Do the Gray Lady’s editorial writers even read their own pieces?
…many of Mr. DeLay’s actions remain legal only because lawmakers have chosen not to criminalize them.
Funny how that works.
11 thoughts on “Mine, Too”
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Do the Gray Lady’s editorial writers even read their own pieces?
…many of Mr. DeLay’s actions remain legal only because lawmakers have chosen not to criminalize them.
Funny how that works.
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In other news, people breath only because of air.
That might be…did he mean…if that was ever…huh?
Doesn’t that cover ANY activity NOT currently addressed by laws? All in all, that might seriously be THE dumbest thing I ever read.
Mr. DeLay later helped block a bill that would have required the garment manufacturers to pay workers the minimum wage.
Another omission here is that it was Pelosi that killed this bill as her family has a tuna canning plant on one of the islands in question.
Well, pre-Lewinsky, Bill Clinton’s administration was generating so many scandals that some observers (i.e. me) thought that it was a deliberate strategy of scandal pre-exhaustion on the part of the Clintonistas.
In those heady days of travelgate and Whitewater and Vince Foster and FBI file abuse and Indian/Buddhist/Taiwanese shakedowns, it became a common piece of journalistic wisdom that “the shocking thing is what’s legal, not what’s illegal”. I think we’re hearing the last gasp of that formula.
Eh, most of Chuck Rangels actions remain ethical only because because law makers have chosen not to enforce the laws on themselves.
Leland wins this round, mostly by stating the still legal truth.
Actually, I think that presents kind of an interesting philosophical question. It seems intuitively obvious to us that some acts should be illegal. The most obvious I can think of is that murder should be illegal. Self defense and acting as a soldier in warfare present interesting couters to that obvious thing, but I think most would intuitively agree that murder for, say, entertainment or simple rage, or almost anything should be illegal. Less obvious but still intuitive (for most of us at least) is normal laws about private property–person A shouldn’t steal or take something from person B just because he wants it or he can. That intuition certainly hasn’t held for all cultures at all times. But then there are all sorts of murkier issues where things are harder to draw lines about. Noise and public nuisance laws? People should be able to do what they want, but shouldn’t it be illegal for my neighbor to blare a foghorn every morning at 3 A.M. just because he feels like it? Laws about what kind of signs you can put up? Public decency laws? Laws restricting things most people don’t want kids to see? Insider trading? Enforcement of contracts? Debt and bankruptcy laws? And then there seem to be laws which seem to be laws just because legislators wrote them and have very little relation to what we might intuitively think should be laws.
Yep, even Rawls just punts on this point and says, (paraphrasing) “Hey, it’s moral so long as people put-up with it!” Practical but uninsightful.
“The most obvious I can think of is that murder should be illegal.”
Murder is, by definition, illegal. Murder consists of killings that are deemed illegal. See the first definition at dictionary.com.
“Murder is, by definition, illegal.” Okay, yes. Substitute “killing another human being” for “murder” in my prior post and that’s what I mean. That does, however, put a point on the idea that we certainly do NOT consider killing a human to be illegal in all circumstances.
Circumstances are a killer. I am a strong believer in states’ rights. Not so good with individual states rights to the point of having legal slavery in some states. We’d have a lot more states rights now if some states hadn’t insisted on that one. (Monday afternoon, mind wandering around topics…)
He knows what you meant; he’s just being a pedantic troll.
A more useful definition of murder is an immoral killing, which would be killing outside of self-defense (oneself or others), punishment for a crime or the execution of a Just War (rule of engagement).
There. Now you have a working definition which can act independent of arbitrary law and also help you judge not only individual actors, but also legal agents and even the law itself.