Wednesday, July 13, 2016

e Comics on Whitsleblowers

Image courtesy of pixtawan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Chess is a two-player strategy board game played on a chessboard, a checkered game board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. Chess is played by millions of people worldwide, both amateurs and professionals.  Each player begins the game with 16 pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns. Each of the six piece types moves differently. The most powerful piece is the queen and the least powerful piece is the pawn. The objective is to 'checkmate' the opponent's king by placing it under an inescapable threat of capture. To this end, a player's pieces are used to attack and capture the opponent's pieces, while supporting their own. In addition to checkmate, the game can be won by voluntary resignation by the opponent, which typically occurs when too much material is lost, or if checkmate appears unavoidable. Genre(s) - mind sport, abstract strategy game
This is the preferred game (strategy) of the elite.  Have you noticed the black and white checkered floor designs for the power players? Well, it's another approach that seems to use the extremes as their means to an end. However, this pragmatic view allows for the use of individuals as a tool to benefit the few. You're familiar with the far left-wing and far right-wing... and that sort of thing. Using both sides gives flight to their ideas. Of course, the plain black vs. white extreme has been overdone, and everybody gets that one.  That happens when you use the same strategy over and over too close together in time. The checkered floor forms the foundation of the game played. Pawns are usually the first to fall in this game between the elite and the other 90% of ordinary people. A pawn's passion will be used against them when the time is right for a strategic move. Often, they sacrifice the lamb (a genuinely good person fighting for the people and unwittingly used as a pawn) or some form of innocence when attempting to sway public opinion.  Case in point the Jo Cox story...  

                 
However, just days after the dramatic scene with Jo Cox the people of England voted strongly for Brexit as did Wales.  In this instance, the people call checkmate… because the people used their conscience instead of being a pawn in this chess game. 

Let’s examine the film On the Waterfront where Marlon Brando’s character is faced with examining his conscience and finding no other way but exposing criminal actions. This is an important aspect of discovering if a person is a pawn for the elite or a real whistleblower. We should discern the left and right positions with reason to arrive at the truth of the matter at hand.     

       "You're nothing, your guts are all in your wallet and in your trigger finger..."  
Marlon Brando delivers the crux of his character and of the film in his own unique style with these lines, and when the passion heats up...
 "Shut up about that conscience...  That's all I've heard about." 
Both the common man and the man of status or wealth are enticed by the  "Roman Philosophy."  And both must examine himself to make a reasonable decision on how to act.  

On the Waterfront is just as powerful and influential today as it was in 1954 because it speaks to our current political and criminal situation.  From large corporate organizations to government agencies, the common man is sick of the corruption.  

Brexit: Radical power shift proposed for UK nations.  


Marlon Brando examines his conscience and concludes he must expose the criminal actions.

page1-440px-Whistleblowing.pdf



























whistleblower (whistle-blower or whistleblower) is a person who exposes misconduct, alleged dishonest or illegal activity occurring in an organization. The alleged misconduct may be classified in many ways; for example, a violation of the law, rule, regulation and/or a direct threat to the public interest, such as fraud, health and safety violations, and corruption. Whistleblowers may make their allegations internally (for example, to other people within the accused organization) or externally (to regulators, law enforcement agencies, to the media or to groups concerned with the issues).

The Continental Congress enacted the first whistleblower protection law in the United States on July 30, 1778, by a unanimous vote.  The Continental Congress was moved to act after an incident in 1777 when Richard Marven and Samuel Shaw blew the whistle and suffered severe retaliation by Esek Hopkins, the commander-in-chief of the Continental Navy. Congress declared that the United States would defend the two whistleblowers against a libel suit filed against them by Hopkins. The Continental Congress also declared it the duty of "all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other the inhabitants thereof" to inform the Continental Congress or proper authorities of "misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by any officers in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge."  - Wikipedia

Conscience is an aptitudefacultyintuition or judgment that assists in distinguishing right from wrong. Moral judgment may derive from values or norms (principles and rules). In psychological terms, conscience is often described as leading to feelings of remorse when a human commits actions that go against his/her moral values and to feelings of rectitude or integrity when actions conform to such norms. The extent to which conscience informs moral judgment before an action and whether such moral judgments are or should be based on reason has occasioned debate through much of the history of Western philosophy.- Wikipedia

This Western philosophy is eloquently expressed in On the Waterfront.  We will discover the deeper aspects of this powerful film when we review the relevant points found in Cicero's Teaching on Natural Law by Thomas G. West.   (St. John's Review, Summer 1981. Vol. 32)
We are in the midst of a crisis - not always evident in the comfortable lives we lead, but a crisis nonetheless.  A sign of the crisis is the ongoing political collapse of the West; the liberal democracies of America and Europe are barely willing to defend themselves against the insolence of petty tyrants and the armed imperialism of the Soviet Union. Why this somnolent slide into voluntary weakness? Because we are not convinced that we have anything to fight for. We are ready to believe the worst of ourselves, and the best of our adversaries, because we no longer fully believe that we deserve to survive.  That is because we no longer know what the West is, and why its preservation matters for nurturing and sustaining the noblest and best of human activities.  In particular, we in America no longer know why the United States is the best hope for the modern world.
cicero
"Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, orator, political theorist, consul and constitutionalist. His works rank among the most influential in European culture, and today still constitute one of the most important bodies of primary material for the writing and revision of Roman history."  -Wikipedia

Why is this important?
Cicero, or rather Roman philosophy generally, represents for Heidegger an important stage in the gradual forgetting of the Greek discovery of nature, a forgetting process which has marked the whole history of the West.  According to Heidegger, the very translation of Greek philosophy into Latin effaced that insight.  Roman philosophy conceived natura, the nature of things, as present-at-hand and readily available to easy philosophic contemplation and the formulation of ethical doctrines.  It thereby failed to renew the vibrant amplitude of the Greek physis, which embraces the emergence and coming-to-be of things no less than their distinct standing-forth in full presence before the mind's eye. The Roman narrowing of nature therefore prepared the way for the modern view of beings as mere disposable resources, easily accessible to human projects and manipulation.
...By tremendous efforts Greek philosophy had achieved its insight into the distinction between and yet necessary belonging-together of nature and convention, being and appearance, truth and opinion, an insight anticipated in the dark lyrics of the pre-Socratic thinkers and given its consummate expression in the works of Plato and Aristotle. But now, in the moribund Roman republic, this grasp upon the tense unity of nature and convention was forgotten by politicians unformed by philosophy and philosophers disdainful of politics.  

...Cicero strove to reyoke the sundered pair.
Poetry and law (law taken in a wide sense, like the Greek nomos, to include custom and tradition) appear immortalize the transient or even to bring non-being into being by touching our minds and memories through words.  If philosophy, which strives uncompromisingly to unveil the true nature of things, is the antithesis of poetry, it would likewise seem to be the enemy of the traditions and beliefs on which law depends and which in some measure law is.  The beginning of Cicero's laws unobtrusively questions whether law contains any truth whatever. Law, like poetry, may be nothing more than a fiction that furnishes pleasure by establishing trust in eternally binding precepts and practices.  Cicero forestalls this positivist inference by drawing a distinction between two senses of the word law: the popular sense, according to which law is "that which sanctions in writing whatever it wishes, either by commanding or prohibiting," and the more learned sense, derived from nature itself, according to which law is 
"The mind and reason of the prudent man."    
...Law is natural in the same way that reason is natural, as a gift of nature bestowed on every human being.  But only in the prudent man, whose reason is developed as far as it can be, does reason become "correct," and so only his commands and prohibitions are truly "law."  ...Even if complete knowledge of good is unavailable, as Cicero's skeptism implies, we may infer that an approximation to wisdom is accessible through the assiduous exercise of understanding. Cicero's final peroration to Book I paints a picture of perfect wisdom that can be a standard, even if unattained, of human striving.  Self-knowledge is the key.  For once we learn that we are equipped by nature for acquiring wisdom, and we sense that the mind, as sort of image of the gods, is worthy of care and cultivation.
In conclusion, passion is the beginning of discernment.

3rd Dog

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