A new thread on Metafilter, where somebody says:
This reminds me so much of that scene in Se7en where Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt gain access to John Doe's library check-out list and attempt to use it to profile his behaviour based solely on this list that they've illegally obtained.
And
that reminded me of
the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court:
During debate over his nomination, Bork's video rental history was leaked to the press. His video rental history was unremarkable, and included such harmless titles as A Day at the Races, Ruthless People, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Writer Michael Dolan, who obtained a copy of the hand-written list of rentals, wrote about it for the Washington City Paper. Dolan justified accessing the list on the ground that Bork himself had stated that Americans only had such privacy rights as afforded them by direct legislation. The incident led to the enactment of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act.
Here's the whole Michael Dolan article. Excerpt:
When the list landed in them, I felt as if I held history in my hot little hands, and wondered whether I dared dissect it. Then I remembered A.J. Weberman. Weberman, founder of the school of intellectual discourse known as “garbageology,” was a Greenwich Village loon who spent years stealing Bob Dylan’s trash and subjecting it to the sort of deep-focus scrutiny usually reserved for such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. If Weberman could deconstruct Bob Dylan’s detritus, I finally decided, Dolan could deconstruct Bob Bork’s, even if the trash was cultural and not literal.
The garbageologist’s life may be a sleazy one, but it’s not an easy one. Weberman suffered for his scholarship; Dylan once caught him rooting through the used Pampers and kicked his inquiring butt. Invading Judge Bork’s privacy could get me into trouble if we ever met face-to-face. But then, I’ve seen the man move – he might be in line to vote for reinstating the death penalty, but he’s way too slow to pull a Refrigerator Perry on me. And anyway, the judge indicated during his confirmation hearings that he’s not necessarily a rabid fan of the notion of a constitutional guarantee of privacy.
So let’s get Borkological. Let’s Bork out. Let’s Bork again like we did last summer....
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18 comments:
Yes, they got Clarence Thomas instead who will be there years after Bork is gone. The usual clear thinking by the left.
Clear of any long term, that is.
I wrote about A.J. Weberman once before, here. Check out the comments. I don't know if that's the real AJW or not, but someone using that name participates in the comments and says things like "Tough shit on you assholes but the book got reviewed in the Times. Go suck on some big dicks." I could put this in my blog banner: "some Law Professor pontificating on shit you know nothing about."
1Q84 was k3WL!
"Dolan justified accessing the list on the ground that"
"justified." As if he needed any "justification." As if a BS non-sequitur provided any "ground." As if any Prog ever doubted that for the cause anything goes.
@Amexpat I had to delete you for violated the rule against adding extra spaces. Please try again.
There's a distinction between what was done with Murakami and Bork & Thomas. The former was done in the spirit of scholarship to deepen an understanding and appreciation of an important writer's literary influences. The latter was done with malice, solely to look for dirt to discredit a nominee to the supreme court. [@Althouse, not sure what I did wrong the first time, any extra spaces were inadvertent]
I wonder what was in Clinton's / Obama's/ Kerry's trash?
I wish I could get a list of the books I've checked out over the years. I was always finding recent nonfiction displayed out front of the stacks, and there were some really good ones..but I can't remember the titles. The librarians said they weren't allowed to keep a record because terrorism or something.
My goodness! Althouse violated Michael Dolan's copyright clearly written in his "The Bork Tapes Saga" inside The American Porch blog.
"PS/This is a copyrighted work, protected under all applicable U.S. law. No reproduction in any medium is permitted without written permission. Violations will trigger legal action, civil suits, and stuff you never ever want to know about. To negotiate terms, contact the author at mikedolan@mac.com."
Dolan, you see, has legal rights (so watch out, Ann), but Judge Bork was open to be ridiculed. How could anyone have written such a long article with no worthwhile news and no apology given to the judge? “Lotsa windup, not much pitch...” Indeed!
Correlation does not prove causation. People need to tread lightly when indulging their god-complex.
Two points:
1. The Japanese are really concerned about privacy, and I think it's a concern that operates at the level of culture, not a product of legalisms about slander and libel. I read an article in a tabloid in Japan about people whose names are in the public record in the US, but the names were all replaced with initials. They're surprisingly delicate about things like that, in the Japanese press.
2. These journalists are making what I'd like to call a category error -- confusing what is legally permissible with what is acceptable to do as a human being, but the conflation of the two is so widespread here in the US that I'm the weird one. It's like a pervert getting caught spying on his neighbours demanding to know whether there's a law against it, as though the existence or the nonexistence of a law had anything to do with the wrongness of his actions.
As a librarian, I can tell you we consider this a terrible violation of privacy. We aren't supposed to keep individual circulation records.
I didn't much like Bork, but a lot of bad precedents got set during his hearing.
And after Joe Biden, Robert "Sheets" Byrd, Ted Kennedy, and all of the other Senate Democrats of such high personal distinction got through with trashing Bork and creating a new verb, we got... Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. And Lawrence, Windsor, and Obergefell.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/justices-liberal-slush-fund-1449188273
"Dylan... kicked his inquiring butt."
How much would you pay to see Dylan kick ANYONE'S butt?
In addition to being shameful, I thought the treatment of Bork by the commie-pinko lefties shoulda/coulda been a great learning experience for the republicans. But alas they still prefer to fight fair. And continue to lose.
Loretta Lynch being the latest example.
People check lots of materials out of libraries which they never get around to reading/listening/watching, as the zero cost of borrowing encourages deferring decisions on whether it's worth investing one's time consuming the material.
Whereas Amazon demands cash. And therefore one's purchasing history on Amazon is probably far more valuable than one's history of borrowing from a library, as it's less noisy. And what, if anything, prevents Amazon from selling data about you?
(Although I do remember a library clerks disparaging remarks about a CD I wished to check out. This reminded me of the snotty comments bookstore clerks used to make when you bought something they disapproved of, and of as little consequence.)
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