<<Polygraphs are accepted by many employers , including the US government for the purpose of employee screening , at hireing and finding pilferers to fire.>>
Well, employee screening isn't meant to be accurate at all, it's just an attempt to "clear the decks" or "winnow" the crowd of applicants so that whoever's left is a lot less likely to become a problem employee if hired. It's a rough tool, and accuracy in detecting liars is not the criterion. If the machine identifies some real liars and also mis-identifies some honest people with false positives, for the purposes of the employer, as long as there is a good-sized pool of candidates remaining, the machine has served its purpose. If you need ten good apples for baking some apple pies and an apple-sorting machine takes a couple of hundred apples, detects about 150 bad apples and also throws out 20 good ones as well, you're still left with thirty apples, all good, from which to choose ten for your pies. That's the principle of screening.
Employee hiring - - far as I can tell, same as screening.
Finding pilferers? Far as I can tell, if an employee denies pilfering and is fired only because the machine says his denial is a lie, I'd say he's got great cause for a wrongful dismissal lawsuit.
<<Is this pertinant?>>
Not really, because we're not dealing with any random schmuck of no particular sophistication. We're dealing with a pervert who has a lot of money and is able to purchase all the coaching and practice he needs to beat the machine and/or to buy the right man to analyze his TV appearances. In Cain's case, I can say with total confidence, the "passing" of the test is 100% meaningless. Which is not to say that it won't influence plenty of ignorant couch-potato schmucks who don't know any better.
<< I am trying to remember which of us rejected the "presumption of innocence" because it was valid only in court.>>
What I said was that the "presumption of innocence" originated in the English criminal courts at a time when over 250 distinct criminal offences carried the death penalty. We in Canada (Nova Scotia) for example, carry the dubious distinction of having hanged a 12-year-old servant girl for the offence of stealing a silver spoon from her employer. So it was very important for a court of such fucking barbarians to at least try to limit their barbarism to such victims who were actually guilty of what they were charged with.
The presumption of innocence was carried over into modern times, on the theory that criminal convictions, with or without further penalties of incarceration, carried a stigma comparable in seriousness to the infliction of the death penalty, and therefore that the criminal courts must still bend over backwards to ensure that no innocent man or woman would be unfairly stigmatized with a criminal conviction if actually innocent.
However most decisions in our lives are not made to such rigorous standards. If I have to decide whether or not Herman Cain is a loathesome creep, and my decision doesn't involve penalties or jail time for the Hermster, much less the sentence of death, the standards by which the decision is made have to be somewhat relaxed. So the standards of criminal proof (guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, presumption of innocence, etc.) are not applied.
This doesn't prevent anyone from applying whatever standard of proof he chooses to any particular set of circumstances. The problem is one of practicality and rationality - - I won't take my umbrella with me unless it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it will rain; if there are twenty of my son's favourite cookies missing from the cookie jar, even though my wife hates those cookies, I won't break my son's presumption of innocence and will insist on proof beyond a reasonable doubt before blaming him for taking the cookies. In real life, presumption of innocence is rare. It's counter-intuitive. The reason the concept was even invented in the first place was that most people just don't think like that, just don't use "presumption of innocence" in their own lives outside the courtroom.
The other problem is consistency - - people who insist on giving Cain the presumption of innocence in the face of all the indications that he's not innocent, yet never even thinking of presumption of innocence in alleging that Obama's a Muslim, born in Kenya, a socialist, a hater of white Americans, etc.
