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Judicial Nominations In the Internet Age
Hugh Pickens writes "Chris Good writes in the Atlantic that nominees to the Supreme Court and other high-profile positions are required to provide the Judiciary Committee with everything they've ever written or said publicly, to the best of their abilities within reason. Thanks to the Internet, the last major judicial nominee reported out by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ninth Circuit nominee Goodwin Liu, included links to YouTube videos of lectures and talks he gave, 573 pages of public writings, news articles about him, syllabi from courses he taught, and statements about legal issues. Even so, Liu was admonished for failing to fully disclose his writings and public speeches to senators, including appearances at such occasions as brown bag lunches and alumni gatherings. 'In preparing my original submission, I made a good-faith effort to track down all of my publications and speeches over the years,' wrote Liu. 'I checked my personal calendar, I performed a variety of electronic searches, and I searched my memory to produce the original list. But I have since realized that those efforts were not sufficient.' Not so long ago, entire news articles in local papers could go wholly unnoticed, by both the nominee and committee members and staff, but not so in the era of the Internet. 'Imagine what will happen when, decades from now, a president nominates someone to the Supreme Court who had access to Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook at the age of 15.'"
Don't be so certain they are completely gone. Google, The Internet Archive, and other crawlers may or may not have saved that information in some form that is accessible. Now with Twitter being archived by the Library of Congress and the never-ending FB account, the age of discarded information is slowly disappearing.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
It seems to me that what's going to have to happen is that people are going to have to get over the idea that they can actually review every statement a nominee has ever made, get over the idea that people should be automata who never say anything possibly embarrassing (and thus that it even makes sense to want to review everything they've ever written), and get over the idea that there's some absolute bright line between the public and private life.
While we're doing that for the Supreme Court, maybe we should also do it for other random jobs. It's idiotic to check every Facebook a job candidate has ever made to see if they've failed to toe the line at all times. Doing that favors worthless nonentities.
These pretenses are technologically obsolete, and people need to deal with that.
I can't wait for the day when a nomination for the supreme court gets rejected because of his 13 year old rants about how "Xboxes are totally for fags and noobdy likes Xbxes but fanboys"
Or because of 14 year old self's Xbox Live login name...
"I see here you used to go by the alias, 'p00nhunter.' Now, can you please tell this committee what exactly a p00n is? And why you were hunting them?"
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
a president nominates someone to the Supreme Court who had access to Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook at the age of 15.
This is why it is important to realize that everyone has multiple lives: private, public, serious, fun, sexual, intimate, bigoted, religious, etc...
It is not enough to inquire about a person's character. People have many characters. The characters or personae overlap somewhat, but not greatly.
Consider the English judicial court. The lawyers and judges put on ceremonial robes and wigs to specifically separate their lives, personalities, and past histories outside of the courtroom from the current business inside the courtroom.
Consider the thousands of women who have posed for men's magazines. Millions of men use their images for sexual projection ('wanking' for all you insensitive UK sods). Thousands of men have found themselves in the situation where they are working with women that they masturbated to, and felt an intimate connection for a ten second window. Only a serious jerk would dig up the old magazines or internet erotic photos and flash them to the other co-workers. Porn is a separate realm: what is in the stroke rag or porn film stays there. The woman that you work with is not the same woman whose picture is in the magazine, even if it is the same person. One person; multiple personae. Simple Puritan brains can't handle this concept. But,hell, you mastered C language and Linux APIs, you can master real-world sophistication also.
We see this also in the peculiar American obsession for destroying people's careers over the presence of molecules of marijuana in their urine. What a weird obsession! 'You are the purity of your piss!'. When people are stoned they are not the same personae as when they are sober. Both conditions are valid. But have their place. The only valid reason to destroy a person's career over their intoxicational preference is if (and only if) they are uncontrollably intoxicated in a situation where they are supposed to be sober. Outside of that, different drugs make different personae. Only fascists refuse to accept this.
These politicians digging into the judge candidate's background and demanding every brain fart of the candidate's past are all assholes. They are transparent chickenshit party hacks of a corrupt and bankrupt political system. They have some minor importance now, but they won't in future. All they will have then is the eternal hatred and contempt of the people trying to live with the consequences of their stupidity.
If by "better qualified" you mean being a silver tongued bastard who has an innate ability to always say what's politically expedient.
Please note that this is not the same as being either honest or competent.
"Yes Congressman, I was a horny 14 year old that wanted to score pussy. Your secretary tells me you are *still* like that."
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I'm less worried about Congress and more worried about the voters. Congressmen can be reasoned with, because for the most part they have embarrassing events in their lives too and can understand slips of the tongue. But not the voters. Imagine if you will:
VOTER #1: "OMG! Did you see what Senator Joe Smith posted when he was in college! Quote: Hey roomie: I am going to score some pussy tonight. Can I have the dorm from 8 to 12? thx."
VOTER #2: "Woah. He treats women like sex objects!"
VOTER #3: "Horrible. Let's protest against this womanizer."
VOTER #4: "Yeah! Girl power! Death to chavenists!"
And it spreads from there. It doesn't matter if Senator Smith is now in his 60s and does an annual walk with his wife & daughters to raise money for a breast cancer cure..... the idiot voters will skewer him for a post he made ~40 years earlier.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I was actually having the same conversation with one of my coworkers last night. The subject: Facebook. There used to be a day and age in America where you lived a professional life, and a private life, and there was little overlap.
Really, as long as the work is being done, it does not matter at all what I do in my left-over UNSOLD time. However, thanks to facebook, your friends are not the only ones who can pry into your private life. These days, employers look into all of the details of your personal life to judge you, instead of judging you based on your ability to actually work.
In the end, it doesn't matter. I don't have a facebook, and no one is going to stop me from smoking joints in my spare (unsold) time.
You're not really following good privacy practices right now.
It looks like you have a Google Code profile under a different username. That username is also your AIM name, which is listed under your Slashdot profile. It doesn't show up in a Google search as being associated with your Slashdot username...yet. I assume that if you ever finish somenewlang, and want to show it to a prospective employer, that you would need to delete your current account---and hope they don't check the Internet archives!---and create a new account under a different name, so that your Google Code account would not be associated with your Slashdot username.
In any case, once they have "TehZorroness" as a potential alias, they can find you with user accounts on torrent sites and over here admitting you smoke pot. Nothing I care about, but nothing you want an employer to see, either. And I haven't even gotten past the first page of results. So don't bang on us for using Facebook.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Oh, shit. You can.
Fucking Live Journal. I thought I deleted that when I was 17.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Well , it's a combination of both :
- You work your ass off trying to earn money
- I sit and watch TV or internet all day, and then I suck the cash out of your wallet to pay my bills (food stamps, housing, doctors' bills, welfare, and other free stuff).
- You lose your legs in a work accident
- You get some money , but it doesn't cover your medical costs at all , it barely covers your loss of income .
Really : i pay quite a lot of taxes , which i would expect to go to those who need it , but those people barely get anything from it ( i have a grandmother who worked her whole live , while also raising 4 kinds on her own , and she barely gets enough from her pension to live by ).
Instead it goes to people who know how to game the system.
So , it's a good idea in theory , but the problem is it can easily be abused , which results in the taxpayer paying too much , and those in need getting too little.
Offcourse , I'm talking from my own country's perspective ( Belgium ) . In some other European countries , like Sweden , it's a lot better ( you pay a little more taxpayes , but the medical care is a whole lot better ) .
Slipping shoelaces ?