if so, is it getting the proper support in relation to what is assigned to learning disabilities?

Are we suffering from blindness to how brilliant these good students will be if we invest some time versus how bad the laggards already are at present?

Should our society as a whole support the achievers among us with some of our valuable resources now at some expense to our needy so that they can contribute even more to our society and allow us to have more resources to help those in need later? Will the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of this world do more for us if we have more infrastructure, encouragement for them?

Help for the needy, investment on the promising; both are unending demands to pour our resources into without ever feeling that we have done "enough".

Our politicians would like us to think that they have done both with a fine balance while the demands from social welfare, education, research and development, and industry promotion are all saying they need more.

Other than continuing to do what we have done before, is there any other way of establishing the balance in these competing demands?

Is this a question of emotional pull on our compassionate heartstrings versus hard nosed investment economics?  After all, in our own personal lives, we somehow managed to spend money on  entertainment to sustain our sanity while we ignore some of the many humanitarian causes around us. We even manage to save some money as well!

Maybe comparison is the answer.  In the 70s, the general health of the Canadian male was put to shame by comparison with the typical Swede 10 years older which resulted in a general awareness of the need for more exercise and better diet.

If we can evaluate an elusive quality like health by comparison, perhaps we can compare other illusive qualities that way?

What if we are all off the mark, and the blind is leading the blind? That the typical healthy Swede can be even healthier?  That we can have a much much better society than others if we will put up with several years of welfare pain for more money to spend on the needy later on?  Or the reverse, put up with a decade or so of economic hardship and risk of losing our brightest while we build a compassionate society and great place to live ?

11-Jul-12 Is it wrong to pay a pro to be your bridge partner?

This coming Wednesday at the Ideas Cafe,  we are going to discuss things that are challenges to our concept of "fair play".

My wife likes to play bridge.  It is a game that involves two opposing teams of two. It is the weak member of the team that determines the level of play as the better player cannot do any more then what the weak play does.
 

So it shouldn't matter if someone brings along a bridge pro to be their partner? Everyone can learn from the pro and theoretically, the pro cannot really be an unfair advantage as the weak partner is the one that determines the level of play. But somehow, it does not feel right.

Concern parents hire tutors to help with their children's academic progress.  Is this unfair to other children who are expected to manage on their own?

Examination bodies publish past exam questions which are used as reference for people preparing for the exam. Is this unfair to others who study for the sake of acquiring knowledge rather than passing exams?

How is fairness in sports and games determined?

I understand that there is a lot of scientific research going into fishing lures. The scent, color, movement of the lure in the water, are all well researched as fishing is big business. How "fair" is it to buy one of these lures to go catch fish? How much credit can one claim when the poor fish goes for this super attractive lure?

If boxing is separated into various weight classes to make the opponents better matched, then why is basketball not separated into various leagues based on the player's height?

 What is the difference between performance enhancing drugs and plain good nutrition for athletes? Are vitamins and other supplements okay so long as they are not too effective at improving the athlete's performance?

Is the practice of identifying future Olympians early in their childhood and dedicate their youth to training for Olympic performance fair to other "amateur" athletes?  How much training is an unfair amount of training for an amateur athlete?

In law enforcement, is it "fair" for radio announcers to broadcast where the police has set up speed checks to catch speeding motorists? It has the intended effect to have less speeder be caught but it also slows down motorists who may have otherwise driven faster.


Should radar detectors be allowed?

Similarly, my gps warns me of intersection camera ahead presumably so I will avoid getting a ticket for running a traffic light. Is that reducing the practice of running traffic lights at the camera locations but at the expense of more light running at the intersections with no cameras?

How are these practices not considered obstruction of justice?

Shouldn't we be on the side of the police who is trying to help all of us?

What is the foundation we use to judge fairness?

Meeting on pardoning criminals

Last evening we had an interesting discussion at the Ideas Cafe on the practice of pardoning and removing criminal records from people who have served their time and have since been in good behaviour.

It was inevitable that we got involved in details of what is the current practice in Canada which none of us if sure of. But the more interesting discussion was with the overall handling of people who have been judged to have committed an offense against the law. 

Richard suggested the view point that criminal record is a fact and we should not in general be suppressing facts of what had happened.  It is better to look at the person as a whole including his/her criminal record and the kind of challenge they face and the adversity they had to overcome.  The person with the criminal record may well be a better employee/volunteer/friend because of the life experience gained through the process.  Pardoning and eliminating the criminal record only provide a false picture of this person.

There was general skepticism that our society is not ready for such frankness, that human resource department will automatically exclude people with criminal records without an interview and people's judgments will be unfairly biased.

Shula further pointed out that in peer review of academic papers, the practice is to have the author anonymous  so that the reviewer will not be bias by professional jealousies and other personal preconceptions.  So facts that are not relevant are best kept away to prevent bias that we all have.

Richard also suggested that atonement with the community affected by the crime is a better way of integrating the offender back into society.  For the offender to come face to face with the damage done, victims affected, and hopefully eventually come to be at peace with the community that they have offended.

Shula put forward the view that she would not want punishment for the crime to be affected by how attractive the victim is.  That the law is to judge the crime itself in terms of the act in order to preserve equal justice for perpetrator of all such acts without consideration of how powerful or beautiful the victim is.

Tina agreed with Richard that atonement with the community is a good way to go and that the court can hand out the judgement and sentences but that atonement with the community is a healing process for the offender to recognize what was done as well as for the community to accept some of the circumstances leading to the offence.

Raffi raised the difficulty of defining the community affected and the people to be involved in such a process, that perhaps in our current society, it is difficult to have people involved.  Besides, the community affected is no longer just closed geographical circles.  It can be international in scope for white collar banking crimes and the victims are sometimes difficult to define.

Through this discussion, what stands out to me is that the general public needs to know more about this subject as my perception is that the majority looks at having or not having a criminal record as an indicator of the probability to re-offend. Most don't realise that a small infraction such as being caught owning a small amount of marijuana in their youth may leave a criminal record for life and that hard crimes resulting in bodily injury can be pardoned after the offender have served time and in good behaviour within a set waiting period.

Richard also brought up the point that historically, pardon has been granted to participants of rebellions as a way of moving on after an uprising.  Mano also mentioned that sometimes the justice system with its rigid set of rules can lead to a dead end and pardon is a way for a higher authority to exercise judgement on these situation.

This is somewhat opposite to Raffi's view in favour of having professional jury as is the case in some European countries.  Raffi felt that having common citizens as jury may end up with examples like the OJ Simpson case where the jury discarded DNA evidence because it was too new a practice at that time.  A professional jury with some training in logic and fact analysis will make a better decision here.

The problem I think, with a process that is overly professional without everyday citizen involvement is that it risk drifting away from what common citizens see as relevant to their lives. Professionals go by rules of engagement but it is the common citizen that can raise the point that the rules themselves may need to be revisited from time to time because the outcome is not relevant to what the whole justice system is about.

Lots to think about and we didn't even get to Sandra Zhou's comments !