New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is at it again, telling us peons that we're not deserving of our full measure of yet another freedom, this time to express ourselves.
As reported by Dana Rubenstein at CapitalNewYork.com (HT The Blaze), "As it turns out, Bloomberg, the highest-profile cheerleader for New York City's burgeoning tech scene, doesn't really like the social media revolution upon which much of it is premised." Excerpts after the jump reveal that Bloomberg wants tech, but only on his terms:
Last year in Singapore, he said social media makes governing harder, an argument he reiterated during a press conference at BuzzFeed in February.
And today, the mayor, who has a Twitter account managed by his staff, focused his criticism on Twitter and Facebook.
"Number one, I don't understand why people don't understand that anything you write, anything you send out, is gonna be retweeted, re-Facebooked, re-this, re-that," he said, at a Williamsburg press conference about helping the unemployed get jobs. "You should write down, number one, only things you believe, and number two, then think about how it would look if somebody else sees it. There are just a lot of young kids who are doing things on their Twitter account, their Facebook account, that later on is gonna come back and bite them."
Part of the problem, Bloomberg argued, is that the brevity of the form allows readers to take things out of context.
"You can't talk about a complex subject, or a controversial subject, in a soundbite," he added.
This from a guy whose gun-grabbing organization is quite active in social media, while working night and day to come up with catchy slogans and soundbites and spending millions of dollars to distribute them, all in the name of making the loss of our Second Amendment rights seem acceptable.
This further reinforces Investor's Business Daily's characterization of Bloomberg as a tyrant a few days ago:
Mayor Bloomberg's Urge To Rule Makes Him A Tyrant
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that he thinks "there are certain times we should infringe on your freedom." If he really believes that, then he truly is a little tyrant.
Bloomberg's attitude is dangerous — and ubiquitous. Elected officials all across this land of the free feel the same as he does, though they rarely express it as vocally as he has.
But it's there, from proposals to carve up the Second Amendment to confiscatory tax rates and the accompanying redistribution of wealth, and from ObamaCare's individual mandate to Bloomberg's court-reversed ban on large soft drinks.
And now, it's in Bloomberg's "social media is for me, but not for thee" attitude.
There isn't a chance in Hades that a Republican or conservative could so casully discuss limiting freedoms without generating a justifiable press firestorm. But as long as someone supports the causes they like, the press lets it ride. How disgraceful.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
