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Topic: Surfing the Slippery Slopes. Follow instructions get arrested. RIP Freedom. (Read 858 times) |
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Hermit
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Surfing the Slippery Slopes. Follow instructions get arrested. RIP Freedom.
« on: 2007-04-28 00:50:26 » |
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Student arrested for essay's imaginary violence
Source: Associated Press.
Authors: Not Credited.
Dated: 2007-04-27
Datelined: CARY, Illinois (AP)
A high school senior was arrested after writing that "it would be funny" to dream about opening fire in a building and having sex with the dead victims, authorities said.
Another passage in the essay advised his teacher at Cary-Grove High School: "don't be surprised on inspiring the first CG shooting," according to a criminal complaint filed this week.
Allen Lee, 18, faces two disorderly conduct charges over the creative-writing assignment, which he was given on Monday in English class at the northern Illinois school.
Students were told to "write whatever comes to your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing," according to a copy of the assignment.
According to the complaint, Lee's essay reads in part, "Blood, sex and booze. Drugs, drugs, drugs are fun. Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, s...t...a...b...puke. So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did."
Officials described the essay as disturbing and inappropriate.
Lee said he was just following the directions.
"In creative writing, you're told to exaggerate," Lee said. "It was supposed to be just junk. ... There definitely is violent content, but they're taking it out of context and making it something it isn't."
Lee was moved to an off-campus learning program, and the district was evaluating a punishment, schools spokesman Jeff Puma said.
"It wasn't just violent or foul language," Puma said. "It went beyond that."
The teenager's father, Albert Lee, has defended his son as a straight-A student who was just following instructions and contends the school overreacted. But he has also said he understands that the situation arose in the week after a Virginia Tech student gunned down 32 people before committing suicide.
Defense attorney Dane Loizzo said Allen Lee has never been disciplined in school and signed Marine enlistment papers last week.
A conviction could bring up to 30 days in jail and a maximum $1,500 fine.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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Re:Surfing the Slippery Slopes. Follow instructions get arrested. RIP Freedom.
« Reply #1 on: 2007-04-28 04:38:52 » |
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[Blunderov] From the nation that gave the world Guantanemo Bay I suppose this should come as no surprise.
Has the 1st amendment been repealed or something?
Disorderly conduct? This must a pretty damn scatter-gun legal definition if it can take in an essay written at an educational institution.
I suppose one should take into account that the natives are restless after the Virginia shootings, but it's hard to imagine how this kind of ridiculous legalism would head off another such incident. In fact it seems well calculated to precipitate it.
Meanwhile Lee's application to join the marines has been put on hold because of these shenanigans, so at least something good has come of all this. For now that is. I forecast that the charges will be swiftly quashed in the interests of shipping the young man and his invaluable fantasies of violence off to Iraq as fast as possible.
Northwest Herald
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Walter Watts
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Re:Surfing the Slippery Slopes. Follow instructions get arrested. RIP Freedom.
« Reply #2 on: 2007-04-28 08:09:24 » |
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Quote from: Blunderov on 2007-04-28 04:38:52
[Blunderov] From the nation that gave the world Guantanemo Bay I suppose this should come as no surprise.
Has the 1st amendment been repealed or something?
Disorderly conduct? This must a pretty damn scatter-gun legal definition if it can take in an essay written at an educational institution.
I suppose one should take into account that the natives are restless after the Virginia shootings, but it's hard to imagine how this kind of ridiculous legalism would head off another such incident. In fact it seems well calculated to precipitate it.
Meanwhile Lee's application to join the marines has been put on hold because of these shenanigans, so at least something good has come of all this. For now that is. I forecast that the charges will be swiftly quashed in the interests of shipping the young man and his invaluable fantasies of violence off to Iraq as fast as possible.
Northwest Herald
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E pluribus fascium
Walter
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Many morons that is......
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Walter Watts
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No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!
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Fox
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Re:Surfing the Slippery Slopes. Follow instructions get arrested. RIP Freedom.
« Reply #3 on: 2007-04-30 19:46:49 » |
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Disorderly conduct over a piece of imaginative writing? How ridiculous.
The already hazy deinitinon of "free speech" in the modern society of free countries has reached a new low.
Could this fall under thought crime? Or perhaps even evolve to such? If so could you imagine the future, people having their brains scanned, maybe even trawled. A disturbing vision indeed.
Land of free speech my ass. Yeah there's freedom alright... freedom for the extreme right christian clowns, and even then its only dogmatic based illusion.
I mean if this legalism applies to this poor guy what about all those American authors and creative writers who write about similar things?
Do they all face the same asinine charges?
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us. — Justice William O. Douglas
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Blunderov
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Re:Surfing the Slippery Slopes. Follow instructions get arrested. RIP Freedom.
« Reply #4 on: 2007-05-01 05:24:58 » |
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Quote from: Nin` on 2007-04-30 19:46:49
...Could this fall under thought crime? Or perhaps even evolve to such? If so could you imagine the future, people having their brains scanned, maybe even trawled. A disturbing vision indeed... |
[Blunderov] The Catholic precept that "the wish is not the deed" appears to have become, like the Geneva Coventions, a quaint relic of a bygone time. I'm deeply opposed to the idea that some arbitrary interpretation of a brain scan could or should lead to real world consequences in the way people are treated without their explicit consent.
I shudder to think of a world in which everybody knows (or thinks they do) what everybody else is *really* thinking! Nobody would get out alive that's for sure.
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/004209.html
Brain Scans To Pose Ethical Questions On Preemption Of Crimes?
Brain scans show that psychopaths are not like the rest of us in how their brains work.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere have started taking scans of the brains of psychopaths while the patients view horrific images, such as photographs of bloody stabbings, shootings, or evisceration. When normal people view these images, fMRI scans light up to indicate heavy brain activity in sections of the emotion-generating limbic system, primarily the amygdala, which is believed to generate feelings of empathy. But in psychopathic patients, these sections of the amygdala remain dark, showing greatly reduced activity or none at all. This phenomenon, known as limbic underactivation, may indicate that some of these people lack the ability to generate the basic emotions that keep primitive killer instincts in check.
Should we use information from brain scans and other measurement methods to identify people to preemptively target before they commit crimes? Some day scientific measures will probably allow us to calculate different odds for each person on whether the person will kill or rape or molest children or otherwise violate the rights of others. How should we use the future ability to perform those odds calculations? I think the answer depends on a number of factors:
1) The cost of the preemptive action for us and those who feel its effects.
2) The efficacy of the preemptive action. How much would a given preemptive action reduce the odds of a person from committing rape, assault, theft, etc.
3) The avoided costs of whatever might be prevented. The costs depend on the potential crime(s) that a given person has a propensity to commit. But then what price tag to put on, say, a rape avoided?
4) The accuracy of the odds prediction. How high would the odds and the accuracy of the odds have to be to make you think the odds warrant action by the state against a currently innocent person?
5) The costs of identification of threats. Brain scans, blood tests, gene tests, and other tests will cost money to perform.
What sorts of preemptive actions to use? I can think of a lot of actions aside from preemptive imprisonment: For example:
A) Talk therapy. But would it help?
B) Drugs or other treatments that reduce violent behavior. Note that the power of these treatments will go up as biotechnology and medicine advance.
C) Exile. This can be from a country or a region or specific neighborhoods. For example, imagine an island to ship potential pedophiles to where there are no children.
D) Tracking bracelets. For example, track when a potential pedophile goes near a playground or school. Or track when a potential murderer is parked along a street at night watching.
E) Warn the neighbors. That way they can arm and otherwise protect themselves appropriately.
F) Outlaw the creation of offspring that carry genes that'll make them high risks to become murderers, rapists, etc. This intervention requires the existence of technology for offspring genetic engineering. That technology will come in 10 or at most 20 years.
Are you philosophically opposed to all preemption guided by the results of brain scans, genetic tests, and other methods of measurement? Or do you see it as valuable and worthwhile under some circumstances?
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Blunderov
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Re:Surfing the Slippery Slopes. Follow instructions get arrested. RIP Freedom.
« Reply #5 on: 2007-05-01 08:26:41 » |
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Quote from: Walter Watts on 2007-04-28 08:09:24
E pluribus fascium
PS
Many morons that is......
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[Blunderov] This compulsive conventionality is positively Teutonic and speaks to a deep insecurity. It makes me laugh when I see sad little slogans like "Jesus Christ is Freedom. Marxism is the devil". The brute fact of the matter is that the West could not be more at odds with the morality of its professed religious mascot if it decided to enthusiastically represent the interests of Satan instead. And this absolutely blatant and completely obvious contradiction can never, ever be admitted to exist. On pain of violence. As witness:
atheistrevolution
Censorship, Personal Safety, and Unorthodox Atheism
01 May 2007, 12:13:26 | vjack
Convinced that atheists have nothing to fear from believers and that to suggest otherwise is just being paranoid? I want to draw your attention to a disturbing account over at Unorthodox Atheism.
After Reed lent his copy of Dawkins' The God Delusion to an atheist friend, the friend's father found the book, took it so that his son could not read it, and contacted Reed in what sounds like a threatening manner. Picturing Reed obsessively checking his locks and actually sleeping with a baseball bat makes me sad. It makes me sad for we atheists who must always consider scenarios like this before speaking our minds, and it makes me sad for open-minded Christians who strive to practice tolerance.
I think that Reed handled this difficult situation extremely well. It is a good thing he had the foresight to alert personnel at his school since his friend's father actually showed up to demand that he be punished for distributing atheist literature. Evidently, the father refuses to acknowledge that his son is already an atheist.
Believe it or not, it sounds like Reed may end up facing some sort of punishment at the hands of the school. Could he actually be punished by the school for loaning a friend a book outside of school? I certainly hope not, but we'll see.
The censorship issue is certainly relevant in that the friend's father wants to make sure that his already atheistic son is prevented from accessing atheist literature. But what strikes me as even more important in this case is the safety issue. Here we have a rabid Christian willing to call a high school student at 11:00pm to tell him that he is on his way over and who then shows up at school the next day. Is it any wonder that many atheists have trouble speaking out?
unorthodoxatheism
Idiocy Revealed!
30 April 2007, 23:52:01 | Reed Braden
In my dealings with my principal today, she gave no absolute affirmative or negative on punishing me for loaning another student my Dawkins book. She merely said she was "reviewing an ongoing investigation." She couldn't answer me why this was any business of the school at all. She did however give me a thousand half-assed reasons to punish me; the most interesting being violation of the establishment clause.
She told me that in loaning a religious book to another student, I was promulgating my religious beliefs and forcing the school into an establishment clause violation.
WHAT?!
This kid is an Atheist and I am an Atheist and this book is about Atheism. There doesn't seem to be much "promulgation" there. The God Delusion is also not a religious book. I explained to her that Atheism is not a religion, and so the topic of the book is more akin to philosophy and science. One other thing I don't understand is how what goes on between students violates a clause that states the government cannot sponsor a religion. If the school was handing out The God Delusion, it could be seen as an establishment clause violation, but not if it was solely between students.
She also said that since the book was not in line with the school's curriculum, it was inappropriate for school. I then asked her what she meant by this: if I were to be reading it by myself on campus, would I be breaking a rule? According to her, yes. My English class is not allowed to read Grapes of Wrath because it was deemed unsuitable for non-AP classes by the school board. I happen to be a Steinbeck fan. I asked her if it would be inappropriate to read Grapes of Wrath in school. Her answer was, in my case, yes.
In this sense, it is also against school rules to loan students extracurricular books of any kind. When I loaned Dante's Inferno to my friends Janel and Melissa, I was not spreading around a piece of literary excellency, I was breaking a rule. When I loaned Obama's Audacity of Hope to my friend Betsy, I was not doing a favour, I was breaking a rule. When I loaned Stephen King's Firestarter to my friend Lauren, I was not providing her with an entertaining short novel, I was breaking a rule. When I loaned Stephen King's Everything's Eventual to my English teacher, Mrs. Nichols, I was not helping her find a correlating short story to Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," I was breaking a rule.
I asked her where these rules were written and she couldn't answer me. She instead set up an appointment for me to meet with one of the superintendent's office clowns. Everything about this roars wildly with censorship.
I'm just trying to graduate.
----- Unorthodox Atheism is a daily blog written by Reed Braden, an Atheist, from Roanoke, Virginia. You may contact him at kingreedbraden@gmail.com or 540.556.8857.
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