Garry Tan, the CEO of YC, accused me of unethical reporting

https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/truth-power-and-honest-journalism

by gok • 2 months ago

565 170 2 months ago

radleybalko.substack.com

boroboro43• 2 months ago

This is what great reporting looks like: well-written, transparent, and rigorous. It’s sad to see how hatred toward progressives can distort people’s judgment.

loeg4• 2 months ago

This isn't great reporting. It's politics.

Analemma_• 2 months ago

Completely content-free junk statement. The post is purportedly about correcting bad information about a person who held public office, and (if it is in fact misinformation) was spread for political reasons. How are you supposed to do such a correction without it being political?

vrganj2• 2 months ago

Everything is politics.

Which food you eat (are you vegan? carnivore diet? Both have implications in regards to animal welfare, climate change, soil use, identity etc etc), which media you consume (obvious), which job you have (which power structures do you strengthen with it? who benefits from your labor? who do you try to disrupt?).

To say one is "apolitical" is just voicing a preference for the status quo.

To decry something as political is just voicing one's political opposition to the view expressed.

tptacek21• 2 months ago

Kind of a category error to suggest there's a stark difference. Over the last 100 years, enormous amounts of excellent journalism has been informed by political objectives on the part of reporters.

burnte2• 2 months ago

It’s sad to see how hatred toward progressives can distort people’s judgment.

The status quo is easy, change is hard, and anyone benefiting from the status quo will do whatever they have to in order to prevent change. Progressive by definition want change, progress. Change is scary. Humans are most easily motivated by fear.

thrance• 2 months ago

I think it's a little more than just fear of change. Garry Tan knows where his (material) interests lie, and will do and say anything to fight off those who would build a more equal society, even if it means supporting actual fascists like Trump. The ultra-wealthy are very class conscious.

tim333• 2 months ago

Re. hatred towards progressives and the Boudin recall:

Boudin ... alleged... that the campaign was largely a Republican effort to remove him from power. Despite Boudin's claims, the recall campaign was publicly led by Democrats. 83% of donors to the campaign were from Democratic-registered voters or no-party-preference voters, with over 80% of donations coming from local San Franciscans. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin)

There's quite a lot on the reasons why in the article.

stickfigure• 2 months ago

From an article linked in the original article:

In the pro-recall camp, big money makes up a much bigger slice of the pie. Over three-quarters of the total money raised ($4.76 million) has come from $50,000-plus donations, and only 4 percent has come from donations smaller than $1,000.

This doesn't give me a very charitable view of the recall donors. Democrats or not.

justin66• 2 months ago

Given how many articles he's published in Reason Magazine over the years, Radley Balko might qualify as "libertarian" or perhaps "civil libertarian" rather than "progressive." Not that the labels ought to matter too much.

(I posted this article with its actual title a few days ago and it didn't pop at all, which is funny I guess)

pstuart• 2 months ago

An acknowledgement, let alone an apology is highly unlikely.

SwellJoe• 2 months ago

I've come to be convinced that having a huge amount of money causes some kind of mental breakage, a need to control other people that is unhealthy for everyone it touches. I don't mind everyone having or expressing an opinion, even opinions I disagree with, but when someone uses their disproportionate wealth and influence to spread misinformation and disrupt and dismantle democratic systems it crosses a line. It takes a lot of nerve to call spreading misinformation and funding recall campaigns based on lies speaking truth to power. And, to attack someone for reporting facts that correct that misinformation? Grotesque.

throwaway132448• 2 months ago

You have it backwards. The person didn’t change, they were always like that, long before money. Our system selects for them and rewards them, and when they attain those rewards they use them to further express themselves as the person they always were.

bombcar• 2 months ago

This is the truth of the matter - everyone else got off the train at millions or a small billion; the only people who ride it all the way to trillions are the pathologies.

thisisit• 2 months ago

Quite often money is equated with intelligence and with time people want their opinion on everything under the sun - especially on things outside their area. With time so much smoke has been blown up their ass that they think they are better than everyone and can get away with mistreating people. Money does impact people.

k__• 2 months ago

This.

Directors of small companies are the same, they're just not wealthy enough that they could do any harm.

Snow_Falls• 2 months ago

I would agree with you, I see people like Jeff Bezos who's unfathomably wealthy but also treats his workers so terribly that they have to pee in bottles and I wonder why? What compels someone to so obssesively seek wealth that they must treat people like that. I can only see it as some sort of mental illness. When someone compulsively hoards trinkets to the detriment of all around them, we call that a disease and I don't see why we should treat it differently when it's dollars they're collecting.

Sharlin• 2 months ago

To get to where Jeff Bezos is, it's almost mandatory to have sociopathic traits and to be genuinely incapable of regarding other people as anything but means to an end. It's a simple selection effect.

aquariusDue• 2 months ago

Who knew dragons in real life could be so lame compared to fiction /s

sleepybrett3• 2 months ago

To be fair, I don't think jeff has proclaimed that their drivers need to pee in bottles. That's all mid level managers trying to show gains to their up-line reports.

Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient, and wants to find efficiencies to report to the board and the shareholders. However it's fucking dave, 6+ layers below jeff that is firing drivers for missing unreasonably tight delivery schedules because they had to stop to take a leak. So that dave can tell suan who can tell susan who can tell .... and finally jeff that deliveries are now 2.3% faster.

I do think that enough money and therefore a higher degree of control of your own life experiences does warp your perceptions of the world, however. I fail to understand why anyone with a billion fucking dollars in the bank just doesn't retire to a beach stocked with sex workers and cocaine and instead decides to continue torturing people through layers of unthinking bureaucracy though.

derangedHorse2• 2 months ago

When someone compulsively hoards trinkets to the detriment of all around them, we call that a disease and I don't see why we should treat it differently when it's dollars they're collecting

He doesn’t hold dollars, he mostly holds equity. Also it doesn’t seem like he’s directly involved in the day to day tasks assigned to delivery drivers so it’s weird to assign blame to him for that as well.

One could argue that if drivers were unhappy with the work, they could just quit. Another would argue that that’s a callous way to view the problem as a new job may not be easy to get.

I’d link these 2 issues and say my view is that if Bezos were to sell his stock to give to charity, Amazon’s own stock would plummet which would indirectly force the decision to leave Amazon onto their drivers. A depreciating stock price means their corporate RSU grants look less attractive, which I speculate would make working at Amazon less attractive, leading to worse talent and declining company performance. If a decline was to happen in this way there would probably be more demands on drivers, potentially decreasing demand for the job as the whole, and leaving the drivers who stay behind in worse conditions.

AlexandrB• 2 months ago

It's the same problem that afflicts celebrities. Once you're to a certain level of prominence, there are many people who will gladly sniff your farts and tell you your ideas are great, thus you "lose touch" with reality on the ground. Then when someone comes along that doesn't care for your ideas or worldview it's easy to assume they're either engaging in bad faith or are somehow biased because it flies in the face of your day-to-day experience. I don't envy these folks, they're surrounded by liars and grifters.

Imustaskforhelp• 2 months ago

You are actually kinda right. I do think that if you turn as a "really rich" person, you just don't know about anything to trust at a certain point.

Firstly, you will have the people who will praise your diamonds and everything and make you lose touch with reality.

But there would also be the more subtler ones whom you actually consider friends. there can be two things that you meet some people before hand and judge them or were already rich before having such friends, but even then the first group might just change knowing that you are now extremely rich and might want subtle favours and so act subtly different.

In a nutshell, I feel like extremely rich people might not know how people actually think of them because we have commoditized everything to money,opportunities and networks and in some sense, they are unable to trust their own real instincts too.

Also we are forgetting the fact that these people would change with so much external influences too and that some people would stop after a certain point so as to they will not reach the scale of billions but rather stop at millions.

All of these factors combined make for the most egotistical machines.

just a few thoughts on extremely rich people, South park creators seem to be one of the exceptions for me and it seems like those guys are just two friends who just like doing what they do and even said a massive fuck you to paramount even on television.

burkaman• 2 months ago

I don't think having the money causes the problem, it's the journey to get to that point. People like MacKenzie Scott or lottery winners generally don't act like this. But aside from those rare instances, in order to make it to a billion dollars you need to consistently exploit people and absolutely refuse to use your power to help others in any significant way. You have to wake up every day with a hundred million dollars and think "the best thing I can do with this money is use it to make more money".

at-fates-hands• 2 months ago

> in order to make it to a billion dollars you need to consistently exploit people and absolutely refuse to use your power to help others in any significant way.

I would categorically disagree with your statement.

Jeff Bezos

Elon Musk

Bill Gates

Mark Zuckerberg

All billionaires. All have created one (or multiple in Musk's case) products that have greatly benefitted society in numerous ways. The Gates Foundation has donated billions to causes all over the world. Bezos has committed over $3B to various charitable causes.

Also, More than 70% of lottery winners will run through of the money they've won and be right back where they started before winning. Further proving my point the people who win the lottery are not visionaries and have no desire to create products that will change people's lives. They're just happy to have the money.

runjake• 2 months ago

Perhaps it's more accurate to say that people are used to getting what they want. When they don't, it violates their hedonic adaptation and provokes a negative reaction.

Mixing wealth into this situation increases the blast radius and makes it more public.

mghackerlady3• 2 months ago

How much money do you think causes it? Additionally, perhaps it's the other way around. Being someone who's predisposed to those tendencies is better at gaining capital. I think some good evidence for this is that Ken Olsen, by most accounts, was a saint and he owned DEC. Him having a substantial amount of wealth didn't turn him evil, so perhaps either he didn't hit that threshold or got lucky enough to not need the unhealthy and controlling tendencies to make it big

Barrin922• 2 months ago

think some good evidence for this is that Ken Olsen, by most accounts, was a saint and he owned DEC

You're right that the money itself does not cause it but what mattered with people like Olsen was that he had a Scandinavian background and was born in the 1920s. 'Saint' is a telling description because people like him came out of a, not necessarily explicit but still functioning culturally Christian environment with virtues that tempered the influence money had on them, he often remarked that humility was most important to him.

Very different person from the current class of individuals who are completely unrestrained by the values people took for granted for a long time.

bix62• 2 months ago

I read this and had a similar question of why do they all go so far down the right wing rabbit hole? Just noticed that one of the amplifiers was such which got me thinking. It seems like all these extremely wealthy people pick up such destructive and twisted worldviews that all somehow feed on this weird energy of stupidity. I’m just so baffled by it cuz they are surely smart people but so blinded. Sometimes I think it must be a marketing stunt but nope.

ericmcer• 2 months ago

Or like... getting money is a big filter and any normal person who hits it stops working and disappears from the corporate world.

Lionga• 2 months ago

Why are there so many stories that are older AND have less points higher on frontpage?

striking• 2 months ago

User flags can weigh stories down. If you'd prefer a different sort, try https://news.ycombinator.com/lists ("active" is popular, though not my taste really)

tomhow• 2 months ago

That’s always true of almost any story. There are many signals that influence a story’s rank: votes, flags, vouches, age, site, software penalties, and moderator intervention (usually to override flags and automatic penalties).

In this case, there’s no way this story would be considered worthy of front page placement if it wasn’t about a YC exec. We’ve overridden usual moderation policies and signals to keep it on the front page, as per our longstanding policy.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

v0x• 2 months ago

Well, to be fair, Garry's article was clearly 100% AI-generated. So perhaps he didn't even really post it; maybe it was just a rogue agent. Or, y'know, an assistant who posted without his authorization. Or perhaps Ambien was involved. Or, it was an Ambien-addled assistant who misconfigured an agent to post the article. Clearly not Garry's fault.

Atotalnoob• 2 months ago

Then he shouldn’t be posting under his real name? Or specifically call that out.

When people tell you who they are, listen to

nerdsniper• 2 months ago

I catch the /s, but honestly - if you sign your name on work product, you own it. Regardless if it was written by AI or ghost-written or whatever.

tptacek21• 2 months ago

The Chesa Boudin DA "misrepresentations" document, linked towards the end of this story, is weak, bordering on Trumpian. It highlights as "misrepresentations" cases where Boudin simply disagrees with Lim about a statement of opinion (whether his office was suitable forthcoming, organized, or deflecting). At one point it accuses Lim of "violating HIPAA", which is not a thing† (HIPAA constrains covered entities, not reporters).

I think both sides of this conflict (Tan and Radley) are talking past each other and scoring points for their respective sides; Radley is famously an advocate of progressive prosecutors, and Tan (IIRC) worked to remove Boudin. I don't expect a totally accurate and balanced retelling from either side, in the same way that you should not expect a completely neutral report on inner-ring suburban housing policy from me (I'm a housing activist).

But I did come away from this with a lower opinion of Boudin's office.

(For what it's worth, I was extremely optimistic about the wave of progressive prosecutors led by Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and while I have some Radley Balko issues, I've been reading John Pfaff on this stuff for a decade. What's happened to my worldview since then is that I feel like I've watched outsider-y progressives get elected into prosecutor roles and then fail their constituencies not because of ideology but over basic competency issues. I'd be foursquare behind a progressive prosecutor in a major city that ran a tight ship; we tried this in Chicago and didn't get that.)

† btw: if you're the DA for a jurisdiction that includes a reporter, and you claim the reporter's journalism is unlawful, you sure as shit better have that right.

xKingfisher• 2 months ago

How does it seem that Radley is talking past Gary?

All discussion of the 'Misrepresentations' article is responsive to Gary's mention of it in the original article. And at no point does Radley appear to endorse its contents.

rafram• 2 months ago

The main HIPAA claim seems to be that the victim didn’t provide (or consent to the publication of) that X-ray, and neither did their only family member known to possess it. I don’t know who released it, but if it was someone in the medical office, that is a genuine HIPAA violation.

tptacek21• 2 months ago

It could be a violation at the medical office, but Lim isn't a covered entity, and the document accuses her directly.

adrr• 2 months ago

HIPAA only covers entities that are legally required to follow it. Covered entities and business associates. It doesn’t apply to anyone else.

dijksterhuis3• 2 months ago

The Chesa Boudin DA "misrepresentations" document, linked towards the end of this story, is weak, bordering on Trumpian.

Are we reading the same document?

The first example is almost a perfect example of what's stated in TFA. Lim is incredibly aggressive in making her argument, and not an argument based on real evidence.

Scanning through the rest, it reads as much the same.

Direct gdrive link for those who don't want to go back and scroll through the article again: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VZKYxe0oGq7HeC5Kj2lxf-X55r4...

edit:

At one point it accuses Lim of "violating HIPAA", which is not a thing† (HIPAA constrains covered entities, not reporters).

Ehhhhh. I diagree with that reading. There's a clarification bullet point two lines down from the headline bullet (page 3). Emphasis mine.

This suggests Ms. Lim was received a patient’s privileged medical records from another unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA.

I read this as the unauthorized source is violating HIPAA. But I guess neither of us are lawyers. So...

tptacek21• 2 months ago

That's an extremely charitable read of a DA's office alleging lawbreaking. I really think you have to kind of slant your head and squint to come away with the impression that that section isn't about Lim, but rather the unnamed medical office.

js2• 2 months ago

Direct gdrive link

I'm confused where this came from. I cannot find this link in the original article as submitted:

https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/truth-power-and-honest-jo...

The most I can find is "But I found another place where someone has posted all 81 pages. It’s here. Feel free to look them over."

Where "here" links to:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21011168-responsive-...

That is the 81 page PDF referred to multiple times in the article and is titled "Responsive Records Lim - Balko correspondence_Redacted". I don't see "HIPAA" appear in it anywhere. Toward the end of that document on page 69 is a screenshot of a text that includes a Word attachment titled "Dion Lim Misrepresentati...". After that are screenshots that are excerpts of the gdrive document that you linked, but the HIPAA accusation is not in any of those screenshotted excerpts.

So how did tptacek even come across the HIPAA accusation, and how did you find the document that you linked that contains it?

Edit: ah, it's linked from this sentence "But in the interest of transparency, I’m posting it as well. You can read it here." where "here"[^1] links to the gdrive document.

Sheesh.

[^1]: Pet peeve - you've failed HTML 101 if you use "here" as a link. A few sentences earlier in that paragraph is the text that should've been the link text: 'the “Dion Lim Misrepresentations” document that Tan mentions in his post'.

nickburns• 2 months ago

Can you elaborate on "basic competency issues", either in the case of Boudin's office and/or other high profile reformist prosecutors? Is that just a polite way of calling them dumb, à la what the kids are calling a 'skill issue' nowadays?

tptacek21• 2 months ago

I can speak at length to the tenure of Kim Foxx, Chicago's former high-profile progressive prosecutor. I know some of the issues rhyme with Boudin's term, but San Franciscans can tell his story better than I can.

So, first, no, I feel like I'm saying the opposite of "they're dumb". I don't think either Foxx or Boudin are dumb. I think they're both interesting people with interesting and valuable views.

When I say "basic competence issues", I'm talking about the kinds of things that would go wrong if, like, you or I took over the CCSAO and started managing all the prosecutions in Cook County. For instance: having huge numbers of line prosecutors resign, in part because you totally fuck up the promotion ladder, in part because you shift staffing priorities away from line prosecution and towards internal policy positions, and in part because you fail to sell your immediate-term vision for how you're going to manage the agency.

The superficial way to look at veteran prosecutors resigning is that they're no longer culture fits, which you can look at as a good thing: Boudin and Foxx were hired to change those cultures. But a more practical and immediate way to look at them is that losing veterans puts the screws on your ability to execute the day-to-day of the agency. These prosecutor offices were incredibly strained before people like Boudin and Foxx got there. Which means: there was already an extent to which prosecution decisions were being made not just on justice, safety, or public policy more broadly, but simply on a triage basis.

When you start losing significant numbers of people, you lose the ability to set your own execution priorities; circumstances are making prosecutorial decisions. Foxx tried to put a brave face on it, but nobody was buying it.

What's more frustrating is that Foxx was doing this at the same time as Illinois was rolling out SAFE-T, which ended cash bail in Illinois. I am wholeheartedly in favor of SAFE-T, and I think by-default cash bail is an idiotic system that unnecessarily amplifies the societal cost of law enforcement. But SAFE-T was ultra-controversial in Chicagoland, and Foxx went through all this stuff while people were freaking out daily about catch-and-release. It didn't help that all of this coincided with a huge regional increase in carjackings, the second most important urban index crime after murder. It further didn't help that she was accused of refusing to prosecute juvenile carjackers, and that when confronted by reporters about that, she didn't have a clear denial.

I hope this reads as I intend it to, which is: not ideological, just an assessment about whether someone is prepared to step in and run the office, most of which is boring and just needs to be done correctly.

(I think you can probably look at Krasner as an example of a prosecutor who has avoided these traps.)

0xbadcafebee• 2 months ago

I've watched outsider-y progressives get elected into prosecutor roles and then fail their constituencies

Political achievement via moral/ethical/legal means does not work. We expect a single person with extremely limited power to assume a relatively minor position in government, then somehow defeat incredibly wealthy organized opponents, in addition to solving complex logistical and social issues, and to do all that without ever doing anything wrong? It's nearly impossible. Progressives need to return to the good old days of corruption and coercion if they want to get anything done.

JumpCrisscross6• 2 months ago

then somehow defeat incredibly wealthy organized opponents, in addition to solving complex logistical and social issues, and to do all that without ever doing anything wrong?

No, we expect them to do like one thing right without bungling the basics. The track record of the pre-pandemic era wave of progressive prosecutors was some combination of doing absolutely jack shit in the first category and/or being asked for table stakes on the latter and swallowing their chips.

JumpCrisscross6• 2 months ago

I feel like I've watched outsider-y progressives get elected into prosecutor roles and then fail their constituencies not because of ideology but over basic competency issues

Huh, I went through a similar journey in New York, starting as an advocate of criminal-justice reform and then getting fed up with the incompetence.

And while I wouldn't say ideological inflexibility is ideology per se, one of the contributors to ineffectiveness I saw in New York was a simultaneous inability to tolerate competent people with even slightly-divergent viewpoints (and there were a lot of red lines–I don't know what multidimensional beast could thread them), or, alternatively, an inability to fire or beach clearly-incompetent people because they were part of a priority community. (Read "community" broadly. It might be an identity. It was more often whatever union or local progressive club the person cropped up through.)

abirch• 2 months ago

Some of the difficulties of criminal-justice reform include: you can't arrest your way out of mental illness. It's easier for society to lock up the mentally ill in with a 1-dollar bond that it is to provide the help that they need. It's probably cheaper to do give them the housing and help, but it's easier to get money for jails and jailers than it is to get money for mental health facilities.

singleshot_• 2 months ago

I'd be foursquare behind a progressive prosecutor in a major city that ran a tight ship

Strongly inclined to hire such a prosecutor. Has this model been successfully deployed in any large U.S. cities? My only experience is watching it struggle in a medium one.

On your last point: given the ethical responsibility of a prosecutor, I’d go one step further. If you’re the prosecutor for a jurisdiction where a journalist works, and you make any statement about the legality of the journalists works, you better be substantially likely to secure a conviction, otherwise you should mind your business.

tptacek21• 2 months ago

Yes. It is a weird document. Journalists are unfair to prosecutors and police chiefs all the time. Shut up and do the job.

(I have feelings here because we're in a mini-spat between our PD and our terrible local newspaper, which is upset that our chief won't give them an interview after the local police union gave her a no-confidence vote; where I live, that vote is, reasonably, viewed as a sign she's doing the job well. But either way: she's not going to give an interview on this!)

jrflowers8• 2 months ago

Violating HIPAA rights and “violating HIPAA” aren’t the same thing. The rights granted by HIPAA are universal, everybody’s got them and anybody can violate them, it’s just that healthcare professionals are bound to not do that. You could violate my HIPAA “rights” all day and not get in trouble, because the law around protecting those rights does not apply to you. I could still write in a memo that the associated behavior is a dick move or a troubling issue with your character and ethics though.

Anyway, possibly poorly-worded title aside, it is made clear that Lim was receiving information from someone that clearly was violating HIPAA laws.

Here is the text:

    Dion Lim Violates HIPAA Rights of a Victim of Violence & Invades Her Privacy

    • Dion Lim released an x-ray of the victim of a stabbing—without the victim’s permission, in a clear violation of the victim’s HIPAA and privacy rights.
    o She claimed online that she had her grandson’s permission, but there is no indication he was authorized to grant consent on her behalf—and he was not the one to provide the photo, which she made clear in a tweet explaining she showed the x-ray to him, “and explained the decision to share it” as part of pressure to ensure the case was prosecuted.
    ▪ This suggests Ms. Lim was received a patient’s privileged medical records from another unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA.
    • In connection with that same case, Ms. Lim posted video of the brutal stabbing.
    o Despite the DA’s Office’s press release referencing the victim’s request for privacy (which was reiterated at the May 7, 2021 press conference in which Ms. Lim was present), she has not taken down this post.

It says that the victim’s HIPAA rights were violated in the process of that information being released, which appears to be objectively true. The second reference goes further to clarify:

This suggests Ms. Lim was received a patient’s privileged medical records from another unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA.

The only way to read that sentence as an accusation of Lim violating HIPAA would be to read it and conclude that she was both “an unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA” and also the reporter that the unauthorized source shared the information with (in violation of HIPAA, the law)

Calling the whole document “Trumpian” is kind of extreme when the criticism is “There’s an ambiguous phrase in it and I will not be addressing the clarifying language a couple sentences away from it” or “I think this lawyer meant ‘statutes’ when he wrote ‘rights’ which I imagine makes him wrong”

tptacek21• 2 months ago

There's a whole subthread that already covered this ground. The passage obviously implicates Lim --- the subject of the entire document --- a reporter, in lawbreaking, without alleging facts sufficient to establish that liability, and was written by the DA's office. When Trump's DOJ does this sort of thing, we all (rightly) freak the fuck out.

max0077• 2 months ago

why is YC worshipping this guy who pretends like he's the only guy who knows how to use cc?

jrflowers8• 2 months ago

It is hilarious that Garry Tan is still talking about Chesa Boudin. I thought Tan & co. solved crime in San Francisco with their super PAC four years ago?

loeg4• 2 months ago

I thought Tan & co. solved crime in San Francisco with their super PAC four years ago?

I mean, kind of? You can definitely point at certain quantified types of crime falling since Boudin left office in 2022: https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/02/san-francisco-2025-crime-s... . (Of course progressives wave their hands and say, it's random, or caused by structural oppression, or whatever.) And Lurie seems to be taking steps in a reasonable direction as well. The Board of Supervisors is still packed with nuts, of course.

jrflowers8• 2 months ago

Of course progressives wave their hands and say, it's random, or caused by structural oppression, or whatever.

Or part of a nationwide trend that couldn’t possibly be caused by Boudin or Tan

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2024-re...

tqi• 2 months ago

In the about page, this author states that they produce "original reporting and commentary on the criminal justice system and civil liberties." I really think it is a mistake to blur that line. These days it feels like you can pretty reliably predict what narrative a journalist will present on any given story based on their individual poltics.

How can you reasonably expect to be viewed as an objective reporter of facts if you also are acting as a commentator trying to shape public opinion?

janalsncm• 2 months ago

I used to think that it was possible to “objectively report facts” but the reality is we all have biases. Everyone needs to decide for themselves what is worth mentioning. So even if you state only 100% true facts, you can present a skewed lens on reality. This is how most propaganda works: not by spreading false facts but by selectively spreading true ones.

DonsDiscountGas• 2 months ago

It's really not realistic to expect people to have deep knowledge of a topic and also have no opinions on it.

rayiner4• 2 months ago

Lim’s book, called Amplified, was published by Third State Books, a company started by Tan’s wife, Stephanie Lim, to provide a voice for Asian-American authors.

How is this even legal? Surely the article means it’s a company focused on stories relating to Asian Americans, regardless of the race of the author.

OrangeMusic• 2 months ago

Why would it not be legal?

Traster3• 2 months ago

The person you're replying to is making the argument "Would you object to a book publisher that only signed writers who were white" or "Should a coffee shop be allowed to only hire white barristas". Which is a sound logical argument if you ignore the entire history of racism in the United States.

TimorousBestie2• 2 months ago

How is this even legal?

Title VII doesn’t apply to independent contractors. If you want to argue that authors should count as their publisher’s employees, go sue TSB in some complicit jurisdiction.

rayiner4• 2 months ago

Gotcha. That was the gist of my question. Like I said, I’m not an expert on this. I can’t keep the roman numerals straight. It’s interesting there’s not something that applies to contractors. I expect that’s also how OpenTable and whatnot get around these promoting “minority owned businesses.”

shadowtree• 2 months ago

Balko was a big proponent of police body cams, as they would clearly reveal massive police abuse and brutality.

Since the bodycam rollout however, we're inundated with videos of justified police actions, over and over again. Proving that most criminals are indeed retarded, unable to follow simple commands and escalate minor stuff into full violance, necessitating the use of force against them.

Balko now of course sees bodycams as propaganda or "copaganda".

Utterly biased "reporting", starting with an agenda and then trying to prove the point by any means possible.

Go Gary.

Traster3• 2 months ago

I'm always a bit sad that silicon valley just doesn't get free speech. Or rather, their view of free speech is "I can say what I want". The damning part for Tan here isn't the defence that Balko makes of their work. It's this

The DA’s office, which should have been prosecuting the people attacking Asian Americans, was orchestrating a media hit on the journalist covering those attacks.

A reporter being in contact with the prosecutors office and getting their view is a core part of the reporters job. It would be malpractice for them not to be getting that view on this story. To characterise it as the government "orchestrating a media hit" is just flatly wrong. It's just straight up defaming a journalist for doing their job.

And this is a consistent trend in silicon valley - that reporting they don't like is actually just corruption. This is a fundamentally anti free speech view and it's toxic and you see it all over silicon valley.

UncleMeat2• 2 months ago

Everything makes sense when you see it as an expression of hierarchy. Tan is an anti-liberal. He does not believe everybody should have the same rights. So of course "free speech" means different protections for him and his buddies.

bomewish• 2 months ago

So two different parts of the state use favoured journalists as methods to publicise information that they could not make public directly. When they do this they also get to shape the framing.

What a rather unpleasant business.

Garry Tan, the CEO of YC, accused me of unethical reporting

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