Pass The Press Please

Classificationism, Police Statism, Protectionism, Statism
Share

What does it take to be considered a legitimate news organization?

Gothamist, the operator of nine city-centric blogs that cover local news, events and culture have finally received their NYPD press credentials which allows them access to on-scene reporting or press events that are otherwise closed to others. This was after almost 8 years, countless emails, phone calls, two appeal hearings, $5,000, and getting high-profile civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel involved.

In their very detailed guide they explain how the process works, and how it favors the establishment players:

If you work for a mainstream outlet, like a newspaper, radio, or television station, you can stop reading right now. Your boss has no doubt processed dozens of press pass candidates through DCPI, and will have no trouble getting you a pass. This seems to apply to any old media outlet, no matter how small, so if you write the produce column for your food co-op newsletter, you’re gold.

As part of the process, the applicant has to show proof that he or she covered a certain number of major events within the past two years, a barrier-to-entry hurdle for those in a fledging news organization denied access to many major events. Furthermore, the qualification for these major events are those that give deference and respect to the powers that be– events that had an NYPD detailed presence, and mayoral and/or city council press announcements.

In other words, the only news that counts is that which covers officially-sanctioned events which flatter the egos of politicians, which is why Gothamist’s “Occupy Wall Street” coverage was rejected(!) even though there was an overwhelming police presence at what could anyways be considered a significant news event absent the NYPD.

Ladies and gentlemen, so much for an “independent” news media.

Pass The Press Please Read Post »

The Perils of Positive Law

Classificationism, Education, Legal System, Libertarian Theory
Share

Just a couple days ago the New York City council voted to ban the practice by sanitation workers to sticker the window of vehicles that were violating the alternate-side street cleaning rules. Whilst the vehicle’s owner would still receive a parking violation fine, they are no longer allowed to punish drivers by defacing their vehicles with the hard-to-remove stickers. While I find the ban agreeable, I have a bone to pick with the general legislative approach.

One of the problems with positive law is that the mindset it encourages is antithetical to what should otherwise be a presumptive prohibition of aggression and the security of both property and personal liberties. Unlike the “negative” rights of common law, the legislative process of positive law will all too often err and enshrine legal principles that are unjust. This is not to say that legislators do not get it right sometimes– for example laws that prohibit murder, theft and fraud are all [potentially] perfectly just laws.

With a positive law mindset, actions that are not yet defined in the statutes lie in a grey area neither prohibited nor permitted “under the law”.  And later, if ever, when the statutes are codified, the result could be in having laws that don’t prohibit or permit enough, or in fact laws that prohibit or permit too much.  This is a problem inherent to a process that tries to encapsulate the entire range of possible actions and to explicitly codify them into the written law.

The presumptions now change- anything not explicitly forbidden is arguably permissible. Actions which are now prohibited lie beyond the reach of justice if they were carried out before the law was passed under the legal principle ex post facto. Of course it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way– laws that forbids theft and injury could already be understood to include all forms of theft, damage and injury without the codification of specific actions, i.e. “killing with a knife in the right hand using a stabbing motion”. What the positivist mindset encourages is the tendency to look at the codified word as the source of justice, so that one could then hair-split it so that the actual action is not specified and thereby not prohibited.

That said, property defacement should be considered a forbidden action (regardless of the actual codified law) and therefore there was no actual need for a specific law to ban the stickering practice. Instead the government could have enforced the already existing laws against property defacement to stop this punitive, vindictive crime.

The Perils of Positive Law Read Post »

Semantics and IP Antics

Education, IP Law, Libertarian Theory
Share

One of the reasons why IP-abolitionists oppose “intellectual property” is because IP monopolies in effect boil down to a restriction on existent ownership rights. To this charge, a common retort heard even from libertarians, is that all property rights are not absolute (i.e. “you can’t shoot your gun wherever you choose”, “the right to swing your fist ends by my nose”, etc.) and so too IP laws can morally and thus justly restrict people from using certain configurations or arrangements of their already owned property.

It occurred to me that this is a mere semantic quibble. If we substitute the word “to” for the word “with”, we no longer have an equivalence between IP and those examples. For argument’s sake, we can even agree with the gist of those examples and suppose that an owner may not always have the right to do certain actions with his property but this wouldn’t contradict a fundamental right to do certain actions to his property, which is more precisely what anti-IP arguers hold.
This retort focuses solely on the restrictionist view in that it’s [morally] just to have laws that restrict existent property rights. But those examples are a flawed comparison to begin with; we would never hold that property rights to a gun would allow the violation of another persons’ property.
This is because ownership isn’t a bundle of certain permissible actions or rights, but rather the totality of  a “negative” quality– a restriction upon others from violating the owner’s right to control. In any given context, violations of property rights is what determines the impermissibility for any given action, not a deficiency in the ownership rights of the hypothetical gun or swinging-fist.

Semantics and IP Antics Read Post »

Land of the Free™ (Rules and Restrictions May Apply)

Anti-Statism, Humor, Victimless Crimes
Share

From PokerNewsDaily.com I learn that the terrorists hate us so much for our freedoms, they are now preventing us from using their online poker rooms.

SwitchPoker.com, a small independent online poker room, became a trailblazer this week, becoming the first internet poker room to accept Bitcoin as a valid currency for both deposits and withdrawals.  Bitcoin is a unique currency, as it is purely virtual and does not require financial institutions to process transactions… It does not accept players from the United States.

What will the terrorists think of next?

Land of the Free™ (Rules and Restrictions May Apply) Read Post »

Crying Over Spilled Trash

Environment, Humor
Share

I came home yesterday to find that someone emptied our outdoor waste receptacles (read: garbage cans) onto the sidewalk, most likely to root through them for valuables, you know the sort that the state extorts a $0.05-$0.15 bounty in advance for their rendition to the local bailiff for redemption.

This isn’t the first time that profit-seeking scavengers have combed through our trash for illegally-discarded recyclables, but most of the time they are kind enough to retie the bags and place them back where I left them. I suppose this may be a new low in the professional salvage business.

 

Crying Over Spilled Trash Read Post »

Scroll to Top