What you write can (and should?) be held against you.

So here's a question that's been on my mind:  How much of what you say on a blog should reasonably be held against you?  An Alaska blogger recently lost her job for running an extremely nasty blog on the tiny Alaska town where she was news director at an NPR station.  The locals eventually found the blog and they were not happy.  Now I really can't find much pity here.  People are always doing this sort of thing; especially transplants in rural areas on the assumption that country folk are too dumb to use the internet or not nosey enough to google the names of people they know (The first is just insulting and kind of stupid.  The second is amazingly stupid since one stereotype about small towns that is definitely true is that the citizens are nosey as heck) and it they're always surprised when it blows up in their faces. Posting a blog like chillyhell about the town you live in is like playing with gasoline and matches.  Fun sure, (and yes it is fun we all know fire is fun let's not deny it) keep it up long enough though and it's likely to burn you.  Any sensible person should know this.

But behind that there's a more interesting question:  Is it ever morally justifiable to fire someone for what they post on a blog?  To me it seems to depend on who they are and what they post.  Suppose you're a campaign worker and post long rants about how the folks in congressional district X are mouth breathing morons who ought to be put in a zoo.  Once you're found out keeping you on the payroll is not going to do anything to get your candidate elected; just the opposite in fact.  And since that's why they pay your salary, well they'd be fools not to let you go.  Not only that but blogs aren't like bitching to your coworkers over drinks, mom and dad on the phone, or friends via email.  Everyone can read them.  So once certain lines are crossed in what someone says it seems reasonable that various employers might justifiably have grounds to can you for what you say on a blog.  After all, it can hurt the organizations' images and play heck with morale and employees ability to work with one another.  I know that if I took it into my head to trash a prof in my department I happened not to like online and at length I wouldn't be surprised if I got called into the chair's office and got read the riot act (in fact I'd be pleasantly surprised if that's all that happened to me).

But yeah, "once certain lines are crossed" just where do we draw those lines?  Well anything personal about someone who isn't a public figure seems to me to be in danger of crossing those lines.  Hillary Clinton, Mitch McConnell, Kent Conrad, etc.  all chose to put themselves in the limelight.  If you just need to make fun of someone; at least make fun of someone who has in some way asked for it.  What's more we have a compelling interest in making being able to discuss these people even in the roughest possible terms.  But can anyone really tell me that anyone besides the blogger and his or her friends has a compelling interest in trashing a few poor yokels no one's ever heard of before or that these people somehow deserve it?  Seems bad enough to be trapped in rural Alaska.  Anyway to some extent it seems common sense.  Within limits we think hating an otherwise decent person for his political opinions is unjustifiable, but hating someone for saying snarky, hurtful things about people we know and like, well that's a different thing entirely.

What happened to the author tags?

Dear Ms. Tuba Town,

Please bring back a few elements of our little corner of the world! There were a few things here that will be sorely missed:

Seeing who posed what
The link in the top corner of the Blog that linked to the settings page
A line or break separating one post from the next



The gods will smile upon you and yours if you could bring these things back to me Ms. Tuba Town.

Thank you

Voting: privilege or right?

Whaddya know? Got a theme goin' on here.

A brilliant, conscientious legal student friend o' mine over at the U of T sent me this video of a town hall with Congressman Mike Castle of Delaware, which was interrupted by a woman ranting about her birth certificate and her father's service in WWII. She eventually gets the whole assembly to rise and recite the pledge of allegiance.

A couple of things that caught my eye:

1. She actually gets them all to rise. She is moving people, having an effect. They are listening. This is not the kind of person I would find compelling, and I'm looking for the trick. Where are the mirrors?
   
2. She has quite a few supporters in the audience. Enough that their idiocy carries the day, and they're politically active. If there are an equal number of considerate, coherent citizens in that area, they're apparently the ones staying home!

Sometimes when my conversation gets real good and lubricated, I've been known to float the idea of competence tests for voters. Like a driving license, voters would have to answer some basic questions to determine that they care a little and have some information about what they're doing. I was once asked what kind of questions should go on such a test, and the best answer I have, not having done any serious research, would be the same questions the country would pose to immigrants. It would be something of a democracy-sophocracy hybrid. To be honest, I'm not sure if the video is an argument for or against it.

Rights & Privileges

Christopher Hitchens, former communist and trenchant (if grating) atheist, has recently argued that Henry Gates should have used his 4th amendment rights to keep a nosey constable at bay than to claim the officer was acting in prejudice. Though I would agree with the conclusion, Hitchens provides little more than personal anecdotes of how he himself has been harassed by the police without any justification for the position, so I'll do it for him.

It's pretty obvious that those on top of the North American social hierarchy have missed few opportunities to abuse those below. Cortez whooped the Aztecs, Pizarro did a number on the Inca, economienda and slave-driven agriculture gave privilege to the privileged. This practice has fortunately been losing legitimacy and its legal underpinnings. That the pendulum is swinging back is to be welcomed, but could it swing too far?
Now, I don't want to argue that some amount of institutionalized preference in favour of the historically downtrodden is illegitimate. How are those in a society that rewards education and privilege supposed to pull equal if they are starting from a position of ignorance and destitution? I've raved before about how important I think it is for everyone to have a fair shot and how tricky things get when fairness seems unattainable. There was no racial caveat before, and there never should be. I think, though, that legal interference to redress fair but unwanted outcomes has several negative side-effects. First, it could create a system of reverse discrimination (by the way, when does reverse discrimination mature and become just regular discrimination?). Second, it could lead those receiving the preferential treatment to become dependent on it. The man who gets a fish delivered to his door every day is going to be a lousy fisherman. Third, and maybe most seriously, it reifies the prevailing categories. There is a whole branch of arithmetic devoted to determining what fraction of First Nation blood one must have in order to qualify for benefits under the Canadian Indian Act. If we want a society that is colour blind, or at least colour tolerant such that it becomes a category devoid of normative content, then how are we supposed to get there if we're always thinking of rules and metrics to make distinctions on colour/race/sexual orientation/long list of etc?
I really respected that Barack Obama didn't play the race card during his campaign. He had his folksy moments, but they were as affected as his competitor's. And y'know, I think it worked. He got elected! So how do we maintain the post-racial momentum and capitalize on post-racial gains? I propose that, in cases of potential discrimination where a general right that applies to everyone would achieve the same outcome as a particular one that reproduces the categories that nobody wants anyway, argue generally. Use the 4th amendment. It would be wonderful if the general argument became recognized as the stronger one.

In other news, I've recently run across not one, not two, but three (!) articles expressing sympathy for the "hardships" faced by millionaires (and billionaires) in these tight times. I have little sympathy for a bus driver or telemarketer who overleveraged him/herself to speculate on the value of his/her house, but I have absolutely none for those who did essentially the same thing on a larger scale and will have much softer landings. A rich man might well get into heaven, but he ain't gettin' any sympathy for having to drink domestic beer.