Andrew Comments on a Previous Post – In Search of a Good Dictator (via Diasporadical)

On By southwerkIn business ethics

Andrew often comments on this blog and I am pleased to bring his thoughts to you.

The original post is here.

Here’s Andrew –

I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine the other day regarding the odds of successfully establishing self sustaining representative democracys in the Middle East. He borught up a good point. Every facet of our lives, and what is expected from us as citizens, is based on our cultural system of values. While an individual can easily become “enlightened” to the ideas of freedom and democracy, its much harder to change the cultural value system of an entire society to progress one way or another. When you look at different scales of human interaction (from the individual, to the family, to the community, to the state… all the way up), you see different sociological mechanisms becoming dominant.

These dictators remind me of the Joker in the new batman movie. What they are telling the masses has a ring of truth to it. The problem is that they pervert the line of reasoning towards their benefit, or they take it too far to an extreme. It is true that it takes a lot longer for a culture to naturally develop into a new system of values. In the West, we had our Enlightenment period in the 18th century in which the inertia of cultural values finally gave way to the way to our current system of values. The middle east didnt really go through that period the way we did. So while you can easily find a middle easterner to agree that freedom and democracy are good for values for the middle east, the emotional need to break that cultural inertia seems to not have reached that critical point yet.

I predict that it wont be 30 years after we are completely out of Afghanistan and Iraq before their democracies (that we gave to them, they didnt earn it like we had to.) are in shambles and new dictators arise to take power.

 

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

Aung San Suu Kyi. The Reith Lectures. (via magsmuse)

On By southwerkIn business ethics

I’m going to take a side here and it’s not with the government of Burma.

James Pilant

Aung San Suu Kyi. The Reith Lectures. SECURING FREEDOM/LIBERTY I believe that if you really want or need to say something, then you really should  have the freedom to gently clearly and directly speak that Truth.  A soul should not be denied. God will forever inspire us to articulate and seek the Truth.    It is an injustice to be wrongly convicted or under house arrest, spiritually or physically.  To communicate yourself, directly is so important, for through another you can never b … Read More

via magsmuse

Shareholders hammer Tepco over nuclear fiasco (via MY VOICE)

On By southwerkIn business ethics

My favorite sentence –

Another investor shouted that Tepco’s executives should jump into their stricken reactors and die to take the blame for the fiasco.

Enjoy the article and remember that TEPCO has paid out more than 19 billion dollars in damages but that if this happened in America, the responsible utility company would be out less than a hundred million dollars due to our government protecting them from losses.

James Pilant

Shareholders hammer Tepco over nuclear fiasco By KAZUAKI NAGATA Staff writer Tokyo Electric Power Co. faced a six-hour barrage of heavy flak from shareholders Tuesday at their annual meeting, with management blasted over how it has handled the world’s worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Demonstrators gather outside Kyushu Electric Power Co.’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Fukuoka Prefecture. KYODO Many investors demanded to know why Tepco failed to foresee the tsunami … Read More

via MY VOICE

Dutch unease about society “understandable” (via Radio Netherlands International)

On By southwerkIn business ethics1 Comment

So it is not just us.

From the article –

“Cohesion in towns and villages has disappeared with the advent of individualisation, immigrants from around the world and an increasingly complex society,” said Mr Verhagen, leader of the Christian Democrats, junior partners in the Dutch coalition government. “It is no longer taken for granted that our children will have it better than we did.”

Cohesion is disappearing. I have been noticing for some years now that things as simple as common experiences are disappearing. When I try to use a movie as an example in class, only the biggest blockbusters will have been seen and, even then, often by less than half the class. Our culture seems to be fragmenting into individual units almost all of them focused on the personal and the trivial.

James Pilant

Saudi bans domestic workers from Indonesia, Philippines (via Radio Netherlands Worldwide)

On By southwerkIn business ethics

It appears the Saudi government is attempting to set a record for mindless greed.

This is incredible. Read this little piece –

Earlier this year the Philippines asked Saudi Arabia to guarantee higher pay for Filipina housemaids but the request was turned down.

The Philippines demanded $400 in monthly wages for for housemaids but Saudi authorities offered a base monthly salary of $210, Filipino labour official Carlos Cao had told AFP in Manila in May.

So, let me get this straight, one of the richest nations on earth is unwilling to pay its maids almost $2 an hour but is willing to pay less than one dollar an hour?  (This is assuming a forty hour week which I find totally implausible. I figure 12 – 16 hour days with no weekends off.)

I’m sure this is great publicity for one of America’s closest allies and apparent beneficiary of the neo-liberal school of economics – which is a basic philosophy of unregulated capitalism. Well, here it is, unregulated capitalism in all it glory. Here we have not just greed but sexual harassment and physical violence, not to mention the occasional execution.

Read the article, you’ll find it interesting.

James Pilant

KPMG Study Shows Company Bosses Increasingly Commit Fraud (vis Ethics Sage)

On By southwerkIn business ethics2 Comments

The invaluable Ethics Sage has a new article.

I, in particular, like this paragraph –

I find it astonishing that corporate fraud continues to increase and top management is leading the way. The increase in the FRP statistic seems to bear out the spread of the cancer that has been attacking the capitalistic system during the past 20 years or so. Remember the “Greed is Good” mantra in Wall Street? Well it’s instructive to look at the entire quote by Gordon Gekko: “The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated…The  point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the            essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the uoward surge of mankind.”

I won’t spoil the article by revealing more. But I promise you if you subscribe and favorite the Ethics Sage, you will have little cause for regret and many reasons to be pleased with your good judgment.

James Pilant