As the semester is coming to a close I have started paying more attention to the news again. There has been a lot of breaking stories over the course of this last month that I did not get a chance to talk about. One of the biggest stories is also one of the most recent. I of course am talking about the recent healthcare bill that the house of representatives have passed. This bill is the second attempt at repealing some features from obamacare in order to make it more affordable. The problem however, is that in the process of doing this millions of americans are going to be left without any insurance. House republicans are trying to run healthcare ike a business, which I think is extremely unethical. In my opinion, I don’t believe any first world country should even have to consider universal healthcare for its citizens. The criticisms of this bill don’t end here though, another major change that many people are protesting is the change to leave pre existing condition coverage up to the states. The people who requiree health care the most are the one’s being left out of it (is the state has anything to say about it). This change comes a couple of weeks after president Trump promised to leave the pre existing conditions part of obamacare alone. Blatant lies like these need to be confronted, we cannot allow our elected officials to get away with lies to the public without any sort of explanation. The solution they came up for treating people with pre existing conditions was to create high risk pools. These money pools would be government funded and provide money for people with pre existing conditions. The problem however, is that the current funds that are provided do not even scratch the surface of what would be required. These issues need to be addressed before the bill passes the senate and becomes law. If it is not I hope that the american people will make their voices heard when the elections of 2018 arrive. So there you have it, the citizens of this country need to start holding their elected officials responsible, for too long that position has been plagued with corruption and with the interest of big companies first. President Trump also promised to “drain the swamp” and so far it does not seem like he's keeping this promise either considering that insurance companies will be given much more power again if this bill becomes law.
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This week I wanted to take a break on all the censorship talk and instead talk about what has been happening in the news lately. As you all may have heard, the United States recently bombed an airfield in Syria, one that was under control of President Bashar Al-Assad. This was in reaction to a recent chemical attack on a city nearby the airfield. There are people from both the left and right criticizing and praising president Trumps attack. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I can see where both sides are coming from. I believe that a big factor to this dilemma is establishing whether it was Al-Assad who bombed the city or if it was indeed the rebels as some are claiming. However that is neither here nor there, what I found interesting was that the United States warned Russia ahead of time, before the bombing. It’s pretty obvious that this was done in order to minimize the backlash that could have been from Russia, but I am curious if this also had something to do with the “Rules of War”. For some reason, governments around the war have collectively come together and decided that there are some acts so heinous that they must not be outlawed. This idea has good intent behind it and if everybody was as nice as they claim to be then maybe it would work. However, in my honest opinion I seriously doubt any organization follows these rules, at least not when the world isn't watching. Should countries really be constrained against an enemy that is holding nothing back from them? I don’t know, but let me know what you guys think in the comments.
These last couple of days I have been diving deeper into my research topic, censorship. I have began focusing more and more on government censorship, specifically media and browser censorships. The key suspects in the most guilty of these “crimes” is easily China. China is one of the most oppressive first world governments in today's era. They police social media sites and even news sites vigorously. In fact, China actively censors social media posts that do not fall inline with government views. This includes political issues as well as religious ones like the Dalai Lama. I find it hard to believe a country as oppressive as China can continue being a first world power without daily revolts. According to researcher Gary King, “Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content.”. Basically the censorship they do for social media sites is mostly aimed at stopping any kind of protest, or revolt/revolution. Besides censoring social posts, they also censor what you can and can't search for on the web. Unless you have a VPN or something similar, citizens of China will not come up with any search for websites that the government deems “dangerous”. For example you cannot use Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube. News is also censored and and only pro Chinese government propaganda is allowed to be printed or posted. This should raise a red flag for any Chinese citizen (as if the last couple of examples weren’t enough), censoring the news gives governments huge control over their citizens and allows them to practically brainwash most of the population, in my opinion. It isn't only China however, the United States and Great Britain’s governments also use censorship, although not to the extremes of China. The United States does not censor their citizens’ opinions, it would go against the first amendment, however they do have laws that restrict graphic content or offensive content. Like with all things there should be a healthy amount of censorship in any government, but there is always a thin line and we should stay aware and make sure not to cross it.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/how-censorship-in-china-allows-government-criticism-but-silences-collective-expression/C7EF4A9C9D59425C2D09D83742C1FE00 This week I have been pondering the morality of suicide after we had that class lecture on Monday. Suicide is one of those very interesting “crimes”, at least to me it is. Unlike murder, or other crimes such as battery, suicide is unique because the individual is choosing to kill himself. How do we as a society have the authority to take away that right from the individual? Some states like Oregon have passed laws allowing people to undergo assisted suicide. This is where a licensed professional can legally kill a patient that has some kind of terminal condition. I believe that every person should have the right to choose when to kill himself when confronted with a terminal illness. However, when someone wants to kill themselves because of depression there should be more restrictions put into place. A lot of times it can be hard to judge why someone killed themselves. Many times the victim never showed signs of depression or at least never showed signs of severe depression. I think that a lot of this stems from our poor funding of mental health and especially our eagerness to dismiss it when it is brought up. Anyways all this thinking about suicide led me to think about all the social media sites that have been in the news because someone filmed themselves killing themselves. Should companies have the right to create algorithms that may be able to recognize when a person is planning on killing himself? This would probably involve parsing through the individual's private messages and posts. This would be a clear violation of privacy, but is it ethical if it leads to suicide prevention? This is a tough question and one to which I do not have the answer to. I believe that these tough questions must start being answered starting with our government and then transitioning to law.
This week I did some more research into my ethics and technology topic, censorship. I chose censorship as my topic because I am very anti-censorship and I wanted to see if I can find any information that would either change my view of it, or solidify my opinions on it. I started by finding a couple of different types of censorship. Parental controls, social media, and government censorship were the first three that I decided to look into. It turns out there's a couple of different parental controls that parents use to supervise their children. Although this is a much less talked about form of censorship it is still censorship and I believe that in extremes it can lead to a sheltered child. The next thing I investigated was censorship in social media websites. Websites have the power to hinder certain stories or information from the public. For example, if Facebook wanted to they could censor all stories about a politician and make sure that they would not show up on trending, eetc. This kind of censorship is a lot more dreadful since it can have devastating consequences when very large websites do it. We can take the latest US election as an example. There are reports of many fake news stories being shared at an alarming rate on certain websites, while their counterparts were nowhere to be seen. And finally I did some research on government censorship which is prevalent in many countries around the world, with an emphasis on China. The main way that governments censor the “web”, is by forcing search engines to exclude websites for certain search queries. Governments can also ban certain social media posts and force social media websites to delete comments that do not agree with the government's agenda. Again the best example of this is China, which is terrifying. Billions of people are being forced to live under this kind of censorship, it almost reminds me George Orwell's 1984.
This week there was a big leak on the CIA, it has renewed everyone's fears on privacy and rightly so. The big leak this week is being called vault 7 and it is only the “tip of the iceberg”, according to wikileaks. The first few reports point to an issue that has been plaguing the United States for a while now. It seems more information has come out and it all points to the CIA purposely infecting millions devices from United States citizens. Samsung TV’s and consumer smart phones have been just a couple of the targeted devices. Furthermore some documents point to the CIA deliberately finding flaws in some smartphone operating systems and never reporting them, in order to use them later when needing to access information. This is completely unacceptable and unethical. We the people should immediately demand an investigation into these accusations. The fact that the CIA thinks they can just go about anyway they want to get the information they need then they have a bad time coming. I jozy will not allow for this type of behavior, I will be a social warrior and make sure that people know what is going on. For example, I will start spreading the word and making sure everyone is aware of the deeds that the CIA are doing. I’m joking of course, but seriously this is pretty bad. We love to talk about how free America is, land of the free as we call it. Yet our own government is actively conspiring against its citizens and constantly hiding critical information from us.
This week I saw the movie that everyone has been talking about lately, Get Out (There will probably be spoilers in this by the way). Since hearing that Jordan Peele was directing the film, I was stoked to watch it. I think this movie does a very good job on presenting how there are still some shades of modern racism and how they can be difficult for the person committing them to recognize them. An excellent example of this comes from a very innocent scene in the movie where Kris’s (the main protagonist in the story who happens to be black) father in law tells him he would vote for Obama a third time. He does this as an act of kindness from his perspective, however Kris takes is as an act of racism. Obviously this is pretty tame and many would consider this as extending an olive branch, but from Kris’s perspective he feels that he is being identified by his race instead of by who he is. I find this to be a very interesting interaction, and I can see how it can be considered racist, however I think ‘’racism’’ might be too strong of a word for it. The film obviously amplifies a lot of these interactions, there is a scene where a woman grabs Kris’s arm to see how “fit” he is. Eventually the film presents a kind of underlining message which goes something along the lines of, white people want to control the positive attributes that african americans possess such as athleticism. This is a very crude interpretation but it is what I got. Anyways it was a very good movie and I recommend everyone go check it out, the racism is not nearly as up in your face as I might make it seem, it is presented in more subtle ways and done in a very entertaining matter.
This has been a busy week for news agencies. There are a couple of things that occurred throughout the week that I would like to discuss. The first being the recent fake terrorist attacks that President Trump and his administration continue to produce. I don’t even know how to react, I am seriously starting to question exactly how much research and thought is put into our president's speeches. Having something like this happen once should be an embarrassment, allowing it to happen three times makes this administration look like a circus. At first it was the bowling green massacre, followed by the alleged terrorist attacks in Atlanta, and now the Sweden terrorist attack. This is simply unacceptable and needs to be addressed. For those who don’t realize, these comments were made to make a point. Lying and making up fake attacks to push your narrative can spiral out of control very quickly. Going around criticizing the media on fake news, and then spilling an unprecedented amount to the public is hypocritical. As if this wasn’t ridiculous enough, his explanation on how this misinformation came to be was even more embarrassing. You would think that the president of the United States would be the last person on earth to require an intelligence briefing from FOX news. However it seems this is his primary source for information. He admitted that he got his information from a story that was developing on FOX news. Furthermore, the piece he was referring to was not even talking about terrorist attacks, it was a piece on Sweden refuges and an increase of the rape rates. The next story I want to discuss are the recent media band from the whitehouse. It appears that in the latest press briefing, a couple of news organizations were barred from entering. These include CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and The LA Times. I believe this is a serious blow to our democracy and a huge concern when it comes to the freedom of the press. Cherry picking which news outlets can cover the white house press briefings is a major step in the wrong direction. Furthermore, how can you ban the BBC, and still allow news outlets like Breitbart to attend? This is the news site that came up with the story of there being a supposed couple of million illegal voters in the U.S.. My point is, if you’re trying to ban the news outlets which you consider “fake news” you should at least ban both the left and right leaning ones.I don’t usually like getting into politics, but these weekly blogs and Trumps weekly material give me no choice. Once again Trump has been on the news and once again he is caught doing something which is probably illegal. This may not be the biggest story of the week but it is one of the more interesting ones. It seems that the designer fashion store chain Nordstrom has dropped Ivanka Trump’s clothing line. Normally I doubt anyone would even notice this but, after president Trump tweeted about it a couple days ago it seems the whole nation is aware at this point. This begs the question, is this illegal? Should the president be able to tweet about business decisions taken against his family? For those not aware president Trump tweeted “My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by Nordstrom. She is a great person -- always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!”. Nordstrom has given an explanation for dropping Ivanka’s brand, it was simply was not selling too well. Whether this is true or not should not matter. Now i’m no lawyer but, i’m almost positive the president of the United States is not allowed to publicly support a family business. This tweet was stupid enough but, the Trump administration couldn’t let it go. In a recent interview with Kellyanne Conway, she is seen preaching to Fox news about the scandal. She says and I quote, “...go buy Ivanka’s stuff I hate shopping and i’m going to go get some for myself today”. It’s becoming embarrassing at this point, it sounds like she is selling a commercial to our nation. The Trump administration seems to act more childish every week, how are we supposed to maintain the title of “Leaders of the free world” when our president and his administration whine over the smallest scandal, especially when it is illegal. I know some people might bring up Jimmy Carter and his brother, however I don’t think you can even compare them. Jimmy Carter never publicly advertised his brothers business, in fact it was the opposite. Billy Carter did his own advertising, he knew that he could get some recognition thanks to his sibling and so he traveled the country advertising his own beer by himself. I think the events that have taken place this past week are a disgrace to our democracy and most importantly our image as a leading nation.So this week I have been thinking about some pretty controversial topics, specifically the “muslim ban” that every news outlet has been mentioning. I have been thinking hard about what it means to be a racist and what is just an exaggeration. I know it sounds silly but at this point i’ve heard so many accusation of racism over the most petty things that it has become a real problem for me to gauge these articles without reading multiple ones with opposing views. With Trump taking office it seems there’s breaking news every couple of hours around the clock. The latest decision that has caused an outcry and probably rightly so has been his latest “muslim ban”. Although I don’t necessarily see it as a muslim ban since everyone from those seven countries are banned, not only muslims and there are other countries such as Saudi Arabia with muslim majority which are not banned. I do not agree with this ban, however I don’t think that spreading misleading information or naming it something is not is helping anyone. Besides that though I completely disagree with the ban he implemented. I think it’s unethical to bomb a country for months on end and then tell the very civilians whose homes have been destroyed that they can no longer enter the United States. I believe this only creates a circle of hatred that only fans the flames of terrorism. I think this ban does more harm than good, especially when you consider that most of the last couple of terrorists that have attacked the U.S. have been been born in the U.S.. Next although it’s seems completely unrelated, I am very disappointed with the riots that have recently occurred in UC Berkeley. What ever happened to freedom of speech and constructive arguments? It’s a shame that this small minority is tainting the left and giving liberals a bad name. To quote Tyrion Lannister, “When you tear out man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar; you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”. If you really hate what Milo has to say and you disagree with it with all your heart, then the worst thing you can do is try and silence him. These protesters are just giving him more coverage and exposure. This shouldn’t have to be said, but at no point does silencing your opponent win you the battle in fact it does the exact opposite. Universities are not meant to be some kind of safe space, they are meant to be a place of learning, a place where your ideas and ideals are challenged. I really disagree with these new notions about “safe spaces”, if you don’t want your ideas challenged you should just stay at home, I don’t think college is for you. |
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May 2017
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