Firstly, I have been following this thread and holding a view but wasn't going to comment until I saw this, it has encouraged the below, in a good way.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rushy
I am not going to try and play down the tension between this persons past and their current status as a FAL holder, but what is worth considering is that there are essentially two systems to choose from, one very rigid 'if x then y' without any room for exceptions, and the other, is one with stipulations but with some room for judgement calls as well. There are good and bad with both, the bad of the rigid is that it works fine until someone comes along who is naughty on paper only, it could be in the vein of sober driving a drunk friends car home on a restricted licence at 10.02pm. A rigid system sees the difference between 9.58pm and 10.02pm as legal/illegal even though there is no material difference. A police officer with discretion might let a restricted driver off if they were turning into their street at 10.02pm. And that is the good of the system with room for exceptions, it can look at whether the law was broken on paper without breaking the intent of the law. It allows people to over ride the rules when they see a lack of commonsense in how the system might treat a specific case.
This is also the negative of the discretionary system, it opens the window to serious mistakes. But whatever system we operate under, we take the good and the bad. It is fair to say the subject of this thread is an edge case, one that calls into question whether the ability to deploy some discretion is a good thing. But before I call for anyones past to be aired as dirty laundry, I consider my own, and hope that if I had to choose between one type of system or another, that I would first consider some of my previous life choices.
