Before I argue further I would like to point out that in practice the principal probably doesn't have to prove a damn thing if he doesn't want to since the school board is going to take his word above that of some jackass who got photographed with some booze. I am merely concerned with whether or not his actions are justified, which I think requires some certainty that those being punished did in fact drink alcohol. (sarcasm)Heaven forbid we have to suspend an important football player!(/sarcasm)
What are the realistic chances that many, if not most of the individuals in question were in fact engaged in the very activities presented in the photographs?
Any realistic estimation of the chance of a teenager at a party who is holding a container of alcohol actually drinking it will be very high. However "most likely drinking it" and "drinking it" are two very different things. If the principal in question were to calculate the odds that a teenager holding an alcoholic beverage drank any of it and then use the same odds to determine whether or not the students singled out for punishment actually received it I would support his decision. However, he's probably not going to do that, and he really shouldn't be able to punish students for off campus policy violations (and to address another argument in his favor: athletic codes of conduct are policies as well). I opine that instead of potentially punishing kids that weren't even drinking, he should stop trying to police morality where he doesn't have the authority (even if he does have the power) to do so, and spend that time doing what he's getting paid to do, which is educate them.
Additionally, if someone has enough time on their hands to go through Facebook and collect photos in order to rat out hundreds or thousands of students, they probably have enough time to put drinks in the hands of a few people they didn't like who were photographed not drinking at the party. Given that high-schoolers, particularly in a situation like a party, are not always good photographers, it would not be especially difficult to exploit poor lighting and the like to make it so that it would be nigh impossible to discern which photo was manipulated, at which point you would have to have additional proof that the other hundreds or thousands of photos were not also manipulated.
Furthermore, sorry, but the idea of a glass, cup, bottle, or can of alcohol being held by a student but not consumed is as patently ridiculous as smoking a marijuana joint but "not inhaling".
Smoking cannabis but not inhaling is ridiculous because by definition you must inhale in order to smoke cannabis. However it is quite possible for even a high-school student, many of whom don't actually drink at all, to hold a spirituous drink without drinking any of it. He could be holding it for someone else so that it isn't accidentally picked up while they use the restroom, which I've seen myself (and no, I was not drunk at the time). I submit that it is the idea that alcohol exerts some kind of force on high-schoolers to where they cannot hold a drink without drinking it that is patently ridiculous.
I find your standards of proof distressingly low. If you were a cashier and your manager stole money from your drawer, would you accept termination and criminal charges because the "realistic chances" were good that you took it?
Unless they were in sports and signed an athletic code that prohibits them from doing the already illegal act of drinking. Then they broke that code and have to face the punishments prescribed by the code which are often suspensions/disqualifications that can affect scholarships.
Because photographs cannot be altered and because alcoholic beverages cannot be held without being drunk.
As a side note, it's nice that we're awarding scholarships to these athletes based on their athletic performance. It really shows what America looks for in its educational system. It's certainly much more logical than awarding scholarships to those who busted their asses academically.
If the rules in the agreement say you will not take part in any (no matter where) underage drinking/illegal activity then they ARE dealing with problems on their own campus - the problem of students not following the rules they agreed to.
It's really not the jocks getting burned on athletic code that get me riled up about this story. It's that principals these days think off-campus drinking, MySpace, and Facebook are bigger problems "on" their campus than the declining quality of education, marginalization of those students ahead of or behind the average, and other concerns related to actual education. The principals should be worrying about maintaining a safe and effective educational environment - everything else is firmly within the scope of parenting, which is something I do not want schools having a single goddamned thing to do with.
Of course like a good Slashdotter I didn't RTFA until I already posted, and so I assumed the administrators went and found the pics themselves. Instead an anonymous source mailed a CD in, which is a different ball of wax (although the anonymous source would probably have been better off minding their own damn business too).
While it would be considerably more offensive if the admins had been using my tax money to troll around Facebook before shoving their "authority" into what should be the jurisdiction of parents, it is still the shoving of "authority" that is the main point of contention with this story.
As other school districts have been punishing students for such trivialities as having "offensive" songs on their Myspace pages, however, I let my parent post stand.
Definitely true, and worth pointing out. I chose the income tax as an example because it's galling and it's in your face. Much more effective for making the particular argument than, say, a luxury tax on a $300,000 yacht or something.
The point is even stronger though. If the government is not just going to take a quarter of my check but a growing percentage of every purchase I make, a percentage of everything I worked to accumulate over the course of my life when I die, and the myriads and myriads of other little chunks of my personal assets they collect every day... then they damn well better not be paying principals to butt in on their students' parental authority with it all.
Of course they'll probably spend it on something else that directly contradicts my values instead, which is why they don't deserve it and should stop levying taxes. It is truly a shame that our formerly-representative republic has come to this.
Regrettably I'm not good for documentation, but this type of policy made me very angry when I was informed of it in high school and so I did a bit of research on the matter. If I hadn't burned my student handbook that day I'd scan the page with the policy on it for you, but the one at my school stated essentially that school officials may punish students for any violation of school policy at any time as though they were on the school campus.
Schools, public or private, operate under the legal concept of in loco parentis, which by my understanding (IANAL) means that by sending their kids to the school, the parents are temporarily transferring legal parental authority to the school and its authorized agents (i.e. officials, security guards).
The officials at my school took great care to explain that, in terms of the policy, "temporarily" meant "until you leave the graduation ceremony or drop out." Unfortunately I never found out if that definition of "temporarily" fit with the precise legal definition of in loco parentis.
It doesn't seem to be that well known. I doubt most parents would stand for the school butting in on their jurisdiction. My own parents nearly breathed fire at in loco parentis itself; I had never quite heard bloodthirst in my mother's voice before she repeated the phrase back to me.
is it at all (naively) possible that this admin is doing what he thought best?
Does it honestly matter? There are thousands of possible examples of people doing what they thought best that turned out to be grievously wrong. Imagine a father who catches his daughter having sex with her boyfriend and viciously beats her out of a deep-seated concern for her health and future. He may well genuinely be doing what he thought best, but that doesn't make him any less of a child abuser, right?
Anyone who truly seeks to act in the best interest of another has a responsibility to that person to make sure, to the best of their ability given the circumstances, that what they're doing is actually in the best interest of that person. If they do not do so, I for one do not recognize "but I thought it was the best thing to do" as a valid excuse.
When I went to school some of the officials were competent, decent people who I respected then and still respect now. But others were lunatics who probably shouldn't have been in charge of their own damn selves, much less somebody else's children. Every single one of them was at heart trying to do what was best for us. The fact of the matter is that children are the people who will one day be adult society - we shouldn't blindly trust the actions of the officials appointed to "administrate" them simply because those officials' hearts are in the right place. In light of recent events, and giving George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt in every possible way... does anyone really want another generation of American voters growing up used to having well-meaning idiots in charge?
These kids are getting a lesson about privacy and being mature.
Nobody but these kids know what kind of lesson they're getting. You may think they're learning about privacy and maturity, but there are a lot of things a developing mind could conclude from this incident. For example, the school administration's massive bleating and gnashing of teeth regarding underage drinking, when viewed in light of the fact that being drunk isn't actually that big of a deal, would teach the lesson that the school administration is behaving like a bunch of histrionic idiots.
Since incidents of administrative power-grubbing like this happen throughout elementary and middle school as well, the developing mind might conclude that instead of just acting like histrionic idiots, school administrators actually are histrionic idiots.
Upon considering that somebody specifically hired all of these histrionic idiots to administrate a school, and that nobody seems to think anything is wrong with that but other youths, a new lesson is learned: most adults are histrionic idiots that cannot be trusted.
I say this because that's what I learned from high school. I didn't get caught drinking because some narc handed in Facebook photos, but that's close to how my line of thought went as a youth. Fortunately I didn't take it quite as closely to heart as some other people I went to school with.
Although, looking at some of the other responses here on/. maybe I was a bit closer than I thought:P
Believe it or not, some kids don't drink at parties. Many of these kids make use of concepts like "logic" and "reason" and decide that getting drunk just isn't worth the risk of getting caught by their parents or the police. Or in this case, the school administration. Some of them even decline alcohol because they don't want it! I know it's counterintuitive to people who think children magically and instantly develop human intelligence at age 18, but I've seen it. Quite a bit actually. I even went to one party in high school where the host couldn't get any alcohol, but everyone stayed and had a good time anyway! Will wonders never cease?!
Second of all, if he's freely distributing evidence of himself breaking the law, he's lucky it's just his school that is punishing him.
A picture of himself holding what appears to be an alcoholic beverage is not evidence that he broke the law, which is why colleges send the RAs and not the campus police to search dorm rooms when pictures like this get posted on Facebook. There could be anything in that container. The school district may consider it actionable, and it may seem reasonable to you, but it would be simply wrong to assert that the only kind of liquid that even a beer can could possibly contain is beer. Were you at the party? Did you examine the can and its contents?
Third, he's lucky it's just him getting punished and not his parents.
Not really. Even the most audacious of administrations fears the parents of its students. One vague threat to take the children to another district and most principals will kiss parents' feet. As for the police, they didn't have anything to do with this kid, and even if they did, unless the parents hosted or actively furnished the alcohol (which they didn't) they have nothing on them.
Kid breaks law, gets in trouble.
No law was conclusively broken, but the kid got in trouble anyway, because the school administration gave itself the jurisdiction that previously belonged to parents.
The internet was mildly involved. News at 10:00. Bitching on Slashdot at 9:30.
If I wanted to watch the news I would watch the news. I wanted to read people bitching about the news, so I got on Slashdot.
what the hell gives schools such a wide bullshit jurisdiction?
It doesn't have any real basis, they sort of gave themselves that power. They still have it because most of the parents who know about it actually think it's a good thing because they have no spine and can't discipline their children themselves.
School boards are out of control these days. Most of them are more concerned with high test scores for NCLB, making their schools look expensive and modern, and pushing governmental agendas on kids (observe pro-abstinence programs for a good example) than actually educating them.
Caring about their reputation more than their results, expanding their powers in order to further dominate and control students, and getting money (which will probably go to nothing actually educational).
You aren't acting in an official capacity as a school administrator though. You're making friends with your students.
Befriending your students is a good thing. The problem here is that some do-gooder snitch was cruising Facebook for pictures of students doing things they shouldn't and turned them into the administration, who made like good little fascists and punished said students for things that happened off campus, which should be firmly outside the jurisdiction of the school administration but unfortunately is not.
If you were to express concern to one of your students over a picture they posted of themselves drinking, I would consider you a good person who I want teaching the next generation. What we have here is somebody who for whatever reason got a bunch of kids in trouble with an "authority" who should be spending his time (and our money) dealing with problems on his own campus.
You're all missing the point. The reason the school administrators are punishing the kids instead of reporting them to the police is to avoid giving (or adding to) the kids' criminal records.
Or these administrators could mind their own fucking business and stop wasting my tax money cruising Facebook for pictures of their students drinking off campus. That would prevent any additions to the kids' permanent records (snort) as well. I work for my damn money and if the government (state and/or federal) is going to take a quarter of my paycheck from me, they'd damn well better be educating kids with it, not trying to extend their influence beyond school campuses.
Frankly I don't think any school administrator has any business on Facebook in any official capacity. Period. Policing their students' morality is about as far from their duties as they can possibly get. If this shit is allowed to stand we're going to see kids whose Myspaces list them as Slayer fans harassed and monitored by the administration as potential school shooters, which I feel compelled to add would be a Bad Thing.
Darwin Tremor: [manipulating Dupree's mouth so Jack seems to be speaking to him] Oh hell yeah, we was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, so don't feel so bad, chief.
I think one of the major barriers to the video-game industries quest for mass media acceptance is the stuck-in-the-1980s tendency to portray women as sexual objects with boys-club-only lack of shame.
This would make a great deal of sense if:
Video games weren't part of the mass media.
The (other) mass media weren't also portraying women as sexual objects as early and often as possible.
The (other) mass media ever had any shame whatsoever.
Since video games are part of the mass media, the mass media loves to portray women as sexual objects, and the mass media never had any shame, neither your premise nor your argument make any sense.
Ah, so I'm an asshole for using a feature of the seat that the airlines purchased and had installed when the plane was built?
Not necessarily. On some planes you can recline all the way back and still leave a generous amount of room for the individual behind you. However, some airlines are assholes and pack the rows together so that you can quite literally recline your seat into the lap of the traveler behind you... if you're an asshole.
Seems to me like you're so selfish that you think you get to dictate what I do with the seat I paid to occupy for X amount of time.
I'm selfish? You paid to occupy your seat, not your seat and the one behind it. If you did, in fact, pay to occupy both seats, that would be different, but something tells me that's not the case.
Gotta love that "me first, screw you" attitude.
Says the guy who paid for his goddamned seat so he can recline it halfway into the chest cavity of the passenger behind him if he goddamn well wants to.
While we're sharing things about ourselves nobody else cares about, I'm sick of bloggers, pop music and the War on Drugs.
300 passengers sitting elbow-to-elbow for hours on end REQUIRES "censorship".
Bullshit. Until the airlines also censor obnoxious children, assholes who insist on reclining into your lap, and people's malodorous bodily gases, there is precious little point in censoring any provided Internet access. Most flights I've been on would have been much more tolerable if I could distract myself by watching somebody else's porn.
Better yet, I'll let you access whatever you like, and as soon as you expose a small child to some porn, I'll have your ass thrown in jail as soon as we land.
I would much prefer that to censorship. The guy lurking/b/ in front of small children is being just as big a dick as the bitch who brought her desoxyn-tweaking hellspawn onto the plane and told it to kick my seat, and if you can get him convicted for his antisocial behavior then I applaud you. Even better, your proposal answers both the guy surfing porn and the guy watching porn that he already had on his computer, and therefore is a much better solution than simply filtering access.
You people are forgetting that we can't even bring a pair of nail clippers on board an airplane, and you all want unfettered access to all the seedy corners of the Internet?
Banning nail clippers is completely fucking retarded too. Does that have anything else to do with filtering Internet access? I submit that it does not.
And pray tell, how is NO access at all better than limited access?
Simple. Not having access pisses me off significantly less than paying for access only to find that all the sites I was going to use to avoid paying attention to the annoying drunk next to me for the next three hours are blocked because the airline uses a filter designed for kindergarteners.
Censorship is a lazy and ineffective solution to problems up to a certain point, which is beyond the point where the censorship becomes more offensive than whatever you're censoring. While it will always be tempting for humans to try and make undesirable ideas and subjects go away, it will never actually work.
WTF? Does real life include beating up people just in order to get 5$ from their pockets?
In my elementary school the bullies beat up for an average of about 45c... so, yeah, it does. As an aside I very much doubt that this behavior was learned from Grand Theft Auto, which did not exist yet.
Or does it include randomly robbing people's cars?
I want to believe you weren't actually trying to say that nobody IRL steals cars but people have done it before. Yes, real life does in fact include people who rob cars. The criminal charge for doing so in the United States is called "Grand Theft Auto", which is why the popular and controversial video game series is named what it is and not "Extreme Stealing of Cars, Picking Up of Hookers, and Mob Violence".
Kids are inexperienced, but they are not grievously stupid as so many adults assume them to be. If you can figure out that there is a difference between the blocky polygonal world inside the TV and the non-blocky, non-polygonal world that is not stuck in the TV, so can they. The youngest children who may not be able to discern this are more likely to be scared of the bad man running around with guns and a chainsaw than anything else.
The average middle-class white boys who generally cause these massively-hyped school shootings will continue to do so whether or not they play violent video games. This is not just a matter of "lulz i liek beating peoplez up in gta, don't take it away plz". This is also a matter of children's lives. What if we were spending the time and money that we waste fighting about video games on finding out why they want to kill people to begin with? We would be able to find and help these kids before they snap. They might actually end up OK, and their victims would still be alive.
Instead they snap. They end up dead or in jail. Their victims end up dead.
By holding up actual progress with their anti-game bullshit, idiots like Clinton have more of a part in these deaths than any Rockstar developer ever did.
...it's MUCH easier to switch a government that's doing things you don't like for a different government that will continue to do things you don't like than it is to conduct an armed revolution.
Fixed.
Not that I'm a rabid gun nut stroking my metaphorical Kalashnikov at the thought of revolt, mind you. It's just that the American political system was not designed for the one-party system we basically have now, where the Democrats and Republicans argue about largely inconsequential bullshit to occupy the minds of the voting populace while silently coming to perverse agreements like the DMCA. Our government is out of control, and we have little to no guarantee that it would even recognize the results of an election if it would bring outsiders to a position of sufficient power.
Makes us a little jaded toward "well why don't you just vote them out?"
Chat speak is nothing more than a streamlining of language. While this may cause a massive debasement of the English language once the generation that we are currently raising on such vernacular becomes dominant in society, I'm not particularly worried. The absence of a word to describe a concept does not cause the concept to magically vanish from existence. After all, English might not have a word for Schadenfreude, but Americans sure do love the hell out of watching men get hit in the crotch.
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow, I don't think so.
I think he understood that the community can't really fix proprietary code, that's why he said no fix could be available for them.
Additionally, if someone has enough time on their hands to go through Facebook and collect photos in order to rat out hundreds or thousands of students, they probably have enough time to put drinks in the hands of a few people they didn't like who were photographed not drinking at the party. Given that high-schoolers, particularly in a situation like a party, are not always good photographers, it would not be especially difficult to exploit poor lighting and the like to make it so that it would be nigh impossible to discern which photo was manipulated, at which point you would have to have additional proof that the other hundreds or thousands of photos were not also manipulated. Smoking cannabis but not inhaling is ridiculous because by definition you must inhale in order to smoke cannabis. However it is quite possible for even a high-school student, many of whom don't actually drink at all, to hold a spirituous drink without drinking any of it. He could be holding it for someone else so that it isn't accidentally picked up while they use the restroom, which I've seen myself (and no, I was not drunk at the time). I submit that it is the idea that alcohol exerts some kind of force on high-schoolers to where they cannot hold a drink without drinking it that is patently ridiculous.
I find your standards of proof distressingly low. If you were a cashier and your manager stole money from your drawer, would you accept termination and criminal charges because the "realistic chances" were good that you took it?
As a side note, it's nice that we're awarding scholarships to these athletes based on their athletic performance. It really shows what America looks for in its educational system. It's certainly much more logical than awarding scholarships to those who busted their asses academically. It's really not the jocks getting burned on athletic code that get me riled up about this story. It's that principals these days think off-campus drinking, MySpace, and Facebook are bigger problems "on" their campus than the declining quality of education, marginalization of those students ahead of or behind the average, and other concerns related to actual education. The principals should be worrying about maintaining a safe and effective educational environment - everything else is firmly within the scope of parenting, which is something I do not want schools having a single goddamned thing to do with.
Of course like a good Slashdotter I didn't RTFA until I already posted, and so I assumed the administrators went and found the pics themselves. Instead an anonymous source mailed a CD in, which is a different ball of wax (although the anonymous source would probably have been better off minding their own damn business too).
While it would be considerably more offensive if the admins had been using my tax money to troll around Facebook before shoving their "authority" into what should be the jurisdiction of parents, it is still the shoving of "authority" that is the main point of contention with this story.
As other school districts have been punishing students for such trivialities as having "offensive" songs on their Myspace pages, however, I let my parent post stand.
Definitely true, and worth pointing out. I chose the income tax as an example because it's galling and it's in your face. Much more effective for making the particular argument than, say, a luxury tax on a $300,000 yacht or something.
The point is even stronger though. If the government is not just going to take a quarter of my check but a growing percentage of every purchase I make, a percentage of everything I worked to accumulate over the course of my life when I die, and the myriads and myriads of other little chunks of my personal assets they collect every day... then they damn well better not be paying principals to butt in on their students' parental authority with it all.
Of course they'll probably spend it on something else that directly contradicts my values instead, which is why they don't deserve it and should stop levying taxes. It is truly a shame that our formerly-representative republic has come to this.
Regrettably I'm not good for documentation, but this type of policy made me very angry when I was informed of it in high school and so I did a bit of research on the matter. If I hadn't burned my student handbook that day I'd scan the page with the policy on it for you, but the one at my school stated essentially that school officials may punish students for any violation of school policy at any time as though they were on the school campus.
Schools, public or private, operate under the legal concept of in loco parentis, which by my understanding (IANAL) means that by sending their kids to the school, the parents are temporarily transferring legal parental authority to the school and its authorized agents (i.e. officials, security guards).
The officials at my school took great care to explain that, in terms of the policy, "temporarily" meant "until you leave the graduation ceremony or drop out." Unfortunately I never found out if that definition of "temporarily" fit with the precise legal definition of in loco parentis.
It doesn't seem to be that well known. I doubt most parents would stand for the school butting in on their jurisdiction. My own parents nearly breathed fire at in loco parentis itself; I had never quite heard bloodthirst in my mother's voice before she repeated the phrase back to me.
Anyone who truly seeks to act in the best interest of another has a responsibility to that person to make sure, to the best of their ability given the circumstances, that what they're doing is actually in the best interest of that person. If they do not do so, I for one do not recognize "but I thought it was the best thing to do" as a valid excuse.
When I went to school some of the officials were competent, decent people who I respected then and still respect now. But others were lunatics who probably shouldn't have been in charge of their own damn selves, much less somebody else's children. Every single one of them was at heart trying to do what was best for us. The fact of the matter is that children are the people who will one day be adult society - we shouldn't blindly trust the actions of the officials appointed to "administrate" them simply because those officials' hearts are in the right place. In light of recent events, and giving George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt in every possible way... does anyone really want another generation of American voters growing up used to having well-meaning idiots in charge?
Since incidents of administrative power-grubbing like this happen throughout elementary and middle school as well, the developing mind might conclude that instead of just acting like histrionic idiots, school administrators actually are histrionic idiots.
Upon considering that somebody specifically hired all of these histrionic idiots to administrate a school, and that nobody seems to think anything is wrong with that but other youths, a new lesson is learned: most adults are histrionic idiots that cannot be trusted.
I say this because that's what I learned from high school. I didn't get caught drinking because some narc handed in Facebook photos, but that's close to how my line of thought went as a youth. Fortunately I didn't take it quite as closely to heart as some other people I went to school with.
Although, looking at some of the other responses here on
School boards are out of control these days. Most of them are more concerned with high test scores for NCLB, making their schools look expensive and modern, and pushing governmental agendas on kids (observe pro-abstinence programs for a good example) than actually educating them.
Caring about their reputation more than their results, expanding their powers in order to further dominate and control students, and getting money (which will probably go to nothing actually educational).
Sounds like school administrators to me.
You aren't acting in an official capacity as a school administrator though. You're making friends with your students.
Befriending your students is a good thing. The problem here is that some do-gooder snitch was cruising Facebook for pictures of students doing things they shouldn't and turned them into the administration, who made like good little fascists and punished said students for things that happened off campus, which should be firmly outside the jurisdiction of the school administration but unfortunately is not.
If you were to express concern to one of your students over a picture they posted of themselves drinking, I would consider you a good person who I want teaching the next generation. What we have here is somebody who for whatever reason got a bunch of kids in trouble with an "authority" who should be spending his time (and our money) dealing with problems on his own campus.
Frankly I don't think any school administrator has any business on Facebook in any official capacity. Period. Policing their students' morality is about as far from their duties as they can possibly get. If this shit is allowed to stand we're going to see kids whose Myspaces list them as Slayer fans harassed and monitored by the administration as potential school shooters, which I feel compelled to add would be a Bad Thing.
Darwin Tremor: [manipulating Dupree's mouth so Jack seems to be speaking to him] Oh hell yeah, we was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, so don't feel so bad, chief.
- Video games weren't part of the mass media.
- The (other) mass media weren't also portraying women as sexual objects as early and often as possible.
- The (other) mass media ever had any shame whatsoever.
Since video games are part of the mass media, the mass media loves to portray women as sexual objects, and the mass media never had any shame, neither your premise nor your argument make any sense.Censorship is a lazy and ineffective solution to problems up to a certain point, which is beyond the point where the censorship becomes more offensive than whatever you're censoring. While it will always be tempting for humans to try and make undesirable ideas and subjects go away, it will never actually work.
And, amusingly enough, so are you.
Kids are inexperienced, but they are not grievously stupid as so many adults assume them to be. If you can figure out that there is a difference between the blocky polygonal world inside the TV and the non-blocky, non-polygonal world that is not stuck in the TV, so can they. The youngest children who may not be able to discern this are more likely to be scared of the bad man running around with guns and a chainsaw than anything else.
The average middle-class white boys who generally cause these massively-hyped school shootings will continue to do so whether or not they play violent video games. This is not just a matter of "lulz i liek beating peoplez up in gta, don't take it away plz". This is also a matter of children's lives. What if we were spending the time and money that we waste fighting about video games on finding out why they want to kill people to begin with? We would be able to find and help these kids before they snap. They might actually end up OK, and their victims would still be alive.
Instead they snap. They end up dead or in jail. Their victims end up dead.
By holding up actual progress with their anti-game bullshit, idiots like Clinton have more of a part in these deaths than any Rockstar developer ever did.
Those people are idiots because they usually pay for tap water as well.
Part of me thinks there is money to be made in the bottled air business. I must consult the underpants gnomes to draw up a business plan.
Not that I'm a rabid gun nut stroking my metaphorical Kalashnikov at the thought of revolt, mind you. It's just that the American political system was not designed for the one-party system we basically have now, where the Democrats and Republicans argue about largely inconsequential bullshit to occupy the minds of the voting populace while silently coming to perverse agreements like the DMCA. Our government is out of control, and we have little to no guarantee that it would even recognize the results of an election if it would bring outsiders to a position of sufficient power.
Makes us a little jaded toward "well why don't you just vote them out?"
Well if you're going to blow your own house up, you might as well make sure you really teach it a lesson.
Chat speak is nothing more than a streamlining of language. While this may cause a massive debasement of the English language once the generation that we are currently raising on such vernacular becomes dominant in society, I'm not particularly worried. The absence of a word to describe a concept does not cause the concept to magically vanish from existence. After all, English might not have a word for Schadenfreude, but Americans sure do love the hell out of watching men get hit in the crotch.
If MySpace was a first person shooter I would spend a lot more time on it.
"He was one man... against a million emo kids"