man she is soooo hot too.

also, yeah Blue I can identify with that. I ended up going to a school for 6th grade with a lot of racist kids, and I think I was one of like 2 mexicans in the whole school. They didn't even know what racial slurs to use, I think they decided I was of arabic descent after a while.

anyways, long story short, I injured a lot of kids that year and was suspended twice. But I guess that's just another lesson in adversity. I don't think it's necessarily wrong to knock some punks lights out, I mean your parents won't be there when you get mugged coming home from work either.

Hmm...

fas⋅cism
  /ˈfæʃɪzəm/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [fash-iz-uhm] Show IPA
Use fascism in a Sentence
See web results for fascism
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–noun
1. (sometimes initial capital letter) a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
2. (sometimes initial capital letter) the philosophy, principles, or methods of fascism.
3. (initial capital letter) a fascist movement, esp. the one established by Mussolini in Italy 1922–43.

Yup, not seeing caning.

Totalitarianism would have fit better, but I was being hyperbolic, so...

Either way, no.

Explain how "That's just how it is, suck it up" is any different.

Which: Marc, Preturbed, Kepor, Wigmund, and I'm tired of reading old posts now--all said in not so many words.

Then we have no beef.



You can do a lot to further the movement of changing shit.









If they give a shit, and they aren't just being evil assholes about it, while still implementing things like uniforms then the only option left is that they're too stupid to actually do research and disseminate the results.



Or, more often, it's one kid that smuggles alcohol, and then the administrators because they either don't give a shit or think all teenagers are rebellious nasty little shits who do everything wrong just because they can decide that they will just outlaw the entire practice of bringing drinks.

As MoM said already, if you catch a kid with alcohol (and it's not hard, alcohol does have a distinct smell, not to mention most high schoolers can't hold their liquor), and you don't punish them harshly enough that no one else wants to risk it, you are doing it wrong. You don't punish everyone because a couple of people fucked up.



Also, go look up the supreme court case on that girl who was searched for aspirin recently.

It's unlawful.



It is when you're trying to teach them things at individual levels, and their brains are still developing, meaning that any great changes in behavior will affect them for years to come.

Further, I know the kids who I went to high school with. I would rather not be in a group with them.


School board members, man. That was about school board members.

They're just pandering to the lowest common denominator. When dealing with large groups of people that's typically the best method of sucess, especially if success constitutes bringing the entire population in question up to a certain educational standard.

Yeah, that probably would have worked better with say, security cameras instead of caning.

Still, we're a far cry from fascism.

People have said "That's how it is", but I don't think anyone has actually said "suck it up".

I would also actually like to say that I agree with you, mostly. I just find some of your choices... questionable.

You can do that, you can. And I think there are quite a few people working towards that. However, we're not going to see an overnight change. It would be nice, but realistically, we're not.

The problem is that when you're a overworked person in charge of a large body of teenagers, the most hellish creature known to man, you're likely going to jump at anything that sounds like a good idea or you think will make your job easier.

Again, not saying it's right, I'm just saying I can understand how rules like that get into place.

Except in this example, it's not just alcohol. If you outlaw soda, that's going to be a much bigger problem.

Also, another problem up at the higher levels in my opinion is blanketing, where you see the couple of bad kids, punish them, have the problem crop up again, and decide it would be much easier to just get rid of the whole problem than to deal with it.

Again again, not saying that's right.

Then I'll start air-dropping pamphlets as soon as you can get me a hang-glider.

Though I'm not up-to-date on that, wouldn't it still be legal if they made you sign something?

*insert not-saying-it's-right here*

Actually, I think one of the really big problems in schools is overcrowding, mainly because of my own experiences. I used to have a lot of problems, particularly in the first two grades of middle school with about a 1000 other kids. In the eighth grade, I moved to a school a third the size, and I got waaaaaaaay better, and got even better when I came to an even smaller high school.

Isn't that pretty much the exact same sentiment you say people express towards kids who go nutso and shoot up their school?

Fair enough. Still, I'd say you're painting quite a few decent people in an unfair light.

Except, why would you outlaw soda?

soda is the leading cause of childhood obesity in America.

...I'm just sayin'

...Interesting, because most things I find on the matter (with an admittedly cursory check) cite lack of exercise, or other such things. Where are you getting this info, if I may ask?

I'm not saying its not a factor, but I do question the validity of banning a drink completely just because of this link. Not selling it in school? Maybe, I guess. Banning it from even being brought to school? Overboard. Waaaaay overboard.

Fun story, lots of schools actually have cameras, these days. Though I don't actually see that as such a big deal, as it's a public building, and every other public building these days has them, and it doesn't actually try to enforce that the students not do things. It just makes it easier to catch them when they do things that the school board enforces.



Without bothering to go look it up, I know Funka said those exact words, and Wigmund strongly implied it.


And I'm saying that if you can't be bothered to care about your job because you are busy and deal with teenagers, then you shouldn't have a job that requires you to be busy and deal with teenagers.

In fact you should be removed from that position and replaced with someone who has the ability to continue caring and do research.



Sure, but I'd rather a few kids sneak in soda and drink, omg fattening sugars and caffeine they're getting at home, anyway (if they have a supply they can smuggle to school), than outlaw any kids drinking anything ever.

It's an overly heavy handed approach and shows the 'fuck the kids' mentality that seems to pervade the school systems in this country.



Probably not if you did as a high schooler, as you are under 18 and unable to give legal consent to anything. If your parents sign it as well, though, then yes. You are effectively signing away your ability to protest an, otherwise, unlawful search.

Which, if you remember all the outrage over that honor role girl being stripped to bra and panties by the school, is exactly why rules like that piss me off.

100% agreed.

I'd have mentioned it, myself, but I felt it was a little off topic. Further, it's going to be a lot harder to get your state to give more money to schools, or the feds to give more money to states to give to schools, than it will be to bitch slap your school board into not wasting their time on ridiculous rules.

Mostly because the school board is a lot more accessible and has a much smaller number of constituents.


Well, not the EXACT same.

Also, I was being partially facetious.

Though, the fact is kids tend to form their own groups of like minded individuals who get along on their own. Trying to make the entire school into a group of non-like minded individuals is probably kinda pointless, and not so much a good idea.



Maybe, but then maybe if those decent people stood up for their decent beliefs to the other members of the board/FORMED some decent beliefs, instead of getting apathetic we wouldn't have situations like the ones detailed above.

Re: bringing drinks to classes,

Intuitively this seemed like the case and I was hoping I could find something to back it up, this looks like a step in that direction.

Basically - and it's amazing that this point requires making - thirsty people can't concentrate on things. When you need people to concentrate on something, such as a class where they are meant to learn, not letting them have water is completely counterproductive to what you are trying to do.

If your school administration wants to keep its students from learing, then it should ban waterbottles, and continue shitting its collective britches about the Evils of Alcohol. If it wants its students to learn anything in the course of the day, it should let 'em have a drink of fucking water when they want one.

Sorry, Fifth, I'd help with the words, but I had my daily ragegasm earlier in the thread.

Deleted that part because it's just not worth it to use that many words explaining that the obvious is obvious.

It's just that of everything that's occurred to me since I left gradeschool for the vastly less insane worlds of postsecondary education / semi-gainful employments, the water thing more and more stands out as the perfect example of everything completely ridiculous and bass-ackwards about how our educational system is run.

Hey just some food for thought as a recent ex-highschooler myself regarding the whole waterbottle issue.

Sure, we were allowed waterbottles in class. I often forgot mine. Thusly, I was thirsty fairly commonly.

It's not that big of a deal. It's nowhere near as distracting as people are making it out to be, unless you're literally dehydrated, in which case get to a damn drinking fountain.

In general, I agree with your post. The negative effect isn't going to be extremely noticeable to the person experiencing it. However, there is a trend associated with it, and it seems to be statistically significant (assuming I read the article correctly). This is the kind of thing school administrators should be looking at.

Basically, the plural of anecdote is not data.

This post is awful and wrong in so many ways.

Just the fact that you think something not being a big deal for you means it's automatically not a big deal for anyone else and that it's therefore okay to tell them what to go damn do makes it not even worth trying to respond to any of the other basically awful things.

Eric Harris was like this. Klebold was more the traditional depressive type, which is sadder, because Harris was probably beyond hope, but Klebold likely wouldn't have done more harm to others or himself than most teenage depressives do if he hadn't gotten mixed up with a psycho. Which is not to disagree with your point--he's the only one I know of that's been officially labeled as "probably a genuine psychopath"--I'm just sayin'.

They might have. When I went to HS, I wore leather miniskirts and boots and wandered the halls, and nobody cared because they knew I was harmless. Some students I think got annoyed with my excessive "hall breaks," but for the most part high school and I had a pact of mutual non-aggression. (RE: the water bottle thing, we could carry them, though it was up to individual teachers whether or not they would let us drink stuff in class.)

I'm told it got worse; a lot of things changed after I left, including most of the administrative staff. A bunch of search-and-seizure bullshit starting happening in service of a War on Pot, and the administration began monitoring all the stuff that people wrote in their Xangas (yeah, for some reason everyone at my school started using Xanga, I don't get it either). I could kind of see a case if the kids were posting stuff during school hours, but otherwise that stuff is really not any of the school's business. That might just have been my school, but in general it sort of feels like the climate has changed.

Not that there wasn't bullshit in my time, like the stupid "no hats" rule that's been in effect for eons, and no, just because that's how it's always been doesn't mean that's how it always should be.

In fact, if I were to put on my old person hat and start going on about what's wrong with kids these days, I'd argue that what's wrong is exactly that "you can't do anything" attitude they're been given. And it's not like you can just kick them in the ass and tell them to stop being apathetic--I had teachers (English ones, naturally) that were like that, and it pisses me off now even more than it did then, because when you're 15 and have never had anything that wasn't given to you, your reaction to all these "change the world" speeches is, "Okay, how?" They're kids--they've got to learn to be self-motivated, but somebody has to point them in right direction.

I'm not saying it's not totally stupid and wrong of the school to be banning waterbottles from classrooms, because it is. You're putting words in my mouth that I would never say in any circumstance ever and you know it.

That's fair.

Fenris, you can't blame Fifth. You're avatar makes you look like a tremendous douche, and as much as I enjoy being an asshole, I'm telling you out of complete honesty, and not to be an asshole. I just look at that motherfucker smiling and want to punch him.

I'm just glad he decided to go with the face.

Success!

Man, you should be lucky you haven't looked at my profile picture, then.

I was under the impression that the no hats rule was to try to limit gang activity. There are a lot of gangs that share the same colors, but differentiate by how they wear their hats. That kind of thing, of course, is not readily apparent to non-members. Obviously, they can't control what happens outside of school, but it may or may not actually keep someone from getting shanked on school grounds.

No, it won't. In fact, this reeks of adults having a threadbare grasp of the problem, and the sort of "Well if they aren't wearing hats..." nonsense helps nobody in that regard.

You take your hat off because you're fucking inside a building and it's polite, damn it!

I'm skeptical of that explanation. Like Nikose's post suggests, the whole "hats are inappropriate, yo" thing seems to be more widespread and reach farther back than substantial amounts of this sort of gang activity.

Why?

"My allowing you to see my beautiful hair is a sign of respect."? I've never understood why removing one accessory/article of clothing when indoors is considered polite. I should take my pants off every time I enter a building to be more polite.

Yeah, gangs weren't exactly an issue on the mean streets of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The closest we got were the "suburban thug" types we made fun of by shaping our hands into an MW and shouting "Midwest siiiiiide!"

Really, I always thought my whole dominatrix motif was more questionable than anything in my collection of sweet hats.

Bastard.

Fortunately the long and incredibly angry part of this conversation happened over IM so i'm just gonna say 1. I probably overstated my case a bit earlier which is actually more "thirsty people have an unnecessarily harder time concentrating on things" which isn't to say that it makes it impossible or anything 2. inasmuch as what you meant to say was "it's not totally impossible for anyone to handle a class when they're thirsty" I agree and I guess what I mainly am saying is I just find it incredibly dumb for schools to have a policy that inhibits concentration to any degree just because like, it's a school, it's what you're there for.

OH! Okay this is a good metaphor: It's like if a movie theater banned people wearing glasses/contact lenses. Like yeah a lot of people could get by just fine and some more could get by okay and only a relative few would be totally flat-out boned. But man like why would you make any kind of rule to inhibit the ability of people to see stuff on a screen at the dang movies?

Well, even though the explanation might not hold, I do know the hats thing is true. Remember, I spent my early life, and my mother spent most of her life, in Milwaukee, where such things were an issue. We actually have some gangs in my area as well, although they generally aren't as dangerous. Still, you can pick the posers from the gang-bangers if you know what to look for.


Edit: That is to say, I learned a lot from her and she explained things like why stores had all the different colors in different sections and stuff. It's not like I have specifics memorized or anything, but I do know the basic mechanics.

I've got no doubt it is, and a similar reasoning for other parts of dress codes could be given as well, but I think they're all a posteriori, really.

I dunno that I have a huge problem with hats as a general stupid social custom inasmuch as it doesn't cause actual problems for people.

...Like a lot of schools are cold as hell well before the governing authority sees fit to turn the damn heating on so you need that damn hat so you don't freeze to death in class BUT in Louisiana this is probably not generally the case, so whatever if the school wants to enforce that particular dumb rule as part of a dress code that is no more than typically dumb.

I don't think either of those terms means what you think they mean.

Man, don't give the kid a hard time. He's been off the streets for awhile, but he back now. He still bangin'.

Translation: Okay, I'll let him prove himself before I take him out Old Yeller style.
 

Awright, dawg, I'll give the 'lil g a chance to be the new big G before I hafta bust a cap in his dome-piece.

Gah. Yeah, I should have said "gangstas" and "gang members," I suppose. Really wasn't thinking when I typed that and I wanted something more snappy. :sweatdrop

The hats thing isn't a big deal to me, I've just always thought that the whole "Wearing hats indoors is rude" was particularly silly, like saying that some words are inherently offensive regardless of intent or usage.

But those two words DO have a meaning associated by the kids imitating gangsters because they're cool (Posers) and the kids who actually ARE in gangs (gang-bangers) nowadays. Trust me on this.

Just because that isn't the definition we're accustomed to, doesn't mean they aren't words that have become associated with the "gang-bangers" of the modern high school. In the area I worked, little elementary students referred to themselves as 'gang-bangers'. These students had older siblings in gangs, who referred to themselves as 'gang-bangers', as well. It's a trend of the youth these days.

Gangbanger:

1. (slang) a member of a violent gang
2. (slang) a violent person
3. someone who gangbangs

Gangbang:

1. Sexual intercourse involving more than two persons, especially with a high proportion of men.
2. A street gang attacking random people on the streets and/or committing gang crimes.

Posers are well-to-do white kids who are pretending to be anything but white and well-to-do.

Gangbangers are people who participate in group rape.

Like seriously, gangbanging is the act of a gang (group) of people banging (fucking) somebody.

Re: Noncon who i'm too lazy to go back and quote, I don't get the hat thing either really, it's just one of those completely arbitrary things that every society seems to accumulate.

...I guess if I looked for a reason it would be that if you've got a baseball cap or other hat with a brim and you pull it down then a teacher or someone speaking might not be able to see your eyes to know that you're paying attention to them and it's just easier to go HATS OFF than go all YOUR HAT IS 5 DEGREES TOO LOW RAISE IT PLEASE SO I CAN SEE YOUR EYES.

Oh, good. I was afraid it was just a local thing. Like I said, the gangs around here aren't exactly big city. :sweatdrop

I'm well aware of the traditional meaning. Doesn't mean little kids have picked those words up and started applying them differently. You act like words can't change over time.

You wanna shout at me to get off your lawn next? :P

First I need to put in my dentures.

But no seriously it baffles me that the word has taken on like 3 more definitions in the time it took me to get not-so-gently corrected on my incorrect usage of the term 5 years ago.

I think the non-sexual meanings (plural) might be the original meaning, bucko. I'll check.

...I don't know who corrected you five years ago but I'm pretty sure gangbangers was what they called gang members when I was in high school like a billion old-ass cranky man years ago.

Might just be a regional thing.

Isn't language just wacky?

My crappy old Merriam Webster says gang bang comes from 1950 and is about copulation by several persons with another (passive) person and gangbanger (circa 1972) means member of a street gang.

Yeah, well. Shut up.

I'd never heard about that particular definition until I moved to Seattle to teach. This was the elementary school kids I mentioned

Then again, after moving back to my hometown, I spoke at my old high school and they used the term. Apparently the kids have changed a lot since I was there. Three years ago.

If y'all had played GTA San Andreas you'd know this shit.

e: although I, too, only knew the porn definition when I did and boy was I confused the first hour or so

That would explain a lot, actually.

Like, wow. Are you serious? I've had that game and I didn't know that because I never played it.

Just to get in very very late, the uniform groupthink thing can actually cut both ways. I went to a uniformed school and we were one of the most militant student bodies in the country and managed to get a whole boatload of ridiculous rules overturned, precisely because we were a unified group. We had some very strong-minded and radical student reps who lead student action and so the uniforms binded us against the administrators not in service to them. I will agree it mostly works the other way, but it doesn't have to.

Let me read The Divine Comedy in peace!
 

I was lucky enough that my school didn't have uniforms, but they didn't allow drinks either*, except for a few rare teachers who screwed the rules. Although personally I can't really see these things negatively affecting the learning experience to a large degree, I'm opposed to the rules-obsessed/adults-in-charge nature of schools for a few reasons. Yeah, there are some really good teachers, but there are some real douchebag ones too, and the more you create the sort of atmosphere of sit down, shut up, stare straight forward and don't think anything I'm not saying (Which is what some teachers seem to expect), the worse off the student body will be. I generally found, with a few exceptions, that some of the best teachers were the ones who didn't give a fuck what I did in class, so long as I did what I needed to and wasn't disruptive.

To contrast:

English Teacher A: Guy had a short temper, but was generally pretty nice, and he couldn't care less that I was reading one of the class' copies of The Hot Zone during class, because he knew I had already finished what the class was reading, and didn't see any point in making me stay at their pace.

English Teacher B: She was generally pretty nice, too, but whereas Teacher A had given me freedom so long as I did what I needed to, in her class I had to stay at everyone else's pace. Who care's if I had finished The Giver? Guess I'd better read it again, because that's what the class was reading and if I was reading something that wasn't that, I would get in trouble.

I learned more and had a better experience in the first class because I was given freedom, and was treated as an individual, rather than having to conform. Basically, in high school, students are starting to become adults, and need to be treated as such and given freedom. Yes, there are those who will abuse that freedom, but you punish them for abusing it, not the entire student body.

That was a lot more rambling and anecdotal than I originally intended, but I think I got my point across, more or less.

*They actually had a semi-decent reason for not allowing sodas, since they didn't want us to ruin the carpet. That said, the carpet was ugly puke orange and it would be impossible to make any worse.

So I guess whe just have to make sure our kids all are militant radicals to keep the schools in line, right? ;)

Really, I'm pretty sure that's the exception, not the rule.

If wearing uniforms encourages kids to radicalise and understand the power of the populace I'm totally for it. The world needs more militants.

Kind of like the word gay, in that respect.

Seriously, in the days of yore when our forefathers rode in things called "horseless carriages" and sent mail with a "postal service" the word gay meant to be happy or merry.

Now it means homosexual, and it's usually used as a rather ineffective derogatory remark.

Back on topic: Them rules be bullshit, Megaman. I say ye cast off with your loyal crew, assail the school board and make them walk the plank of democracy and justice.

http://superdickery.com/images/stori...uska_panel.jpg

The general student attitude is one of conformity and apathy. A disturbingly large number of students in this school don't mind. The only ones that do are ones that moved here from other states where they didn't get away with this kind of crap.

On a related note, I've just discovered that one of the other schools in the local district has a wikipedia entry. I'll be back as soon as I'm done vandalizing the hell out of it.

EDIT: Turns out there is a page for the whole district. I figured I'd run my rough draft by you guys before submitting it.

The Livingston Parish school district is a school district located in Southern Louisiana that has over 42 schools and 10,000 children who are daily subjugated to tortures indescribable by human speech. It was originally established during Germany's Third Reich when Germany temporarily occupied a small part of America's southern coast by way of a Naval assault. After establishing a strong hold on the area, the Nazi's saw that the KKK was already doing a fine job killing jew and other non Anglo-Saxons and left after congratulating them and commending them for their efforts. Since that time, the school has continued under the constant supervision and control of the KKK. More recently, the Klan has been using the school as a means of human experimentation on a controlled environment including but not limited to: encouraging a unitarian mentality among students through school uniforms, spreading racist propoganda in order to increase their dwindling recruitment rates, and studying the long term reactions of an apathetic and conformist population to the rist of a fascist or totalitarian government. Their experiemnts in the use of 'school spirit' propoganda to distract students from their blatant fascism and racism have met with such success that Livingston Perish has recieved various commendations from Paul G. Pastorek, Louisiana's superintendant of education.

Anything I should add before I confirm the changes?

You forgot the Communist baby-killing squads.

Seriously, man? Vandalizing a Wikipedia page?

That's just petty juvenile crap, right there, especially since it'll be changed back in five seconds.

Yeah, too mundane.

You start out ok with the Nazis but then they leave and it just goes down hill from there.

Yeah, couldn't you just I don't know, run down the hallway naked instead, Or in only a sign saying "THIS IS MY UNIFORM!"?

Kind of like the Sound of Music really, you got nothing without the Nazis.

Make sure to put in something about flourine in the water dulling the senses and mind control bugs in vaccines, it'll totally make your argument foolproof.

Also, children who question the school's authority disappear for days and when they return they are never the same.

MM I support your plight and everything but vandalizing Wikipedia isn't a way to get the message across - it's two seconds for a Wikipedia moderator who isn't even a member of the school to revert it back.

I mean shit remember when someone deleted all of CoM:CoL on Nuklearpedia? Same thing.

Really if you want change you gotta get involved.

So you're saying I need to vandalize an American History textbook to say this instead?

EDIT: Sorry, this is just the kind of thing I come up with after reading MLIA all day.

I think you need to sit down for a minute, man. Seriously, editing a wiki page is highly unlikely to do anything except get you in trouble if they so much as want to pin it on you with no proof. I had a friend get suspended for an entire semester and barred from coming in 50 feet of school grounds for the duration because my district pinned an Internet bomb threat on him that wasn't even his. The only reason it stuck was because he was friends with another friend of mine who'd caused them trouble and was "expelled" (I put in quotes because they totally threw out the process and basically told him he was and not to come back). If a school wants to screw with you, they can quite easily.

Not that I expect anyone to notice, but if you're making yourself a problem in general, they're going to want to make you go away any way they can get away with.

Well, mostly the problem now is that there are only really 5 ways "through the system" to change something like this.

1. Student Government
2. Mass numbers of students
3. Mass numbers of angry parents
4. Threats of legal action
5. Going directly to their superiors.

Problems with these are:
1. We have no student government to speak of
2. The student body is too content to conform and I'm not the most charismatic person anyway, so if someone is going to pull some viva la revolution mass revolt, it won't be me.
3. While some parents are pissed off about the stupid attitude the school has, many more are too complacent to care in the least about what their children do or the quality of their education.
4. Legal action does very little unless the school does something so blatantly terribly wrong as to physically harm a student or some such, considering school uniform lawsuits have been favoring uniforms since the dawn of time.
5. The only people my school answers to are the parish school board, who are just as bad/even worse.

There really isn't a whole lot I can do at this point except joke about vandalizing a web page.

Get enough people to file petty charges, like over your class and similar, and things can snowball from there. One person CAN convince others to take such action, especially if they've stepped over the line, like my district did with my friends. Actually, the one they "expelled" made it his personal duty to go around the area and start collecting evidence, but I don't know how far he got. It's even easier when people see other people doing it.

Dude, chill out it's High School. Trust me, not worth it, so many more important things to bitch about.

The interesting thing about that is, you don't really have to rally people to you as to your cause. So, if there's a lot of student dissatisfaction, you can probably use that.

These are teenagers we are talking about, the most rebellious group of society. They live to cause shit for adults.

So, trying to better a school environment for both himself and others isn't worth bitching about?

Shit, taking action now can have far reaching consequences in the future! If MM does decide to stand up and do something about this, the impact may be small right now, but if you get enough people stirred up and irritated by this, things could very well change for the better (The only thing I could possibly see as getting worse at this point is if they start getting into downright tyrannical bullshit, which would get them shut down as a school district).

I for one think public education in America is enough of a joke without treating it as such. My kids are going to private school or we're moving the hell out of America.

Well, being a reactionary, uneducated Republican, I don't really have the intellectual stamina to read pages 2-14. However, I'm willing to bet good money that a lot of people are going to take (or already have taken) issue with your use of the word "socialist. As a fairly conservative guy, I'm quite sympathetic to your identification of socialism and tyranny, since I believe the former can often lead to the latter, if taken to an extreme, but a lot of people are going to object to that characterization, and it might get you derailed from your main topic.

Instead, I'd call them Fascists or Nazis, since everyone hates those. Or if you want to avoid Godwin, just call them unfair;)

We already did this. We determined they were totalitarian.

Yes already been covered. Fascist and totalitarian were raised as closer defintions.

Edit: To curtail the off topic argument, let's just say that some people will strongly disagree with linking socialism and tyranny. What with them being polar opposites and all ;).

My problem with this is that this argument is used to justify pretty much everything. The system isn't that bad, your lack of employment rights is not a big issue, healthcare isn't that important- the economy is failing we can't fix all this other stuff.
If you lie down now it becomes habit, you come toa ccept your own lack of power and the dominance of the system. You can't compromise.

FTFY

Also, I'd just like to say I'd be interested in hearing about the supposedl blown-out-of-proportions reaction(s) to your essay, MM. All power to ya'.

EDIT: See, Barrel had the right idea. :p

EDIT2: I think the equating socialism to tyranny comes from the examples of Communism we have. Like, Stalin is a well known one.
Or in other words, yes, socialism doesn't have anything to do with tyranny by itself, it's when socialism is taken so far as to not be socialism at all that's the issue. But then, at that point, why call it socialism? I dunno.

EDIT3: Well heck let's go back on topic then. My school never had problems, and neither should yours. If your school does have problems, please, if not for yourself, than for those that come afterward, say something. You'd make a lot of people happy, I'm sure.

I think he's confusing Socialism's goals with how Communism has been applied. Most Republicans think they're more or less the same thing, though I don't remember my Government classes well enough to recall the actual differences, I'll admit.

Socialism is like Canada or many nations in Europe. Communism is like China. The difference is the addition of a hint of fascism to the system. Socialism works to improve the living quality of the people with aid; communism works to centralize all the wealth and power by making everyone beneath the leadership equally miserable.

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Every sentence here has at least one thing wrong with it. That's got to be a record.

To clarify for people:
Socialism is a transitory state between capitalism and communism. The simplest way to look at it is that in communism there is no state anymore, socialism still posses a state, still possesses classes and still possesses an economy based around incentives and rewards. It is designed as a point of transition between capitalism and communism, to exist when the economies are still shackled by capitalist ways of working and under-mechanisation and there is a lack of "super-abundance"- ie want has not been eliminated.
The way to remember the difference is the classic statements:
Socialism "From each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution"
Communism "From each according to his ability, to each according to his beed"
Communism relies upon a super-abundance of goods such that "want" is eliminated and everyone is satiated.
Socialism is the stage before this has been achieved, when scarcity is still present and there is still unequal division of goods. People are rewarded based upon their contribution to the social good in this situation.

Calling Europe or Canada "socialist" is about as laughable as calling China "communist", they are all through and through capitalist havens.

we should rename this thread "One Giant Slippery Slope"

I'd really love it if you could provide your own examples of socialist and communist states. Pretty sure the entire "cradle to casket" thing is socialist, and, well, I know your opinion on China as a communist nation, but it's pretty much one of the only ones in existence because, uh, communism doesn't work. For really obvious reasons. In any example of a communist nation, you got a small class of people who were "more equal" than others, and guess who was on top of the system? True communism is a pipe dream reliant on a utopian society, where people are fully willing to give their all for absolutely no incentive, which is just not how humanity works. In practice, you get rampant laziness and a shortage of resources that somehow doesn't manage to affect the elite that's not supposed to be there pulling all the strings. That same elite, like any elite, likes to stay in power and thus puts down the opposition of the people they're not supposed to be any better than. That's where I drew the fascism comparison, because, like it or not, that's the most similar system. Absolute state control is absolute state control. It's just a matter of degree of violence and a difference in the honesty of the government in what they're doing.

You know what's REALLY funny?

You guys comparing economic models and governance models.

Ok, let me break this down, here--Socialism, Capitalism, and Communism are NOT ways you run your country. They are economic models. They are ways you control your money, NOT your people.

Fascism, totalitarianism, and democracy are all forms of government. These are ways you run your country. They are NOT economic models. They are ways you control your people, NOT your money.

To break this down further, you can have fascist/totalitarianist capitalism. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's how Nazi Germany rolled. In fact they employed Keynesian economics and saw the largest and quickest unemployment drop of any country during the Great Depression, but that's an argument for another thread.

Meanwhile we have China, which is a fascist capitalist government that calls itself communism. They used to be fascist communist, but they've implemented so many capitalist ideas to strengthen their economy that it can't be, truthfully, called that, anymore.

While Soviet Russia was a fascist communism.

And then we have Sweden which is socialist enough that I have no issues calling it a democratic socialist country (though they still roll with capitalism too--it's just a mix leaning stronger toward socialist than capitalist).

Canada, in the meanwhile, is a capitalist democracy with lots of socialist programs, but still leaning hard enough to capitalism that we can't really call it socialist.

Etc. etc.

We haven't seen a democratic communist country, yet, but you can't base your problems with communism off of fascist communisms. At least not when all your problems are with the fascist parts.

Do we have a better understanding now?