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A few matters of morals and the social order

My wife likes to watch "Prison Break", the new episode of which is playing now. I am familiar with the concept, characters and the basic plot turns (the same way that she is symmetrically with The Sopranos, which I enjoy but she doesn't watch), but don't watch the show. There are just too many shows to watch. Anyway, she mentioned today one thing about this show that she finds funny: the escape plan of the main character to save his brother from execution has already directly and indirectly caused the deaths of several innocent people. (For example, the veterinarian who was killed by T-Bag.) Now there is a problem for professional ethicists to ponder: is such tradeoff morally acceptable? An interesting conclusion to this show would certainly be that the main character was captured and sent to the chair for felony murder. On the other hand, as David Brin has often pointed out, the needs and emotions of the aristocrat hero outweigh any number of redshirt deaths.

But it's not like the youth learn only bad habits from these American revolver films. Thanks to police procedural shows such as CSI people are starting to accept the whole notion of DNA evidence. Things sure are different now than they were, say, at the time of the O.J. Simpson trial. However, some people out there seem to have a big ethical problem with collecting and storing DNA from people who are suspected or accused of crimes. What I find very strange is that these people don't similarly seem to have any problem whatsoever with collecting and storing fingerprints and photographic likenesses of people who are suspected and accused of crimes. You'd think that the ethical problems and their arguments would be identical, but for some reason they just don't seem to be. Lots of people would instantly cry fascism if a DNA sample was taken from all people who have been arrested (or convicted of a crime and sent to jail, depending on the laws of the location where you are reading this), but taking their fingerprints or taking their photographs after the arrest doesn't seem to concern anybody. I wonder why this is. Is there perhaps something special in the DNA that makes it different from fingerprints or photographs in some important and essential fashion?

Crime is not a crime if it is executed in a TV show, but also if it is executed in a virtual world, as in the famous "Mr. Bungle" virtual rape case. Now, somebody has been running a virtual Ponzi scheme inside a MMORPG, as reported in this essay that also examines the legal and moral implications of this virtual crime, since in many games, there is a real-world market for game currency and items. I also can't help but think that this is somehow related to the observation made by Richard Cobbett, namely that "evil" characters in MMORPG's are not actually allowed to do evil things within the game, but they only get to pose in dark clothes.

Here in the physical world, many people, especially those of the leftist temperament, also seem to have ethical problems with Wal-Mart and say that it is worse than CostCo because the former company pays their floor-level workers a lot less than the latter. I discussed this issue in one of my very earliest posts "Shopping for a better life", and now I can see that Tim Worstall has crunched the numbers in his article "Wal-Mart and Toddler Economics". In brief, CostCo can pay their workers more because unlike Wal-Mart that hires pretty much anybody, CostCo only hires the very best people and would never stoop down to hire the people that Wal-Mart employs as associates. (This difference should be evident to anybody who walks through both stores and just plain looks at the workers there.) There are no greeters in CostCo, and everything you buy you also cart out yourself. The correct comparison is therefore not "Wal-Mart pays a worker $7/hour while CostCo pays a worker $15/hour" but rather "Wal-Mart pays a worker $7/hour while CostCo would pay that same worker $0/hour", which doesn't exactly make Wal-Mart look like the bad guy here. CostCo also employs a lot fewer people per sales: as Worstall notes, Costco has sales of some $465,000 per employee and WalMart $147,000 per employee. Therefore, if Wal-Mart actually started to operate like CostCo, what would happen? Answer:

To wish that WalMart move from its current low wage and lots-of-labor model, to Costco's (relatively) high wage and low labor utilization is fine, but an adult view would include the acknowledgement that for WalMart to adopt the second model would require that they fire between 860,000 and 975,000 of their current workforce. The child's view would be that everyone should just be paid more because I want it to be so! -- i.e. that there are no side-effects to such decisions.

Panu recently emailed me to point out that Theodore Dalrymple, whose fan I am and who ideas I often quote, is a hypocrite for not opposing smoking the same way he opposes drugs, tattoos, screeching slum rock and other underclass mannerisms. I take Panu's observation seriously, since both men are otherwise very similar in their opposition of the underclass values permeating through society via useful idiots in the pseudointellectual classes. And I do agree with Panu that the good doctor is clearly hypocritical when it comes to smoking (perhaps he smokes himself, and for that reason excuses smoking from the list of immoral behaviours the same way as the otherwise stern talk radio Judeo-moralist Dennis Prager or the late Objectivist cult leader Ayn Rand), since today smoking clearly is a gateway to underclass. However, I understand that the man comes from an era and society in which smoking was not typically a lower class activity but a normal part of adult life even in the social circles that he has lived in. I hope that perhaps Dr. Dalrymple will change his opinion in time as smoking becomes virtually exclusively an activity of the lower class and the underclass.

I know that Udolpho smokes, but I also know that the man is smart enough not to rise up with the snarky prenumeric objection that I am claiming that he is an underclass dweller because he smokes, and because he is not an underclass dweller, my whole claim is ridiculous and false. In the new post "Boy, does Blogger suck", he tells us about his experiences in trying out Blogger, or as I call it, WaitingForBlogger.com. The words "slow as hell and surprisingly awkward to get around in" are exactly what this service is about. To be fair, the server has been unusually slow and unreliable for the past couple of days, with no real explanation in the Blogger Status site, even post facto. The whole service is free so I guess that I can't complain, and it's adequate enough so that I don't feel the need to switch to a competitor which would probably suck in some other way. And I am sure that the people at WaitingForBlogger are furiously working on ways to make it even better as we speak.

Speaking of blogs, I know that most people don't know HTML and CSS, but it's so annoying when many blogs use the exact same layout template. (With those "Edit-Me" links left in, of course. Template creators, please don't put such placeholders in the template. Anyone who is skilled enough to take them out is also skilled enough to create links wherever he wants.) Come on people, just change that template a little in some way so that I can tell at a glance which blog I have arrived to. Speaking of which, how do all youse guys like the simple banner that I quickly put together with Gimp to make this blog to be instantly recognizable? I don't have any artistic skills or eye, but just took a few colour gradients and pattern fills as a basis and apply some filters here and there, and the resulting splotch at least looks different than any other blog out there that uses the otherwise same Stevenson template.

Oh yeah, and one more thing. When you write comments to blogs, if you make a typo or some grammatical error, you don't need to follow up with another comment where you point out and correct the error, unless that error really affects the point that you were making. I promise that I will not think less of you because of some small typo or grammatical error. Heck, I make typos constantly myself.

10 comments

Teddy D is a non-smoker who opposes smoking bans, as he explains in this essay:

http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000760.php

Because the crusade against smoking is a thoroughly middle class one, there will always be non-underclass circles where smoking is approved (in the same manner as cocaine is).

Now if you said virtually the only parents that smoke will be lower and underclass, then I would agree completely...

"Teddy D is a non-smoker who opposes smoking bans, as he explains in this essay"

Certainly. And he opposes them for essentially libertarian reasons, i.e. the same reasons underclass cites for why it behaves the way it does.

Smoking bans are however about prohibiting the public indulgence in a manner that is essentially one of the main shibboleths of underclass. Underclass values and behaviours keep infiltrating middle class in the way broken windows and graffiti on walls make an area more vulnerable to petty underclass crime. Public smoking is a kind of social, or sociological, "broken window". Where smoking bans are introduced, underclass is discouraged to behave in the underclass way. And if Dalrymple weren't somehow ideologically (and blindly) opposed to smoking bans, he would have no problem grasping this.

And if I may put it bluntly: Dalrymple's stance on this smoking issue is so blatantly inconsistent that I tend to conclude that he is standing on somebody else's soapbox, that he is a kind of sponsored spin doctor after all. There are many issues on which I do tend to agree with him, but his opposition to smoking bans flies so blatantly in the face of the general drift of his writings that I don't think I can take him seriously any more. I mean, I don't think I can see him as a bona fide independent thinker any more.

As both a libertarian and Dalrymple fan, I don't see what the big fuss is about. I can't remember Dalrymple ever advocating any specific law before (although he does say he would advocate a smoking ban given certain evidence in the essay c. van carter links to), and his writings on heroin seem to minimize it, claiming histrionic writers are responsible for our belief in its terrible powers. If you can find where he supports a ban against tatoos, piercing or shouting "Oi!" while intoxicated and watching a game of footie on the telly in the pub, THEN I'll have lost some respect for him!

Panu, I find your remarks quite provactive. Possibly Dalrymple is being inconsistent, but is it not also possible you are (to borrow Dr. Gloom's own phrase) an intolerant monomaniac when it comes to smoking? Since I'm unable to speak for Dalrymple and I don't know you, I can't really say.

I would argue smoking bans are anti-society, because smoking faciltates conversation and going out for socializing, while smoking bans force people to stay in their homes by themselves watching TV. But then smoking is my second favorite hobby, so I would say that.

I question whether smoking is innately underclass in the way that chronic drunkenness or loutishness or sluttishness is. The effect of tobacco, after all, is to sharpen the mind, much the way caffeine does. It's done as much for working men and intellectuals as idlers.

(I quit my 2-cigarette a day some 15 years ago, though.)

"but is it not also possible you are (to borrow Dr. Gloom's own phrase) an intolerant monomaniac when it comes to smoking?"

Is it not possible that you descend into the depths of obvious ad hominem a little too early?

Is it not possible that ad hominem indicates the complete absence of more relevant arguments?

"Is it not possible that ad hominem indicates the complete absence of more relevant arguments

Was I arguing? I don't think I was (and isn't accusing Dalrymple of being a "sponsored spin doctor" ad hominem?).

We have differing tastes. I like smoking, I think it a civilized pastime, and I'm not the one making unsubstantiated claims like "Public smoking is a kind of social, or sociological, "broken window"".

This post has been removed by the author.

We haven't got "different tastes". Hard scientific facts regarding the detrimental effects of smoking are on my side, so I've got facts and you've got a "taste". Read my lips: Smoking - must - go. I am not taking any shit from anybody who sees it as his inalienable right to pollute my atmosphere just for the sake of his perverse "taste".

And if you find my remarks "quite provocative", it's just too bad. Even astrologers find my remarks "quite provocative", when I tell them what a load of crap their beliefs are, from the scientific point of view.

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