usmbguest5318
Gold Member
This morning, someone asked me what I thought of the Joe Barton matter. What I told them is:
- Barton's situation highlights the importance and role of news reporting.
- Barton did what he did and that is what it is.
- People who may consider what he did as sufficient to make him (or any other high office holding elected/appointed official) unworthy their granting him their approbation have both a need and a right to know what he (and others) did.
- Unless one happens to know well a given elected official, absent news reporting, one will otherwise be ignorant about the character of the person asking for one's vote.
- It's not a news organization's job to determine what information about a (would-be) politician matters to voters and what of it does not matter. It's a news organization's job to attempt to obtain whatever credible information it can and share it.
- Barton's situation illustrates yet again that the only way to be sure that information one does not want shared is, indeed, not shared, is to not oneself share it.
- Following from that: The less of one's personal information one shares digitally, the lower the risk that others can/will obtain it.
- The easiest and most effective way to ward against others avenging themselves at one's expense is to always do unto them as one'd have them do unto oneself. One'd think after 2000+ years, folks'd realize that and practice it without fail, or at least would have the people who seek public approbation writ large, but clearly too few such folks do.
- Among the most unstable of things on which to build one's credentials and reputation is one or several moral positions, except when one's own ethicality/morality is irreproachable. Folks who've been either a "boy scout" or boring all their lives are well set to stand on character. Others, with few exceptions, are well advised not to do so.
