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Sex Offender Gets New Hearing After Hearing Officer Rants Against Arial Font
ericgoldman writes "People often feel passionately about fonts, but government decisions shouldn't depend on what font people choose for their written submissions. In Massachusetts, a sex offender overturned the decision of a hearing officer after it was determined that (among other possible biases) the hearing officer posted to Facebook that he 'can't trust someone who drafts a letter in arial font!' and 'I might be biased. I think arial is inappropriate for most things.' This is just the latest example of how social media rants by government workers are causing problems for the workers — and the people they deal with."
If you spend your time dealing with sex offenders, and your rants are about Arial, is it possible that you might have your priorities in poor order?
You would prefer that defendants be defenseless? In the US legal system, everything is on trial. The law, the defense, the prosecution, the evidence and witnesses are all open to scrutiny and testing. If something in the prosecution's case is not right, then the prosecution is potentially not right. I wouldn't have the system any other way.
social media rants by government workers are causing problems for the workers
Seems to me more like "social media helps to uncover insane asshats among government workers".
Seriously, this guy apparently prejudiced against someone in a sexual assault case based on a font - he just gave everyone with whose cases he was involved a cause to ask for a retrial.
What are the chances an innocent person went to jail cause he didn't like their font or their hair style?
Once again this just proves that if you give asshats enough rope, they will eventually hang themselves with it.
I say "thumbs up" for the social media.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
So, uh... WHY are there rules on fonts?
Readability. The same reason they usually mandate double spacing, the numbering of paragraphs, and so on.
You'd appreciate the same if your job primarily consisted of reading documents on paper. Didn't your professors/instructors at school have similar requirements?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
That might not be important for you. But other aspects of the system could be. E.g. take an A3, you can put two A4 pages exactly on it. Also, you can blow up an A4 page, to A3 and keep the exact dimensions. Or, blow down an A4 page to A5, and keep the exact dimensions. There are so many benefits from the system, even if you don't use them all.
I like printing two pages to a sheet, it saves paper. Because I use A4 size sheets, I can fit exactly two pages of a document. Nice.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
This would seem to indicate that it's a personal bias, and not some kind of technical requirement.
Maybe, maybe not. It was certainly unprofessional; I won't argue that. But it's also the kind of thing I might say as a joke to a friend afterward without attaching any real meaning to it at all.
Suppose I interview an engineer and it goes badly. We have an up-or-down vote after his series of interviews and decide not to hire him. At that point, I could see telling jokes like "...and I'd never hire someone with Perl on their resume, anyway." We'd all laugh and move on to the next person. In fact, though, if the candidate was good then it would never come up again. It absolutely would *not* prevent us from hiring someone and wouldn't even remotely be a weighted factor.
I suspect it was a similar throwaway comment that didn't actually reflect the judge's true feeling, but was meant as something his coworkers would find amusing (even as they understood it was utterly lighthearted). It was obviously a bad idea to joke about it somewhere as public as Facebook, but doubt that it truly reflected any personal biases.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
There's a simple principle I go by for jokes: something is a legitimate joke when you're making fun of yourself or of [someone in] power. When you're making fun of someone you hold power over, that's not called a joke. It's called being an asshole.