Uh, then what did you bring it up for? Because it wasn’t relevant to the discussion.
Right. By snarking at Bricker. Like I said, no class. If you were capable of admitting that you were off-base in starting this pit thread, and apologized, I would think you were a decent person who got caught up in the moment. But even your retractions here are half-assed and obnoxious.
You don’t seem to understand the point of my telling you you didn’t have enough information to reasonably criticize Vetbridge. You don’t know enough about either incident to decide whether Vetbridge’s actions were reasonable or not. I tried to tell you that in my first post; you ignored it.
Honestly, I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. “I totally understand that I don’t know anything about the situation and therefore I have no business condemning Vetbridge’s actions. So anyway, Vetbridge, I pit you!” Is that it?
Your behavior in starting and continuing this thread is just bizarre.
“Brave”? “Well done”? Are you serious?
She hasn’t even apologized. I don’t think saying, “I’m not going to talk about this anymore” is really “brave” in the context of her launching this unwarranted attack on Vetbridge. Even if she apologized at this point, it wouldn’t be worth much. But it would be something.
On occasion class will point out the lack thereof, just as truth will sometimes require exposing falsehood. Excalibre is perfectly correct that it would be less than just if the author of a thread pitting a fellow SDMB member were allowed to walk away from it short of (a)proving the allegation(s), (b)disavowing and apologizing for them, or (c)sticking around to take their deserved lumps. Zoe has often shown herself (at least on this message board) to be a thoroughly humane, thoughtful and admirable person, but every year or so (full disclosure: I was a loud, if not especially important, participant in her thread attacking Phlosphor) she is, I think, wrong in judging others. Most of us are occasionally wrong, but we can learn to curb our impulse to falsely accuse others of wrongdoing or poor ethics or general ickiness if we are called to account when our accusations prove baseless. The problem is, Zoe wants none of that. Having challenged her adversary (or maybe a few of them) to a duel, fired, and missed, she’d now just as soon forget the whole thing. I understand the impulse. But I’d just as soon something happened right now, in this thread, to quell her impulse to mount these attacks in the future. She’s just not credible enough any more to carry it off even if she turns out to be right with one of these things someday.
It will be unfortunate to have this thread resolved so unsatisfactorily, since integrity and personal ethics should dictate that if you call someone out, you see it through or apologize. We will also miss out on the Word of Shodan’s Dad.
It was eye-opening, nevertheless, to see how ignorant many people are of privacy and confidentiality matters in a professional relationship. Just to sum up, since this seemed to persist in the face of repeated efforts:
The holder of priviledge is the individual who engaged the professional to begin with (when there is no guardian, conservator or other similarly designated person). Other individuals can have no expectation of confidentiality (from the client) when they contact the professional with information about the holder of priviledge.
A psychologist, or I presume a physician or attorney or veterinarian or architect is not a designated secret keeper with whom everyone can expect a duty to protect information.
“Hey Qadgop the Mercotan, I want to fuck my neighbor’s wife. Ha ha! You can’t tell because you’re sworn to secrecy!”
Gee thanks, Zoe! In one pit thread you’ve managed to denigrate mentally ill people in a far more effective and compact way than Tom Cruise ever could have! Outta sight!
No, I don’t have some problem with you. I just thought you were getting a little boring and redundant. Maybe you should try something like “apologist” for a while.
I don’t have a defense of Zoe, but it seems the “putting perfectly healthy animals to sleep” would have been a better ethics argument than “sharing crazy neice letters.” Hindsight is 20/20. Although, count me among the people who would be interested in hearing from Shodan’s dad before this thread is closed.
I don’t like putting healthy animals to sleep. When I worked at an animal shelter, I cried when I gave the order to put sick kittens to sleep because we didn’t have the funds to treat them and couldn’t risk them infecting the other cats in the shelter.
There was a letter to the editor in the local paper yesterday which touches on this topic. A single man in the Army received orders for deployment to Iraq. (damnit) In getting ready for deployment, he tried to find home for his three dogs. The shelters here all said they were full. He was about to take the dogs in for euthanasia when he found someone to take them.
If he had not been able to find a place for the dogs, what would you have had him do? Leave them on the side of the road somewhere? Many vets will take healthy animals rather than euthanize them, but there is a limit on how many they can take. A vet has to make his business work, and feeding/sheltering too many homeless animals can cut into your bottom line pretty quickly. If your business doesn’t make money, you have out of work employees to consider as well.
It is easy to say you wouldn’t do it, but sometimes choices aren’t as straightforward or simple as you would like them to be.
How about the people you despise? Cuz we think you’re nuts in this thread too. Go on, just admit it; “I was wrong, I’m sorry”. You’ll feel better afterwards, I promise.
Zoe, in your exchange with Bricker, you might want to consider a proverb he offered up in a thread pitting him a couple years ago: When ten people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down. It was a mark in his favor that, when he realized his actions were so frustrating to so many people, he didn’t defend them to the death. He said, essentially, “Hmm. I’m not necessarily seeing it, but these people aren’t all crazy. Maybe I need to reconsider what I’m doing.”
The comment you made about the legal profession wasn’t a whoosh by any definition I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t a subtle joke that people took seriously because they didn’t catch the obscure allusion you were making. It was just a nasty swipe. That’s not a whoosh.
And your comments about vetbridge are similarly inappropriate. He’s in a difficult situation, but I can certainly see where he’s coming from. As a teaching analogy, imagine this: your student’s estranged father writes you a letter, castigating you for teaching the student such Satanic texts as The Tempest, and saying that he’s planning on gaining custody of the student so that you can’t subject him to such soul-damning materials any more. Are you really telling me it’d be inappropriate to call the student’s mother in for a conference about the situation, and share the father’s letter with her?
You owe several people an apology. I really hope you’re able to look at the advice without anger or defensiveness and see that.
Sorry, but that’s not an accurate analogy. The analogy would go more like this: A student is paying you $1,000s of dollars per month for information that he may or may not need and his father is questioning your profiting off of his son as well as his son’s mental health. Then the question is: Are you telling me it’d be inappropriate to call the student in for a conference and share the father’s letter with him?
I’ll work with your analogy, but we gotta modify it: the student’s mom is paying me (or, rather, the private school I run) thousands of dollars per term for education he may or may not need (like all education), and the father tells me the mom is crazy and that he’s going to be trying to get custody of the son, because his son doesn’t need a fancy private-school education.
Remember, my obligation is to the student, but the mom’s the one paying the bills. That’s where we need to take the analogy, if you want to involve money in it like that. We need a situation in which:
-I’m providing service to the client (the student/dog)
-Requested by a bill payer (the mom/dog owner)
-To the best of my ability
-And a third party with no legal ties to the client (the dad/niece)
-Questions the bill payer’s sanity
-And threatens to intervene in such a way as to terminate my ability to provide service to the client
-and in a manner that I am almost certain the bill payer will not appreciate.
In such circumstances, I see a personal obligation to let the bill payer know what’s going on behind her back.
Okay, wait, wait, wait. It’s not quite right yet. Let’s keep going here. The mom is paying not only for her son, but for random children that she picks up off the street who she thinks are stupid and need an education at her expense. And you have also wondered about her mental health yourself. I don’t know whether it is ethical or not to share the letter. I’m going to guess it IS ethical since everyone here has harped on it for four pages. But from my perspective, it is POSSIBLE that you COULD create the (false!) impression that you are worried more about your pocketbook than you are about your client in such a situation. Maybe that is why it seems questionable to some?
Nope–you’re pulling in extraneous variables, and may as well add the fact that the children she brings in sometimes bark or meow. In our society, it’s not uncommon for people to adopt stray animals off the street, but it’s extremely uncommon for people to pay for random children off the street and their education. (You could make that work by theorizing a scholarship fund, but that’s not necessary to the analogy’s central point, and detracts from it by excising the personal relationship between client and bill-payer).
Sure thing–so what if I have? I’m not in a position to judge her mental health: I’m in a position to provide my services as competently as possible.
I can see how some people could get that false impression from his continuing to provide services to the clients and continuing to take money from the billpayer. But sharing the letter? No: that’s just showing a modcum of respect to the bill-payer, giving her information that someone’s going behind her back.
True. But I don’t think it’s uncommon in our society for people to pay for their own children’s education and I do think it is extremely uncommon for people to have dozens of pets, be “obsessive” as to their care, go to the vet at least once a week, and choose state of the art treatment every time. I also think it is extremely uncommon to spend an average of $800 a week on pets. So maybe there’s no good way to make this analogy “apples to apples.”
Not purely apples to apples, but I pulled out what I believe are the salient points above, since Zoe seemed to be having trouble relating professionally to the situation. Everything you describe as uncommon before might properly be analogous to an extremely doting and involved parent who spares no expense for their own children.
