USA Politics

Natalie said:
I wonder if there's research out there about level of education and what side of the political spectrum you lie on generally...there must be a correlation there somewhere. Oh but education is so damn liberal as well, that's right.
Click to expand...

There is. I am not familiar with all the studies nor can I remember any particular one of them, but I seem to recall that the more degrees one has, generally speaking the more liberal one tends to be. Which is not surprising.

On a somewhat related note, there's an interesting book, which sparked a fair amount of debate (particularly in my childhood home state of Kansas), called "What's The Matter With Kansas?" in which the author asked the question why poor to middle-class whites tend to vote conservatively when it is not in their interest to do so, and then attempted to answer it. Here's a link to the wiki for more info.
 
I am not quite sure why people cannot understand when it comes when it comes to students and guns on campus

Real Gun --- sound be confiscated and they should be turned over to the cops
Fake Guns, food products or sticks made to look like guns ... toys, cannot really harm anyone.
 
I wonder if it's a power trip for principals and such and that maybe they're taking advantage of the recent events. A 10 day suspension for a 5 year old kid for a first time "offense"? That sure sounds like a principal just wanting to show off their power to me.
 
I don't know if that is the case or not. I sometimes think that school administrators are living in constant fear of doing the 'wrong thing' and losing their jobs. Sometime, over the past 15 or so years, parents went from the administration's side to the children's side. I wouldn't be half surprised if that principal booted the kid because he was afraid of all the other parents.

I wouldn't want that job.
 
What exactly is it that the principal would fear of the other parents?

Something I would love to see is a protest where every parent has all their kids bring fake guns to school and start having pretend wars with each other in the halls.
 
The fear is that something will happen that will lead to a lawsuit. This country is way to lawsuit happy which drives up costs, creates stupid rules, and in an indirect way leads to crap like this.
 
Fear of negative publicity as a result of complaints from parents could be part of it, too - although this sort of publicity hasn't done them much good, either!
 
Travis The Dragon said:
Something I would love to see is a protest where every parent has all their kids bring fake guns to school and start having pretend wars with each other in the halls.
Click to expand...

:blink:

My goodness. Is that how you want your children to grow up? Teaching children that war is fun and a great way to protest against something?

A horrid outlook.
 
There is a fine line though .. do you really support suspending a kid for eating a pop tart and making it look like a "gun" and I put gun in quotes because it really looked like an "L"

Didn't any of you play some version of Cowboys and Indians/shooting each other with laser guns ala Star Wars/running around the woods pretending to be army men when you were kids? If anything I would rather have my kids doing that rather than doing the same thing on an X-Box .. if anything they are outside getting some fresh air.
 
... in the never ending assault on privacy


(Reuters) - The Obama administration on Thursday acknowledged that it is collecting a massive amount of telephone records from at least one carrier, reopening the debate over privacy even as it defended the practice as necessary to protect Americans against attack.

The admission comes after the Guardian newspaper published a secret court order related to the records of millions of Verizon Communications customers on its website on Wednesday.

A senior administration official said the court order pertains only to data such as a telephone number or the length of a call, and not the subscribers' identities or the content of the telephone calls.

Such information is "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States," the official said, speaking on the condition of not being named.

"It allows counter terrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States," the official added.

The revelation raises fresh concerns about President Barack Obama's handling of privacy and free speech issues. His administration is already under fire for searching Associated Press journalists' calling records and the emails of a Fox television reporter as part of its inquiries into leaked government information.

It was not immediately clear whether the practice extends to other carriers.


The order released on Wednesday is from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and directs Verizon's Business Network Services Inc and Verizon Business Services units to hand over daily electronic data until July 19. The order can be seen at: r.reuters.com/kap68t
Click to expand...
 
bearfan said:
Didn't any of you play some version of Cowboys and Indians/shooting each other with laser guns ala Star Wars/running around the woods pretending to be army men when you were kids? If anything I would rather have my kids doing that rather than doing the same thing on an X-Box .. if anything they are outside getting some fresh air.
Click to expand...

Of course, and I was a really bloodthirsty kid as well. But the thing is, after a particularly heavy shooting spree, my parents would take me aside and talk to me about it. My dad told me he used to do the same thing as a kid, and he knew it was a lot of fun, but he also talked to me about what killing people means and why it is necessary to distinguish between reality and imagination. Effectively, he let me play as long as I knew what I was doing, and as long as I knew that it was just that: a game.

That is fucking light years away from what Travis is suggesting. Quite frankly, it is one of the most disgusting ideas I have read in a long time. If your parents tell you war is fun and cool, and it's great to kill people and it's a valid form of protest, that is a society I do not want to see children growing up in.
 
I do not want to put words in Travis' mouth .. but I think he was suggesting protesting the school admins suspending kids for making pop tart guns and the kid that brought a toy gun to school .... not glorifying war ... at least that is what I got out of it.

There is literally a story or two a week about some kid (usually under 10) getting suspended and in some cases getting a "making a terrorist threat" charge put in their record for stupid shit like bringing a toy gun, a lego gun, a pop tart gun (there have been at least two of these), a girl talking about (not actually bringing) a Hello Kitty gun that shoots bubbles, etc.

Two kids near here got Fs on their paper where the subject was a essentially write about a memorable moment in your life and they wrote about hunting trips with their families ... and they got Fs because it involved guns

I think that kind of stuff is going waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too far and it is a bit frustrating when you see schools getting worse and worse despite more and more money being spent and this is the kind of crap they are paying attention to. A fucking pop tart .. if anything they should be glad the kid did not eat the whole thing with all the sugar and crap in them.
 
I get that point, but I still think that holding such a war game protest would do more harm than good by sending the wrong message to the kids. Let's not forget that this is still primarily about education.
 
Sure, probably not But I do think the post was intended as an extreme action to protest another extreme action and perhaps not serious
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top