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Post by Vince524 on Mar 14, 2018 19:13:34 GMT -5
Yeah, that's it. I was too busy keeping my grades up.
I just was in my own world.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 14, 2018 19:53:49 GMT -5
I was all political in high school. I doubt anyone is surprised.
By the way, the NRA chose to tweet a picture of an AR-15 today to celebrate the school protests concerning a bunch of kids getting gunned down by an AR-15.
Charming.
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Post by nighttimer on Mar 15, 2018 14:29:52 GMT -5
Here's some more "posturing and blaming" for Peterson. Oh look. Video. Sure there are. Here's five. Scot Peterson is a coward.
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Post by Don on Mar 17, 2018 6:02:15 GMT -5
NPR on perceptions vs. reality.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 17, 2018 12:10:58 GMT -5
About that "the pro-NRA/Trump kid is so nice and polite" thing...
in response to a non-political, none-gun-related normal-kid tweet:
I'll be honest -- I think Kyle is pretty insufferable in a way that has nothing to do with his pro-gun tweets. My guess is many of his classmates have long felt the same way. I know he's just a kid, but ugh -- that's a gratuitously nasty public reply made solely to jeer and humiliate, which, IMO, speaks badly of his character.
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Post by Amadan on Mar 17, 2018 12:45:48 GMT -5
NPR on perceptions vs. reality. This is a fair point, and one I've made myself. But... People are not calculators. You can say "Well, even though a mass shooting at a school happens every year or so, the odds of you being personally affected are 0.03%," but it's a tough sell to tell kids and their parents that therefore, we should do nothing and just hope that today isn't the day you draw the unlucky lottery ticket. It's not even about rational risk assessment, because even if you aren't personally a victim of a mass shooting, every one causes a huge amount of pain and grief and despair to a lot of people, which is amplified and affects the rest of society, so it's not just about calculating the odds that someone will come to your school and shoot you. So to the people who want to do something in the hopes of preventing mass shootings, I don't think "You know that it's very unlikely that you'll ever be shot" is a very convincing argument.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 17, 2018 13:41:52 GMT -5
The correct number of kids to be shot while in school is zero.
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Post by Amadan on Mar 17, 2018 14:01:12 GMT -5
The correct number of kids to be shot while in school is zero. Well, yeah, but that's not helpful either. We could make all firearms illegal tomorrow and the number of kids shot while in school still wouldn't be zero.
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Post by Don on Mar 18, 2018 7:39:12 GMT -5
I have to say this is the first "protest" or "walkout" I'm aware of where kids were punished for staying in their classrooms. When I was in school, events sanctioned by the schools with required participation were not called "protests" or "walkouts," they were called assemblies.
So we have kids marching in school-approved events, shouting school-approved slogans, financed by taxpayer dollars, begging the government to make them less free by stripping them of their natural right of self-defense, and everybody's talking about how brave and rebellious they are? That's pure, undiluted blackwhite duckspeak courtesy of minitrue.
This is what 1984 looks like. And that obviously means I'm guilty of crimethink.
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Post by Amadan on Mar 18, 2018 8:07:10 GMT -5
I have to say this is the first "protest" or "walkout" I'm aware of where kids were punished for staying in their classrooms. When I was in school, events sanctioned by the schools with required participation were not called "protests" or "walkouts," they were called assemblies. So we have kids marching in school-approved events, shouting school-approved slogans, financed by taxpayer dollars, begging the government to make them less free by stripping them of their natural right of self-defense, and everybody's talking about how brave and rebellious they are? That's pure, undiluted blackwhite duckspeak courtesy of minitrue. This is what 1984 looks like. And that obviously means I'm guilty of crimethink. Don, you've crossed the threshold into "Cranky old man complaining about kids these days." With a dose of Snopes-fodder on top. If you are referring to this story, read it. He wasn't punished for not protesting, he was punished for not going where he was supposed to go during the protest. He chose to stay alone in the classroom. If the school decides "This protest is happening, so we might as well make sure we have accounted for everyone's whereabouts," deciding you're going to refuse and stay in the classroom is no different than saying you refuse to go to an assembly. "Funded by taxpayer dollars" is a stretch of the most disingenuous sort, and I cannot find any instance of "school-approved slogans," unless you mean by that that in some cases, the school administration was supportive of the protesters. However, if you scan the headlines, there were many more cases of students being punished for protesting, including with paddles. You may not agree with their cause (gun control), but the older generation usually doesn't like what the kids are protesting about or for. And I cannot help but admire the fact that high school students are doing this. If you don't like their cause, then convince them they're wrong. Or, you know, you can keep complaining about how the world is going to hell because kids these days have different ideas than you think they should have.
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Post by maxinquaye on Mar 18, 2018 8:15:46 GMT -5
That sounds so much like what’s happening on this side of the Atlantic. Before the last UK elections, politicians and social researcher were regular guests on TV talking about how to “engage young people” in the political process. All sorts of stunts, the type conjured up in meetings by middle aged people who hasn’t talked to a young person since cirka 1990, were tried.
Then in 2017 the young people did go out and vote. The response? Basically, it came down to “kids are stupid because they voted for the wrong person! What’s wrong with them? If they continue like this, maybe we should increase the voting age.”
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Post by Amadan on Mar 18, 2018 8:38:22 GMT -5
If a "Blue Wave" sweeps the mid-term elections, as some are predicting, I predict a lot of people on both sides will be trying to cook numbers to show it was because of a massive increase in the youth vote (whether or not it's true), which will lead to (from the losers) lots of gnashing of teeth about how stupid kids are and how easily misled they are and maybe we ought to raise the voting age, which will be delicious irony for those on the other side who will point out that they apparently think votes are more dangerous than guns.
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Post by nighttimer on Mar 18, 2018 11:51:17 GMT -5
I have to say this is the first "protest" or "walkout" I'm aware of where kids were punished for staying in their classrooms. When I was in school, events sanctioned by the schools with required participation were not called "protests" or "walkouts," they were called assemblies. So we have kids marching in school-approved events, shouting school-approved slogans, financed by taxpayer dollars, begging the government to make them less free by stripping them of their natural right of self-defense, and everybody's talking about how brave and rebellious they are? That's pure, undiluted blackwhite duckspeak courtesy of minitrue. This is what 1984 looks like. And that obviously means I'm guilty of crimethink. No, you're guilty of a different Orwellian offense: Ownlife.
The life of the 17 students and teachers who perished in the bloody halls of a high school may matter to you, but not as much as your own life. You bitch about them "begging the government to make them less free of their natural right of self-defense" when in reality what they're engaged in the fine art of peaceful civil and non-violent protest. Which is their right despite your mendacious misrepresentation of their actions. Which you do not because you're stupid. You do it because you wrap your self in this flag of rugged individualist when in reality, your demonstrated intolerance of dissent continually rears its ugly head. When Frederick Douglass famously observed, " Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will" those were sentiments you should admire, but in actuality Douglass was pointing the finger right at guys like you who proclaim how much you love individualism, but only in the abstract. Here we have individuals coming together in common cause to right a wrong and where are you? In lockstep with the autocratic defenders of a status quo that doesn't protect our young. Vince wants to encourage a dialogue between the sides of gun rights and gun control. I don't see how that's possible when extremists in the NRA and on this board purposely belittle and distort what these courageous young people are fighting for. Fact is, you don't understand even a little bit what these kids want. They aren't begging to have their 2nd Amendment rights taken away. They are begging not to have their lives taken away. They want their ownlife too. They want to have that option to enjoy solitude and a walk in the woods just for the sweet sake of being an eccentric individualist. You just want them to stay in their lane and in their place. Which is lined up in the sights of a murdering scumbag like Nicholas Cruz. No more ownlife. That's takelife.
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Post by Don on Mar 18, 2018 16:56:26 GMT -5
If instead of new gun control laws, "Prayer in Schools" had been seized on as the solution to the problem of school violence, and promoted as righteously as these "protests" have been by taxpayer-funded institutions, a ton of people would change their position so fast their necks would snap.
Imagine if this had been a christian institution, the kids reacted in accordance with their beliefs, and it had suddenly become a national movement. Would that be ok? Not to me. YMMV.
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Post by Amadan on Mar 18, 2018 17:37:49 GMT -5
If instead of new gun control laws, "Prayer in Schools" had been seized on as the solution to the problem of school violence, and promoted as righteously as these "protests" have been by taxpayer-funded institutions, a ton of people would change their position so fast their necks would snap. Imagine if this had been a christian institution, the kids reacted in accordance with their beliefs, and it had suddenly become a national movement. Would that be ok? Not to me. YMMV. Well, no, because you and I both know that prayer in school has never been illegal, contrary to what "prayer in school" campaigners claim. So they'd be protesting for what, exactly? I am still wanting to know in what way taxpayer-funded institutions have been promoting these protests. I'm sure some schools have been more supportive than others, but you are making it sound like it's been the official policy of school administrations nationwide to encourage walkouts, and I see no evidence that that's the case. If your more general point is that I would change my position if they were advocating for something I find abhorrent - say, mandatory prayer in school - as opposed to something I merely find questionable, then you're only partially correct. I'd still respect their right to protest for whatever they want. Obviously I'd be much less sympathetic to their goals. But really, you're just applying a weak slippery slope argument. What if they were marching for anarcho-libertarianism and a dismantling of our entire corrupt crony capitalist system? Would you say those damn kids should keep their butts in the classroom then? What if they were marching for white supremacy? Well, I daresay we'd all be horrified then. But the thing is, most of those silly examples are not within the Overton Window and we know high school kids aren't going to march for those things en mass. So, is your point that even talking about regulating firearms should be outside the Overton Window, or that damn teenagers should stay out of political discussions and not have opinions and things?
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