I received this in an email. While it is pretty funny, at the same time it evokes premonitions of impending doom. Agree or disagree?

(I hope this is in the correct forum. If not, my apologies.)

Scenario: Jack pulls into school parking lot with rifle in gun rack.

1973 - Vice Principal comes over, takes a look at Jack's rifle, goes
to his car and gets his to show Jack.

2006 - School goes into lockdown, FBI called, Jack hauled off to
jail and
never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors called in for traumatized
students and teachers.
-----------------------------------------------

Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fist fight after school.

1973 - Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end
up best friends. Nobody goes to jail, nobody arrested, nobody expelled.

2006 - Police called, SWAT team arrives and arrests Johnny and Mark.
Charges
them with assault, both get expelled even though Johnny started it.
------------------------------------------------------

Scenario: Jeffrey won't be still in class, disrupts other students.

1973 - Jeffrey sent to office and given a good paddling by the
Principal. Sits
still in class.

2006 - Jeffrey given huge doses of Ritalin. Becomes a zombie. School
gets
extra money from state because Jeffrey has a disability.
---------------------------------------------------------

Scenario: Billy breaks a window in his father's car and his Dad gives
him a
whipping.

1973 - Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to
college, and
becomes a successful businessman.

2006 - Billy's Dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy removed to
foster care
and joins a gang. Billy's sister is told by state psychologist that she
remembers being abused herself and their Dad goes to prison. Billy's mom
has
affair with psychologist.

----------------------------------------------

Scenario: Mark gets a headache and takes some headache medicine to
school.

1973 - Mark shares headache medicine with the Principal out
on the smoking
deck.

2006 - Police called, Mark expelled from school for drug violations.
Car
searched for drugs and weapons.
----------------------------------------------------------

Scenario: Mary turns up pregnant.

1973 - 5 High School Boys leave town. Mary does her senior year at a
special
school for expectant mothers.

2006 - Middle School Counselor calls Planned Parenthood, who
notifies the
ACLU. Mary is driven to the next state over and gets an abortion without
her
parent's consent or knowledge. Mary given condoms and told to be more
careful next time.
----------------------------------------------------------

Scenario: Pedro fails high school English.

1973 - Pedro goes to summer school, passes English, goes to trade school.

2006 - Pedro's cause is taken up by state democrat party. Newspaper
articles
appear nationally explaining that teaching English as a requirement for
graduation is racist. ACLU files class action lawsuit against state
school system and Pedro's English teacher. English banned from core
curriculum. Pedro given diploma anyway but ends up mowing lawns for a
living because he can't speak English.
----------------------------------------------------------

Scenario: Johnny takes apart leftover firecrackers from the 4th of July,
puts
them in a model airplane paint bottle, and blows up a red ant bed.

1973 - Ants die.

2006 - BATF, Homeland Security, FBI called. Johnny charged with
domestic
terrorism, FBI investigates parents, siblings removed from home,
computers
confiscated; Johnny's Dad goes on a terrorist watch list and is never
allowed to
fly again.

----------------------------------------------------------

Scenario: Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his
knee. He is
found crying by his teacher, Mary. Mary hugs him to comfort him.

1973 - In a short time Johnny feels better and goes on playing.

2006 - Playing tag is banned from school playgrounds. Mary is
accused of being
a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces 3 years in prison.

Some of those are fairly accurate. Not even 1973, though. Even 10 years ago these weren't issues.

When I was little and lived in the 'burbs, I got a huge trampoline for Christmas. All the neighborhood kids would come over to jump. Sometimes they fell off and got hurt. My mother would call the kid's mom, bandage up the cut or scrape, and send the child off on his/her merry way.

My little cousin is 8. She went to a friend's house recently for the same thing. One of her little pals fell off and got hurt. Her parents sued. Now no one can come over to jump on the trampoline without written consent from their parents waiving any responsibility on the part of the property owner for injuries caused by the trampoline.

The one about the firecrackers and ants is the only one that's exaggerated.

Newsflash: Someone not caring about a problem doesn't mean there's no problem.

There was more violent crime in 1973 than in 2003. But there were more arrests for violent crime in 2003. There were more reports of violent crime to police in 1973. But there were more police investigations in 2003.

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/cv2.htm

I got in several fights in school and I was never expelled. As to arresting school age children for fights, I'd want to see some actual cases, because it sounds like you're attacking a strawman. I wouldn't deny that there's more of a crackdown on fights- and what kind of message does that send to our kids? That violence is an unacceptable way to solve problems? That it's not okay to pick on those weaker than you? How outrageous! Did you get this tripe from Reader's Digest?

I suppose if I ignored every study on the subject which shows time and again a correlation between a use of physical discipline and a moral irresponsibility and tendency towards violence in adults, I might lament it's unpopularity, too. Unfortunately, you are wrong in this as some states, prominently Texas, still believe in hitting kids to make them shut up and sit still (you couldn't think of a better bullshit offense than "Not sitting still"? It's like you want to lose this. Kids aren't dogs. They're not trained to sit and bark on command).

Overmedication of kids is certainly a problem, but the solution to that problem, as well as the problem of idiotic parents hitting their kids, is teaching people proper disciplinary techniques. No rational, decent parent ever has to strike their kid. Needing to beat them to instill discipline is a sign of incompetence.

Thank you for that Reefer Madness moment. Every statistic on Earth shows that kids that are punished with corporal punishment are far more likely to join gangs, commit violent crime, and deal in hard drugs than those who aren't. See my previous reply.

Wait, a second ago we were talking about how over-medicated kids were. Where did you pull this bullshit from?

As someone who's anti-abortion, it galls me when you're this stupid. This scenario is clearly more beneficial to Mary than the previous one.

This is bullshit, of course, but it's also not widely supported. Given the choice between a few people advocating abandoning English, and living in 1973, it's a pretty clear cut decision for me, but that's because I'm not a flaming retard.

Enough of the strawmen. Where has the FBI come in to arrest small children for attacking ants? Find me a single incident. Either do it, or shut the fuck up with your Anne Coulter-brainwashed, I-only-listen-to-Fox-News, Society-Is-Collapsing-Cuz-of-the-Gheys! propagandist nosense.


Oh please. They had to fight tooth and nail to get a female teacher who was repeatedly having sex with her students out of the school system. I don't think a hug's going to get you in trouble.

It is true that playgrounds suck more these days because of lameass parents who are afraid of their kids getting a scrape. But being a raving moron who thinks that everything about the past was awesome and doesn't have any kind of logical basis for what you're saying isn't a way to fix the problem in society- which, I note, are far smaller than the problems in society in 1973.

God, DM. Have you always been this pedantically annoying?

Double post.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt the self-righteous and unfounded chortling and intellectual masteurbating over complaints that were untrue and ill-founded. I'll let you get back to that now.


And yes, I have.

You pick apart everything said by everyone in this board and others. Then you call them all idiots. You even resurrect threads to call people idiots. What's the point in all that?

You've been here long enough to know you're never going to make anyone "see the light". You can argue til you're blue in the face, but Billy will still be Billy. Dyshade will still be Dyshade.

Because I was picked on all the time in school by these kinds of idiots, and it gives me immense satisfaction to reveal to them their own stupidity and leave them spluttering without a defense? I realize I won't actually change their minds, but that doesn't mean I'm not doing any damage to their unjustified sense of self-satisfaction.

You oughta know Billy never lacks for a defense, valid or not. So I still wonder what the point is.

"Without a defense that makes the slightest bit of sense to anyone but him", then. And call me a hopeless optimist, but I don't think Billy's head is quite that incredibly thick; I think even he has to suspect a little bit that he's full of shit in some of these arguments.

To Dark Messiah: I didn't write any of it, as I said, so I don't take your response personally. I do agree that some of points made in the email were rather exaggerated, while others hit the mark well. I'm not even positive if the intentions of whomever did write it were for it to be taken literally, or as concrete information. Altho that wouldn't surprise me at all if it was. I'm not sure any of it is so "cut & dried," clearly there are fallacies, as you took the time to point out.

What I gathered from the email is that the overarching intent was to illuminate, even satirize, the state of society as we know it. One of the points I took away from it is that there is an ever-growing trend towards "hand-holding" or babying people to the extent that we nurture irresponsibility. It would appear that we've been stirred into such a frenzy of fear of our own shadows that no one has the competance to deal with anything without police (or other authoritarian) intervention. The writer could have taken a more objective standpoint in his/her efforts, but again, I question how seriously it was meant to be taken.

It's like what happened in Boston recently, when they found the Aqua Teen LiteBrites & of course automatically it's a bomb. Or, in extreme cases, like the woman who called 911 because her burger was wrong.

Since you asked nicely:
http://www.washingtoninformer.com/OP...2005May23.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcelroy/mcelroy60.html
& these 2 are for fun:
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/cri...onable_se.html
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/fea..._has_her_.html

Absolutely. Agreed on all points.

As someone who is pro-choice, I can agree with this point as well.

It's rather funny you should say this, because apparently the site this was found on was some conservative forum. I have no idea as to the original context, however.
So from your points & mine, perhaps we can ascertain that parents need to take more responsibility for raising their children. The current system as I see it certainly tolerates a lot of excuse-making & promotes fear.

Yeah, I can go with that. There's certainly an attitude of hand-holding in society that's just excessive and wrong, but conservatives have this bad philosophy where anytime something stupid happens in society, they feel a need to be even more stupid in criticizing it. They can't just say, "It is excessively stupid to call 9-1-1 because your cheeseburger was made wrong" or, "A mooninite is not a bomb, and the only person who cost the city millions of dollars and hours of time wasted dealing with a bomb thread was your stupid fuckery", or, "Handcuffing a child for a stick figure drawing is retardedly criminal", but they have to attach it to their own propagandist bullshit saying that instead of fixing the problems, we should take a step back to where everyone just beat their kids into docility.

Marry me . . .

In what universe?

F.U.N.

Find some.

The others were kind of sad and disturbing, even if they were a little exaggerated for entertainment value. The above is the only one where I think that the 2006 solution is much, much better than the older one. Though I think they should have told her to be more choosy as well as more careful.

A timely and witty response. The pieces are set! The board is in motion! We come to it at last, the great flamewar of our times!