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Resistance is Not Futile. But It’s Also Not Enough.

October 28, 2017 / 0 Comments

Many people know the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech. Some can even recall something about religion and a free press being in there.

But there are two other parts of at the end of the run-on sentence opening the Bill of Rights that are often overlooked1: “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”.

Projection 188

It’s a good thing James Madison thought to include them. Assembling and petitioning have gotten a vigorous workout this year.

We certainly need to exercise our rights to push back against the racist, xenophobic, mysoginistic, Islamaphobic, and anti-immigrant policies being forced on us by both the Executive branch as well as the majority party in Congress.

But that need to resist is always there. Anytime governments or organizations, at any level, try to make changes we feel are not in the best interests of society, we should speak up.

We must resist the attempts to privatize our public school system, to degrade health services for women, to remove basic protections for the environment, and to completely unravel the already fragile support system for those on the low end of the economic system.

We need to push back against “leaders” who claim to know it all but don’t want the public to know anything about what they’re doing. Ones who say they have all the answers but won’t reveal even the questions.

However, resistance is not enough.

Pushing back too often results in maintaining the status quo. The same old ideas and leaders who got us to this point in the first place.

Resistance alone does not move society forward.

For that we need leaders who will clearly articulate and advocate for positive policies and laws. The people currently forcing regressive policies on the country need to be replaced with those who are not afraid of change and the future. It’s not enough for candidates to simply be “not them”, or run on trying to make us afraid of what “they” might do.

Unfortunately, that’s very much what is happening in the current off-off-year election for governor and other state-wide offices here in Virginia. The messages from Democratic candidates I’ve seen2, is very much of the “help us resist” variety rather than articulating a vision for the future of the state. And both sides are actively engaged in scaring people rather than giving them something positive to support.

I have no idea what will happen in this election. Despite all the noise, I suspect there are still too many indifferent people who are not paying attention and will not vote, leaving the choice to a minority of activists more concerned with gaining power than with building a better society.

I can only hope I’m wrong.

1. According to polls, only 12% of Americans know about their right to assemble. On the other hand, many also misread the part about Congress not making any laws abridging the right of speech and assume everyone else has a Constitutional obligation to put up with their rants.

2. I admit I haven’t seen all that many political messages since I actively avoid advertising of all kind. But the negative campaign has been very hard to miss.

The image is from an article in the Washington Post about an activist who pulled off an interesting protest at the Old Post Office building in DC, currently occupied by the Trump Organization.

Legislating Government Censorship

March 17, 2017 / 0 Comments

In May 2014, the high court of the European Union declared that EU citizens had a “right to be forgotten” online, derived from the Union’s stringent personal privacy laws. The information is actually forgotten, of course, just removed from our collective memories, also known as Google.

The “right to be forgotten” in the European Union originated from a court ruling demanding Google and search engines remove links to a story that embarrassed a Spanish man because it detailed a previous home repossession. The story was not factually inaccurate. He insisted it was no longer relevant and that it embarrassed him, and the court agreed he had the right to have the information censored from search engines.

Recently courts in the EU have found exceptions to that absolute right, but here in the US many lawmakers and pundits have speculated as to whether we should have the same right and the Europeans.

This week, two members of the New York legislature decided the answer is yes, and have introduced their own interpretation that actually goes beyond the rights granted to European citizens. Because if anything is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.

Censorship 1

Their bill would require the removal of “content about such individual, and links or indexes to any of the same, that is ‘inaccurate’, ‘irrelevant’, ‘inadequate’ or ‘excessive’”, from both search engines and the original website, within 30 days of a request.

Basically, with some exceptions for information about certain crimes and matters of “significant current public interest”, the law requires anything posted on the web that someone claims is “no longer material to current public debate or discourse” must be forgotten. Under penalty of some heavy fines.

What could possibly go wrong with a poorly defined (at what point does content become “excessive”?) law like that?

So, under this bill, newspapers, scholarly works, copies of books on Google Books and Amazon, online encyclopedias (Wikipedia and others) — all would have to be censored whenever a judge and jury found (or the author expected them to find) that the speech was “no longer material to current public debate or discourse” (except when it was “related to convicted felonies” or “legal matters relating to violence” in which the subject played a “central and substantial” role). And of course the bill contains no exception even for material of genuine historical interest; after all, such speech would have to be removed if it was “no longer material to current public debate.” Nor is there an exception for autobiographic material, whether in a book, on a blog or anywhere else. Nor is there an exception for political figures, prominent businesspeople and others.

I’m not a Constitutional expert, but even I realize a law like this would never survive a many First Amendment challenge.

But beyond the legal issues there is a far more concerning 800-pound gorilla. Right now we have far too many “leaders” who lust for tools that would allow the government to review and censor the online discussions of it’s citizens.

We don’t need a right to be forgotten in the US as much as we do a right to be left alone.

We Have The Right to Deceive

January 4, 2012 / 0 Comments

The Department of Transportation is telling airlines they have to be honest in their advertising.

Beginning Jan. 24, the Transportation Department will enforce a rule requiring that any advertised price for air travel include all government taxes and fees. For the last 25 years, the department has allowed airlines and travel agencies to list government-imposed fees separately, resulting in a paragraph of fine print disclaimers about charges that can add 20 percent or more to a ticket’s price.

Some airlines are suing to stop the rules on the grounds the government is violating their First Amendment free speech rights.

Is it possible for these companies to get any more contemptuous of their customers?

Maybe Too Much Freedom?

March 27, 2011 / 0 Comments

In a Post story about one segment of the news business that’s not suffering any decline, we find this little nugget of information,

The number of print, broadcast and digital journalists credentialed to cover Congress has been growing over the past five years and will exceed 6,000 this year, according to Senate press gallery director Joe Keenan, suggesting a ratio of roughly 11 news hacks to each member of Congress. Although not every registered journalist actually shows up on the Hill each day (most don’t), “there are more people than ever covering Congress on a daily basis,”… [my emphasis]

Could this be why congress critters believe most of what they say and do every day is actually important?

Are they spending too much time in an echo chamber, talking and listening to their personal entourage of 11 news hacks (and you know the high profile members have far more than eleven following them around)?

“Journalists” who are more interested in instant, headline grabbing scoops than educating the public about the problems facing the country and the proposed solutions (or, more likely, non-solutions).

And then there’s the fun fact that this article is on the front page of the Style section, which says that the Washington Post editors consider this entertainment news, fluff that goes nicely with their gossip column and movie reviews.

I wonder if this is what those founding fathers, revered by everyone in Congress, had in mind when they created the First Amendment phrase about freedom of the press.

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