andy.dyer9@tiscali.co.uk wrote:
At what point do we start discussion people being accountable for their actions. If someone was a porn star in a previous life, that's what they were
- we're not "sacrificing" them by pointing it out,
especially when we're not the first.
If we were to be discussing people being accountable for their actions, then our first port of call would be to consider the accountability of an editor who posts an article about the girl who entered a "wet T-shirt competition" when she was 18.
Her kids could be tormented (perphaps literally) to death by the school-children who find out about it from Wikipedia. Or her husband could find it and use it to break up the family.
It's highly unlikely that, 3 or 5 or 10 years later that the husband would find out adequate detail from any other source, even if she/they were still to be living in the same street. Wikipedia has the potential, quite easily and thoughtlessly, of wrecking the lives of several people, just with one article.
This seems to make the moral judgement that her entry into the wet T-shirt competition was a bad action from the beginning. Why would she have kept this a secret from her husband in the first place. Secrets are not a good way to run a marriage. Since the underlying assumption is that the material was taken from a reliable source we might well ask what the material was doing there. If her kids are being subject to schoolyard bullying over this there are a lot more serious problems going on than the odd risqué picture.
Remember - the money and influence of a President's son may have saved him from us finding out why he was (supposedly) working on a community program that specialised in re-habilitating cocaine users in 1973 (when he appears to have been AWOL). Up to 300 million other Americans have much less to hide, but don't have the same strings to pull.
One then has to weigh the value of helping cocaine addicts against such a minor indiscretion as being AWOL. What did he have to hide? There seems to be a disproportionality between criticizing a president for his military policies, and criticizing his daughter for smoking pot.
Ec