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Judge Rules TV Essential
A Brazilian judge has ruled what I have known for years, TV is an "essential good" needed to watch soccer and popular reality shows. I would have changed "essential good" to "best friend" or "mentor," but I can recognize the need to be conservative in a ruling. The judge awarded $2,600 in damages to a man who sued a store for not replacing his faulty television set. "In modern life, you cannot deny that a television set, present in almost all homes, is considered an essential good," ruled the judge. "Without it, how can the owner watch the beautiful women on 'Big Brother,' the national news broadcast or a football game," the judge quipped.
Does this mean that if I don't watch Big Brother or the soccer game, that I'm unnecessary evil?
From the article it looks like the judge was being somewhat tongue in cheek. The article describes him as making the comment as a "quip." Very likely he was simply commenting on the fact that for many people tv is very important and so the store in question's failure to help out with a broken tv they sold is even more unacceptable than if it were a generic luxury good. (This is my inference from the very short article). If that's the case this seems reasonable. Heck, I don't have a TV and this seems to make some sense. Note that this is for example in contrast to the Italian custody case where one parent was an Orthodox Jew who didn't want the kids exposed to TV and the court decided that that did constitute a reason to award custody to the other parent.