What Caught My Eye forMarch 12 - 18 (#8)

At every point, invasions of privacy don’t just risk revealing something intimate about you to the world, they shift the balance of power toward whoever holds the most data.

Of course, this didn’t just begin with Trumpism. For the better part of the last fifty years years “free market Libertarians” and Republicans (often with help from corrupt Democrats) have waged a brutal war on the regulatory state, insisting repeatedly that the path toward innovative utopia in all industries required that we defund, understaff, and legally undermine regulators at every turn.

It’s worth noting the majority of these folks weren’t arguing for reasonable and modest regulation, they were arguing, repeatedly, for no meaningful oversight of corporate power whatsoever (see: telecom). When the reality of that unpopular policy choice surfaces in the form of mass suffering, financial hardship, and death, a lot of these very vocal opinion havers routinely get mysteriously fucking quiet.

Crazy idea: maybe don’t write headlines that treat Trump’s words as equivalent to reality when a decade of evidence suggests they’re often the opposite.

As the old journalism saw says, if someone says it’s raining, and someone else says it isn’t, a reporter’s job is not to report on what they said, but to look out the damn window and report on what’s actually happening.

It’s raining. It’s been raining for a decade. Now would be as good a time as any for reporters to look out the damn window and report on what’s actually happening.

Sometimes there aren’t two sides to a story. Sometimes one side is just a lie.

You’d think this would be uncontroversial among Democrats. You’d think that watching the Trump administration wage open war on free expression—retaliating against media companies, threatening platforms, unleashing threats from federal agencies on critics—would make it crystal clear that now is not the time to blow up the legal framework that protects people’s ability to speak freely online.

And yet…

Of the 279 people accused by officials on X of attacking federal officers in the past year, 181 were U.S. citizens, the Journal found. Close to half of those Americans were never charged with assault. None have been convicted at trial.

Yet names, mug shots and other identifying details posted by the government put a bull’s-eye on them. They had to explain the accusations to family, friends and employers. In a few cases, their home and workplace addresses were leaked online, drawing death threats.

A rather frank and depressing conversation about what’s going on in America’s war on Iran.