Category: ZT & PC

“The idea of loosely running around and chasing each other is not safe.”

So says Long Hill, NJ, School Superintendent Arthur DiBenedetto. That’s why, of course, one Long Hill School District’s elementary schools required that students, as part of “code of conduct” they had to sign, agreed to a ban on tag.

Because, of course, the next thing you know, they’re going to be shooting each other, or pushing each other off cliffs, or something.

Dodge ball, meanwhile, is on the outs, because of fears that certain kids will be ganged up on. And, of course, by banning dodge ball, bullies will no longer be able to pick on other kids.

Not, of course, that tag is any better.

“There’s potential for some victimization,” said Mary Beth Klotz, a psychologist with the National Association of School Psychologists. “Tag may look OK socially, but it can be a double standard because kids can use it to bully a certain student.”

Well, thank goodness we’ve put a stop to that.

If you’re the Flesh Public Library (named seventy years ago after local business man Leo Flesh), you shouldn’t be surprised when your (federally mandated) Internet filtering software doesn’t let you pull up your own web site.

Your tax dollars at work …

“Changing the world, one student at a time.” That’s what the marquee in front of Fred A. Anderson Elementary School in North Carolina says.

Too bad the changes aren’t for the better, as a nine-year-old, dressed up in his duck hunting garb for “Camouflage Day” at school (!) discovered a shotgun shell in his pocket from an outing with his dad and brothers the weekend before. He made the mistake of pulling it out where a teacher could glimpse it and, faster than you could say “Pull!” the straight-A student netted a five day suspension.

Granted, shotgun shells are not exactly what you want kids bringing to school. But there’s no indication (or even accusation) that it was intentionally brought, or that the kid was playing with it or intentionally endangering anyone. His mom admits she should have checked out the clothing (duh), and the school as abruptly realized that maybe “Camouflage Day” is a bad idea.

So why suspend the kid for five days?

Because, school officials say, they have “no choice,” based on county school board regs.

“Changing the world, one student at a time.”

How do you think Jonathan Cross has been changed?

It’s way too easy to do two years in the pokey. At least, if you’re a sex toy distributor who does something to get your car pulled over.

Don’t Texas police and DAs don’t have something better to do with their time? Like harrass comic book stores?

What the frell is Harvard Law School, font of such First Amendment champions as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, doing debating whether to develop a speech code?

If you can’t deal with harassing, offensive language, perhaps the law is not where you should be focusing your attention.

Yet Dershowitz incited even more fury after he challenged a member of the Black Law Students Association to be more specific after the student read a statement reiterating her group’s support for a ”discrimination harassment policy” that includes penalties.
”With all due respect, what you stated is extraordinarily abstract,” Dershowitz said. After the student was not able to cite an example of offensive language that could be censured in a speech code, Dershowitz said of the proposal: ”That’s like asking someone to first vote for censorship, and then figure out later what is censored. With all due respect, I find that statement unhelpful.”

If you can’t even define what you’re looking to ban, it really sounds like law is perhaps not your best career move.

Instapundit quotes the University of Chicago’s stance on the subject.

The ideas of different members of the University community will frequently conflict and we do not attempt to shield people from ideas that they may find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even offensive. Nor, as a general rule, does the University intervene to enforce social standards of civility.” . . .
In other words, the University permits partisan, even hostile statements against groups or states, but not violence or physical intimidation of individuals. And while we do not enforce speech or civility codes, we have long prided ourselves on the kind of respectful environment that encourages all to offer their views. We see this kind of civility not as a requirement, but as a virtue, and therefore worth pursuing. In short, while we sometimes treat ideas here rather roughly, we strive to treat others with the civility we would like to receive ourselves.

How remarkably refreshing — and, dare I say it, appropriate for an academic institution.

Folks in the US sometimes take the First Amendment for granted. But, I’ll tell you folks, it’s that sort of thing that makes it — well, not impossible, but a lot more difficult to get crap like this happening here.

The Council of Europe has amended its cybercrime treaty to devise criminal penalties for those who dare to express unpopular ideas for public consumption with any manner of computer equipment. The measure specifically targets so-called ‘racist and xenophobic material’, and would apply to any controversial Web-site, or even a mean-spirited posting to a BBS or an e-mail newsletter. …
The venerable Eurocrats have decreed that, “‘racist and xenophobic material’ means any written material, any image or any other representation of ideas or theories, which advocates, promotes or incites hatred, discrimination or violence, against any individual or group of individuals, based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin, as well as religion if used as pretext for any of these factors.”

In other words, if the authorities decide that your electronically-expressed opinion expresses hatred toward others, it’s a crime. Well, it’s a crime if it’s hatred based on race, color, descent, nationality or ethnicity. It’s okay to hate someone based on religion, as long as it’s not a “pretext” for hating their ethnicity. It’s also presumably okay to express your hatred for someone based on their being left-handed, handicapped, gay, Republican, or being a Madonna fan. This year, at least.

Does this strike anyone as being the slightest bit — odd? Quixotic? Scary?

Special mention is made that part of this protocol is to nail folks who either deny or endorse the Holocaust. Unless, one presumes, the endorsement is based on condemnation of the Jewish religion, vs. Jewish ethnicity.

This stuff is, by the way, tucked into the “economic crimes” category, under “cybercrime.” The EU’s “chirpy press release” on this can be found here (where we find the US is welcomed to sign on to the protocol, never mind that irksome little 18th Century dross known as the US Constitution), and the actual new treaty protocols can be found here.

UPDATE: Well, I was busy all weekend, which is why I didn’t see the SDB commentary on this. As usual, much more thorough and much more thought-out a job than I could possibly manage.

Given that, why’s the US Army so hot to fire Arabic language specialists, which both the military and intelligence are chronically short of, just because they’re gay?

I mean, what’s the real priority here, folks?

(via InstaPundit and Shark)

Heavens to Betsy. I don’t know whether to be pleased or apalled that some school administrators aren’t focusing all their time on suspending students for pseudo-violent behavior. Instead, some are pursuing pseudo-lacivious behavior, as is the case here, where a football player was given a two day “in-school suspesion,” including being kept out of playing in the homecoming game, for …

… attacking his girlfriend?
… groping his girlfriend?
… fondling his girlfriend?
… dropping to the ground atop his girlfriend (or vice-versa)?
… liplocking with his girlfriend, with Maximum Tongue Action™?

Nope. For giving his girlfriend a kiss on the forehead.

Imagine what would have happened had he kissed her hand, Southern Gentlemanliness or no.

The district considers “inappropriate” contact between students a no-no and leaves it up to principals to decide exactly what is inappropriate.

Yeah, because that’s a way to ensure clear, consistent, and non-arbitrary exercise of power.

Rodney Bowler, Union Grove principal, said kissing, hugging excessively and other physical contact distracts students from academics.
“We run a strong academic environment in which kissing is not an activity that needs to take place in the school building,” he said.

Yeah, it should take place out by the bike racks, like it did in my days.

Come on. Was he smooching with his sweetie in class? Nope. In the library? Nope. In study hall? Nope. In the hallway. What sort of “academics” was he being distracted from while there?

And how come the girl (who presumably gave up her forehead to the kiss willingly) isn’t getting busted for this?

If anything is being learned from this, it’s not chaste restraint and focus on academics within school walls. It’s hyperbole, as the suspended student laments:

“It hurt me so bad, my senior year missing my homecoming game. I’m going to be scarred for life. I’ll have no stories to tell my kids.”

Heaven help that I should ever be in so great a national tragedy that, should someone satirize or poke fun at it, even inadvertently, I don’t need to turn to Jesse Jackson to voice how “deeply insulted” I am, and how the very existence of such fun-poking must be expunged from the pages of history.

(via Xkot)

Y’know, if there’s something that gets the average citizen to press for school vouchers and private alternatives to public education, it’s not going to be educational reform or testing or anything like that. It’s going to be yahoos like the administration at Creek Elementary School in Oklahoma, who suspended a sixth grader for the horrific crime of “shooting” his finger at another student.

The scary/aggravating thing about this is that usually school administrators hide behind, “Well, we have to follow the letter of the rules, so we don’t have any discretion [liability] here.” In this case …

[Muskogee School Superintendent] Gleichman said that pointing a finger like a gun is not specifically addressed in the district handbook for elementary students. But he said it could be construed as threatening and would be covered under the district’s anti-bullying rules.
“Right now, its all kind of in the eyes of the beholder,” Gleichman said. “I’m not saying every principal at every school would address it the same way, but they’d have to do something.”

Really? They would?

I particularly enjoy how it “could” be considered threatening, and therefore automatically qualifies as “bullying.”

Read the article. Pay close attention to how the school’s story has changed, and how, in response to questions about that, “they could not comment on the punishment of a particular student due to confidentiality laws.”

How convenient.

Swear to God, if Katherine ever gets caught up in insanity like this, I’ll shoot my damned finger at the principal, and see whether the police want to file charges.

Bored? Nothing to do? I mean, absolutely nothing that would add to the betterment of life on this here Earth? Like taking out the trash. Or dusting your furniture. Or turning off the TV?

Then you probably might as well join this campaign condemning AFLAC commercials for “degrading ducks.”

No, I’m really serious here. Or, at least, United Poultry Concerns is.

Needless to say, there’s probably some worthwhile things that UPC does in terms of the conditions of factory farms, etc. But actually urging a letter-writing campaign about the AFLAC commercial betrays an attitude that is so over the top that, like PETA, it poisons the whole well of everything else they have to say.

(via BoingBoing)

I’m not sure I am any happier with North Tynside Council’s current reason for no longer supporting a long-standing carol-singing competition for kids — because the kids might get cold — any better than their original reason — because it’s a competition, and some kids will be labeled “losers.”

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill has won a victory over Sears, getting it to pull t-shirts from its shelves that is says made fun of the mentally ill.

The shirts said, You should hear the NAMES the VOICES in my head are calling you.

The organization also called on Wal-Mart Stores, Kmart Inc., Kohl’s Corp., and Target Corp. to stop selling the T-shirts and similar merchandise “mocking mental illness” or risk facing potential legal liability under federal or state anti-discrimination laws.
“The T-shirt perpetuates prejudice and discrimination against people with mental illnesses through the intimation of threats flowing from auditory hallucinations,” said Ron Honberg, NAMI national legal director. “They reinforce an unfair perception of violence.”

Riiiiigggghhhttt …

I have a great deal of sympathy for folks suffering from mental illness. From as personal experience as one can get without actually being the one diagnosed, I know how disruptive it can be, how painful, how terrifying to experience and difficult to overcome. And certainly this country has a piss-poor attitude toward providing care and appropriate support for the mentally ill.

(For anyone who had a chance to hear the story, there was a chilling article on NPR a week or two ago about a VR program that simulates the effects of schizophrenia. Even just the soundtrack was very disturbing. It’s being developed to give physicians a “taste” of what their patients are going through.)

In short, I am (and have been) willing to go to the wall for fair, decent treatment of folks so afflicted.

But let’s get real folks (so to speak). Battling funny t-shirts at Sears is not going to get better treatment for the mentally ill. It’s not going to engender sympathy, or a desire to help. It’s going to just make NAMI come across as another Politically Correct you-will-respect-us-whether-you-want-to-or-not.

You want to get sympathy and respect? You learn to laugh at yourself. You learn to be the one to tell jokes about your own too-human foibles. We all have them. Making fun of those foibles isn’t the same is making fun of ourselves. Mocking mental illness isn’t mocking the mentally ill.

I mean, not to equate something like gaming with mental illness, but I could be one of those guys who gets in a high dudgeon every time someone makes a deprecating remark about gamers. Or I could be someone who wears Dork Towers t-shirts and is the first to laugh at gamer jokes when they come up.

I know which sounds like more fun, and which is more likely to make me seem like someone who is approachable, friendly, and deserving of respect.

Sometimes when you fight too many small battles, you’re setting yourself up to lose the war. And if you focus just on small battles, you’re more likely to find them, too.

(The cynic in me wonders, BTW, how long we’ll be able to use a phrase like “suffering from mental illness,” and instead have to refer to someone as “enjoying being differently cognizant.”)

Now, you might well ask, how is this different from telling racial or ethnic jokes? Well, ultimately, it’s not. But from what I see, these things go through a cycle. After being constantly joked about, the persecuted minority gets the majority to realize that, y’know, maybe that’s not so funny. But at the same time, the minority members can tell those very same jokes among themselves. And then, slowly, the resentment begins to fade, and everyone can tell at least some of the jokes, particularly the ones that have a grain of truth in them.

So I’ve seen this with a lot of ethnic jokes. Everyone can tell Irish jokes these days, or even wear t-shirts with them — jokes that at one time were actually meant cruelly, or which would have provoked a fist fight (you know those hot-headed Irish types). I expect the same thing will eventually happen with blacks and Hispanics. And with the mentally ill, too.

I just wish we didn’t have to have such sound and fury (and VOICES) in the meantime.

Since 1936, the University of West Virginia Mountaineers have had a team mascot (the Mountaineer, natch), who fires off a musket (powder only, natch) when the team scores.

Which, of course, is why the University of Wisconsin banned the Musketeer’s musket from Camp Randall Stadium.

The school was quick to assert it was just a matter of following “policy” against “weapons” in the stadium. Though the athletic department made it clear that they just thought the whole musket thing was, well, wrong. “We don’t need a gun going off in front of 80,000 people,” said the Wisconsin associate athletic director.

Right. After all, probably only 60,000 of those folks voted for a 1998 state constitutional amendment, asserting that “the people have the right to keep and bear arms for security, defense, hunting, recreation or any other lawful purpose.”

And after all, it’s not like the stadium wasn’t named after an old Civil War training camp. Oh, wait … it was.

Maybe it was considering that — or considering that they were being made a laughingstock on ESPN — which led to the Wisonsin folks backing down. This time, at least.