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Boy Scouts Introduce Merit Badge For Not Pirating
The_Slaughter writes "The MPAA has recruited the boy scouts of America to do their dirty work. Scouts will now be able to learn a merit badge for anti-piracy related activities, including creating public service announcements urging others not to steal movies or music. No word yet on if that includes helping the MPAA file lawsuits against 80-year-old grandmothers."
The article is a little short on details. In Boy Scouts, the official things you work towards are Merit Badges, which are determined by the National Boy Scouts of America organization. The L.A. council/district/whatever doesn't, as far as I know, have the authority to create a new Merit Badge.
What this article makes it sound like is that it's just a patch. Anybody and their uncle can make up a patch and make up their own requirements for it. We had patches made for activities only our troop would do. It sounds like this is just one of those, which if so, is no reason for anyone to get worked up about it. Sure, they're trying to brainwash Scouts, but there's nothing official or magical about it.
The two or three scout parents I know are the kind of old fashioned, independent thinking, screw-the-post-modernists sort of people whom you'd want to have around in case of actual emergency. Can't speak for their sons, whom I have not met.
Succumbing to the moral dry-rot so rampant in contemporary America is something we have to eschew individually.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
As has already been pointed out, this is NOT a Merit badge, it is a patch. Anyone can create a patch and offer them to anyone. It has nothing to do with whether the LA Boy Scouts want to earn the patch or not.
Also for the comment about a merit badge for 'learning how to think'. That is really the whole point of scouting - to give young men the skills they need for adulthood, including thinking.
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This article is inaccurate. A Council (local office) of the BSA cannot create their own Merit Badge. This is some local program to educate the Scouts, but whatever award they earn is not "official", and would not help them earn a rank advancement or anything like that.
Here is a list of the current Merit Badges, along with the requirements to earn each one.
If you are so inclined, consider volunteering at your local Council as a "Merit Badge Counselor". If you have expertise in a particular area covered by a Merit Badge, you may be a counselor. A scout may not earn a badge unless a counselor verifies that the scout has completed all of the requirements. So if a scout cannot find a counselor for a particular badge, they have no way of earning it.
For more information, see this training page, this guide and the application form.
You needed to grow up in the former USSR to get the joke. The communist party often spread its message through organized youth groups such as pioneers & rewarded those kids with various awards for their political activities.
As a (former) Scout, I can pretty much be sure that's the case. The badge requirements for the Computers merit badge look as if they were written in about 1992 last I checked (before electronic mail was shortened to email...), so I never even really considered to bother with it, though that site says they were revised in 2004. The article was incredibly thin on details, though I'd be interested to find out a bit more. Like what the thing is called. Something tells me that "Respecting Copyrights" isn't going to fit between Archery and Citizenship in the Nation, but then again I earned Dentistry and Space Exploration without the use of a dental pick or spacesuit.
I'd just like to know how many people would have any interest in earning the thing. I'm thinking that, aside from those 'have to earn them all' types, there will be very, very few.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
http://www.usscouts.org/mb/mb036.html