— On Assholes

Berlusconi hoped to get off.  Instead, his conviction for tax fraud was upheld.  (Although, alas, he’ll finally do house arrest or community service instead of  jail time).  See, e.g., here.

For his predictably outraged reaction, see here.

I mean Larry Summers, who reportedly cost Harvard’s endowment 2 billion dollars, because of his over-confidence.  See here, for this:

Summers, unduly impressed with his own economic credentials, overruled two successive presidents of Harvard Management Corporation (the in-house fund management operation chock full of well qualified and paid money managers that invest the Harvard endowment). Not content to let the pros have all the fun, Summers insisted on gambling with the university’s operating funds, which are the monies that come in every year (tuition and board payments, government grants, the payments out of the endowment allotted to the annual budget). His risk-taking left the University with over $2 billion in losses and unwind costs and forced wide-spread budget cuts, even down to getting rid of hot breakfasts.

As the Boston Globe explained:

In the Summers years, from 2001 to 2006, nothing was on auto-pilot. He was the unquestioned commander, a dominating personality with the talent to move a balkanized institution like Harvard, but also a man unafflicted, former colleagues say, with self-doubt in matters of finance.

Read More

Which is apparently becoming overrun with assholes, and other uncivil gente.  This is according to Cubans themselves, including President Raúl Castro.  See here.

Ethical guidance through cautionary tales courtesy of the US Department of Defense.  Possibly the only public government document that is (intentionally) a spoof of itself.   The full document, for 2012, is here: Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure_2012.  Here’s a sample, from a separate document entitled “2012 Updates”  (In word doc, here: eef_complete_2012-1).

Encyclopedia of Ethical Failures:  2012 Updates

(From DoD IG)

MISUSE OF GOVERNMENT RESOURCES AND PERSONNEL

Pointing and Shooting for Personal Gain

An O-5 in communications decided that his day job wasn’t enough, so he started a side business photographing local sports events.   While on duty, he asked a subordinate to create photo products for his personal business during official time.  The officer also requested a press pass on behalf of the Defense Media Activity, which he then used to gain exclusive entry into sporting events to take pictures in his off-duty time.  When he was finally caught for misusing the press pass, he received a letter of concern from command.

Hors D’oeuvres and Wine…On the Taxpayers’ Dime

A member of the Senior Executive Service authorized the use of appropriated funds for two optional, off-site “teambuilding” events: a wine tasting event and a hors d’oeuvres-tasting event.  The SES member argued that these events were justified as “necessary

In this ezine, here.

Where “justice” is making sure he gets his credit, like when he didn’t get credit for his shots from the high school basketball coach, and still isn’t getting his credit today for his music, despite all those Grammy’s.  But it is also a fight for the children, to “clear a path so that people can dream properly.”

And about that whole Taylor Swift apology, in which he faltered as a human and caved to peer pressure.  Despite the original act, his main drive has only led to “complete awesomeness at all times. … awesome truth and awesomeness. Beauty, truth, awesomeness.”

Moments of Zen from this  interview in the NY Times, here.

One of two Italian archetypes, according to Tim Parks (discussed here).  The “furbo,” or clever person, bends the rules, in contrast with the “pignolo,” who is law-abiding stickler.  At a train station, for instance:

“When a “furbo” cuts in line, “there is a slow, simmering resentment, as if the people who have behaved properly are grimly pleased to get confirmation that good citizenship is always futile, a kind of

Italian historian Carlo M. Cipolla writes a fun book, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, which contains this nice definition:

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. (p. 36).

Cipolla notes that, at first blush, it can be hard to see why anyone would

Suppose you must choose to live in one of the following two societies, not knowing where in either one you’ll end up (the names are only suggestive; they aren’t definitions):

CAPITALISM: everyone is richer than they would be in any other kind of society.  Yet there are also very large inequalities in wealth–

[A lecture by yours truly, recently given to CSULB.]

Today I address two main questions, What is it for someone to be an asshole? and, Who cares? That is, why would a philosopher care, about the answer to what is surely among the least profound philosophical questions of all time? My bold answer is that a certain theory of the asshole is of some philosophical interest, and indeed surprisingly so, given that one could have easily assumed that asshole theory would be of absolutely no philosophical interest at all to anyone, philosophically speaking.

My main question is, What precisely is the difference between the asshole and the mere jerk, prick, dick, twit, wanker, prat, schmuck, cad, boor, bastard, ass, ass-clown or douchebag? Here is my proposal: the asshole is the guy (yes, assholes are