Gongol.com Archives: December 2019

December 7, 2019

How does a police chase end up with dead innocent bystanders?

There's really quite a lot that doesn't sit right about the incident in Miami that killed an innocent UPS driver and a motorist in a nearby car. ■ This kind of incident -- with all the questions it raises about the use of force -- is exactly why we need an NTSB-style Federal agency to investigate all police-involved shooting deaths. Every last one of them. It's imperative that we know fairly and impartially what happened in these circumstances, and that lessons be learned from them. ■ The public should demand answers to questions like: Why were occupied civilian vehicles used as shields? Why were so many rounds fired when innocent people were located in the line of fire, in the full 360° around the vehicle being chased? If the carjacked UPS truck was traveling in rush-hour traffic in Miami, how come measures weren't used to halt the traffic ahead of the vehicle, as police in the same area did in a similar situation in 2003? Why weren't spike strips or a PIT maneuver put to use? Why did police continue to draw fire towards civilian vehicles clearly trying to escape the situation? What are reasonable people supposed to do with gunfire being exchanged around them, especially if they can't "get down" or "take cover" -- or, God forbid, if they have a child in a booster seat or carseat in the back of an exposed vehicle? In the live video coverage from a TV news helicopter, at least 30 or 40 officers can be counted on-scene, and at least 20 or 30 police vehicles can be counted; exactly what kind of command-and-control authority was being exercised to prevent crossfire or to perhaps preemptively cut off escape routes for the carjackers? ■ These are questions that ought to be answered, and if it cannot be assured that they will be comprehensively and transparently investigated by the authorities in what ought to be an accountable process of oversight, then such an investigation ought at least to be conducted by a neutral and independent agency whose conclusions do not have to carry the weight of enforcement -- for the very same reasons that the NTSB is separate and independent from the DOT. The NTSB's mandate forms a useful template for what should be used in cases of police shootings: "The NTSB determines the probable cause of the accidents and issues safety recommendations aimed at preventing future accidents. In addition, the NTSB carries out special studies concerning transportation safety and coordinates the resources of the Federal Government and other organizations to provide assistance to victims and their family members impacted by major transportation disasters."

Distressing report from NATO-related team finds social-media manipulation is rampant

This report confirms with a fair amount of rigor what your gut has probably told you quite often: Social-media environments are bubbling over with fake accounts and manipulation, and the platforms are doing next to nothing to fix the problem, either proactively or reactively. For about $300, they bought thousands of followers and tens of thousands of engagements across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. And even when they reported fraudulent activity taking place, the platform companies did almost nothing to stop it or to correct the damage done. The scale of the fraud conducted by "Manipulation Service Providers" (MSPs) -- particularly originating in Russia -- is the kind of thing people ought to understand better. Social proof is important, and it has effects on people's commercial and political decisions. The scale by which that social proof can be fabricated or manipulated is vast within social media, and the costs are trivially low. That's a toxic brew.

Samoa's crash course in vaccination

With a population of about 200,000, they've vaccinated about 20,000 against measles in the last two days. The island has low vaccination rates, and they have an active measles outbreak that has killed more than 5 dozen people.

Internet access as human right?

Sen. Bernie Sanders says that's how he would treat it if elected President. The problem with the mindset that claims certain positive rights around material things a person can have (health care, Internet access, housing, employment) is that those claims muddy the waters around the negative rights (things government or others cannot do to you) that are even more important, even if they are literally without substance. This is a real problem, because there is a hierarchy to these things: The right not to be thrown into prison for expressing one's peaceful religious faith is, in fact, more important than a "right" to have someone deliver a DSL line to your house. Reducing the world to a laundry list of material concerns means that you might sacrifice the very building blocks of personal liberty and individual dignity in exchange for your "rights" to have other people pay for your stuff. It is precisely because those negative rights encompass things that don't take a physical form, and that represent what others may not do to you rather than what they might withhold from you, that the negative rights have to come before the positive ones. And in fact, the positive "rights" ought instead to be framed as what they are: Scarcity problems that almost always have answers found in the material world. The difference between wanting to maximize the amount of health care available and saying that everyone has an enforceable right to health care is that one sees a material problem with material constraints, and the other describes the world as one might want it to be. And a positive material right quickly becomes an entitlement, and entitlements must be funded by either voluntary or (more likely) involuntary means. An oppressive government can withhold those positive goods and claim that scarcity made them do it. The same cannot be true for negative rights.