Why Andrew Sullivan Fails the Bullying Pranks Test

I am usually a Big Fan of Andrew Sullivan.  His emotional instinct is almost always right on target.  He’s been living with HIV for two decades and, as a Gay Man, the center of his universe is clearly his sexual identity as evidenced in his daily blog posts.  Every once-in-awhile Andrew stumbles — and he fell hard last week by dismissing Mitt Romney’s youthful hazing of another student as a form of bullying — and his readers attacked and Andrew backed down, sort of, with a half-hearted and utterly bewildering defense of “Pranks” vs. “Bullying.”

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Posted in Surveilling | Tagged , , , , , | 16 Comments

Pretending to be the Police Will Not Get You Out of Trouble

On the television and in movies, the police are not always shown to be the most competent people around. They pine for donuts and can easily be confused when they confront criminals, leading to said criminals getting away. After watching the Police Academy movie series, in which the police were depicted to be nearly entirely incompetent (and yet surprisingly successful when there was a need) I reached the conclusion that the police should not be taken seriously. Fortunately, I have had a good life of positive and less than positive experiences with the real police to know exactly how serious they are.

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Posted in Government | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Focusing on Facebook Timeline Body Image

There is a fantastic scene in the groundbreaking film Mean Girls (one of the last good films with Lindsay Lohan in it, as far as I am concerned) in which the characters are all looking in the mirror and criticizing themselves. Lindsay Lohan’s character, having lived in South Africa until that year, thinks to herself that she was only aware of girls being fat or thin and didn’t realize how many things could be wrong with someone as her schoolmates criticize their hairline, pore size, and bad breath. There is a whole new monster that has reared its ugly head in the world of self hate and its name is Facebook.

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Posted in Medicine | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Who Started the Fire? Plutarch or Yeats?

Who started the fire?  Was it Plutarch so many years ago, or was it W.B. Yeats not too long ago?  The quotation in question — “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire” — is extensively used in education, and in arguments about scholarship and proper attribution the world over.  Here’s that quote, found right on the main page of Gallaudet University’s Department of Education, attributed to “William Yeats:”

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Posted in Watching | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments