I can’t agree. I’m with you as far as “sincerity is a mitigating factor” in that I’d rather, I suppose, be imprisoned by a man who sincerely believes I need to be locked up than by a man who’s locking me up to feed a witch hunt he doesn’t believe in but uses to keep himself in power. Hell, I might even prefer a society where I serve a week in jail from the one guy over one where I serve three days from the other. But given the choice of “dead or living with a man who bangs hookers and lies,” well, count me on the liar’s side.

I can’t quite shake the impression that you’re conducting moral thought-experiments with other people’s imaginary lives. It doesn’t sound like you’ve owned the idea that your sincere tyrant isn’t just oppressing other people. Can you tell me honestly “I, Alexander, would prefer to die in agony at the hands of a man who sincerely believed in my murder than to live in a country with a head of state who acts differently than his professed moral code?”

DHEX:
You’re assuming he believes that what he did was right AND that he believes that it’s wrong when other people do the same thing. We don’t have any actual evidence (he said on TV that he thinks it’s wrong for him and for others, but he had to say that so I’m not taking it as evidence of anything besides that he’s a politician.) There are four cases:
1. What you said. He’s a pseudoaristocratic piece of shit who believes that what he did is okay because of who he is but not okay if plebes like you or I were to do the same.
2. He’s not aganst sleepin’ with whores. He doesn’t actually have a problem with prostitution at all. He did what he did because he didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. He claimed to hold other beliefs because he had to claim those beliefs to keep his job (and either he’s a powerseeking scumsucker or he places the end of the good he thinks he can do or has done as AG ahead of the evil of the lie).
3. He is really, sincerely, sorry for his crimes. He screwed up because he is human and fallible, like most of us. This might put him in the same box as some of the Founding Fathers, several of whom were mildly in favor of abolishing slavery, but kept slaves while alive (commonly including in their wills the freedom of their slaves).
4. He believes that engaging the services of a prostitute is morally okay for some people, but that he is not one of those people. This one is unlikely in my opinion, but at least theoretically possible. Oddly, it’s the one I come closest to: Spitzer’s married and while it’s possible that he and his wife have an explicit or implicit negotiated agreement about extramarital sex, I doubt it. For that reason, his actions were wrong, not because he hired prostitutes, but because he betrayed a trust in doing so.

Obviously 1 and 3 are the most likely, and I don’t think you’re wrong in suggesting that 1 is the largest chance, but I do think you’re wrong in assuming that he feels no remorse or guilt for his actions. He might well.

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the main issue here is more that he used his power to imprison others for doing something he himself was involved in. that’s chutzpah-licious! and typical scummy good for me but not for thee type behavior we expect from the imperial class.

for a real-life analogue, check out http://www.copswritingcops.com

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‘Children can even simulate having sex with a prostitute…’

…when they should be doing it for real, I presume?

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TDS: Was March 10, as a list of Spitzer puns he wouldn’t be making. (The others being “Bang the Gov Slowly” and “Fuckgate”.
Anyway, if you look hard enough, all the puns have been made.

Hypocrisy: ad hominem circumstantial is the fallacious argumentative form you’re referring to: an argument is valid or invalid regardless of the person sustaining it. So I can say, for example, “Drinking St.-Emilion and posting to RPS is a horrible thing”, then go and do exactly that, and the fact I behave opposite to my principles doesn’t invalidate those principles.

On the other hand, if someone makes the basis of their power their image as a fighter of organized crime and corruption, then getting caught supporting those things destroys the image, and the basis of power. You can’t say “I’m against organized crime”, and then spend thousands of bucks personally supporting it.

“You can’t shield the children” — right, that’s not entirely true. But when you talk about controlling what a 14-year-old finds out about, then in that sense, you can’t “protect them” from the “ugly parts” of the world, and trying to do so generally has the opposite effect.

What I find loathsome about the “anti-videogame” politicians is just how transparent they are. “Think of the Children” is one of the nastiest appeals to pity out there (just as “Tough on Crime” is to anger). Should there be controls on children and games? Sure. Parents should be taking an interest in their children and in what they do, particularly, in the case of videogames, in their own homes. If they don’t take an interest, no amount of government regulation is going to protect teh kidz.

And what are the solutions out there? ESRB? All ESRB serves to do is provide a barrier to entry for small developers (got enough money to develop a small game? yeah? how about to certify it with the ESRB?) and an ongoing liability (what if someone mods your game to include something nasty they saw in a Japanese comic book?).

Meanwhile, he’ll complain about GTA, which in its current incarnation is nothing more than a sanitized version of every R-rated action/crime film cliche out there. With an awesome soundtrack, of course.

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If there is anything affecting kids, it’s probably their parents. Cut the debate short, cut away from the monitors, look at the kids behind you, look at reality, the exact way we ‘inherit’ (because we don’t, we learn) personality from our parents; we don’t become our parents, but their personality greatly affects us.

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Hypocrisy is only society’s ultimate ill if you’re unwilling to postulate actual moral values for your society. If your society is against slavery, then pro-slavery advocates who whinge when they themselves are enslaved are guilty of an embarrassing peccadillo, while those who enslaved them are guilty of a terrible crime indeed.

If our society is against prostitution, then Elliot Spitzer is less wrong than most johns, because while he did commit the crime, he also made (presumably good faith) efforts to prosecute and suppress it. Compare to a gang member who made sincere efforts to persuade others not to follow his path.

I think this whole argument really comes from the fact that most of our commenters don’t regard sex work as a categorical evil. If sex work isn’t in and of itself wrong, and if Spitzer wasn’t forcing anyone into it, was paying fairly, et cetera, than the only thing we can pin on him is hypocrisy. And since he tried to pin on our tribe the very peccadillo he was guilty of himself, we’re mad at him for that.

Sure, it’s worth crowing a bit. But in the end, I’ll take a hooker-bangin’ moralist over, say, an utterly sincere, single-faced, walked-the-walk, seen-the-elephant, practiced-what-he’s-preaching John McCain any day. John McCain’s got a lot more dead bodies behind him than Spitzer ever will (given the likely downward trend of Spitzer’s career).

Hiring sex workers is a bit fraught and I suspect that if I had an omniscient view of Spitzer’s actions I’d find them suspect. Moralistic tirades, I don’t like. I think they’re bad. I especially think it’s bad when you’re egging on a crowd by telling them what they want to hear and inciting them to persecution. But Spitzer’s were fairly mild cases of the tirade, and even if they hadn’t been, killing is killing. You take away a kid’s games, he grows up and buys them. Maybe he doesn’t and his life is a bit less happy than it would have been. But if you kill him, he’s dead. That’s it. So Spitzer the hypocrite is still, morally, ahead of any number of totally sincere politicians in my book.

Of course, the gripping hand is that if he were President or Senator or Congressman Spitzer, he’d have no qualms about voting for or ordering those deaths, so it doesn’t really matter.

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Apologies offered from this end :)

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I haven’t watched TDS since the strike breaking. How was it rejected? (I was fairly sure someone else would have come up with the joke before me, but I’d not seen it anywhere).

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