Are You Still a Human Being?

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Are you still a human being? –
Explore the ethical and moral dilemmas of modern life
 in this insightful and thought-provoking examination.

Part 1

Is this still a society?

Part 2

Is this still a church?

Part 3

Is this still justice?

Part 4

Current Page

Part 5

Emotional Impact

Part 6

Deceptive Justice

Bart De Pauw

The making of

Deliberate Wrongdoing

Central Park Jogger Case

1 Prior: The Moral Compass

Trust is a judgement

that someone else can be relied upon or

that some institution can relied on.
It isn’t proof.
Trust is what we do when we need a shortcut.

Please listen to the BBC MP3 of philosopher, Onora O’Neill.

The big idea: the new distrust (about 10 minutes)

Trust in justice

The Moral Compass

Human Engagement
  • You realize what’s happening, you have knowledge of the facts, and it dawns on you.
  • In an emergency, 30 seconds were enough for Mamoudou Gassama to save the life of a 4-year-old child hanging from the balcony railing on the 4th floor.
  • Society moves heaven and earth to rescue 12 teenagers and their coach from a cave flooded by the monsoon in Thailand in 2018.
  • It’s about honesty and humanity; you have no choice, from your conscience, you are compelled to intervene.
  • There are a thousand and one examples.
    It’s the biblical story of The Good Samaritan.

Desiderata - Max Ehrmann - Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

1 Desiderata – A Life Changing Poem for Hard Times

 

16 apr. 2020

Newest episode to our Powerful Life Poetry series.
We hope this finds you well in these troublesome times. –
 
Read by Shane Morris
Music by Tony Anderson –
 
Max Ehrmann was an American attorney and poet who often wrote on spiritual themes. During his life, he contributed great thoughts to our literary lexicons, blending the magic of words and wisdom with his worthy observations.
 
Desiderata, which means “things that are desired,” was written by Max Ehrmann “because it counsels those virtues I felt most in need of.”

2 Donovan Livingston’s Harvard Graduate School of Education Student Speech

 
26 mei 2016
May 25, 2016 Convocation Speech. Full remarks transcribed here: http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/16/05…
 
Since its founding in 1920, the Harvard Graduate School of Education has been training leaders to transform education in the United States and around the globe. Today, our faculty, students, and alumni are studying and solving the most critical challenges facing education: student assessment, the achievement gap, urban education, and teacher shortages, to name just a few. Our work is shaping how people teach, learn, and lead in schools and colleges as well as in after-school programs, high-tech companies, and international organizations. The HGSE community is pushing the frontiers of education, and the effects of our entrepreneurship are improving the world.
 

Donovan Livingston delivers his awe-inspiring poem Lift up

 

Text      Donovan Livingston’s Harvard Ed. Student Speech

2 What exactly is social justice supposed to mean and why has it become such a murky term?

Thousands of years ago, Plato came up with the idea of justice being to give each person his due. This is still an influential way of looking at justice (even if I think we have to twist it a bit). In the context of social justice, it is about making sure that each citizen gets his share of the benefits and burdens of society.

Nowadays, it is more often called “distributive justice”. It is concerned with questions about the distribution of income, wealth, the social bases of self-respect and so on. Essentially, the question of who gets what (from the moral point of view).

It is controversial for two main reasons:

  • there is a lot at stake. People really do have lots to gain and lose by the laws we choose to instantiate, and the theories of distributive justice we choose to implement through our political institutions
  • it is genuinely a really hard question. There are many good arguments for various different positions


Finally, some libertarians think that the concept of social justice is incoherent. Hayek seeks to claim something like this in places. However, the view that social justice is not a coherent concept strikes me as very weak and I have never encountered a strong argument for it.

Peter Hawkins Passionate about politics.

3 Mauro Manuel

A moral / ethical dilemma

Mauro Manuel was an Angolan asylum seeker who came to the Netherlands in 2003 at the age of nine. He traveled alone on a KLM flight from Angola to the Netherlands, where he sought asylum. He was granted a temporary residence permit on humanitarian grounds, which allowed him to stay in the Netherlands and attend school.

In 2010, Mauro’s case gained national attention in the Netherlands when it became clear that he would soon turn 18 and would no longer be eligible for the temporary permit. There was a public debate about whether he should be allowed to stay in the country, with some politicians and citizens arguing that he should be deported back to Angola, and others advocating for him to be allowed to remain in the Netherlands due to the length of time he had lived there and his integration into Dutch society.

In the end, the Dutch government decided that Mauro would have to leave the Netherlands when he turned 18. However, after widespread public protests and pressure from advocacy groups, the government eventually granted him a residency permit that allowed him to stay in the country.

Mauro’s case drew attention to the complexities and controversies surrounding immigration and asylum policy in the Netherlands and in other countries around the world.

3 Mauro Manuel in Pauw & Witteman 22-09-2011

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Angolees Mauro Manuel moet terug van Minister Leers.

4 The Disgraced Cop Louis N. Scarcella

NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella

Scarcella born 1951) is a retired detective from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) who earned frequent commendations during the “crack epidemic” of the 1980s and 1990s, before many convictions resulting from his investigations were overturned during his retirement.

Louis Scarcella’s partner admits they used ‘questionable tactics’

A summary of the key events and issues surrounding John Bunn’s case, including his wrongful conviction, the lawsuit he filed, the settlement reached with the city, and the concerns raised about Detective Louis Scarcella’s tactics.

  1. John Bunn, who spent 16 years in prison for a murder he was charged with at age 14, only to have his conviction overturned.
  2. Bunn filed a lawsuit for “malicious prosecution, denial of due process and civil rights conspiracy”, which the city settled for $5.9 million in 2020.
  3. Bunn claims he was wrongfully convicted in 1991 based primarily on coerced testimony and questionable tactics by Scarcella and his partners.
  4. Scarcella’s involvement in 14 cases from the 1980s and ’90s, including Bunn’s, has raised concerns, leading to the overturning of eight cases by the Brooklyn DA’s Conviction Review Unit and six by judges.
  5. Bunn alleges that despite lacking physical evidence linking him to the crime, he was convicted after a brief trial.
  6. He asserts that Scarcella and his colleagues were known for violating police procedures and making tainted arrests.
  7. Bunn was paroled in 2009 and cleared in 2016, prompting his lawsuit, which accuses the police and the city of malicious prosecution, denial of due process, and civil rights conspiracy.
  8. Scarcella declined to comment, and the city law department did not provide a statement on the case.
5 Paula Vennells

4 Church ‘Should Have Inquired More’ About Paula Vennells


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5 Post Office ‘knowingly withheld’ defence evidence from sub-postmasters | Forensic Auditor

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6 Judge DESTROYS Post Office Expert

Back to menu  IMPORTANT CONTENT  Listening recommended  Must ***

6 Rotherham scandal

Rotherham scandal

The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal consists of the organised child sexual abuse that occurred in the town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, Northern England from the late 1980s until 2013 and the failure of local authorities to act on reports of the abuse throughout most of that period.

Police officers in Rotherham were not equipped to deal with the widespread child sex abuse that plagued the town for more than 15 years, according to a new report. The long-awaited findings from the police watchdog are the latest in a series of inquiries into a scandal that has cast a shadow over South Yorkshire.

Operation Linden was a series of investigations carried out by The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) looking at South Yorkshire Police’s response to allegations of child sexual abuse and exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.

The watchdog has found that systemic problems meant the force failed to recognise the scale of the problem.

It echoes Prof Alexis Jay’s 2014 report that found 1,400 children in the town were targeted by grooming gangs during the period.

BBC News looks at what prompted her report and what happened after its publication.

BBC – Rotherham abuse scandal: How we got here

7 – 1,400 children exploited in Rotherham child abuse scandal

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26 aug 2014

At least 1,400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, a report has found.

Children as young as 11 were raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated, it said.

The report, commissioned by Rotherham Borough Council, revealed there had been three previous inquiries.

Council leader Roger Stone said he would step down with immediate effect.

Mr Stone, who has been the leader since 2003, said: “I believe it is only right that as leader I take responsibility for the historic failings described so clearly.”

The inquiry team noted fears among council staff of being labelled “racist” if they focussed on victims’ description of the majority of abusers as “Asian” men.

8 – U.K. child abuse study finds 1,400 victims in one town

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7 Saint-Omer, near Calais in northern France Compass

Saint-Omer, near Calais in northern France

8 Ethics – Casualties of war

Ethics

Casualties Of War

From visionary director Brian De Palma, war is war, but murder is murder. Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn star in this action-packed Vietnam war saga in which one soldier thought he had a license to kill and another dared to stand in his way.

9 Buying a hammer to hurt himself to cause false accusations

“She Should Get Life in Jail” – Man Falsely Accused

11 Phone Booth Thief

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Part 1

Is this still a society?

Part 2

Is this still a church?

Part 3

Is this still justice?

Part 4

Current Page

Part 5

Emotional Impact

Part 6

Deceptive Justice

Bart De Pauw

The making of

Deliberate Wrongdoing

Central Park Jogger Case