That's what he did. If he'd only done it once, no one was going to bother. But he repeated the ruckus and then took it to another public place.
And I'd far rather see him charged on a misdemeanor than see them try to define his behavior as a hate crime involving the internet and see him tried on a felony.
Or, I did have Fedora 12 on an iBook, until the iBook's video chip started acting up. (Cold solder or a hair-line crack or something, fixed it once, but a few months after, it went intermittant.
I like Sharp's NetWalker, but it's a little expensive at JPY 40,000+. I'm thinking they could be selling ten times what they sell of those if they dropped the price to 10,000, and I'm wondering whether it couldn't be sold at 5,000.
Nokia 900 was mentioned elsewhere, but it was expensive and not available here, and, yeah, I'll probably end up getting an Android phone when my wife's docomo dies and we give their family plan the boot. (Don't like Docomo's Androids.) And a small keyboard of some sort.
Okay, I should have said that the Constitution does not forbid restrictions on free speech and that even the First Ammendment can't disallow all restrictions.
Better?
This is not a matter of how they please. It's a matter of, do we want an appropriate, existing law, applied here, or do we want to give a large community of distraught parents motivation to go to legislatures that are all too willing to pass stupid laws, clamoring for something stronger to protect their daughters. Do we want to give a corrupt legislature even more chances to make laws that do even more damage to the First Ammendment?
Would you really rather this kind of behavior end up classed in with hate crimes, so that it's no longer a misdemeanor, but a full felony? Unforunately, that's what the options are.
But as far as the girls should learn to tough it up a bit, so should the guys. There are much less offensive ways to get a girl's attentions than judging her physical appearance, much more appropriate things to compliment in public than her physical measurements, crudely. And, while it is true that being socially inept is not, in and of itself, a crime, repeating the ineptness and being even more extreme, which was apparently done in this case, can become disorderly, offensive, and harmful.
There are certain kinds of words which, when regeatedly and pushed to extremes, do go beyond mere words.
Come on, get out of your idealized fantasy world and live in the real world, where words can, indeed, count.
If being charged with a misdemeanor is the same thing as being silenced, there are problems with the community that claiming First Ammendment rights won't even come close to fixing..
If you want to defend the poor guys that can't get any action, let me suggest a couple of things:
I don't want to think you really think so, but just in case you do, getting action is not a particularly inalienable right. Non-sexual friendship is not even an inalienable right. There are some things that forcing destroys.
Asserting the right to say no is no-way equivalent to asserting the right to not be told no.
If you can't see that, then real relationships are always going to be frustrating to you. I'd suggest that you'll find more satisfaction from the pages of Oui, except that what you probably need is to quit reading/viewing the porn long enough to figure out that the yesses, noes, and maybes are a big part of the reason real people are a lot more interesting than those idealized images you see in porn.
Figure that out, and maybe you have a hope that of understanding why a reckless and clumsy proposition could, in some situations, cross the line into misdemeanor crime.
Pardon me for being blunt. And if you were intending to be sarcastic, well, you need to learn to use the sarcasm tags a bit more effectively.
All law can be prone to abuse. Disorderly conduct laws are, perhaps, more prone to abuse than some, but I'm not sure they're more prone to abuse than, say, those laws that enable city councils to set up "special improvement districts."
Setting aside fine distinctions between, say, yelling fire in a crowded theater, using emotional blackmail to push a girl to do something with you that she would otherwise not want to do, dissin' a particular guy's junk in the locker room every day for the whole school year, and so forth, let me ask you this:
Would you rather the police use this law, giving the boy in question a chance to say, in court, that it was not significantly worse behavior than what the mayor's (member of the city concil's, etc.) son was doing,...
or would you rather that the parents run screaming to the legislatures demanding that new laws be made to keep people from being disorderly, or rude, or even just not politically correct on the internet?
Okay, okay, for far too many people, the only thing the computer has done, etc.
I also use computers in good ways from time to time. I'm not sure if slashdot is an overall positive or not. It consumes more time than I wish it did, but it also helps me keep my English up while I live and breath Japanese most of the rest of the day, and it keeps me in touch with more of what I think is important news. But I probably should be spending more time on slashdot.jp and reading Nikkei's tech news and such.
Yeah, I was in a reactionary mood the other day. Even Microsoft's junk can be put to good use.
But I do wish that more schools would teach the use of plain text before they teach word processors, and teach how to use an array in Python before they teach how to use spreadsheets.
So, if someone doesn't like a certain type of speech, it should be restricted?
It isn't a matter of simple preferences, and you know it isn't. Girls have a right to tell guys no. They don't have to be subjected to verbal abuse from boys who have been turned down, and they don't have to be subjected to the splashback when boys get their feelings hurt.
When a boy's opinion has been refused, and the boy persists too long in forcing his opinion on a girl, it becomes a tool of emotional abuse. Emotional abuse can be a reason for children to appeal to adults. If a boy further persists, it is abuse, and can become a wedge to enable physical forms of abuse. That is the point where this kind of thing crosses the line into criminal behavior.
that is a slur and a racial slur. Sexual slur, too.
And?
Racial and sexual slurs are most often used in precisely this way.
Seriously, what other reason would one have for using racial and sexual slurs, other than as an attempt to strip one's opponent of emotional defense?
No, the Constitution does not forbid restrictions of free speech. The First Amendment says that the government shall not make laws abridging the freedom of speech. The Constitution itself provides for promoting the arts and sciences by certain activities which would be restrictions on the freedom of speech if that freedom were absolute, even without the current ridiculously draconian (mis-?)interpretations of copyright and patent law.
The first paragraph of the Constitution specifies the purpose of the Constitution. The purposes include establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty.
Therefore, the Constitution provides for some things that take precedence over freedom of speech claims. I am sure you know this, even though you seem to chose to ignore it.
There is no way, in the real world, that the freedom of speech can be untangled from the other rights and responsibilities of citizens. If you talk about the rights of freedom of speech, you also have to talk about the responsilities, and citizens do have some responsilitiy to refrain from using the freedom of speech as an end-run around protections of another persons rights.
When opinions remain opinions, they are free. But when they are used to oppress other citizens, there are Constitutional means of recourse when those repressed are not fully able to defend themselves.
Sexual and racial slurs are often used as tools of physical and sexual abuse. The words, "prove it" are one of the cutting edges of the tool, in spite of abusers behaving as if they have the right of having something proved to them.
This is the line that is potentially breached by what the boy(s) here did. I say potentially, because we can't know whether it actually was breached without digging into the facts, but that is not our job. Misdemeanor charges are one way of providing both the offended and the accused an opportunity of trying to figure out whether the line was actually crossed. Sometimes it is appropriate to let a judge figure things like this out.
It is absolutely appropriate to have the option of pressing charges of disorderly conduct, particularly since the conduct was performed in two public places: in the school, made public because the passed the printed list around, and on-line because the forums they used there are public.
It is also essential that the courts be fair, and that is perhaps a question that should be asked, but, unless we have reason to believe the boy in question is not going to get a fair trial, we must recognize the option of arrest. From what we do know, it is very possible that the line was crossed.
I've said it elsewhere, but what is most appropriate here is that the people here are using existing law to deal with it, instead of attempting to use the more recent, very flawed laws that could have been invoked, under which this could have been charged as a felony.
I'm a teacher. Doesn't mean I know everything about teaching.
I'll agree that corporal punishment (Yeah, we all knowt that's what you meant.) is appropriate at times, and might have been more appropriate here. As a first response. I'm also aware that corporal punishment can easily go too far. Not everyone is able to do what your relative did. Not because they don't want to, but because it doesn't work for them. People have different skills.
From what one of the people who has responded here said, we have some reason to consider the possibility this wasn't the first time, and the guy(s) responsible had been warned. We also have reason to consider the possibility that the guy who got arrested is being turned into the fall guy, and that others are going unpunished. Unfortunately, we don't know the whole story.
I think I was a little too absolute. I should have said that having the option of pressing misdemeanor criminal charges for disorderly conduct is appropriate, as one option.
What I was trying to focus on was the idea that they are using existing law instead of trying to invent new law unnecessarily. This is most definitely disorderly conduct in a public place. Whether to press charges or not is a separate issue.
A guy tells a girl in the hall something like, "Hey, what are you wearing that thing under your shirt for? Protect your mosquito bites?"
Maybe she is cool enough to deal with it someway that doesn't encourage him or do herself emotional harm. Most likely, being a child, she has no idea how to deal with it.
But this kind of thing goes on all the time. Learning how to deal with it is part of growing up. While the adults nearby should try not to be to quick to notice it, they should also avoid showing tacit approval. Preventing the behavior would be worse than having the behavior happen, as well.
If the girl being put down does not know that she can turn to the adults, she is likely to end up giving the jerk an opportunity to say something like, "Well you know how you could prove it to me..." You don't want children to be put in the position of having to tell guys like this no before they know how.
That's not the only way this kind of thing goes south. There are quite a few ways that verbal abuse escalates to physical and sexual abuse.
When a guy publishes his opinions in two public forums as has happened here, in many cases the adults cannot simply stand by. Otherwise, their inaction will be interpreted as tacit approval. That leaves a lot more children defenseless.
Maybe the teachers and the police and/or judge decide that the criminal charges are not the path they should pursue. There are other paths, and all of them also require a lot of adults to invest a lot of time. Maybe the criminal charges aren't appropriate here. Maybe I put that in terms too absolute. But having the option of misdemeanor criminal charges is appropriate. Having the option is most assuredly appropriate.
You are assuming quite a bit. Judging from the post from the guy who claims to be a brother of one of the girls, we can gues that your assumptions may be right.
But the adults still need to let all the children know that what he is doing is not even tacitly approved.
And he still needs to know that he has crossed a line into a range of activities that are no longer protected by first amendment rights. The adults have to make judgement calls and that they have this option is not a bad thing. And he needs to know that when he uses the language he has in two public forums in the way that he has, he has just put himself at the mercy of the adults.
We don't want the adults to abuse the option they've taken, but if we take the option away from them, the result would be just as bad as if we were somehow able to prevent the behavior from occurring in the first place.
If you want to engage in adolescent behavior here, that's fine.
I'll get a chuckle out of it and we go on.
Adolescent behavior in the classroom is, well, unavoidable. Or the cure would be worse than the symptoms. I'll agree with that much.
But such lists should not be simply ignored by teachers. Girls can be seriously scarred, emotionally, by such lists. In an ideal world, we might wish that all girls should be tough enough, or get tough enough. This world is not such a world. Moreover, such lists, especially when given the appearance of tacit approval from the adults, can be used as emotional blackmail, resulting in physical abuse.
("You want your rating upped? I'll tell you how,...")
The adults also matter. School is not some sort of sandbox where kids get to do all the wrong things to each other and always come out unscarred, and the adults are not just ornaments necessitated by the Victorian ideas of the parents. I don't care how idealistic you are, but kids are vulnerable, and adults have responsibility to see that things don't go too far.
Misdemeanor criminal charges are not the only way to deal with such disorderly behavior. They are one way and may be necessary. The little we know of this case, I'm telling you that I cannot say they are not necessary.
Since someone who claims to be the brother of one of the girls on the list responded here, we can theorize that we know some of the problems in the system in this case, and guess a lot of things about why the author(s) would make such a list, and we'd probably miss something important. No, we'd surely miss something important.
Criminal charges at the misdemeanor level may be appropriate here, and the school needs to have the option. Not saying that he should be found guilty. We'd hope they do not abuse the option, but that they have the option is not a bad thing.
Maybe I should say it this way: We know the school system could abuse this. But the cure that would prevent the possible abuse is just as bad for all involved as the cure for preventing children from doing anything bad to each other would be.
The only thing the computer has done, the way we use it, is to make it quicker to come to the wrong conclusions.
Some people use the computer to make it easier to back up and try a new path having once come to the wrong end-point. That's a real improvement.
But it also makes it easier to just blindly try more wrong paths. Computers induce a lot of churn into our daily lives. I guess that's different. I'm still not convinced it's substantive. Too many of the important problems have too many paths to try, so many that you're probably going to die before you hit a right solution. And if you get used to the churn, I think you lose the ability to recognize a right path, so you often find yourself having backed off a real solution and started on a new wrong one, and by the time you can get back to what was a right path, well, you've changed, and the network has changed.
I've noticed that my cell phone has more storage and more computing power than the Univac 1100 that we used at college. More even than the Sun workstations I used at the university. Shoot, I have a couple of AT&T 7100s or whatever those 68010-based Unix workstations were called stored in a basement somewhere in the States, half a meg of RAM and 20M of hard disk. The OS floppies are still there, I think.
My cell phone has 64M or RAM, a full gig of flash RAM for persistent store. The display has a bit fewer pixels. Or does it? The keyboard, well, okay, that's a loss. Network connectivity? No ethernet, but it is connected to telephone network.
And the OS is a derivative of Linux that Docomo (and NTT) refuse to acknowledge, much less live up to the license requirements of letting me access it, so I can't run dc (or bc) or vi on it.
I want a portable Unix workstation the size of a pocket calculator. I know it could be done.
You're a judge, you're posting here, and you back away from the chance to apply existing law appropriately without inventing new law just because it's them intarnets?
Public. Yeah, Facebook is a public forum, or at least many parts of it are. The people there are often lawfully assembled.
How can you say that distributing this kind of a list, on the internet or printed, is not tumultuous, or even fighting conduct? The older brother of one of the girls posted a comment earlier, did you not see it and the reactions of some of those who claim to be defending free speech? I think, if I were the brother of one of the girls who didn't like her rating (whether because it was "good" or "bad"), I'd be inclined to a little disturbing of the peace, myself. That's incitement.
Sure, comments casually made in the hall should be ignored. When only one or a few girls are targeted and it gets out of control, restraining orders should be sought. But when you get more than a few girls targeted, it definitely may cross the line into criminal behavior, just as statutory rape is not necessarily benign.
If you realy are a judge, I'd suggest you examine your own tendency to judge things too quickly.
I don't know the facts of the case. It could well be that the boy who was arrested may be the subject, on the contrary, of discriminatory legal attention. It may be that the list itself and the environment at schoolare such that this should not be considered even misdemeanor disorderly conduct. It may well be that the boy who has been charged needs a capable advocate/social-worker more than he needs even suspended jail time. But he probably needs to be aware that he's at least dangerously close to crossing the line between discourteous behavior and behavior that causes actual harm to others.
Disorderly conduct is a misdemeanor, not a felony. It would be appropriate in some situations, sounds like it would be appropriate here, if the whites who are in control don't use it as a chance to send the guy to one of those schools that specializes in teaching kids how to be juvenile delinquents even though they are nominally correctional.
Sounds like the kid needs an advocate who can be strict enough to teach him better ways to seek attention while keeping him from being made a public example of. (Dangerous job, but sometimes you can find someone who can do it.)
And your sister needs your support, too. Make sure she doesn't blame herself for things that are not her fault.
Check, say, wikipedia on what a misdemeanor crime is. (As opposed to, for example, a felony.)
We don't have enough details to judge, perhaps, but this could well have crossed the line into precisely the sort of misdemeanor crime that are described as disorderly conduct.
Making demeaning comments about a few girls is discourteous. Making them on-line is a bit more than discourteous because of the public and persistent nature of the web. Repeating such behavior may give cause for getting, say, a restraining order.
When a whole lot of girls become targets, it can definitely be disorderly conduct in a criminal sense.
The line would be drawn if one or more of the girls targeted became afraid for her personal safety.
This is not a case of making up new (and probably inappropriate) law. This is a case of applying existing law, possibly (probably?) appropriately.
Yes, if "Kelly" doesn't want to be rated "hot" by you, and especially if she doesn't want to be rated "Asian", that is a slur and a racial slur. Sexual slur, too.
Or (assuming you're white) maybe you just want to be able to go get yours with the hot (non-white-race) bitches across town every Friday night?
Huh? Maybe someone should post it so you, a 3rd party, can instigate the Streisand effect?
Let me unpack things for you.
First, there are limits that usually are matters of courtesy. If a girl doesn't like your attention, even if you mean to be appreciative with your wolf-whistles and other compliments, she has a certain right to tell you where to get off. If you persist against her wishes, she has a right to ask for help, and if you insist, she has the right to drag the law into things.
By the same token, negative attention that is persisted in too far can become a matter of law.
These are matters of law which pre-date the internet, predate modern computers and even the telephone. It's a bit of a fuzzy area, and definitely can encroach on US 1st Ammendment rights if not handled carefully.
Disorderly conduct is one of the classifications of law that has traditionally been used in such cases (along with cases of screaming fire in a crowded theater, etc.). It is not a felony class offense (although it can become one), but it does allow the law to help defend people who, for whatever reason, need help defending themselves.
Now, why should a person have limits placed on his ability to express himself in this way?
Subjection is a actually a key word, when it comes to sexually demeaning language and behavior.
Which may be why you are arguing. You may well be trying to assert your "right" to use demeaning language and behavior to get your way. Is that what you really mean?
Slashdot Mirror
Thus, 1-causing a ruckus in public.
That's what he did. If he'd only done it once, no one was going to bother. But he repeated the ruckus and then took it to another public place.
And I'd far rather see him charged on a misdemeanor than see them try to define his behavior as a hate crime involving the internet and see him tried on a felony.
Or, I did have Fedora 12 on an iBook, until the iBook's video chip started acting up. (Cold solder or a hair-line crack or something, fixed it once, but a few months after, it went intermittant.
I like Sharp's NetWalker, but it's a little expensive at JPY 40,000+. I'm thinking they could be selling ten times what they sell of those if they dropped the price to 10,000, and I'm wondering whether it couldn't be sold at 5,000.
Nokia 900 was mentioned elsewhere, but it was expensive and not available here, and, yeah, I'll probably end up getting an Android phone when my wife's docomo dies and we give their family plan the boot. (Don't like Docomo's Androids.) And a small keyboard of some sort.
Yeah, you're thinking along a lot of the same lines i'm thinkin along, here.
Okay, I should have said that the Constitution does not forbid restrictions on free speech and that even the First Ammendment can't disallow all restrictions.
Better?
This is not a matter of how they please. It's a matter of, do we want an appropriate, existing law, applied here, or do we want to give a large community of distraught parents motivation to go to legislatures that are all too willing to pass stupid laws, clamoring for something stronger to protect their daughters. Do we want to give a corrupt legislature even more chances to make laws that do even more damage to the First Ammendment?
Would you really rather this kind of behavior end up classed in with hate crimes, so that it's no longer a misdemeanor, but a full felony? Unforunately, that's what the options are.
But as far as the girls should learn to tough it up a bit, so should the guys. There are much less offensive ways to get a girl's attentions than judging her physical appearance, much more appropriate things to compliment in public than her physical measurements, crudely. And, while it is true that being socially inept is not, in and of itself, a crime, repeating the ineptness and being even more extreme, which was apparently done in this case, can become disorderly, offensive, and harmful.
There are certain kinds of words which, when regeatedly and pushed to extremes, do go beyond mere words.
Come on, get out of your idealized fantasy world and live in the real world, where words can, indeed, count.
If being charged with a misdemeanor is the same thing as being silenced, there are problems with the community that claiming First Ammendment rights won't even come close to fixing..
If you want to defend the poor guys that can't get any action, let me suggest a couple of things:
I don't want to think you really think so, but just in case you do, getting action is not a particularly inalienable right. Non-sexual friendship is not even an inalienable right. There are some things that forcing destroys.
Asserting the right to say no is no-way equivalent to asserting the right to not be told no.
If you can't see that, then real relationships are always going to be frustrating to you. I'd suggest that you'll find more satisfaction from the pages of Oui, except that what you probably need is to quit reading/viewing the porn long enough to figure out that the yesses, noes, and maybes are a big part of the reason real people are a lot more interesting than those idealized images you see in porn.
Figure that out, and maybe you have a hope that of understanding why a reckless and clumsy proposition could, in some situations, cross the line into misdemeanor crime.
Pardon me for being blunt. And if you were intending to be sarcastic, well, you need to learn to use the sarcasm tags a bit more effectively.
All law can be prone to abuse. Disorderly conduct laws are, perhaps, more prone to abuse than some, but I'm not sure they're more prone to abuse than, say, those laws that enable city councils to set up "special improvement districts."
Setting aside fine distinctions between, say, yelling fire in a crowded theater, using emotional blackmail to push a girl to do something with you that she would otherwise not want to do, dissin' a particular guy's junk in the locker room every day for the whole school year, and so forth, let me ask you this:
Would you rather the police use this law, giving the boy in question a chance to say, in court, that it was not significantly worse behavior than what the mayor's (member of the city concil's, etc.) son was doing, ...
or would you rather that the parents run screaming to the legislatures demanding that new laws be made to keep people from being disorderly, or rude, or even just not politically correct on the internet?
Okay, okay, for far too many people, the only thing the computer has done, etc.
I also use computers in good ways from time to time. I'm not sure if slashdot is an overall positive or not. It consumes more time than I wish it did, but it also helps me keep my English up while I live and breath Japanese most of the rest of the day, and it keeps me in touch with more of what I think is important news. But I probably should be spending more time on slashdot.jp and reading Nikkei's tech news and such.
Yeah, I was in a reactionary mood the other day. Even Microsoft's junk can be put to good use.
But I do wish that more schools would teach the use of plain text before they teach word processors, and teach how to use an array in Python before they teach how to use spreadsheets.
Wish the N900 had been available in Japan.
I guess there are Androids that are close, but I sure don't like the on-screen keyboard.
I think I need to check Android out a bit better.
Yes, if "Kelly" doesn't want to be rated
So, if someone doesn't like a certain type of speech, it should be restricted?
It isn't a matter of simple preferences, and you know it isn't. Girls have a right to tell guys no. They don't have to be subjected to verbal abuse from boys who have been turned down, and they don't have to be subjected to the splashback when boys get their feelings hurt.
When a boy's opinion has been refused, and the boy persists too long in forcing his opinion on a girl, it becomes a tool of emotional abuse. Emotional abuse can be a reason for children to appeal to adults. If a boy further persists, it is abuse, and can become a wedge to enable physical forms of abuse. That is the point where this kind of thing crosses the line into criminal behavior.
that is a slur and a racial slur. Sexual slur, too.
And?
Racial and sexual slurs are most often used in precisely this way.
Seriously, what other reason would one have for using racial and sexual slurs, other than as an attempt to strip one's opponent of emotional defense?
No, the Constitution does not forbid restrictions of free speech. The First Amendment says that the government shall not make laws abridging the freedom of speech. The Constitution itself provides for promoting the arts and sciences by certain activities which would be restrictions on the freedom of speech if that freedom were absolute, even without the current ridiculously draconian (mis-?)interpretations of copyright and patent law.
The first paragraph of the Constitution specifies the purpose of the Constitution. The purposes include establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty.
Therefore, the Constitution provides for some things that take precedence over freedom of speech claims. I am sure you know this, even though you seem to chose to ignore it.
There is no way, in the real world, that the freedom of speech can be untangled from the other rights and responsibilities of citizens. If you talk about the rights of freedom of speech, you also have to talk about the responsilities, and citizens do have some responsilitiy to refrain from using the freedom of speech as an end-run around protections of another persons rights.
When opinions remain opinions, they are free. But when they are used to oppress other citizens, there are Constitutional means of recourse when those repressed are not fully able to defend themselves.
Sexual and racial slurs are often used as tools of physical and sexual abuse. The words, "prove it" are one of the cutting edges of the tool, in spite of abusers behaving as if they have the right of having something proved to them.
This is the line that is potentially breached by what the boy(s) here did. I say potentially, because we can't know whether it actually was breached without digging into the facts, but that is not our job. Misdemeanor charges are one way of providing both the offended and the accused an opportunity of trying to figure out whether the line was actually crossed. Sometimes it is appropriate to let a judge figure things like this out.
It is absolutely appropriate to have the option of pressing charges of disorderly conduct, particularly since the conduct was performed in two public places: in the school, made public because the passed the printed list around, and on-line because the forums they used there are public.
It is also essential that the courts be fair, and that is perhaps a question that should be asked, but, unless we have reason to believe the boy in question is not going to get a fair trial, we must recognize the option of arrest. From what we do know, it is very possible that the line was crossed.
I've said it elsewhere, but what is most appropriate here is that the people here are using existing law to deal with it, instead of attempting to use the more recent, very flawed laws that could have been invoked, under which this could have been charged as a felony.
I'm a teacher. Doesn't mean I know everything about teaching.
I'll agree that corporal punishment (Yeah, we all knowt that's what you meant.) is appropriate at times, and might have been more appropriate here. As a first response. I'm also aware that corporal punishment can easily go too far. Not everyone is able to do what your relative did. Not because they don't want to, but because it doesn't work for them. People have different skills.
From what one of the people who has responded here said, we have some reason to consider the possibility this wasn't the first time, and the guy(s) responsible had been warned. We also have reason to consider the possibility that the guy who got arrested is being turned into the fall guy, and that others are going unpunished. Unfortunately, we don't know the whole story.
I think I was a little too absolute. I should have said that having the option of pressing misdemeanor criminal charges for disorderly conduct is appropriate, as one option.
What I was trying to focus on was the idea that they are using existing law instead of trying to invent new law unnecessarily. This is most definitely disorderly conduct in a public place. Whether to press charges or not is a separate issue.
Let's work through this step by step.
A guy tells a girl in the hall something like, "Hey, what are you wearing that thing under your shirt for? Protect your mosquito bites?"
Maybe she is cool enough to deal with it someway that doesn't encourage him or do herself emotional harm. Most likely, being a child, she has no idea how to deal with it.
But this kind of thing goes on all the time. Learning how to deal with it is part of growing up. While the adults nearby should try not to be to quick to notice it, they should also avoid showing tacit approval. Preventing the behavior would be worse than having the behavior happen, as well.
If the girl being put down does not know that she can turn to the adults, she is likely to end up giving the jerk an opportunity to say something like, "Well you know how you could prove it to me ..." You don't want children to be put in the position of having to tell guys like this no before they know how.
That's not the only way this kind of thing goes south. There are quite a few ways that verbal abuse escalates to physical and sexual abuse.
When a guy publishes his opinions in two public forums as has happened here, in many cases the adults cannot simply stand by. Otherwise, their inaction will be interpreted as tacit approval. That leaves a lot more children defenseless.
Maybe the teachers and the police and/or judge decide that the criminal charges are not the path they should pursue. There are other paths, and all of them also require a lot of adults to invest a lot of time. Maybe the criminal charges aren't appropriate here. Maybe I put that in terms too absolute. But having the option of misdemeanor criminal charges is appropriate. Having the option is most assuredly appropriate.
You are assuming quite a bit. Judging from the post from the guy who claims to be a brother of one of the girls, we can gues that your assumptions may be right.
But the adults still need to let all the children know that what he is doing is not even tacitly approved.
And he still needs to know that he has crossed a line into a range of activities that are no longer protected by first amendment rights. The adults have to make judgement calls and that they have this option is not a bad thing. And he needs to know that when he uses the language he has in two public forums in the way that he has, he has just put himself at the mercy of the adults.
We don't want the adults to abuse the option they've taken, but if we take the option away from them, the result would be just as bad as if we were somehow able to prevent the behavior from occurring in the first place.
If you want to engage in adolescent behavior here, that's fine.
I'll get a chuckle out of it and we go on.
Adolescent behavior in the classroom is, well, unavoidable. Or the cure would be worse than the symptoms. I'll agree with that much.
But such lists should not be simply ignored by teachers. Girls can be seriously scarred, emotionally, by such lists. In an ideal world, we might wish that all girls should be tough enough, or get tough enough. This world is not such a world. Moreover, such lists, especially when given the appearance of tacit approval from the adults, can be used as emotional blackmail, resulting in physical abuse.
("You want your rating upped? I'll tell you how, ...")
The adults also matter. School is not some sort of sandbox where kids get to do all the wrong things to each other and always come out unscarred, and the adults are not just ornaments necessitated by the Victorian ideas of the parents. I don't care how idealistic you are, but kids are vulnerable, and adults have responsibility to see that things don't go too far.
Misdemeanor criminal charges are not the only way to deal with such disorderly behavior. They are one way and may be necessary. The little we know of this case, I'm telling you that I cannot say they are not necessary.
Since someone who claims to be the brother of one of the girls on the list responded here, we can theorize that we know some of the problems in the system in this case, and guess a lot of things about why the author(s) would make such a list, and we'd probably miss something important. No, we'd surely miss something important.
Criminal charges at the misdemeanor level may be appropriate here, and the school needs to have the option. Not saying that he should be found guilty. We'd hope they do not abuse the option, but that they have the option is not a bad thing.
Maybe I should say it this way: We know the school system could abuse this. But the cure that would prevent the possible abuse is just as bad for all involved as the cure for preventing children from doing anything bad to each other would be.
telnetting in works!
The only thing the computer has done, the way we use it, is to make it quicker to come to the wrong conclusions.
Some people use the computer to make it easier to back up and try a new path having once come to the wrong end-point. That's a real improvement.
But it also makes it easier to just blindly try more wrong paths. Computers induce a lot of churn into our daily lives. I guess that's different. I'm still not convinced it's substantive. Too many of the important problems have too many paths to try, so many that you're probably going to die before you hit a right solution. And if you get used to the churn, I think you lose the ability to recognize a right path, so you often find yourself having backed off a real solution and started on a new wrong one, and by the time you can get back to what was a right path, well, you've changed, and the network has changed.
I've noticed that my cell phone has more storage and more computing power than the Univac 1100 that we used at college. More even than the Sun workstations I used at the university. Shoot, I have a couple of AT&T 7100s or whatever those 68010-based Unix workstations were called stored in a basement somewhere in the States, half a meg of RAM and 20M of hard disk. The OS floppies are still there, I think.
My cell phone has 64M or RAM, a full gig of flash RAM for persistent store. The display has a bit fewer pixels. Or does it? The keyboard, well, okay, that's a loss. Network connectivity? No ethernet, but it is connected to telephone network.
And the OS is a derivative of Linux that Docomo (and NTT) refuse to acknowledge, much less live up to the license requirements of letting me access it, so I can't run dc (or bc) or vi on it.
I want a portable Unix workstation the size of a pocket calculator. I know it could be done.
Nostalgia makes sense to me.
Never used finger, either.
You're a judge, you're posting here, and you back away from the chance to apply existing law appropriately without inventing new law just because it's them intarnets?
Public. Yeah, Facebook is a public forum, or at least many parts of it are. The people there are often lawfully assembled.
How can you say that distributing this kind of a list, on the internet or printed, is not tumultuous, or even fighting conduct? The older brother of one of the girls posted a comment earlier, did you not see it and the reactions of some of those who claim to be defending free speech? I think, if I were the brother of one of the girls who didn't like her rating (whether because it was "good" or "bad"), I'd be inclined to a little disturbing of the peace, myself. That's incitement.
Sure, comments casually made in the hall should be ignored. When only one or a few girls are targeted and it gets out of control, restraining orders should be sought. But when you get more than a few girls targeted, it definitely may cross the line into criminal behavior, just as statutory rape is not necessarily benign.
If you realy are a judge, I'd suggest you examine your own tendency to judge things too quickly.
I don't know the facts of the case. It could well be that the boy who was arrested may be the subject, on the contrary, of discriminatory legal attention. It may be that the list itself and the environment at schoolare such that this should not be considered even misdemeanor disorderly conduct. It may well be that the boy who has been charged needs a capable advocate/social-worker more than he needs even suspended jail time. But he probably needs to be aware that he's at least dangerously close to crossing the line between discourteous behavior and behavior that causes actual harm to others.
Disorderly conduct is a misdemeanor, not a felony. It would be appropriate in some situations, sounds like it would be appropriate here, if the whites who are in control don't use it as a chance to send the guy to one of those schools that specializes in teaching kids how to be juvenile delinquents even though they are nominally correctional.
Sounds like the kid needs an advocate who can be strict enough to teach him better ways to seek attention while keeping him from being made a public example of. (Dangerous job, but sometimes you can find someone who can do it.)
And your sister needs your support, too. Make sure she doesn't blame herself for things that are not her fault.
You're the guy they arrested, right?
Check, say, wikipedia on what a misdemeanor crime is. (As opposed to, for example, a felony.)
We don't have enough details to judge, perhaps, but this could well have crossed the line into precisely the sort of misdemeanor crime that are described as disorderly conduct.
Making demeaning comments about a few girls is discourteous. Making them on-line is a bit more than discourteous because of the public and persistent nature of the web. Repeating such behavior may give cause for getting, say, a restraining order.
When a whole lot of girls become targets, it can definitely be disorderly conduct in a criminal sense.
The line would be drawn if one or more of the girls targeted became afraid for her personal safety.
This is not a case of making up new (and probably inappropriate) law. This is a case of applying existing law, possibly (probably?) appropriately.
Yes, if "Kelly" doesn't want to be rated "hot" by you, and especially if she doesn't want to be rated "Asian", that is a slur and a racial slur. Sexual slur, too.
Or (assuming you're white) maybe you just want to be able to go get yours with the hot (non-white-race) bitches across town every Friday night?
Does that help you see the problem?
Huh? Maybe someone should post it so you, a 3rd party, can instigate the Streisand effect?
Let me unpack things for you.
First, there are limits that usually are matters of courtesy. If a girl doesn't like your attention, even if you mean to be appreciative with your wolf-whistles and other compliments, she has a certain right to tell you where to get off. If you persist against her wishes, she has a right to ask for help, and if you insist, she has the right to drag the law into things.
By the same token, negative attention that is persisted in too far can become a matter of law.
These are matters of law which pre-date the internet, predate modern computers and even the telephone. It's a bit of a fuzzy area, and definitely can encroach on US 1st Ammendment rights if not handled carefully.
Disorderly conduct is one of the classifications of law that has traditionally been used in such cases (along with cases of screaming fire in a crowded theater, etc.). It is not a felony class offense (although it can become one), but it does allow the law to help defend people who, for whatever reason, need help defending themselves.
Now, why should a person have limits placed on his ability to express himself in this way?
Subjection is a actually a key word, when it comes to sexually demeaning language and behavior.
Which may be why you are arguing. You may well be trying to assert your "right" to use demeaning language and behavior to get your way. Is that what you really mean?
Wikipedia has a article on disorderly conduct.
Actually, I read this and think we are finally seeing officers of the law figuring out how the internet fits in.
Clearly, this is disorderly conduct in a couple of public places, and it sounds like the appropriately class of response is being pursued.
Misdemeanor, as opposed to felony. A bit more serious than a traffic fine, but not nearly on the level of being arrested for grand theft, even.