TRoaches

From what I've read he was in a nearby country (I think it was either China or Korea I can't remember) and he went with a tour company that targets their advertising towards western students studying abroad. The trips are marketed as "The trip your parents don't want you to take!" and that sort of thing. The company apparently ceased to exist in the wake of this incident. Most people probably just do it so they can have a crazy story to tell when they get back home. Its hard for me to even feel sympathy for him. What he did was astoundingly arrogant.

At the risk of sounding like an old person I really think this is the dawn of a new era of "internet kids", meaning people that were born recently enough that they have only experienced life with, and on, the internet. I really do think social media has, ironically, stunted the average 20-something's ability to exist socially. A BIG part of being a social animal is conflict resolution. Before the internet children were forced to learn to resolve social conflicts face-to-face. This is an awkward, but invaluable, experience that I think the internet generation is missing out on. Sometimes it leads to fights, crying, hurt feelings, and lost friendships. All negative things, but very valuable negative experiences that are highly educational. Resolving a social media conflict is as easy as unfriending or blocking the problem. This doesn't work in the real world, and if you primarily learn to resolve conflict this way you will never learn how to actually resolve conflict, which is to try to see the other person's perspective and help them to see yours. Related to this is the illusion of control. In the real world you may have very little control over who you interact with on a daily basis. Rarely in life are you allowed to pick your classmates or co-workers. If someone is annoying you at work you can't just block them. You are forced to address the issue, ignore them, or find a new job. Social media has led people to believe that they are entitled to complete control over who they interact with, and this has morphed into something like "I voted for X, therefore X should win". They can't fathom the possibility that something like the elected government is completely beyond their individual control. I'm far from a luddite and I wouldn't place the blame for anything 100% on social media, but it really looks like a big contributing factor to me. If memory serves the internet became mainstream in the mid 90's with social media really taking off about 10 years later. A person born in the mid 90's who started using social media right from the start, when their social development was just getting started, would have just voted in their first presidential election (or maybe just the first one where their candidate lost). For many of them the automatic reaction to perceived negativity or defeat is BLOCK BAN I QUIT UNFRIENDED, like our friend from reddit has apparently done with their mods. http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/200/368/147.jpg

Many Americans are Democrats in their younger years, then gravitate towards the Republicans as they get older, then vote for Democrats again after they die. :wink:

I watched an interview with Thomas Sowell (economist, author, think tank guy) where he made an argument against affirmative action that I had never considered before. Consider a situation where a person pursues a job in a field where they have no real experience but they are confident that they would be able to learn and perform if given a chance. Sometimes companies love to hire people like this, because they are cheaper and may turn out to be a stellar hire who just hasn't been given a real chance to excel yet. It is a gamble, however, and the person may not work out in the end. The company may decide, after a trial period, that they just aren't going to work out. When a minority applicant is in this position, according to Sowell, a company is actually incentivized NOT to hire them because of affirmative action, because it makes it much more difficult to fire them down the road if necessary. If the applicant is white they can just tell him thanks but no thanks and send him home. Sowell contends that affirmative action, in the end, causes companies to shy away from giving ethnic minorities a shot at a position unless they are over-qualified and not asking for much money. A cheap, over-qualified applicant is more of a sure thing than gamble. This means that the only people who really benefit from the law are people who would likely be solid contenders for the job in question without such a law, and even then they will only benefit if they are competing with other applicants with the same level of qualification and experience and affirmative action laws are the deciding factor. It achieves this, however, to the detriment of ambitious candidates who are younger and less qualified. If the goal of the law is upward economic mobility, and if Sowell is right (I think he is), then it is achieving the exact opposite of its goal by silently shutting doors on minority applicants.

I'm curious to see how trans rights are going to play out when trans-women start collecting all of the Olympic women's records.

This is precisely why "political correctness" really is a modern form of modern political tyranny, a method by which those in power can control the population. It sounds clever enough: we will discourage bad things like bigotry and eventually they will disappear! The problem is that the definition of bigotry changes over time and from person to person. It is an arbitrary human construct built, not from logic, but from human emotion. Some forms of hatred are perfectly acceptable (e.g. I hate Nazis!) and others are considered despicable. It is so far removed from logic that even objectively observable facts and legitimate scientific theories can be branded as political heresy and their advocates silenced. Most people look back on the witch hunts carried out in the past by the church and agree that they were absurd, even evil. Not nearly as many see the blatant parallels between those witch hunts and the ones that we have today. The new gospel is tolerance and social justice, and the new heresy is anything that deviates from that gospel. The old church ladies who gossiped about which of their neighbors was the least pious or most scandalous have been replaced by "social justice warriors" who will hunt down your employer and demand that you be fired from your job because you dared to say something that, to their ears, sounded intolerably intolerant. In the old days a person who did something heretical would be forced to confess and made to do some kind of penance. If they refused to confess they were tortured or jailed. Now you are forced to apologize (a form of confession) and if you refuse you will be punished through loss of employment or other opportunity. This is the great paradox at work: The more "tolerant" we seem to become as a society the less tolerant we really are. Tolerance, as it is used in modern jargon, is a code word for homogeneity, which is the opposite of diversity. Its all very Orwellian use of language to obscure what is really happening. Consider the recent stories about bakeries refusing to make particular types of cakes. If a baker refuses to bake a cake for a gay wedding because of their religious beliefs they are branded as intolerant and forced to go to government re-education (not a joke, really happened). If another baker refused to bake, for example, a confederate flag cake there is no backlash, and they may even be heralded as heroes of tolerance. No logic to be found, just emotion. One is bad, the other is good, and anyone who disagrees is just a bigot, and they can rest assured that they will be "held accountable" for their beliefs at the next Two Minutes Hate session to be held on Twitter and covered by the Daily Show.

Hate is a thought. Hate crime is a form of thought crime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQLUlenavRo

***(gavel bangs)*** CONGRESS IS NOW IN SESSION.....Our first order of business, we will vote on the amendment to completely destroy the gravy train that we all personally benefit from, and was the sole motivation for 99% of us to enter politics in the first place. All in favor of destroying said gravy train, say aye...... (crickets chirping) All opposed..... (a chorus of nays) The motion fails. ***(gavel bangs)***

After considering the choices presented and trying to come up with my own alternative to them I have decided that the Fallout universe is not really well suited for crossover writing, because of the historical divergence. If you mash something like Star Trek and the X-files together there is no conflict there because both of those stories are set in a universe that very closely resembles our own reality. The Fallout universe is a complete historical divergence, particularly with regard to technological development. The only way I think it could work would be through some kind of convoluted time travel scenario, i.e. the Enterprise passed through/was sucked into some galactic anomaly (again) that sent it back through time to some point prior to the point of divergence, but even then the continuity would get really messy. Though, for what its worth, that lack of continuity has never seemed to bother the Star Trek writers when they were writing the scripts. The Voyage Home and First Contact both come to mind as examples of near-total disregard for timeline continuity.

.....and the other party (and their fans :wink:) are holding that report up and spinning its projections in a positive way, claiming that its projections are indicative of the ACA's positive effects on the economy (net increase in demand for goods, boost demand for labor, create jobs, etc). You have two sides interpreting the report to their favor, one in a positive way and the other in a negative way. You have chosen to accept the positive interpretation and reject the negative interpretation, despite the fact that neither interpretation is based on reality. Your premise has no more or less merit than that of a person who accepts the negative interpretation. You are simply being hopeful. Hope made for a fine campaign slogan, but the economy does not run on hope.

I found myself wondering just now about the historical accuracy of CBO projections. I would encourage anyone interested to do a quick web search for "CBO historical accuracy" and see if they can find anyone from either academia or business who has anything positive to say about the accuracy of CBO projections. It is fair to say they have been laughably inaccurate. 40% margins of error are not unheard of. Some of the inaccuracy is explained by simple bias on the part of the people who prepare the reports, who are likely "encouraged" to make them a bit rosier than they should be by the presidents and congresspeople who back the proposed budgets. Another explanation is that once the CBO prediction is released it becomes a self-defeating prophecy. For example, if the CBO predicts a surplus congress and the president take that as a cue to start spending the surplus and then POOF no more surplus. In other words, if this CBO projection turned out to be even close to accurate it would be the exception to the rule, because the historical precedent is for them to be EXTREMELY inaccurate. eta: I also found this article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2012/02/02/are-cbo-estimates-really-the-gold-standard-of-accuracy/ proposed an interesting explanation for the inaccuracies, that being that the economic model that is used to produce the projections is itself flawed, and will always produce erroneous results regardless of the input that you give it.

So now unemployment is a good thing....... :thumbsup:

I can't even express how uninterested I am in browsing a 170 page CBO report so I'll just ask you: On what page does it say that the ACA will reduce the deficit, boost the economy, and create jobs? Also, why do you consider it a good thing that people will be "purposely dropping out of jobs"? Because that sounds, to me, like a very bad thing. "My government takes care of me so I don't need to work.", said no successful, productive, or innovative person, ever.

Objective journalism isn't really supposed to have "sides". You readily admit that you are getting your information from media sources that belong to one "side", and blasting the other "side" for being....biased?!?! If your preferred news sources can be described as coming from a particular "side" of any given issue then that source is biased, and should not be considered a true news source. MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN produce about 95% editorial content. I would BARELY consider them legitimate news sources. If any of those infotainment productions were to submit a transcript of their broadcast to a Journalism 101 class for critique the professor would fail them all for their complete disregard of anything resembling journalistic ethics.

You have a tendency to ignore the substance of a statement and prefer to focus on semantics. You would rather comment on my use of the word "propose" than what was actually said. So I'm going to try again: Why is it considered antagonistic to wear a US flag in the US? This is the aspect of this that nobody has given any explanation for. I have only heard justifications of the school's right to censor an image, and I already ceded several times that the school has a right to do that, but I have heard NO justification for WHY that image would need to be censored. To illustrate: If I want to wear a bucket on my head while I sleep that is my right, as a free and sovereign human. There is no question that I have this right, and not much of an argument can be made against my right to wear that bucket. A much more interesting topic to explore would be WHY I want to wear a bucket on my head. If the school wants to declare that something is a possible security threat or distraction, and ban that thing as a result, that is their right. A much more interesting topic to explore would be WHY they view that thing as a threat or distraction. No, it really doesn't debunk anything. It only proves that nobody ripped the flag down. Given this statement in the same post: ...I would expect you to refrain from making definitive statements about the thoughts and motivations of the students involved but, somehow, you seem to know that the people involved felt just fine about the flag on the pole. I will also reiterate this question: Why is display of the US flag "malicious"? The school no doubt had a flag pole flying the US flag, like every other school in the entire nation. Was the school being malicious? If not, what is the difference between the school displaying the flag a student displaying the flag? Why is one "malicious" and the other acceptable? If the school had a problem with a gang of gay bashers attacking students who display an LGBT rainbow flag and the school's response was to ban any expression of support for LGBT rights such as rainbow flags, would you support that decision? If a student stood firm and refused to remove a rainbow flag from their apparel would you support their suspension? I can only guess that you would, based on your support of flag bans in general, but please correct me if I'm wrong and explain why they are different.

I wasn't advocating that such a thing happen. I was presenting it as an analogous situation, but one in which the censorship and capitulation to violence would not be tolerated due to political correctness. The point being that we have reached a point of such absurd adherence to political correctness that censorship is a fine thing, so long as it is not being applied to a "protected" group, such as LGBTs. If anyone were to suggest that a victim of gay bashing "should have known what was going to happen if they dressed/behaved that way", and that they should have "avoided antagonizing" their attackers then they would be labeled an intolerant bigot, and an apologist for the bashers. The more relevant question: Why was the US flag censored at a US school? Why is it considered antagonistic to wear a US flag in the US? This is the aspect of this that nobody has given any explanation for. I have only heard justifications of the school's right to censor an image, but have heard NO justification for why that image would need to be censored. The closest that anyone has come is to simply say that it was "antagonistic" to wear that flag on that day. Why would the US flag ever be antagonistic to Americans? The answer is that the people who were antagonized likely do not consider themselves to be Americans. They consider themselves to be Mexicans who are living in a region of North America that was, according to Mexican Nationalist ideology, is illegitimately claimed by the US but legitimately should be controlled by Mexico. Cinco de Mayo is NOT a Mexican national holiday. The event is largely ignored in Mexico, with the exception of Puebla simply because the battle that the holiday celebrates took place there. It is a celebration of Mexican nationalism, practiced primarily by Mexican Americans. Mexican Nationalism is no different from any other nationalist movement: It is rooted in bigotry and beliefs of racial superiority. It is no different from the brand of nationalism that is practiced by white supremacists, but it is tolerated in our society because Hispanics are considered to be one of the aforementioned groups that is protected by political correctness. It is a backwards, tribal philosophy and it hinders human progress by emphasizing our cultural differences as a justification for ethnic isolation. As long as people view themselves primarily as Mexicans, or Americans, or whatever, there will be no further progress towards universal human rights. There will only be advancement of Hispanic rights, gay rights, and so on. The problem with compartmentalizing humans into groups, then granting them rights based on their inclusion in that group should be apparent when compared to the much more idealistic concept of universal human rights. 1. Why is display of the US flag "malicious"? The school no doubt had a flag pole flying the US flag, like every other school in the entire nation. Was the school being malicious? If not, what is the difference between the school displaying the flag a student displaying the flag? Why is one "malicious" and the other acceptable? 2. What is the connection between wearing a US flag and yelling racist remarks? Is the school itself being racist by displaying a US flag? 3. Nobody said they were courageous, or praised them in any way. Advocating for someone's right to do something is not the same as supporting what they are doing.

@ripple: So they weren't suspended.....they were "kicked off campus", according to your source. Yes, I can see now what a HUGE difference that is. That said, "kicked off campus" still sounds very punitive to me. Student A: Hey Student B! Where have you been? Did you get suspended? Student B: Don't be silly! I was simply kicked off campus against my will by the school administration. I was definitely NOT suspended, though...... What "political agenda" do you think I have regarding this topic? Also, how do you feel about the idea that I proposed of banning symbols of LGBT rights in order to protect LGBT students from agitated bashers? Would that be appropriate, and would it send the right message to both the victims of the bashing and the bashers?

Ugh, fine they were not expelled. They were, however, suspended. Being sent home from school against your will for disciplinary reasons is a suspension, regardless of what it was "registered" as (whatever that means). I hope you feel better now, but my use of the wrong term (expelled vs suspended) really doesn't validate anything substantive that you have said, or invalidate anything substantive that I have said. If the school had a problem with a gang of gay bashers attacking students who display an LGBT rainbow flag, and the school's response was to ban any expression of support for LGBT rights such as rainbow flags, would you support that decision? If a student stood firm and refused to remove a rainbow flag from their apparel would you support their suspension? I can only guess that you would, based on your support of flag bans in general, but please correct me if I'm wrong and explain why they are different.

I never claimed that the students expelled were also the students who were attacked, or made any statements about the timeline of events. I restated what the administration said: That they banned the shirts because altercations involving gangs who were agitated by the shirts, and who had attacked other students because of this agitation. Careful reading indeed! (Truthfully, I can't be bothered to read back through and confirm this, so I may have slipped up at some point and incorrectly implied that the attack victims and the censorship victims were the same people. I don't think that I did, though. I'm sure you'll let me know.) I made no claims regarding the internal motivation of the school administration, beyond what they said themselves. I do know for a fact that what was done was a form of punishment. They were expelled from school. How is that not a form of punishment? It is not my "belief" that they were expelled because they displayed the same flag that is mounted on the flag pole outside of the school. It really did happen. No belief necessary. And there is one of the aspects that distinguishes this case from most others involving challenges to school dress codes. It would be one thing if the school banned the display of any political flag. It is entirely another thing to ban the display of a particular flag. Imagine the outrage if the school had banned the Mexican flag instead of the US flag, or if they had banned rainbow flags or pink triangles. An argument could be made that each of those examples could be disruptive. What if a gay student was beaten by a gang, and the school's response was to ban any LGBT symbols because they don't want any disruptions? I acknowledge their right to do so, but is it really the right thing to do? Wouldn't it be better to teach the kids that, in a free society, you are not allowed to impose your will on others through the threat of violence simply because you disagree with their view point? Instead they showed the kids that if you beat up enough people you will get what you want. Remember kids, violence solves problems! I guess you should probably "mope around and sigh about it".

An example below... There is nothing in your example that is inaccurate or untrue. The school did, in fact, say that their decision was in response to a gang at the school and the altercations that the gang was involved in regarding the flag shirts. Their attorneys even stated this in court, so the evidence is pretty clear that my statement was accurate. Try again! You heard it here first! Colourwheel believes that, as long as the school administration believes they are acting in the best interests of their students, they would be within their rights to expel students who have had abortions. They don't need a logical reason! The individual rights of those students are irrelevant! They can do whatever they want, as long as they believe it is necessary for the safety of the school.

Please, point to one single claim that I have made that is demonstrably false. I bet you can't do it! Now, let us apply your logic to another issue and see how this attitude jives with you...... There is a group of students at the school who are extremely opposed to abortion and premarital sex. The very idea of abortions and premarital sex cause those students great agitation, and they have threatened to violently attack other students who are pregnant or have been pregnant, are considered to be promiscuous, or are known to have had abortions in the past. The school must protect the students from this agitation, so they expel any student who fits any of those criteria. If a girl is pregnant or has been pregnant, or is wearing an outfit that is the least bit revealing or spends too much time with her boyfriend she is sent home. They must do this, because the safety of the school is of paramount importance and trumps the rights of those students who are expelled. If they do this the only thing one can do is just mope around and sigh about how their freedoms are taken away from them... Do you see how catering to the will of the agitated segment while punishing the agitators is completely backwards? In this scenario the people who should have been punished are the agitated students who are a threat to the others, not the ones who are "agitating" others through their actions. Do you see how ridiculous it is to say that all that can be done is to "mope around and sigh about how their freedoms are taken away"? I know that you would be outraged by such a thing, because you have made it very clear that you consider reproductive rights to be sacrosanct. I feel the same way about free speech. Expression should only be hindered in the most dire of situations, and some punks starting a fight because they do not like someone's t-shirt is hardly a dire situation.

Like I already said, bandannas are banned from pretty much every school in the country, regardless of what image, print, or color they are. What is the point that you are trying to make? What does a story about a gang that wore flag bandannas have to do with the school ban on flag t-shirts? There is zero evidence or mention of the students who wore the t-shirts having any gang affiliation, so I do not see the connection. If you want to prove that sometimes people do bad things while wearing US flags then wow, point taken. How profound! Hey check this out.... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/3832732/The-Smoking-Gun-2008-mugshots-of-the-year.html?image=11 Does that prove anything about Obama, or people who support him? Does it establish some kind of link between the behavior of the people in the mug shots and the rest of Obama's support? Of course not, and it would be absurd to argue otherwise. Likewise, your story about a gang that wears flag bandannas has no bearing on the banned flag t-shirts, and it is absurd to imply any relevance between the bandanna gang and the topic.

I am not sure that they were not in a gang. I am sure that no mention was made of the students who were punished having any gang affiliation. What WAS mentioned, was that the aggressive students were in a gang, and that the school was responding to the threat of this gang. I have not speculated about any aspect of this. You, on the other hand, have done nothing but produce speculative reasons why they may have deserved their punishment, including possible gang affiliation, without any evidence of this whatsoever. As far as patriotism and anti-Americanism are concerned, I could care less. I have publicly burned more than one American flag. Anti-American sentiment is surely justified in many corners of the world and here in the States. I simply do not accept any situation where a person's right to expression is trumped by someone else's thin skin, and I certainly have no sympathy for anyone whose response to expression that they disagree with is to bring violence against that person. I did not claim that trolling was illegal. I was showing that the students who were breaking the law were the ones who the school catered to. You have one group of students who are in a gang that terrorizes the student body with violent attacks. You have another group of students who wore a symbol on a t-shirt. The school punished the students who wore the t-shirts. As far as "deliberately doing things that would agitate fellow students" I can only say....who cares? In a free country you are allowed to agitate your peers. You are not, however, allowed to respond to agitation with violence. It is not an imaginary scenario. The administration said that the ban was in response to altercations involving a gang at the school. No imagination necessary. The evidence of the altercations is the school's statements regarding the incident. That isn't actually a flag on that shirt. It is an arrangement of blue and red bandanna that vaguely resembles a flag. If you can find me a picture of a post office with that image flying off the flag pole then I will be convinced that the shirt pictured in that article is a US flag. Bandannas are probably banned from pretty much every school in the country, regardless of what image, print, or color they are.

What I really love about this is the way that you segue directly into a "theme shift" of your own, in which you compare people who dare to display the US flag to the WBC protestors.... "Trolling" is not illegal. Violently attacking someone is. Therefore, they became victims the moment that they were attacked by a violent street gang that, apparently, is running the school. You are basically saying "they were asking for it", which again correlates closely with the "blame the victim" attitude that some people apply to rape victims. Mexican flags were allowed to be displayed by the school administration. The only flag that was banned was the US flag. Unless there is another flag that was also banned that day then the US flag was singled out. Were there any other flags banned by the school? Or was the US flag the SINGLE flag that was banned, meaning it was SINGLED out? Only in the United States, and perhaps a few other nations populated by self-loathing automatons (I'm looking at you, UK) would the display of the national flag be banned so as to not offend an immigrant group. I do not think that any particular policy or institution is "anti-american", and have never claimed otherwise. What I do think is the gang that was attacking students who were wearing flag shirts was demonstrating a probable "anti-American" attitude within their ranks. I also know that the administration's response to the influence of this gang at the school was to punish the victims of the attacks by restricting their expression as a method of protecting them. The expression of Mexican nationalism at the school was tolerated, but American nationalism was censored and punished with physical violence.