Joshua Herzig-Marx » media

Too bad I don’t like his music

herzigma — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 07:26:57 +0000

Marilyn Manson, metal musician, has been frequently blamed for the fall of American youth and the destruction of our culture. As the perpetrators of the Columbine Massacre were said to cite him as one of their inspirations, he was interviewed by Michael Moore for the controversial documentary Bowling for Columbine. Frankly, he was the only adult in the movie who came across as at all intelligent or sympathetic.

So, I was pretty excited to see that Manson had recently been interviewed by talk show bully Bill O’Reilly. Now, O’Reilly and Moore couldn’t be more different so I was please that Manson still avoided taking the bait and responded to all of the questions thoughtfully, intelligently, and with humor.

Marilyn Manson on O'Reily Factor
Uploaded by DarKwon

Manson seems like a neat guy – too bad I can’t stand his music.

Current style in web design

herzigma — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 06:06:18 +0000

Something to read through more carefully – who wants to look at last year’s web pages?

Current style in web design

Boston Globe Opinions page asks: “Do Librarians Protect Terrorists”?

herzigma — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 02:19:16 +0000

In his recent Boston Globe Opinion section column, Richard Cravatts discusses When librarians protect terrorists. He thinks Kathy Glick-Weil, the Newton Free Library’s director, was abetting the terrorists and misinterpreting the law when she refused the FBI and local police access to public computers following a bomb threat to Brandeis University.

I am not a lawyer. Richard cites conservative Heritage Foundation’s Paul Rosenzweig in suggesting that the patrons’ privacy was not in fact protected by the Constitution. He weakens his point, though, when arguing that the Constitution must sometimes be circumvented to be protected. Which is it?

It hardly matters, in the end. As I’ve said before, the police and FBI, as armed law enforcement officers, always have a remedy available should they consider the public safety put at risk by an overzealous privacy activist. That they did not could suggest something more dangerous: were these officers simply attemptingf to test their authority and set a precedent for future searches? Or, even worse, did they actually believe that they had the authority to seize library records?

Glick-Weil’s point, entirely missed by Cravatts, was not that the police did not have the right to examine the records of a potential criminal or terrorist. Her concern, which I share, is the privacy of other library patrons. The police should be concerned as well. Any evidence of illicit activites gained through such illegal search and seizure could likely be excluded from prosecutorial evidence as poisoned fruit. Or something. Anyways, I’m not a lawyer.