Color Me Flagrant

It sure seems at times that our second amendment community has come a long way in a few years. Tireless court battles and fighting for CCW and even open carry legislation seems to have turned the tide back from the days when the Brady Center and associated associations of their ilk seemed to be dictating legislation in Washington as well as state and local governments. Recent polls have shown that the average American thinks the Second Amendment guarantees individual gun rights. The courts have also called cities like Washington on the carpet because of their unconstitutional bans (or laws that essentially count as bans) on guns.

Yeah, things are looking up.

But as Gunny Highway said:

Just because we're holding hands doesn't mean we'll be taking warm showers together until the wee hours of the morning.

There is an existing bias that is well entrenched in our society and does not show any signs of exiting the stage quietly. Witness this article in the NYT today:

Social Media History Becomes a New Job Hurdle
By JENNIFER PRESTON

Companies have long used criminal background checks, credit reports and even searches on Google and LinkedIn to probe the previous lives of prospective employees. Now, some companies are requiring job candidates to also pass a social media background check.

A year-old start-up, Social Intelligence, scrapes the Internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years.

Then it assembles a dossier with examples of professional honors and charitable work, along with negative information that meets specific criteria: online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages or videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and clearly identifiable violent activity.

“We are not detectives,” said Max Drucker, chief executive of the company, which is based in Santa Barbara, Calif. “All we assemble is what is publicly available on the Internet today.”

The Federal Trade Commission, after initially raising concerns last fall about Social Intelligence’s business, determined the company is in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, but the service still alarms privacy advocates who say that it invites employers to look at information that may not be relevant to job performance.

And what relevant unflattering information has led to job offers being withdrawn or not made? Mr. Drucker said that one prospective employee was found using Craigslist to look for OxyContin. A woman posing naked in photos she put up on an image-sharing site didn’t get the job offer she was seeking at a hospital.

Other background reports have turned up examples of people making anti-Semitic comments and racist remarks, he said. Then there was the job applicant who belonged to a Facebook group, “This Is America. I Shouldn’t Have to Press 1 for English.” This raises a question. “Does that mean you don’t like people who don’t speak English?” asked Mr. Drucker rhetorically.

Mr. Drucker said his goal was to conduct pre-employment screenings that would help companies meet their obligation to conduct fair and consistent hiring practices while protecting the privacy of job candidates.

For example, he said the reports remove references to a person’s religion, race, marital status, sexual orientation, disability and other information protected under federal employment laws, which companies are not supposed to ask about during interviews. Also, job candidates must first consent to the background check, and they are notified of any adverse information found.

It all sounds soooo obvious, clearly correct and true, no? I mean, people who are anti-Semitic, racist, drug abuse and inappropriate pictures of a sexual nature - well, ya don't want them working for you, now do you?

But just hold on a second there sport - just exactly when did "flagrant displays of weapons" become a crime? For that matter, when did it become a crime to object to insidious multiculturalism by joining the Facebook group about "pressing one?" I thought political views were not a criteria for judgment. Shows what I know - if you have the wrong view, yer toast. I mean, after all, if you object to that, it only logically follows that you're a Hispanic hating bastard who should be put away.

Let us get back to flagrant displays of weapons here for a minute. Just what constitutes a flagrant display? And while we're at it, please cite any studies that show that people who own more than one gun for self defense make lousy employees? Or people who hunt are prone to violence in the workplace? I'll be waiting right here.

This is just plain bullshit, period. Somehow, somewhere, I'd bet these demotivational posters would put a tingle right up Max Drucker's leg:

Here we have a shotgun, two semiauto handguns, an evil black rifle, some ammo, magazines and a flashlight, for Gods sake. Oooooh, that's bad. Bad indeed. Obviously the owner of those weapons needs psychological assistance right now, immediately if not before. Clearly this is a perfect example of flagrant pictures of weapons.

Now this kid is even worse. Never gonna get hired for that cubicle job - I mean just look at him. He's even looking prideful of his collection. No ammo, but just what the hell is going on with all those handguns, buster? I mean, you only need one to defend yourself kill some disadvantaged person who needs your stuff and your life more than you do. Oh, the humanity.

I'd really expect this picture to leave yellow puddles under the "safe and sensible" gun control advocates. Nuff said.

Marc S. Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, based in Washington, said that employers were entitled to gather information to make a determination about job-related expertise, but he expressed concern that “employers should not be judging what people in their private lives do away from the workplace.”

Yeah, that's gonna make me sleep better.

Less than a third of the data surfaced by Mr. Drucker’s firm comes from such major social platforms as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. He said much of the negative information about job candidates comes from deep Web searches that find comments on blogs and posts on smaller social sites, like Tumblr, the blogging site, as well as Yahoo user groups, e-commerce sites, bulletin boards and even Craigslist. Then there are the photos and videos that people post — or find themselves tagged in — on Facebook and YouTube and other sharing sites like Flickr, Picasa, Yfrog and Photobucket.

And it is photos and videos that seem to get most people in trouble. “Sexually explicit photos and videos are beyond comprehension,” Mr. Drucker said. “We also see flagrant displays of weapons. And we see a lot of illegal activity. Lots and lots of pictures of drug use.”
He recalled one man who had 15 pages of photos showing himself with various guns, including an assault rifle. Another man included pictures of himself standing in a greenhouse with large marijuana plants.

See, y'all just thought I was pulling your leg about having more than one gun being a detriment to being hired. Notice how illegal drugs, illegal activity and sexually explicit photos are linked with gun ownership. Again with the flagrant display term, which is not defined. It's just assumed. You agree, don't you, citizen of the world? You'd better, if you want to eat away from the government dole. Otherwise, you'll be unemployed, unemployable and on the .gov tit for all your miserable life.

Joe Bontke, outreach manager for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s office in Houston, said that he regularly reminds employers and human resource managers about the risks of violating federal antidiscrimination employment rules and laws by using online research in hiring decisions. “Things that you can’t ask in an interview are the same things you can’t research,” he said, which includes the gamut of information covering a person’s age, gender, religion, disability, national origin and race.
That said, he added that 75 percent of recruiters are required by their companies to do online research of candidates. And 70 percent of recruiters in the United States report that they have rejected candidates because of information online, he said.

Oh yeah, the EEOC is right on it. That's gonna change everything.

Dave Clark, owner of Impulse Advanced Communications, a telecommunications company in Southern California, began relying on Social Intelligence for background screening because he said the company needed a formal strategy and standards before assembling online information about job candidates. “They provided us with a standardized, arm’s-length way of using this additional information to make better hiring decisions,” he said. About half of all companies, based on government and private surveys, now use credit reports as part of the hiring process, except in those states that limit or restrict their use. As with social media background checks, there are concerns about information that is surfaced. The equal employment agency filed a lawsuit last December against the Kaplan Higher Education Corporation, accusing it of discriminating against black job applicants in the way it used credit histories in its hiring process.
But it is not unusual for senior-level executives in many companies to undergo even more complete background checks by a private investigating firm.
“We are living in a world where you have an amazing amount of information and data on every executive,” said Ann Blinkhorn, an executive recruiter in the converging technology, media and communications industry. “I think that puts the burden on the recruiter and the hiring manager to be really thoughtful about what is important and not important when making the hiring decision.”

“They provided us with a standardized, arm’s-length way of using this additional information to make better hiring decisions" - no, what they do is provide you with a much smaller list of candidates that you'll feel comfortable about choosing from rather than actually using your head to make the choices. By accepting the rejection criteria implicitly, you've jumped right in there with the PC crowd and joined such successes as the zero tolerance policies that many schools use. You've just freed yourself from making a decision, rather than using your noggin to judge people fairly. As in: Can they do the job and work well within the organization? Apparently if we don't have the same beliefs as the PC HR types, no.

And notice how this crap is self perpetuating. Nimrods who allow over enthusiastic screening like this are just making sure that their world is insulated from any sort of outside thought - because thinking that having guns is a right of the individual is an outside thought to them.

Aaand, a lot of gunnies are going to be upset about the gleaning of Facebook and social media data to hoist them on our own petard, as it were. Well, the privacy issues set sail a loooong time ago. Just exactly how do you suppose the social sites actually pay for all that bandwidth so you can play Farmville for free? It's not just ads on the side that no one ever clicks on. People are just being ignorant about data mining. Let's say you "like" Harley Davidson and guns, plus Blake Shelton, for instance. A data miner is going to be looking at your relationships to see who likes similar things, what "sort" of friends you have, and try to knit all the things they can together so they can effectively target ad campaigns, or to present whatever political ideas might get you to vote for someone, or whatever. All the interactions with individuals and concepts on Facebook are valuable in this way.

Nope, our past ideas of privacy are unfortunately antiquated in this brave new world. But we can still fight against the subtle discrimination displayed by this new trend in business solutions.