ethical_dilemma epitome of incomprehensibility I don't want to be paid to write essays for someone to plagiarize. I also don't want to be bad at deadlines anymore, but I still am. I want to live by an ethics of fairness. Whether I do or not is another question. So. I said I'd do a editing/writing project that my tutor boss passed along. Let's call him Writing Pimp, or WP for short. He has connections who ask him to do writing and editing and he passes this work along to people who'll do it for less money, thus giving him the profit as the commissioner/middleman or whatever. Business? Business. It sounds lazy, but that's not all he does - he also works at an education centre and helps run a website. The ethical part comes in here: I said I'd get "something done by Friday" on this thesis-like project - editing and writing the last part of it - even if it wouldn't be very finished. This writing thing, if I do it all, will presumably get me $120. But yesterday, when I was doing work for Prof. K, I was reading aloud a Karl Barth sermon on not letting "necessity" justify evil. Barth was mostly talking about World War 1, but I realized that WP had never told me straight out how the project would be used. Yesterday, in that moment, I felt quite certain that it was another plagiarism thing, that it's not the school but a student paying for someone to straight-up finish his/her undergrad thesis and that it wouldn't be used for a grant application after all as WP had hinted. If my conscience twinge was a Message from God and/or Karl Barth - I relate to Karl Barth better since I married his imaginary sister in a dream - I haven't followed up with them that well. I was going to email Writing Pimp and ask him to clarify how this piece of writing would be used, and say that I wasn't going to write something that could be plagiarized because that wasn't fair. He could always lie, of course. My moment of conscience/clarity didn't tell me what to do if he lies. Plus I don't like how this man pressured me into editing/writing the thing in the first place, even though I went with it and asked for what I thought a halfway decent amount of money. I'm not going to say the world should apply an enthusiastic-consent ethic to doing paid work (YES! I want to edit a rambling, vaguely written academic project! Right now! On the floor!) but I don't like being pushed into stuff. Partly I should stand up for myself better. Anyway, I didn't send the email yesterday and I haven't even finished the editing part today. I have to sing and then volunteer tomorrow; I only have the morning free. I was thinking I could do the editing part, attaching it to the next email I send him, and say "Thus far - no farther" if the thing looks too sketchy. But I don't know. That's not fair either, when he was expecting me to do the whole thing, at least eventually. Two wrongs don't equal Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. I am not good at many things. Deadlines. Ethics. Being effective while busy. Getting sleep. The world expects me to have a Protestant work ethic, and I've got an agnostic one. 150320 ... raze my two (now obsolete) pennies, for what they're worth: go with your gut. if it's half as smart as you are (because, as you know, stomachs have their own brains and codes of conduct), it cannot steer you wrong. 150320 ... unhinged i try to surround myself with people that will make me a better person. it is something shakyamuni buddha suggested that i fell is very smart. if you want to become enlightened, surround yourself with people that are enlightened. if you want to become enlightened, leave behind the people that dont measure up to what you believe that to be. i periodically check in with myself about what i think enlightened qualities in others might be and if that lines up with the tenets of my religion. i have let go of a lot of people in my life in the past year that either a) act from a place of unenlightened heart or b) cause me to act from a place of unenlightened heart. yesterday me and my sister had a conversation about taxes and how she thinks its not fair that poor people dont have to pay them. (which is first of all an oversimplification) i am disgusted by her lack of compassion and generosity. 'if i have to pay taxes, so should everyone else' says the woman with a different pair of nikes for every set of scrubs she wore to work. 'it is not the responsibility of other citizens to take care of people that dont have enough money' says the woman that made a living from old people's medicare. another buddhist teacher i keep very close to my heart has asked his community to envision an enlightened society. a society that taxes money from its poorest citizens and gives it to people like my sister so she can take a winter vacation in the bahamas is not the kind of society i want to live in. a society that leaves homeless people on the street and takes away food assistance from hungry kids so my sister can drive a lexus is not the society i want to live in. a government that offers absolutely no help to the destitute to cut tax rates for my sister so she can buy an 11th northface jacket that she doesnt really need while others in her community cant afford new coats at all in subzero weather is not a government i want to support. my dilemma hear is i dont want to speak to my sister anymore after the display she made yesterday of her completely selfish and hypocritical views. (well maybe not completely hypocritical, but definitely cosmically ironic). but she is my sister. do i practice forgiveness and let it go? or do i divert the energy i would normally spend talking to her to other activities that would keep me on the path of enlightenment? i guess its pretty sad really that her heart is so shrunken that she believes poor people getting tax refunds from the government is encouraging people to not work hard. how hard should someone have to work to keep a roof over their head and have a little food security? why do people that have more than they actually need resent people with nothing asking for a little help? 150321 ... e_o_i Yeah. It's disappointing when people who are close to you say things you know, or at least believe, to be grossly unfair. A few weeks ago, my mother said some homophobic things and then I got mad at her and made some unfair personal accusations (saying she was "always prejudiced against things she found abnormal" was far too harsh) - but at least we were able to have a somewhat calming discussion after. It still disappointed me that she thinks like that. To me, an ethic of fairness includes marriage equality and LGBT+ rights in general. Perhaps blocking out the negative in this case means avoiding conversations with her on those topics (social security, poverty, etc.) without cutting her off entirely? With your spiritual training, you'd probably be better than me at holding a reasoned argument without getting mad, but if it only makes you miserable, don't bother. That's a good point for me, too: not to make myself miserable for no reason. Granted, some work is difficult, some learning is difficult, and it needs to be. But if the outcome is more misery than usefulness, I shouldn't bother. I'll write the guy tomorrow. Promise. 150321 ... e_o_i Pff. I promise? I should not promise. Basically, I avoided things until he called me three days later, and then when I voiced my plagiarism worries he insisted it was the school that was asking for this writing, so I said, Okay, but I need to know what I'm actually supposed to write. I have no outline, no nothing, just a vague mandate to pad out the middle part and write a conclusion. He said he passed my request for an outline on to the school, but they hadn't sent him anything yet. I wonder how much of the world's economy is based on people pretending to know what they're doing. Am I playing the game wrong to admit I don't know? 150414 ... past everyone makes it up as they go along. 150415 ... amy aliza the business world. school shouldn't be a business world though. there is something fundamental about that keeping the ethics up for the sake of telling the truth and providing a good example.... if they are asking you to pick their pieces they should pay pretty well, at least. 150416 ... e_o_i Hm. Yes. I was wrong about plagiarism, right about "not a decent wage." I got more instructions for this project, and now I turned it down, rather at the last minute I'm afraid. My revisions were supposed to be done Monday, but they required access to databases, and I don't want to take time to sign up for a university guest account or use my father's work computer after library hours just for badly paid grant writing. Besides, what the researcher wanted (and my boss passed along without giving me the person's email address) was a major rewrite of a whole section, not just a few edits here and there. I told my boss plainly that I was sorry for not getting to this earlier, but original academic writing simply takes more time than he's willing to pay me for, so... no thanks for this kind of project. My father had to be there to caution me against either wimping out or getting angry and saying something I regretted. So, +2 for being firm and polite, -1 for having to complain to parents. New thought: it's not bad to ask parents for help, but be polite to them too. Don't a) complain at them or b) apologize excessively. That shouldn't be a "new thought," should it? More like a note to self. Live, learn, and spell clee-shay phonetically just because. I'm rather fearing repercussions, but I need to think rationally. He could refuse to pay for the editing part. Out of annoyance, he might stop giving me other editing jobs. He could conceivably fire me from the tutoring job, but since it's unrelated I don't think he'd be able to do that without some creative rationalizations. On the unselfish side, might this indirectly make things fairer for other workers somehow, slightly? Unlikely. I need to go obsess over something else now. 150424 ... e_o_i Hm. I finished it, even though in the end he didn't give me much time (more money, though) and I had to rewrite a whole section. On a totally different topic, it's nice to see an article that explains GMOs cogently while not letting Monsanto off the hook: http://vitals.lifehacker.com/the-biggest-concerns-about-gmo-food-arent-really-about-1702906290 For example, Joe Schwartz who writes a science column for the Montreal Gazette never seems to acknowledge that many concerns against big agribusinesses are ethical ones rather than about the supposed evilness of GMOs themselves (okay, "frankenfoods" is a silly word, I'll give him that.) True, he writes about chemistry rather than politics, but the practice of science should be aware of where it stands in the world. Anyway, it seems eating local is best, better than eating something grown organically but far away (says Canadian e_o_i who's eaten about 10 bananas and oranges in the past week, but yeah!) 150508 ... past science is often blinded by it's purported ideology of non-ideology. there's ethics and politics aplenty in physics (etc) if you don't close your mind to it. or, someone who says they're completely rational cannot be trusted to see the emotion underlying that claim. 150508 ... e_o_i Oh yeah - I shouldn't have worded things the way I did when I wrote "the practice of science should be aware of where it stands in the world" because it sounds like I'm saying the monolithic Science is unaware of anything else and here's ye little olde EngLit graduate out to larn it. Nope nope nope. Anyway, you're on to something about the claim to rationality. People have criticized the high-profile Dawkins for it, though I haven't read enough of him to even start judging. On a less scientific note, I've heard misogynists claim that men are more rational than women, so, since they are men, they are therefore automatically logical! (At that point one feels justified, perhaps, in pointing out their logical fallacies and being just the teensiest bit snotty about it. Unless one is a woman who is admittedly too emotional and then it's, "Aha! You are emotion! Therefore, you cannot logic!") 150510 ... past I think that impulse is in part behind how the media is treating Elizabeth May this morning. Someone broke one of their rules and can't possibly be taken seriously anymore. What an outrage, someone spoke her mind! 150511 ... unhinged i want to tell my brother to fuck off. telling my brother to fuck off will not solve anything AND i will be totally in the wrong, the asshole. his dog is sick. he is getting his dog treatment for a lump the vet found. he owes me over $3000 and the amount is only growing ( long_story_short ) i got hurt at work on tuesday and i could use treatment, chiropractics or acupuncture, which i cannot afford cause of this ongoing financial issue with my brother. but he is paying for treatment for his dog. which is like his child. which is like my canine nephew. which is the dog that changed my mind about dogs. once again i am caught frustrated and angry as shit in a no win situation where i just swallow my bile and keep putting one foot in the other. my will to do the latter is quickly diminishing. (i must have been a horrible person in a past life to have all this stress karma come to fruition at the same time) 150521 what's it to you? who go blather from