Public Shaming on Twitter a Nightmare for all Parties

This is really horrible. Two guys at a tech conference are overheard privately making jokes about "dongles" and "forking," which were interpreted as sexist by a woman sitting in front of them whom they did not know. The woman then tweeted a picture of them with comments in order to publicly shame them.

Cue the, at turns, hyper-PC, hyper-insensitive and often nasty Internet, which within hours turned the story into a career and public-relations nightmare for the parties involved, their companies and the tech conference they were attending. What in years past would have resulted in a nasty look or, at worst, a testy conversation between the jokers and the offended party—most likely ending in apologies, a better understanding of each other and perhaps even friendship—has now resulted in the firing of one of the jokers and the offended tweeter herself.

The biggest problem with these sort of viral situations is that things quickly spin beyond the initial issue at hand. Was the tweeter right to publicly shame the men, rather than privately rebuke them? Were the tech guys being offensive or just a bit childish in their banter? What's the proper reaction for conference organizers and others on Twitter to this incident? Instead, we have hateful people tweeting horrible things about the woman. Her employer's website was hacked and shut down. The employer, running scared, fired her, around the same time the employer of one of the men fired him.

It's hard to say what can be done about such things in the wide-open world of social media. Restraint from all parties involved is called for, of course, but perhaps the key missing element here is courage. The offended tweeter could have brought the issue up with the men. The men could have apologized to her directly, or on Twitter, once they knew someone had taken offense (the one who was fired did apologize in a blog comment). The companies involved could have stood by their employees until the furor died down. Most of all, the cowardly Internet trolls and haters could have put up or shut up—they are the ones most deserving of shame.

Putting 'Liberty' Above Life—and the Pursuit of Happiness

If Government's the Disease, is Chaos the Cure?

So, Fernando Antonio Salguero, I hear a police dog detected explosive materials in the trunk of your illegally parked car, and you got arrested by police in New Jersey. The tear gas canisters they found you call "larger pepper-spray cans" (in case of attack by Yeti); the rocket-propelled flares are for distress (presumably on a boat in the open ocean), and the extendable baton, you claim, allows you to break windows to rescue people from burning cars.

"There's no problem [with having a baton] here in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but in the state of New Jersey the people are much closer to the slave state. Slaves are not allowed to be armed . . . at all," you told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

"I'm not anti-cop," you added. "I'm anti-tyranny."

You believe 9/11 was a fix and are a founder of the survivalist group Survive and Thrive. You refuse to fly. You are a self-styled defender the U.S. Constitution against "all enemies, foreign and domestic." You think juries should be able to nullify laws.

Like so many of your ilk, you claim to love some mythologized notion of America and have nothing but contempt for what the country actually is. You distrust government and the agents of government, believe in vast conspiracies upheld by armies of drone-like beaurocrats, and expect any day that the forces of evil will attempt to take away all your rights and liberties, enabled by our corrupt justice system.

If you dislike America so much, why don't you go live somewhere else? In Pakistan, you can own fully automatic weapons, live in a gated community, and hire armed guards to prevent your kids from being kidnapped on the way to the movie theater! Sounds good, right?

Of course, you won't leave, and here's why: the United States is a nation of laws, and the powers you rail against are the bastion of a functioning civil society, which you rely on every day of your life for health, security, well-being, safe delivery of goods and services, infrastructure to get to work, and your very job itself, the carrying out of which is predicated on notions of mutual trust, civic standards and voluntary access to private property.

You might appreciate the police a little more if we lived in your paradise of freedom, where government has little power to prevent vigilante justice (the voice of the people!), weapons hoarding and/or mini-fiefdoms created by self-styled "defenders of liberty." I'm not saying you personally are a bad person; I'm sure you mean well and believe you do what's best for your family. But think a bit more about the consequences of your ideology. You may find that is where Scary truly resides.

Damning Evidence of Charter Schools' Cherry Picking

I wrote last year on this blog about how, by building in a bias toward parents who have the means and desire to make their children's education a high priority, charter schools gut the public schools of their best students and make themselves look more effective than they actually are, as public schools are forced to handle those whom private educators refuse to admit, due to issues of behavior, disability or neglect.

More compelling evidence of this dynamic has just come out in a damning investigation by Reuters into charter schools' throwing up barriers in order to only get the students they want. As I mentioned last year, if we continue down this path of aggressive "school choice," we will only increase educational disparity in this country—the single biggest factor behind social and economic inequality. The charter school movement is not the path to quality schooling for all.

Read the Reuters report here.

The NRA's Twisted Vision

As is often the case with ideologues on the defensive, Wayne LaPierre's defense of Second Amendment rights was full of self-righteous moralizing about the "real" causes of gun violence. More important than his attempt to shift the conversation away from high-powered assault weapons, however, was the much-publicized proposal for placing armed guards in every school.

The notion that an armed society is a safe society, that the best way to handle a "bad guy with a gun" is with a "good guy with a gun," defines the essence of what the NRA is about. Reflecting on this idea as it would play out in a real-world mass shooting exposes it as more than just a risky social experiment. It is in a very real sense sick, twisted, and delusional.

Columbine High School had an armed guard, who failed to stop Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold from murdering 12 of their fellow students in 1999. In a situation such as played out last month in Newtown, Conn., a quick and effective response by the good guys would be very unlikely. People would have died before the shooter was disabled—and that's assuming guards or gun-toting teachers could have succeed in taking down a well-armed gunman possessing the element of surprise and ample time to plan an assault.

Arming school employees would not dissuade determined sociopathic, suicidal or mentally ill persons from planning and carrying out a massacre. Knowing what they would face, such individuals could take steps to safeguard themselves with bullet-proof vests, accomplices, hostages or shields. They likely would expect to die—but not before getting a number of rounds off, going out in a "blaze of glory." They might even relish the fight, looking forward to a Call of Duty-style shootout as innocent victims are caught in the crossfire. 

To even be discussing this is sheer insanity. Essentially, LaPierre is arguing that Americans' right to buy assault weapons without restrictions is worth the lives of a few kids every now and then, or a few moviegoers, or a few citizens assembled to meet their member of Congress, or a few bystanders at a mall.

Banning firearms outright would not succeed in disarming criminals any more than drug prohibition tamps down the drug trade. But, as with alcohol and tobacco, reasonable restrictions are in order. LaPierre's "solution" is a desperation move, a distraction, a red herring that firearm fundamentalists can run—or at least shield themselves—with.

For a voice of sanity, read former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell's recent op-ed piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer. We may never change the NRA, but we can insist they stop bullying lawmakers into doing nothing about a problem for which they have no solution.

Is God a Democrat?

Before the 2008 Democratic Convention, James Dobson and Focus On the Family promoted a prayer campaign asking God to rain on Barack Obama's open air convention speech in Denver. Well, it didn't come to pass; the weather was great that day, and the convention a resounding success. Instead, there cameth an economic meltdown near the end of the 2008 campaign season, convincing America that George W. Bush's economic policies were, in fact, horrible (and that John McCain had nothing helpful to say about the crisis), and catapulting Obama into the White House.

Now we have Hurricane Sandy, which altered the flow and tenor of the campaign by putting climate change squarely back on the political radar, and earning Obama an endorsement from New York's independent-minded mayor Michael Bloomberg.

So, do these uncannily-timed catastrophic events prove God is a Democrat? If you ask me, I'd say no, because I don't believe in a deity that sends plagues and murders first-born sons, much less chooses sides in an election. Even if I did, I would not presume, as do the supremely arrogant Dobson and his ilk, to have seen His yard sign. I instead draw a much more down-to-earth conclusion: real-world events favor the Democrats because that's what real-world events tend to do.

The modern Republican Party draws its fuel from myth: lone-wolf libertarianism, Randian capitalist utopianism, the inherently corrupt State (always teetering on the brink of Stalinism) and the Founding Fathers as pious prophets—not to mention a gaggle of conspiracy theories, demagoguery and hyperbolic histrionics. It's a nice way to avoid facing facts, such as global warming being real, evolution being true, taxes and regulation being necessary, the constitutional separation of church and state, and the like.

But facts, as William C. Redfield once said, have a way of substituting themselves for fancies. It's happened again and again in history as conservative stands have been dashed against the shores of reality. The Royalists did not prevail in the 1700s, nor the antebellum slave apologists and Know-Nothings, the Hooverites, the Isolationists, the John Birchers, the segregationists; and so it will be for today's Tea Party, as environmental crisis, science, economic necessity and 21st century realpolitik make these ideas irrelevant. Sorry, folks: history just aint on your side.

Meantime, we have events like Superstorm Sandy to remind us of why we should listen to those proffering data and expertise rather than claiming the mantle of righteousness—especially when of the divine sort.