Tag Archives: ethics

“Journalists”

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The NLMSM is getting their own tactics, on occasion, used against them.

And they’re squalling like stuck pigs.

Last week, a New York Times editor, Tom Wright-Piersanti, was demoted after 10-year-old tweets mocking Jews and American Indians resurfaced and were widely covered by conservative outlets.

But, but—no fair! [emphasis added]

“But using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for—or as a warning not to pursue—coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power,” wrote reporters Jeremy Peters and Kenneth Vogel.

Here, though, are a couple of examples of “news media scrutinizing people in positions of power” (I’m omitting the NLMSM’s conspiracy-peddling here):

[A] CNN crew showed up on an elderly woman’s lawn in Florida to publicly shame her for unknowingly sharing a “Russian-coordinated event” on her Facebook page. Consequently, the woman received waves of violent threats, abuse, and harassment online.

And

[T]he Daily Beast reporter Kevin Poulsen doxed a black forklift operator from New York who doctored a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Naming the man would have been entirely legitimate.  Doxing, however, goes a bridge—a deliberate bridge—too far. Doxing someone publishes his address, his personal contact data, where he works, the names and place of work of his wife, and the names of his children—and it often includes where those children go to school.

But the screaming from pseudo-journalists is this: don’t you dare do to us what we do to you. You cannot hold us to our own standards. We’re special, and these are special tools.

Can there be any further question of the fundamental dishonesty of the press, or of the NYT in particular?

No, Mssrs Peters and Vogel. You’re not that special, and neither are the public’s tool of discourse and criticism.  You are that disgusting, though.  And Wright-Piersanti?  Look for him to be quietly repromoted in a bit.

 

h/t Grim’s Hall

Gun “Control”

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The Wall Street Journal‘s student-written Future View column turned to gun control recently, and Rasmus Haure-Peterson, a philosophy and economics major at the University of Oxford, had a thought in his letter.  He wrote, in part,

Given the spree of mass shootings, some targeted gun-control measures are needed for the sake of a safer America, even if they curb some people’s rights on the margins. But gun-rights advocates won’t make that concession unless they know that giving an inch won’t cost them a mile.

Haure-Peterson was on the right track until he got to the first part of this. It’s wrong, morally and legally, to punish—especially under the insidious guise of “restrictions,” or during the hysteria of “mass shootings”—everyone for the crimes of a few. Go after the few.

He got back on track with the last. As long as the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party flat refuse to say what their gun control limiting principle is, the only possible conclusion is that they’re after the natural limit: taking all of our weapons.

Student Loans and Scams

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Folks are growing concerned about the magnitude of, and problems associated with, the massive student loan situation, and the some are even calling it a scam.

Defaults have fallen for most forms of consumer debt as the economic expansion continues. Mortgage delinquencies last quarter hit a historic low. But severely delinquent student loans have soared since 2012 and are now 35% of “severe derogatories”—more than credit cards (23%), auto loans (21%), and mortgages (11%).

This “scam” is laid at the feet of the CBO during the Obama administration.  It’s certainly true that the CBO misread the situation, perhaps even negligently so.

Here’s the short and sweet of it, though.

The student loan overhang is a serious problem.  However, the real scam is that of so many Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates who want to forgive all those loans—transferring the loan problem directly onto the backs of taxpayers, instead of leaving it where it belongs: the responsibility of the students and parents who borrowed so foolishly and of the lenders who so foolishly loaned.

In Which the 9th Gets One Right

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Facebook’s use of the output of its facial recognition software—imagery of individuals’ faces—without those individuals’ prior permission can be contested in court, according to the Ninth Circuit.  Facebook had demurred when the case was brought.

On Thursday, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected Facebook’s efforts to dismiss the ongoing class-action lawsuit, which could potentially require the company to pay billions in compensation.
The lawsuit dates back to 2015 when three Facebook users living in the state [Illinois] claimed the tech giant had violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which requires companies to obtain consent when collecting their biometric information.

Judge Sandra Ikuta, writing for the court, wrote:

We conclude that the development of a face template using facial-recognition technology without consent (as alleged here) invades an individual’s private affairs and concrete interests.

Yewbetcha.  However, the courts, ultimately, the Supreme Court, need, in the end, to rule decisively that no company gets to steal a man’s personally identifying information—which his face assuredly is in this day of highly accurate facial recognition software—and theft is what it is when the data are taken without permission.

It’s even worse when these data, these facial recognition image outputs, are monetized for the benefit of the company in question with that done behind the individuals’ backs, too.

They Do

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Hong Kong closed its airport for several hours Monday because protesters were thronging the terminals in protest of the People’s Republic of China’s Hong Kong—Carrie Lam—government’s attack on the “semi-autonomy” of the city, and of the police’s growing violence against what have been fundamentally peaceful protests over the last several weeks.  The movement into the airport is a recent development of these peaceful protests.

Then Lam’s Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung said this regarding the protests at the airport:

[P]eople should cherish the future of Hong Kong, which is the collective hard work of everyone over many years.

That’s exactly right, although not in the way Cheung meant.  The Hong Kong people do cherish the future of their city and environs. That’s why they’re in the streets, and now the airport, protesting an overweening government that’s so plainly in the hands of the PRC’s autocrat President Xi Jinping.

Their city most assuredly is the outcome of the result of the work of all those people, effort expended over so very many years.

Their city most assuredly is very much at risk at the hands of that misbehaving government.