Teens Sue School for Punishing Them over Lewd Photos
Two teenage girls, along with the ACLU, have filed a lawsuit against their school district after the school punished them for publishing racy photos on their myspace pages. Let’s get ready to rage.
The background: a group of girlfriends had a sleepover earlier this summer that involved phallic lollipops and a digital camera. “Suggestive” photos of two of the girls eating the candy found their way to myspace (surprise), though the girls set their privacy controls so that only “friends” could see them. A few months later, some jackass kid (probably an ex-boyfriend or a vindictive drama queen) printed the pictures out and brought them to school, where they were shown to school officials. School officials then suspended the girls from their fall semester extracurricular activities, made them apologize to an all-male coaches’ panel, and made them seek counseling.
There’s so much wrong with this situation that I don’t even know where to begin. First, you’ve got school administrators disciplining kids for activities that didn’t take place on school grounds, during the school year, and had nothing to do with school, period. When kids bring phallic-shaped candy to school, confiscate it. When they violate dress code, send them home. When they misbehave, discipline them. But when they exercise their free speech rights as private citizens (and at fifteen, who among us wasn’t experimenting with the power of sex appeal?), the school has no business acting as a censor.
Second, it seems to me like the wrong people were punished. What about the kid(s) who printed the pictures out and brought them to school? Aren’t they the real evildoers here? They took what was intended to be private knowledge and publicized it. While that may not be illegal, there’s definitely a lesson here that these creeps aren’t learning. You don’t tell other people’s secrets, and you never spread unflattering or character-destroying photographs of anybody around school or the web. Those are two things that civilized, decent people just don’t do. Isn’t that a more important life lesson for becoming a decent person than the glib message “don’t take pictures of yourself licking a dick-shaped lollipop?”
Third, the punishment here does not even come close to fitting the “crime.” 1) The crime here is young ladies acting lewdly. Not minors engaging in sex acts. Not peddling child pornography. They were acting un-ladylike. If school admins looked around their lunchroom any day of the week, they’d see the same thing happening among giggling groups of girlfriends. It’s called “adolescence,” and while teens might be annoying to everyone else, they’re not doing anything out of the ordinary (I recall an old video of a friend of mine performing two seconds of over-exaggerated fake fellatio on a banana back in the 8th grade – good thing myspace wasn’t around then). 2) The punishment resulted in the situation going from merely embarrassing to downright humiliating. Someone tell me WHY these girls had to seek counseling. Even more important, tell me WHY they had to issue apologies to an all-male panel of coaches. Shaming someone over his or her sexual expression is a sure-fire way to really screw with their head and unleash their insecurities; the effect is worse if done publicly. Why on earth is the school getting away with publicly shaming two teens?
Fourth, the sanctimony displayed on the part of the school’s administrators is out-fucking-rageous. High school teachers: as much as you’d like to think otherwise, you are not charged with the sacred task of instilling a moral compass into other people’s children. You are civil servants – basically government employees. Your job is to educate, supervise, and when necessary protect these teens from external danger or from other students. Your job does not include the right to impose disciplinary sanctions on the basis of your subjective ideas about drugs, sex, rock and roll, politics, etc. That’s a job for parents. If anybody had any responsibility whatsoever, it would have been for a concerned teacher to quietly notify the girls’ parents of the photos, and let them deal with it. Instead, they made the whole incident into a much bigger deal than it needed to be.
The girls in question here have every right to be upset. School officials overreacted and overstepped their bounds. At the same time, these girls learned an unfortunate but important lesson about posting unsavory photos on the web. As I’ve said before, kids are stupid, and when you post pictures of yourself acting uncharacteristically lewd on the ‘net, you’d better be ready to be judged. But being teased by peers is punishment enough; being shamed and humiliated by school authorities is totally uncalled for.
Yep, Econ Students are Still Awesome
It’s nice to know that the economics department at Minnesota State University is still producing opinionated and informed students. My friend Mark Leirmo wrote this letter for the MSU Reporter, carrying on a tradition of econ students pointing out the administration’s wasteful spending and half-baked policies. An excerpt:
Who you love or what you worship doesn’t affect me, so I have no problem with it. What does affect me is when the university finds it necessary to spend money that I intended to use to better myself through what I wanted to study on trying to make me more “culturally enriched.” People who want to celebrate who they are should be more than free to. But I feel if people want to do this they should start a club on campus and manage their own funds, rather than the university funneling scarce resources from our paper printing budget into them.
British Apologize to Gay WW2 Codebreaker Alan Turing
This week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered a belated apology to one of the most famed computer scientists in history. Alan Turing, the hallowed Father of Modern Computer Science, was instrumental in breaking the German’s “Enigma Code” during WW2. He was also gay.
The history of Alan Turing is a sad one. A few years after he broke the German’s code for the British government – which Winston Churchill claimed was the most significant, tide-turning victory of WW2 – he was outed as a homosexual and arrested. At the time, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder. It was also illegal. He lost his security clearance, effectively canning him from his government job, and was convicted of “gross indecency.” To avoid prison, Turing chose to instead undergo a chemical castration process. Two years later, he committed suicide.
Today, the Association for Computing Machinery grants the “Turing Award” each year. It’s something like the Nobel Prize for computing – i.e. a pretty big friggin’ deal. The British government’s apology, while appreciated, is long overdue.
Did Glenn Beck Rape and Murder a Young Girl in 1990?
Just so we’re clear: Glenn Beck probably didn’t rape and murder a young girl in 1990.
Please tell all your friends that Glenn Beck most likely did not rape and murder a young girl in 1990.
Still… if he’s innocent, then why hasn’t Glenn Beck denied that he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990?
I love internet memes, especially ones aimed at dramatic political douchebags.
A Rhetorical Question
So, here’s my question: You’re a policy analyst in a DC nonprofit, and you submit comments to the FCC stating your case for spending $7.2 billion on rolling out broadband internet to rural communities. Even if you really, really want the government to tax and spend $7.2-freaking-billion, do you really, truly believe rural broadband access is the ABSOLUTE BEST, most urgent cause to spend that kind of money on? Not, for example, disaster relief, AIDS or malaria prevention, feeding starving third-world children, public health initiatives, alternative energy research, infrastructure improvements, education, hiring more police officers, or any other public benefit or humanitarian cause? Why spend $7,200,000,000.00 on bringing FIOS out to the middle of nowhere?
Why Didn’t Sprint Give the Pre Away Free?
Michael at Techdirt poses the question (and answers it):
Basically, let Sprint subsidize more of the phone — which it would easily make back in service fees (since the phone requires a two year contract with its most expensive data plan). Pricing the phone at $199 makes it a direct comparison to the iPhone, and that’s the last thing that Palm or Sprint should want. But dropping the price to $1 (or, hell, give the damn phone away for free with a two year plan), would get it a lot of attention, and give people a real reason to switch away from other carriers or other phones, and give the Pre a shot. Trying to compete with the iPhone by just saying “but we’re better” doesn’t work.
My answer: because Sprint and Palm don”t want you to assume that their new handset, which presumably took a long time and a large budget to develop, is a cheap piece of crap. There are lots of cheap copy-cat handsets out there on the market, and even among the decent ones, if it’s not a BlackBerry or an iPhone, no one outside of gadget-geek circles is really paying attention to it. Pricing the Pre at $1 would signal to consumers that it’s nothing more a stripped down, crappy, kiddie version of a real smartphone.
Furthermore, I’d guess that Palm may be trying to poach the early adopters from Apple. While the iPod and the MacBook are still relatively expensive compared to other mp3 players and notebooks, Apple and it’s iCrap isn’t quite the same spendy, for-cool-kids-only brand that it was a few years ago. That you can order an Apple laptop from Best Buy’s website (really) is evidence enough that the brand has become mainstream. When priced at $500 two years ago, only the richest of the hipsters could afford an iPhone; today any Joe Schmoe with $99 can get one. All of this indicates that Apple had one damn effective business model: attract the hipsters first, then pair quirky Gen-Y advertising with steady price declines (or declines in the price-performance ratio), and watch the money pour in as more and more consumers switch to your product. Today, Apple is becoming a household name. The word “iPod” itself is joining the ranks of brand names that have lost their trademark to ubiquity, like “kleenex” and “google,” and I wouldn’t be surprised if someday “iPhone” becomes synonymous with “smartphone.” My guess is that Palm is trying to replicate, or at least profit off of, Apple’s get-the-hipsters-and-the-rest-will-follow strategy. Only Palm isn’t just saying “But we’re better,” they’re also saying “the iPhone is stale.”
Of course, copying a strategy that relied on bringing a revolutionary new product to market requires that, um, you actually have a revolutionary new product to bring to the market. The iPhone had a stylus-free touchscreen and an intuitive user interface. While I’ve heard good things about the Pre, it still has a friggin’ keypad(!) for crying out loud…
Starbucks Ban Laptops?
That’s the question posed by CNET, as apparently several NYC coffee shop owners are restricting the time they allow their patrons to squat on their wifi networks, sans-beverage:
Some coffee shop owners in New York even cover up electric outlets, so that the enterprising, the impoverished students, the merely very lonely or the merely very brazen cannot boot up, sip java, and take up valuable table space all day. Which leads one to wonder just how painful it would be if Starbucks took their lead and banned laptops throughout its vast network.
So, should Starbucks follow suit and place limits on the amount of time customers can hook up to their wifi? My answer is an emphatic “heck no!” Give me your geeky, your parched. If I owned a coffee shop in a neighborhood where my competitors were kicking people out, I’d add more outlets, more seating, and more drink options at various price points to encourage all-day websurfers to approach the counter again. $6.50 for a coffee, with free refills all day? The customers spend their money upfront and stick around for as long as they like. $1 sodas or iced teas? That’s a ridiculously good deal when making a decision at the margin. Food-and-drink specials? Whatever gets a customer to spend their money and have a good experience at my coffeeshop. There’s no need for some snooty barista to shoo them away once their drink is gone.
There’s an obvious market demand for “free” wi-fi (by “free” I of course mean at the point of use – obviously the costs are hidden in the price of drinks and food). Any enterprising business owner would seek to meet that demand, especially when his or her competitors turn a blind eye to it.
Twitter went down?! Oh noes!!1!
Denial-of-Service attacks brought down the little media-darling Twitter yesterday morning, prompting over-reporting of this story by nearly every major news outlet. In the hours following the Twitter fiasco, severe torrential storms in South America killed millions, scores of jets crashed down from the sky across the northern hemisphere, and for a few hours, reports indicated that black became white.
Falling off the Blogging Wagon
This summer has not been kind to my blogs. Two reasons:
1) I haven’t had a reliable home internet connection for the last two months.
2) This is (hopefully) going to be my last summer in college town, and I’ve been determined to have as much fun as I can before the realities of adulthood set in.
So, between work, fun in the sun, dice games, and frequent miscellaneous adventures, I’ve not had a lot of time for blogging. However, I’ve just (temporarily) moved back home, where I’ll be staying for another four weeks or so before moving onto the next phase of my life. I’ve got ‘net access, I’ve got nothing to do on my weeknights, so I’ll be back in the habit of inundating your feed readers with econo-/technophilia again in no time.
