Oh Brother -- Great, great stuff. The Coen brothers have the gift of writing perfect dialogue and never have I found this more in abundance than in this movie. It's as if they didn't so much try to make a movie set in the 1930s, but actually made a 1930s film. The acting matched the dialogue. If you are a fan of the Coens, sit back, relax, and enjoy as one wonderful scene unfolds after another.
Crouching Tiger -- Probably the best movie of the year. No, not influenced by The Matrix! The Hong Kong influence came first, and this is Ang Lee's exploration and celebration of this school of film. It is a great mix of epic tales, romance, eastern philosophy, and the most lyrically beautiful fight scenes I've ever seen. I'll never forget the fight on the tree tops for sheer elegance and beauty.
Finding Forrester -- I seem to disagree with Katz on this one, for I enjoyed it very much. I especially enjoyed the way they didn't dwell on the usual racial stereotypes, so evidently either I missed something, or Katz saw something that wasn't there. Good acting by all. And probably one of the better movies about writing I've seen (although the ending cops out a bit on that score). ________________
"The great majority of Internet Users dial in via their home telephone line. If they start making phone calls over said line, the phone company (which owns the line) is losing out unfairly"
Wait just a sec. You contract with the telco for phone service for a unlimited use rate. It's a contract, with both sides agreeing.
Now that some users decide to take the telco's at their word and really use the lines in an unlimited manner, and the telco realizes, "Uh oh, when we said 'unlimited' we didn't really think they would actually use it that much" and decides to change their contracts, you defend them because they are "losing out unfairly"?
What's unfair? Unlimited means unlimited. If you go to a restaurant that advertises unlimited buffet dinner for a certain price, and you keep going back for seconds, and the manager finally kicks you out, do you defend the manager because they were "losing out unfairly"?
Sorry, they made a bet about consumer behavior and lost the bet. Nothing unfair about it, just short-sighted on the telco's part. ________________
I appreciate the feedback, and I basically see the point of most of the respondents: Mr. Glass does fit as a villain.
I still think more will come from the wife if any sequels are made, for she was irrationally against having the hero lead even a hint of a hero's life. Perhaps just will just be explained away as a personality quirk of hers, and I just picked up on a red herring.
I will admit that my theory was formed halfway through the movie as I began to notice that the wife was his opposite, so that when it was said that you find a villain by looking for an opposite the wife came to mind. Especially since the Jackson character had said earlier that they were similiar in some ways. I guess I out thought the situation and should have just accepted the obvious ending. ________________
No, the day-to-day things weren't evil, it was the way the wife was constantly trying to get Willis to avoid being in situations that would allow him to be heroic. She is constantly the voice saying not to move forward, which is why Willis's character is so depressed when he gets up in the morning.
The Jackson character encourages the hero to act. The wife tries to stop him. Thus my theory. ________________
No, I didn't think the ending was lousy, but that's because I took the ending in an entirely different way than you and every other reviewer I've read. Probably means I'm just wrong, but I like my theory better. I already posted my thoughts here. I'd be interested in your thoughts as to the viability of my concept. ________________
NOTE: There are major spoilers in this message, so if you don't want to know the ending, do not read this message. You have been warned.
I have a theory about Unbreakable that seems to be at odds with what everyone else thinks about the ending. That probably means I'm just wrong, but I'd like to get some feedback on the theory:
The Jackson character never says he is the opposite of the Willis character. Oh, he implies it a lot, and the screenplay leads us in that rather obvious direction. But even at the end, Jackson never directly says he is the opposite of Willis. My theory, then, is that Jackson is not the villain that everyone assumes is the lame ending.
Oh sure, he's insane all right. And he does evil things in setting up the disasters. But he's not the villain because he does those things for good reasons -- insane reasons, but with a good motive: To find a hero that can help humankind. If he were truly evil, and not just insane, the last thing he would want is to find a hero, for it would interfere with his evil actions (as actually does happen at the end when he goes to prison). Talk about stupid actions for a villain! But then, as I said, he never does come out and call himself a villain, or say that he is Willis' opposite. We just assume this from the carefully crafted writing and the way the characters dress and act.
Since I heard Unbreakable is supposed to be part one of a trilogy, I think the real villain is yet to be revealed. My theory is that the wife is the real villain. Consider, she is the one who contstantly tries to stop Willis from acting on his hero tendencies. She is the one who holds him back. When Willis survives the train wreck miraculously, she rushes back into his life to hold him down again. And, most significantly, in the screenplay, she is the only one who explicitly says she is the direct opposite of Willis' personality!
My theory is that the Jackson character is well-meaning but insane, while the wife is seemingly benign but actually the one doing the most to stand in Willis' way, preventing him from acting as a hero. Far-fetched, yeah, but maybe the next movie will reveal this. In any case, it seems a less obvious (and lame) ending than the movie actually had. It seems unlikely such a good writer who is so good at misdirecting an audience would settle for such an obvious choice of villain.
Those of you who have seen this movie, what do you think? Viable theory, or have I overlooked something in the screenplay? ________________
"Adults still insist they have lessons to teach the next generation. But the young have come to believe, with increasing justification, that their elders know much less than they do, and have little worth passing along. All they have to offer are boring and outmoded educational systems, political structures that no longer work, and exhausted forms of fading, sacrosanct, heavily subsidized "culture."
So the new paradigm is gaming? How is that different than what the parents view as culture? You say that the parents have "heavily subsidized" culture, but isn't that true of gaming as well? Don't games come from megacorps the same way that television and movies do?
Seems to me that it's all the same source, but different 'fixes' for different segments of society. You are young? Fine, check out MegaCorp's Final Death IX. You are middle-aged? Fine, check out MegaCorp's Faded Dreams, the latest weepie movie.
So what if web sites have cropped up around games? They crop up around every topic imaginable, including dreck movies.
So what if the young have their own lingo for gaming that no one else gets? That's been true of every generation that's ever lived, you dig?
It's all just more of the same entertainment being fed to the masses by the corporations. Only the target audience is different. Ain't nothin' that unique about gaming. ________________
"For the first time, performers and artists will be rewarded for the performance of their works online," says John Simson, director of artist and label relations for SoundExchange. "
The quote was said to continue as follows:
"...rewarded for the performance of their works online in the same way artists are rewarded for the performance of their works offline. That is to say, after the RIAA takes their massive cut, the artist will be lucky to get a nickle. But if they work really, really hard on their next album, they might get more. Maybe. After promotional expenses." ________________
"The vast majority of us have no idea what tetrachromacy would be like. Anyone who had the supersense wouldn't know she did, let alone be able to describe it. After all, it is an exercise in futility for trichromats to try to explain their visual experience to color-blind people. "
Roses are red,
violets are blue,
trichromats can't see
the other amazing hues ________________
Good point. Actually, the tech in Star Trek I am most impressed with is how those console buttons work:
Captain: "Target their sensor arrays with a medium-burst photonic beam."
Ensign: "Aye, Captain" and pushes 3 or 4 random buttons on the console.
Captain: "Set up a medium-level force field around decks 3, 4, and 17 aft."
Ensign: "Aye, Captain" and pushes 3 or 4 other random buttons.
Captain: "Create a weapon out of technology none of us have ever thought of before this very moment but the lieutenant over there just suggested."
Ensign: "Aye, Captain" and pushes 4 or 5 buttons.
NASA can brag all they want, but until they get this magic console button technology, they ain't got squat! ________________
Why should this be a surprise that there might be electrical problems? Haven't we learned from Star Trek that future space craft, when under any kind of stress, immediately give off massive sparks through the consoles? ________________
Both you and "disenfranchised" commented on China or other repressive regimes. In fact, I used them only as an example of what I was really talking about. You touched on it when you said, "We need laws with intelligence and forsight instead of bending to the wills of the big spenders."
That is the trend I am noticing, laws being bent to the wills of the big corps. So my worry, though not really feasible at this time, is that one day MegaNewsCorp will control 95% of the western news outlets, and will try to go after the pesky remaining 5%. Not because of political will, but out of concern for shareholder value. After all, if the clueless consumers begin to read real news, they will realize they have been spoon fed pablum by MegaNewsCorp and become dissatisfied with the product.
Consider as a current, if orthagonal, example that of AOL and the way they try to prevent their users from leaving the AOL universe and going out to the Web at large. Do they absolutely forbid it? Nope, but they are making it gradually harder. And they do this because they want you to view their material so they can make more money.
So if MegaNewsCorp decides that they don't want people reading that 5% of independent news outlets, where you find out what's really happening, instead of the anestheticizing news about the latest trend from Hollywood, they might try to get those sites shut down.
All right, all right, I know...typical/. paranoid rant that will never come true. Probably not. But the trends are there, as in cities where all the daily papers are owned by one corp., and the news web sites that are being folded into each other under the banner of one corp., etc. ________________
There are so many things we would want preserved, it's hard to know where to begin. Some random thoughts:
Bug reports for software. I can imagine MS or AOL or some other big software producer clamping down on practical information about what works and what doesn't work in any given version of software. Remember, many software licenses now demand that you not make a negative review of the product without permission. It's a short leap from that to demanding that you not talk about a product's shortcomings. "Your honor, it is imperative to our nation's security that software holes are not publicized where terrorists can get them."
Independent news: China just cracked down again on Chinese web sites wanting to report news, saying that they can only link to official news feeds, not those imperialistic foreign news sources. It seems unlikely that such would ever happen in the West, but it's not inconceivable. As more and more news organizations get swallowed up by mega corporations, their news quality suffers. They are unable to report all the news, for some of it might be embarrassing to the bosses back at HQ. Imagine if all the news were like this, and the only way to find out what is really happening is to go to some independent web sites for news. I can conceive of the day when the AOLs of the world try to discredit any non-Time Warner-approved news, so to speak.
Man, first we see a skull in outer space, and now we see a violent collision between galaxies. Doesn't anyone think of the children? We need to ban these violent space images before they turn the hearts of our children dark! ________________
Another factor was that the Register of Copyrights defined "classes of works" very narrowly, in a way that severely damaged many of the submissions -- they were too broad.
OK, so first thing we do is make sure our submission is specific.
Even where specific classes of works were singled out by the commenters, unless they submitted a great deal of evidence, they weren't deemed to have met the burden necessary of proving that they were being harmed by the prohibition on circumvention of access controls.
OK, so next thing we do is make sure we provide a massive amount of evidence to back up our specific submission.
In particular, the Register of Copyrights noted that "individual cases" would not be sufficient to meet the burden of showing harm.
Erp! Um, so lemme get this straight: We have to provide specific submissions, not general ones, but if we provide 'individual cases' we get looked down upon?
And no exemptions were granted where there was a large company opposing the exemptions.
Oh well, screw it then. The fix was in from the beginning... ________________
You obviously missed a major point here. Just because the D.A.R.E. spokesperson had one little slip and didn't convey their feelings to the full extent, you say the program is bad?
Since that isn't what I said, and is a gross oversimplification of my words, I don't think I missed the point. I said the program is bad for philosophical reasons -- that parents are the ones who should impart morality, not the schools which then have to choose which version of morality to teach to all kids.
>>"...we can never say for sure. But I'm wholeheartedly convinced it's worth doing." The idea she was probably trying to get across was most likely this: If all the entire D.A.R.E program ever did was save this one little girl Amber from getting abducted, molested, and maybe killed, was it worth it? Hell yah. We'll never know how many little girls/boys got saved by something they learned at D.A.R.E because they don't all make the news like this. D.A.R.E teaches more than just drug education, so don't throw it all out as a bunk program.
That's your reasoning? You must be joking! Hey, look at how many women are being prevented from being raped by what the Taliban is doing in Afghanistan. Maybe we should do the same in this country and not let women in public alone or with any part of them showing. After all, according to your reasoning, as long as Taliban's laws "ever did was save" just one woman from being raped, it's worth it, right?
See the problem with that reasoning? I mean, Mussolini made the trains run on time, so fascism must be good, no?
Look, my point is not that morality shouldn't be taught. Of course it should! But it's the parents who should do the teaching. The fact that 10-year-old Amber didn't credit her parents from teaching her from going inside some strange man's truck makes you wonder where they were. These are the ones who should teach morality, not shirk their responsibility off on the state.
________________
I found this story on the D.A.R.E. web site, in their news section where they list success stories. In the section about kids and D.A.R.E, I found this excerpt:
"A 10-year-old Newport Beach, California girl named Amber escaped a would-be abductor near her home last weekend. Then, with TV cameras rolling, she credited the DARE officer at her school for teaching her what to do. You can bet hundreds of DARE police officers throughout the nation were whooping when they saw that...
"How well does it work? That's a crapshoot; we can never say for sure," said Lynne Bloomberg, who coordinates the DARE program for the Newport Mesa Unified School District. "But I'm wholeheartedly convinced it's worth doing." Just ask Amber. She'd just gotten off her bicycle to pick flower in her Eastbluff neighborhood when someone pulled up in a truck, opened the door and tried to grab her. Amber said she knew from her DARE officer not to get close enough that he could reach her and that she should scream and run like crazy to get away. "
Other than the humorous image of a bunch of cops "whooping" when they heard about Amber's actions (whooping ass? the imagination soars...), I found this story odd.
For one thing, note the logic error of the D.A.R.E. spokesperson when talking about whether or not D.A.R.E. works:
"...we can never say for sure. But I'm wholeheartedly convinced it's worth doing."
There you go! We can't say for sure, but I just did. What more proof do you need?
Secondly, what has this got to do with D.A.R.E? Dare to avoid sex offenders? Furthermore, why did Amber credit D.A.R.E for teaching her not to get into trucks with strange men? Didn't her parents provide this salient fact?
I find this to be part of the larger trend of people shirking personal responsibility. Parents should teach morality to their children, not outsiders in the school. Otherwise, whose morality gets taught? The morality that says weed is not as bad as crack and heroin? Or the morality that says all drugs are universally and equally bad, including that aspirin, you naughty boy! D.A.R.E has to choose one parent's morality and not the other. Predictably, of course, they chose the easy to remember, Claritin will lead to a life of depravity, level of morality. ________________
"Perhaps November will be more meaningful if large numbers of Americans deliberately choose not to participate in this election, and make their reasons known, rather than shrugging and ignoring it. Perhaps then, the Beltway might really buckle a bit. "
OK, well, that describes me. I have objections to every candidate running this year, and cannot, in clear conscience, vote for any of them. Yes, that includes Reform, Libertarian, and Green party candidates, all of whom have some valid points, and some points that scare me. (No, I don't want to get into a political argument about your pet candidate -- you like 'em? good for you, but let's stick to the topic, please).
So, how does the conscientious non-voter "make their reasons known"? Serious question. What is the right approach to take in such a case so as to make my objections known? Or does the fact that I will be lumped into the lazy, ignorant, non-voter group mean my reasons will disappear into the void of Washington apathy?
Slashdot Mirror
"How realistic is the worry that people might feel constrained? This is how the copy protection module will affect viewing:
Hmmm...all I see is No, No, No, No, NO, NO!. Just the way I, as a consumer, want to be treated -- like a 2-year-old.
Remind me again why I want these things...
________________
Crouching Tiger -- Probably the best movie of the year. No, not influenced by The Matrix! The Hong Kong influence came first, and this is Ang Lee's exploration and celebration of this school of film. It is a great mix of epic tales, romance, eastern philosophy, and the most lyrically beautiful fight scenes I've ever seen. I'll never forget the fight on the tree tops for sheer elegance and beauty.
Finding Forrester -- I seem to disagree with Katz on this one, for I enjoyed it very much. I especially enjoyed the way they didn't dwell on the usual racial stereotypes, so evidently either I missed something, or Katz saw something that wasn't there. Good acting by all. And probably one of the better movies about writing I've seen (although the ending cops out a bit on that score).
________________
I hadn't thought of that, and it does blow a hole in my theory.
________________
Wait just a sec. You contract with the telco for phone service for a unlimited use rate. It's a contract, with both sides agreeing.
Now that some users decide to take the telco's at their word and really use the lines in an unlimited manner, and the telco realizes, "Uh oh, when we said 'unlimited' we didn't really think they would actually use it that much" and decides to change their contracts, you defend them because they are "losing out unfairly"?
What's unfair? Unlimited means unlimited. If you go to a restaurant that advertises unlimited buffet dinner for a certain price, and you keep going back for seconds, and the manager finally kicks you out, do you defend the manager because they were "losing out unfairly"?
Sorry, they made a bet about consumer behavior and lost the bet. Nothing unfair about it, just short-sighted on the telco's part.
________________
I still think more will come from the wife if any sequels are made, for she was irrationally against having the hero lead even a hint of a hero's life. Perhaps just will just be explained away as a personality quirk of hers, and I just picked up on a red herring.
I will admit that my theory was formed halfway through the movie as I began to notice that the wife was his opposite, so that when it was said that you find a villain by looking for an opposite the wife came to mind. Especially since the Jackson character had said earlier that they were similiar in some ways. I guess I out thought the situation and should have just accepted the obvious ending.
________________
The Jackson character encourages the hero to act. The wife tries to stop him. Thus my theory.
________________
No, I didn't think the ending was lousy, but that's because I took the ending in an entirely different way than you and every other reviewer I've read. Probably means I'm just wrong, but I like my theory better. I already posted my thoughts here. I'd be interested in your thoughts as to the viability of my concept.
________________
I have a theory about Unbreakable that seems to be at odds with what everyone else thinks about the ending. That probably means I'm just wrong, but I'd like to get some feedback on the theory:
The Jackson character never says he is the opposite of the Willis character. Oh, he implies it a lot, and the screenplay leads us in that rather obvious direction. But even at the end, Jackson never directly says he is the opposite of Willis. My theory, then, is that Jackson is not the villain that everyone assumes is the lame ending.
Oh sure, he's insane all right. And he does evil things in setting up the disasters. But he's not the villain because he does those things for good reasons -- insane reasons, but with a good motive: To find a hero that can help humankind. If he were truly evil, and not just insane, the last thing he would want is to find a hero, for it would interfere with his evil actions (as actually does happen at the end when he goes to prison). Talk about stupid actions for a villain! But then, as I said, he never does come out and call himself a villain, or say that he is Willis' opposite. We just assume this from the carefully crafted writing and the way the characters dress and act.
Since I heard Unbreakable is supposed to be part one of a trilogy, I think the real villain is yet to be revealed. My theory is that the wife is the real villain. Consider, she is the one who contstantly tries to stop Willis from acting on his hero tendencies. She is the one who holds him back. When Willis survives the train wreck miraculously, she rushes back into his life to hold him down again. And, most significantly, in the screenplay, she is the only one who explicitly says she is the direct opposite of Willis' personality!
My theory is that the Jackson character is well-meaning but insane, while the wife is seemingly benign but actually the one doing the most to stand in Willis' way, preventing him from acting as a hero. Far-fetched, yeah, but maybe the next movie will reveal this. In any case, it seems a less obvious (and lame) ending than the movie actually had. It seems unlikely such a good writer who is so good at misdirecting an audience would settle for such an obvious choice of villain.
Those of you who have seen this movie, what do you think? Viable theory, or have I overlooked something in the screenplay?
________________
So the new paradigm is gaming? How is that different than what the parents view as culture? You say that the parents have "heavily subsidized" culture, but isn't that true of gaming as well? Don't games come from megacorps the same way that television and movies do?
Seems to me that it's all the same source, but different 'fixes' for different segments of society. You are young? Fine, check out MegaCorp's Final Death IX. You are middle-aged? Fine, check out MegaCorp's Faded Dreams, the latest weepie movie.
So what if web sites have cropped up around games? They crop up around every topic imaginable, including dreck movies.
So what if the young have their own lingo for gaming that no one else gets? That's been true of every generation that's ever lived, you dig?
It's all just more of the same entertainment being fed to the masses by the corporations. Only the target audience is different. Ain't nothin' that unique about gaming.
________________
The quote was said to continue as follows:
"...rewarded for the performance of their works online in the same way artists are rewarded for the performance of their works offline. That is to say, after the RIAA takes their massive cut, the artist will be lucky to get a nickle. But if they work really, really hard on their next album, they might get more. Maybe. After promotional expenses."
________________
Thank you, that's a much better version than mine.
________________
Roses are red,
violets are blue,
trichromats can't see
the other amazing hues
________________
Captain: "Target their sensor arrays with a medium-burst photonic beam."
Ensign: "Aye, Captain" and pushes 3 or 4 random buttons on the console.
Captain: "Set up a medium-level force field around decks 3, 4, and 17 aft."
Ensign: "Aye, Captain" and pushes 3 or 4 other random buttons.
Captain: "Create a weapon out of technology none of us have ever thought of before this very moment but the lieutenant over there just suggested."
Ensign: "Aye, Captain" and pushes 4 or 5 buttons.
NASA can brag all they want, but until they get this magic console button technology, they ain't got squat!
________________
Why should this be a surprise that there might be electrical problems? Haven't we learned from Star Trek that future space craft, when under any kind of stress, immediately give off massive sparks through the consoles?
________________
So in accordance with the Open Source philosophy, are we gonna, um, see how this release was accomplished?
________________
Yes, that is the word I wanted, thanks!
________________
That is the trend I am noticing, laws being bent to the wills of the big corps. So my worry, though not really feasible at this time, is that one day MegaNewsCorp will control 95% of the western news outlets, and will try to go after the pesky remaining 5%. Not because of political will, but out of concern for shareholder value. After all, if the clueless consumers begin to read real news, they will realize they have been spoon fed pablum by MegaNewsCorp and become dissatisfied with the product.
Consider as a current, if orthagonal, example that of AOL and the way they try to prevent their users from leaving the AOL universe and going out to the Web at large. Do they absolutely forbid it? Nope, but they are making it gradually harder. And they do this because they want you to view their material so they can make more money.
So if MegaNewsCorp decides that they don't want people reading that 5% of independent news outlets, where you find out what's really happening, instead of the anestheticizing news about the latest trend from Hollywood, they might try to get those sites shut down.
All right, all right, I know...typical /. paranoid rant that will never come true. Probably not. But the trends are there, as in cities where all the daily papers are owned by one corp., and the news web sites that are being folded into each other under the banner of one corp., etc.
________________
________________
Man, first we see a skull in outer space, and now we see a violent collision between galaxies. Doesn't anyone think of the children? We need to ban these violent space images before they turn the hearts of our children dark!
________________
OK, so first thing we do is make sure our submission is specific.
Even where specific classes of works were singled out by the commenters, unless they submitted a great deal of evidence, they weren't deemed to have met the burden necessary of proving that they were being harmed by the prohibition on circumvention of access controls.
OK, so next thing we do is make sure we provide a massive amount of evidence to back up our specific submission.
In particular, the Register of Copyrights noted that "individual cases" would not be sufficient to meet the burden of showing harm.
Erp! Um, so lemme get this straight: We have to provide specific submissions, not general ones, but if we provide 'individual cases' we get looked down upon?
And no exemptions were granted where there was a large company opposing the exemptions.
Oh well, screw it then. The fix was in from the beginning...
________________
Since that isn't what I said, and is a gross oversimplification of my words, I don't think I missed the point. I said the program is bad for philosophical reasons -- that parents are the ones who should impart morality, not the schools which then have to choose which version of morality to teach to all kids.
>>"...we can never say for sure. But I'm wholeheartedly convinced it's worth doing." The idea she was probably trying to get across was most likely this: If all the entire D.A.R.E program ever did was save this one little girl Amber from getting abducted, molested, and maybe killed, was it worth it? Hell yah. We'll never know how many little girls/boys got saved by something they learned at D.A.R.E because they don't all make the news like this. D.A.R.E teaches more than just drug education, so don't throw it all out as a bunk program.
That's your reasoning? You must be joking! Hey, look at how many women are being prevented from being raped by what the Taliban is doing in Afghanistan. Maybe we should do the same in this country and not let women in public alone or with any part of them showing. After all, according to your reasoning, as long as Taliban's laws "ever did was save" just one woman from being raped, it's worth it, right?
See the problem with that reasoning? I mean, Mussolini made the trains run on time, so fascism must be good, no?
Look, my point is not that morality shouldn't be taught. Of course it should! But it's the parents who should do the teaching. The fact that 10-year-old Amber didn't credit her parents from teaching her from going inside some strange man's truck makes you wonder where they were. These are the ones who should teach morality, not shirk their responsibility off on the state.
________________
"According to AOL, removing the home page icon was a way to make the service simpler for subscribers without limiting their preferences."
Got it? Removing a preference does not limit their preferences. And black = white and we have always been at war with Oceania.
________________
"A 10-year-old Newport Beach, California girl named Amber escaped a would-be abductor near her home last weekend. Then, with TV cameras rolling, she credited the DARE officer at her school for teaching her what to do. You can bet hundreds of DARE police officers throughout the nation were whooping when they saw that...
"How well does it work? That's a crapshoot; we can never say for sure," said Lynne Bloomberg, who coordinates the DARE program for the Newport Mesa Unified School District. "But I'm wholeheartedly convinced it's worth doing." Just ask Amber. She'd just gotten off her bicycle to pick flower in her Eastbluff neighborhood when someone pulled up in a truck, opened the door and tried to grab her. Amber said she knew from her DARE officer not to get close enough that he could reach her and that she should scream and run like crazy to get away. "
Other than the humorous image of a bunch of cops "whooping" when they heard about Amber's actions (whooping ass? the imagination soars...), I found this story odd.
For one thing, note the logic error of the D.A.R.E. spokesperson when talking about whether or not D.A.R.E. works:
"...we can never say for sure. But I'm wholeheartedly convinced it's worth doing."
There you go! We can't say for sure, but I just did. What more proof do you need?
Secondly, what has this got to do with D.A.R.E? Dare to avoid sex offenders? Furthermore, why did Amber credit D.A.R.E for teaching her not to get into trucks with strange men? Didn't her parents provide this salient fact?
I find this to be part of the larger trend of people shirking personal responsibility. Parents should teach morality to their children, not outsiders in the school. Otherwise, whose morality gets taught? The morality that says weed is not as bad as crack and heroin? Or the morality that says all drugs are universally and equally bad, including that aspirin, you naughty boy! D.A.R.E has to choose one parent's morality and not the other. Predictably, of course, they chose the easy to remember, Claritin will lead to a life of depravity, level of morality.
________________
Is that enough? Will my reasons for doing this be known, or will they just think I was too stupid to know how to make a choice?
________________
OK, well, that describes me. I have objections to every candidate running this year, and cannot, in clear conscience, vote for any of them. Yes, that includes Reform, Libertarian, and Green party candidates, all of whom have some valid points, and some points that scare me. (No, I don't want to get into a political argument about your pet candidate -- you like 'em? good for you, but let's stick to the topic, please).
So, how does the conscientious non-voter "make their reasons known"? Serious question. What is the right approach to take in such a case so as to make my objections known? Or does the fact that I will be lumped into the lazy, ignorant, non-voter group mean my reasons will disappear into the void of Washington apathy?
Suggestions?
________________