Suspension of Disbelief 507
Well, you knew this post was coming when you read the news. A federal judge has ruled that Katie Evans, who had been suspended from high school for creating a Facebook group calling one of her teachers "the worst teacher I've ever met," can proceed with her suit seeking attorney's fees from her principal for violating her First Amendment rights. Evans, now a journalism student at the University of Florida, is represented in her suit by the ACLU of Florida.
If any of the recent student online free-speech cases should have been adjudicated in the student's favor, this would most clearly be the one. As Judge Barry Garber wrote in his ruling, Evans's page did not contain threats of violence (if it had, it would have been a matter for the police, not for a school punishment), and the principal didn't even find out about the page until two months after she took it down. It's hard to believe that the principal's lawyers, if he consulted with them, would have gone along with a recommendation to suspend the student. And once the Florida ACLU contacted the principal, wouldn't he have realized that the longer he fought the case, the more legal bills the ACLU would amass, along with the possibility that the principal could be ordered to pay them? Even if he had estimated that there would only be a 5% chance that he could end up being ordered to pay legal fees, was it worth the risk, if the fees could come to thousands or tens of thousands of dollars? Well, now he knows.
When a different judge ruled that a student had no right to challenge his suspension for making a vulgar Myspace page about his principal, I said that there was no more objective basis for saying that the ruling was legally "right" than it was "wrong," because if you put 10 judges in separate rooms and ask them how they would rule on the case, you could get 10 different, mutually contradictory answers. Well, fair is fair — even though I support Judge Garber's ruling 100%, I have to concede that it did not necessarily follow inevitably from the facts and the law, and there's no objective basis for calling it "the" right ruling. Judges are not like doctors who look at a mammogram, and draw on experience that the general public does not have, in order to see something that would be hidden from the rest of us. In cases like these, judges simply have multiple plausible interpretations in front of them, and they pick one. As such they're acting more like referees (who make a decision so that the game — or, in this case, society — can move on) than true "experts."
There is a temptation to think that there is some consistent reasoning behind the different courts' rulings — say, that the student who created a vulgar page mocking his principal (the student was identified in papers only as "J.S.") went too far and crossed a line, while Katie Evans's page complaining about her teacher was clean enough to stay on the safe side of the line, and make her eligible for damages in a First Amendment suit. This, I think, is nonsense, an attempt to put a consistent theory on top of a legal system that does not follow consistent rules from one court ruling to the next. If different judges had been randomly assigned to J.S.'s case and Evans's case, then it might have been J.S. who won and Evans who lost. After all, it was a federal judge who once ruled that a Utah high school had the right to suspend a student for wearing sweatshirts emblazoned with "Vegan" and "Vegans Have First Amendment Rights." (The judge and the principal had apparently confused veganism with eco-terrorism.) How do you reconcile that with any of the recent rulings? (No prizes for guessing how that judge would have ruled if the shirts had said "Christian.")
But even if it's still a roll of the dice how a court would rule in a particular student free-speech case, what matters from the point of view of a principal in a future case, are the potential payoffs. What if you're thinking about suspending a student for a non-threatening, non-libelous Facebook page? If the case ends up in court and you win, then you get the satisfaction of being "vindicated." But if you lose, you could be ordered to pay tens of thousands of dollars to the student's attorneys. So even a small number of victories for students in free-speech cases, even if mixed in with an equal or greater number of victories for the schools, still create an enormous incentive for a principal not to risk the case at all, when the potential gain is so small and the potential loss so huge. Even if you think there's only a 5% chance of being ordered to pay the student's $10,000 legal bill, that means you'd still have to decide if it's worth (on average) about $500 to get the satisfaction of suspending them.
(On the other hand, if a student created a page that was so threatening or libelous towards a staff member, that the school would run the risk of being sued if the principal didn't suspend the student, then the school and the principal are taking some legal risk either way, but the risk involved in suspending the student is much smaller. Fine — there's nothing wrong with suspending a student for threats of violence.)
So the ruling is a much more significant victory for student speech than many of the parties involved probably realize. Even though Judge Garber didn't actually award Evans her attorney's fees (yet?) — he only said that she could proceed to seek them against the principal — just the fact that it's coming dangerously close to that, means that principals in future cases now know what the risks are.
But why was all this necessary? How did the legal and societal climate of attitudes toward people under 18, lead to a principal thinking that he could punish a 17-year-old for comments that she made about a teacher, on her own time, to a third-party audience? If the students in the school had been comprised, not of minors, but of adults from some other minority group — African Americans, immigrant women, native Spanish speakers — there's no question that the principal never would have thought he could get away with suspending the student for criticizing a teacher.
Similarly, students at Harriton High School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania just discovered that school officials had given laptops to students to take home with remotely-activated webcams, that could be used to take photos in student's homes and transmit them back to school officials. Incredibly, this was discovered not by students or their parents examining the laptops, but because school officials used the feature to take a photo of a student in his bedroom, and then confronted him about "inappropriate" behavior, not considering that the students and their parents might consider it "inappropriate" that the school snuck spy cams into their bedrooms. (The school has issued a denial claiming, "At no time did any high school administrator have the ability or actually access the security-tracking software" — which doesn't seem to make sense, since the lawsuit was filed in the first place because the student was told by the assistant principal that the webcam had caught him engaging in "inappropriate behavior.") What was the school thinking? Probably, they were thinking, "These are minors, we can do what we want." If their student clientele had been comprised of adults, they never would have dreamed that they could confront a student about behavior in their room that they captured with a hidden camera. (Ironically, the school may end up in more trouble for spying on minors, as this editorial argues, since the school officials may now be guilty of recording and possessing child porn, depending on what the cameras "captured" in the students' rooms!)
So no matter how much ink is spilled analyzing the legal technicalities of suspending a 17-year-old student for off-campus speech, that's not what the case is really about. The case is really about attitudes. Change society's attitudes to think of 17-year-olds the way we currently think of 25-year-olds, and no judge is going to deny them their right to criticize their school on their own time, any more than a judge in today's society would deny that right to a 25-year-old.
And where does this attitude towards minors come from? I suspect that most people who believe that we have to draw the line somewhere around age 18, believe it for no better reason than because they were raised in a society where most other people believe it too. If you think that setting the cutoff age at 18 is just "common sense," then I would bet my house that if you had been raised in a society where the cutoff age was set at 13, that would seem like "just common sense" to you as well, and similarly if you had been raised in a society where the cutoff had been set at 22. This may seem like an unremarkable observation, but my belief in minors' rights has always been motivated by a more fundamental belief that you should not believe things merely because most people in your society believe them. If that sounds like a trite platitude, consider how few people in the US seem to question the rule that you can show a man's chest on television but not a woman's chest. In more liberal Denmark, supermarkets can stock tabloids at toddler-eye-level with photos of topless women on the cover, while in Saudi Arabia, adult women can't leave the house without covering their faces, and in all three societies, the majority thinks these regulations are just plain "common sense." Is the age of majority just another arbitrary illusion caused by the power of consensus?
When I said this on The David Lawrence Show, the host made the thoughtful observation that most countries all over the world set the age of majority for most purposes at 18. Close, I said, but it doesn't quite prove what it seems to prove, because those globally diverse societies did not reach that conclusion independently — they move in similar directions because of cross-cultural influences. (The voting age was set at 21 in many democracies before many of them lowered it to 18 in the 1970's within a few years of each other.) To get a better sense of whether there is any merit to the idea, we'd have to do something like the "putting the 10 judges in 10 separate rooms" test — put 10 different societies in mutual isolation from each other, let them develop and debate things on their own, and see if all or most of them reach the conclusion that 18 us a good cutoff age for adulthood.
The idea that actual children — under the age of, say, 11 — are qualitatively different from adults, has in fact been re-discovered by civilizations that developed independently at different points in history, all over the world. So there's probably something to it. The idea that teenagers are qualitatively different from adults, is something particular to recent history, and a wise person transported forward in time from the 1500's to the present day might scratch their heads and wonder why we think that 18-year-olds should be allowed to criticize their teachers but 17-year-olds cannot. I suspect the artificial extension of childhood grew out of the fact that because modern jobs are more complicated than they used to be, we need more years of schooling before we can go out and compete in the workforce. The fallacy there, though, is that just because we need more years of schooling, doesn't mean that the natural age of "human maturity" has gone up. So we end up with 17-year-olds having to go to court to establish their right to criticize their teachers on their own time.
Judge Garber wouldn't have been in a position to make this argument in his ruling even if he agreed with it. But even if his ruling was based on logic that has nothing to do with the underlying case for minors' rights, it was still a step in the right direction.
Ageism (Score:5, Insightful)
The scary thing is, I just don't think age has much to do with maturity.. I've met plenty of minors who seem to have a really decent grasp on maturity, while I've met plenty of 18+ who will never grow up.
Curfews and other discriminatory things are inherently ageist, and should be examined. Let's let parents do some parenting, shall we?
TLDR (Too Long, Did Read) (Score:2, Insightful)
Can someone tag this 'article in the summary'?
More contributors like this please.
The right decision is easy. (Score:5, Insightful)
If it happened outside of school and it was illegal, call the police.
If it happened outside of school and it was legal, mind your own business.
Can you say "rant"? (Score:3, Insightful)
How many different directions and issues do you need to drag up in one Slashdot posting????
Maybe you make some good points, but your rambling makes me put you in the "tinfoil hat" category. Don't drag down one good argument by associating it with 7 less important ones.
Re:Ageism (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunetly, Ageism is generally only considered to be "descrimination against people for being too old", not the other way around. This is definetly something that should be changed in my opinion.
Re:TLDR (Too Long, Did Read) (Score:4, Insightful)
Every generation does it (Score:5, Insightful)
We rage against our parents, get older and then oppress our kids. Happens without fail.
What's disturbing now is that the current generation looks like kittens compared to the last three or four that came before. Truth is, they're being oppressed by adults who came from a generation of serious trouble makers.
I suspect that's where a lot of the worst of it comes from. We just assume the problem is with young people, and never stop to consider whether the problem was if our generation was maybe a little too fucked up.
Re:TLDR (Too Long, Did Read) (Score:1, Insightful)
Apparently his post was too long for you to read. He said "Too long, did read" and "More contributors like this please". Maybe you should take the time to comprehend before replying.
Re:Ageism (Score:5, Insightful)
Real Question: Jurisdiction of Public School (Score:4, Insightful)
The issue is whether the school has jurisdiction over activities that a student performs outside school. Legally, the school does not have any such jurisdiction.
For example, consider a Christian fellowship meeting. The governing council of a school district can ban the conduct of such a meeting on the premises of the school, but students wishing to attend a Christian fellowship meeting off campus are free to do so. Once you walk off the premises of the school, you are free to do whatever you want.
Consider another example. Smoking cigarettes on campus will result in a suspension. Yet, smoking cigarettes at about 1 foot outside the perimeter of a campus will result in nothing.
Showing a woman's chest on TV (Score:5, Insightful)
It's even more ridiculous than that. In 1999, Lil' Kim went to the MYV video music awards with one breast hanging out. She covered her nipple with a pasty and all was well. So breasts are allowed, but showing a woman's nipple turns it from a normal (ok, maybe slightly more-than-normal) show of skin into "OMG!!! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!"
In addition, we've gotten to the point that we (as a society) can't seem to see a woman's breast as anything other than a sexual object. If a woman breastfeeds her child in public, she risks being told to cover up her breasts because someone doesn't get that her breast isn't being used in a sexual manner but is being used to feed her child. She might even be told to take it to the bathroom. As if anyone really would like to eat their meal sitting atop a toilet! But breasts are involved so therefore someone, somewhere might see this as sexual and therefore we must push them out of sight entirely.
I often imagine a world where women are free to go topless whenever they want. Yes, a lot of guys likely just started drooling, but really think about it for a second. After a few weeks of that, seeing a topless woman would be just a normal part of life. It would be like seeing a woman's leg: Yes, a guy might be attracted to that piece of her anatomy, but it wouldn't cause him to go into a frenzy. Of course, the THINK OF THE CHILDREN crowd would eventually move on to another body part, calling kids seeing that as inherently harmful and thus required to be hidden from view at all possible times.
Re:Ageism (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you been around many of your age-peers lately? I'm 26 myself, and remember enough of college to think that denying a vacation rental to college age kids is a great idea.
Places that restrict rentals in such a way are worried about a group of immature people coming in and destroying the place without any means to pay for it.
Re:Showing a woman's chest on TV (Score:4, Insightful)
It's even more ridiculous than that.
By saying that it's ok for men to be seen topless but not women implies that men are unable to control themselves, while women are. That's a double-dose of sexism - women's bodies are shameful and must be covered up, while men are brutish and incapable of controlling themselves.
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The right decision is easy. (Score:1, Insightful)
If it happened outside of school and it was illegal, call the police.
If it happened outside of school and it was legal, mind your own business.
I am a conservative and over 40, a parent of three school age children and I couldnt agree more. They are trying to legislate a schools right to ground children as though the school/state is the parent. Dangerous territory. Whats more, are our civil rights so damaging and dangerous that they cant be extended to children, or at least defined/abridged in an explicit way? I have met adults that arent more mature than a 15 year old. Maybe their rights should be removed too, hmm?
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Insightful)
I would prefer to judge each person's maturity based solely on their maturity. (Redundant, but needs to be said).
Awareness of one's maturity or lack thereof does not, in itself, decide ones maturity. And while maturity is a highly subjective matter, having an honest view of ones self does not always imply ego, and therefore is not inherently contradictory of maturity in itself.
In fact, I'd consider one who is mature to have a much more accurate self-view than one who is not. And while it is considered uncouth to speak of such things, as it is commonly considered egotistical, it must be defined in context- such an opportunity which you have just forgone in favor of an adage instead of logic.
Re:This isn't that different from the adult world. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you ask a teacher no medium is the correct medium to criticise a teacher.
In the principles office you'll get ignored or randomly punished for questioning their authority and being a malcontent.
The school board will ignore you or you'll get randomly punished for criticising a teacher in public rather than quietly in the principles office.
If you go to the papers you'll be ignored or get randomly punished for criticising a teacher in the newspapers rather than quietly in the principles office.
Teachers and school administrators aren't exactly known for being fair and just.
(except if you ask a school administrator or teacher that is)
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Insightful)
Often, to segment customers and discourage the wrong crowd from your business, putting hurdles is customary. To avoid the lower class from a 5 star hotel, they charge the amount only classy people would pay. Do some people sneak past that filter? I'm sure they do. But it's certainly less discriminatory than ageism. If you can pay, you can play.
Who Does The Parenting? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that I, in any way, think it's right we've ended up in this situation, nor that the conclusion is right. For the sake of providing an alternative perspective, however...
"And where does this attitude towards minors come from?"
Under the legal age of consent, minors are considered a group that require additional guidance: greater praise to encourage positive actions, protecting from greater long term consequences of negative actions, more immediate short term consequences for those actions.
Under that system, it's generally considered a parent's responsibility to discipline.
Unfortunately, the common belief is that a hell of a lot of parents don't bother. They've got other things to do, are absent, would rather be the kids' friends, had kids whilst kids themselves and never learned the lessons they need to teach, a whole slew of reasons.
The common belief holds that they tend to dump pretty much the entire responsibility for parenting on a school system that has to deal with the consequences of that lack of parenting every day.
Given they've had both the responsibility and consequences dumped on them, for the entirety of raising a child, time and again... and they know the parents often won't back them when it becomes the parents' responsibility in situations that overlap... how surprising is it that issues keep coming up where they overreach what would ever be acceptable in a world where every parent acted like a parent?
I'm not saying it's right. As is always joked, there are tougher requirements on having a beer or driving a car than there are on becoming a parent. It's not acceptable that many parents do a terrible job of raising their kids. It's not acceptable that responsibility and consequences are dumped on the school system. It's not acceptable that some parents acting so poorly leads to some teachers generalizing for all parents and overreaching in all cases. It's not acceptable that we value education as poorly as we do, have class sizes as large as we do, and create a situation where teachers don't have time to genuinely assess each case.
It's wrong in every way. But the only way you stand any chance of fixing something is to understand the whole broken system and everything that needs fixing... rather than just finger pointing at one symptom at the end of the chain and declaring that it is wrong. Sadly, as a society, we much prefer that fingerpointing and scapegoating to actually facing tough truths. So, I imagine these teachers will get sued, we'll all feel very righteous, then wonder why it's continued to get worse next year.
Re:Ageism (Score:2, Insightful)
in your second sentence, replace "immature" with "black". we could take the time to reword the first sentence too, but i hope you get the point....
Re:This isn't that different from the adult world. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but your boss pays you. On the other hand, the students parents pay the principal/teachers.
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Insightful)
Just make a "no party" clause with huge monetary penalty for breaking. Make it bloody obvious from the beginning that this clause is there, and that it will be enforced if necessary.
Re:Ageism (Score:4, Insightful)
Because old people have the time, resources and experience to make you eat your rule. Additionally, even if they are old or senile, chances are that they have spawned some children who have become adults who don't want their parents fucked with.
I have to admit that right now, it seems like teens who are for the most part, pretty much physically adults, are being treated like children. That has caused all sorts of problems. On the other hand, looking back at when I was 17, I was smart, and didn't get into too much trouble, but I was completely inexperienced compared to the way I am years later. And the thing is that some of the most important lessons I have learned weren't a few years later, it was more like five or even ten years after.
So I am torn between advocating rights for teens over say fifteen or so, or demanding that no one gets to vote or be an adult until they are 25. Honestly, the answer is probably "both", depending on the level of experience that they need to make certain decisions. The reason to lower the voting age to 18 was because you could draft 18 year olds into the military. It was therefore considered appropriate to at least let them vote for the people making that decision. I consider that fair even if it means that we have a more inexperienced voter pool at the low end. However, I don't really want anyone younger than that voting. There are people who are too ignorant to vote at 25, let alone have teens vote who haven't even finished their basic education.
As for bars and car insurance companies that discriminate against single men under 25, let's face it, at least in the case of the insurance companies, they've done the studies and both know their target audiences. You can argue the alcoholic drinking age all you want, but while it is in effect, people are going to be more likely to binge drink for a good few years after they are legal. I don't know about 25, but 22 or 23 definitely doesn't seem like a stretch to me to ban all those undergrads.
Re:Ageism (Score:2, Insightful)
You are using the racism straw man to misrepresent his argument.
Re:The right decision is easy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Freedom of speech applies to everyone, adults, children, and (now) corporations.
Freedom of speech can be limited in certain situations (on private property, speech that meets the legal definition of obscenity, speech that is threatening or libelous, or speech that is likely to provoke imminint lawless action.)
Minors are only a special case in that they have parents who are allowed to punish them - or rather they don't have any legal recourse to parental discipline. In some situations, schools act in loco parentis. This is very different from saying that minors don't have free speech rights.
Re:How did we get here? (Score:4, Insightful)
If this claim were true, then we would see such repression all over the world, since many countries support public education.
But all indications are that the effect is instead particularly an American one. So no, it isn't about "socialized education".
Re:The right decision is easy. (Score:3, Insightful)
You forgot the most important point:
You are not the one who decides on its legality!
Also, isn’t vigilante justice illegal for a reason?
You call the cops because you think it might be illegal. The cops then also just bring the person in front of a judge, because they think it might be illegal, and because they have the power. And the judge, in a proper process, checks if it fits the laws and hence is illegal, because he has the competence. (At least in theory.)
In any case, you and the cops got no business in judging over other people.
Re:The right decision is easy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Technically, schools do have the rights of a parent (for the most part) when THE KID IS AT SCHOOOL. It's called in loco parentis.
They don't (or at least, shouldn't) have any rights as a parent when the kid is back at home. So these sorts of things (like the PA spying case) should be treated as any other illegal intrusion by a government agency.
Re:This isn't that different from the adult world. (Score:2, Insightful)
What a sweeping and ridiculous comment. Sounds like you are generalizing from a bad experience with a "principle."
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Insightful)
That would be great if parents "parented". Most don't. There are so few consequences for poor parenting and 0 standards about who can become a parent. Let's start sending parents to jail for their kid's stupid behavior and see how that goes. "Drunk driving minor? You and kid lose their license for X days." In military brat communities parents are held liable for their kid's behavior. If the Sergeant's son is caught shoplifting it can hurt daddy's career. Consequently, such problems are rarer. Daddy gives a shit.
Discrimination is not inherently bad. i have no problem with telling blind people they can be airline pilots. It may be ageist to tell kids to be home by 10pm, but that doesn't make it wrong. Or is ageism age discrimination we dislike? Few feminists are clamoring for women to be subject to the draft.
If we don't use age, we have to use something else to determine responsibility. If schools would allow kids to take classes at their own pace then we could use graduating HS to be the "age of consent". We could then allow the GED as a test. i'd say that should be a requirement for earning a full driver's license. Most of the trouble teens get into happens when they are driving themselves and each other around unsupervised.
i do think the drinking age should be 18. And i do resent that people call our military members "kids". They are all over 18, they are adults (mature or not). Just because a soldier is someone's child or is young, does not make them a child.
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Insightful)
Ageism against the young is particularly heinous in this period because even as tuition is going up and support is going down, there's increased competition from people that would've retired had they behaved responsibly previously and had most of the defined benefit pensions not been phased out via deregulation. I'm sorry, but chances are that if you're hitting retirement age and realizing that you can't afford it that it's your own damned fault for not planning ahead. The youth shouldn't have to sacrifice their future because you didn't do any retirement planning.
Want it both ways? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand how they can't have full free speech rights, yet be held accountable for criminal acts. If a 17 year old student came to school with a gun and killed someone, they would want to try them as an adult. If you're going to be held to adult standards in that situation you should also have adult privileges.
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Insightful)
The difficulty here is that 'child', 'teen', 'adult', 'elderly', and 'infirm' are points drawn on what is actually a smooth continuum. From conception until death, you pass through the continuum of humanity. Your apogee occurs around age 35, which is when you are probably wisest and strongest and most independent... that is: your humanity is greatest.
There is no way to defend any line drawn on a continuum. Therefore, 18 is not defensible versus 17 or 19, but there nevertheless remains the need to draw a line somewhere in that vicinity. So we must be prepared to deal with many border-cases and exceptions. Any request, such as the submitter is making, for a logically defensible "bright line" are fundamentally misguided and immature along the lines of "Waah, I want my reality to be neat and tidy!".
Ditto the abortion debate. Both sides are trying to draw a "human here!" line on a continuum, but at different arbitrary spots. They'll never resolve it until they realize it's a smooth continuum.
Re:Ageism (Score:4, Insightful)
Women (and men) who support traditional gender roles can engage in a lot of harm. Look at how culturally appropriate it is to think that women make better parents.
Re:The right decision is easy. (Score:4, Insightful)
There are already laws covering libel and slander. If one of them is broken, take proper action. As far as I know, being a jerk is not illegal in the jurisdiction in question.
You state that the school should punish certain legal behaviors occurring outside of the school. Should the school post a list of behaviors that shall be punished, or should it have the authority to levy punishments for arbitrary actions? Should the schools really have the authority to do either? Should private schools have the same authority?
Re:Ageism (Score:1, Insightful)
No, you just missed his point. It would be unthinkable to deny access to "all black people", just because some minority of black people might cause damage and not be able to pay for it. That is called "prejudice". You see, the hotels are "pre-judging" people under 25, with no real basis for judgement.
Re:Ageism (Score:2, Insightful)
it's that there's less harm resulting when a minority engages in it than when somebody in the majority does.
Spoken like a true racist. How you can think that being a white guy and being beaten to death by a group of black guys does less harm than being a black guy and getting beaten to death by a group of white guys, is sickening. I guess that the thing with racists though. They always have an excuse for why their racism doesn't really count.
Re:Every generation does it (Score:4, Insightful)
That said, as a father who has not forgotten his own childhood, there are things that happened to me that I will not let happen to my own daughter. I will answer any question she asks with the truth, and if I catch anybody lying to her because they think innocence can only be achieved by ignorance, I will thank them not to do it again. If somebody has a problem with her behavior they should take it up with her first to give her a chance to change of her own accord or to even defend her rationale. I hated it when people would air their grievances with me behind my back to my parents as though I were some disobedient dog that did not deserve the respect of direct contact but should be brought to heel by my 'owner'. There are more than these, of course, but the take away point is this: I am not my parents.
However I get the impression that I am a minority. At PAX some years ago I went to a panel about the role of gamer parents in their children's lives, and I heard the same old crap that the generation before ours gave us. I got up and asked the panel, essentially, 'if it didn't work the first time, why do you think it will work now?' And they fed me and the crowd some more crap. No approach is so perfect that it can't be improved. If we mindlessly follow the same patterns as our parents, how can we hope to improve our children beyond that limit? Social development will stagnate. Luckily, even if my kind are a minority, there's still some movement.
Free speech is an inalienable *human* right (Score:3, Insightful)
To my knowledge, free speech is an inalienable human right not an inalienable adult right. The age of the individual should not matter in the slightest, but be subject only to the conditions on free speech itself, ie. libel and slander.
Re:Ageism (Score:4, Insightful)
I think I make a better parent than most women in my neighborhood, even though I'm "just a male". For one thing I don't sit my kid in front of a TV, and then leave for hours on end like I see many mothers do. I sit and watch the TV with my kid, because I know my kid will only be a kid for ~13 years, and that's not a long time. I think I can spare 13+ years.
Plus I think they need that human-human interaction, especially when they say something like, "Why's that guy stealing on the tv?" and you explain that stealing is wrong and he'll eventually be punished for it. If you weren't there, the kid might think it's okay to steal.
Re:The right decision is easy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Freedom of speech applies to adults(i.e. over 18 in some states, over 21 in others).
Seen and not heard, eh? And preferably, not seen either? But, oh, the thinking!
you have to draw the line some where
Who says you have to? And why must it be a line? And why must it be a hard line based on age?
This is why many states have juvenile laws that are separate from adult laws.
And whenever that line is blurred, it is always against those on the wrong side of it (such as 11 year olds tried as adults).
Re:How did we get here? (Score:1, Insightful)
Privatizing the school system will solve it!!!
That's the dumbest comment i've read today, but one has to love the American way of solving things. Who cares about those families who can't pay those bills you talk about? And have you thought that you can already send your children to a private school if you want to? Nevermind, do whatever you want with your already so privatized "lets save money for 20 years to send our children to college" eduaction system. In Europe we can't wait to see your education system becoming Healthcare Insurance v2.0:
Hey ma'am I want an education policy for my child.
-Ok lets make him take some tests. Shit, only an IQ of 100, here in California we only accept childrens with such an IQ for infance garden schooling, but you can write your son into it for 18 years. -Wait what?
-Yes sir, we can't risk lowering our statistics by taking your son into a medium highschool program, think about the children!!
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, he's talking data; you're talking anecdote.
Re:Showing a woman's chest on TV (Score:3, Insightful)
If you read the Old Testament, you'll find that social standards determined that women were unclean when menstruating, and contact with them was a sin. Further that women who gave birth to boys were unclean for a week, and those who gave birth to girls were unclean for two weeks. Community standards can be complete bullshit.
Quite frankly, though I am neither a feminist nor female, I think that the aversion to breasts stems from the remnants of patriarchal power jealousy. Where men are concerned they don't like being reminded that they were utterly dependent on their mothers at one point, and where women are concerned I think part of it is internalized patriarchal masculinism (as there have been women who were even against sufferage) and the other part is instinctual jealousy and anxiety over how men will be attracted to the breast-feeder and her fitness as a mother. As none of these are rational, the mind varnishes the feelings with some bullshit about morality.
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Insightful)
At some point, people have to become adults within our society and suspending all their rights and "protecting" them from the real world until they hit a magic age isn't a good way to prepare them for adulthood. Neither is it the gov'ts job to raise our children -- rather it is parent's who should "protect" their own children, not the gov't.
Re:Every generation does it (Score:5, Insightful)
My concern is more about big, stupid generational assumptions. Like how Generation X was supposed to be a bunch of bums, but instead spent a decade fueling the tech bubble, finance bubble and real estate bubble. Not exactly the actions of unambitious people.
Generic assumptions about any generation get over-ridden by the ground truth of the decade when they hit their 20s. You don't really know anything about a generation until the hit 30. By that point, you've discovered how they treat work, money and family. And only then do you know who they are.
I come from the generation that was told to lock the door, fear strangers and murder anyone who says "Hi" to you because all strangers want to fuck you in the ass or force you into a cult.
None of that was helpful. Strangers rock, it turns out. It's the people you know who should scare the fuck out of you.
And why were raised that way? Because my mom's generation became adults in the 60s and early 70s, and were convinced that the end of all civilization was upon us. They saw one of the highest rates of violent crime in the history of the industrialized world. I think that's why they elected Reagen and Thatcher.
My generation became adults in the age of terrorism. We've watched "the end of the world" happen so many times since the Berlin Wall fell (supposedly "The End of History" happened at that moment) that we just find the possibility the world could end a little implausible.
Point being? All the shit our parents' generation inflicted upon us was not only useless (turns out there weren't big scary negroes or any Russians fixin' to kill me) but counter productive considering that we live in a much more social world than we were told would ever exist. None of the shit they told us helped. And in fact, shit like "Make sure you invest" put a fuckin' to us.
And truth is, we can't help but do the same thing to our kids. We look at how they use the internet, and all we can see is awesome ways they're going to be raped and murdered. So, we inflict the same crap on them.
Mod up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Free speech is an inalienable *human* right (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ageism (Score:5, Insightful)
For one thing I don't sit my kid in front of a TV, and then leave for hours on end like I see many mothers do.
Meh. You always see complaints about parents not taking time to spend with their kids as if it were simply a function of laziness. But one of the reasons parents were able spend more time with their kids "in the good old days" is due to a more subtle problem: economics. It used to be possible for a young man to graduate high school, get a good unionized job in manufacturing, and make enough money to buy a house, a car, and for his wife to to stay home with the kids or work part time.
Whereas now it's more common for both parents to work 40+ hours a week for the same or lesser lifestyle. And when you've been dealing with a stressful job all day, it becomes a lot easier to think "fuck it" and say "okay kids, go ahead and watch tv..."
Re:Ageism (Score:1, Insightful)
Here's the problem with that. White people who are prejudiced against blacks didn't start out black and mature into whites. Older people did, however, used to be young once.
Re:Ageism (Score:2, Insightful)
There are a number of interesting things going on in your post, not least of which is you having a conversation with someone who does not actually appear to be myself. Let's just forget what the other guy said - if he feels like it, he can chime in, but, frankly, if I were him, I'd stay the hell away.
What I think, is that the impact of racism is magnified by the power of the group that is racist. What you're not getting is I'm applying this at the level of society, you're applying it at the level of a small group of people. At the low level, duh, of course the group of people beating on the individual have more power than the individual, whatever their race. But, move up to the level of the society as a whole - one of those two groups is going to have more power, that's the group who's racism will have the greater impact.
Think about it this way. Hypothetically say you have a society that is 10% one race, 90% another (notice that I'm not saying black or white - that makes no freaking difference). Say both races are equally racist towards one another. Say that tha majority group happens to have vastly more political/social power as the minority. What I am saying is that despite both groups being equally racist, there will be more racist acts by the powerful majority towards the less powerful minority than vice versa. And so, while each individual act is equally bad, there's more badness flowing in one direction.
So yes, it is just as bad and not as bad, as you so eloquently put it. You simply need to be able to look at the issue at the level of the individual incident and in the aggregate.
That said, since you concluded your well written argument by apparently using racist as a synonym for "I disagree with you," followed by the interesting claim that I had equated whiteness with racism, I suspect there's the outside chance that you will not quite agree with this argument. I welcome further, well reasoned, points.
Re:Ageism (Score:5, Insightful)
"It used to be possible for a young man to graduate high school, get a good unionized job in manufacturing, and make enough money to buy a house, a car, and for his wife to to stay home with the kids or work part time."
It is still possible. The jobs may not be in manufacturing but they are still out there.
"Whereas now it's more common for both parents to work 40+ hours a week for the same or lesser lifestyle."
Sorry, but in many cases both parents work because they want or expect a HIGHER standard of living. They want more than one car, a big house, the toys, etc. If my parents had lived like the average family of today, one income would not have been sufficient either.
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, does this mean that I think we should return to the days of "whites only" lunch counters
It sounds like that's exactly what you are saying, assuming the lunch counter isn't owned by the government.
Seriously? It's not about age. (Score:2, Insightful)
With respect to free speech.
If they are human, they have the right.
Re:Ageism (Score:2, Insightful)
People used to spend more time with their kids? Maybe so, but kids used to spend a lot more time off by themselves, unsupervised, figuring out who they were and how the world works.
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Insightful)
Racism from a minority, fuels the aversion and can be used as a poor excuse by the racists from the majority group.
Just because racism from a minority is less common, it doesn't mean it shouldn't be considered. And by no means it is just an anecdote.
It is unlikely equality and fairness will be result of a system that doesn't consider the necessities of all groups equally.
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Insightful)
The old "I'm a better parent than women who let their kids be couch potatoes because I plant my ass on the couch right next to them so we can all be best 'spuds'" argument.
And I think you delivered it in all seriousness. :)
I like the sig, though.