Can I hate on these vine things that are too big for my laptop screen/browser window and start and stop all jerky and shit? Because 20 seconds of video shouldn't do that.
I thought Iowa State all stoners and hippies. Which, I guess it might be for Iowa and still have plenty of people like that.
I guess she doesn't remember what happened to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Also, I am pretty irritated with how a lot of the "Too much Internet shaming!!" trend articles conflate people being shamed for their actions with people being shamed for themselves.
I am no way no how on board with shaming Chris Christie over his body, but I'm just fine with shaming him for being corrupt and bullying.
I wouldn't shame Justine Sacco for being blonde (is she blonde?), but I'm just fine on shaming her for publicly posting a racist "joke".
Etc.
I wouldn't shame Justine Sacco for being blonde (is she blonde?), but I'm just fine on shaming her for publicly posting a racist "joke".
There is also an issue of proportion here. Yes, her joke was racist, and she shouldn't have made it, and she shouldn't have thought "oh, it's ok, people know me and will know I'm not really racist. Yes to all of that. But one poorly thought through remark shouldn't ruin your life.
That's the thing that is troubling about these internet pile ons. There just doesn't seem to be any stopping the mob once they get going.
That said, the sign-tearer will have to do a lot of quick apologizing before I start saying she's had enough shaming.
I want an ethical justification for making fat jokes about Christie, but that still prohibits them in general. Maybe something in an exemption for those that are both assholes and public figures.
Some philosopher might try to be useful is what I'm saying.
The Justine Sacco thing was a crime. I'm ashamed I played any part in propagating it (I forwarded it to people).
6.1: I don't think anyone said that in this case. It's a faux quote making the same point you're making.
Also, Justine Sacco's joke was actually kind of funny. Maybe it's "hipster racism," but I don't think that's all that helpful a way of understanding jokes like that.
Sacco's apparently successful recovery of her reputation makes me think she's good enough at PR to know not to make jokes like that on twitter.
Her reputation has recovered because the website that destroyed her life deigned to let it recover years later.
I wouldn't shame Justine Sacco for being blonde (is she blonde?), but I'm just fine on shaming her for publicly posting a racist "joke".
Well, in fairness 99.9% of the blondes you see bleach their hair, and hair bleaching counts as an action, so you'd safe shaming her for that.
Losing your job is NOT the same as having your life ruined. And losing your job when your job is specifically the exact issue that you screwed up strikes me as pretty fair justice.
I know that the specific woman in the video probably didn't say the MLK thing, but I see almost verbatim comments virtually every day on Twitter. It's definitely a widely-held belief among a segment of the public.
It's definitely a widely-held belief among a segment of the public.
Yup, that's why the poster put it in quotes. As in, "they say this, but look what happens." We're all on the same page here, sister Witt.
What are they protesting? "Our lives will come to an end the day we become silent about things that matter" and "numbers not neighbors"?
It seems to have been related to a Trump appearance.
At least she's politically engaged!
17: Trump's comments on immigration and his generally anti-Latino comments. See discussion.
I had damned well better be permitted to make fat fun of Chris Christie, not least because "fat, mean, loudmouth asshole" is his brand.
The way of the warrior is an ethos, Moby! Does Chris Christie look like Toshiro Mifune to you?!?!
Anyone make out what she said at the end?
I can't, but here is a news story with longer video and some details.
Losing your job is NOT the same as having your life ruined.
Speak for yourself. I think a lot of people would disagree. There may be instances where everything works out ok in the end, but I think for most people, being fired would be ruinous.
I think most people lose their job involuntarily at least once in their life. Usually, it's being laid off, but still losing a job is not something you can reasonably hope to avoid for an entire career.
This is a really petty thing I noticed, but that sign ripped very easily. I think maybe it was just newsprint or something. Some of the other protesters had some proper poster board, but I think this guy must have been Mr. Last Minute Sign.
I think she's just super strong.
I guess it couldn't have been newsprint because the sign was upright and he was holding it at about 1/4 of the way up from the bottom.
It wouldn't take strength, but technique. Maybe she does this a bunch or practiced at home.
IT WAS AN INSIDE JOB WE MUST BE VIGILANT AGAINST FALSE PAPER SLEEPER CELLULOSE
Jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt paper.
Per the article in 25 she's apparently college-aged but not an ISU student. Wheels within wheels.
Probably at Wolf Cub or whatever we were calling it. No football there.
I agree that losing a job and having an internet pile-on, is pretty ruinous. Less than a spouse leaving you, or massive injury, or actual death, yes but pretty awful. And I thought her stupid ironic racist joke was to a small audience, right? We shame right wing bigots when they blow all out of proportion something activists say that was intended for a small twitter audience, right? Do we shame them only because they're right wing bigots and hence inherently shame-able, or because there was something shame-worthy intrinsic to their action?
That Sacco's a PR person makes it more complicated, and I'm sure I'm having misapplied empathy, but I say a lot of dumb shit (here, for example, and definitely on Twitter) and wouldn't want the public-but-quasi-privateness of it to ruin my life. Or almost ruin my life. Or anyone else's.
No sympathy for the woman in the video, tho'.
Knowing when you're making jokes in poor taste under a pseudonym on an obscure blog and when you're using your personal twitter account under your own name to an audience of anyone able to access a URL is one of those skills I'd hope a PR professional would have figured out. The magnitude of the outrage, on twitter and sites reposting it is the only thing that makes her remotely sympathetic. Had she lost her job because she made the same tweet and her company fired her quietly in response to complaints, she'd still have been just as fired but it probably would have looked less unjust, had it even been visible.
I would guess that the woman in the video wishes she'd have not given her real name to the student reporter or whoever.
Well, we don't actually know that she did.
29: She's Jessica Walters, aka She-Hulk.
35: There's football at Wolf Cub. Just not any FOOTBALL.
40: Maybe she has a vandalism pseud.
The idea of public shaming seems fine until you see that most of what it consists of is people threatening other people with rape or murder of their families on the internet. It never seems to stop with "Hey, that was a fairly rude thing to do that undermines freedom of speech and disrespects right to assemble!" OK, maybe that's where it tends to stop hereabouts.
I was first made aware of this by a friend who was on LiveJournal around 2001, that he said anyone suspected of having pedophilic tendencies would be doxed and harassed. Like sure, maybe it's good for your LJ friends to step in and say, hey, dude, don't comment that way on that 16-year-old's picture, but trying to get that person fired or jailed or harassed into suicide is taking things rather too far.
Maybe that's why the whole thing with the bear took off.
Maybe Chris Hansen got his programming ideas from LiveJournal.
48: Right? It's like people suddenly realized that even though it's the 21st century, we can still lynch people.
I don't think "To Catch A Predator" was healthy for society, but I don't think it was an problem on a level with actual lynching.
To be fair, I've only seen one of the two.
And then of course there's the internet notoriety that comes when a company that operates a virtual assistant app gives your picture to a police force on the other side of the globe who then uses it as an excuse when it tackles and arrests a well-known athlete waiting outside of their hotel who looks vaguely like your picture. As will happen from time to time.
Wait. Why was the NYPD using Go Butler to find a suspect?
53: I assume use of the app was somehow part of the identity theft case.
I guess that sounds better than what I was thinking, that they typed "find me a picture of X" in the Go Butler search box.
Yikes.
I was also going to say that there's something terribly creepy about what happens to mugshots these days. It doesn't even matter if you're found guilty of a crime; if you have a mugshot, it's instantly up on several different websites with your name, and you have to pay thousands of dollars to get it taken down. It happened to a friend of mine after a DUI, and he spent upwards of $15K to get the sites to remove it before discovering cheaper subscription-style services that take care of it for you. There's nothing illegal about this, apparently.
An image search for my name (with middle initial) produces no pictures of anything connected to me except for my boss. On standard search, it doesn't show anything connected to me until the fourth page of results. I've been trying fix that by writing more, but maybe I can just get a DUI. I've already got the "UI" part down.
It may be changing, but from what I've seen, unless your job involves driving, the first DUI doesn't hurt you much. It's the second one that starts to close doors.
I'm happy to see that my online footprint is pretty negligible. As far as I can tell, everything that comes up in any of the standard search engines is science related.
Re: public shaming by internet mobs. Public figures such as politicians or wealthy CEO's doing sleazy stuff: fine. Smaller companies like the doctors office in the thread above this one that do really heinous shit like calling the police on undocumented immigrants trying to get basic healthcare: fine.
Random private individuals who make a joke on social media that goes over the line of good taste: not fine.
But you get arrested for fucking a goat just one time...
25: Although Reed did not agree with the views of the protesters for Students Against Bigotry and had his own views on illegal immigration, he questioned the way they were protesting. "Who's likes bigotry?" Reed said. "Who's going to say they're for bigotry?"
I forgot that Martin Luther King was also deeply committed to making his opponents' best possible case, putting together a rhetorically soaring and logically sound case for white supremacy so that America could properly decide after full Solomonic consideration.
When they say they want the protesters to be like Martin Luther King, they aren't referring to his non-violent civil disobedience, they are referring to him being dead.
"You've probably punished yourself more than we could ever punish you."
Hey, it fits the title at least, right?
Coming back to affirm that when I meant public shaming, I really did mean "shaming," and not "threats" or "harassment."
And I mean it mostly in the realm of logical consequences -- not "You're an evil person nyah nyah" but "You have done something hurtful and contradictory to the agreements you made, and now people are going to behave as though you broke an agreement -- because you did."
I find it bemusing and somewhat disheartening that public discussion of this issue is conflating people who are being attacked because of who they are with people who are being criticized for what they've done. Attacks are not criticism, and actions are not identity.
And I would disagree with AWB's claim that The idea of public shaming seems fine until you see that most of what it consists of is people threatening other people with rape or murder of their families on the internet.
Yes, if you focus on the horrific Gamergaters etc that's what public shaming looks like. But the overwhelming majority of incidents I'm aware of are "public" in the sense of having 40 to maybe 5,000 people know about them. People get publicly called out, they either apologize or fake-apologize or double-down, maybe there are some consequences, maybe not, and then the whole thing dies down. But -- here's the important part -- sometimes people improve in the future! And if they don't, sometimes other people observing the event do.
I'm going to keep calling out newspapers for running headlines about "sex" between teachers and preteens when they mean "rape" because I think they ought to be ashamed of doing that. And if somebody gets suspended from work for a day (ha, as if), then I would consider that an utterly fair consequence. And if someone got FIRED over it, I would consider that a grossly disproportionate response but still unlikely to "ruin their life."
I dunno. The consequences of being even a pretty big asshole as a generally non-public person don't really seem like they should include 5,000 or more strangers picking apart your actions based on a shared internet video or comment or whatever. It's hard to complain too much when the people really are assholes, like racist sign-ripping blonde here, but I don't see why I need from 2000 miles away to get all het up about some racist blonde woman in Iowa who is in no way a public figure and who did something utterly unremarkable, even if assholish. Being publicly notorious for something bad is actually pretty awful, even if you did do something bad, and it often seems like punishment way out of proportion to the crime.
I mean shaming like public stocks or whatever were serious punishment because it really really really sucks to be shamed. Personally if hypothetical hardcore racist me ripped down this sign while being drunk or whatever I'd much rather go to jail for a few weeks than have some viral video of me go around the country. And that's not to mention all the problems with context and editing and what not that get obscured by random videos or photos (probably not the case in the video in the original OP, of course).
To be clear, I'm not talking about legal remedies, just that the internet fucking sucks.
I dunno, maybe you're right and I'm being too extreme.
You know, the internet does suck, but racist sign-ripping blonde was actually cheered by the crowd who saw her rip the sign.
Also terrible. Only firm but fair dictatorial rule can resolve these contradictions.
Sacco made a poorly crafted joke about racist presumptions. Sign-ripper is a xenophobic asshole. There isn't a conversation worth having that doesn't distinguish the two*.
*I'm a little too intoxicated to know if anyone here is failing to make this distinction.
70: This gets at why I can't get on board with the whole internet shaming thing when it comes to non-public figures. In general it doesn't distinguish between cases like Sacco and racist sign ripper. The most obnoxious thing about these outrage parties is how random they are. That's why I'm unconvinced that they're some brave new frontier in social justice, except when they are aimed at targets with actual power, as noted in 59.
The link in 25 now contains the apology of the ripper. Because outrage work, I guess?
72: Looks like she couldn't make up her mind between a non-apology apology and an apology apology. I would love to know the "context" in which tearing up a stranger's sign wasn't meant to upset anybody!
An acquaintance of mine was semi-notoriously internet shamed back in the early days of internet shaming. Congressional staffer who had the poor judgment to (a) work for Republicans and (b) post too-sexy pictures of herself and talk about sex on MySpace. I don't know her well enough to have asked her about it, and it's entirely possible that she'd have ended up on the same non-politics career path she ended up on regardless, but it sure as fuck must suck for the first n google hits for your name to still be misogynistic stories in Wonkette/Roll Call/etc., almost 10 years years later.
If that's who I'm thinking of, I don't know if that was actual shaming or just plain old prurient interest dressed up as shaming.
Probably doesn't matter much from the target's perspective, though.
74: It's probably not. There was another much more notorious congressional staffer internet shaming roughly around the same time I think, which is likely what you're thinking of. Much more prurient interest value in that one.
That's right. That one was a blog, not myspace. Also, buttsecs.
I've only had my protest sign ripped up by a huge, off-duty cop, never by a blonde in an ISU shirt, so I'm not sure if I have standing to comment, but it seems to me that public acts of fascism are worth attacking even if they're fairly minor.
I'm sure there are many of you who will leap to Charlie Hebdo's defense in light of their recent choice to make light of the death of Aylan Kurdi.
their recent choice to make light of the death of Aylan Kurdi
Not at all how I read those cartoons.
Not at all how I read those cartoons.
Agreed, Islamist.
Context, which will surely be ignored by the usual crew.
Late to this, but since the thread is reawakened I'm going to post. I remain amazed at how many people are willing to accept that Sacco was "joking." First of all, there is no recognizable joke there. There's no setup, there's no punchline, there's no undermining the listener's expectations, there's just bald bigotry.
Second, is there any evidence Sacco wasn't serious? Other than her statement after the fact? This is a genuine question; I followed the story reasonably closely when it happened but haven't since then. Did she have a public record of making non-racist jokes about topics like HIV or something?
On the sign-ripping: I watch that video and I think about the immigrant kids I know who have grown up in fear that at any moment their parents could be taken away from them, and I think about how the casual assault on a sign is really a casual statement of power: I can do this to you and nobody will care. People will laugh in support.
Why don't they just publish more Holocaust cartoons? Surely they can't have run out of funny things to draw about it already.
If they have, what good are they?
83 last is right on. It's a perfect demonstration of white privilege.
I totally disagree with you about Sacco, though. I can't remember if I said here or in private somewhere that there should be a word for when you speak in someone else's voice in order to mock that view. Then I was like, oh yeah, satire. It's what Sean Penn did at the Oscars with the Mexican/green card joke, and it's what Sacco was doing in her tweet. The one external piece of evidence I've seen that she's not a big ol' racist is that her (white, South African) family were ANC supporters and she was mortified by their mortifaction, which makes it seem unlikely, to me anyway, that she'd be casually racist, rather than trying to make fun of the racism that assumes only blacks get AIDS. And that's the problem with jokes of that form: they rely on knowledge of the teller's beliefs and motivations to work, otherwise they're indistinguishable (mostly) from plain racism. You could say she was dumb to make the joke on twitter, but there also need to be semi-private spaces where we can joke with friends that way, without things being forwarded to the world.
So, Sacco is the moral equivalent of somebody who kidnaps Madonna?
87 is probably sexist.
Anyway, I tend toward the ogged position on Sacco.
Or at least, I think Sacco was much less wrong than Gawker was in blowing up the thing.
Rather than worrying about whether shit like Sacco's tweet or Hebdo cartoons or this Iowan's sign ripping are good or bad, why don't we just focus on whether they are smart or stupid? I think it's pretty obvious that Hebdo's constant provocations of radical islamists were pretty fucking stupid -- not just in hindsight --people had been saying so for awhile and Hebdo's editorial staff didn't listen. When people give you good advice, and you don't listen, and then it blows up in your face, well we got a word for that, and it's called "being a dumbfuck".
Murder might be different from ripping a sign.
Unless the sign is tattooed across somebody's body.
And that's the problem with jokes of that form: they rely on knowledge of the teller's beliefs and motivations to work, otherwise they're indistinguishable (mostly) from plain racism.
Yup. Definitely.
You could say she was dumb to make the joke on twitter, but there also need to be semi-private spaces where we can joke with friends that way, without things being forwarded to the world.
She didn't just "make the joke on Twitter." She made the comment, under her real name, in the context of a Twitter feed that was (as much as I can remember) NOT known for satire.*
Part of why this irritates me so much, I think, is that in my IRL experience, actually-racist people being shocked! that their racism has blown up on them is so, so, SO much more common than little ol' innocent I-meant-to-be-doing-satire people who get blindsided. Like, an order of magnitude more common. So being asked to believe Sacco is the latter is asking me to believe something that in real life, in my experience, is pretty rare. Not impossible, but definitely rare.
*The thing is, we already hold people of color to an extraordinarily high standard of what it is OK to express in public. So when white people kick and scream about how unreasonable it is for people to hold them accountable for their words -- including their innocent words being misunderstood -- it is really white people saying "How dare you hold me to the same standard as other people!!"
You could argue that the ideal should be that we not hold *anyone* to those impossibly high standards, but that's not the world we currently live in.
I dunno, I'm just some weirdo who tags her sarcastic tweets with /s, though. And I fully expect to live with unreasonable consequences myownself at some point.
79: correct. This was a year or so after that. And in fact looking at some of the stories again now, a couple of them straight-up admit this was nowhere near as big a deal as Jessica Cutler, but we're going to spread it around anyway! This didn't go much beyond posting some pics of her thong showing over low-cut jeans and comments about the kind of guys she liked to hook up with. Total bullshit but I guess people were hoping a little digging would expose the next Washingtonienne. Or they were just assholes.
Lots of folks in the Maghreb seem to be fully capable of parsing the recent CH cartoons re refugees. CH has evolved it seems to me in interesting ways since the shootings that I'm fairly certain some of the staff would contest. But I think that evolution both has occurred and is a good thing.
Plus, you got to figure people named "Sacco" might be owed one, justice-wise.
Some socialist seems to have taken over Sacco's twitter handle.
97: I thought later evidence has shown the case against them is stronger than they were railroaded story allows.
On the subject of hateful idiots, Patrick Lynch's pervasive odiousness is old news, but jesus christ the last line of this letter is unbelievable. Did he really just say that criticizing cops deprives them of due process and amounts to summary professional execution? What an obscene fuck you to people whose loved ones have in fact been summarily executed by cops.
Wikipedia says Sacco did it, but not Vanzetti. So never mind.
I guess that means for Halloween, "Sexy Sacco" is in poor taste but "Sexy Vanzetti" is fine.
"Sexy Judge Thayer" is right out.
I'm going as "K-hole Mike Dukakis" this year.
I've always been uncertain about the Sacco thing because my first read of the tweet was pretty much what she claims it was intended to be, which would have been about the same as if she'd said: "Going to the US - hope I don't get murdered by the police. Just kidding. I'm white!" Which would have made it just a failed attempt at a particular kind of joke but not obviously anything more, and mostly a matter of someone being clumsy enough to muddle up the various layers of privilege involved in a way that makes it fail. And so it seemed like a lot of the reaction was overblown and probably the better response would have been along the lines of 'opportunity to talk about the social stuff here' than 'time to make the consequences of open bigotry clear'.
I mean, the latter is absolutely a kind of time that exists. There's a long tradition of right wing bigot style "jokes" which are just the exact thing they absolutely believe but won't publicly admit to thinking because then they'd be called crazy bigots by PC liberals (or something). And a lot of the time they think "I was just joking!" is some kind of safe word that they can use whenever someone reacts as if they'd said what they absolutely, obviously meant. So it's a vague line but it seemed to me that there was more "Wait - nevermind! I forgot for a moment that my privilege exempts me from worrying about how that really serious social problem could affect me!" than "Ha ha! AIDS is for black people!" going on.
Because life isn't creepy enough, apparently searching Amazon for tarp-style tents can get you a scale model of three Wehrmacht soldiers and their tent under the "Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed" thing.
Well at that point I don't see how you have a choice in the matter. You'll just have to figure out something to do with them.
"Going to the US - hope I don't get murdered by the police. Just kidding. I'm white!"
Why don't you head the communications department for a PR firm, tweet this, and see what response you get?
93: Also it's worth noting that the twitter account in question wasn't really known for anything - she had some small number of followers but it wasn't anything big. It only blew up when someone else happened across it and publicized it. So 'chatting with friends and someone else saw it' is actually about the right context.
Yeah, it was just her and somewhere between 400 and 500 of her closest, non-media connected friends.
Although given this list of tweets she made that didn't get her fired*, I guess you can see how she could have posted her AIDS in Africa joke without thinking anything was going to happen. If that's the worst Buzzfeed could find, she really does seem like someone who just misjudged a stupid joke, not the world's greatest monster.
*And I'm not saying they should have gotten her fired, just that they also were in poor taste. The first 10 Google results didn't turn up anything else with quotes from her account. Maybe in a few decades someone will find her full timeline in the Library of Congress twitter collection.
NYT says 170. So, no really not much above standard personal social media stuff that people take as generally private. And apparently the guy who publicized it had it leaked to him by some anonymous person, so not exactly a fancy everyone-reads-it account.
CNN said "fewer than 500" at the time, but it could have already jumped by the time they saw it.
I do think S/am B/iddle comes out worst in this story.
90 is an important principle that has many applications outside of this situation. For example, everyone know that cops will beat protestors, so it's pretty fucking stupid for protestors to protest, right? And I think we can all agree with Chrissie Hynde's recent comments.
90: "But, don't you see, he wouldn't beat you if you didn't keep doing dumb things like making him mad".
90: "I mean, obviously if Dr King kept trying to get equal rights for black people, some demented cracker was going to shoot him. He'd been warned about it but the idiot just wouldn't shut up."
a scale model of three Wehrmacht soldiers and their tent under the "Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed" thing.
Worst Nativity scene ever.
Well, the one with the burning Russian village background is extra.
118/119: so Sacco and Hebdo are equivalent to Dr Martin Luther King Jr? Congratulations on your most moronic and racist and anti-Islam comment yet!
Oh no, wait, you actually wouldn't have minded that.
You don't need to show that Hebdo is the equivalent of MLK Jr. to argue that the people who shot the staff at Hebdo are the equivalent of James Earl Ray and the like.
Well, at least we're following the instructions in the OP.
Seriously, 90+122 is ridiculous. The reason not to do/say racist/hurtful things isn't a threat of violence, it's decency and humanity. And if you claim to be on the side of decency and humanity, but smile and say, "They had it coming" when somebody like that is attacked with violence, then maybe you don't give a shit about decency and humanity, and are just rooting for a side.
That said, I don't have a program for fighting fascism that doesn't involve violence. I mean, ultimately, I'm not convinced that SNCC won.
So this seems like the right place for random venting about the Irving, Texas, muslim-nerd-kid-gets-arrested story, right? I mainly hope that (1) either the story doesn't progress to the "right wing assholes harass victim and family" stage (probably hopeless) or (2) the kid at least gets a nice scholarship from like Elon Musk or something out of the whole misery.
The kid's dad has apparently run for president of Sudan. I can't figure out if he's for real or like the Sudanese Pat Paulsen.
Can you provide a link, for easier venting?
It kills me that he's wearing a NASA shirt the whole time. What is wrong with those teachers? (The cops too, but I expect cops to hate learning, the teachers are supposed to like learning.)
130: http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dallas-county/headlines/20150915-irving-ninth-grader-arrested-after-taking-homemade-clock-to-school.ece
Partially it's a "digital readout plus wires == OMG BOMB" thing but mainly it's an OMG MOOSLIM thing.
Oh, man.. The black girl who got arrested for doing something nerdy in chem class at least got a scholarship to Space Camp out of it
And yeah, what kind of school calls the cops over that? That's horrible.
I think it's mostly racism plus genuinely believing that it could be a bomb that gets you to the cops.
I'm sure he'll get something similar, e.g. Raspberry Pi is already on Twitter trying to find out how to send him more "dangerous-looking electronics." But the good way the tech and science communities responds to stories like this doesn't make the story any less horrifying. (In both cases, the MIT sector of my facebook blew up real fast.)
129: indeed:
Ahmed's father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who immigrated from Sudan and occasionally returns there to run for president.
Man's got to have a hobby.
I think it's mostly racism plus genuinely believing that it could be a bomb
Because of course a kid who is building an actual bomb would bring it to school to show it to his teacher. Yes, that makes lots of sense.
plus genuinely believing that it could be a bomb that gets you to the cops.
The story makes it look as if no one ever thought it was a bomb -- that what he's in trouble for is making something that he might have been able to use as a prop in a bomb hoax, if there were any reason to believe that he was going to do that, which there wasn't at all. Like, he showed it to his engineering teacher immediately, who both seems to have understood what it was and taken it to the school administration to punish him for it because learning is bad.
And I want to send the kid this T-shirt. Counterproductive, but still.
Man's got to have a hobby.
Sounds like a fucking dangerous hobby, but good luck to him.
If I was Elon Musk I'd give the kid a free ride through the university of his choice and a lab to play in at the end of it.
because learning is bad
There's probably a sticker on the science texts saying just that.
Because of course a kid who is building an actual bomb would bring it to school to show it to his teacher.
Hang on. Of course I think the teachers are racist assholes. But for the sake of logic, when kids do have contraband, they do more-or-less seem to take them to school and show them off. Kids like to show off their drugs to my friend who is a high school teacher.
The engineering teacher didn't turn him in, it was a teacher in another class later when the alarm on the clock went off.
Didn't the engineering teacher warn him not to show it to anyone else? Because he knew the kind of dumb shits who worked at the school, presumably.
107: a scale model of three Wehrmacht soldiers and their tent under the "Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed" thing.
120: Worst Nativity scene ever.
The picture of him in cuffs makes me insane. It's a big country, i know, but it's just amazing how backwards some parts of it are.
The picture of him in cuffs makes me insane. It's a big country, i know, but it's just amazing how backwards some parts of it are.
I wouldn't have figured Irving as very backward.
Kids like to show off their drugs to my friend who is a high school teacher.
Is he their teacher, or a teacher in their school? And does he do anything about it?
144, 145: Whoops. Sorry, engineering teacher, I was unjust.
149: The mayor of Irving has previous form, having become a right-wing hero by heroically blocking Sharia Law from being established.
Is he their teacher, or a teacher in their school? And does he do anything about it?
I think he basically intensely tells them to get that shit away from him before he has to report them. If it were a gun or he were concerned for their safety, he'd report it.
What a mistake the 22nd amendment was...
Let's not get hasty here. Obama is spectacular at warm personal involvement in this kind of situation, but I'm still disappointed in him. Not that he's going to be replaced by anyone better, but still: an endearing tweet does not make him a great president.
I don't know where the bar for 'great' is but he's certainly been the best president of my lifetime.
What he'd have been without the shrieking insanity of the Republican party I have no idea, though. It's entirely possible that he would have been way worse if he wasn't forced to focus only on the most important parts of his job and had the freedom to, I dunno, go after large scale education reforms of something.
I've come around to the view that, while he's made some mistakes, he's presidented about as sensibly and morally as one can, given the political class, the media, and the deep state. I'm trying to get in early on retro-Obotism.
Wow, good thing I refreshed before getting seriously pwned by 159.1.
At any rate, the 22nd amendment should always live in infamy for giving us W.
I have really been enjoying the post-compromise Obama. I teared up too.
If it weren't for the TPP, I'd be comfortable calling him "great", or as great as any of us is likely to see during our lifetimes. As it is, he's more than a SD above replacement value.
One of the things that makes me cautious about evaluating Obama's performance overall is his, at this point kind of obvious, tendency to suddenly turn out to have won something big that didn't seem like a big deal right up until he won it, or to 'lose' some conflict in a way that, purely by coincidence, gets him everything he wanted going in. The man doesn't just play the long game on stuff he plays it very, very quietly, which is part of why this last bit of his presidency seems so unexpected.
I mean, the Iran deal is huge, but it's not like he started work on it recently: that had to have been in the works (well) before the 2012 election. So what we're seeing right now is partially "Obama is suddenly being effective", but probably more "Obama is cashing in his chips". And he may well have other stuff going on (who knows!) behind the scenes which could be as big a deal as Iran or the TPP (which is also a pretty big deal only going very much the other direction).
I should probably also qualify 159.1 by noting that the "within my lifetime" means that it amounts to the fact that he's better than "Oh good grief. I mean, ok, fine. I guess. Ugh." But I'm not so young that it doesn't mean a lot to have a president that clears that bar.
164: Fair enough on this.
165: And on this.
The trickier question is who's the second best president of my lifetime: HW or Clinton. It's really not obvious to me either way, though it's possible that's due to not really remembering the HW presidency well.
I distinctly remember Obama posting a 'noruz mobarak' video for Iranians the first spring he was in office. He's been reaching out to Iran from the getgo.
I can't figure out if he's for real or like the Sudanese Pat Paulsen.
That really takes me back. I remember when television personalities who ran for president were considered joke candidates.
155: GW Bush could be reasonably eloquent about acceptance of Muslims, but he never would have invited the kid to the White House. Republicans will oppose racism right up until doing so requires them to oppose racists.
The trickier question is who's the second best president of my lifetime: HW or Clinton.
I often wonder how different the world would be had HW been reelected in '92, and Clinton (or another Democrat) elected in '96. In this alternate-reality scenario:
Moral of the story: Damn you, Ross Perot!
171: Haven't you read any of the extensive literature that proves that Ross Perot did not help Clinton?
(I haven't! But I've read the headlines and 1st paragraphs!)
The trickier question is who's the second best president of my lifetime: HW or Clinton.
This makes me realize just how much more positively I feel about Clinton than many people here -- I recognize his (major) failures, but I still don't find that at all a tricky question.
Just remember how many of the W Bush era catastrophes were like half "kept doing what Clinton started" and it'll make more sense...
Admittedly a lot of the rest were "stopped doing what Clinton started". Bush really did manage to successfully separate the probably-good from the leading-to-disaster ones though.
I think it's mostly racism plus genuinelyIGNORANTLY believing that it could be a bomb that gets you to the cops.
175; I don't think it's possible to separate the racism and the belief that it could be a bomb.
175: I don't think there's any way anybody involved thought it was real bomb. The teacher took the clock, and put it in her desk. Sometime later, they called the kid into the principal's office to get arrested. I'm not sure what I would do if somebody handed me a bomb, but I'm pretty definite on the fact that "put it in my desk" is not on the list of possibilities. If they thought there might be a real bomb, they would have evacuated the school and the police would have been there right away.
A lot of Clinton's signature legislation hasn't aged well: crime bill, welfare reform, DOMA. Both of them were good on the core fundamentals: they raised taxes on the rich, and had foreign policies that avoided major quagmires and generally built up the international order rather than undermining it. The end of the Cold War could have gone quite badly, but HW seemed not to screw it up too badly.
I'm not sure what I would do if somebody handed me a bomb, but I'm pretty definite on the fact that "put it in my desk" is not on the list of possibilities.
Ask a graduate student to take it to the parking lot.
We had a training. That's what I recall from it.
Anyway, he was accused of making a fake bomb, not a bomb.
It's the 'fake bomb' stuff that makes me that this is explained entirely by racism, as opposed to racism+whatever. They (many people!) immediately reacted to it with "ok this thing is innocent but it sort of looks like it could be a bomb therefore telling people it was one to scare them was this guy's plan", even in the face of the person explaining exactly what it was and giving a very reasonable and obvious explanation for its presence. It's such a pure example of "you know how those people are" that it would be obvious even if they hadn't literally said a bunch of super racist stuff in the process.
The end of the Cold War could have gone quite badly, but HW seemed not to screw it up too badly.
That's true enough, and his son showed us that things could get worse, but I've seen this basic point made a lot as an argument about the affirmative greatness of Bush I and it seems nuts to me. Why didn't the end of the Cold War go as terribly as it might have? Mikhail Gorbachev and the then-elite of Russia. That's it. If there was a foreign leader who mattered, it was Helmut Kohl. Bush was a marginal figure in the process who had led the CIA (which had dead wrong information about the end of the Cold War up to and through 1991). I mean GHWB should be congratulated for not being affirmatively insane but everything else is a real stretch.
I think people are just trying to sell him by using the politest possible way of pointing out the difference between "didn't fuck up the whole process for everyone else" and "didn't succeed in fucking up the whole process for everyone else", and arguing that unlike the other Republican presidents the general not-going-as-badly-as-it-could-have is better described as the former rather than the latter.
182: Yeah. I wouldn't fault the teacher for doing a double-take at first, but it really seems like the sort of thing that would have been sorted out by talking to the engineering teacher once everyone was clear it wasn't a real bomb.
What I remember about 90s/00s politicians is how impressive it is that Tony Blair was both the Clinton of the UK and then the GWB of the UK. I'm sure he was like Clinton in all the slick awful ways, but Bush was still a significant step down from even the worst bits of Clinton. Was Blair always significantly more awful in Clinton in ways we (aka precocious American teenagers) didn't notice, or did he get worse?
Anyways, I think that Clinton is a president whose reputation is getting worse over time, especially wrt dismantling oversight on the finance and banking industries. Not that GW didn't speed things along, but Clinton was absolutely a plutocrats president. I was reasonably bummed about Obama, but I also agree he's kicking ass, and is doing so in ways that will leave permanent, momentous repercussions. Obamacare isn't the golden unicorn universal health insurance we all want,* but it's orders of magnitude better than what we had before, and it's at this point pretty un-dismantleable. Deals with Iran and Cuba will realign US foreign policy for the better, and are a major, possibly permanent, setback to the neocon hawks. The months long tantrum which has culminated in calls for impeachment and even military coup on NRO shows that they recognize the significance of their defeat. If we had HRC as president in 2008, we may have gotten health insurance, but I don't see a deal with Iran in the same way. Worst case scenario, she would have gotten us involved with a war.
The TPP thing is really awful and hopefully fails. I'm not sure I trust H Clinton to not be similarly awful, but I'm hoping the general populist direction of the US populace will push her more to the left on this issue.
*But fuck yeah as a poor I have free health insurance, whereas before 2013 I'd be paying a third of my annual income in premiums if I wanted coverage.
Oh, and on issue of the clock, when my brother was in HS (late 90s), he and his nerdy white/east asian friends did all sorts of hijinx that would get people expelled elsewhere. My brother manufactured napalm at home and brought it to school in his diorama of the iconic monk immolating himself for the Vietnam war unit. The teacher was both extremely impressed and also a bit ohmygodican'tbelieveyoumadenapalmandbroughtittoschool. Nothing happened to him, although the teacher no longer offered a choice to make a diorama after that. He also had a friend who made a bomb in chemistry class and set it off outside a classroom to impress a girl in the class. It cause minor denting to some lockers and resulted in a 3 day suspension, but nothing more.
Obamacare isn't the golden unicorn universal health insurance we all want,* but it's orders of magnitude better than what we had before, and it's at this point pretty un-dismantleable.
There's an extended section in this piece about how Kyle Turley found himself frustrated by the bureaucracy and inadequacy of NFL retired-player health coverage, and then frustrated by the bureaucracy and inadequacy of "Obamacare", and then frustrated by the bureaucracy and inadequacy of Medicare.
On the one hand, it's frustrating to see "Obamacare" painted as something profoundly inadequate. Kyle Turley is basically the world's most injured 40-year-old man. Before Obamacare, no insurance company in the world would sell him a policy. Now he has the option of affordable health care coverage that is still not adequate to meet his needs, and he's not happy because only some MRI's are covered. On the other hand, it's good that we are now seeing people with an expectation that they will not have to pay for their own health care despite dozens of preexisting conditions. As this gets normalized maybe the "Obamacare" system will actually become comprehensive to meet everyone's needs. Hopefully by becoming a single-payer system.
What I remember about 90s/00s politicians is how impressive it is that Tony Blair was both the Clinton of the UK and then the GWB of the UK.
And Gordon Brown was both the Al Gore of the UK and then the George W. Bush of the UK (he happened to be in office during the global financial crisis, so he lost the 2010 election).
The Democrat elected in '96 is reëlected in 2000, and thus W is not president on 9/11
The end of the Cold War could have gone quite badly, but HW seemed not to screw it up too badly.
"Periods in American history in which a George W. Bush presidency would have been even more disasterous than 2001-2008" would be a fun game.
188.3 (last) is something I hadn't considered but may actually be true. It would be hilarious if years of Republican attacks on how it wasn't good enough at giving everyone the healthcare they obviously deserve had the effect of pushing everyone towards a generally European "of course everyone deserves healthcare good grief what is wrong with you people" attitude, which will only damage their attempts to kill further healthcare reforms.
Then again there's still the "keep government off of my medicare" effect.
although the teacher no longer offered a choice to make a diorama after that
teo would like to buy your brother a drink.
What? I have nothing against dioramas.
Wow, the pathetic-losers GOP debate is kind of amazing. You can literally see the despair on the faces of the four candidates. It would be painful if these weren't such incredibly awful people who have caused so much damage.
It's really got to sting that their party had CNN change the eligibility requirements of the real debate to get one of the people who would otherwise have been there into it, leaving them behind.
193: Sorry, I really was sure I remembered you being on Team DioramasSuck in a long-ago thread.
Maybe he just didn't like your diorama.
I often wonder how different the world would be had HW been reelected in '92, and Clinton (or another Democrat) elected in '96. In this alternate-reality scenario:
HW is remembered by present-day Republicans as a successful president, and the GOP has an actual moderate wing.
This is what quite a lot of people on both sides assumed would happen. George I had 88% approval ratings in May 1991 and winning in '92 looked like a lock. Sam Nunn, among others, decided to sit 1992 out and keep his powder dry for '96. Clinton was not really seen as an obvious contender.
But I don't think it's definite that second-term George I would have been very successful. Remember that almost his last action before leaving was to put the Marines into Somalia. He would, without a doubt, have been every bit as militarily adventurous as Clinton if not more so, because Clinton had zero foreign policy experience and knew it, and George I thought he was a foreign policy genius - an belief that would have been strengthened after he won a second term on the back of his incredibly successful little war. And one of those interventions would have gone wrong.