Buddy, I could participate more fully in a thread than you will ever be able to with half my brain tied around your wife’s cratered thighs. So fuck right the fuck off please, thanks.
That incident is one of my all-time favorites in describing how insensitive we have become with the nuance of our language.
Especially rich was some professorial talking head claiming, after everyone involved had issued their mea culpas, that he still shouldn’t have used the word, because, for some odd reason, the utilizer of a proper word in the english language has to somehow be a guarantor of sensitivity upon its use.
I’ll share another interpretation of the events:
I have a pool in my area. I use it. I only go to the pool when there is a “low enough” ratio of kids to adults (no, i don’t count - it’s just a general back-of-the-envelope assessment). If I’m at the pool and the ratio gets out of whack (read: there are a shit ton of annoying, loud kids), I leave.
If I were paying for a club and I was being displaced because my club allowed/accidentally allowed 60 children into the pool that I was spending my time at, I’d raise cain. And if it were a posh enough club (btw, this one’s website looks like it serves the local trailer park crowd, and what is up with this open membership garbage anyways?) I could very easily see the manager-on-duty asking the heretofore duly-admitted group of children to hit the road.
The guy may have had an unfortunate use of the word “complexion” but once you exclude all of the hearsay that’s been bandied around this story there’s not a whole lot more to suggest that they were excluded based on their race. correlation does not imply causation.
Can Sam’s club exclude anyone they want from shopping there because they have a membership required to shop there?
I tend to agree this may well be a case of poor planning and communication on both sides part more than anything else.
But you mispelled caucasian 
Er, I don’t think you can just automagically banish a contract into it-never-happened-land by offering a refund, unless the contract specifically says so. Presumably if this contract did specifically say so, the club would raise that point in its own defense.
Efficient breach, hello?
I.e., “I don’t have an answer.”
Again, care to discuss the law here?
So, in other words, they were right, but you have to be right too because their motives were wrong. BS.
Well, that’s not exactly how it works. Efficient breach is only economically efficient if you pay the injured party expectation damages, rather than merely restitutionary damages (the refund).
Recall, a reallocation is Pareto efficient only if everyone remains at least as well off as under the original allocation and someone is made better off. To do this, the original counterparty to the contract must have his/her original expectations satisfied. If the market price for the good has increased, a mere refund will leave the victim of the breach worse-off. (BTW, if the market price decreased, there is no incentive for the good supplier to breach.) Thus, you must pay the injured party’s cover. If you can do this while still earning profit by selling to a third-party, then you will have found a Pareto improvement by breaching the contract.
I’m just sayin that “acting as if you don’t have a contract no mo” isn’t exactly earth shattering jurisprudence.
They have banners flying outside their facility, per the video I saw, advertising availability of memberships and of the facility for pool party events. I don’t think they’re holding themselves out to be an exclusive sort of venue.
In any case, happy ending for the children for now: Girard College has given the camp access to their pool for the remainder of the summer.
Is there anything as indicative of the freedom and happiness of summertime for kids as the smile of child in the process of jumping into a pool?
Don’t you have some little boy’s undergarments to sniff?
Sure, in a technical sense. But you don’t think the skeezy lawyer who takes the case won’t be helping the press find out who the members of the club are, the management too? Remember that news stories end up in search engines forever, pretty much always. Heck, that could start happening even without a lawyer. The members won’t like it, and they are probably smart enough to do their best to head it off to minimize bad publicity.
I don’t suppose any lawyer will need to do much poking around to find something either, if there are similar incidents alleged in the past, they will find the lawyer, the lawyer won’t have to have much initial cooperation from the club for support of fishing trips.
Hmmm.
Who said anything about bankrupting? Is the settlement I suggested really that unreasonable compared to the risk of unwanted publicity for members and the club alike (not civil suits)?
Is this something you think would be fair?
It’s quite obviously a business engaging in interstate commerce*. Cracker Barrel settled 42 individual suits for less egregious discrimination (seating black patrons only in smoking sections, regardless of their preference) for $8.7 million, and I doubt the club has that much. Is it fair? Probably not - but it’s an awful lot less than their exposure.
*As in, I can book admission for Tuesday from right here in Florida thanks to their handy-dandy online booking and payment system.
Depends on which side is paying me to represent them.
If you asked instead is it just, I’d say that if there is in fact a pattern of discrimination, this would probably rectify it while using the assets of the club and or its members to do some social good, and that may in fact be just.
If it turns out the kids were stealing from the candy machine and snapping all the cute girls’ bathing suits, and the manager chased them out when they couldn’t be controlled one step ahead of calling the cops, well, then maybe it would neither be just nor suggested by me as a way it might go down.
And to be fair, we haven’t heard from others who were there, including the local members, just one quote from the manager. Still, there seems to be enough smoke to take a look to see if there is fire, and if there is, well…
60 “minorities” ? Never mind. Thats nothing compared to “60 minutes” showing up.
Given the racial make up of Philly, it seems rather odd for the club not to have been better prepared to avoid this situation.
Maybe it was set up for the precise reason to avoid this situation, but the manager was new and didn’t get the memo yet.
[/wild ass speculation and joking]
All fine and dandy and it may well turn out thus. But how long do you think the club would stay in business? The white members would leave en masse (look at their sudden exit from the pool when the black kids entered it), another private club would open to fill the gap, and the old club would go bust.
The kids would certainly have the satisfaction of putting the place out of business, which is something, but they’d still have nowhere to swim.
Philly is Philly (see post above).