Month: July 2011

Why Should I Pay 300 When I Can Get Away With 100 (via In Charvak’s Footsteps)

On By southwerkIn business ethics

Should you pay the full fine or pay a bribe?

Please read the attached blog post for the correct answer.

James Pilant

My wife D, when she goes shopping to the congested Commercial Street area, insists on using her scooter. This weekend, unfortunately, she ran into trouble. Apparently she parked where she shouldn't have and the traffic police towed away her scooter while she was inside a shop. Now D is a very conscientious citizen and obeys all rules and regulations and when she says that there was no sign that prohibited parking, I believe her. However, those of … Read More

via In Charvak's Footsteps

In Search of a Good Dictator (via Diasporadical)

On By southwerkIn business ethics8 Comments

Some of the best outrage is generated overseas. I hope you read this with as much delight as I did.

Here’s a sample paragraph –

Move on to what, though? Where does one go after a dictator? How to let go of a mental lifestyle that’s been seeded by a lifetime’s worth of democracy-talk? We are the generation that’s been weaned on talk that a country has to be at a certain point on the development chart before its peeps can even begin to comprehend democracy, much less enjoy its fruits. The country shouldn’t have so many freaking poor people, for starters, because you just can’t trust poor people. They never ask for much. A litre of paraffin and some cooking oil is fine, really. We have spent half our lives listening to life-presidents perpetuating the idea that, while we might never be ready for democracy, we are always ready for dictators. It would appear that we have a proclivity for despotism. That’s our lot.

This is good writing expressing that universal yearning for a life free from manipulation and control.

James Pilant

In Search of a Good Dictator What I am about to tell you, I would never tell anyone else. Yet I trust Diasporadicalists. You are the least judgemental people I know. I am confident that none of you will use what am about to tell you against me. I know my confession is in safe hands. Okay, deep breaths everyone. Here goes: When people ask me what democracy is, I still reply with a definition my primary-six civics teacher scribbled on the blackboard. That is: ‘Democracy is the … Read More

via Diasporadical

Practicing Medicine Can Be Grimm Work (via New York Times)

On By southwerkIn business ethics

Valerie Gribben writing a guest editorial in the New York Times discussed life as a doctor in relationship to stories.

Here’s a paragraph –

Fairy tales are, at their core, heightened portrayals of human nature, revealing, as the glare of injury and illness does, the underbelly of mankind. Both fairy tales and medical charts chronicle the bizarre, the unfair, the tragic. And the terrifying things that go bump in the night are what doctors treat at 3 a.m. in emergency rooms.

I believe in stories. I teach my students that humans think in two ways, through reason and by stories. Often, the stories win out over facts and reason. There’s a good reason for that. Stories are the older of the two methods. We humans have only been trying in any large numbers to use reason and logic since the Enlightenment in the 18th century. The Iliad was being repeated over and over again around campfires for hundreds of years before Christ. And for many thousands of years before that, the storyteller had been working his craft.

In many ways we live by stories. We live several narratives at the same time. In the United States, we have running at the same time, the “city on a hill” narrative along with the “American Dream” story. (Maybe that’s why we foolishly equate success with goodness?) We have our personal story running in synch, opposition to and in tandem with, everybody elses’ dreams.

But Ms. Gribben points to Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I have read a good number. Generally speaking when we think we are familiar with one (Cinderella), our knowledge is based on a Hollywood sanitized version.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales are stories from a world of sadness and terror, fear and danger. They were used to warn and teach about a dangerous world where even the smallest most innocent child was in danger.

I worked with juvenile delinquents for some years. I believe that the sadness in those stories was often mirrored in my clients. And certainly our author here, has found a world of application for these stories.

So, please read her guest column and enjoy.

James Pilant

Carolyn Bourne – the Mother in Law from Hell? Yes, she is.

On By southwerkIn business ethics4 Comments

This story has been generating a great deal of media attention. My inclination after reading about the case was to let other people criticize and move on with my other issues. Then I read the e-mail message the future mother in law sent.

Here it is.

from: Carolyn Bourne
to: heidi withers
subject: your lack of manners

Here are a few examples of your lack of manners:

When you are a guest in another’s house, you do not declare what you will and will not eat – unless you are positively allergic to something.

You do not remark that you do not have enough food.

You do not start before everyone else.

You do not take additional helpings without being invited to by your host.

When a guest in another’s house, you do not lie in bed until late morning in households that rise early – you fall in line with house norms.

You should never ever insult the family you are about to join at any time and most definitely not in public. I gather you passed this off as a joke but the reaction in the pub was one of shock, not laughter.

You regularly draw attention to yourself. Perhaps you should ask yourself why. No one gets married in a castle unless they own it. It is brash, celebrity style behaviour.

I understand your parents are unable to contribute very much towards the cost of your wedding. (There is nothing wrong with that except that convention is such that one might presume they would have saved over the years for their daughters’ marriages.)

If this is the case, it would be most ladylike and gracious to lower your sights and have a modest wedding as befits both your incomes.

One could be accused of thinking that Heidi Withers must be patting herself on the back for having caught a most eligible young man. I pity Freddie.

This is the bottom of the barrel wretched. I want this woman to have to hide in her house from a vengeful press for many years to come.

However, I do have one belief in common with the “Mother in Law from Hell;”  – I pity Freddie, not because of his future wife but because of his current mother. Maybe, his mother-in-law will be an improvement.

James Pilant