September 28, 2014 at 5:55 P.M. I am in receipt of a letter ostensibly from the IRS stating that a replacement check could not be sent to us because it was undeliverable at our home address. This communication was delivered, somehow, to our correct home address.
The IRS "notice number" on this letter is "CP 564." Allegedly, this communication was sent from The Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, P.O. Box 16246, Philadelphia, PA 19114-0035.
Evidently, the IRS uses the same computer as Invicta's "Michelle Castro." There is no postage mark on the envelope. The envelope may have been placed (by hand) in my mailbox, presumably by someone in my building.
September 27, 2014 at 11:14 A.M. I am unable to send or receive emails, no images can be posted at these blogs, and no response to my requests for information has been received from Invicta, or any American public official, in connection with my watch. ("The Invicta Watch Company" and "The Invicta Watch Company Caper.")
I do not know how or why these actions are taken against me, nor by whom they are taken. Several computers and printers have been destroyed by hackers, including some at the New York Public Library. ("How censorship works in America.")
By comparison with many persons and places in the world, however, I am fortunate: my property and money, much of my professional life and recognition for intellectual or creative achievement has been stolen, but others in places like Gaza and Iraq, Central America and in many urban communities in America have much more stolen from them -- including their lives and rights -- without the opportunity to respond or argue, nor even an explanation or any disclosure of the truth. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")
When a society speaks of freedom of speech in its organic documents, human rights and dignity in its laws -- while allowing for the commission of such crimes against anyone -- then it must be said that hypocrisy and mendacity have won over genuine commitments to its political ideals. ("Innumerate Ethics.")
I will continue to write for as long as I am able to do so. A list of sources and items will be added to this text in the days ahead. I am grateful for the good wishes of many persons in the world sharing in this struggle. ("The Audacity of Hope" and "Israel Heightens Gaza Crisis.")
Stephanie Clifford, "Ex-Detective Defending Work in Disputed '91 Murder Case, Points to the Role of Prosecutors," The New York Times, September 25, 2014, p. A23. ("Crooked Cop Lies to Convict People" and "Prosecutorial Misconduct.")
Michael Kunzelman & Janet McConnoughey, "BP May be On the Hook for $18 Billion Fine: Gross Negligence Ruled in 2010 Spill," The Record, September 5, 2014, p. A-1. (Lawyers for BP assisted in covering-up and perpetuating gross negligence in clean-ups, resulting in deaths, as government lawyers were criminally incompetent in enforcing -- or not enforcing -- regulations. "'Michael Clayton': A Movie Review.")
Ben Horowitz, "Teacher Gets 5 Years for Touching Student," The Star Ledger, September 6, 2014, p. 9. (One of several persons in New Jersey schools indicted for child abuse. Allegedly, this case has led to an investigation of "networks" involved in this activity in Garden State schools. Daniel Sheck, 31, fondled and may have done worse to a 15 year-old student. George Prado? "New Jersey Rabbi Faces Child Abuse Charges.")
Mary Ann Spoto, "Former Teacher Indicted On Charges of Sexual Assault of Male Student," The Star Ledger, September 6, 2014, p. 9. (Kate Warnick, 24, charged with aggravated sexual assault and child endangerment for a "sexual relationship" with a male student 15 years of age. Ms. Warnick described herself as a "feminist," allegedly, but may have used the so-called "date rape drug" to take advantage of the young man in question. Is Ms. Warnick also a "lesbian"? "N.J. Female Professor Rapes a Disabled Man.")
Bill Wichert, "Court Overturns 2007 Murder Conviction: Alleged racial discrimination of jury facilitates decision reversal," The Star Ledger, September 6, 2014, p. 13. (N.J. has a problem of "systematic and pervasive racism" in the court system. N.J. prosecutors engaged in "IMPERMISSIBLE DISCRIMINATION." Prosecutors then LIED about this fact. Saladdin Thompson, 55, was falsely convicted of murder as a result of prosecutorial misconduct. "So Black and So Blue in Prison" and "Stuart Rabner's Selective Sense of Justice.")
James Queally, "Central Park Five to Receive $41 MILLION: Settlement reached 10 years after lawsuit," The Star Ledger, September 6, 2014, p. 14. (Finally, thanks to a superb mayor in New York, Mr. De Blasio, justice is done, healing can begin, and a difficult matter can be closed and laid to rest in this city. "No More Cover-Ups and Lies Chief Justice Rabner!")
Kathleen Lynn & Dave Sheingold, "New Jersey Recovery Lagging: Census Shows Poverty Up, Incomes Lagging," The Record, September 18, 2014, p. A-1. ("The Christie Miracle" may destroy New Jersey's economy. Should Mr. Christie bring these failed ideas to the White House? Should Ms. Guadagno expect to win the governorship after being a part of this catastrophic Christie administration? "Christie Gives a Donor $1 Million of New Jersey Money.")
Joe Malinconico, "New Job For Mayor's Wife Questioned: Council critic calls role a 'conflict of interest,'" The Record, September 18, 2014, p. L-1. (How do you get two salaries as a N.J. mayor? Create a bogus job and put your wife on the payroll. Or you could do the same using a dead person's information. "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead.")
James C. McKinley, Jr., "Detective In Patz Case Added Words to Transcripts," The New York Times, September 24, 2014, p. A28. (This is the type of obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence that is routine for Mr. McGill and the OAE. Falsifying alleged recordings, hiding discoverable material, and threatening persons to file grievances against an attorney who is "disliked" by the OAE then LYING about having done these things is no longer disputed by the OAE as concerns me: "John McGill, Esq., the OAE, and New Jersey Corruption" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" then "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
Michael Phillis, "Guardagno [sic.] Office Subpoenaed On 'Hoboken Issues': Unclear if it involves mayor's claim," The Record, September 5, 2014, p. A-3. (Ms. Guardagno, a former participant in my Philosophy Cafe discussions and, sadly, a participant also in New Jersey's cover-ups of my matters, may have lied about Dawn Zimmer and/or whether Mr. Christie lied about what he knew about "Bridge-gate." Ms. Guardagno may have lied to the FBI about knowing me. Christie and Guardagno are distinguished members of the bar in New Jersey. They are aware of my situation and claims as well as evidence suggesting the nature of the serious public danger in this matter not only for myself, but for many others. No response has been received to my requests for the truth from Trenton. "Guardagno versus Zimmer.")
Matt Friedman, "Guardagno Addresses Hoboken Subpoena," The Star Ledger, September 6, 2014, p. 2. (Ms. Guardagno is aware of the use of OAE computers and her office to commit computer crime and engage in censorship as well as of the persons sending bogus letters to my home address, but she is required to LIE or remain silent about the facts as New Jersey's Lt. Governor. Ms. Guardagno a.k.a. "Guadagno" is welcome to debate me further on philosophical or ethics issues at any time. Lucy? "Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
"The New Jersey Department of State, which is headed by Lt. Governor Kim Guardagno, has received a subpoena related to 'Hoboken issues,' a spokesman for the state Attorney General's office confirmed Thursday." ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
Ms. Guardagno may have attended several "Philosophy Cafe" sessions in New York and also may have debated -- or attempted to debate -- philosophical and legal issues with me online.
Ms. Guardagno probably lied about these facts to federal officials. ("Jennifer Velez is a Dyke Magnet!")
Did Ms. Moses -- or persons on her behalf -- also not tell the truth to interviewers looking into my claims? ("Sybil R. Moses and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")
Ms. Guardagno may have used the name "Jill Ketchum" and other names at discussion forums that I hosted online.
Ms. Guardagno may be able to identify other participants in these discussions. She may also have sent emails to me using various pseudonyms. ("New Jersey's Nasty Lesbian Love Fest.")
Ms. Guardagno may have lost a humiliating public debate with me and may now be a little shy about admitting that she "erred." ("New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "New Jersey's Judges Disgrace America.")
Has Ms. Guardagno renounced lesbian affiliations and/or relationships? ("Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Sexual Favors For New Jersey Judges.")
Ego is a character flaw among lawyers that sometimes obstructs justice. If questioned about these matters the most likely response from Ms. Guardagno (allowing her to avoid explicit lying while being deceptive) is "no comment." (Again: "John McGill, Esq., the OAE, and New Jersey Corruption.")
Prosecutors are often reluctant to admit errors KNOWING that by lying about their mistakes persons languish in prisons, or great human suffering is prolonged for many innocent individuals, or that the risk of future harm for innocent members of the public is increased. The word "ethics" on the lips of such prosecutors generates laughter and disgust. ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics" and "Prosecutorial Misconduct.")
" ... Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer has said that Guardagno threatened to withhold Superstorm sandy [sic.] relief aid if the mayor did not support a construction project [kickbacks?] that had ties to the Chairman of the Port Authority at the time, who was appointed to the post by Governor Christie." ("David Samson, Esq. Resigns.")
This certainly sounds like very familiar "brass knuckles" New Jersey politics in the warm and lovable style of Mr. Christie. (See my essay "Is Christopher Christie 'Mentally Deranged' and a 'Liar'?" The answer is: "Yes, he is both of those things!" At least this was the view of Sheila Oliver, Assembly Speaker in Trenton and the next Lt. Governor in New Jersey.)
Nonetheless, Guardagno would be a pretty stupid lawyer -- someone like John McGill, Esq., perhaps? -- to make explicit threatening comments. It is unwise to extort political support for a "pay-to-play" project on the record. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" then "New Jersey's Political and Supreme Court Whores.")
I am more interested in other subpoenas allegedly served on Ms. Guardagno -- who still denies being a lesbian or "knowing" Diana Lisa Riccioli and/or Estela De La Cruz, nor ever having heard of or met Marilyn Straus -- in connection with events in my life.
Was there a sexual relationship between Ms. Guardagno and any (or all) of these ladies? ("Marilyn Straus Was Right!" and "Diana's Friend Goes to Prison!")
"Connections" between Ms. Guardagno and other persons who have resigned in disgrace as well as alleged underworld figures in New Jersey cannot be confirmed. ("Joe Ferreiro is Bergen's Godfather" and, again, "David Samson, Esq. Resigns.")
"Guardagno has strongly denied Zimmer's allegations and a report by the New York law firm hired by the governor's office to investigate the Christie staff's role in the lane closures -- as well as Zimmer's claims -- discounted the story." ("Mafia Influence in New Jersey Courts and Politics" and "Joe Ferreiro Indicted Again!")
Mr. Mastro is billing several million dollars more as I type these words for phone calls he made in the course of writing his memo and for meals that he consumed at Le Bernadin while doing so. Sensibly, Mr. Mastro lives and works in New York.
See you at the Opera, Randy. Bring Rudy along! ("A Night at the Opera" and "The First Kiss of Spring is Mine!")
The role played by Ms. Guardagno in this story probably falls into the cover-up category: How much personal property and how many documents pertaining to me remain in the possession of Ms. Guardagno (and Mr. Chiesa) now being sought by federal prosecutors is anyone's guess. Still lying, Kim? ("Is truth dead?")
The shredder in Trenton will be running 24 hours per-day. ("New Jersey Lawyers' Ethics Farce.")
Will Ms. Guardagno cooperate with Justice Department efforts to obtain the truth in my matters? Will Ms. Guardagno continue to lie and cover-up in my matters to protect her girlfriends? Has Ms. Guardagno served on the New Jersey Legal Ethics Committee? Was Ms. Guardagno instructed, at any time, to involve herself in matters pertaining to me by Mr. Christie or others on Mr. Christie's behalf or by anyone at any time? If so, by whom? Who tried to steal my Invicta? ("Is Union City, New Jersey Meyer Lansky's Whore House?")
Stay tuned to this station for further updates:
"When asked about a possible subpoena and the legal bill after an event in Atlantic City" -- Hosted by one of New Jersey's organized crime families, perhaps? -- "Guardagno said: 'I don't have any idea what you're talking about. I have no idea what you are saying.' ..."
These statements and others may have been recorded, Kim, along with your presence at The Philosophy Cafe in New York.
I believe and hope that federal authorities are in possession of the files backed-up on my old computer.
Would Ms. Guardagno act on her own without instructions from Mr. Christie?
Blatant lying from New Jersey officials (or incompetence) must end. Some effort should be made to deal with these issues so we can all move on. ("What did you know, Mr. Christie, and when did you know it?")
We all have to move on, Mr. Rabner. ("What did you know, Mr. Rabner, and when did you know it?" and "Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?")
Friday, September 26, 2014
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Innumerate Ethics.
April 2, 2015 at 1:25 P.M. Alterations of the size of the text and previously corrected "errors" were reinserted in this essay. I will try to make all necessary corrections.
I have yet to receive a response concerning the Invicta watch matter. I look forward to receiving such a response from any one of the many parties that I have contacted about the issue.
I invite and welcome members of the public inquiring further about my watch. I will make as many of the details and documents public (concerning the Invicta watch "case") as I possibly can.
I will also continue to pursue the matter which so many people find symbolic of the very issues discussed in this essay. ("New Jersey Steals From the Poor to Give to the Rich.")
What follows is a list of sources accompanying my essay responding to Derek Parfit's classic article: "Innumerate Ethics."
I have experienced great difficulties and obstructions in signing-in to these blogs from my home computer and from NYPL computers. At any time I may be unable to sign-in to these blogs in order to continue writing. If this happens, I will struggle to create another blog somewhere online.
Another of my home computers has been rendered useless. I will do what I can at NYPL computers during 45 minutes per day.
Primary Sources:
John M. Trauber, "Should Numbers Count?," Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (Summer 1977), pp. 293-316.
Derek Parfit, "Innumerate Ethics," Philosophy and Public Affairs 7, no. 4 (Fall 1977).
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 67-87.
Secondary Sources:
Ian McEwan, The Children Act (New York: Doubleday, 2014).
Examination of autonomy in connection with the right to die question allows the British novelist to explore not only the underlying problem of ethical versus legal justice, but to focus on women's unique investment in critiques of the public/private distinction in liberal jurisprudence as expressed, for example, in the abortion controversy, but also with regard to freedom in sexual relations and equal dignity before the law regardless of gender.
Mr. McEwan's second recent novel to feature a woman's narrative voice is an engagement with crucial feminist issues in literature and law as well as philosophy. No reviewer has detected these themes in commenting on the novel, to my knowledge, as of my writing this paragraph.
Identity and agency issues are among the very questions dealt with by Derek Parfit in his article entitled "Innumerate Ethics" and in all of Professor Parfit's philosophical writings.
Ian McEwan is one of the most important novelists in the English language at the moment.
Deborah Friedelle, "The Body's Temple: In this Ian McEwan novel, a judge must decide the case of a teenage Jehova's Witness who refuses treatment for leukemia," The New York Times Book Review, September 14, 2014, p. 11. (What are the boundaries of paternalism by the state as against rights of individuals in the private realm? This reviewer seems confused as to the central themes of the book or why these themes matter to women in positions of authority. Is Ms. Friedelle also "Jennifer Shuessler"? Jill Abramson?)
Tessa Hadley, "The Children Act by Ian McEwan -- The Intricate Workings of Institutionalized Power," The Guardian, Thursday 11 September 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/the-children-act-ian-mcewan-review-novel ("Tessa" also missed the point of the novel. "'The Constant Gardner': A Movie Review.")
Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). ("Mana" -- the good -- and how to distribute the good in the bare-bones liberal state.)
F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (New York: MacMillan, 1897).
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1977). ("Hard Cases.")
Charles Fried, Right and Wrong (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1978). (The priority of rights to human dignity in the struggle for good results in biomedical controversies.)
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence On Modern Morals and Happiness (London: Penguin, 1985). (1st pub. 1793.) ("William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.") ("William Godwin" or "William Godwyn" are common spellings of this name before the standardization of spelling in the twentieth century and these are still acceptable uses, according to my Oxford Companion to the English Language. Hence, "counsellor" and "counselor," "algorithm" and "algorythm" are also acceptable spellings of these words.)
Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1983). (Public versus private moralities: "Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch on Freedom of Mind.")
H.L.A. Hart, "Between Utility and Rights," in Alan Ryan, Ed., The Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1979), pp. 77-98.
Kimberly Hutchins, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (London: Polity, 2003). (Dialectics between, among, "as" genders: "Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
J.R. Lucas, On Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), esp. pp. 163-170. (Problems of distributive justice: Does justice inhere in situations, outcomes, persons, actions, rules or results?)
Alasdair McIntyre, "Egoism and Altruism," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. II, pp. 462-466. (New York: Dutton, 1967). (Paul Edwards, Ed.)
Alasdair McIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (Indiana: Notre Dame U. Press, 1968).
Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Harmonsworth, 1975). (R. Livingstone and G. Benton translators and editors. "Inequality.")
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark, 1989). ("The Idea of Perfection" and "The Sovereignty of Good.")
Michael Newman, Socialism: A Very Brief Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ("'Che': A Movie Review.")
Susan Moller Okin, "Gender, the Public and the Private," in David Held, Ed., Political Theory Today (Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1991), pp. 67-91. (See the discussion above of Ian McEwan's The Children Act.)
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York & Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974). (Also Harvard University Press in America.)
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1971).
W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1930). ("Zero Dark Thirty.")
Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1982).
Judith Jarvis Thomson, Rights, Restitution and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1986).
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Law in Modern Society (New York: Free Press, 1976).
Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (London & Indiana: Notre Dame U. Press, 1994), pp. 21-39.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindications of the Rights of Woman (London: Penguin Classics, 1975). (1st Pub. 1792.) ("Master and Commander.") (Rejecting the province of "ladies," for the first time in Western philosophy, as against the public or political life in society for "women" as equal "persons" before the law.)
I.
Discussions of ethics and/or politics as well as legal theory often center on problems of competing values: Individual liberty concerns are pitted against the collective need for equality. Rights questions of men and women are weighed against the interests of majorities, or the social good for groups of persons.
There are debates about the terms used to designate and understand these questions of metaethical-hermeneutics. A choice must be made between "deontological" as against "telelogical"," rights-based as distinguished from consequentialist-utilitarian theories. ("Derek Parfit's Ethics" and "John Rawls and Justice.")
At the heart of these discussions is the challenge of determining whether the "good of the many" (whatever that may mean if the notion is even coherent) is preferable to the "good of the few."
This tendentious formulation privileges good outcomes in the world over right actions that are a matter of conscience. A doubtful assumption that is often unarticulated in these discussions, however, is that it is at least possible to decide what is the good for many, or a majority, of persons that is somehow different from the decision-maker's opinion of what is the good (or best) outcome for him- or herself, and/or others like the decision-maker(s), to say nothing about who gets to make such decisions in the first place:
"Rawls insists on the essential plurality of the human subject when he faults utilitarianism for extending to society as a whole the principles of choice for one man. This is a fallacy, he argues, because it conflates diverse systems of justice into a single system of desire, and so fails to take seriously the distinctions between persons. ... There is no reason to suppose that the principles which should regulate an association of men is simply an extension of the principles of choice for one man." (Sandel, pp. 50-51, emphasis added.)
A classic example of the analysis of these dilemmas in political and legal theory is Derek Parfit's comment upon and reaction to John Trauber's classic essay on "numbers" in ethics.
Returning to these wonderful essays many years after I first read them, I am sure that the issues are more timely than ever before. I am also certain that the discussion from the late twentieth century needs to be supplemented by theoretical developments following, among other things, from feminist philosophy's much-noted political turn.
Judith Jarvis Thomson and Judith Butler as well as Angela Davis, Bell Hooks, and others have altered the terms of the debate making their works essential to any discussion today dealing with public paternalism involved in a dialectic with the dignity and autonomy of persons -- especially with regard to women as persons -- but also in light of the torture controversy in American political thought.
Confidence that "the individual choosing agent" may act upon the lives of "others" (usually the little brown people and all women) "for their own good" has been undermined, as a general or blanket principle, after the abortion and right to die conundrums besides the torture and spying controversies that have accompanied America's post-9/11 paranoia phase. ("Cornel West On Universality" and "Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism.")
The impressive philosophical literature emerging in the seventies establishing the "inviolable dignity enshrined in rights" of persons, as legal subjects, under Anglo-American political liberalism, has turned out to be far more frail and vulnerable than anyone suspected, particularly when it comes to "annoying" immigrants and persons adhering to strange religions in the Middle East, to say nothing of "terrorists" (an amorphous category of sub-humans that may include any of us on any given day).
Those anointed by the Lord (or the Pentagon) to decide what is good for the majority of persons on the planet rarely pause to consider the extent of the burden to be imposed on persons whose interests and welfare must be sacrificed to their definition of the greater good coinciding, suspiciously, with the advantage of elites like themselves. ("The Audacity of Hope" and "Israel Heightens Gaza Crisis" then "America's Torture Lawyers" and "NSA Spying is Illegal" and "Drones and Murder.")
"But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital [Stuart Rabner?] now tells you 'Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you -- we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months.' ... Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation?" (Thomson, pp. 2-3.)
True, this unfortunate situation involves a massive imposition on you -- as the victim -- and violations of your fundamental rights, but think of the benefit to society from torturing you and you will be bound to agree on how wonderful such a situation can be for the rest of us. ("What is Enlightenment?")
Similar arguments were used to "justify" slavery. If you create a society in which it is not necessary to pay for human labor then you may be sure that your industries will out-perform the rival industries of other nations where workers are actually paid monetary wages for their labors.
Over the course of a century or so a nation may become wealthy and powerful -- thanks to slavery -- despite the frustrating inconvenience of a civil war setting the slaves "free" towards the end of that century as well as puzzling claims about the rights of slaves to be free and equal persons in society. ("America's Holocaust.")
A similar process of reasoning for many persons would sanction limiting a woman's right to abortion in order to achieve the "good" social result of protecting the potential human lives of "unborn children."
Kantian deontology forbids this sort of decision in either case (slavery or abortion), I believe, because it violates the integrity of the potential slave or any woman, as a person with autonomous control over the most self-regarding decisions and life-choices in a person's life, even against the welfare or values of society as determined by others.
Professor Parfit states the issue with deceptive simplicity:
"Suppose that we can help the one person or many others. Is it a reason to help the many that we may thus be helping more people?" (All references to Parfit's thinking will be to "Innumerate Ethics" unless otherwise indicated.)
After all, Parfit insists: "Suppose that we could save either the life of one stranger or the arm of another. Call these strangers X and Y."
No one is X and Y, or as law students are taught to express it: "P and D."
The difficulties of an ethical dilemma can only be appreciated fully when "X and Y" become real persons with names -- persons whom we love or hate, respect and cherish, feel responsible for or struggle against. ("Magician's Choice.")
The difficulties only increase when we set principle against passion by pondering obligations to remain ethical persons even in terms of our conduct regarding enemies (or former enemies) who are also persons. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")
The duty owed to another person, according to Kant, transcends issues of identity. Where obligations are absolute they must attach to any other person merely because he or she is a moral subject. This aspect of Kant's thinking moved Marx to express outrage at inequalities that denied the moral status of "person" to victims. ("Dehumanization" and "Little Brown Men Are Only Objects For Us" then "Ape and Essence" and "Persons and Personhood.")
Suppose that we must decide whether to sacrifice the arm of someone we love to save the life of an important stranger? Or even an enemy who happens to be a philanthropist? Should we make the choice that is "objectively" required by consequentialism in order to benefit a majority? Or is my duty to a beloved other person, say, primary regardless of the effects on strangers? ("A Doll's Aria.")
I doubt that most of us would accept the choice made on our behalf on such issues by any authority. The arrogance and presumption of choosing "for" others -- much worse is to do so, secretly, without communicating the fact -- alone is sufficient to make some choices unacceptable to persons insisting on their dignity and freedom. ("Obama Says Torture is a Secret!" and "Americans May be Killed Illegally.")
I will respond to a few questions that struck me as I reflected on Parfit's essay:
What are the boundaries of "self-interest"? Where does the individual end so that the community or collectivity may begin? Does the very notion of an "individual choosing agent" that is so beloved in liberal theory become meaningless in light of the challenge to the entire species (climate warming) and problems of resource distribution essential to survival for persons who are unjustly denied the means to live in our world? Is the individual not a product of the community? Can the liberal subject "stand apart" from the society he agrees to join? Or must there be a society that forms a person before he or she is in a position to choose anything? After all, even Richard Posner must have been a baby at some point in his life. ("Richard A. Posner On Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility" then "Dialectics, Entanglement, and Special Relativity.")
How much should burdens and numbers count, if at all, in establishing these divisions in goods, services, needs? Will the sacrifice of my loved-one's arm be justified by the saving of one thousand, a million, or billion strangers' lives? Should I give up my SUV if by doing so I may rescue five persons from developing lethal cancers? Should the person making such a decision for another be compelled to accept a similar judgment about his or her life, and/or loved-ones? Should the beneficiaries of inequality decide whether the status quo that creates those inequalities is "fair"? Are these merely questions of power and not of justice or fairness? Who defines human rights for humanity? America? China? Israel? The United Kingdom? UN? ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
Are motives and causes (private/internal) to the subject primary over harms and results (public/external) in assessing actions as opposed to events? If Charles Manson adheres to the letter of the law for sinister reasons whereas Mother Theresa violates a law -- consciously and for moral reasons -- is one of them ethically or legally "superior" to the other? Is the legal judgment in this hypothetical identical or diametrically opposed to the ethical conclusion? (See Dr. King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" and Ralws "On Civil Disobedience.")
I conclude my comments with reflections that are forbidden to analytical philosophers on the importance of love even in political/ethical decisions. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
II.
Trauber writes:
"Unless it is for some reason impermissible for one person to take the same interest in another's welfare as he himself [permissibly] takes in it, it must be permissible for me, in the absence of special obligations to the contrary, to choose the outcome that is in [Y's] self-interest." (Trauber, p. 302, quoted by Parfit.)
Is it "permissible" for me to decide on another person's "self-interest"? If I did so, would it remain the self-interest of another person? Or is the residue of such a choice merely what I decide that I want -- probably for my own reasons of interest or convenience -- to become the other person's interest?
Other persons (if they are truly persons) are as unique in their values and beliefs as well as desires as those of us who presume to be choosing agents "for" the so-called inferior "others" requiring our wisdom in such matters.
"Their" choices are usually based on values and valuing different from our own.
Differences of fundamental values may lead, for example, to decisions to forego life-saving blood transfusions, which offend some people's religious sensibilities and beliefs, even when persons know that they may die as a result of those refusals. ("Law and Literature.")
We presumptive decision-makers may regard such a choice by anyone as insane, bizarre, or irrational because it is self-destructive, but respect for the integrity of persons -- for the differences among us made possible by individual autonomy -- may require neutrality, at least by the state, or non-presumption even by powerful prospective decision-makers, that is, respect for the "otherness of the other" may require a sometimes painful willingness to allow the other person to be who she is and not necessarily who we would like her to be. ("Marilyn Straus Was Right!")
A person must be permitted to live and love, to feel and even die as she wishes, even if this means terminating a pregnancy or ending her life, on her terms, when she suffers from a terminal illness. ("Is there a gay marriage right?")
Assuming that we can accept a principle that "self-regarding behavior" is properly the subject of an individual's determination, provided that any behavior is sufficiently "self-regarding" in a world of mutual dependencies -- given normal competence -- the issue becomes whether public "concern" or "community" requires respecting that choice and (more importantly) the "choosing" (freedom) because others will in turn respect and facilitate our choices and choosing.
Determinations concerning incompetence must be made in legal proceedings where persons may submit contrary evidence from their own experts and where all due process protections are afforded to the subject of proceedings.
The material conditions of our lives, wealth and/or poverty are rarely a matter of choice, but these material conditions set the background conditions or contexts for our "choices."
What we have -- or can have -- often determines what we can choose to do or be.
Where individuals' choices and values conflict, may we give priority to our own choices and desires, or interests and needs, even if they concern or affect others? If so, to what extent? What are the limits on this "priority"?
"Perhaps Y could save his arm rather than X's life; but he ought to save X rather than his own umbrella. May we give priority to the welfare of others? Most of us think we sometimes may, and sometimes ought to do so. Thus we ought to give priority to the welfare of our own children. This is what Trauber calls a 'special obligation.' ..." (Parfit.)
The annoying historical fact of mutuality (globalization) suggests that to protect "our" children's interests we may have to respect the rights and interests of other people's children.
The difficulty concerning mutuality raises the most uncomfortable problem for those of us residing in wealthy societies: 80% of the persons in our world make do with a monetary income that is a tiny fraction of what residents of the richest societies spend on fast food in equivalent time periods.
The richest 1% of the world's population now receives as much income as the poorest 57%, while the income of the 25 million richest Americans, alone, is the equivalent of almost 2 billion of the world's people. The latter number may have risen to 3 billion people. Please see Michael Newman's Socialism: A Very brief Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 140 for many more such depressing facts.
Disparities and inequalities in income or wealth, and the limitations imposed in terms not only of the quality of life and life-options for the poorest as compared with the richest persons in the world -- also on what persons can even dream of having or being -- have reached a level that can only be described as obscene.
It is injustice that is the true obscenity in the world and not representations of sexual behavior in erotic art that is limited to consenting adults as creators and recipients.
Most human beings in the world today survive on about one dollar per day, some on considerably less than this amount. What is much worse is that we in the wealthy nations (even those of us who are of very modest means) are implicated in grotesque injustices or disparities in material conditions from which we, knowingly or not, benefit in countless ways all the time.
The poverty of others makes possible the wealth of a few in the First World. It is "convenient" (for me and you) that people by the billions are kept on the edge of starvation if we are to retain our affluent lifestyles. We are amazingly good at living with this injustice.
The "War on Terror" rarely deals with the "terror" of hunger.
It is hunger and failures of recognition of people's sufferings and pains at injustice that supplies terrorist organizations with suicide bombers for their agendas.
"Shopping" in rich countries is not limited to what one does to acquire necessary supplies for living; "shopping" has become entertainment and self-expression. Interestingly, "shopping" is one of the English words that has become universal by way of the Internet.
We live, according to Jean Baudrillard, in the "Age of Shopping." We buy things in order to have the pleasure of buying more things. A number of college students -- mostly women -- have listed their religious affiliation as "shopping." These students may not be joking. ("Why Jane Can't Read" and "America's Nursery School Campus" then "Nihilists in Disneyworld" and "Whatever!")
"When it would cost us nothing to do either, we ought to relieve one stranger's agony rather than another's [a loved-one's?] minor pain. And we ought to save lives rather than limbs." (Parfit.)
I suggest that we ought to "relieve a stranger's agony" even when it costs us "something," or a great deal to do so. ("Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meanings of Prison.")
If we take the "ethics of love" seriously -- whether as religious persons or secular humanists -- we ought to do much more than we are doing now to balance the inequities in our world.
At the very least, we should be willing to share in the pain of others even -- or especially -- when we can do little to diminish that suffering or pain. This is to hint at the importance of love that I mentioned at the outset.
Merely to recognize or feel the pain of one other person is a gift of respect and a sign of fundamental equality. Perhaps, in a moral sense, this "sharing" in another human being's pain, alone, relieves the sufferer's agony. ("Pieta" and "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
"The self," Iris Murdoch writes, "the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness [and love?] is connected to the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of virtuous consciousness. 'Good is transcendent reality' [Simone Weil] means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful." ("The Sovereignty of Good," p. 93.)
III.
"Why do we think it worse if more people die? If David dies, he would lose as much as any of the five. But they together would lose more. Their combined losses could outweigh his." (Parfit.)
The idea of "combined," "accumulated," or "sums of suffering" is a subject of controversy.
Many conservatives reject the notion that large numbers of people suffering is worse than only one person suffering (especially a rich white person) because there is no way to compare or combine, to sum-up sufferings, so as to generate a large mass of pain. After all, if there is one human experience that is particular or unique it must be endurance of agony:
"Justice requires difference -- different goods distributed for different persons among different groups of people -- and it is this requirement that makes justice a thick or maximalist moral idea, reflecting the actual thickness of particular cultures and societies." (Walzer, p. 33.)
Justice is always particular. Philosophers who have responded to Parfit's essay from a Kantian direction have argued that more persons "experiencing" wrongs or pains is worse than one person experiencing such harms, without assuming a collectivist stance with respect to the violations of rights or ethical judgment.
The wrong inflicted on a person is always individual to that subject; doing the same harm to many others merely burdens more "individuals" and, in that sense, is "worse."
The danger with a collectivist-consequentialist or utilitarian view that allows for infliction of suffering on some persons -- or illegality only on some occasions -- in order to avoid an injury committed against a larger number, or otherwise to benefit many persons, is that this only universalizes and legitimates a principle applicable to all and (therefore) hurts everyone. This universalizing practice of collectivizing choice creates a principle that says:
"Your individual rights and the rule of law may be set aside, at any time, when from a social or collective perspective, [whatever that may be,] it is deemed convenient or 'useful' for the majority of the population to do so."
The moral injury to one person resulting from dehumanization (deprivation of rights) is moral harm to ALL members of a community who may be similarly placed at any future time.
"Hurting" one person "for his or her own good" is hurting everyone (all persons) in a community, at the level of moral principle, which is never "for their own good." ("Manifesto For the Unfinished American Revolution.")
Drones may be used to kill thousands of innocent persons, for example, because by doing so, we are told, among the dead we will probably find some "terrorists."
These so-called "terrorists" pose a danger to a group of persons "we" (decision-makers) wish to protect by using these drones, or even a majority of persons in the selected group who are not targeted by these drones. Inevitably, those to be protected by the use of drones will be, in fact, a few privileged elites in centers of power, often at the cost of thousands of innocent persons' lives in poor countries. ("The Audacity of Hope" and "Israel Heightens Gaza Crisis.")
Sometimes the deaths of thousands in Third World countries bears no relation to making anyone safer, anywhere, and may well make everyone far less safe, everywhere, in the long term. Parfit quotes Tauber:
"Suffering is not additive in this way. The discomfort of each of a large number of individuals experiencing a minor headache does not add up to anyone's experiencing a migraine." (Parfit.)
C.S. Lewis writes:
"We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about 'the unimaginable sum of human misery.' Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity X: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity X. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2X. But you must remember that no one is [actually] suffering 2X: search all time and space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness."
You will, however, discover two persons afflicted where before there was only one.
Mr. Lewis' views on the subject of pain certainly changed after his own experience of great suffering at the loss of his wife. Compare Surprised by Joy with A Grief Observed and other writings appearing after Lewis' "The Problem of Pain":
"There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but have reached all the suffering there can ever be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow sufferers adds no more pain."
This is plainly absurd if we recognize that two persons in agony is worse than only one individual suffering.
Nevertheless, granting this point does not necessarily license the infliction of suffering on one person by any individual believing (possibly falsely) that, somehow, this will prevent suffering by many more persons at some future point in time. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
Violating rights, deliberately, is always an evil. It may be that a political leader will find it necessary to embrace such evil, but this can only be done honestly, with full acceptance of responsibility and recognition that, it is in fact, evil that is being done that sets a dangerous precedent by causing a collective moral/jurisprudential harm to society, or the totality of individuals and/or to the very idea of legality and a legal system. ("America's Torture Lawyers" and, again, "John Rawls and Justice.")
Definitions of mild headaches as compared with migraine, "atrocity" as compared with "acceptable losses," may well depend on the identity of the victim or victims.
Your child's mild headache may be worse to you than my child's migraine. In fact, if your child's mild headache in Jerusalem may be avoided, allegedly, by causing the migraine of a Palestinian child in Gaza, you may deem the sacrifice by others worthwhile.
Philosophers all over the world are excellent at enduring the suffering of others.
The Palestinian child's migraine may become the Jerusalem child's migraine soon enough. The existence of either child's headache may be connected to the other's dilemma, in other words, in a world of mutual dependencies.
This is to say nothing of the pain any normal person feels at the suffering of a child, anywhere, including hungry children in Cuba or even New Jersey. ("Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")
Two children suffering from migraine may be the worst possible outcome for all concerned. This is true both from a rights-based and utilitarian perspective.
It is difficult to admit one's shared humanity with another person and also to inflict suffering on that other person. Victimizing another human being, for any alleged "reason," seems to require dehumanization. Dehumanizing another person also dehumanizes the culprit. ("Dehumanization" and "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
Mechanisms of denial and dehumanization kick-in the moment we must do evil to others who suddenly become "Jihadists" or "fundamentalists" or "militants" (also "unethical") even when many of OUR victims happen to be children.
Racial epithets are all too familiar a part of recent world history for much the same reason. Bombing "extremists" is easier than bombing innocent people who happen to live in Islamic societies. ("So Black and So Blue in Prison" and "Is Western Philosophy Racist?")
Philosophers in Kantian and other traditions -- this is especially true in America in light of the Jeffersonian and Lincolnesque traditions with the added teachings of Dr. King -- have argued that human self-interest and desire for happiness, or material advantage, are certainly important for everyone and all nations, but it cannot stop us from doing what is right even at a cost in happiness (social good); this does not mean that morality is more important than happiness, but remaining a person or moral subject is about being more than happy at all times.
Utilitarians and other hedonists fail to realize that "happiness" is merely "conditionally valuable" (an "instrumental good") whereas being a person is uncondititionally valuable -- also inescapable in thinking about these questions of ethics -- and other matters involving weighing of factors.
Being a "moral person" (which may be a redundancy) may be the precondition of true happiness, as Aristotle suggested, so that consequentialism may put the proverbial cart before the horse.
To conclude with a return to the importance of higher emotions, like love, F.H. Bradley writes:
"The way of taking the world which I have found most tenable is to regard it as a single Experience, superior to relations and containing in the fullest sense everything which is. [Jerusalem and Palestine] Whether there is any particular matter in this whole which falls outside of any finite center of feeling, I cannot certainly decide; but the contrary seems perhaps more probable. We have then the Absolute reality appearing in and to finite centres [sic.] and uniting in one experience." (Bradley, p. 245.)
To speak of "one experience" uniting all of us may be another way of discussing love. Love obviates the need for much of this analysis. ("Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism" and "'Interstellar': A Movie Review.")
I have yet to receive a response concerning the Invicta watch matter. I look forward to receiving such a response from any one of the many parties that I have contacted about the issue.
I invite and welcome members of the public inquiring further about my watch. I will make as many of the details and documents public (concerning the Invicta watch "case") as I possibly can.
I will also continue to pursue the matter which so many people find symbolic of the very issues discussed in this essay. ("New Jersey Steals From the Poor to Give to the Rich.")
What follows is a list of sources accompanying my essay responding to Derek Parfit's classic article: "Innumerate Ethics."
I have experienced great difficulties and obstructions in signing-in to these blogs from my home computer and from NYPL computers. At any time I may be unable to sign-in to these blogs in order to continue writing. If this happens, I will struggle to create another blog somewhere online.
Another of my home computers has been rendered useless. I will do what I can at NYPL computers during 45 minutes per day.
Primary Sources:
John M. Trauber, "Should Numbers Count?," Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (Summer 1977), pp. 293-316.
Derek Parfit, "Innumerate Ethics," Philosophy and Public Affairs 7, no. 4 (Fall 1977).
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 67-87.
Secondary Sources:
Ian McEwan, The Children Act (New York: Doubleday, 2014).
Examination of autonomy in connection with the right to die question allows the British novelist to explore not only the underlying problem of ethical versus legal justice, but to focus on women's unique investment in critiques of the public/private distinction in liberal jurisprudence as expressed, for example, in the abortion controversy, but also with regard to freedom in sexual relations and equal dignity before the law regardless of gender.
Mr. McEwan's second recent novel to feature a woman's narrative voice is an engagement with crucial feminist issues in literature and law as well as philosophy. No reviewer has detected these themes in commenting on the novel, to my knowledge, as of my writing this paragraph.
Identity and agency issues are among the very questions dealt with by Derek Parfit in his article entitled "Innumerate Ethics" and in all of Professor Parfit's philosophical writings.
Ian McEwan is one of the most important novelists in the English language at the moment.
Deborah Friedelle, "The Body's Temple: In this Ian McEwan novel, a judge must decide the case of a teenage Jehova's Witness who refuses treatment for leukemia," The New York Times Book Review, September 14, 2014, p. 11. (What are the boundaries of paternalism by the state as against rights of individuals in the private realm? This reviewer seems confused as to the central themes of the book or why these themes matter to women in positions of authority. Is Ms. Friedelle also "Jennifer Shuessler"? Jill Abramson?)
Tessa Hadley, "The Children Act by Ian McEwan -- The Intricate Workings of Institutionalized Power," The Guardian, Thursday 11 September 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/the-children-act-ian-mcewan-review-novel ("Tessa" also missed the point of the novel. "'The Constant Gardner': A Movie Review.")
Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). ("Mana" -- the good -- and how to distribute the good in the bare-bones liberal state.)
F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (New York: MacMillan, 1897).
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1977). ("Hard Cases.")
Charles Fried, Right and Wrong (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1978). (The priority of rights to human dignity in the struggle for good results in biomedical controversies.)
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence On Modern Morals and Happiness (London: Penguin, 1985). (1st pub. 1793.) ("William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.") ("William Godwin" or "William Godwyn" are common spellings of this name before the standardization of spelling in the twentieth century and these are still acceptable uses, according to my Oxford Companion to the English Language. Hence, "counsellor" and "counselor," "algorithm" and "algorythm" are also acceptable spellings of these words.)
Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1983). (Public versus private moralities: "Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch on Freedom of Mind.")
H.L.A. Hart, "Between Utility and Rights," in Alan Ryan, Ed., The Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1979), pp. 77-98.
Kimberly Hutchins, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (London: Polity, 2003). (Dialectics between, among, "as" genders: "Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
J.R. Lucas, On Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), esp. pp. 163-170. (Problems of distributive justice: Does justice inhere in situations, outcomes, persons, actions, rules or results?)
Alasdair McIntyre, "Egoism and Altruism," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. II, pp. 462-466. (New York: Dutton, 1967). (Paul Edwards, Ed.)
Alasdair McIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (Indiana: Notre Dame U. Press, 1968).
Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Harmonsworth, 1975). (R. Livingstone and G. Benton translators and editors. "Inequality.")
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark, 1989). ("The Idea of Perfection" and "The Sovereignty of Good.")
Michael Newman, Socialism: A Very Brief Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ("'Che': A Movie Review.")
Susan Moller Okin, "Gender, the Public and the Private," in David Held, Ed., Political Theory Today (Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1991), pp. 67-91. (See the discussion above of Ian McEwan's The Children Act.)
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York & Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974). (Also Harvard University Press in America.)
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1971).
W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1930). ("Zero Dark Thirty.")
Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1982).
Judith Jarvis Thomson, Rights, Restitution and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1986).
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Law in Modern Society (New York: Free Press, 1976).
Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (London & Indiana: Notre Dame U. Press, 1994), pp. 21-39.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindications of the Rights of Woman (London: Penguin Classics, 1975). (1st Pub. 1792.) ("Master and Commander.") (Rejecting the province of "ladies," for the first time in Western philosophy, as against the public or political life in society for "women" as equal "persons" before the law.)
I.
Discussions of ethics and/or politics as well as legal theory often center on problems of competing values: Individual liberty concerns are pitted against the collective need for equality. Rights questions of men and women are weighed against the interests of majorities, or the social good for groups of persons.
There are debates about the terms used to designate and understand these questions of metaethical-hermeneutics. A choice must be made between "deontological" as against "telelogical"," rights-based as distinguished from consequentialist-utilitarian theories. ("Derek Parfit's Ethics" and "John Rawls and Justice.")
At the heart of these discussions is the challenge of determining whether the "good of the many" (whatever that may mean if the notion is even coherent) is preferable to the "good of the few."
This tendentious formulation privileges good outcomes in the world over right actions that are a matter of conscience. A doubtful assumption that is often unarticulated in these discussions, however, is that it is at least possible to decide what is the good for many, or a majority, of persons that is somehow different from the decision-maker's opinion of what is the good (or best) outcome for him- or herself, and/or others like the decision-maker(s), to say nothing about who gets to make such decisions in the first place:
"Rawls insists on the essential plurality of the human subject when he faults utilitarianism for extending to society as a whole the principles of choice for one man. This is a fallacy, he argues, because it conflates diverse systems of justice into a single system of desire, and so fails to take seriously the distinctions between persons. ... There is no reason to suppose that the principles which should regulate an association of men is simply an extension of the principles of choice for one man." (Sandel, pp. 50-51, emphasis added.)
A classic example of the analysis of these dilemmas in political and legal theory is Derek Parfit's comment upon and reaction to John Trauber's classic essay on "numbers" in ethics.
Returning to these wonderful essays many years after I first read them, I am sure that the issues are more timely than ever before. I am also certain that the discussion from the late twentieth century needs to be supplemented by theoretical developments following, among other things, from feminist philosophy's much-noted political turn.
Judith Jarvis Thomson and Judith Butler as well as Angela Davis, Bell Hooks, and others have altered the terms of the debate making their works essential to any discussion today dealing with public paternalism involved in a dialectic with the dignity and autonomy of persons -- especially with regard to women as persons -- but also in light of the torture controversy in American political thought.
Confidence that "the individual choosing agent" may act upon the lives of "others" (usually the little brown people and all women) "for their own good" has been undermined, as a general or blanket principle, after the abortion and right to die conundrums besides the torture and spying controversies that have accompanied America's post-9/11 paranoia phase. ("Cornel West On Universality" and "Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism.")
The impressive philosophical literature emerging in the seventies establishing the "inviolable dignity enshrined in rights" of persons, as legal subjects, under Anglo-American political liberalism, has turned out to be far more frail and vulnerable than anyone suspected, particularly when it comes to "annoying" immigrants and persons adhering to strange religions in the Middle East, to say nothing of "terrorists" (an amorphous category of sub-humans that may include any of us on any given day).
Those anointed by the Lord (or the Pentagon) to decide what is good for the majority of persons on the planet rarely pause to consider the extent of the burden to be imposed on persons whose interests and welfare must be sacrificed to their definition of the greater good coinciding, suspiciously, with the advantage of elites like themselves. ("The Audacity of Hope" and "Israel Heightens Gaza Crisis" then "America's Torture Lawyers" and "NSA Spying is Illegal" and "Drones and Murder.")
"But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital [Stuart Rabner?] now tells you 'Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you -- we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months.' ... Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation?" (Thomson, pp. 2-3.)
True, this unfortunate situation involves a massive imposition on you -- as the victim -- and violations of your fundamental rights, but think of the benefit to society from torturing you and you will be bound to agree on how wonderful such a situation can be for the rest of us. ("What is Enlightenment?")
Similar arguments were used to "justify" slavery. If you create a society in which it is not necessary to pay for human labor then you may be sure that your industries will out-perform the rival industries of other nations where workers are actually paid monetary wages for their labors.
Over the course of a century or so a nation may become wealthy and powerful -- thanks to slavery -- despite the frustrating inconvenience of a civil war setting the slaves "free" towards the end of that century as well as puzzling claims about the rights of slaves to be free and equal persons in society. ("America's Holocaust.")
A similar process of reasoning for many persons would sanction limiting a woman's right to abortion in order to achieve the "good" social result of protecting the potential human lives of "unborn children."
Kantian deontology forbids this sort of decision in either case (slavery or abortion), I believe, because it violates the integrity of the potential slave or any woman, as a person with autonomous control over the most self-regarding decisions and life-choices in a person's life, even against the welfare or values of society as determined by others.
Professor Parfit states the issue with deceptive simplicity:
"Suppose that we can help the one person or many others. Is it a reason to help the many that we may thus be helping more people?" (All references to Parfit's thinking will be to "Innumerate Ethics" unless otherwise indicated.)
After all, Parfit insists: "Suppose that we could save either the life of one stranger or the arm of another. Call these strangers X and Y."
No one is X and Y, or as law students are taught to express it: "P and D."
The difficulties of an ethical dilemma can only be appreciated fully when "X and Y" become real persons with names -- persons whom we love or hate, respect and cherish, feel responsible for or struggle against. ("Magician's Choice.")
The difficulties only increase when we set principle against passion by pondering obligations to remain ethical persons even in terms of our conduct regarding enemies (or former enemies) who are also persons. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")
The duty owed to another person, according to Kant, transcends issues of identity. Where obligations are absolute they must attach to any other person merely because he or she is a moral subject. This aspect of Kant's thinking moved Marx to express outrage at inequalities that denied the moral status of "person" to victims. ("Dehumanization" and "Little Brown Men Are Only Objects For Us" then "Ape and Essence" and "Persons and Personhood.")
Suppose that we must decide whether to sacrifice the arm of someone we love to save the life of an important stranger? Or even an enemy who happens to be a philanthropist? Should we make the choice that is "objectively" required by consequentialism in order to benefit a majority? Or is my duty to a beloved other person, say, primary regardless of the effects on strangers? ("A Doll's Aria.")
I doubt that most of us would accept the choice made on our behalf on such issues by any authority. The arrogance and presumption of choosing "for" others -- much worse is to do so, secretly, without communicating the fact -- alone is sufficient to make some choices unacceptable to persons insisting on their dignity and freedom. ("Obama Says Torture is a Secret!" and "Americans May be Killed Illegally.")
I will respond to a few questions that struck me as I reflected on Parfit's essay:
What are the boundaries of "self-interest"? Where does the individual end so that the community or collectivity may begin? Does the very notion of an "individual choosing agent" that is so beloved in liberal theory become meaningless in light of the challenge to the entire species (climate warming) and problems of resource distribution essential to survival for persons who are unjustly denied the means to live in our world? Is the individual not a product of the community? Can the liberal subject "stand apart" from the society he agrees to join? Or must there be a society that forms a person before he or she is in a position to choose anything? After all, even Richard Posner must have been a baby at some point in his life. ("Richard A. Posner On Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility" then "Dialectics, Entanglement, and Special Relativity.")
How much should burdens and numbers count, if at all, in establishing these divisions in goods, services, needs? Will the sacrifice of my loved-one's arm be justified by the saving of one thousand, a million, or billion strangers' lives? Should I give up my SUV if by doing so I may rescue five persons from developing lethal cancers? Should the person making such a decision for another be compelled to accept a similar judgment about his or her life, and/or loved-ones? Should the beneficiaries of inequality decide whether the status quo that creates those inequalities is "fair"? Are these merely questions of power and not of justice or fairness? Who defines human rights for humanity? America? China? Israel? The United Kingdom? UN? ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
Are motives and causes (private/internal) to the subject primary over harms and results (public/external) in assessing actions as opposed to events? If Charles Manson adheres to the letter of the law for sinister reasons whereas Mother Theresa violates a law -- consciously and for moral reasons -- is one of them ethically or legally "superior" to the other? Is the legal judgment in this hypothetical identical or diametrically opposed to the ethical conclusion? (See Dr. King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" and Ralws "On Civil Disobedience.")
I conclude my comments with reflections that are forbidden to analytical philosophers on the importance of love even in political/ethical decisions. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
II.
Trauber writes:
"Unless it is for some reason impermissible for one person to take the same interest in another's welfare as he himself [permissibly] takes in it, it must be permissible for me, in the absence of special obligations to the contrary, to choose the outcome that is in [Y's] self-interest." (Trauber, p. 302, quoted by Parfit.)
Is it "permissible" for me to decide on another person's "self-interest"? If I did so, would it remain the self-interest of another person? Or is the residue of such a choice merely what I decide that I want -- probably for my own reasons of interest or convenience -- to become the other person's interest?
Other persons (if they are truly persons) are as unique in their values and beliefs as well as desires as those of us who presume to be choosing agents "for" the so-called inferior "others" requiring our wisdom in such matters.
"Their" choices are usually based on values and valuing different from our own.
Differences of fundamental values may lead, for example, to decisions to forego life-saving blood transfusions, which offend some people's religious sensibilities and beliefs, even when persons know that they may die as a result of those refusals. ("Law and Literature.")
We presumptive decision-makers may regard such a choice by anyone as insane, bizarre, or irrational because it is self-destructive, but respect for the integrity of persons -- for the differences among us made possible by individual autonomy -- may require neutrality, at least by the state, or non-presumption even by powerful prospective decision-makers, that is, respect for the "otherness of the other" may require a sometimes painful willingness to allow the other person to be who she is and not necessarily who we would like her to be. ("Marilyn Straus Was Right!")
A person must be permitted to live and love, to feel and even die as she wishes, even if this means terminating a pregnancy or ending her life, on her terms, when she suffers from a terminal illness. ("Is there a gay marriage right?")
Assuming that we can accept a principle that "self-regarding behavior" is properly the subject of an individual's determination, provided that any behavior is sufficiently "self-regarding" in a world of mutual dependencies -- given normal competence -- the issue becomes whether public "concern" or "community" requires respecting that choice and (more importantly) the "choosing" (freedom) because others will in turn respect and facilitate our choices and choosing.
Determinations concerning incompetence must be made in legal proceedings where persons may submit contrary evidence from their own experts and where all due process protections are afforded to the subject of proceedings.
The material conditions of our lives, wealth and/or poverty are rarely a matter of choice, but these material conditions set the background conditions or contexts for our "choices."
What we have -- or can have -- often determines what we can choose to do or be.
Where individuals' choices and values conflict, may we give priority to our own choices and desires, or interests and needs, even if they concern or affect others? If so, to what extent? What are the limits on this "priority"?
"Perhaps Y could save his arm rather than X's life; but he ought to save X rather than his own umbrella. May we give priority to the welfare of others? Most of us think we sometimes may, and sometimes ought to do so. Thus we ought to give priority to the welfare of our own children. This is what Trauber calls a 'special obligation.' ..." (Parfit.)
The annoying historical fact of mutuality (globalization) suggests that to protect "our" children's interests we may have to respect the rights and interests of other people's children.
The difficulty concerning mutuality raises the most uncomfortable problem for those of us residing in wealthy societies: 80% of the persons in our world make do with a monetary income that is a tiny fraction of what residents of the richest societies spend on fast food in equivalent time periods.
The richest 1% of the world's population now receives as much income as the poorest 57%, while the income of the 25 million richest Americans, alone, is the equivalent of almost 2 billion of the world's people. The latter number may have risen to 3 billion people. Please see Michael Newman's Socialism: A Very brief Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 140 for many more such depressing facts.
Disparities and inequalities in income or wealth, and the limitations imposed in terms not only of the quality of life and life-options for the poorest as compared with the richest persons in the world -- also on what persons can even dream of having or being -- have reached a level that can only be described as obscene.
It is injustice that is the true obscenity in the world and not representations of sexual behavior in erotic art that is limited to consenting adults as creators and recipients.
Most human beings in the world today survive on about one dollar per day, some on considerably less than this amount. What is much worse is that we in the wealthy nations (even those of us who are of very modest means) are implicated in grotesque injustices or disparities in material conditions from which we, knowingly or not, benefit in countless ways all the time.
The poverty of others makes possible the wealth of a few in the First World. It is "convenient" (for me and you) that people by the billions are kept on the edge of starvation if we are to retain our affluent lifestyles. We are amazingly good at living with this injustice.
The "War on Terror" rarely deals with the "terror" of hunger.
It is hunger and failures of recognition of people's sufferings and pains at injustice that supplies terrorist organizations with suicide bombers for their agendas.
"Shopping" in rich countries is not limited to what one does to acquire necessary supplies for living; "shopping" has become entertainment and self-expression. Interestingly, "shopping" is one of the English words that has become universal by way of the Internet.
We live, according to Jean Baudrillard, in the "Age of Shopping." We buy things in order to have the pleasure of buying more things. A number of college students -- mostly women -- have listed their religious affiliation as "shopping." These students may not be joking. ("Why Jane Can't Read" and "America's Nursery School Campus" then "Nihilists in Disneyworld" and "Whatever!")
"When it would cost us nothing to do either, we ought to relieve one stranger's agony rather than another's [a loved-one's?] minor pain. And we ought to save lives rather than limbs." (Parfit.)
I suggest that we ought to "relieve a stranger's agony" even when it costs us "something," or a great deal to do so. ("Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meanings of Prison.")
If we take the "ethics of love" seriously -- whether as religious persons or secular humanists -- we ought to do much more than we are doing now to balance the inequities in our world.
At the very least, we should be willing to share in the pain of others even -- or especially -- when we can do little to diminish that suffering or pain. This is to hint at the importance of love that I mentioned at the outset.
Merely to recognize or feel the pain of one other person is a gift of respect and a sign of fundamental equality. Perhaps, in a moral sense, this "sharing" in another human being's pain, alone, relieves the sufferer's agony. ("Pieta" and "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
"The self," Iris Murdoch writes, "the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness [and love?] is connected to the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of virtuous consciousness. 'Good is transcendent reality' [Simone Weil] means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful." ("The Sovereignty of Good," p. 93.)
III.
"Why do we think it worse if more people die? If David dies, he would lose as much as any of the five. But they together would lose more. Their combined losses could outweigh his." (Parfit.)
The idea of "combined," "accumulated," or "sums of suffering" is a subject of controversy.
Many conservatives reject the notion that large numbers of people suffering is worse than only one person suffering (especially a rich white person) because there is no way to compare or combine, to sum-up sufferings, so as to generate a large mass of pain. After all, if there is one human experience that is particular or unique it must be endurance of agony:
"Justice requires difference -- different goods distributed for different persons among different groups of people -- and it is this requirement that makes justice a thick or maximalist moral idea, reflecting the actual thickness of particular cultures and societies." (Walzer, p. 33.)
Justice is always particular. Philosophers who have responded to Parfit's essay from a Kantian direction have argued that more persons "experiencing" wrongs or pains is worse than one person experiencing such harms, without assuming a collectivist stance with respect to the violations of rights or ethical judgment.
The wrong inflicted on a person is always individual to that subject; doing the same harm to many others merely burdens more "individuals" and, in that sense, is "worse."
The danger with a collectivist-consequentialist or utilitarian view that allows for infliction of suffering on some persons -- or illegality only on some occasions -- in order to avoid an injury committed against a larger number, or otherwise to benefit many persons, is that this only universalizes and legitimates a principle applicable to all and (therefore) hurts everyone. This universalizing practice of collectivizing choice creates a principle that says:
"Your individual rights and the rule of law may be set aside, at any time, when from a social or collective perspective, [whatever that may be,] it is deemed convenient or 'useful' for the majority of the population to do so."
The moral injury to one person resulting from dehumanization (deprivation of rights) is moral harm to ALL members of a community who may be similarly placed at any future time.
"Hurting" one person "for his or her own good" is hurting everyone (all persons) in a community, at the level of moral principle, which is never "for their own good." ("Manifesto For the Unfinished American Revolution.")
Drones may be used to kill thousands of innocent persons, for example, because by doing so, we are told, among the dead we will probably find some "terrorists."
These so-called "terrorists" pose a danger to a group of persons "we" (decision-makers) wish to protect by using these drones, or even a majority of persons in the selected group who are not targeted by these drones. Inevitably, those to be protected by the use of drones will be, in fact, a few privileged elites in centers of power, often at the cost of thousands of innocent persons' lives in poor countries. ("The Audacity of Hope" and "Israel Heightens Gaza Crisis.")
Sometimes the deaths of thousands in Third World countries bears no relation to making anyone safer, anywhere, and may well make everyone far less safe, everywhere, in the long term. Parfit quotes Tauber:
"Suffering is not additive in this way. The discomfort of each of a large number of individuals experiencing a minor headache does not add up to anyone's experiencing a migraine." (Parfit.)
C.S. Lewis writes:
"We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about 'the unimaginable sum of human misery.' Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity X: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity X. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2X. But you must remember that no one is [actually] suffering 2X: search all time and space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness."
You will, however, discover two persons afflicted where before there was only one.
Mr. Lewis' views on the subject of pain certainly changed after his own experience of great suffering at the loss of his wife. Compare Surprised by Joy with A Grief Observed and other writings appearing after Lewis' "The Problem of Pain":
"There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but have reached all the suffering there can ever be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow sufferers adds no more pain."
This is plainly absurd if we recognize that two persons in agony is worse than only one individual suffering.
Nevertheless, granting this point does not necessarily license the infliction of suffering on one person by any individual believing (possibly falsely) that, somehow, this will prevent suffering by many more persons at some future point in time. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
Violating rights, deliberately, is always an evil. It may be that a political leader will find it necessary to embrace such evil, but this can only be done honestly, with full acceptance of responsibility and recognition that, it is in fact, evil that is being done that sets a dangerous precedent by causing a collective moral/jurisprudential harm to society, or the totality of individuals and/or to the very idea of legality and a legal system. ("America's Torture Lawyers" and, again, "John Rawls and Justice.")
Definitions of mild headaches as compared with migraine, "atrocity" as compared with "acceptable losses," may well depend on the identity of the victim or victims.
Your child's mild headache may be worse to you than my child's migraine. In fact, if your child's mild headache in Jerusalem may be avoided, allegedly, by causing the migraine of a Palestinian child in Gaza, you may deem the sacrifice by others worthwhile.
Philosophers all over the world are excellent at enduring the suffering of others.
The Palestinian child's migraine may become the Jerusalem child's migraine soon enough. The existence of either child's headache may be connected to the other's dilemma, in other words, in a world of mutual dependencies.
This is to say nothing of the pain any normal person feels at the suffering of a child, anywhere, including hungry children in Cuba or even New Jersey. ("Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")
Two children suffering from migraine may be the worst possible outcome for all concerned. This is true both from a rights-based and utilitarian perspective.
It is difficult to admit one's shared humanity with another person and also to inflict suffering on that other person. Victimizing another human being, for any alleged "reason," seems to require dehumanization. Dehumanizing another person also dehumanizes the culprit. ("Dehumanization" and "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
Mechanisms of denial and dehumanization kick-in the moment we must do evil to others who suddenly become "Jihadists" or "fundamentalists" or "militants" (also "unethical") even when many of OUR victims happen to be children.
Racial epithets are all too familiar a part of recent world history for much the same reason. Bombing "extremists" is easier than bombing innocent people who happen to live in Islamic societies. ("So Black and So Blue in Prison" and "Is Western Philosophy Racist?")
Philosophers in Kantian and other traditions -- this is especially true in America in light of the Jeffersonian and Lincolnesque traditions with the added teachings of Dr. King -- have argued that human self-interest and desire for happiness, or material advantage, are certainly important for everyone and all nations, but it cannot stop us from doing what is right even at a cost in happiness (social good); this does not mean that morality is more important than happiness, but remaining a person or moral subject is about being more than happy at all times.
Utilitarians and other hedonists fail to realize that "happiness" is merely "conditionally valuable" (an "instrumental good") whereas being a person is uncondititionally valuable -- also inescapable in thinking about these questions of ethics -- and other matters involving weighing of factors.
Being a "moral person" (which may be a redundancy) may be the precondition of true happiness, as Aristotle suggested, so that consequentialism may put the proverbial cart before the horse.
To conclude with a return to the importance of higher emotions, like love, F.H. Bradley writes:
"The way of taking the world which I have found most tenable is to regard it as a single Experience, superior to relations and containing in the fullest sense everything which is. [Jerusalem and Palestine] Whether there is any particular matter in this whole which falls outside of any finite center of feeling, I cannot certainly decide; but the contrary seems perhaps more probable. We have then the Absolute reality appearing in and to finite centres [sic.] and uniting in one experience." (Bradley, p. 245.)
To speak of "one experience" uniting all of us may be another way of discussing love. Love obviates the need for much of this analysis. ("Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism" and "'Interstellar': A Movie Review.")
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
Christie's Cover-Up and N.J. Corruption.
September 18, 2014 at 6:20 P.M. More deception from the Supreme Court of New Jersey, perhaps aimed at changing the subject, will not help to distract readers of this blog from the reality of continued cover-ups and lies and hypocrisy in connection with all matters pertaining to me as well as additional censorship efforts. ("Stuart Rabner's Selective Sense of Justice.")
Peter J. Cammarano, Esq., former Hoboken Mayor, has been disbarred for accepting a bribe of $25,000 from an FBI informant even as Mr. Rabner ignores charges that he took cash from Solomon Dwek; Mr. Christie procures a $1 MILLION bonus (supplied by taxpayers) for a croney and fellow member of the bar who, allegedly, will kick-back to the governor; Mr. Menendez accepts cash contributions and sexual "gifts" from the likes of Dr. Melgen; and Barry Albin who worships at the same Short Hills Temple as Mr. Rabner and is a strong supporter, allegedly, of the recent Israeli Gaza action, speaks of the need for "ethics" in New Jersey's practice of law. ("New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
The New Jersey judiciary claims an exclusive on bribe-taking from litigants, allegedly. ("New Jersey's Failed Judiciary" and "New Jersey's Judges Disgrace America.")
With all due respect to New Jersey's judiciary and legal system -- which may be very little respect indeed -- the Garden State has no credibility on ethics issues unless and until they come clean and "fess-up" to the lies, cover-ups, frauds, computer crimes, assaults, thefts (and worse) committed against me and many others. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" then "John McGill, Esq., the OAE, and New Jersey Corruption" and "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
Ted Sherman, "Top N.J. Court Permanently Disbars Ex-Hoboken Mayor," The Star Ledger, September 18, 2014, p. 1. (It is easy to disbar Mr. Cammarano, an alleged front-man for the mob like many N.J. lawyers, but not so easy to tell the truth about the crimes committed against me -- which have been known to the authorities for years -- or to bring much-needed charges against Menendez, Christie, Rabner and probably Albin and many others as well.)
September 10, 2014 at 9:21 P.M. I am in receipt today of what purports to be an email from "Michelle Castro" at Invicta Watch Company (mcastro@invictawatch.com) addressed to Fernando Fernandez of the New York Public Advocate's Office at ffernandez@pubadv.nyc.gov dated September 8, 2014:
Hello[,]
Thank you for contacting our service center.
Our records show your watch arrived at our service center in Swisserland [sic.] overseas. Please be advised that all repairs can take up to 90 days. The estimated time of arrival of your watch back to you is on or before 12/03/2014.
Should you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me via email or contact our service center at the number below.
Thank you and have a great day!
Signed:
Michelle Castro
mcastro@invictawatch.com
CUSTOMER SERVICE CENTER
1 Invicta Way (3069 Taft St.)
Hollywood, Florida 33021 USA
A note on a pink stick-on paper, allegedly from Mr. Fernandez, says: "Please call me, F. Fernandez [sic.] 212-669-3571. No messages please."
"Michelle" and "Fernando" still share the same email address and handwriting. This latest letter was, again, mailed from the wrong zip code for the NYC Public Advocate, Ms. Letitia James.
There is no country in the world called: "Swisserland." Not even "overseas."
Invicta Watch Company can usually spell "Switzerland" correctly. There is, in fact, also a country known as "Sweden." These two names designate different nations. ("Is the universe only a numbers game?")
I will send a copy of this letter and envelope to Ms. James by certified mail, return receipt requested, and also to Invicta.
If I receive no authentic response by the end of September, I will have no alternative but to file a police report for conversion, criminal fraud, criminal misrepresentation of authority, and/or I will forward a copy of all communications to Mr. Vance's office by certified mail with return receipt requested.
Representations made on behalf of Invicta (if they are not explicitly denied by that company) could bind or create liability for Invicta Watch Company for the full retail value of the item plus my costs amounting to more than $2,000.
Use of Invicta's trademark by Ms. Castro could create even more liability for the company under laws criminalizing mail fraud.
Have a good one, Ms. Castro.
On my return to New York from New Jersey this evening the bus in which I was a passenger was hit, seemingly deliberately, by a commercial truck. Several persons were injured.
September 9, 2014 at 2:30 P.M. What follows is the latest account of attorneys and police officers displaying what is regarded as "legal ethics" in New Jersey.
Michael Phillis, "Law Firm Bills $780,000 More For GWB Work: Christie-Hired Team's Total Rises to $7.2 Million," The Record, August 30, 2014, p. A-3. (Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Esqs. continue to bill taxpayers for conducting a defense of the governor with regard to any prospective legislative hearings on "Bridge-gate." The governor should pay his own legal bills. "New Jersey Lawyers' Ethics Farce.")
Matt Friedman, "More Lawyer Bills for GWB Scandal," The Star Ledger, August 30, 2014, p. 7. (The total bill from Randy Mastro, Esq. is now at about $9 MILLION, including $1,000 for copying a letter, allegedly. I am sure that Mr. Mastro himself stood at the copier performing this task. Evidently this bill is fine with the OAE: "New Jersey's Politically-Connected Lawyers On the Tit.")
Sue Epstein, "Man Admits Sending Child Porn Online," The Star Ledger, August 30, 2014, p. 9. (ARMIA ALBER, 28, pleaded guilty to distributing child pornography, online, admitting to being only one member of an international "peer-to-peer file sharing network between March and July, 2013 and [to having more] than 600 images or videos of children being sexually abused." Some of these videos are professionally produced and depict quite brutal rapes. This is no amateur network. Again, it is only one of many such operations that are, often, PROTECTED by the legal authorities in New Jersey who disapprove of my ethics: "New Jersey Welcomes Child Molesters" and "New Jersey is the Home of Child Molesters" then "Edward M. De Sear, Esq. and New Jersey's Filth" and "Menendez Consorts With Underage Prostitutes.")
Steven Strunsky, "P.A. Cops Face Scrutiny for Allegedly Drunken Rowdiness," The Star Ledger, September 4, 2014, p. 10. (Drunken PA police officers cause a near-riot in a Hoboken bar not far from Mr. Menendez's apartment. Was Alicia Mucci in a fight, Bob? "Wedding Bells Ring For Menendez!" and "Senator Bob, the Babe, and the Big Bucks.")
Thomas Zambito, "Ponzi Scammer Admits to Another Fleecing: Prosecutors -- Weinstein Got at Least $8 MILLION by Lying About Buying Facebook Shares," The Star Ledger, September 4, 2014, p. 13. (Convicted Ponzi schemer and "fraud thief" ELIYAHU WEINSTEIN pleaded guilty yesterday to fleecing investors out of millions of dollars by convincing them he had the "inside track" on facebook shares ahead of the company's 2012 initial public offering.)
Shawn Boburg, "Vivid Accounts Show Cops' Concern: Lawyer Says PA Officers Were Told Not to Interfere in Gridlock," The Star Ledger, September 4, 2014, p. 1. (Police records indicate that officers reported "hazardous" or "life-threatening" conditions on the bridge, but they were ignored and silenced. Efforts were made to intimidate persons seeking to pursue an inquiry into the causes of the illegal traffic jam. "Forget about it!" There are some wrongs that will not be forgotten.)
AP, "Scammer Pleads Guilty in 2nd Investment Fraud," The Star Ledger, September 4, 2014, p. A-3. (Mr. Weinstein does it again, after claiming a "friendship" with Mr. Rabner. Will he surpass Solomon Dwek's record for scams in New Jersey? "Solomon Dwek Gets 6 Year Prison Sentence.")
"Israel's Land Grab: U.S. Support Will Fade If This Aggression Continues," (Editorial) The Star Ledger, September 5, 2014, p. 16. ("Israel's own Justice Minister said the decision 'weakens the state of Israel and harms its security.' ..." The Minister was referring to the decision to claim or steal 1,000 acres of Palestinian land as well as further threats to Gaza. Theft has never been a policy of the Israeli people, and -- I hope -- persons in Florida will realize that this includes theft of watches from tortured dissidents. Plagiarism is also theft: "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review" and "What is it like to be plagiarized?")
Steven Strunsky, "P.A. Probe to Scrutinize Cops' Roles at GWB: Lawyer's Memo Says Police on Bridge Were Told to Stay Silent About Lane Closings," The Star Ledger, September 5, 2014, p. 15. ("An internal probe by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is looking into whether police officers assigned to the George Washington Bridge during last September's lane closures were told to keep quiet about it as part of a cover-up, sources said yesterday.")
"Stifling a Scandal: Telling Port Authority Cops to 'Shut Up' Was Just the Beginning," (Editorial) The Star Ledger, September 5, 2014, p. 16.
Threats to political witnesses, attempts to frighten persons into committing crimes, perjury from bogus and bought witnesses, obstructions of justice, tampering with evidence and the contents of transcripts were only some of the "peccadillos" committed by the OAE against me, as efforts continue to silence me and suppress my writings and to prevent me from all further publishing online, to say nothing of more stealing from me: "The Invicta Watch Company" and "The Invicta Watch Company Caper."
I wonder whether New Jersey's OAE can shed some light on the Invicta matter pertaining to me? Is theft and lying "ethical," Mr. Rabner, when the OAE commits the sin? How could I not love New Jersey? ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics" and "Sexual Favors For New Jersey Judges.")
"Port Authority cops working the George Washington Bridge during the infamous Fort Lee lane closures said they sounded early alarms about 'horrific traffic.' At least one officer radioed his supervisors to warn that it was endangering the public, we learned from a memo released yesterday. [emphasis added] The answer he got was [terse]: 'Shut Up.' ..."
This incident is typical of the contradictions of New Jersey law.
Persons entrusted with enforcing the law in the Garden State violate rules for strictly political reasons, to benefit elected officials or judges from a particular party, who will show their appreciation by providing monetary rewards and promotions for loyal troops in uniform. ("The FBI Wants Assata Shakur" and "Albert Florence and New Jersey's Racism.")
Police must not become private armies for politicians whose primary motivation will be career benefits as a result of "serving" those politicians who may not always be law-abiding.
"I have reason to believe" -- as Lourdes Santiago, Esq. says -- that the OAE followed similar illegal and even criminal methods in going after me at the behest of crooked politicians who did not like my politics. This conspiracy probably refers most explicitly to Bob Menendez and his friends. ("Menendez Croney's Office Raided" and "New FBI Investigation of Menendez.")
Persons in my family and friends were threatened, or bribed, to betray my trust and help to violate my legal rights by informing against and LYING about me. ("John McGill, Esq., the OAE, and New Jersey Corruption.")
These facts are known to New Jersey authorities and media. Requests for information pertaining to my matters, however, receive only one response: "No comment." ("Sybil R. Moses and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" then "Virginia Long's Departure.")
The result of Mr. Christie's cover-up for New Jersey's taxpayers is shocking, but it is probably less than what the thirty-year efforts against me have already forced the system to spend and far less than what the fight will cost the state in the years ahead:
" ... A more than $9 MILLION bill for the Mastro report. That's as of earlier this week -- and the meter is still running, at a minimum of $350 an hour."
A democracy governed by the rule of law cannot function with behind-the-scenes criminal operations targeting persons who are "controversial" for any number of reasons.
I am now, have always been, and fully expect to be "controversial" for the rest of my life.
Radical politics and criminal defense work are not popularity contests.
The lies of former prosecutors who become governors and/or senators with a fondness for young prostitutes and cash from self-identified "professional gamblers" cannot go unexposed. ("Is Menendez For Sale?" then "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "Is Union City, New Jersey Meyer Lansky's Whore House?" and "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead.")
Victims are entitled to the truth from a legal system and government. The system must remedy its festering failures or lose all claim to legitimacy in legal proceedings. ("Christie's Bridge of Sighs" then "Christie Gives a Donor $1 Million of New Jersey Money" and, again, "Menendez Consorts With Underage Prostitutes.")
"Under oath, they [PA cops] said they KNEW about the lane closings but kept quiet out of fear. Who ordered the superior officers to keep quiet, and did they obey out of loyalty to the governor?" (emphasis added!) ("Jennifer Velez is a Dyke Magnet!")
America is not a country in which citizens have to live in fear because they have expressed controversial opinions or philosophical thoughts of any kind. ("Manifesto For the Unfinished American Revolution.")
Mr. Rabner's continuing silence about my matters is especially disturbing. More worrisome is the Chief Justice's seeming apathy and disdain as his tribunal and judicial robes are further soiled by this spectacle that undermines what little respect (or dignity) remains to the New Jersey Supreme Court, or himself. ("New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court.")
Is Mr. Rabner sporting a new Invicta watch? Or is it an Apple "wearable computer" donated to Chief Justice Rabner by Mr. Netanyahu? ("Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?" and "Stuart Rabner's Selective Sense of Justice.")
" ... A governor who served seven years as a prosecutor then went and hired a firm of lawyers to produce a flimflam report that exonerates himself. Like the supervisor who orders an honest cop to keep his mouth shut, is that not a betrayal of public trust?"
Peter J. Cammarano, Esq., former Hoboken Mayor, has been disbarred for accepting a bribe of $25,000 from an FBI informant even as Mr. Rabner ignores charges that he took cash from Solomon Dwek; Mr. Christie procures a $1 MILLION bonus (supplied by taxpayers) for a croney and fellow member of the bar who, allegedly, will kick-back to the governor; Mr. Menendez accepts cash contributions and sexual "gifts" from the likes of Dr. Melgen; and Barry Albin who worships at the same Short Hills Temple as Mr. Rabner and is a strong supporter, allegedly, of the recent Israeli Gaza action, speaks of the need for "ethics" in New Jersey's practice of law. ("New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
The New Jersey judiciary claims an exclusive on bribe-taking from litigants, allegedly. ("New Jersey's Failed Judiciary" and "New Jersey's Judges Disgrace America.")
With all due respect to New Jersey's judiciary and legal system -- which may be very little respect indeed -- the Garden State has no credibility on ethics issues unless and until they come clean and "fess-up" to the lies, cover-ups, frauds, computer crimes, assaults, thefts (and worse) committed against me and many others. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" then "John McGill, Esq., the OAE, and New Jersey Corruption" and "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
Ted Sherman, "Top N.J. Court Permanently Disbars Ex-Hoboken Mayor," The Star Ledger, September 18, 2014, p. 1. (It is easy to disbar Mr. Cammarano, an alleged front-man for the mob like many N.J. lawyers, but not so easy to tell the truth about the crimes committed against me -- which have been known to the authorities for years -- or to bring much-needed charges against Menendez, Christie, Rabner and probably Albin and many others as well.)
September 10, 2014 at 9:21 P.M. I am in receipt today of what purports to be an email from "Michelle Castro" at Invicta Watch Company (mcastro@invictawatch.com) addressed to Fernando Fernandez of the New York Public Advocate's Office at ffernandez@pubadv.nyc.gov dated September 8, 2014:
Hello[,]
Thank you for contacting our service center.
Our records show your watch arrived at our service center in Swisserland [sic.] overseas. Please be advised that all repairs can take up to 90 days. The estimated time of arrival of your watch back to you is on or before 12/03/2014.
Should you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me via email or contact our service center at the number below.
Thank you and have a great day!
Signed:
Michelle Castro
mcastro@invictawatch.com
CUSTOMER SERVICE CENTER
1 Invicta Way (3069 Taft St.)
Hollywood, Florida 33021 USA
A note on a pink stick-on paper, allegedly from Mr. Fernandez, says: "Please call me, F. Fernandez [sic.] 212-669-3571. No messages please."
"Michelle" and "Fernando" still share the same email address and handwriting. This latest letter was, again, mailed from the wrong zip code for the NYC Public Advocate, Ms. Letitia James.
There is no country in the world called: "Swisserland." Not even "overseas."
Invicta Watch Company can usually spell "Switzerland" correctly. There is, in fact, also a country known as "Sweden." These two names designate different nations. ("Is the universe only a numbers game?")
I will send a copy of this letter and envelope to Ms. James by certified mail, return receipt requested, and also to Invicta.
If I receive no authentic response by the end of September, I will have no alternative but to file a police report for conversion, criminal fraud, criminal misrepresentation of authority, and/or I will forward a copy of all communications to Mr. Vance's office by certified mail with return receipt requested.
Representations made on behalf of Invicta (if they are not explicitly denied by that company) could bind or create liability for Invicta Watch Company for the full retail value of the item plus my costs amounting to more than $2,000.
Use of Invicta's trademark by Ms. Castro could create even more liability for the company under laws criminalizing mail fraud.
Have a good one, Ms. Castro.
On my return to New York from New Jersey this evening the bus in which I was a passenger was hit, seemingly deliberately, by a commercial truck. Several persons were injured.
September 9, 2014 at 2:30 P.M. What follows is the latest account of attorneys and police officers displaying what is regarded as "legal ethics" in New Jersey.
Michael Phillis, "Law Firm Bills $780,000 More For GWB Work: Christie-Hired Team's Total Rises to $7.2 Million," The Record, August 30, 2014, p. A-3. (Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Esqs. continue to bill taxpayers for conducting a defense of the governor with regard to any prospective legislative hearings on "Bridge-gate." The governor should pay his own legal bills. "New Jersey Lawyers' Ethics Farce.")
Matt Friedman, "More Lawyer Bills for GWB Scandal," The Star Ledger, August 30, 2014, p. 7. (The total bill from Randy Mastro, Esq. is now at about $9 MILLION, including $1,000 for copying a letter, allegedly. I am sure that Mr. Mastro himself stood at the copier performing this task. Evidently this bill is fine with the OAE: "New Jersey's Politically-Connected Lawyers On the Tit.")
Sue Epstein, "Man Admits Sending Child Porn Online," The Star Ledger, August 30, 2014, p. 9. (ARMIA ALBER, 28, pleaded guilty to distributing child pornography, online, admitting to being only one member of an international "peer-to-peer file sharing network between March and July, 2013 and [to having more] than 600 images or videos of children being sexually abused." Some of these videos are professionally produced and depict quite brutal rapes. This is no amateur network. Again, it is only one of many such operations that are, often, PROTECTED by the legal authorities in New Jersey who disapprove of my ethics: "New Jersey Welcomes Child Molesters" and "New Jersey is the Home of Child Molesters" then "Edward M. De Sear, Esq. and New Jersey's Filth" and "Menendez Consorts With Underage Prostitutes.")
Steven Strunsky, "P.A. Cops Face Scrutiny for Allegedly Drunken Rowdiness," The Star Ledger, September 4, 2014, p. 10. (Drunken PA police officers cause a near-riot in a Hoboken bar not far from Mr. Menendez's apartment. Was Alicia Mucci in a fight, Bob? "Wedding Bells Ring For Menendez!" and "Senator Bob, the Babe, and the Big Bucks.")
Thomas Zambito, "Ponzi Scammer Admits to Another Fleecing: Prosecutors -- Weinstein Got at Least $8 MILLION by Lying About Buying Facebook Shares," The Star Ledger, September 4, 2014, p. 13. (Convicted Ponzi schemer and "fraud thief" ELIYAHU WEINSTEIN pleaded guilty yesterday to fleecing investors out of millions of dollars by convincing them he had the "inside track" on facebook shares ahead of the company's 2012 initial public offering.)
Shawn Boburg, "Vivid Accounts Show Cops' Concern: Lawyer Says PA Officers Were Told Not to Interfere in Gridlock," The Star Ledger, September 4, 2014, p. 1. (Police records indicate that officers reported "hazardous" or "life-threatening" conditions on the bridge, but they were ignored and silenced. Efforts were made to intimidate persons seeking to pursue an inquiry into the causes of the illegal traffic jam. "Forget about it!" There are some wrongs that will not be forgotten.)
AP, "Scammer Pleads Guilty in 2nd Investment Fraud," The Star Ledger, September 4, 2014, p. A-3. (Mr. Weinstein does it again, after claiming a "friendship" with Mr. Rabner. Will he surpass Solomon Dwek's record for scams in New Jersey? "Solomon Dwek Gets 6 Year Prison Sentence.")
"Israel's Land Grab: U.S. Support Will Fade If This Aggression Continues," (Editorial) The Star Ledger, September 5, 2014, p. 16. ("Israel's own Justice Minister said the decision 'weakens the state of Israel and harms its security.' ..." The Minister was referring to the decision to claim or steal 1,000 acres of Palestinian land as well as further threats to Gaza. Theft has never been a policy of the Israeli people, and -- I hope -- persons in Florida will realize that this includes theft of watches from tortured dissidents. Plagiarism is also theft: "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review" and "What is it like to be plagiarized?")
Steven Strunsky, "P.A. Probe to Scrutinize Cops' Roles at GWB: Lawyer's Memo Says Police on Bridge Were Told to Stay Silent About Lane Closings," The Star Ledger, September 5, 2014, p. 15. ("An internal probe by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is looking into whether police officers assigned to the George Washington Bridge during last September's lane closures were told to keep quiet about it as part of a cover-up, sources said yesterday.")
"Stifling a Scandal: Telling Port Authority Cops to 'Shut Up' Was Just the Beginning," (Editorial) The Star Ledger, September 5, 2014, p. 16.
Threats to political witnesses, attempts to frighten persons into committing crimes, perjury from bogus and bought witnesses, obstructions of justice, tampering with evidence and the contents of transcripts were only some of the "peccadillos" committed by the OAE against me, as efforts continue to silence me and suppress my writings and to prevent me from all further publishing online, to say nothing of more stealing from me: "The Invicta Watch Company" and "The Invicta Watch Company Caper."
I wonder whether New Jersey's OAE can shed some light on the Invicta matter pertaining to me? Is theft and lying "ethical," Mr. Rabner, when the OAE commits the sin? How could I not love New Jersey? ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics" and "Sexual Favors For New Jersey Judges.")
"Port Authority cops working the George Washington Bridge during the infamous Fort Lee lane closures said they sounded early alarms about 'horrific traffic.' At least one officer radioed his supervisors to warn that it was endangering the public, we learned from a memo released yesterday. [emphasis added] The answer he got was [terse]: 'Shut Up.' ..."
This incident is typical of the contradictions of New Jersey law.
Persons entrusted with enforcing the law in the Garden State violate rules for strictly political reasons, to benefit elected officials or judges from a particular party, who will show their appreciation by providing monetary rewards and promotions for loyal troops in uniform. ("The FBI Wants Assata Shakur" and "Albert Florence and New Jersey's Racism.")
Police must not become private armies for politicians whose primary motivation will be career benefits as a result of "serving" those politicians who may not always be law-abiding.
"I have reason to believe" -- as Lourdes Santiago, Esq. says -- that the OAE followed similar illegal and even criminal methods in going after me at the behest of crooked politicians who did not like my politics. This conspiracy probably refers most explicitly to Bob Menendez and his friends. ("Menendez Croney's Office Raided" and "New FBI Investigation of Menendez.")
Persons in my family and friends were threatened, or bribed, to betray my trust and help to violate my legal rights by informing against and LYING about me. ("John McGill, Esq., the OAE, and New Jersey Corruption.")
These facts are known to New Jersey authorities and media. Requests for information pertaining to my matters, however, receive only one response: "No comment." ("Sybil R. Moses and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" then "Virginia Long's Departure.")
The result of Mr. Christie's cover-up for New Jersey's taxpayers is shocking, but it is probably less than what the thirty-year efforts against me have already forced the system to spend and far less than what the fight will cost the state in the years ahead:
" ... A more than $9 MILLION bill for the Mastro report. That's as of earlier this week -- and the meter is still running, at a minimum of $350 an hour."
A democracy governed by the rule of law cannot function with behind-the-scenes criminal operations targeting persons who are "controversial" for any number of reasons.
I am now, have always been, and fully expect to be "controversial" for the rest of my life.
Radical politics and criminal defense work are not popularity contests.
The lies of former prosecutors who become governors and/or senators with a fondness for young prostitutes and cash from self-identified "professional gamblers" cannot go unexposed. ("Is Menendez For Sale?" then "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "Is Union City, New Jersey Meyer Lansky's Whore House?" and "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead.")
Victims are entitled to the truth from a legal system and government. The system must remedy its festering failures or lose all claim to legitimacy in legal proceedings. ("Christie's Bridge of Sighs" then "Christie Gives a Donor $1 Million of New Jersey Money" and, again, "Menendez Consorts With Underage Prostitutes.")
"Under oath, they [PA cops] said they KNEW about the lane closings but kept quiet out of fear. Who ordered the superior officers to keep quiet, and did they obey out of loyalty to the governor?" (emphasis added!) ("Jennifer Velez is a Dyke Magnet!")
America is not a country in which citizens have to live in fear because they have expressed controversial opinions or philosophical thoughts of any kind. ("Manifesto For the Unfinished American Revolution.")
Mr. Rabner's continuing silence about my matters is especially disturbing. More worrisome is the Chief Justice's seeming apathy and disdain as his tribunal and judicial robes are further soiled by this spectacle that undermines what little respect (or dignity) remains to the New Jersey Supreme Court, or himself. ("New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court.")
Is Mr. Rabner sporting a new Invicta watch? Or is it an Apple "wearable computer" donated to Chief Justice Rabner by Mr. Netanyahu? ("Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?" and "Stuart Rabner's Selective Sense of Justice.")
" ... A governor who served seven years as a prosecutor then went and hired a firm of lawyers to produce a flimflam report that exonerates himself. Like the supervisor who orders an honest cop to keep his mouth shut, is that not a betrayal of public trust?"
Thursday, September 4, 2014
Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown Cleared by DNA After Decades On Death Row.
A note on censorship at Blogger: Is Google just another name for the NSA or "nothing left to lose"?
I will be creating a second site online for double-posting of texts. There is a danger, I am led to believe, that these blogs may disappear from one day to the next. I also may be denied the opportunity to sign-in at any time. I expect alterations in the size of this text.
Censorship that is political or content-based -- permitted or protected by corrupt public officials -- is dangerous in America, where conflicting political opinions are not exactly unforeseeable.
To enforce an unofficial consensus on controversial issues, like the Gaza horrors, is unwise and used to be unconstitutional. That is, when we had a Constitution that applied to and was enforced for ordinary people.
America's Constitution is now a document more honored in the breach than in the observance, it seems, unless one happens to be a corporation asserting First Amendment rights. ("How censorship works in America.")
Continuing silence and even complicity of a few N.Y. journalists in computer crime and censorship against me is not only foolish, for them, but may be suicidal for all U.S. media. Silencing a tortured dissident will not make the evils I describe disappear. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
Censorship rarely stops with one controversial writer's opinions and thoughts. Soon others will be denied their free speech rights until we are left only with the profound philosophical wisdom of Mr. Boehner and Marco Rubio, perhaps, who are allowed to publish their writings as the rest of us are left to ponder their immortal words:
"Hell is the kingdom of the mad, abused, monstrous, traumatic, surreal, disgusting and excremental [prison?] which Jacques Lacan, after the ancient god of havoc calls Ate, [also known as "Malbus,"] it is a landscape of desolation and despair. But it is a despair that its inhabitants would not wish for a moment to be snatched from them. For it is not only what gives them an edge over credulous idealists of every stripe; it is also the misery that assures them that they still exist. Even this, did they but know it, is a lie, for theologically speaking, as we have seen, there can be no life outside God. ... the evil, who believe that they have seen through it all, are thus ensnared in illusion to the end."
Terry Eagleton, On Evil, p. 78. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow" and "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script" then "Is it rational to believe in God?")
Jennifer Shuessler, "Book Portrays Genocidal Nazi as Evil, but Not Banal," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. C1. (Hannah Arendt did not suggest that Eichman was ignorant or stupid, in an academic sense, merely "unaware," unconcerned with the moral meaning of his actions by his own choice. Nothing in the book under review undermines that claim.)
Peter Baker & Steven Erlanger, "U.S. and Europe Are Struggling With a Response to a Bold Russia," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A1. (Mr. Putin has taken the initiative by suggesting a "path to peace." Will we take him up on these proposals?)
Mark Landler & Eric Schmidt, "ISIS Says It Killed Second American After U.S. Strikes: Video Shows Beheading of Hostage and Raises Pressure on Obama to Act," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A1. (Ground invasion is unlikely in Syria; further incidents targeting Americans are extremely likely, both in the region and worldwide; experts suggest this is partly in reaction to the events in Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu seems to be sporting a watch remarkably similar to my Invicta. Perhaps my watch is deemed part of the 1,000 acres in the Palestinian territories declared "annexed" by Israel?)
Salman Masood, "Pakistani Lawmakers Support Premier," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A6. (Pakistan's PM Narwaz Sharif holds on for the time being. He must distance himself from U.S. drone policies that he has endorsed in the past and avoid awkward references to his alleged unnumbered Swiss accounts filled with U.S. dollars that have mysteriously "appeared" in them.)
Isabel Kershner, "Israel Says Hamas is Hurt Significantly," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A7. (80% of Palestinians support Hamas; Israeli attack ads against UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon will not help with the UN investigation into atrocities committed by Israeli forces in the recent actions in Gaza.)
Somini Segupta & Rick Gladstone, "Palestinian Leaders Seek Actions in Security Council and Court," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A7. (Hannal Ashrawi has moved away from American influence and towards a global perspective on ending the occupation. Money alone is not going to win her loyalty.)
Andrew Roth, "Putin Tells European Official That He Could Take Kiev in Two Weeks," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A10. (Probably an understatement by Mr. Putin.)
Adam Liptak, "A Prisoner's Beard Offers the Next Test of Religious Liberty for the Supreme Court," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A15. (Does inmate Gregory Holt have the right to grow a beard as part of his religious observance as a Muslim? Perhaps if Mr. Holt were a corporation he would prevail in his suit.)
Stephanie Clifford, "Congressman's Fraud Trial to Start After Fall Elections," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A20. (Republican Michael R. Grimm will face trial for fraud after his expected reelection in November. Mr. Grimm is from Staten Island which has a great baseball team.)
Alison Leigh-Cowan, "Second Trial For Rowlands On Charges of Corruption," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A18. (John G. Rowland is on trial for corruption. He is from Connecticut and favors plaid jackets.)
Trip Gabriel, "Judge Rejects Defense's Criteria for Convicting Ex-Governor as Jury Gets Case," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A16. (Gov. Bob McDonnell and wife convicted and facing extensive prison sentences will soon have more Democrats joining them in federal prison. Mr. McDonnell is from Virginia, delighting in an occasional "smoked ham.")
Developments in New Jersey focusing on whether Mr. Christie (an attorney) through assistants (also attorneys) threatened or asked persons to lie to a N.J. legislative committee investigating "Bridge-gate" will be based on Port Authority police officers, under David Samson, Esq. at the time, who may have told witnesses to "shut up" or they would be "destroyed" at the request of the Governor, allegedly, even as Kim Guardagno and the N.J. Attorney General's office receive new subpoenas this week duces tecum -- some pertaining to my matters, allegedly -- making similar allegations concerning OAE attorneys and others.
Did Mr. Rabner (or his predecessors) request that New Jersey attorneys and others lie, or remain silent, about unethical actions they were asked to take by OAE attorneys, and/or agents of such OAE attorneys, and/or "others" enjoying New Jersey protection and in connection with me? ("Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?" and "What did you know, Mr. Rabner, and when did you know it?")
Additional sources pertaining to these issues will be posted below if I am able to regain access to these blogs. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "David Samson, Esq. Resigns.")
I will be required to visit New Jersey some time next week. There is always a risk when I am in the Garden State that I will be shot in the back, accidentally, by an off-duty police officer, or assaulted by a person or persons unknown. In the event that I suffer an "unforeseen accident," I will try to ensure that the relevant sources are posted anyway and that efforts continue to obtain the truth in my matters. ("Stuart Rabner's Selective Sense of Justice.")
Steven Strunsky & Ben Johnson, "P.A. Cops: "We were told to shut up on GWB closings" [!] -- Officers Say They Had Expressed Concerns About Traffic Backups," The Star Ledger, September 4, 2014, p. 1. (Intimidation and lying constitute obstructions of justice: "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
Shawn Boburg, "Vivid Accounts Show Cops' Concern: Lawyers Say P.A. Officers Were Told Not to Interfere in Gridlock," The Record, September 4, 2014, p. A-1. (Cops and others told witnesses to lie, or say nothing, ostensibly on behalf of Mr. Christie or his agents. Did John McGill tell my former secretary to lie about being spoken to, did he contact clients illegally, threaten my relatives to say nothing to me about illegal information gathering against me? Is this New Jersey's "legal ethics," Mr. Rabner? "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "New Jersey's Legal System is a Whore House.")
Michael Phillis, "Guardagno Office Subpoenaed on 'Hoboken Issues,' Unclear If It Involves Mayor's Claim," The Record, September 5, 2014, p. A-3. (Additional matters were the subject of this federal request for information -- preferably, the truth, I hope -- from the New Jersey Attorney General: i.e., matters pertaining to me have also, finally, interested some federal and New York prosecutors.)
Richard A. Oppel, Jr., "As 2 Go Free, a Dogged Ex-Prosecutor Digs In: Insists He Had Right Men in '83 Killing, Despite DNA," The New York Times, September 8, 2014, p. A1. (Persistent, hate-based efforts to destroy and smear targeted individuals, who have been exonerated, borders on insanity by prosecutors. "Prosecutorial Misconduct.")
Jonathan M. Katz & Erik Eckholm, "DNA Evidence Clears Two Men in 1983 Murder," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A1.
Matt Appuzzo & Manny Fernandez, "Justice Department Inquiry to Focus on Practices of Police in Ferguson," The New York Times, September 4, 2014, p. A12.
Jonathan M. Katz, "From Death Row to Unfamiliar World," The New York Times, September 4, 2014, p. A17.
Terry Eagleton, On Evil (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 2010).
William Styron, "Victims: The Death-in-Life of Benjamin Reid," and "Benjamin Reid: Aftermath," in This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (New York: Random House, 1982), pp. 109-137, also "A Death in Cannan," [sic.] pp. 149-150.
"The law (and one must assume that a definition of the law includes the totality of its many arms, including the one known as law enforcement) is not merely imperfect, it is all too often a catastrophe. To the weak and the underprivileged the law in all its manifestations is usually a punitive nightmare. Even in the abstract the law is an institution of chaotic inequity, administered so many times with such arrogant disdain for the most basic principles of justice and human decency as to make mild admissions of 'imperfection' sound presumptuous. If it is true that the law is the best institution human beings have devised to mediate their own eternal discord, this must not obscure the fact that the law's power is too often invested in the hands of mortal men who are corrupt, or if not corrupt, stupid, or if not stupid, then devious or lazy, and all of them capable of the most grievous mischief. ..."
William Styron, "A Death in Cannan," in This Quiet Dust, pp. 149-150.
Among the features that become obvious to me as I review and edit my posts at these blogs is the "structural" racism that plagues America's legal system.
President Obama not withstanding, the racism I describe seems to pervade America's political-legal-aesthetic culture in all of its aspects.
It is often an internalized form of racism that takes its devastating toll on young people long before they enter the "system." One out of three young African-American males, at least, will experience the nightmare of incarceration, often unjustly. ("So Black and So Blue in Prison.")
The word "structural" is crucial because I am describing not an incidental feature of the workings of law in our society, but a defining and essential characteristic of America's legal architecture that is -- often unconsciously -- kept in place by the very mechanisms created to eradicate this hideous aspect of ourselves. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
This is merely to acknowledge the insidiousness of racism in American society.
Why is such simple and irrefutable truth impossible for otherwise intelligent people (who happen to be judges) to accept? ("Protecting Sex Workers.")
With very few exceptions judges wish to deny the presence of racial factors that are dispositive, in most cases, in order to focus on "neutral principles" of law that are as mythical as the tooth fairy. ("Albert Florence and New Jersey's Racism" and "America's Holocaust.")
It is time to tell the truth about this reality of racism that must be confronted in a serious way. The human consequences of continued failure to examine and repair this wound in ourselves will be lethal for all of us.
The point about the death penalty is not simply the barbarity of the punishment which has been abandoned by most First World nations, including Russia when it entered the European Union (I heard Mr. Putin argue, brilliantly, against the death penalty in a television show), but the systematically racist and economically-determined character of the penalty in the American legal system that makes it, in the words of Justices Blackmun and Brennan as well as Marshall: "hopelessly inequitable."
The death penalty violates the equal protection and cruel and unusual punishment sections of the Constitution, to say nothing of due process violations, because it is and can only be an expression of racism in America. ("The FBI Wants Assata Shakur.")
Political scientists can, literally, predict on a statistical basis, a priori, roughly the number of "false-positives" (as it were) of persons who are factually innocent of the crime of murder but who happen to be guilty of being black in America and, thus, likely to be convicted and EXECUTED. ("Driving While Black [DWB] in New Jersey.")
It may be a greater determinant of conviction in most American courtrooms that the defendant is African-American than any amount of evidence or the law let alone charges and/or facts in the matter. ("Manifesto For the Unfinished American Revolution.")
As a gentleman who happened to be a former inmate and also African-American (this may be redundant) once explained to me: "They'll put a crime on some [dark-skinned person] -- and he's gonna wear it."
What that man did not say that we both know is that there are prosecutors who do not care if a person is innocent of the underlying offense, who ignore the truth, because what they care about for career reasons is getting a conviction. Accordingly, anybody who may be convicted for "something" -- especially when a conviction is desperately sought because of publicity for a crime -- will do just fine. ("Larry Peterson Cleared by DNA.")
The assumption that nobody will care about a poor African-American defendant is, sadly, usually accurate. The most recent result of this madness is a man deprived of 30 years of his life while sitting on death row for a murder he did not commit. Mr. McCollum was lucky to avoid execution. All of this incarceration and years of litigation to win exoneration with very little acknowledgment of his pain and the daily denial of his humanity. Some people are offended that this man "presumed" to stand up for his rights. What do you expect him to do? ("John McGill, Esq., the OAE, and New Jersey Corruption.")
Far from being an isolated case this travesty is essential to America's legal system because these convictions confirm stereotypes that our society is not yet willing to relinquish.
It is necessary for men like Mr. McCollum to be convicted and, if possible, to be executed, regardless of guilt, in order to keep American racism in place. ("Justice For Mumia Abu-Jamal" and "Freedom For Mumia Abu-Jamal" then "Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Unconstitutionality of the Death Penalty.")
This grotesque injustice will be repeated, every day, in some part of the country, sometimes on a large scale and at other times in smaller cases. The process will continue until we examine and admit our pathology, collectively, at a national level that involves legal academia, courts, and legislatures, both state and federal. ("Jabbar Collins Serves 16 Years As An Innocent Man" and "Louis C. Taylor Serves 42 Years as an Innocent Man" then "Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey" and "Aaron Schwartz, Freedom, and American Law.")
In light of the foregoing statements it is obvious why I am still dealing with attempts to silence and steal from me as well as the absurdity and corruption in failures to deal with my problem on the part of the authorities.
I am asking the nation and all readers to look at this reality, directly, a reality of corruption and hypocrisy in our legal and ethical standards that will not go away if we ignore it. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "Foucault, Rose, Davis, and the Meanings of Prison.")
"LUMBERTON, N.C. -- Thirty years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half-brothers were declared innocent and ordered released Tuesday by a judge here."
These men are African-Americans, surprisingly enough. Henry Lee McCollum, 50, and Leon Brown, 46, who were serving life-sentences, essentially, have been deprived of their lives -- "murdered," in a manner of speaking -- by the evil of racism and typical incompetence in America's legal system. A legal system that works so differently for persons like Stuart Rabner and Solomon Dwek. How strange that the Times did not mention racism as a factor in this case? ("Stuart Rabner's Selective Sense of Justice" and "Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?")
My pursuit of the truth from New Jersey is approaching 30 years, 12 years online. I continue to receive no response from public officials. (Again: "John McGill, Esq., the OAE, and N.J. Corruption" and "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
Mistakes are made by judges and juries. People suffer for those mistakes. Deliberate actions designed to cause human suffering in disdain for the truth and cover-ups are much worse.
The atrocity committed against these two men in North Carolina seems to bear characteristics of both kinds of legal disasters, stupidity and malice are equally visible, much the same is true in my situation in light of the glaringly apparent cover-up. ("New Jersey Supreme Court's Implosion.")
Disasters in a legal system undermine its integrity, especially when they are "mishandled" by cowardly and lying officials, as in New Jersey. ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics" and "New Jersey's Judges Disgrace America" then "New Jersey's Failed Judiciary.")
The struggle against racism is costly and time-consuming. Many persons will wonder why we devote our lives to remedying injustices. The effort to bring to light such evils, to correct them, and do the right thing is never-ending for many of us. The victims of legalized and sanctioned injustices in America will never desist in the effort to find the truth that alone allows for healing and redemption.
I expect continued censorship and attempts at silencing. People prefer their lies to the realities that the lives of Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown force them to confront. For example, Justice Scalia in debate with Justice Blackmun, contended that the proposed execution of Mr. McCollum "vindicated the death penalty." No doubt Justice Scalia would also argue that Bush v. Gore vindicates America's electoral process. I dissent:
"The exoneration based on DNA evidence was another example of the way tainted convictions have unraveled in recent years because of new technology and legal defense efforts like those of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, a non-profit legal group in North Carolina that took up the case."
Mr. McCollum, like me, has experienced interrogational torture using psychological methods. Mr. McCollum suffers from some intellectual impairments, but he was highly eloquent in his remarks after being released describing all that had been taken from him.
The Supreme Court has recently -- to Justice Scalia's chagrin -- rejected the death penalty, finally, for minors and the mentally-impaired. Mr. McCollum's case reinforces the wisdom of this decision and requires that we do much more to prevent recurrence of this nightmare in the future.
As a final petty insult of Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown, the men were returned to prison Tuesday to await filing of the paperwork for their release "which to the frustration of the defense lawyers and the men's relatives was delayed, apparently until Wednesday."
In commenting on the similar life and experiences of Benjamin Reid, William Styron noted:
"There is, of course, no such thing as absolute justice, but even advocates of capital punishment will grant that when a human's life is at stake, there should be the closest approximation of absolute justice the law can attain."
Mr. Styron concluded:
"It is this abrupt, irrevocable banishment, this preemption by the state of the single final judgment which is in the province of God alone -- and the subtle but disastrous effect this act has upon the whole philosophy of crime and punishment -- that wrecks the possibility of any lasting, noble concept of justice and causes the issue of the death penalty to become not peripheral, but central to an understanding of a moral direction in our time."
I will be creating a second site online for double-posting of texts. There is a danger, I am led to believe, that these blogs may disappear from one day to the next. I also may be denied the opportunity to sign-in at any time. I expect alterations in the size of this text.
Censorship that is political or content-based -- permitted or protected by corrupt public officials -- is dangerous in America, where conflicting political opinions are not exactly unforeseeable.
To enforce an unofficial consensus on controversial issues, like the Gaza horrors, is unwise and used to be unconstitutional. That is, when we had a Constitution that applied to and was enforced for ordinary people.
America's Constitution is now a document more honored in the breach than in the observance, it seems, unless one happens to be a corporation asserting First Amendment rights. ("How censorship works in America.")
Continuing silence and even complicity of a few N.Y. journalists in computer crime and censorship against me is not only foolish, for them, but may be suicidal for all U.S. media. Silencing a tortured dissident will not make the evils I describe disappear. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
Censorship rarely stops with one controversial writer's opinions and thoughts. Soon others will be denied their free speech rights until we are left only with the profound philosophical wisdom of Mr. Boehner and Marco Rubio, perhaps, who are allowed to publish their writings as the rest of us are left to ponder their immortal words:
"Hell is the kingdom of the mad, abused, monstrous, traumatic, surreal, disgusting and excremental [prison?] which Jacques Lacan, after the ancient god of havoc calls Ate, [also known as "Malbus,"] it is a landscape of desolation and despair. But it is a despair that its inhabitants would not wish for a moment to be snatched from them. For it is not only what gives them an edge over credulous idealists of every stripe; it is also the misery that assures them that they still exist. Even this, did they but know it, is a lie, for theologically speaking, as we have seen, there can be no life outside God. ... the evil, who believe that they have seen through it all, are thus ensnared in illusion to the end."
Terry Eagleton, On Evil, p. 78. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow" and "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script" then "Is it rational to believe in God?")
Jennifer Shuessler, "Book Portrays Genocidal Nazi as Evil, but Not Banal," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. C1. (Hannah Arendt did not suggest that Eichman was ignorant or stupid, in an academic sense, merely "unaware," unconcerned with the moral meaning of his actions by his own choice. Nothing in the book under review undermines that claim.)
Peter Baker & Steven Erlanger, "U.S. and Europe Are Struggling With a Response to a Bold Russia," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A1. (Mr. Putin has taken the initiative by suggesting a "path to peace." Will we take him up on these proposals?)
Mark Landler & Eric Schmidt, "ISIS Says It Killed Second American After U.S. Strikes: Video Shows Beheading of Hostage and Raises Pressure on Obama to Act," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A1. (Ground invasion is unlikely in Syria; further incidents targeting Americans are extremely likely, both in the region and worldwide; experts suggest this is partly in reaction to the events in Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu seems to be sporting a watch remarkably similar to my Invicta. Perhaps my watch is deemed part of the 1,000 acres in the Palestinian territories declared "annexed" by Israel?)
Salman Masood, "Pakistani Lawmakers Support Premier," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A6. (Pakistan's PM Narwaz Sharif holds on for the time being. He must distance himself from U.S. drone policies that he has endorsed in the past and avoid awkward references to his alleged unnumbered Swiss accounts filled with U.S. dollars that have mysteriously "appeared" in them.)
Isabel Kershner, "Israel Says Hamas is Hurt Significantly," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A7. (80% of Palestinians support Hamas; Israeli attack ads against UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon will not help with the UN investigation into atrocities committed by Israeli forces in the recent actions in Gaza.)
Somini Segupta & Rick Gladstone, "Palestinian Leaders Seek Actions in Security Council and Court," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A7. (Hannal Ashrawi has moved away from American influence and towards a global perspective on ending the occupation. Money alone is not going to win her loyalty.)
Andrew Roth, "Putin Tells European Official That He Could Take Kiev in Two Weeks," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A10. (Probably an understatement by Mr. Putin.)
Adam Liptak, "A Prisoner's Beard Offers the Next Test of Religious Liberty for the Supreme Court," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A15. (Does inmate Gregory Holt have the right to grow a beard as part of his religious observance as a Muslim? Perhaps if Mr. Holt were a corporation he would prevail in his suit.)
Stephanie Clifford, "Congressman's Fraud Trial to Start After Fall Elections," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A20. (Republican Michael R. Grimm will face trial for fraud after his expected reelection in November. Mr. Grimm is from Staten Island which has a great baseball team.)
Alison Leigh-Cowan, "Second Trial For Rowlands On Charges of Corruption," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A18. (John G. Rowland is on trial for corruption. He is from Connecticut and favors plaid jackets.)
Trip Gabriel, "Judge Rejects Defense's Criteria for Convicting Ex-Governor as Jury Gets Case," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A16. (Gov. Bob McDonnell and wife convicted and facing extensive prison sentences will soon have more Democrats joining them in federal prison. Mr. McDonnell is from Virginia, delighting in an occasional "smoked ham.")
Developments in New Jersey focusing on whether Mr. Christie (an attorney) through assistants (also attorneys) threatened or asked persons to lie to a N.J. legislative committee investigating "Bridge-gate" will be based on Port Authority police officers, under David Samson, Esq. at the time, who may have told witnesses to "shut up" or they would be "destroyed" at the request of the Governor, allegedly, even as Kim Guardagno and the N.J. Attorney General's office receive new subpoenas this week duces tecum -- some pertaining to my matters, allegedly -- making similar allegations concerning OAE attorneys and others.
Did Mr. Rabner (or his predecessors) request that New Jersey attorneys and others lie, or remain silent, about unethical actions they were asked to take by OAE attorneys, and/or agents of such OAE attorneys, and/or "others" enjoying New Jersey protection and in connection with me? ("Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?" and "What did you know, Mr. Rabner, and when did you know it?")
Additional sources pertaining to these issues will be posted below if I am able to regain access to these blogs. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "David Samson, Esq. Resigns.")
I will be required to visit New Jersey some time next week. There is always a risk when I am in the Garden State that I will be shot in the back, accidentally, by an off-duty police officer, or assaulted by a person or persons unknown. In the event that I suffer an "unforeseen accident," I will try to ensure that the relevant sources are posted anyway and that efforts continue to obtain the truth in my matters. ("Stuart Rabner's Selective Sense of Justice.")
Steven Strunsky & Ben Johnson, "P.A. Cops: "We were told to shut up on GWB closings" [!] -- Officers Say They Had Expressed Concerns About Traffic Backups," The Star Ledger, September 4, 2014, p. 1. (Intimidation and lying constitute obstructions of justice: "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
Shawn Boburg, "Vivid Accounts Show Cops' Concern: Lawyers Say P.A. Officers Were Told Not to Interfere in Gridlock," The Record, September 4, 2014, p. A-1. (Cops and others told witnesses to lie, or say nothing, ostensibly on behalf of Mr. Christie or his agents. Did John McGill tell my former secretary to lie about being spoken to, did he contact clients illegally, threaten my relatives to say nothing to me about illegal information gathering against me? Is this New Jersey's "legal ethics," Mr. Rabner? "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "New Jersey's Legal System is a Whore House.")
Michael Phillis, "Guardagno Office Subpoenaed on 'Hoboken Issues,' Unclear If It Involves Mayor's Claim," The Record, September 5, 2014, p. A-3. (Additional matters were the subject of this federal request for information -- preferably, the truth, I hope -- from the New Jersey Attorney General: i.e., matters pertaining to me have also, finally, interested some federal and New York prosecutors.)
Richard A. Oppel, Jr., "As 2 Go Free, a Dogged Ex-Prosecutor Digs In: Insists He Had Right Men in '83 Killing, Despite DNA," The New York Times, September 8, 2014, p. A1. (Persistent, hate-based efforts to destroy and smear targeted individuals, who have been exonerated, borders on insanity by prosecutors. "Prosecutorial Misconduct.")
Jonathan M. Katz & Erik Eckholm, "DNA Evidence Clears Two Men in 1983 Murder," The New York Times, September 3, 2014, p. A1.
Matt Appuzzo & Manny Fernandez, "Justice Department Inquiry to Focus on Practices of Police in Ferguson," The New York Times, September 4, 2014, p. A12.
Jonathan M. Katz, "From Death Row to Unfamiliar World," The New York Times, September 4, 2014, p. A17.
Terry Eagleton, On Evil (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 2010).
William Styron, "Victims: The Death-in-Life of Benjamin Reid," and "Benjamin Reid: Aftermath," in This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (New York: Random House, 1982), pp. 109-137, also "A Death in Cannan," [sic.] pp. 149-150.
"The law (and one must assume that a definition of the law includes the totality of its many arms, including the one known as law enforcement) is not merely imperfect, it is all too often a catastrophe. To the weak and the underprivileged the law in all its manifestations is usually a punitive nightmare. Even in the abstract the law is an institution of chaotic inequity, administered so many times with such arrogant disdain for the most basic principles of justice and human decency as to make mild admissions of 'imperfection' sound presumptuous. If it is true that the law is the best institution human beings have devised to mediate their own eternal discord, this must not obscure the fact that the law's power is too often invested in the hands of mortal men who are corrupt, or if not corrupt, stupid, or if not stupid, then devious or lazy, and all of them capable of the most grievous mischief. ..."
William Styron, "A Death in Cannan," in This Quiet Dust, pp. 149-150.
Among the features that become obvious to me as I review and edit my posts at these blogs is the "structural" racism that plagues America's legal system.
President Obama not withstanding, the racism I describe seems to pervade America's political-legal-aesthetic culture in all of its aspects.
It is often an internalized form of racism that takes its devastating toll on young people long before they enter the "system." One out of three young African-American males, at least, will experience the nightmare of incarceration, often unjustly. ("So Black and So Blue in Prison.")
The word "structural" is crucial because I am describing not an incidental feature of the workings of law in our society, but a defining and essential characteristic of America's legal architecture that is -- often unconsciously -- kept in place by the very mechanisms created to eradicate this hideous aspect of ourselves. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
This is merely to acknowledge the insidiousness of racism in American society.
Why is such simple and irrefutable truth impossible for otherwise intelligent people (who happen to be judges) to accept? ("Protecting Sex Workers.")
With very few exceptions judges wish to deny the presence of racial factors that are dispositive, in most cases, in order to focus on "neutral principles" of law that are as mythical as the tooth fairy. ("Albert Florence and New Jersey's Racism" and "America's Holocaust.")
It is time to tell the truth about this reality of racism that must be confronted in a serious way. The human consequences of continued failure to examine and repair this wound in ourselves will be lethal for all of us.
The point about the death penalty is not simply the barbarity of the punishment which has been abandoned by most First World nations, including Russia when it entered the European Union (I heard Mr. Putin argue, brilliantly, against the death penalty in a television show), but the systematically racist and economically-determined character of the penalty in the American legal system that makes it, in the words of Justices Blackmun and Brennan as well as Marshall: "hopelessly inequitable."
The death penalty violates the equal protection and cruel and unusual punishment sections of the Constitution, to say nothing of due process violations, because it is and can only be an expression of racism in America. ("The FBI Wants Assata Shakur.")
Political scientists can, literally, predict on a statistical basis, a priori, roughly the number of "false-positives" (as it were) of persons who are factually innocent of the crime of murder but who happen to be guilty of being black in America and, thus, likely to be convicted and EXECUTED. ("Driving While Black [DWB] in New Jersey.")
It may be a greater determinant of conviction in most American courtrooms that the defendant is African-American than any amount of evidence or the law let alone charges and/or facts in the matter. ("Manifesto For the Unfinished American Revolution.")
As a gentleman who happened to be a former inmate and also African-American (this may be redundant) once explained to me: "They'll put a crime on some [dark-skinned person] -- and he's gonna wear it."
What that man did not say that we both know is that there are prosecutors who do not care if a person is innocent of the underlying offense, who ignore the truth, because what they care about for career reasons is getting a conviction. Accordingly, anybody who may be convicted for "something" -- especially when a conviction is desperately sought because of publicity for a crime -- will do just fine. ("Larry Peterson Cleared by DNA.")
The assumption that nobody will care about a poor African-American defendant is, sadly, usually accurate. The most recent result of this madness is a man deprived of 30 years of his life while sitting on death row for a murder he did not commit. Mr. McCollum was lucky to avoid execution. All of this incarceration and years of litigation to win exoneration with very little acknowledgment of his pain and the daily denial of his humanity. Some people are offended that this man "presumed" to stand up for his rights. What do you expect him to do? ("John McGill, Esq., the OAE, and New Jersey Corruption.")
Far from being an isolated case this travesty is essential to America's legal system because these convictions confirm stereotypes that our society is not yet willing to relinquish.
It is necessary for men like Mr. McCollum to be convicted and, if possible, to be executed, regardless of guilt, in order to keep American racism in place. ("Justice For Mumia Abu-Jamal" and "Freedom For Mumia Abu-Jamal" then "Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Unconstitutionality of the Death Penalty.")
This grotesque injustice will be repeated, every day, in some part of the country, sometimes on a large scale and at other times in smaller cases. The process will continue until we examine and admit our pathology, collectively, at a national level that involves legal academia, courts, and legislatures, both state and federal. ("Jabbar Collins Serves 16 Years As An Innocent Man" and "Louis C. Taylor Serves 42 Years as an Innocent Man" then "Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey" and "Aaron Schwartz, Freedom, and American Law.")
In light of the foregoing statements it is obvious why I am still dealing with attempts to silence and steal from me as well as the absurdity and corruption in failures to deal with my problem on the part of the authorities.
I am asking the nation and all readers to look at this reality, directly, a reality of corruption and hypocrisy in our legal and ethical standards that will not go away if we ignore it. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "Foucault, Rose, Davis, and the Meanings of Prison.")
"LUMBERTON, N.C. -- Thirty years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half-brothers were declared innocent and ordered released Tuesday by a judge here."
These men are African-Americans, surprisingly enough. Henry Lee McCollum, 50, and Leon Brown, 46, who were serving life-sentences, essentially, have been deprived of their lives -- "murdered," in a manner of speaking -- by the evil of racism and typical incompetence in America's legal system. A legal system that works so differently for persons like Stuart Rabner and Solomon Dwek. How strange that the Times did not mention racism as a factor in this case? ("Stuart Rabner's Selective Sense of Justice" and "Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?")
My pursuit of the truth from New Jersey is approaching 30 years, 12 years online. I continue to receive no response from public officials. (Again: "John McGill, Esq., the OAE, and N.J. Corruption" and "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
Mistakes are made by judges and juries. People suffer for those mistakes. Deliberate actions designed to cause human suffering in disdain for the truth and cover-ups are much worse.
The atrocity committed against these two men in North Carolina seems to bear characteristics of both kinds of legal disasters, stupidity and malice are equally visible, much the same is true in my situation in light of the glaringly apparent cover-up. ("New Jersey Supreme Court's Implosion.")
Disasters in a legal system undermine its integrity, especially when they are "mishandled" by cowardly and lying officials, as in New Jersey. ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics" and "New Jersey's Judges Disgrace America" then "New Jersey's Failed Judiciary.")
The struggle against racism is costly and time-consuming. Many persons will wonder why we devote our lives to remedying injustices. The effort to bring to light such evils, to correct them, and do the right thing is never-ending for many of us. The victims of legalized and sanctioned injustices in America will never desist in the effort to find the truth that alone allows for healing and redemption.
I expect continued censorship and attempts at silencing. People prefer their lies to the realities that the lives of Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown force them to confront. For example, Justice Scalia in debate with Justice Blackmun, contended that the proposed execution of Mr. McCollum "vindicated the death penalty." No doubt Justice Scalia would also argue that Bush v. Gore vindicates America's electoral process. I dissent:
"The exoneration based on DNA evidence was another example of the way tainted convictions have unraveled in recent years because of new technology and legal defense efforts like those of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, a non-profit legal group in North Carolina that took up the case."
Mr. McCollum, like me, has experienced interrogational torture using psychological methods. Mr. McCollum suffers from some intellectual impairments, but he was highly eloquent in his remarks after being released describing all that had been taken from him.
The Supreme Court has recently -- to Justice Scalia's chagrin -- rejected the death penalty, finally, for minors and the mentally-impaired. Mr. McCollum's case reinforces the wisdom of this decision and requires that we do much more to prevent recurrence of this nightmare in the future.
As a final petty insult of Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown, the men were returned to prison Tuesday to await filing of the paperwork for their release "which to the frustration of the defense lawyers and the men's relatives was delayed, apparently until Wednesday."
In commenting on the similar life and experiences of Benjamin Reid, William Styron noted:
"There is, of course, no such thing as absolute justice, but even advocates of capital punishment will grant that when a human's life is at stake, there should be the closest approximation of absolute justice the law can attain."
Mr. Styron concluded:
"It is this abrupt, irrevocable banishment, this preemption by the state of the single final judgment which is in the province of God alone -- and the subtle but disastrous effect this act has upon the whole philosophy of crime and punishment -- that wrecks the possibility of any lasting, noble concept of justice and causes the issue of the death penalty to become not peripheral, but central to an understanding of a moral direction in our time."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)