News You Need to Know – Page 14

Find a Career in Letting Children Get Gunned Down

Are you looking for a career that will allow you to live comfortably in your old age? Try a career in standing by while the children you’re tasked with protecting get gunned down:

Scott Peterson, the Broward County sheriff’s deputy who failed to engage the Parkland high school shooter, is eligible to receive an annual pension in excess of six figures.

The Sun Sentinel obtained records from the Florida Department of Management Services showing that Peterson, who retired in the weeks after the March shooting, is due to collect $8,700 per month. That works out to slightly more than $104,000 a year. Peterson, who is 55 years old, will be able to receive that pension for the rest of his life, and Broward County taxpayers will cover 50 percent of his health insurance premiums.

I guess the only solace here is that half of his health insurance premiums will quickly gobble up $104,000 per year at the rate it’s increasing.

My criticism here isn’t so much against Peterson (I’ve already criticized him) but against the department that employed him. Peterson failed to do his job and that failure likely lead to unnecessary deaths (shooters tend to off themselves upon meeting armed resistance so Peterson’s mere presence with a firearm would have stood a very high chance of immediately resolving the situation). He should have been terminated from the department for that. Instead the department let him retire and collect his absurd pension.

Tipper Gore Would Be Proud

Fighting “hate” is all the rage these days. Facebook, Twitter, and now Spotify have all made pledges to fight “hate” on their platforms. But how does one define hate? Spotify decided that it didn’t want to tackle that difficult philosophical question itself so it outsourced the exercise to a few organizations including the Southern Poverty Laws Center (SPLC):

According to the policy, any tracks or artists identified as “hate content”—defined as music that “principally promotes, advocates, or incites hatred or violence against a group or individual based on characteristics, including, race, religion, gender identity, sex, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, veteran status, or disability”—will be either removed from Spotify altogether or suppressed in promotions and stripped out of any platform-generated playlists.

The “hateful conduct” part of the policy will take aim at musicians’ off-the-clock behavior. “When an artist or creator does something that is especially harmful or hateful,” the company explains, that will affect the company’s dealings with them. R. Kelly, who has been accused of sexually abusing underage girls, appears to be the first casualty of this policy: The singer’s music will still stream at Spotify but will no longer be promoted there.

Several advocacy groups will help Spotify identify “hate content.” Among them: the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League, and GLAAD.

Since the SPLC is involved, anything that isn’t left of communism will probably get purged.

What will the aftermath of this policy announcement look like? If other streaming services decide to follow along, we will likely see an increase in music piracy again. People aren’t going to suddenly not want to listen to music by an artist simply because the SPLC decided it was hateful. If Spotify or Apple Music won’t stream the music people want, they will stop paying for those services and find their music elsewhere. This is how things have always worked.

Make the Slaves Carry Their Tracking Devices

Mobile phones are useful for both us and government. For us they provide almost instant communications with any of our contacts across the globe as well as access to the collective knowledge base of humanity. For government they provide real-team location information and a potential goldmine of evidence, which is why one British judge thinks that there are benefits to forcing individuals to carry their cell phones at all times:

A senior British judge has highlighted the benefits of legislation that obliges people to carry their mobile phone at all times.

Sir Geoffrey Vos QC, Chancellor of the High Court and former head of the Bar Council, raised the prospect of compulsory mobe-carrying in a speech to the Law Society (PDF).

His speech hypothesized a future where everybody is required to carry their cell phone and how that would lead to easier criminal prosecutions. It’s also not an implausible future, especially in Britain. The island is already a surveillance state. Legally requiring individuals to carry a tracking device at all times probably wouldn’t even be noticed in the pile of other tracking technologies already being employed by Big Brother. Moreover, once everybody is legally required to carry their cell phone, another law could easily be passed that mandates that all cell phones have a “law enforcement mode” that allows law enforcers to secretly active a phone’s microphone and camera to collect evidence. That would, after all, make life easier for law enforcers, which seems to be what this judge is interested in.

We live in an time where Nineteen Eighty-Four is not only technologically feasible but is easily implementable thanks to the fact that most people already voluntarily carry around a device that can collect evidence against them.

It’s Not the Badge You Wear, It’s the Badge in Your Heart

The brutal attitude held by man law enforcers isn’t instilled by the badge that they wear but by the badge that exists in their hearts:

An analysis by The Intercept, using data from the Fatal Encounters project, found that plainclothes cops play a role in such killings disproportionate to their relatively small numbers among the NYPD’s ranks. Plainclothes police have been involved in nearly a third of all fatal shooting incidents recorded since 2000, according to The Intercept study.

There have been at least 174 fatal shootings by on-duty New York City police officers since 2000, according to an analysis of data from Fatal Encounters, a website that tracks deaths involving police. Plainclothes or undercover police were involved in 54 of those deaths, while uniformed police were involved in 41 fatalities. Eleven cases involved both uniformed and plainclothes cops. (Three of the shootings were self-inflicted.)

There is a lot of speculation one could make about this but at this point I just find it to be an interesting statistic. The New York Police Department has a reputation for brutality and it appears that that reputation doesn’t cease when an officer exchanges his uniform for street clothes.

He Just Wanted to Go Home to His Family

Discharging a firearm in an uncontrolled environment always carries a certain amount of risk. This is just one or many reasons why it’s smart to avoid deadly force when possible. But law enforcers often have a different attitude. Many law enforcers seem to think that even minor situations should be escalated to deadly force:

A deputy with the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office fatally shot a groundhog in Eldersburg on Sunday in an incident captured on video that has been widely shared on social media.

The deputy stopped when he observed the groundhog acting oddly, department spokesman Cpl. Jon Light said.

“It doesn’t appear that it had bitten anyone at that point,” Light said.

It is unclear whether the groundhog was rabid, Light said.

If an animal appears to be acting oddly, it’s probably smart to call animal control since individuals who deal specifically with animals are more likely to know whether something is wrong with the animal or if it’s seemingly odd behavior is actually normal. What isn’t smart is getting out of your vehicle and approaching it. What’s even dumber is needlessly discharging a firearm at it when there are other people in the vicinity.

With all of that said, at least this law enforcer waited until the animal was actually acting aggressively against him (possibly because the animal wasn’t happy with the enforcer acting aggressively towards it) before he shot it. That amount of restraint is far more than is commonly shown by his fellows in situations like this.

Promises, Promises

There was a lot of anger when Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson were arrested for, apparently, being black in Starbucks. Some people have claimed that there were other grounds for the arrest but form what I’ve found, and I admit that I hasn’t spent much time digging deeply into this so I could be incorrect, the arrest was for being black in Starbucks. But the reason for the arrest is irrelevant. What matters is the public’s perception of the arrest. That perception has caused a not insignificant amount of heartache for both Starbucks and the City of Philadelphia, which employs the law enforcers who performed the arrest. The City of Philadelphia, not surprisingly, decided to settle the matter with a payoff. However, it got off cheap:

Two black men arrested for sitting at a Philadelphia Starbucks without ordering anything have settled with the city for a symbolic $1 each and a promise from officials to set up a $200,000 program for young entrepreneurs.

Emphasis mine.

Promises from politicians aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Nelson and Robinson would have been better off taking the $200,000 and setting up the program themselves because I guarantee that the city is going to sweep its promise under the rug as soon as the public forgets about the entire matter. If Nelson and Robinson somehow do manage the make the city go through with its promise, the officials tasked with doling out the money will certainly find a way to disqualify everybody who isn’t politically connected. That’s how government programs work.

Overall, this was good news for Philadelphia and bad news for black people who frequent Starbucks because now neither the city nor its law enforcers have any motivation not to arrest people for being black in Starbucks.

Open Textbooks

I enjoy helping individuals educate themselves. In pursuit of this goal I try to find sources of free educational material and share them with as many people as possible. Recently I stumbled across the Open Culture website, which has a page listing freely available textbooks.

I haven’t had an opportunity to dig through all of the listed textbooks nor am I qualified to determine the accuracy of the material in many of the listed books. However, of the few textbooks I have perused, they appear to be good quality and were written by credentialed professors.

Feel free to go through the list and download anything that piques your interest.

Two Seasons

Here in Minnesota there are two seasons: the season where the roads are unusable due to snow and the season where the roads are unusable due to MnDOT:

This week’s ramp closures and detours are just a foretaste of what’s coming in mid-June. That’s when the Minnesota Department of Transportation will shut down the main ramp leading from northbound Interstate 35W into downtown Minneapolis — for four months.

MnDOT, city officials and many downtown employers are bracing for epic traffic jams and urging commuters to take transit or work at home — and even dangling huge parking discounts for carpools.

The I-94/I-35W interchange is being rebuilt as part of a $239 million makeover of I-35W between downtown and 43rd Street. But that is just one of four work zones that I-35W drivers will encounter this summer. Overlapping projects with lane closures of their own will be underway simultaneously in Burnsville and Roseville and just past the I-35W/35E split in Forest Lake.

The last sentence probably illustrates the biggest issue with Minnesota road construction. It’s not just that parts of a major artery are shutdown but that multiple parts of multiple major arteries are shutdown simultaneously. MnDOT representatives are always quick to tell commuters to use alternate routes but oftentimes no alternate routes exist because MnDOT has shut them down as well.

As a libertarian I’m required by law to answer the question, without government who would build the roads? I will answer that question with another question. Without government who will shutdown the roads? Here in Minnesota it seems like we’re forced to pay a lot of taxes to build roads that we’re never able to use.

Being Inquisitive Versus Believing

William Blackstone expressed the popular idea that, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” Although the concept that accused parties are innocent until proven guilty existed before Blackstone’s formulation, it describes the foundation upon which the concept was built. Innocent people should never have to suffer for a crime they did not commit even if the rigorous criteria that ensure that allows some guilty people to escape punishment.

This is a concept in which I strongly believe, which is why arguments like this make me uneasy:

The mask slips yet again. When challenged to defend flyers posted around an Oregon campus that warn of a widespread sexual assault problem, a college official said the following: “Believing survivors means let’s sit down and understand each other’s experience. Let’s believe what that person said, he or she has experienced, that we have experienced. It may not be the truth, as has been determined, but it is that person’s truth and what they were going through.”

When I express my agreement with William Blackstone, I’m often accused of also necessarily saying that victims of sexual assault shouldn’t be believed. After all, if you believe that accused parties are innocent until proven guilty, you necessarily believe that anybody who accused another of wrongdoing is lying unless they can prove otherwise, right? Not quite.

I think the biggest problem with arguments about whether individuals who accuse others of wrongdoing should be believed is the use of the word “believe.” I’m of the opinion that if one individual accuses another of sexual assault, outsiders shouldn’t automatically believe the accuser nor should they automatically believe that the accuser is lying. Instead outsiders should be inquisitive. They should want to pursue an investigation so that the truth may be discovered.

Far too often people claim that an individual who accuses another of sexual assault should be automatically believed. On the opposite side of the spectrum is the automatic assumption that an individual making such an accusation is lying in order to bring harm to the accused. Neither attitude is productive because both attitudes establish judgements without investigation. It would be akin to a scientist, upon making an observation, concocting a theory to explain that observation and declaring that theory as fact without testing their theory through experimentation to determine whether it’s plausible or incorrect.

Being inquisitive when an individual accuses another of wrongdoing guards against punishing the accused if it turns out they didn’t wrong the accuser while also allowing the accuser to be punished if it turns out that they did wrong the accuser.

The Leaders of North and South Korea Actually Talked

We witnessed a historic moment yesterday. For the first time since 1953 a leader from one Korea crossed the demilitarized zone to the other Korea:

The leaders of North and South Korea have agreed to work to rid the peninsula of nuclear weapons after holding a historic summit.

The announcement was made by the North’s Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in of South Korea after talks at the border.

The two also agreed to push towards turning the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953 into a peace treaty this year.

This is great news. I’m actually surprised that Kim Jong-un is even discussing denuclearization since his nuclear weaponry is likely the only thing that has dissuaded the United States from invading his country. But then this agreement could act as similar agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union did. While both sides paid lip service to denuclearization, neither actually denuclearized. However, the talks about denuclearization opened a dialogue between the two countries, which helped greatly ease tensions.

Perhaps both North and South Korea are interested in denuclearization, perhaps not. But the mere willingness to discuss the matter will likely ease tensions between the two nations enough to allow for further progress on the road to peaceful coexistence.