Gwen's Spot

Some (SPOILERY!!!) Thoughts On Severus Snape: In Which Gwen Pontificates

2007-11-28T15:51:00.000-07:00

(Yes, I know it's been over a year. Sue me.)

Prompt: I guess Snape's good...but he's still a jerk. I never liked him. I don't get why so many people adore him. I hate Harry, but this man could possibly be worse.

On re-reading, it looks like you're saying Severus Snape might be worse than Harry Potter, not literally "could be worse" than he was. Still, I'm going to riff off of my old reading of what you said.

Yes, he could possibly be worse. He could be the type of man who deliberately knocks an old rival on the head who's suffering from concussion, putting his life in danger--instead of the kind of man who conjures a stretcher for the man who's repeatedly tried to kill him and levitating him on that even though no one's around to see him being kind. He could have been worse--he could have left him for the Dementors, and no one in power would have complained. He probably would have been celebrated, if he'd wanted to be, facing off against a convicted murderer (remember, above and beyond what he already knew about Sirius Black, at this point he had every reason to believe that Sirius Black was guilty of the murder of Peter Pettigrew and seventeen innocent Muggles, plus the betrayal to the Dark Lord of Lily Evans and her husband and--nearly--their infant son) to rescue three children from his clutches and--oops! The Dementors finished him off.

He could be the kind of man who puts students in danger by telling no one when an escaped murderer is on a school campus, instead of the kind of man who risks his credibility, his freedom, and his life to protect children--taking an Unbreakable Vow for one, risking his life again and again for others.

He could be the kind of man who doesn't care what happens to others as a result of his actions, who makes excuses for his behavior like "well, he was trying to take points off of us, he deserved to be stuffed in a Vanishing Cabinet without us even telling anyone what had happened!" or "she ratted us out when we broke school rules, she deserved what she got--even afterwards, when she lost all memory of what had happened!" Instead, he's the kind of man who spends his whole life, risking life and limb and sanity, to make up for a mistake he made when he wasn't even an adult yet.

He could be the kind of man who takes stupid risks because he's bored, who puts other people in danger by his own urge to show off, who doesn't think things through and then wonders afterwards what went wrong, instead of the kind of man who came up with a curse "for enemies" (that to all indications was never actually used)--and then came up with a countercurse, a musical one, because he knew better even as a kid than to create a way to cause pain without a way to heal it.

He could be the kind of man who stands by when evil or cruel things are done, who looks the other way because if he's not doing it, why should he risk himself to stop it? Instead he's the kind of man who reveals himself to be a Death Eater, putting himself at risk of Azkaban or worse, because he felt he had to do something that had even a chance of convincing the Ministry that Lord Voldemort was back.

He could have been the kind of man who could only ever attack someone four-on-one, and who would bully someone because the victim existed, or because he thought the victim was trying for a girl who was "too good for him". But he wasn't.

He could have been the kind of man who would abandon a school to chaos when someone evil or cruel came into power. He could have been the kind of man who retreated into his office, who turned a blind eye to the abuses the students were suffering, instead of doing everything within his power to protect the students.

He could have been a stranger to love. Certainly no one ever showed him any. He could have been the kind of man who finds out someone's weakest point, his love, and manipulates him into doing whatever he wanted. "And what will you do for me in return, Severus?" But he didn't; he loved completely, selflessly, and went on loving a woman who married his rival, a spoiled, reckless bully who thought he was God's gift to women.

He could have been the kind of man who gave up, who agreed with the people who told him his life was worthless. A note and a poison, or a dagger, if he'd wanted to be flashy about it; a potions accident, a mistake in his other work, if he'd wanted it to be quiet. He certainly had the means, motive, and opportunity. Or he could have lived the life of the dead, staying in his rooms, drinking himself into a stupor. Or he could have done less than what was required of him--no night patrols, no paying any more attention to Slytherin than the previous head of house had, no going to dances he knew he'd not enjoy. But instead he got a job and did it, even when dealing day after day with students who hated and mistrusted him, an employer who manipulated him and ignored his concerns (even when they were valid, as they often were), co-workers who hated him, mistrusted him, who had once come this close to killing him and still insisted on putting his and everyone else's life at risk, who were utterly incompetent at doing the job he'd applied for.

He could have been the type of teacher who ignored the students in his care, like Professor Flitwick, or who simply gave up, like Professor Slughorn. Certainly he had more to deal with from his students than any other teacher. Dangerous pranks and tricks like throwing fireworks into a cauldron full of a dangerous-on-contact potion, pilfering from his private stores, cheating of all kinds, melting cauldrons, rude insults. Instead, he tried again and again to get through to difficult students, no matter what they did, how lazy they were, or how incompetent they were. Or how many times they accused him of being in league with the Dark Lord, set his robes on fire, invaded his privacy, refused to do the work even when it meant giving the Dark Lord a free chance to look through their minds, putting him and the rest of the Order in danger. He tried, even when they wouldn't.

He could have said "No". Any number of times, he could have done a little less than his best, could have conveniently not known the proper countercurse, could have not acted on his suspicions of fellow teachers. No one would have known except him. He wasn't getting thanked for making sure the Boy Who Lived continued to; how much easier his life would have been if he hadn't faced his fears and gone out to the Shrieking Shack, the place of his worst nightmares, to deal with a werewolf and an escaped murderer, just for one example. He could have refused to perform the mercy killing, or messed up just enough that he didn't have a chance, considering how tight the timing was. How much easier....He could have been the kind of man who chooses what is easy over what is right. He could have been the kind of protector who had to be convinced, threatened, and argued with to take care of their own children, let alone someone else's.

He could have been the kind of man who lied to make himself look better. He could have been the kind of man who lied to himself to convince himself he wasn't really that bad. Instead, he had the courage--the courage I don't see in any Gryffindor in the books--to see his actions as they really were, and to not make excuses or lies. He had the courage to do what was right, even when it meant blood on his hands, or putting himself at risk for death or worse at the hands of the Dark Lord, or putting himself at risk for death or worse at the hands of the Ministry, or teaching a student how to fight the Dark Lord when at any time his eyes could look out from the student's eyes.

He could have been worse. He could have had the other kind of "courage", the kind which means taunting an insane Death Eater in front of a Death Veil just for fun, or attacking and nearly drowning another kid for fun, or laughing when another student is turned into a ferret and bounced off a wall, or casting curses you don't even know what the effects are on your rival, or going out to a bus station in Animagus form when you're supposed to be in hiding and thus endangering the whole Order, or risking your life and thereby risking the fate of the wizarding world by sneaking around without anyone knowing where you are, or if you've been kidnapped or killed by the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters, because you want to drink butterbeer in Hogsmeade.

That's why I "adore" him. Above and beyond Doylian love for him as a character--he shows moral growth, he has a character arc, he makes hard choices, he has angst!--there's the Watsonian love for him as a person. Call it Good Guy Syndrome. I like Severus Snape, and I mourned for Severus Snape (and I'm in denial about his death...), because he lived a life bereft of love or care or kindness and still managed to be a Good Guy despite it all. (No, the frock coat and the gloves and the silky voice and the snark and so on don't hurt, but I'm perfectly capable of disliking someone with all the same outer trappings if he acts like James Potter.)

As for that [being a jerk]--Sirius Black, sorry to anyone who likes him, was a jerk, and above and beyond that, he tried to hurt and even kill those who disliked, regardless of whether they actually deserved it. He was nice to Harry and his friends, isn't that sweet? Same goes for Ron and Hermione and even, to a certain extent, Harry--they're all good to the people they care about.

But not to anyone else.

Severus Snape, on the other hand, went one step beyond the Malfoys and, oh, nearly anyone on the planet. He was good to the people he didn't care about, to the people he disliked, to the people he just plain detested. If you and I can hate Harry after reading a series of books written nearly entirely from his viewpoint, rationalizations and all, how much more must the man who's had to actually bear the brunt of Harry's immature, nasty, and stupid behavior over the years? Yet he still does what he must, because it is right, no matter how easy the other choice is.

Susan B. Anthony All Over Again: In Which Gwen Exults

2006-10-10T19:44:00.000-07:00

I'm too excited to not post this, but too busy to comment right now:

Polling officials allowed 17-year-old to vote
Teenager now facing felony charges
Eden Prairie, Minn. – September 28, 2006:
Calling it the biggest thing he has ever done in his entire life, Jesse L. Hunter voted in the Minnesota primaries on Sept. 12. However, Hunter is unlike other voters casting their ballots this year. He is only 17 years old.
"They [polling officials] examined my driver's license and asked for my social security number," Hunter said, "but they never seemed to notice that I wrote '1989' as the year of my birth. I voted, and walked out euphoric, bearing an 'I Voted' sticker upon my forehead."
Hunter tells fellow members at the National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) that he never intended to actually vote, but wanted to spark a conversation on the voting age. He considers the current voting age to be unfair to those under the age of 18. "I learned about the importance of voting from my high school government teacher," he said.
Hunter's mother broke down in tears after receiving a phone call from the district attorney's office informing her that her son will be charged with voting fraud, a class one felony in the state of Minnesota. According to the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission, a judge is allowed to give a sentence of up to 12 months in jail or other non-jail sanctions as conditions of probation for someone with no criminal history.
"Many adults take the right to vote for granted: more than 80 million eligible adults failed to vote in the 'high turnout' 2004 election," said Alex Koroknay-Palicz, NYRA's Executive Director. "Yet for exercising the central civil right in this country, Jesse is being charged with a felony."
"If Jesse was a year older, he would be applauded for doing his civic duty, but instead, he is being charged with a crime," said Adam King, NYRA's Vice President. "Jesse had the courage to stand up for what is right - for democracy - and he could go to jail for doing so."

About NYRA:

Founded in 1998, NYRA is the largest youth rights organization in the country. Based in the Washington, D.C. area, the organization is committed to fighting for increased rights of young people. NYRA has nearly 7,000 members nationwide."
Except to repeat my reply e-mail when it went through the NYRA-Discuss list:

"Remember Susan B. Anthony! Don't let anyone post bail!

"It will be seen, therefore, that the whole subject, as to what should constitute the 'privileges and immunities' of the citizen being left to the States, no question, such as we now present, could have arisen under the original constitution of the United States. But now, by the fourteenth amendment, the United States have not only declared what constitutes citizenship, both in the United States and in the several States, securing the rights of citizens to 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States;' but have absolutely prohibited the States from making or enforcing 'any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.' By virtue of this provision, I insist that the act of Miss Anthony in voting was lawful."

Ooh, I hope he takes it as far as he can! Go Jesse Hunter!
(And on a related note, I hope he's not convicted for good, because it would suck if someone became a convicted felon for exercising his right to vote, then couldn't vote again because of being a convicted felon...not to mention having to check that stupid "have you ever been convicted of a felony?" box. But then again, if people didn't think it was ridiculous when that fifteen-year-old ended up being a sex offender for exploiting herself by distributing pictures of herself engaged in sexual acts, they probably won't see this as ridiculous either. Voting fraud, my rear; every single person who supported Diebold machines is as-or-more guilty of that than he is!)"

Spread the word! A voter runs the risk of being labelled a felon, all because the Fourteenth Amendment means nothing...(you know all those people trying to get kids excited about voting so they'll vote when they're old enough? Number one way to get kids excited about voting: let them do it. Number two way: when they do it supposedly-illegally [because of an unconstitutional law], don't clap them in irons and call them felons.)

Can We Move To Canada Now?: In Which Gwen Decides That...

2006-09-29T09:09:00.000-07:00

...her friends who said they'd move to Canada if they could after the last election results came through were just unusually fore-sighted.
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004498.html really covers it, for me.
I don't understand how denying due process to people accused in United States courts of United States crimes, denying habeas corpus rights, accepting hearsay evidence in court, giving the President alone the ability to decide which interrogation methods are unconstitutional, keeping defendants from protesting in court about violations of the Geneva Conventions (because, you know, "accused terrorists" are only being incarcerated, according to defenders of "screw fair and speedy trial", to keep them from continuing acts of terrorism; so either we're at war against terrorists and so accused terrorists are prisoners of war, or we're at police action with criminals so they fall under our court system and our Constitution--can't have it both ways!), only protecting against rape and biological experimentation as cut-and-dried inhuman, degrading, cruel treatment (meaning everything else is on the table), and keeping secret prisoners in secret prisons because they're accused with secret evidence* of secret crimes--is in any way an "American" thing to do.
I don't understand how John McCain can check out of the Hanoi Hilton one decade and then support a torture bill in a later one.
I don't understand how "accused terrorist" means "definitely a terrorist," how indefinite waits for trial make any sense at all, how keeping gay people out of the under-funded, under-equipped, under-peopled military isn't necessary for this war but "you can take your Bill of Rights and shove 'em" is.
I don't understand how our government engaging in terrorist tactics is preventing the terrorists from achieving their goals**.
I don't understand how "you're either with us or you're with the enemy" applies to constitutional preventions of government abuse***, and "the enemy" is on the side of the Constitution.
I don't understand how impeaching the person who swore to uphold and defend the Constitution could possibly be more damaging than leaving him in office for two more years to do whatever he wants with it.
I don't understand how a democracy, in which the people supposedly are in charge, is thought to function better when there is less supervision, more secrecy.
I don't understand how we had no problem giving mob bosses, terrorists if there ever were any, due process like crazy and yet we can't do the same for Iraqi tomato farmers without extensive, effective terrorist networks****.
I don't understand how the same branch of government that defines crimes, arrests people for allegedly committing those crimes, incarcerates them indefinitely, interrogates them using God-knows-what methods, tries them (eventually)*****, and then punishes them is allowed to get away with it by the other branches of government; I don't understand how the Constitution allows one branch to have such powers and I don't understand why I have not heard the phrase "checks and balances" outside of my eighth-grade civics class.
I don't understand why no Republican has the moral convictions to savage this bill like it deserves, filibuster, pull strings, whatever it takes to keep us from turning into the Soviet Union. Shouldn't the party of Lincoln stand up for morality above party politics?
I don't understand why no Democrat has those moral convictions, or party self-interest (the Constitution with the Eighth Amendment and a very cautious Article I also has a Twenty-Second Amendment; who says that Bush is out of office in two years? Isn't he the only one we can count on to give us the strong leadership we need in this time of war******? We can't afford to push him out of office on the strength of something so silly as the Constitution; then the terrorists would win!), or--or--even just reflexive Republican-hating, I don't care, someone needs to stop this. Right now. Before the litany's beginning changes to "They came for the terrorists' rights, and I didn't protest, because I was not a terrorist...".
I think I'm going to be sick.
"...and liberty and justice for all."

* At least under this bill the defendant can see all the evidence the jury can. I know that after rotting away in a cell in Cuba for six (eight, ten, twenty) years, I'd sure want to see what evidence they'd managed to come up with during my pre-trial sentence.
Other people, on the other hand, argue that secret evidence is necessary, so that we don't give the terrorists valuable intelligence information. When they say "terrorists" I must assume that they are talking about the actual defendants rather than outside terrorists, because trials are secret. Unless--unless the terrorists have infiltrated the trials, too! Then they'll see that evidence! So better yet would be if the prosecution simply informed the jury that we have enough evidence to convict if we actually showed you the evidence, which we won't because we don't trust you either.
Or perhaps they really are referring to the defendants, in which case I wonder why they're so worried that the evidence will be so little that the defendant will either be aquitted of the charges or get off in a short enough time that the intelligence information will still be worthwhile, and will therefore spill it to all of his/her evil terrorist friends. (Because people who are aquitted might still be guilty. Like Clinton. It's a lot easier for some people to believe than that some people who are convicted--or even just arrested--might be innocent.)
** Right, the terrorists' goals vary from group to group; wanting to get one's family in power in Saudi Arabia obviously isn't directly related to the erosion of government preventions in the United States. Unless, of course, the government manages to create such a state of fear in its citizens about the magical powers of the terrorist bogeymen (they'll snatch you out of bed in the middle of the night! they eat small children who don't listen to their parents!) that the citizenry will call for giving in to the terrorists' demands rather than have another plane fly into people-packed buildings. Because that's the worst they can manage.
Then again, the administration seems quite sure that the goal of the terrorists is whatever the administration wants people not to do--to destabilize the economy, for instance. So perhaps terrorists want us to keep our Constitution intact?
*** Yes, I said it. Constiutional protections of government abuse, because guess what, the founders were understandably worried about the government having power first, and then the people having (suspendable) liberties and rights. They knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely; Parliament had no problem doing whatever it could to the colonies to recoup money lost defending it, or making sure that the colonies were firmly under a rule Britannia instead of governing themselves, especially since none of the British subjects in the colonies had an actual representative in Parliament. So the Constitution very clearly lists the powers of each branch of government, and then declared all other rights and powers to the people or to the states, and then explicitly listed "including, but not limited to" rights of the people from government interference so that there would be no misunderstanding. Just because the "interstate commerce" clause has been bent unrecognizably out of shape to give Congress more power doesn't mean that the government really has more power than the Constitution says it does. The rights of the people don't come from being United States citizens; they're inherent and all the Bill of Rights does is make sure that the government doesn't nose into them. Or shred them.
**** Remember, class, "alleged terrorists" aren't all terrorists. They can just as easily be the enemies of people desperate to say anything under "harsh interrogation", or in the wrong place at the wrong time, or political demonstrators. Because it's again the executive branch who decides whom to arrest. And whom to charge, eventually. And when to charge, eventually, which is to say "when we have enough evidence" (because it's important to arrest without evidence), which is to say "never, or under the next president."
***** See last sentence of above footnote.
****** The War on Terror has never officially been declared. (By Congress, who is all who can according to that old-fashioned document that founded our nation.) But I consider this bill, if it passes, to be Congress's official declaration of the War on the Constitution. Because the Constitution is more dangerous, even, than marijuana, as hard as that may to believe, because it helps the terrorists win. Plus there's that pesky Fourteenth Amendment, the original non-discrimination clause, which also incidentally makes it so that illegal immigrants who come here, stay, contribute to the economy, use social services much less, and then have kids--the children are actually considered, gasp, native-born citizens! Imagine that, people who live in the United States all their lives and attend United States schools and speak English and follow United States laws are allowed automatic citizenship by that silly slave-freeing loophole.
Much better just to toss the Constitution and start in on a new one. Maybe we can just get rid of the judicial branch entirely this time, so that the executive branch can arrest, hold, and try without supervision for all crimes instead of just this one! Then we wouldn't have activist judges legislating from the bench by interpreting the Constitution, or whatever we decide to call the new one, to actually limit governmental powers and protect people's rights. Which is just silly. Everyone knows the Constitution is just a document that you propose flag-burning and anti-same-sex-marriage amendments for in order to prove that you're a supporter of family values! (Family values like making sure that every same-sex couple that is not celibate has to have sex outside of marriage; family values like making sure that kids grow up without married parents; family values like denying insurance, tax-filing, wrongful-death suing rights to people who have been married in the eyes of God--that is, in a church by a pastor or priest--for decades. Family values like making people who were legally married ex post facto never married, involuntary annullment without waiting for divorce, and who cares about "what God hath joined together, let no man tear asunder"?)

Wow: Just Wow

2006-09-05T12:59:00.000-07:00

Two wows:
one for the people who think that poverty is always a choice and that the people in it are just lazy and stupid
from Whatever: http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003704.html
and one for the people who think that agents of the United States government don't have to worry about due process when they're keeping United States citizens from returning to where they live without a court order or any criminal or civil charges whatsoever
from the San Francisco Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/26/LODI.TMP

I thought that the move-to-Canada crowd was full of paranoid conspiracy theorists. Bush was sworn to defend the Constitution, wasn't he? But...warrantless wiretapping (when there's a rubber-stamp court set up to grant warrants after the tapping anyway)? No, you don't have the right to a trial or charges or a lawyer or a court order before we can decide to keep you from freely travelling in your home country, the only country you're a citizen of? No, arresting someone for re-publishing Hezbollah television material based entirely on content makes perfect sense in First Amendment context? If you'd predicted this in '04, or especially '00, I'd've said, write a book, and call it the sequel to 1984, 'cause it ain't gonna happen.

But we're trading liberties and rights in for better security, right? Right? We're safer, at least from bodily harm, than we were before?
Looks like Ben Franklin/Thomas Jefferson was right when he said that those who would trade in an essential liberty for safety deserve neither...except substitute "get" for "deserve." http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/terrorism/169/ Look how much safer we are(n't)!

Burning a flag is such a horrible act, regardless of the actual symbolism the person burning uses, that an amendment to keep people from doing so is more important than the actual freedom (of speech, for one) it symbolizes. So by a similar vein, I expect that the administration will have to literally burn up or tear up the actual Constitution, instead of just metaphorically, before there will truly be outrage.

Bring Back Hiatus!: In Which Gwen Joins The Hiarchy

2006-08-25T17:29:00.000-07:00

This is going in my links on this page. Hiatus is to science fiction shows as Franz Bibfeldt is to theologians: in a word, awesome.
Come join the compaign to bring back Hiatus! With enough people behind it, we might actually get it aired!

Well That Was Fun: In Which Gwen Doesn't Vote In The NYRA Elections

2006-08-05T15:30:00.000-07:00

So I get onto NYRA at around, oh, three o'clock, spend the next half hour reading candidate biographies, questionnaires, statements, and the talk-to-the-candidates forum, I decide whom and what I'm going to vote for, I click on the Vote Here! link, and it tells me that it was over. Because "you have until the fifth of August to vote" doesn't mean midnight, it means six o'clock. PM. Eastern Standard Time. So, sorry Alex and Katrina and Luke and Scott, et cetera, I didn't vote for you.
But "Please remember to vote next year"? 'Scuse me? I happened to get on half an hour late and I get a snarky message? I don't mind it ending not-at-midnight-like-most-reasonable-people-would-expect, but thank you for completely biting my head off, whoever-it-was-that-wrote-that. How about my response being "Thank you for not being a * to people who hadn't had the opportunity to vote this year", where "*" represents a word I can't say here because my mother reads my blog and she'd wash out my keyboard with soap.
Oh well. There's always next year.
---Speaking of voting, the Arizona elections are coming up soon. I read the information booklet the Campaign for Clean Elections sent out to every household with a registered voter in it (well, I skipped the candidates for district representatives other than from our own district). I decided not to put check marks by the people I liked because I didn't want to unduly influence my parents when they read it (adults are very easily influenced by their children's choices, you know).
They didn't read it. It went into the trash.
*Singing:* Six hundred ninety days til I'm of age to vote, six hundred ninety days...

Light Red vs Pink: In Which Gwen Clears Up A Common Misconception

2006-08-04T07:50:00.000-07:00

The way the English language works in regards to colors is this: there are the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue), which each have their own names; there are the three secondary colors (orange, green, and purple) which can be made by an equal mixture of two primary colors; then there are white and black. When you mix one of these base colors with the color right next to it in frequency, or red and purple, the name of the new color is the primary color hyphen secondary color. (So if you mix orange with yellow it's yellow-orange.) When you mix white with any of the basic colors, the name of the new color is "light" name of color--blue plus white equals light blue, for instance. This isn't news to most people.
Some of the mixes have special names--turquoise or teal for blue-green, for instance (not a perfect example because there are two names depending on which of the two mixed colors the color shades toward). White plus black equals grey (or gray). We don't call it "light black" (unless it's much more black than white), but it still is.
So here's the question: when you mix white and red, do you get pink or light red? My answer is both, because they're the same thing. (For the sake of simplicity, I'm ignoring impure pinks like hot pink; it's no more pink than magenta is red. If you consider your basic pink, it's made from red and white. As is light red.) Not everyone agrees with me. My brother, for instance, who in the middle of our discussion of pink or light red appealed to the authority of The Parents, who also think that pink and light red are different colors. Dad's argument was that if I saw something the color of what he was pointing to, would I tell someone that it was pink or light red? Although I have, in the past, answered "light red" just to prove my pink-is-light-red point, the most concise answer was obviously pink. "Light red" is simply not used often enough for the average listener to understand what color was being referred to without pausing to think a second (and even then I'd probably get an answer of "you mean pink?").
What does that point prove?
Nothing.
Well, it does prove that in a case in which two words or phrases could be used to describe the same object, most speakers of English prefer one over the other, but that's not exactly a new observation. In my experience, most people prefer the word "sunrise" to the word "dawn" (except in set phrases like "the crack of dawn") but that doesn't mean that they refer to different phenomena. In fact, an argument based on what one person would be more likely to use when describing something is extremely fallible; if I pointed to an ape and asked somebody to tell me what it was, I'd probably get "monkey" fairly often, even though apes are not in fact monkeys. (File that tidbit of information in the folder marked "it's Istanbul, not Constantinople.") Tap versus faucet. Just because people on this side of the Atlantic might use "faucet" more often than "tap" (except, again, in set phrases like "on tap" or "tap water") doesn't mean that they refer to different objects.
The real test is "if you couldn't use the more common word for something, and you were to indicate that something to someone else, would you use the other term, and would you be understood?" Not in the charades "oh she must be saying bottle because she hasn't been fed for so long" way that barely-verbal children can make themselves understood; no pointing, maybe over the phone. (There's another one; telephone versus phone, T.V. or tube versus television, even wire versus telegram.) If I were to describe my "light red" shirt to my best friend in California, would she know what color I was talking about? If I were to yell to someone in the other room that the tap wasn't working right, would they understand me? Heck, that test even shows that we could get rid of most of our color vocabulary (like that one language, with as small of a vocabulary as possible; it had words for "light/white," "dark/black," "red," "yellow," and "blue," and that was it). Instead of "light green" we could say "light blue-yellow" or "light yellow-blue" and after a moment of thought, most people would understand what color we were referring to.
And my argument (show me something that is "light red" that isn't "pink") fell on deaf ears; frankly, for me, anyone who claims that light red is a different color than pink is, yet can only show me things that are pink, is not all that convincing.
And my final proof: I went to Paint, found the color editor, and started playing around. (If I'd had actual meatworld paint, this would be a better proof, because I'd have my primary colors as my base colors instead of red, green, and blue, but whatever. Go get some watercolors and mix red with white.) To make the perfect color for the base colors, you put it at 255 with the others at zero--"perfect" blue is red-zero, green-zero, blue-255. To lighten it, you pull the little slidey thing on the vertical bar on the right, or you manually change the other two base colors equally (upward)--so that a lighter blue could be 150-150-255. Light green could be 150-255-150. So light red would be 255-150-150. Guess what the color with those numbers looks like?

She's Aliiiive!: In Which Gwen Blogs Again

2006-07-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

I've been...er...doing...stuff, very important stuff. Somehow while doing very important stuff I managed to collect the following links, all of which lead to entertaining things. Unfortunately, due to the very important stuff I was doing, I didn't get to do more than scan the pages involved to determine if they were entertaining or not. Right.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/HNS/Indians/offense.html
I think I tried to read one of his books once, but I stopped when I realized that it wasn't science fiction. (Look, when the back of the book talks about heroic battles and a character being the "last of his race" and strange and alien lands, my mind doesn't automatically jump to some historical novel about Native Americans.) After reading this, I'm glad that I did. Mark Twain was hilarious.
On a side note, isn't it weird how ministers and mathematicians become great novelists under pen names? I probably would have gotten on well with Charles Dodgson, but not Samuel Clemens; yet (say) the Prince and the Pauper is just as readable as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. (Not to mention that it contains one of the funniest passages in any book I've ever read.)

http://holyoffice.livejournal.com/80073.html
This needs no comment whatsoever.

http://geekus-elusivus.blogspot.com/2006/01/methylchloroisothiazolinone-death.html
This is for other methylchloroisothiazolinone lovers out there. I found it trying to find out what this beloved hair product ingredient is (for instance, possibly a carcinogen, and a skin irritant for some people, which is why it's only used in rinse-off products). Not quite as long a chemical phrase as methylchloroisothiazolinone ethylparaben benzalkonium chloride, but

is pretty cool nonetheless.

Self-annihilating sentences: http://ling.upenn.edu/~rclark/gorn.html

And last but not least, Googlefight, where you can learn that the pen is mightier than the sword, that nerds are more popular than jocks, and that kids beat adults hands down, at least in terms of ghits.

As for that very important stuff I've been doing: Mainly what I've been doing lately involves various computer solitaire games (Spider, Kodak, Freecell) while waiting for Language Log posts to load, which in turn is a way to waste time while I wait for my dirt to settle in my dirt-water solution for Environmental Biology. (Is it a "solution" if nothing dissolved/was solved?) Yeah. I had a good birthday, by the way, and a nice Second of July. Discovered filk, thanks to a chain of links starting with a wikiHow article on 1337, moving on to How to Buy a Present for a Self-Proclaimed Geek or Nerd, through to the geek-nerd controversy on the Geek page in Wikipedia, through an article on science fiction, then somehow to a reference to filk, grokking, and the need to gafiate. My new favorite song title ever: "Never Set the Cat on Fire."

Towel Day 2006: In Which Gwen Describes Her Towel Day

2006-05-26T19:27:00.000-07:00

Did everyone have a good Towel Day yesterday? Hope everyone remembered their towels...
My brother Adam celebrated by bringing his towel to school; my mom didn't (she said she knew where her towel was, which was hanging up in the bathroom); my little sister got a towel and had me wrap it around her like a cape because Adam and I had towels. My dad said it was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard of. And of course, I wore my towel all day, to Miranda's future preschool and to Safeway.
No one at Safeway asked me about it, and being a school day no one I knew from middle school was working while I was there. But the kids at St. Luke's asked me a few times why I had a towel around my neck. One girl asked me if it was my blanky. So I got a chance to explain that the day was towel day; one boy named Ethan whom I already knew because he went to school with my brother answered with the Challenge of the Ages: "Nuh-uh." I answered the throwing of the gauntlet, of course, with the equally time-honored response of "unh-huh." Back and forth, but we were interrupted before we could reach the "times infinity" stage. When I told a girl named Cameron that May twenty-fifth, which happened to be her birthday, was Towel Day, her instinctive response was exactly the same as Ethan's. So much for youthful gullibility; and I was telling the truth!
Anyway, here's a picture of me and Adam, taken in our backyard before bedtime. We are both wearing the fashion inspired by Arthur Dent with his dressing gown, or bathrobe as we on this side of the big pond like to call it. I am holding my copy of the Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, containing all five books of the trilogy (go back and read that again, yes, it's a five-book trilogy) plus one short story and an introduction by the man himself. Adam is holding a saucer and a teacup with a teabag hanging out of it. Unfortunately, it's a Lipton Iced Tea bag, as we have less tea than the Heart of Gold, although we have no shortage of liquids that taste almost, but not quite, exactly unlike tea. We both, of course, have towels.

Towel: £10.69

Teacup and tea: £6.23

Dressing gown: £39.99

Picture of Arthur Dent at nine years old: Priceless.

(No, that's not Arthur Dent, that's Adam Smith, and I didn't go the the U.K. just to buy a bunch of things, nor save the receipts; and I'm not affiliated with MasterCard...that's not the point.)

Wishing you all a recursively happy Towel Day, from three hundred and sixty five days from now until Earth's demolition orders filter through to Prosthetic Jeltz,

-Gwen.

Happy Towel Day: In Which Gwen Shows Just How Hoopy She Is

2006-05-25T15:16:00.000-07:00

Happy Towel Day everybody! I hope everyone remembered their towel...
and if you want to check out pictures of people in Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, Hungary, Sweden, Norway, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Colorado who all know where their towels are (on them), check out this thread at the Towel Day forums at towelday.kojv.net--pictures here.

Douglas Adams, the man who gave us I Ching calculators, real-life Schrodinger's Cats, the holistic detective agency, the Babel fish, the Earth entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ("mostly harmless"), jinnan tonnyx, Ol' Janx Spirit, two songs about the ills of teleportation, Disaster Area (the band who played so loud the music had to be piped in electronically and the audience could only listen to them at concerts by "cowering on the horizon"), staying dead for tax reasons, Stavromula Beta, an acrophobic elevator, the Heart of Gold, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaint Department ("Share and Enjoy!"), the whale, the petunias, Agrajag (who was the petunias), Ford, Marvin, Trillian, Arthur, Slartibartifast, Zaphod, Eccentrica Gallumbits, Benjy, Frankie, Fenchurch, and doors with Genuine People Personalities, is dead... long live Douglas Adams!

Schoolhouse Gate: In Which Tinker, Hazelwood, et al, Are Ignored

2006-05-24T18:01:00.000-07:00

An Illinois school board voted two nights ago to add a provision in the student code of conduct allowing the schools to take disciplinary actions against students for illegal or inappropriate behavior posted to students' personal sites.
Yes, that's right: these schools now have given themselves the right to punish students--and because it's a school, no courts or any of the rights of due process juveniles have in the court system--for not only illegal but "inappropriate" behavior, as defined by the schools, that occurs off campus.
I'm reminded of a passage in the Phantom Tollbooth, in which the protagonist Milo is arrested, tried, convicted, sentenced, and jailed all by the same person on literally no evidence. Throughout Milo protests that "only a judge can try someone," "only a jury can convict someone," and "only a jailer can put someone in jail." Officer Shrift, the arresting officer, responds with "Quite so. I am also the judge" to the first protestation, and is similarily the jury and the jailer.
Except now the schools can also make the rules. And their jurisdiction, apparently, is limitless.
Alex makes a valid point at One And Four, and again at the Age of Reason:
"From a simple picture posted online of a student holding a beer bottle it would be impossible to tell whether the bottle is full or empty, whether that student had been consuming it or not, whether the student is in the presence of parents which would make the situation legal, or whether the student is overseas in a country where consuming alcohol is legal. For such reasons a picture posted online is not sufficient evidence for adults to be prosecuted for similar crimes, and should not be used to punish students.
"Regardless, schools attempting to punish students for actions done outside of school is a dramatic overreaching of school authority. No longer do schools seem concerned with the education of students, but rather are now going to extreme measures to control behavior both in and out of school – territory best left to parents."
And another point, this one from the distinguished case 484 U.S. 260, aka Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, from the syllabus. (Yes, I'm lazy and stopped reading about where I found the point.) To sum up, a student newspaper wanted to include two articles, one about "school students' experiences with pregnancy" and the other "discussing the impact of divorce on students of the school." The school's principle deleted the articles, the first because he was afraid that the pregnant students would be identified, and the second because one student's real name was in the article and she complained about her father (he thought that the parents should be able to respond or consent to the publication before the paper was published, and there wasn't enough time).
Although the former students lost the case because the paper was school-produced, as part of a journalism class, the ruling still set positive precedents.
To quote:
"(a) First Amendment rights of students in the public schools are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings, and must be applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment. A school need not tolerate student speech that is inconsistent with its basic educational mission, even though the government could not censor similar speech outside the school. Pp. 266-267.
(b) The school newspaper here cannot be characterized as a forum for public expression. School facilities may be deemed to be public forums [261] only if school authorities have by policy or by practice opened the facilities for indiscriminate use by the general public, or by some segment of the public, such as student organizations. If the facilities have instead been reserved for other intended purposes, communicative or otherwise, then no public forum has been created, and school officials may impose reasonable restrictions on the speech of students, teachers, and other members of the school community. The school officials in this case did not deviate from their policy that the newspaper's production was to be part of the educational curriculum and a regular classroom activity under the journalism teacher's control as to almost every aspect of publication. The officials did not evince any intent to open the paper's pages to indiscriminate use by its student reporters and editors, or by the student body generally. Accordingly, school officials were entitled to regulate the paper's contents in any reasonable manner. Pp. 267-270.
(c) The standard for determining when a school may punish student expression that happens to occur on school premises is not the standard for determining when a school may refuse to lend its name and resources to the dissemination of student expression. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U.S. 503, distinguished. Educators do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns. Pp. 270-273.
(d) The school principal acted reasonably in this case in requiring the deletion of the pregnancy article, the divorce article, and the other articles that were to appear on the same pages of the newspaper. Pp. 274-276."
Note the last sentence of point a and the first sentence of point c--"A school need not tolerate student speech that is inconsistent with its basic educational mission, even though the government could not censor similar speech outside the school....The standard for determining when a school may punish student expression that happens to occur on school premises is not the standard for determining when a school may refuse to lend its name and resources to the dissemination of student expression." Now, if the government cannot censor similar speech--in other words, speech the school considers inappropriate, though not necessarily illegal--outside of school, but can inside of school (if it's "inconsistent with its basic educational mission"), then what restrictions can a school place on Internet speech by its students?
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like the most a school could do about, say, a blogger's photograph of someone with an empty beer can, is determine if the photograph was taken on school campus, or if the photograph was on a website hosted by the school, and leave the rest to the police.
Which makes sense, to me. Schools can moderate behavior on their campuses, or at school functions, to a degree (I, personally, think it should be as long as the behavior materially disrupts the educational process; but "consistent with its basic educational mission" is not much broader as I see it), but unless it's the school's business, it's not the school's business. (Student rights in a tautology.) To clarify: if something happens on school campus or at a school function that materially disrupts the educational process, it's the school's business; if something illegal happens that doesn't materially disrupt the educational process, on or off-campus, it's the police's business; if something that is both illegal and materially disrupts the educational process happens on-campus, then it may be the school's business, or the police's, or both, depending on the context; but if something off-campus happens that the school deems "inappropriate," who cares? If it's illegal, then tip off the police, but frankly I can't think of anything anyone can do off-campus that is both legal and yet somehow materially disrupts the educational process.
So if a Vernon Hills High School student posts a picture of himself apparently smoking a cigarette off-campus, then the police can deal with it, decide if it's enough evidence for court, whatever; and then the school might get involved, to the tune of "sorry no more athletics (or band, or whatever, I guess) for you, mister, you have a police record" if that's provided for in the student code. Or if a Libertyville High School student posts pictures of herself in "sexually suggestive" poses, then either it's porn (remember the girl who got charged with possession and distribution of child pornography [which as I recall made some kind of legal sense] plus child exploitation [which as I recall made me really wonder if the state could plead temporary insanity on appeal]?), or it's just "inappropriate," and the only way I can think of that those photos would disrupt the functioning of the school is if students (or faculty, or administration) were so distracted by the photos they shouldn't be able to access on school computers that they couldn't think straight. And then whose fault is it, especially since it isn't porn?
Remember not shedding "constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate"?
Now you can shed them at login.

Towel Day Coming Up! : In Which The Public Is Served

2006-05-18T08:42:00.000-07:00

This is a Public Service Announcement:
Towel Day
25 May 2006
All hoopy froods carry their towels or risk being called skrags!
--In memory of Douglas Adams--
Do you know where your towel is at?
http://www.towelday.kojv.net/

Links: In Which Gwen Posts Some Links (Clever Title, Huh?)

2006-05-02T09:22:00.000-07:00

Everyone have a great Beltaine? Good, good. Or, oh, that's too bad, depending on your answer.
So, the promised links:
http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html
Totally awesome...dja know that Afton was popular at the turn of the century? that Katrina has been losing popularity as a name since the eighties? Me neither. Or, well, I didn't, depending on your answer.
http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/
So what do you get when Geoffrey Chaucer decides to blog? Creative spelling and hilarious posts.

Towel Day on the twenty-fifth of May this year...all hoopy froods know where their towels are at.

Untitled: In Which Gwen Boasts About Her Binary Clock

2006-05-01T15:40:00.000-07:00

I have a binary clock at the top of my website.

Because I'm awesome.

(Now let's just hope it works.)

Video Games Gateway Drug For NYRA Members, Anecdotal Evidence Shows: In Which Gwen Laughs Out Loud

2006-04-17T15:49:00.000-07:00

Anduwaithe says: I dunno, though... I didn't start liking Rap music until I played GTA: San Andreas. Maybe it does influence you...
SudburyKid says: Playing the Sims always puts me in the mood for a joint
Sciville says: I've been playing a lot of Crash Bandicoot lately. Can't help myself. Now I just can't resist the urge to spin and bust open crates.
KuruRyu says: Spyro's my game. Now all I want to do is glide around and set sheep on fire.
MiNi says: I like SimCity. Now I wish I had the power to cause earthquakes and mass destruction by just pushing a button.
Galen says: Zelda always makes me wanna play the Ocarina....
MiNi says: And I could only imagine the urge to jump on turtles and mushrooms, and to break bricks with your head, and spit fire after playing the NES Super Mario Bros...
Got liberty? says: And pick up your greatsword and slaughter villagers after playing Fable....
KuruRyu says: I just played Pac-Man, and I have this strange craving for pellets...
KuruRyu says: I've just finished up a session of Pokemon, and I have this urge to throw strange balls at animals, then use those animals to fight other animals...
LOL.

Michigan Curfew: In Which Gwen Hits Her Head On Another Brick Wall

2006-04-17T14:41:00.000-07:00

At 11 p.m., kids would be off the streets
Curfew proposed for Wayne County
Amy Lee / The Detroit News
John T. Greilick / The Detroit News
Livonia officials said they have had a problem with teens going over or through the fence at the skate park late at night. The city has a teen curfew on the books.
Curfew CostsKids younger than 17 who are out in pubic in Wayne County past 11 p.m. on weekdays or past midnight on weekends could face tickets and fines. Here's a breakdown of the fines proposed for those caught breaking curfew.
First violation: $100
Second violation in the same calendar year: $200
Third violation within two years: $500
Fourth violation within two years: misdemeanor charge and fine up to $1,000 and or up to 90 days in jail
Source: Wayne County proposed ordinance
The Wayne County Commision is considering establishing a curfew barring anyone under 17 from being in a public area without adult supervision between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. on weekdays, and after midnight on weekends. Do you think such a curfew is a good idea?
John T. Greilick / The Detroit News
Rob Buono, 17, of Livingston County, skates at the Livonia Skate Park on Thursday. If a curfew is imposed, communities could choose to opt out of the regulation. It would also not change existing curfews.
Kids hoping to stretch their outdoor summer fun past 11 p.m. could face hefty tickets under a plan being considered by the Wayne County Commission.
The proposed curfew would bar those younger than 17, who are not supervised by an adult, from being in a public area within the county after 11 p.m. and before 6 a.m. on weekdays, or after midnight and before 6 a.m. on weekends.
It could take effect as early as May 4 and would dovetail with existing curfews, including Detroit's, to create a curfew that blankets the county.
Communities could choose to opt out of the curfew regulation, however. The county regulation would also not change existing curfews for communities that have them.
The proposed law has strong backing from elected leaders and police agencies throughout Wayne County, but critics argue the law violates the civil rights of a group that lacks a political voice. Curfew laws tend to get more attention as the weather warms and the end of the school year draws near.
--And elections draw near.
"It's one more tool that the parents have to keep their kids under control. It's one thing when parents say these are my rules, but when it's the law, it's a different story," said Commissioner Ilona Varga, D-Detroit, who drafted the proposal. "This could prevent a lot of teenagers from getting in trouble in late hours in the night."
--Unless, of course, teenagers don't commit crimes mainly at night; unless parents disagree with the curfew...
Curfews already are on the books in many county municipalities, including Dearborn, Livonia and Taylor, and elected leaders rarely oppose such laws. But teens and groups that work for youth rights say a teen-targeted curfew singles out a group that can't fight back and could make them feel marginalized and under attack.
--No kidding.
"It's absolutely an infringement on the civil rights of young people. We do have a right to assemble," said Alex Koroknay-Palicz, executive director of the 6,500-member strong National Youth Rights Association, based in Rockville, Maryland.
"Teens are the victims of a lot of discrimination and stereotypes, but what it comes down to is fear and the misguided notion that teens commit crimes in greater number than adults, and that's simply not the case."
--Go Alex!
But Megan Mullins, 17, of Livonia says she sees the logic of curfews because peer pressure in high school is nothing to take lightly.
"I'm in high school and I know how stupid people can be, and it always seems like that stuff happens at night," said Mullins, as she sat at the Livonia Skate Park on Thursday afternoon.
--Seems is the key word.
Curfews are nothing new. Several Metro Detroit communities have such laws on the books dating to the 1960s. Research into whether they help deter juvenile crime, however, is scant.
An analysis of curfew enforcement and juvenile crime in California published in 1999 in "Western Criminology Review," however, found no evidence that tougher curfew enforcement reduces juvenile crime.
--No, it showed that it increased certain kinds of crime.
Nationwide, about 121,000 youths under the age of 18 are ticketed for curfew and loitering law violations each year, according to 2002 statistics compiled by the FBI, the most recent available. Of those, about 35,000 are under 15 years old.
--So 86,000 are my age or older. Niiiiice.
Local police often cite curfew laws anecdotally as an effective way to prevent crime, and say curfew laws give an added protection to teens by getting them out of the public domain and perhaps preventing them from becoming a crime victim themselves.
"We need to have it. It's an awesome tool to have," said Sgt. Glenn Carriveau who heads up the youth bureau of the Dearborn Police Department.
--Awesome! Like, totally righteous! If we don't like the looks of any non-criminal punk we can top our daily arrest quota!
Indeed, Mullins said it's not unusual for Livonia kids to head home before 11 p.m. because they know police could ticket them for driving after the curfew hour.
"They say they have to go home because they don't want to get caught by the cops," said Mullins, a junior at Churchill High School.
--Sorry, man, I would stay and help pick up litter/play basketball with a Little/keep this car wash to raise money for charity going--but I'd be breaking the law!
Enforcement of curfew laws tends to pick up over the summer months, when freedom from school gives teens time to cruise streets and congregate in parks. "People hear them walking down the street at 3 a.m., and common sense tells you nothing good can come out of a bunch of kids out at 3 a.m.," he said. "Sometimes the cover of darkness can give kids a sense that they can get away with stuff they wouldn't try during the day. This is as much for their protection as it is for the protection of the community."
--Change "kids" for, say, "blacks", or "convicted felons", or "Japs", and maybe common sense should be thought about, you know, rationally.
--Very protective, I'm sure. Just like "protecting" physically disabled people by putting them under house arrest.
Wayne County Undersheriff Harold Cureton praised the idea of a countywide curfew, noting that the county already oversees the juvenile justice system and that curfews act as a crime prevention tool that could eventually lessen the number of kid who funnel through the system.
--Er, no. I don't know where the common sense--or, for that matter, the statistics--are for that particular assertion.
"You can intercede with them at a much earlier stage and increase the chances that down the line they're not going to be a problem for you in the juvenile justice system," Cureton said. "It would have to be a law that was used selectively. We don't want to punish a kid who's on his way home from work. But we do want to keep kids off the street at night."
--Ahhhh, so if you see an angry young man walking down the street, he's black, got gold chains around his neck and rap on his iPod, and he looks at you funny, you stop him and he says he's coming home from work, you're just going to let him go like the enlightened, good, rights-respecting police officer you are. Right.

My letter:
If lawmakers are worried about criminality, why not keep, say, male baby boomers off of the streets? Or how about actually attack the peak crime period for juveniles--between one and four in the afternoon? Or how about keeping racial minorities, who are statistically more likely to commit crimes than whites, locked up under an evening house arrest (no fair arguing poverty; young people are poor too)?
Or, if it's the particular vulnerability of youth that lawmakers are worried about, why not have a curfew for, say, dwarfs, women, and the physically handicapped?
Or if they just want to reduce the crime rate by as much as possible (and 1984 can go burn itself) why not just have a universal curfew?
Government runs on precedent. The precedent that the government should have the power to literally lock people up, charge them money, and mark them as criminals for walking after midnight like Patsy Cline--no matter the justification for the law--is a dangerous precedent.
So is allowing the government to extend its reach into a parent-child relationship without *either* of them wanting it to. What happens when parents say it's O.K. for their kids to be out, but the police officer down the street disagrees? In short, do we actually *want* the government to havethe power arbitrarily to keep an entire demographic away from public spaces?
And it is arbitrary. A study by Drs. Mike Males and Dan Macaillar studied curfew laws in California. The only correlation found in youth crime rates was that curfew laws raised the number of youth-caused non-curfew misdemeanors (you read that right-raised) and significantly raised the number of arson, a primarily youth-caused crime. And in sixty counties studied, the number of youth violent deaths changed in just three--up.
Ray Bradbury's catalyst for Fahrenheit 451 was having a lengthy conversation with an incredulous police officer explaining that he wasn't doing anything illegal by walking down the street. Someday maybe that won't be funny anymore.

Chain Letters: In Which Gwen Declares War

2006-04-10T14:48:00.000-07:00

I will not send on chain letters.
If they are stupid "if you're a true Christian you'll send this on, but if you don't, you're doing the work of Satan, especially if you simply delete this" emails I will simply delete them.
If they are "send it on to X people and your wish will come true in Y hours" emails I will also delete them, unless they have a nice poem or a joke or some redeeming factor.
If they are "dying girl mysteriously writes poem by David Weatherford and asks that you send this on to everyone you know because the American Cancer Society somehow is tracking the e-mail and donating three cents every time it's passed on" emails I will go to a little site I like to call "Snopes.com," search for it, and email The Facts back to the sender.
I will not send on chain letters. Ever. Period. Not to help fictional dying girls, not to increase my number of friends or amount of luck, not to go to heaven. End of Declaration of War.
Oh yeah, and don't bother checking below for more.

Red Laws Across the Nation: In Which Freedom Of Association Takes One Step Toward Restoration

2006-04-03T16:20:00.000-07:00

So I finally finished searching all of the searchable legislatures in the country, states, territories, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and my results are available to anyone who e-mails me at jen (period) kay (period) leo (at sign) gmail (period) com with the subject line "Communism". (I'd love to attach them to the post, only Blogger doesn't want me to be able to attach things to posts. And it's too long to simply put in the body of the post. Unless you bug me about it.)
The Excel* chart tells you if a state has any anti-communism laws or not, and the Word* document tells you what it is.

*Yes, Microsoft Office programs. Sue me.

Don't select the "Read more here" below, it lies.

Wish List: In Which Gwen Gets Greedy

2006-04-03T14:31:00.000-07:00

You know how I'm usually really, really hard to shop for?
No longer.

LED Binary Watch
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/6a17/
Water-Powered Alarm Clock
http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/lights/7c0f/
Blank Keyboard
http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/7727/
Mind Molester
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/79be/
Binary LED Clock
http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/binary/59e0/
Binary Finger Shirt
http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/binary/6a20/
Schrodinger’s Cat Shirt (Front: Schrodinger’s Cat is Alive/Back: Schrodinger’s Cat is Dead)
http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/madscientist/6dff/
Ant Farm, NASA-Style
http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/madscientist/6fd6/
Grow A Genuine 1-Up Mushroom
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/1upmushroom.shtml
Retro Phone Handset
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/7830/
Mini Lava Lamp That Plugs Into USB Port
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/lights/7825/
Ancient Egyptian Laser Board Game Deflexion
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/lights/7eaa/
Programmable Projecting Wand
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/lights/80ee/
Laser Pointer/Stylus/Pen
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/lights/581b/
LED-Powered Lantern
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/lights/782b/
Infrared-beam Security Perimeter
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/security/78df/
Posable People
http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/cubegoodies/6748/
Digital Stick People
http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/cubegoodies/7b24/
Classic Invader Game Wall Graphics
http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/cubegoodies/6425/
Roller-coaster Kit
http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/cubegoodies/6a7c/
Polarity
http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/games/786f/
1337 5(R4bb13
http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/games/803d/

http://www.despair.com/viewall.html
Particularly Achievement, Adversity, Beauty, Compromise, Discovery, Dreams, Leaders, Motivation, Potential, Power, Pressure, Quality, Risks, Sacrifice (#1), Success, Wishes

Oh yeah.

Edit:
Hey, guess what? Mensa members get discounts!
The folks at http://www.us.mensa.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=ThinkGeek_com&Template=/MembersOnly.cfm&NavMenuID=835&ContentID=3344&DirectListComboInd=D, where they sell stuff for smart people, have a special Geekdeal for Mensans: get $5 off an order of at least $25 and $10 off an order over $50 through June 30. ThinkGeek carries everything from cutting-edge gadgets and gizmos to LED necklaces and geek-inspired welcome mats.
Woohoo!

Commution: In Which Someone's Supposedly Shortened Sentence Stinks

2006-03-27T16:41:00.000-07:00

Considering a certain book, whose name I won't reveal because I don't want to ruin anyone's reading experiences by giving away highly suspenseful endings...I've been arguing that the verdict of guilty was unfair, for various reasons, but the sentence is really the most intriguing part, at least how it was decided. This guy is convicted of about, oh, a thousand or so crimes (I suppose they could be called "war crimes", if you care), and sentenced to death. But then right after the jury both convicts and sentences him (indictment not being necessary, since he asked to stand trial anyway, so at least it's only two court processes squeezed into one), the prosecutor asks that the sentence be commuted from execution to having his soul literally wiped out and the old evil one put in place (this is SF, people, go with it).
Obviously the protagonist prefers the former option, if only because the latter unleashes incredible evil once more on the universe.
But how could the sentence be commuted--sorry, I'll stop italicizing that--commuted to a sentence the defendant prefers less?
Say somebody prefers to be executed to serving twenty-five years in jail. Ignoring the fact that suicide is illegal (what idiot came up with that law, anyway? and should the penalty be death?), I can't really think of any reason to deny that particular death wish. Unless you hold to the old justice-is-punishment view, therefore it would make more sense to force the criminal to live twenty-five years in jail to his/her preferred short, simple death, I can only think of two sensible objections (sensible, adj. 1. describing something with which Gwen agrees. 2, archaic. reasonable, understandable. [Orig. Gwen, of course. Gwen creates everything. She also talks about herself in third person occasionally, leading her imaginery psychiatrist to shake his head in despair]) to denying a criminal a wish for a harsher (as defined by the prosecution) sentence:
1. society disagrees with the prosecution, because the prosecution is off its nut.
2. I don't remember this reason, but I know I had one.
In this case, the prosecution is off its nut, but obviously the judges are too, because they just "commuted" (see, no italics) a sentence of death to a sentence that no one in their right mind would prefer. Unless they agree that "the hybrid [of the Jekyll personality to be wiped out, except that they believe that at least a remnant will still remain to balance the incredibly evil one, and of the incredibly evil one that, on a whim, I will refer to as the Hyde personality] will be greater than the sum of its parts," in which case I suspect that:
1. the person who said this was not as smart as he is supposed to be, because, sorry, (a+b)>a+b is just poor mathematics, especially for someone powered by...er, not going to spoil anyone's reading experience, so I won't finish that sentence.
Or
2. the person who said this was just trying to reassure the person being sentenced to soulwipe (soulwipe, n. a complete destruction of someone's personality via machine or other methodical means [Orig. Gwen, of course, from MINDWIPE-MIND+SOUL]) and/or himself and/or everyone listening.
Still, it's a hopeful note for a particularly depressing ending. The only other optimistic thing at the end is the whistling. (This is what it's all about, folks. Monkeys whistling in a big sweaty bubble. Don't let anyone ever try to tell you otherwise.)
I sure hope that if I ever get convicted of a crime, my sentence won't be "commuted" in that particular manner.

The Fourteenth Amendment: In Which Gwen Decides That Unconstitutional Laws Need Not Be Obeyed

2006-03-19T11:01:00.000-07:00

So I was thinking about Amendment 14 last week, and I had the idea to consider it logically. It breaks up into a fairly simple statement that can be analyzed using nothing more than the rules of logic, like so:


1) IF:
   a) someone is a person
   AND
   b) that person is either:
      1) born in the United States
      OR
      2) naturalized into the United States
   AND
   c) that person is subject to the jurisdiction of the laws of the United States
2) THEN:
   a) that person is:
      1) a citizen of the United States
      AND
      2) a citizen of the state wherein they reside
   AND
   b) no state may make or enforce any law which shall abridge the priveleges or immunities of that person

(That looks complicated, but it's easier to mess with than the original text.)

So, take me. Since I meet conditions 1a and 1b1 (let's leave c for the time being), then either all of 2 is true, or 1c is false, because that's the only condition left. So either I'm a citizen of the United States, and a citizen of Arizona, and so it's unconstitutional for Arizona to pass a law abridging my "priveleges and immunities," OR I'm not subject to the jurisdiction of any of its laws anyway.
Which means, for example, that either AZ's "sure, pass a curfew" law is unconstitutional, or I have the constitutional right to ignore it. It's impossible to have it both ways, that I'm a citizen and have to obey the law, yet a non-citizen in that a law can abridge my first amendment rights no problem.
Unless anyone cares to argue that I'm not a person.

Anyone want to show me where I'm wrong? I'm not a constitutional scholar nor a logician.

Youth Suffrage in the Blogosphere: In Which A Lower Voting Age Is Considered By Non-NYRA-Members

2006-03-19T10:37:00.000-07:00

Bloggers on youth suffrage (and not even lowering the voting age, abolishing it!):
http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2006/03/children-and-vote.html
http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/27883
http://minipundit.typepad.com/minipundit/2006/03/child_voting.html
http://www.oneandfour.org/archives/2006/03/a_dissenter.html

The first, summarizing "On Children's Right to Vote," is amazing. I'm a history student, not a teacher, but I've always had the same thoughts in my classes...all the students bobble-heading to the evilness of denying full suffrage to women, blacks, Jews, actors, prostitutes, and I knew that if I asked them they'd oppose the youth vote; their age strangely irrelevant to the discussion, and a woman with whom I was defending, bizarrely enough, women's suffrage telling me she doesn't converse with children.
The other three are interesting too: the first agrees, the second disagrees, the third is Alex, NYRA's beloved prez, and not surprisingly agrees as well. Read the comments, too...I have to say that all the comparisons of children to chimpanzees disturbed me, until the thought popped into my head that someday chimpanzees may be enfranchised, and the whole "if we let kids vote, why not chimpanzees?" argument will sound as silly to future history classes as, say, "if we let non-property-owning Protestant vote, why not let Jews? Or Catholics? Or, heaven forbid, women?" --Who knows? I'm certainly not going to make any predictions. Especially since the vote should be based on personhood and government, not ability to produce viable offspring with humans, else we'd exclude the celibate, infertile, and impotent as well. (Excessive hair? Difficulty walking upright? Inability to communicate vocally with humans? Percentage of DNA shared? Perhaps a meritcratic vote will be necessary someday.)
The opposing side is of course the most interesting to read. I especially like the "well, that argument was stupid when it was applied to women, but people under eighteen are qualitatively different than adults!" arguments. I can't wait until someone references brain studies a bit more directly than they have so far.
And it's funny seeing the same old arguments for our side hitting the same old overly-refuted arguments from the other..."children can't vote because they don't understand what they're doing" meets "why don't we exclude adults who don't understand what they're doing" which meets "because that's discriminatory!" D'oh.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: I don't care if it's a universal right or a competency-only privelege, as long as the standards are applied equally across age lines. I'm the college-attending fifteen-year-old, remember? I'm in either way. It's only when the system specifically excludes intelligent people under eighteen while permitting incompetents over eighteen to vote that ticks me off.
I saw a poster for the women's suffrage movement, I think it was commissioned by Anthony, that pictured a lunatic, a child, an idiot, a criminal, and a woman (their description, not mine) with the caption something like "The State of New York denies suffrage to:". Except now women can vote, many mentally retarded people can vote (depending on severity I think), there's a movement to allow felons the vote because it's an archaic law of punishment that pretty much prevents reintegration into society, and now who are children being grouped with? Chimpanzees.
Children are citizens, so there's no slippery-slope of granting tourists the vote--read the Constitution!
See next post.

Dancing Bananas Here!: In Which Gwen Increases NYRA Donations, Decreases Average Wealth Of The Gullible

2006-03-13T15:47:00.000-07:00

https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=NYRAUSA%40aol.com&image_url=http%3A//www.youthrights.org/NYRAlogo125x50.jpg&no_note=1&tax=0¤cy_code=USD

It's an awesome...er...animation! Yeah, that's it, a flash animation!

Go watch!

(For those who are, er, "flash-animation"-impaired, type a large number into the box by "Amount" and then click "Secure Checkout." Next, type in your billing address in the box labelled "Shipping Address" and your first and last names in the boxes by "First Name" and "Last Name." Then pick a card type that you have, type the number on the card, and pick your expiration date. Type in your name, as it appears on the card. Continue filling out information, and at the bottom of the page, type in the weird-looking numbers and letters. Click "Continue Checkout" and everything should be happy.

This is all so that the, er, animation of the, er, dancing bananas can have your credit card information displayed, for personalization!)

NYRA thanks you.

This is Arizona: In Which It Snows

2006-03-12T19:08:00.000-07:00

Arizona.
Desert.
Dry.
Cactus.
Tumbleweeds.
Dust.
Heat.
Scorpions, rattlesnakes, centipedes, millipedes.
And also...
as strange as this may seem...
snow.
Yes, snow, the white powdery stuff, has fallen in Arizona. It does this, actually, every year, but because of the aforementioned desert, I have the pleasure of seeing cactus and tumbleweeds half-buried in mounds of snow. And this year, I was extremely fortunate in that I had a camera to boggle the minds of all my out-of-state friends. Especially the ones who live in rather more northern latitudes than I and who never, except maybe once every decade, actually get snow, and thus have to go up to the mountains to get snow. I live in a valley in the middle of Arizona, and yet it snows. Irony.
Without further ado, the picture, to prove to all you doubting skeptics that Arizona isn't just the "but it's a dry heat" state; Phoenix, too, can get the famed NYC benefit of dirty streets covered in a blanket of pristine clean-making whiteness. (Well, maybe not. I don't live in Phoenix. They may be more up to the stereotype of heat-desert-ness than Chino Valley is: they just broke a one-hundred-forty-day-plus dry streak.) Anyway, here it is:

Leftover Laws: In Which Gwen Falls Through A Hole In Time And Ends Up In The McCarthy Era

2006-03-08T16:25:00.000-07:00

So, either nobody in the Arizona State Legislature has seen this, or we're about fifty+ years in the past:

Arizona Revised Statute 16-806. "Proscription of Communist Party of United States, its successors, and subsidiary organizations
The Communist Party of the United States, or any successors of such party regardless of the assumed name, the object of which is to overthrow by force or violence the government of the United States, or the government of the state of Arizona, or its political subdivisions shall not be entitled to be recognized or certified as a political party under the laws of the state of Arizona and shall not be entitled to any of the privileges, rights or immunities attendant upon legal political bodies recognized under the laws of the state of Arizona, or any political subdivision thereof; whatever rights, privileges or immunities shall have heretofore been granted to said Communist Party of the United States as defined in this section, or to any of its subsidiary organizations, by reason of the laws of the state of Arizona, or of any political subdivision thereof, are hereby terminated and shall be void."

(Note that the Arizona State Constitution says, in Article 2, Section 21, that "Free and equal elections All elections shall be free and equal, and no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage." Now, doesn't declaring that the CPUSA doesn't have any of the rights any other political body has kinda interfereing with the free exercise of the right of suffrage? Not to mention, y'know, freedom of association and such?)

Next we have a law pertaining to employers firing their employees based on political ideology, religion, or philosophy, which includes the following interesting caveat:
"H. As used in this article, unlawful employment practice does not include any action or measure taken by an employer, labor organization, joint labor-management committee or employment agency with respect to an individual who is a member of the communist party of the United States or of any other organization required to register as a communist-action or communist-front organization by final order of the subversive activities control board pursuant to the subversive activities control act of 1950."

I don't know, but I'll bet that the subversive activities control act has either
a) been repealed
b) been changed considerably
c) declared unconstitutional
. You think?

Next and longest is at http://www.azleg.state.az.us/ars/16/00805.htm , and basically says a bunch of things about "those d--- commies" that are patently untrue and a bunch of hyperbole anyway, plus are even more untrue because the apparently-nonexistent CPUSA Constitution (http://www.cpusa.org/article/static/15/) definitely states a lot of things about being thrown out for advocating violent overthrow, expression of dissent, democratic processes, et cetera that do not, collectively, describe the party described in this so-called "findings of fact."

Then again, I was talking to someone about this, and she thought that it was just fine, even today, and in fact should be widened to affect lots of different groups. You have to draw the line somewhere, apparently, and if free expression, association, et cetera are cut out of the picture so be it.
I'm curious as to how many states still have these laws. Is America red, blue, or Red?

Dinner and a Movie, Adultism Style: In Which Stupidity Is Examined

2006-03-08T15:40:00.000-07:00

Picture the following scenario:
I'm with my dad and I go up to the ticket office at the movies. There are R-rated, PG13-rated, PG-rated, even some G-rated movies showing. I can't watch the R-rated movies without an adult with me. (Which one is, but still.) Fine, I understand that; it is the law, after all, and I can't blame the movie office. I'm not an adult, according to the movie theatre(/er), right? Right. So far.
My dad buys our tickets. "Two for ----." Now, sure, I could mention that I'm a student, therefore eligible for the cheaper student ticket, but I think that the kid's price is cheaper anyway and besides I don't want to hold up the line. So, here's their prices:
Kids--$5
Seniors--$5
Students--Whatever it is (I don't remember)
Adults--$8
I, the fifteen-year-old, who is too young to watch an R-rated movie alone because I'm a kid, according to them, am with my dad, who is a non-senior adult. What is the price of our tickets? Think about it first, then continue reading.
Sixteen dollars. This is the price for two adult tickets, not thirteen dollars, the price for one kid and one adult ticket.
So, fine, I won't blame the theatre(/er) for the movie rating system, but I will blame them for their prices. Either a) I am an adult and therefore should be allowed to watch R-rated movies alone--by law--or b) I am not an adult and therefore should, legally, not be, but still be charged the kid's price.

Further. The "dinner" part of the title. Or, actually, since I'm on the west coast, lunch. (Do you East-Coasters still do the breakfast-dinner-supper thing?)
I'm not going to talk about the unfairness of kids' clubs ending at twelve, the earliest "adult" status given that I can think of in the United States, except for the eight-year-old crime-responsibility thing. I'm not going to discuss the "adult" buffet price. (Remember, kids, you're only adults when you commit a crime or when we're taking your money.) No, I'm going to talk about something different. Still odd.
Picture this scenario. A year younger, with some of my friends. We're all in high school, we're all obviously under twenty-one. We go to the Prescott Brewing Company, a local restaurant. We sit down at a certain table, which we all liked because it was against a partition with a little window through it, distinctive, fun. No problems.
A waitress comes up and asks us if we're over twenty-one. Of course not, no, we're not interested in your beer or whatever but your food. We're here for a non-liquid lunch.
She requests that we move. (To a table in an adjoining room, completely open, it's not very far away.)
We ask why. (Not to be irritating, we just didn't see why we should move.)
She said it was because we were all black and therefore had to sit in a different section of the restaurant. Er, sorry, flashback. She said it was because we were all underage for drinking and therefore had to sit in a different section of the restaurant.
She was nice about it, apologetic (no kidding! She just forced four people to get up and go to a different table!), so we all moved from the cool window-table to the more boring table she indicated. We ate, drank (ha, no, lemonades), and were merry. (The next day we all died. Ha ha.)
So I was thinking about all of this later. The reason for the restaurant's policy was to make sure they didn't accidentally serve the underage people alcohol. We weren't planning on ordering any, but fine. At the table we were at we could still have bummed some drinks from other people, if we were desperate or something, but we were planning to have a nice nonalcoholic lunch. Apparently they give people who can legally drink alcohol little shot glasses with free samples to try to get them to buy some, like Cosco if they had out-of-store restaurants, so it makes sense, even if it is irritating, to separate people too young to drink alcohol to make sure they didn't. This all sounds perfectly logical.
Except. Except that we were all obviously underage, which was how the waitress knew we were, so even if it were a different person serving us, unless blind people often become servers at the Prescott Brewing Company, that person would still be able to know, duh, don't serve us drinks. Except that the waitress was the same person who ended up serving us. Except that moving us all of fifteen feet would certainly not restrict our access to alcohol anymore than a small restaurant can successfully keep cigarette/cigar smoke from the smoking section from bugging the people in the non-smoking section. (Idle thought: do they ask smokers if they want the smoking section or non? And what would they say if someone smoking requested the non-smoking section?) Except that, in actuality, the restaurant's policy is about as perfectly logical as... er... something that isn't, actually, at all.
I'm not going to complain "That isn't fair" because you always have the air-violinist in the crowd rotely responding "Life isn't fair." How about "That's really, incredibly, amazingly stupid, redundant, and pointless" instead?

Essays for the Reading: In Which Essays Are Published, Generator-Style

2006-02-15T14:47:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't posted in quite a while...I do have things to say, but not much time in which to say them.
In the meantime, though, I will entertain you by posting two youth-rights-related essays I wrote for my first semester of English (wherein I also wrote the causal essay posted earlier).
The first is about "Involuntary Volunteering," the practice in some high schools (and middle and elementary schools as well, which is actually worse) requiring students to complete a certain amount community service in order to graduate. (Community service graduation requirements, or for the Orwellians out there, comserve gradreqs. Doubleplusungood.) Since this was to be an evaluation essay, all I could really say was that they stunk, but the implication is, they shouldn't be allowed either.
The second is about age-based curfew laws, a proposal that they should be abolished. I even unleashed the full power of Mike Males (who is, as you know, a sociologist) and his coauthored study on the effectiveness in age-based curfews. Also doubleplusungood.
So, the essays:

::Students should not have to perform a certain number of hours of community service in order to graduate from public high schools.
::This is because a good graduation requirement for a public high school should be constitutional and within the school’s legal scope of power, useful and fitting with the primary purpose of the school, and nondiscriminatory.
::As a part of the government, the constitutional limitations on schools are usually recognized by the Supreme Court, whose job it is to interpret the Constitution. It doesn’t take much interpreting, however, to see that community service graduation requirements are unconstitutional and, indeed, unethical. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits American citizens from being forced to do unpaid labor without due process of law. These students have committed no crime and faced no trial, and yet they have been sentenced to a choice between unpaid labor or a future with no diploma and limited prospects, simply because they refused to be exploited in this manner. We have a word for this “choice”: slavery.
::The illegality of community service graduation requirements should be enough to stop school administrators from using them. Yet the attitudes of many public schools regarding legality or the Constitution are represented by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in her essay “Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong:” “[T]he arguments against service… [are] more strained. The president of the Maryland Teachers Association, for example, claimed that it violated the Thirteenth Amendment. What’s really bothering the educators? Probably the fact that they would be required to change their teaching methods”—apparently a “claim” of unconstitutionality holds no water for her, at least.
::However, the constitutionality of these requirements is not the only weak point. For instance, requirements should fit in with the purposes of the school. It would be silly, for example, for coaches to work with people to be swift track runners and then base all of the awards at the track meet on an I.Q. test, or for automobiles to be built for convenience and safety and then rate them according to the usefulness of the seat cushions as rose fertilizer. So, if a school’s primary purpose were to train the next generation of litter lifters, food-bank-canned-food shelvers, and soup-kitchen workers, a community service requirement would make sense. But it isn’t and it doesn’t. Arguments that schools should teach (white, middle-class Protestant) values—indeed, that thinking that expecting students and the community to ignore over a century of slavery-free America in order to force students to pick up litter by the roadside would teach those values—only make sense if you don’t look too closely. A school’s primary purpose is to prepare students, through education, to be physically, mentally, and emotionally fit for life. As a government-run, largely compulsory institution, there is no requirement—there cannot be any requirement—for schools to make students morally straight as well as physically strong and mentally awake. If students want to be reverent, clean, cheerful, and all the rest, they can join the Scouts.
::Other opponents of community service graduation requirements point out weaknesses in the values argument:
::::First of all the notion that the school authorities believe is that somehow today's youth are selfish. The idea you can force people to not be selfish by forcing them to do labor is completely moronic. Imagine pointing a gun at someone and saying "I want you to care about other people's well-being!"This forced community service is wrong because it is forcing innocent people to do work without pay, and the last time I check[ed] that was unethical. Well you might wonder, "aren't you forced to do work in classes?" Yes, but that is not providing a service to another. Cleaning up litter, on the other hand, is. Well what about a shop class where you are required to build a house? You're not required to take the class to graduate, and so it is voluntary. But sticking to the facts, being required to provide services to others, and only a few that are deemed "acceptable" by the school, and then not being paid is wrong. It destroys the true meaning of volunteerism. Selfishness is not an entirely bad thing, and everyone has it. People only overcome it when they are allowed the freedom to grow on their own as individuals, and only then can they care about others. I believe most people do, and in fact many surveys show a majority of teens having done some form of volunteer work before they graduated anyway.
Requiring someone to conform to values that you think that they should have, and to show those values in a way that you think that they should, by requiring them to do work without any pay at all that you think that they should do is wrong. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, said that “An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal.” How many school administrators would consent to a law which would require them to do a certain amount of community service in order to keep their jobs?
::The academic goals of a school or academy are to educate and socialize. It is in recognition of education as a goal that most requirements are primarily based on grades, and in recognition of the goal of socialization that such abstracts as “participation” and “good citizenship” enter into the grade-making process at all. If our society still accepted slavery—if the freedoms to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness were not the keystones of our republic—perhaps unpaid labor should be a requirement of America’s youth. However, it isn’t, they are, and it shouldn’t.
::What else should a public high school require in a public high school requirement? Because education is state-run, non-discrimination is an important facet of every action a school administration takes. Yet equally clear is the pervasiveness of discrimination in community service graduation requirements. Students who are bored after school are likely to turn to voluntary community service just to pass the time—as indeed many do. Students who already have their plate full either are working jobs, doing extracurricular activities, studying, helping out at home by cooking and cleaning and watching younger siblings, or a combination of the above. The former are already doing community service on their own, so community service graduation requirements would have at best no effect on their work, and at worst may have a negative effect from feeling forced. The latter industrious students may be working to make ends meet or to save up for college, or they may be working at home because their parents or guardians may be working full-time. Either one means that economically disadvantaged families are harder hit than others by depriving the students of the time and money their family needs.
::Yet many advocates of community service graduation requirements seem to be laboring under the idea that high school students today do not live in worse poverty than previous generations, do not volunteer in higher numbers than ever before, do not have more expectations of themselves, do not have hours of homework daily, jobs, family lives. These supporters unleash their worst insult upon America’s youth—the claim that, all over the country, young people are hanging out. If this is true, young people must be doing it in ever-increasingly clever ways, with legislators (originators of city, county, and state-wide daytime curfews, nighttime curfews, and loitering laws) and businesses (originators of “All people 17 or under must be accompanied by an adult,” “No more than two minors at a time,” and “No minors loitering in the mall after 5 PM” rules) allied against youth. In any case, as long as the “hanging out” does not consist of vandalism, theft, drug abuse, and other illegal activities, is it really so bad that to prevent people from doing it? Didn’t teenagers “back in the good ol’ days” ever hang out themselves? The fact is, many teenagers’ schedules are so full that these requirements require them to sacrifice something that may be vital for their future.
::As one person against community service graduation requirements puts it:
::::Volunteer work? How is it volunteer work if your REQUIRED to do so!? I wonder how many hours of com[m]unity service they do in four years! And don[’]t they realise that high schoolers have jobs, mountains of school work, and other requirements to do? Fourty [sic] hours of work in four years won[’]t break anyone[’]s back, but then add in the other things no one thinks about! And then they are still expected to have friends because if they don[’]t then they are a risk for shooting up the school! Let[’]s require the teachers and anyone who thought this dealy up to do the fourty [sic] hours too! Let[’]s see how they like it.
::Students who are struggling with schoolwork are also overtly discouraged from graduating by community service graduation requirements. Why bother working like crazy bringing my grades up, the reasoning might go, or filling my transcript with extracurricular clubs and sports, if I also have to do forty or sixty or a hundred hours of community service on top of all my studying and joining?
::Most tragic of all is when the struggles to make ends meet at home and to graduate at school overlap, as they so often do. Being young puts one strike against you (any politician advocating forced community service for adults would be committing political suicide, although drug abuse and violent crime statistics indicate that middle-aged adults may be more in need of “values education” than teenagers), being economically disadvantaged adds another, but add the increased difficult of trying to find time to study when you have to do community service with jobs, chores, and stress at home conspiring against you—let alone to try to find time to sleep—and you may cry foul but you’re still out.
::Some supporters of community service graduation requirements claim that, because people aren’t forced to graduate from high school, requirements tied to graduation are completely voluntary. The person in question could simply drop out or go to a different school. However, this suggestion only furthers the discrimination against poorer students in particular, because their options—already limited by their socioeconomic status—would only be limited further by leaving high school. Although many people have left high school and still succeeded later in life, such stories are rare statistically and often do not include people who are forced by unfair graduation requirements to leave. Also, going to a different school is simply not an option for students whose geographic location offers only more schools with similar requirements, those who cannot afford academically the falling behind that often happens when switching schools, and those who cannot afford financially the option of attending a private school. One might as well suggest that forbidding people of a certain race or sexual orientation to graduate is not discriminatory because “they don’t have to graduate from that school.”
::There are other problems with community service graduation requirements. Any proposed solution for a problem can only solve a problem if the following are true: first, the problem must exist; second, the problem must be significant and be harmful if left unsolved; third, the solution must actually solve the problem; fourth, the problems caused by the solution must be lesser in magnitude than the problems caused by the original problem.
::What problems is involuntary volunteering supposed to solve? The reason most commonly cited by supporters of community service graduation requirements is to encourage volunteering over the long term as well as over the short term by teaching students values of “giving back to the community.” Leaving aside the problem that teaching students that they owe something to society simply for being alive was often the reasons given for extremely authoritarian systems of government, this “problem” really isn’t: the average teenager volunteers more than the average American, and rates of volunteering among teenagers are higher than they have been for fifty years.
::Still, trying to impart values of community service, even if it is not within the scope of schools’ legal abilities or obligations, is certainly a nice sentiment. It is true that there is a need for community service, and the more the merrier. The next question, then, is this: Do community service graduation requirements actually cause significantly more teenagers to volunteer over the long term?
::The answer, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (run by the Department of Education) and the Board of Labor Statistics: No.
::Offering another look at volunteerism is the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 from the U.S. Department of Education’s NCES, which focuses on the volunteer activities of teenagers and young adults. The survey follows the volunteer activity of people who were high school seniors in 1992. Within that group, 46 percent of people volunteered in high school: 38 percent did so freely, with 18 percent required to give of their time and talents. Mirroring the results of the BLS survey, the study shows that volunteering decreased dramatically 2 years and 8 years after graduation.
::On the other hand, there is a short-term boost to community service, so even if it doesn’t work over the long term, community service graduation requirements solve more problems than they create, don’t they?
::Not necessarily. When four out of five sixteen and seventeen-year-olds have a job at some point before graduation, and 61% of teenagers work during the school year, the financial help to the community is balanced—and tipped—by the financial harm to teenagers trying to fit in school, schoolwork, a job, chores, and required community service, a problem which significantly affects the volunteer rate of teens of lower socioeconomic status. Teenagers who sacrifice their schoolwork or the community service requirements have a harder time graduating, which translates to lower-paying jobs later in life; teenagers who sacrifice job obligations lose money more immediately. Either one means more trouble for the economy—the best way to increase jobs is to increase spending, and the best way to increase spending is to increase spending money. Teenagers with less spending money will spend less at local stores and restaurants, who may suffer the loss of customers by firing employees, who therefore have less money themselves, continuing the cycle. Economically speaking, required community service is harmful.
::It is also harmful to the political side of the country. The attitude fostered by schools who ignore the Thirteenth Amendment is a dangerous attitude to pass on to students who are the future of the American republic. Emphasizing the importance of the rights guaranteed in the Constitution in class but requiring involuntary servitude without due process of law of United States citizens also has the unfortunate result of causing distrust of the school. If they lie to us in history, why not in math or science?
::The problems created by community service graduation requirements—distrust by the students in America, the Constitution, and their schools and loss of time and money for the students, their families, and the community—are far greater than the positive effects of a temporary lessening in litter by the side of the road.
::As discriminatory rules which are both outside public schools’ rights and responsibilities, which fails to solve a problem that doesn’t exist anyway, community service is a poor choice for a public high school graduation requirement.

::Age-based curfew laws in the United States should be abolished.
::There is no question that the intent of curfews—to reduce crime and protect potential victims of crime—is a noble one, but there is serious evidence that curfew laws are largely ineffective, even counterproductive, in fulfilling this goal. In addition, enforcement of curfews often disproportionately targets people in poorer areas and minorities. Curfew laws also set a dangerous precedent for government involvement in the lives of private citizens and their families.
::One possible perspective on curfew laws is their effects on the rights of young people and their families. Teenagers and young children are recognized as citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (Constitution) Although freedom of mobility is not explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution, the fact that that freedom is restricted through incarceration for people convicted of crimes indicates that it is a freedom generally recognized by society, and the Ninth Amendment (“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”) has been used to guarantee other rights not written out in the Constitution, such as the right to privacy and the right to non-verbal symbolic expression. This right to free mobility is denied to young people by curfew laws, even when their maturity, life experience, size, and all other relevant factors are such that their age warrants no special treatment, as is the case for seventeen-year-olds the day before their eighteenth birthday, for example. It seems it would be difficult to justify arresting young people merely for being in public at certain times as a fulfillment of the constitutional mandate to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
::Another right traditionally recognized by common law and the courts is the right to parent children without needless governmental intrusion, especially when this parenting is both done by a fit parent and in the best interests of the teenager or child in question. Usually when there is a conflict with these parents’ rights, youth rights, and government, the conflict is between the parents and the youth; but when the parents and the young person are in agreement, the government’s only justification for intervening is when a truly criminal act is involved. It is one thing if the government steps in because the parent is allowing the young person to steal, for example, or perhaps do drugs, but the parent’s choice to allow the young person to be in public at certain times of the day is hardly a reason to abrogate parental rights.
::Another perspective on the constitutionality of age-based curfew laws is to view the Constitution and its amendments as documents whose primary purpose is not to delineate the rights granted to citizens, but to detail in what situations and in what ways the government may exercise its power, particularly to limit how the government may intervene when citizens are exercising natural, not government-given, rights (“life, liberty, and property”). Seen in this light, the danger of curfew laws is that they set a disturbing precedent for the use—and abuse—of government authority. If the government has so much power that it can arrest people for the crime of being out at certain times of day, that it can arbitrarily deprive an entire segment of the population of the ability to legally walk down the sidewalk without a conviction or trial or hearing or even a charge of criminality, what power doesn’t the government have? If the government can literally place an entire group of people under house (or school) arrest without due process of law on the assumption that if any member of that group is not in some institution or under the supervision of parent or state, even with parental permission, that parent must be “up to no good,” what can the government not do?
::The system of precedent on which the American legal system is based means that “foot-in-the-door” thinking is not entirely inappropriate. Indeed, historical evidence (curfews for black people before the Civil War, curfews for Japanese-Americans during World War II, curfews for women of any age) suggests that minority-directed curfew laws have not only been directed at age minorities, but racial and gender minorities as well, so the question of “who’s next? Blacks? Latinos? Women?” deserves a great deal of thought.
::The great amount of discretion afforded police means that even age-based curfews may become thinly disguised race-ethnicity-based curfews in the wrong hands. One study examined curfew arrest rates, broken down by race-ethnicity as well as by age, and concluded that
Four large counties displayed a racial bias in curfew enforcement. In Los Angeles County authorities arrest Latino and African-American youth for curfew violations at rates two to three times that of white youth. In Ventura County, curfew arrests of Latino and African-American youths are 8.4 and 7.4 times higher, respectively than those of white youths. In Fresno and Santa Clara counties, Latino youth are five times, and African-American youth, three times, more likely to be arrested for curfew violations. (Males, Marcallair)
::One co-author of the study, Mike A. Males, elaborates in his book Framing Youth: Ten Myths About the Next Generation about one case study examined, Monrovia, California:
::::The first question was who was getting curfewed. Monrovia, like most California cities of any size, is stratified. The uphill, northern part is affluent and nearly all white; family incomes top $50,000. The southern part is mostly Latino and black; one-third of the kids live in poverty. The high school sits in the middle. After school, masses of white kids drive north and masses of dark kids walk south. As a practical matter, youths who walk are more likely to be arrested for curfew than youths who drive, making curfews inherently biased against poorer teens.
::::Prior to the 1980s, most of Monrovia’s 2,500 teens were white; now, 55 percent are nonwhite. I found that black and Latino youths were slapped with 70 percent of the curfew citations, a rate nearly double that of whites. Even more troubling, nonwhites were 40 percent more likely than whites to be curfewed even after each racial group’s overall crime rate was factored out. After the curfew took effect, more than half of all offenses committed by nonwhite youths were curfew violations. That is, the curfew doubled the black and Latino youth ‘crime rate.’ (72)
::Are age-based curfew laws even effective? Do they actually reduce youth crime rates or protect young people from violent crime? The answer, according to a California-based curfew study for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, is a resounding no.
::The researchers studied cities and counties in California with curfews, and compared juvenile crime rates after the curfew with juvenile crime rates before the curfew, juvenile crime rates in cities and counties with less curfew enforcement, and adult crime rates after the curfew. The study examined arrest and crime rates from 1978 to 1996 for the entire state, also focusing on the twelve most populous counties and twenty-one cities with a population over 100,000. The study also compared youth violent death rates in order to examine the “protection” justification. ::::This study found that youth curfews do not reduce youth crime. This was true for any race of youth, for any region, for any type of crime. In those few instances in which a significant effect on youth crime was found, curfews were more likely to be associated with an increase in youth crime (not including curfew citations).
::::For the entire state of California there was no category of crime (misdemeanors, violent crime, property crime, etc.) which significantly declined in association with youth curfews. However, a significant increase in youth misdemeanors was associated with youth curfews. (Males, Macallair)
::When reduction of youth crime and protection of youth are both factored out of the decision to support curfews, the justifications become rather weak.
::An article in the Herald News explains about a Paterson, New Jersey, curfew vote: “Curfew proponents, including 2nd Ward Councilman Aslon Goow Sr., said they were pleased to see that voters agreed that something had to be done about the kids who congregate in public areas throughout the evening.” (“Paterson…”)
::Congregating? Or peaceably assembling? Even when curfew laws specifically state “exercise of First Amendment rights” as a valid reason for being out past curfew, while also providing that police officers have to make sure that the person being arrested for violating curfew had no acceptable excuse, police officers ignore the First Amendment as much as Goow does. I asked a police officer I know whether she would arrest someone who was exercising his or her right to peaceably assemble for violating curfew, and she said yes. She adamantly stuck to that answer even after I pointed out that the law itself states that she had no basis to arrest that person (Hough).
::Other arguments lack rationality. While New York City Councilman Dennis Gallagher may “wonder what good can happen to a child alone on the streets of New York at 2 in the morning,” and say that “no one's been able to give me a good answer on that,” (“Overnight…”) other people can think of plenty of good reasons to be out past the curfew (which affects every teenager as well as every “child”):
::::So, thanks to this curfew, you can't go to midnight mass. You can't see a late movie. You can't go to a concert at Miller's or just sit in [the] Mudhouse and play chess until closing. You can't drive to 7-11 at 2:00am to get those Twinkies that you're craving, or even take a walk around your block. All of these things are illegal. (Charlottesville speech)
::It is one thing for police to escort home a lost and disoriented eight-year-old (or, for that matter, a lost and disoriented eighteen, twenty-eight, or even eighty-year-old) and quite another to escort him or her to the police station in handcuffs to be booked for violating curfew. It is one thing to set a curfew for a convicted criminal on probation or parole, for the criminal’s sake and for society’s (the criminal has presumably already demonstrated a propensity for illegal behavior, so fears that late-night jaunts are on the wrong side of legality are not entirely groundless), but it is another entirely to keep someone with no criminal record from playing midnight basketball at the YMCA because of a nocturnal curfew or a homeschooler from engaging in community service or field trips to the park or art museum during school hours because of a daytime curfew.
::Many opponents of curfew laws argue that police time is better spent stopping non-status-offense criminals, like murderers, rapists, and arsonists. Although it is probable that police departments in general do concentrate their energy on dangerous and violent felony crimes, the monetary cost of enforcing a curfew can be high. For example, the Cincinnati Post reported in March of 2000 that “Cincinnati is spending $168,000 each year to staff recreation centers at night to temporarily detain juveniles who break the city's curfew,” which breaks down into an average of “about $800 per juvenile for violators detained last year [1999]” (Osborne). One hundred sixty eight thousand dollars from the taxpayers (both above and below eighteen) were spent because voters (all above eighteen) decided that keeping juveniles (all under eighteen) from merely being present in public was worth it.
::Even without statistics and facts and figures, the arguments for curfews simply don’t make sense. For example, the argument that age-based curfews are justified because they somehow protect the young people affected from violent criminals don’t make sense on two separate grounds: first, there is no evidence that curfews do protect minors, and second, there is no reason to limit that protection to people below eighteen or to not apply that same protection to different groups who may be in more need of such protection. The idea that passing a law to “protect” a group of people by arresting them if they don’t “protect” themselves is ridiculous, and victims of domestic violence are probably safer outside their homes than in them.
::If curfews are so effective in protecting people, why not pass curfews and other protective laws for other, equally vulnerable groups? Protection is the basis for laws mandating curfews for women, requiring male escorts for women in public, and requiring the use of veils and chadors to “protect” women from violence. Yet, in the United States at least, the most vociferous proponents of age-based curfews are strangely silent on the issue of legislating to reduce violence against women, though often forty-year-old housewives are arguably much more vulnerable to violent crime than seventeen-year-old teenage boys taking body-building.
In fact, curfews and other protective laws applied against people who are severely physically or mentally handicapped or ill, who are more likely to need protecting than the average fifteen-year-old, would likely meet instant opposition on grounds of discrimination, and the same discrimination arguments would be used if the idea that curfews are a tool to reduce crime is taken to the natural conclusion that groups with higher rates of crime, such as black people and (ironically) adults, should be subject to curfew.
::On the other hand, if equality is upheld by “protecting” all people and stopping all criminals equally, the most logical step would be to create a universal curfew that would apply to people of all demographics. Perhaps a government passing such a law could be accused of achieving the equality a lawn mower imposes on grass, but at least it would be a fair and non-discriminatory government. How many voters professing protection for teenagers would cast their ballots in favor of a proposal to “protect” themselves equally? How many would stand by their principles and forgo the nonessential freedoms of late-night parties, romantic walks under the moonlight, even midnight trips to the corner drugstore, these (presumably) average law-abiding citizens bravely sacrificing their nighttimes in order that police might apprehend more dastardly insomniac evil-doers for the preservation of law, order, and the rights Americans hold dear? Very few, I suspect.
::The constitutionality of age-based curfew laws are questionable, their success nonexistent, their enforcement often discriminatory, their logic confusing and their application expensive. Therefore, age-based curfew laws in the United States should be abolished.

Works Cited

“An overnight curfew for youngsters.” Staten Island Advance. 28 September 2004. 29 November 2005. Posted at http://www.youthrights.org/forums/showthread.php?t=1783&page=1&pp=20.
Charlottesville speech given by author of www.curfew.org. 29 November 2005 http://www.curfew.org/fight/speeches/charlottesville/
Constitution of the United States of America. 29 November 2005 www.house.us/constitution/constitution.html.
Hough, Karen. Personal Interview. 2005.
Males, Mike A. Framing Youth: Ten Myths About The Next Generation. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999.
----- and Dan Macallair. 1999. "An Analysis of Curfew Enforcement and Juvenile Crime in California." Western Criminology Review 1 (2). [Online]. Available: http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v1n2/males.html. Also available, including press release and executive summary, at www.cjcj.org.
Osborne, Kevin. “Youth curfew costs city $168,000.” 25 March 2000. Cincinnati Post. 29 November 2005 http://www.cincypost.com/news/2000/curfew032500.html.
“Paterson curfew flies with voters.” Salazar Christian. Herald News. 29 November 2005 http://www.bergen.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk2MDcmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTY4MTMzNzImeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkz.

Hope you like them!

"New Deal"- or Bad Deal?: In Which Involuntary Volunteering Is Re-examined

2005-12-08T12:04:00.000-07:00

::In an opinion article in the Winter 2005 issue of the Current Magazine, Sean M. Harris suggests a “mandatory national service program” as “the perfect answer to post-graduation uncertainty.”
::“Imagine," he says, "if the government took all the anxiety out of the process of determining one’s immediate future by mandating that every student partake in a national service program after commencement,” as though students who have no such anxiety, or would rather not have that anxiety alleviated in the way suggested, simply don’t exist, or perhaps don’t matter. But the rest of the article indicates that Harris just doesn’t care about distinctions of the sort to divide others who, like him, have “absolutely no idea” what they’re “going to do after college” from those who have started planning for a post-graduation life. After all, he recognizes no distinction between the programs initiated by the New Deal (all voluntary) and a mandatory program.
::When Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Congress created programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, they did not require the “large numbers of unemployed men and women” who “were put to work on improving the country in everything from urban development to trailblazing in National Parks” to do so. In fact, the CCC was created to offer these unemployed men and women meaningful, and more importantly paid, jobs, not to build bridges and clear dams. The emphasis was on “what your country can do for you,” not “what your country can force you to do for your country.”
::Similar lapses of logic occur throughout this essay. A bait-and-switch tactic is utilized to make readers agree that “[w]hen this sort of disaster strikes, such a national service program should be a no-brainer” and that “[f]ew would argue that activities like disaster response are not meaningful,” while readers are not even given examples of what “more mundane but nonetheless vital tasks” the program would require people to do so that they can decide for themselves whether the activities are meaningful or not. Claiming that the program “should be a no-brainer” is equally condescending. It is almost always more persuasive to presume that one’s readers, especially the ones who may still disagree, have brains than to assume otherwise, and one usually ends up being right.
::For example, although it takes a brain to argue that these programs will keep people from having “an unfair advantage by declining to volunteer” following college, that brain could also be used to realize that all the mandatory service program would do is postpone that post-graduation choice between volunteering or career by a year. An argument that by forcing the non-volunteers to volunteer, the program is “evening out the field” and allowing volunteers to do what they always dreamed makes no sense. The would-be volunteers are forced to spend what could have been time actually volunteering working for a program that certainly could not be called a “volunteer” program by any responsible use of the dictionary, since it would be mandatory and presumably paid. (Would the government want anyone who couldn’t afford to forego a salary for a year to simply starve to death?) It’s about as voluntary as the draft.
::The proposed program has other things in common with the draft. For one, the draft’s “most significant benefit” is “its egalitarian nature,” because it also forces “young adults from different socioeconomic groups” to “work side-by-side.” (If the purpose first stated as primary—helping victims of national disasters as well as helping out “even outside the realm of national emergencies”—can be so easily dismissed as not the most significant benefit, surely the goal of having virtually unlimited numbers of young people to serve in the military upon demand can be dismissed just as easily.) Even the introduction foreshadows a military feel—the author states that McCain “proposed tacking on a military component to an expanded Americorps,” while “Wesley Clark, a former general and presidential candidate, supported the creation of a voluntary civilian reserve with six-month tours of service.” Military components, former generals proposing tours of service, all made mandatory by a wave of the pen—sounds like the draft to me.
::This program is similar to another, even more historically controversial, “mandatory national service program”—slavery. The government will help graduating students in the same way that slaveowners traditionally “took all the anxiety” of planning a life out of the hands of their slaves. In fact, the arguments for slavery are very similar to the arguments for this program; the economy of the South was such that slavery was vital to growing large enough crops of tobacco, cotton, indigo, and so on to export north, even though it was morally repugnant. (This is why, even after slavery was abolished, the practice virtually lived on though sharecropping, which placed many former slaves right back into depending on extremely hard work for former slaveowners just to survive.) And this program is unconstitutional, just like slavery.
::Yes, Virginia, there is a Constitution…and it is the first thing politicians have to take into account when proposing laws. The reason why Clark’s idea was a “voluntary civilian reserve,” instead of a mandatory one, and why AmeriCorps has always been voluntary, is because of a little thing called the Fourteenth Amendment.
::The Fourteenth Amendment states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” What this means is that United States citizens (for example, college graduates) can’t be deprived of liberty (for example, by being forced to spend a year in service to the government) without due process of law (a trial) by the state where they live, and no state can enforce a law that would abridge those rights (meaning that even if the law was passed on a national level, the state could not enforce it constitutionally).
::In other words, even if it were “philosophically justified” (which I’m not sure that it is), it is not constitutionally justified. If this proposed program were voluntary, like AmeriCorps and the CCC, not only would it be constitutional but I would be a vocal supporter, but until then, I hope that mandatory national service never takes another step from unconstitutional pipe dream toward unconstitutional reality.

Essay: In Which An Essay Is Published On A NYRA Member's Blog, And It's Not Svend's

2005-11-15T13:29:00.000-07:00

I'm very proud of my latest essay, a causal essay I wrote for English. It's pretty long (circa three thousand words), so if you don't have the attention span or the interest, you can skip it and you won't hurt my feelings. Well, you'll hurt my feelings less than if you read it and then told me you absolutely hated it.
I changed it around a little, to accomodate the weird editing stuff in Blogger (mostly indenting problems), so keep in mind that ::: is an indent.
Without further ado, here it is, Mark IV:

:::Believing that parents owe no obligation to the child they physically created leads to a treatment of the child as property, which has profound implications for the child, for the parent, and for society as a whole.
:::In order to examine effects of believing that parents owe their children no obligations, including food, clothing, shelter, and protection, start by assuming that they do. The choice to provide for the child belongs entirely to the parents. The parents, then, have two options: they can either choose not to provide for and protect their children, or they can choose to, with no moral obligation involved either way. If the parents do not feed, clothe, shelter, and protect the child they physically created, either someone else cares for the child, or the child dies, at least at a very young age when the child is incapable of caring for himself or herself. If someone else cares for the child, that person becomes the child’s new protector and provider, and is faced with the same two options that the original parents had. If, on the other hand, the parents do provide for and protect the child, a further complication develops: the parents are giving the child things that they have no moral obligation to. In other words, they are doing the child a favor.
:::Favors have two important characteristics. First, the favors are revocable by the favor-giver in most circumstances. The second characteristic is that of repayment. Depending on the favor, the receiver is usually seen as having an obligation to return the favor in kind. Even if it is not necessary for the receiver to return a favor by default, if the favor-giver requests repayment, most people view giving repayment a moral obligation in most cases.
:::There are cases in which some people consider it morally wrong to revoke a favor. However, when the “favor” is morally irrevocable, it is no longer a favor but a moral obligation. Therefore, it is not consistent to view favors as not being revocable in the parent-child relationship and to view that same relationship as free of obligations from the parent to the child.
:::In the case of repayment of favors, it may be arguable that favors should only be repaid if the receiver of the favor accepted the favor consensually and knowledgeably and knowing that repayment might be expected. Since infants and even very small children do not understand that they are being given a favor or consent to being fed, sheltered, and so on, the favor should not be expected to be repaid, according to this argument. However, as children gain an understanding that they are being fed, clothed, sheltered, and protected, very few reject this by, for example, running away. Therefore, it is not consistent to view favors as needing repayment only when their receiver accepts the favors consensually and knowledgeably and knowing that repayment might be expected, and seeing the parent-child relationship as free of obligations from the parent to the child at the stage when the child understands—but is still dependent upon—the “favor” of food, water, shelter, et cetera.* Also, some parents do hold that the favor of providing for and protecting the child needs repayment even if the child is too young to provide for himself or herself, as evidenced by the statement that “your payment for doing your chores is getting to live in this house and eat our food” to children as soon as they are old enough to ask about allowances, even if they are too young to be reasonably expected to live on their own.
:::Although few parents probably take time to think of all this when providing for their child, the treatment of the providing and protecting as a favor that is both revocable and possibly needing repayment is clearly present on a subconscious level for most. Four stock phrases and sentences of parents both on and off the silver screen provide perfect examples: “As long as you’re living in my house, you’ll follow my rules.” “I put food on your plate, clothes on your back, and a roof over your head, and this is how you repay me?!” “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it!” “After everything I do for you, the least you can do is….”
The first and third clearly show the revocable side of favors—the first invites the contrapositive that “if you don’t follow my rules, you won’t live in my house anymore,” while the third has more ominous overtones taken to their natural conclusion most notably in Biblical law allowing parents to have their allegedly disobedient, drunkard, glutton sons stoned without being guilty of murder (on the word of the parents alone) (Bible KJV) and Canadian, United Kingdom, Italian, and Australian laws allowing for post-partum depression as a defense of infanticide. (“Murder…”) The second and fourth both show the “repayment” expectation.
:::The clearest effect that acting as though the protection of and providing for a child were a favor on the part of the parent is that if the child picks up on this attitude (as she could hardly avoid, if her parents were fond of using any of the aforementioned sentences), she might start thinking that if she did not follow the rules, repay her parents properly, do whatever it was that was the least she could do after everything that they do for her, then her parents might kick her out of the house, take the food off her plate, take the clothes off her back, stop doing everything they had been doing for her, or even fulfill the threat inherent in “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it!”. Considering the theory that the first relationships someone has—in that person’s family—form the template for later relationships, learning that security comes at the cost of pleasing and obeying people could damage someone’s future relationships for life. If home is, as Robert Frost says in his poem “Death of a Hired Man,” where “when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” providing a family life with even the overtones of “when you have to go there, they might take you in, but only if you do what they want you to do, repay them for the favor, follow their rules, et cetera” could make a child “homeless” in the truest sense of the word.
:::Another effect of this view is one many people object to upon hearing. This effect is that the parents begin to consider their children their property.
Some people don’t object to this view at all. “I claim that parents own their children….I claim this in the most radical sense. I claim that parents own their children as one owns a spoon” says someone on an online forum, (Guillorey) echoing Aristotle’s belief that children belong to their parents (actually, their father) until they become adults (Matthews)—although the former person disagrees, saying that “children gain freedom only by the grace of their parents.”
:::Others do object to the idea that parents view their children as property not by saying “who cares? They’re right to think so,” but by saying that in industrial nations, no one has “owned” someone else since slavery was abolished and women gained property rights.
:::Property is something (or someone) which is primarily controlled by someone or something other than itself, with no reciprocal control over that someone or something. The government uses its authority to enforce property rights by passing and enforcing laws to stop people from exercising control over other people or their property; if the government does not use its power to stop parents from exercising control over their child, the government is according parents the same property rights over children that it accords them over other non-persons, such as animals. If parents are the primary controllers of their child, as they are in the current legal system, then a necessary consequence of those parents having no obligation to their child is that they own the child.
:::The ramifications of parents treating their children as property also need to be explored fully. After all, if granting parents property rights over their children only leads to better care for the children in question, what’s wrong with that? Some of the effects, however, are far more dangerous for the child.
:::One of the most dangerous effects is first on the child but translates into a much larger impact on society at large as the children age, become part of adult society, and parent children themselves. A direct result of treating children as their parents’ property is that people will be used to being property. Rasing people from birth on to be used to being another person’s property may not be the best way to ensure the continuation of a society devoted to the principles of life, liberty, property, and equality.
:::Other, more indirect, effects include the results of inevitable conflict between what the child wishes to do and what the parent wants the child to do (or not to do). Sometimes these conflicts are not merely over the parent trying to protect a child in need of protection, but over more trivial things that, if the average adult were to try to force onto another average adult, would win that person the label of “control freak.” Because the adult has legal authority, as well as usually greater physical strength, the adult almost always wins. (For very young children, the bonus that most people at their age do not understand that “Because I said so” or “Because I’m the adult” are not valid arguments also helps adults assert their authority.) Since any challenge is considered a challenge to the parent’s property rights, “insubordination” and “talking back” become crimes in and of themselves. Punishments range from verbal abuse, invasions of privacy and personal space and loss of property to loss of labor and loss of physical freedom. What is considered a crime, whether the child is guilty, and how the child is punished all are decided unilaterally by the parent. Even if the broken rule is not a “control freak” one, the final word is the parent’s; even if the parent tries to be as just as possible, the structure of the parent-child dynamic sets the parent up to fail.
:::People tend to reproduce what they know. Thus, parenting is considered one of the main agents of socialization: the way one is raised becomes the lens through which the rest of life is viewed. (This could mean rejecting everything that one’s parents thought, or blindly accepting all of it, but usually is somewhere in between.) A person who is raised in a family where “justice” is brought by someone setting what is the crime, accusing the person of committing that crime (even post de facto), bringing the person to be judged, deciding if they’re guilty, and carrying out the punishment is one for whom the justice system works by having the accuser, legislator, police officer, judge, jury, prosecutor, and jailer all the same person. Therefore, society—at least any society that does not consider that particular justice-system structure ideal or even good—suffers by allowing parents property rights over their children.
:::Society, on the other hand, has its own problems when this “command/obey” relationship between parents and children becomes generalized into all adults and all children. Children are seen as collective property—not to the extent that Plato advocated (see The Republic), as it is still accepted that “strangers” should have less authority than family members or adult friends of the family, but still to the point that these “strangers” often are seen as having more authority over the child than the child him-or-herself. Children are told that adulthood in and of itself is enough for the child to respect the adult in question, regardless of intelligence, maturity, stupidity, immaturity, criminality, or any morally relevant qualities.
There are other extremely negative consequences of teaching children “respect” for all adults, at least when “respect” is translated as: “do what they say to do, trust them, don’t ever say no, let them touch you (tousle your hair, poke you, pinch your cheeks, kiss you and hug you), let them hurt you even if you don’t like it,” as it often is. One of the most obvious of these consequences is that it sets children up for sexual abuse. How are children, especially very young ones, to understand the difference between being touched when they don’t want to be touched, hurt when they don’t want to be hurt, not saying no, or always obeying adults in a non-sexual matter and the same in a sexual matter?
:::Society also has the same punishment problems that parents have. Schools are a striking example of how children often have the same invasions of privacy, loss of property rights (remember “confiscation”?), loss of labor and physical freedom, and even, in some places, corporal punishment that they may have at home. The same arbitrary nature of justice is upheld, the same ridiculously small “crimes” are punished, the same command/obey relationship is the most common dynamic in schools as at home, and the same lack of due process is common even in public, government-run schools. (In fact, in Ingraham v. Wright, the Supreme Court ruled that the Eighth Amendment was not valid in public schools because it apparently only protects criminals from cruel and unusual punishment. [“Ingraham…”])
:::Society also helps to support the parent-child relationship as a command/obey relationship, by justifying, legitimating, and enabling this relationship in the behavior of parents toward their children. Society justifies it by using the media to portray parents as either cruel and Evil with a capital E, a stereotype with which no parent would identify, or good and loving—no parents who need help to stop abusing their kids, nobody with post-partum depression, no real parents. The media perpetuate the myth that the mere fact of parenthood—in some cases just caused by a lack of proper birth control use—confers magical powers and mystical knowledge that make it so that parents “naturally” love their children and know what is best for them. Stereotypes of children tend toward the children being either helpless (if children don’t have proper adult guidance/ownership, they get into trouble, die, starve, get raped, commit crimes, ad nauseam) or, if the child rebels against the status quo, it is because they are bad, ungrateful, rebellious, and most of all wrong. Therefore, the unspoken argument goes, children need protection—even if it violates their liberties—and if they try to waive the protection, it must be because they are bad.
:::Society legitimates it by setting up government institutions specifically to help parents control their children’s lives. For example, runaway laws require states who find that a minor has run away from their parent, for whatever reason, to send that minor back to the state from which they came and to their parents. (“Welfare…”) Curfew laws take parental curfews one step further—even if parents don’t set as early a curfew as the state or city does, the police can arrest and incarcerate a juvenile simply for being out at a certain time of night (or day, for some curfews). Also, in some places parents can charge their children with being “incorrigible”—not necessarily criminal—and the child could be put in prison. (“Authorities…”)
:::Society enables parents and other adults to abuse and neglect children in several ways. For example, children are set up to be abused by lessons to obey all adults rather than given tools to combat the inherent power imbalance between young children and adults; if children come forth to be abused, they are often called liars and manipulative (or, for younger children, misled) in news stories on the case, and abuse or neglect is extremely difficult to prove. Even when adults are convicted of abuse, they are often sentenced with extraordinarily light sentences. Mike A. Males, a sociologist who lived in Bozeman, Montana, offers some interesting anecdotes from the time he lived there, less than twenty years ago:
"In 1987, the Bozeman, Montana, school district stripped the track letter from a student alleged to have held a party at which other students drank alcohol; the same district took no action when a 31-year-old coach pleaded guilty to drunkenly assaulting a 19-year-old woman outside a tavern. A 16-year-old served a year in jail for exposing himself to women and writing a bad check; the 32-year-old youth program worker who had sexually molested the boy for four years was sentenced to 30 days suspended, community service, and counseling. The admitted molesting of a 12-year-old girl and scrawled notes from a half-dozen young girls who had been victims of attempted rape failed to persuade a judge to sentence the assailment to prison; when the man later brutally raped two adult women, he received 70 years as a 'repeat' offender." (Males)
:::The media also enable adult crimes against young people when they emphasize the wrong culprits. Most people are familiar with “stranger danger;” many fewer are familiar with statistics that state that twice as many kidnappings of children are due to parents kidnapping them than strangers doing so. (NCRJS) Statistics like these could save lives.
:::When society supports the property model of the parent-child relationship by expanding, justifying, enabling, and legitimating it, society causes the same problems that parents do when they treat their children as property. What society does to its children, the children will do to society; when society treats children dictatorially, children are socialized to grow up to be dictators.
:::Believing that parents owe no obligation to their children does lead, if unintentionally in some cases, to treating the child as property. Treating the child as property has profound implications for the child, for the parent, and for society as a whole.

Works Cited

“Authorities, Courts Can Help Parents Deal With Incorrigible Children.” 8 November 2005 .
Bible, King James Version. Deuteronomy 21:18 to Deuteronomy 21:21. Last accessed through on 8 November 2005.
Guillorey, Gil. “Parents own their children.” Forum thread, Anti-State.com. Posted 8 April 2002. 8 November 2005 .
Ingraham et al v. Wright et al, 430 U.S. 651. United States Supreme Court, 19 April 1977. 8 November 2005. Accessed through .
Males, Mike A. Scapegoat Generation, The. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1996.
Matthews, Gareth, "The Philosophy of Childhood", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2002 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), .
“Murder-definition of Murder in Encyclopedia.” Dictionary.LaborLawTalk.com. 8 November 2005 .
National Criminal Reference Justice Service. “Kidnappings of Juveniles: Patterns from NIBRS.” Juvenile Justice Bulletin, June 2000. 8 November 2005 .
“Welfare and Institutions Code 1300-1308.” 8 November 2005 .

* Although children who do run away as soon as they understand the situation and their choices in the matter present an interesting sub-topic for discussion in treating the providing and protecting of a parent to a child as a favor rather than an obligation, so few cases involve this situation that I will reserve that topic for another discussion entirely.

Ten on Tuesday: In Which Gwen's Spot Becomes, For A Tuesday, A Conventional Blog

2005-10-18T11:28:00.000-07:00

(My mom is making me do this...I won't do it again--"You are safe, do not panic.")

10 Favorite People from History....in no particular order
1) Cleopatra
2) Leonardo da Vinci
3) Albert Einstein
4) Edgar Allan Poe
5) Sophocles
6) James Thurber
7) Douglas Adams
8) Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens
9) King George III
10) Michelangelo
Mostly, people who said a lot of funny stuff in my quotation dictionary, or with lots of interesting things about them, or both. If I had more room, I'd include Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, etc.

There you go, Mom. Now my blog has a "Ten on Tuesday List," and can truly be proud to call itself a real blog.

New Song: In Which Another Song Is Published

2005-10-15T15:05:00.000-07:00

I've written a new song and I wanted to share it with everyone.

Tendencies
I have a tendency to want to think for myself
I have a tendency to want a choice or two
I have a tendency to want a little freedom
I have a tendency to stay out past curfew

I have a tendency to want to choose what I learn
I have a tendency to be political
I have a tendency to want to express myself
And I think that's understandable

Do these tendencies make me dangerous?
Do these tendencies evoke feelings of fright?
Do these tendencies make me rebellious?
I think they might

I have a tendency to want to wear what I want
I have a tendency to want to keep what's mine
I have a tendency to want to be more than my age
I have a tendency to step out of line

I have a tendency to want to speak for myself
I have a tendency to want my voice to be heard
I have a tendency to want to be safe from harm
And I don't think that's too much to ask for

Do these tendencies rebel against the status quo?
Do these tendencies vaguely worry you?
Do these tendencies upset your well-ordered world?
I think they do
Yeah I think they do

Woohoo! I was lucid dreaming!: In Which Gwen Talks About What She Does At Night, And No One Cares

2005-10-01T11:12:00.000-07:00

So, the other night I had a partial lucid dream! (A lucid dream is a dream in which you know that you are dreaming and can actually control the dream.) Usually, if I figure out that I'm dreaming, I can't do anything about it- I might comment to someone else in the dream "it's all a dream anyway" but it doesn't change the narrative at all.
This dream, however, was different. The setting was a large room with lots of people and lots of food, a yummy party. How I could tell that I was dreaming was that I lost a tooth. (This may seem very strange, but losing a tooth is a frequent dream theme for me. In fact, it's the only time when I have feeling sensations, because I feel the tooth loosening and coming out. It's really gross, and I'm sure it symbolizes something, but in any case, the fact that I lose teeth way more often in dreamworld than the real world has finally penetrated the consciousness of my dream-person.) So what did I do when I took control of my dream? I tried to fly. I have never, ever had a flying dream, supposedly so common for everyone else (I've never had that dream where you get to school/work/the outside world and suddenly realize you're naked either, actually), and I thought it would be pretty cool.
Unfortunately, I was still enough in the dream that gravity still worked, although I managed to do superhuman bouncing (pretty fun) and even the usual floating-drifting that passes for flying in my dreams, but the dream took over in the form of the party getting busted up by our alien overlords before I got the chance to have an actual flying dream. So I was pretty bummed by that. Still, even if I didn't get an actual chance to fly, I had a lucid dream! Woohoo!

Why we're part of the youth rights movement: In Which Gwen Rambles, But It's On Purpose

2005-09-05T15:44:00.000-07:00

I just wrote a youth rights version of a wonderful poster that www.northernsun.com has about women's liberation.
The women's liberation one states:
Because woman’s work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we’re the first to get fired and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it’s our fault and if we get beaten we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we’re nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we’re nymphos and if we don’t we’re frigid and if we love women it’s because we can’t get a “real” man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we’re neurotic and/or pushy and if we expect childcare we’re selfish and if we stand up for our rights we’re aggressive and “unfeminine” and if we don’t we’re typical weak females and if we want to get married we’re out to trap a man and if we don’t we’re unnatural and because we still can’t get an adequate safe contraceptive but man can walk on the moon and if we can’t cope or don’t want a pregnancy we’re made to feel guilty about abortion and… for lots and lots of other reasons we are part of the women’s liberation movement.

So here's my version, the youth rights poster:
Because children are seen and not heard and if we assert ourselves we’re talking back and if we don’t we’re trampled over and if we don’t do our chores we’re irresponsible and if we try to get paid work we’re too young and if we stay in school we’re dependent and if we try to leave school we’re labeled dropouts and if we complain we’re whiney and if we stand up for ourselves we don’t know how good we’ve got it and if we don’t do what we’re told we’re hit or yelled at and if we hit or yell back we’re incorrigible and if we run away we’re returned and if we skip school we’re breaking the law and if our parents can’t deal with us we’re imprisoned and if we bring property to school it’s “confiscated” and if we commit a crime we’re part of a horrible crime wave and if we try to get a bank account or an abortion or birth control or alcohol or a house or an apartment without our parents’ permission we’re breaking the law and if we express ourselves at school we’re expelled and if we speak out politically we’re adorable or ignored and if we try to take charge of our lives and our rights we’re patted on our heads and told to run along and play and… for lots and lots of other reasons we are part of the youth rights movement.

Youth-rights related songs I've written: In Which Gwen Publishes Songs

2005-09-05T15:02:00.000-07:00

Here are several songs that I have written based on youth rights.

Don’t

Your eyes are looking in my direction but you don’t see me
You’re hearing every word I say but you’re not listening
Your mouth makes all the appropriate sounds but your mind is somewhere else

Don’t ignore me
I know you don’t care what I have to say
Don’t ignore me
Yeah it does matter to me anyway

Don’t you remember what it was to be told to sit still, to shut up?
Don’t you remember what it was to be told to look but don’t touch?
Don’t you remember what it was to be seen but not heard?
Don’t you remember what it was to be scorned, ignored, degraded?

Don’t ignore me
I don’t ignore you
Don’t ignore me
I’m a person too

Don’t ask questions if they don’t have the answers
Don’t give answers if they didn’t ask any questions

I am an echo in a vacuum
I am a shadow at midday
I am the end of eternity
I am the needle in the hay

I am the tree falling in the forest
When there’s no one else around
And I scream as I fall and I die
But I don’t make a sound

Don’t ignore me
I know you don’t care what I have to say
Don’t ignore me
Yeah it does matter to me anyway

How could you forget
Sit still, shut up?
How could you forget
Look, don’t touch?
How could you forget
Being seen but not heard?
How could you forget
Being scorned, ignored, degraded?

Forgetting like you did is one of my biggest fears
But how could you forget eighteen years?

Damned

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t
Damned if you will, damned if you won’t
Why’s the Man got it in for me?
I just want to be young, young and free.

I want to do what I want and don’t what I don’t
Don’t want the government saying No no no
I want to work, want to drive, want to go out and vote
I want to choose to drink or to light up a smoke

The law says I got to go to school (Damned if you do)
The law says I got to follow the rules (Damned if you don’t)
The law says I’ve got be what they want me to be (Damned if you will and damned if you won’t)
Where I can go, what movies I see (I just want to be young)
What I can wear- I just want to be me (Young and free)

Since when has birth been a crime?
Well I’m doing eighteen years’ time
Why does the Man have it in for me?
I just want to be young, young and free.

Damned if you do (where I can go)
Damned if you don’t (what movies I see)
Damned if you will (what I can wear)
Damned if you won’t (I just want to be me)
Just want to be young, young and free.

Where I can go, what movies I see (I just want to be young)
What I can wear- I just want to be me (Young and free)
Why’s the Man got it in for me? (I just want to be young)
I just want to be young, young and free (Young and free)
I just want to be young, young and free
I just want to be young, young and free

For Your Own Good

It's for your own good- It's not discrimination
We're just doing what we should To prevent your exploitation
It's for your own good- It's for your own protection
We're just doing what we should To stop your dereliction

'Cause if I could work I'd be enslaved
And if I could have sex you know I'd be raped
If I could watch what I want I'd end up perverted
If I could go where I would you know I'd be murdered

It's for your own good- It's not discrimination
We're just doing what we should To prevent your exploitation
It's for your own good- It's for your own protection
We're just doing what we should To stop your dereliction

'Cause if I didn't go to school I'd end up real dumb
And if I could live where I wanted I'd end up as a bum
If I lived on my own I'd end up getting banged
If I thought for myself I'd end up in a gang

It's for your own good- It's not discrimination
We're just doing what we should To prevent your exploitation
It's for your own good- It's for your own protection
We're just doing what we should To stop your dereliction

It's for our own good- It may be discrimination
We're just doing what we could To kill your expectations
It's for our own good- It's for our own protection
We're just doing what we could To destroy any objections

Walking- Curfew Version
Based off of Walking, by Patsy Cline

I go out walking
After midnight
Out in the moonlight
Just like we used to do
I'm always walking
After midnight
Breaking curfew

I walk for miles
Along the highway
Well that's just my way
Of saying I want to
Go out walking
After midnight
Breaking curfew

I stop to see a cop arresting
A passing teen pedestrian
Maybe she's protesting like me
It seems the First Amendment
Is no legal imped'ment
'Cause we don't have rights, you see

I go out walking
After midnight
Out in the starlight
Just hoping I don't see
A cop a-walking
After midnight
Searching for me

I stop to see a cop arresting
A passing teen pedestrian
Maybe she's protesting like me
It seems the First Amendment
Is no legal imped'ment
'Cause we don't have rights, you see

I go out walking
After midnight
Out in the starlight
Just hoping I don't see
A cop a-walking
After midnight
Searching for me

Guess the Series: In Which Gwen Confuses Potterites

2005-08-17T17:22:00.000-07:00

The story begins with extraneous birthday narration, then the hero of the tale is told that he is fated to attempt to defeat the Dark Lord, an evil being who, although being thwarted before, lay dormant for years before gathering the strength to return. With the aid of two close friends, along with many others met along the way, the hero finds himself visiting lands he thought purely legendary, meeting people he had never heard of (some good, some evil, and some just plain strange), and doing things he had never thought possible. (He also discovers that he is far more well-known than he had ever imagined.) Despite the fact that his friends and allies are in many ways more resourceful, knowledgeable, and powerful than the hero, all agree that only he has the power- and the destiny- to defeat the Dark Lord.
At the point in the story when I started composing this, the hero had, alone of all his companions, fainted after being attacked by strange evil beings, who, despite having little physical substance, go around in long black robes scaring the living daylights out of everyone. The hero's mentor, an elderly wizard with the bad habit of keeping important secrets from him, is there when he regains consciousness to explain many things from him- the nature of the rising of the Dark Lord and his minions, how exactly the hero's previous guardian got him into this whole kill-or-be-killed mess with the Dark Lord to begin with, and so on.
A couple more hints...
The hero's elderly-wizard mentor is betrayed by another wizard, who was corrupted by long study of the Dark Arts, though he studied them to help good.
This series was made into a series of (non-animated!) fantasy movies not too long ago.
These books are very popular and famous, and have been since their release.
The author's name has, among other letters and punctuation marks, two periods, an R, a J, an N, an L, an I, and an O.
Oh yeah, and pretty much of all the above is spoiler.

Can you guess the series of which I speak? Quick, get out a piece of paper and a writing utensil (pencil, pen, stylus, spaghetti noodle, whatever) and write your guess. Scroll down...

If you guessed the Harry Potter series, by J. K. Rowling, you...are...WRONG! Sorry, I was talking about the Lord of the Rings series, by J. R. R. Tolkien. At the moment, I am re-reading the Fellowship of the Ring, and like every other blogger on the Internet, am compelled to tell you exactly what I'm doing at any particular time. The only difference between me and the other bloggers is that you got, at least, a fun trick to play on your (preferably Harry-Potter-obsessed; you know the type- scrapping pictures of them sitting around with the caption "Waiting For Harry Potter #," the ones who went to the bookstore at ten o'clock to wait for two hours until they put the sixth/fifth/fourth/third/second book on the shelves, just so they could be first in line) friends out of my blog.
Anyway, there are enough differences between HP and LOTR for me to say that there is no more than a very heavy influence of one on the other (or, who knows, maybe she'd never read any of them... but I find that highly unlikely)- for instance, the presence of important females in HP, seven books instead of three-supposed-to-be-one-plus-the-Hobbit-and-the-Silmarillion-and-all-of-the-books-of-Middle-Earth-legends, and the use of an overall repeatedly-defeat-Voldemort-and-try-to-win-the-Cup-at-the-same-time instead of an overall destroy-the-Ring-and-temporarily-defeat-Evil theme.
After I re-read the Fellowship, I'll try to wangle a swing by the library to borrow the Two Towers, and then re-read the Return of the King. After that, on to a re-reading of the Hobbit, then the Silmarillion, then perhaps to the aforementioned all-of-the-books-of-Middle-Earth-legends. At the end of that, I'll probably browse through Harry Potter to give my brain a bit of a break, and giggle over the fact that none of the characters seem to notice that calling the Dark Lord (of the Harry Potter series, obviously) "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" is naming him exactly as much as calling him "Lord Voldemort" or, say, "Tom." (The same thing happens in the movie The Village, incidentally, with all of the villagers referring to "the ones who must not be spoken of" as "the ones who must not be spoken of," and yet "the ones who must not be spoken of" [or, as I prefer to call them, "the ones of whom we must not speak"] are the one topic that they speak of continuously. Hmm.)
Okay, I'm done now. Go check out regender.com on Tamora Pierce's web site, it's disorienting.

Half-Full vs. Half-Empty: In Which Gwen Rants About Split Hairs, And No One Listens

2005-08-08T16:58:00.000-07:00

Someone with a very limited one-way-or-the-other mind has apparently decided that whether you say "half-full" or "half-empty" signifies a whole host of things, among them your entire worldview and permission for people who think that they are more intelligent than you to smirk and say "or half-empty" if you say "half-full" or "or half-full" if you say "half-empty," simply because you are trying to communicate the state of approximate equilibrium between air and a fluid in a given container.

Note to whomever it was: Watch out. If I ever find out who you are, I'm coming after you.

Note to all of the people arguing that the glass is too big, or is sufficient, or is "halfway between half-full and half-empty" (I'm not kidding, someone actually said that), thinking that they're funny: You're not.

Note well-meaning people who think they're being funny: You're not either.

Note to the smirking general populace: Enough about the half-full/half-empty thing. You've made your point: There is balance in the universe, we all follow an ever-changing path, and you are so much more clever than the rest of us poor intellects who thought that you could understand with only one of a pair of complementary adjectives what we were talking about.

Whether I say something is half-full or half-empty depends solely on the situation and my conscious choice.

But because, apparently, you couldn't figure out this relatively simple behavioral concept and instead have decided to justify all the money you spent on The Idiot's Guide To Annoying The Heck Out Of People Around You With Stupid Misapplied Psychobabble In The Vain Hope That It Will Make You Look Smart by pushing your stupid black-and-white view of the universe on me, I've made a handy-dandy reference table for you. Scroll down (or press control+end, or whatever) to the bottom of the post to see it, unless, of course, you're lazy, which wouldn't surprise me if you're a member of the aforementioned smirking general populace.

You're back. So, there you go. From now on, whenever I say that something is half-full, or half-empty, or for that matter partly cloudy or partly sunny, or any other half and half combination, you know to just pay attention and get from it that "huh, she says her glass is half-empty" or "the weather is partly sunny" rather than "haha, she must be a pessimist."

In closing, let's remember the probably misquoted words of Maxine- "The glass isn't half-full or half-empty, it's a glass that's already had someone else's germs on it."

*How I Am Likely To Describe The State Of The Container*
Emphasis:	Filling	Emptying
Past progress	"Half full"	"Half empty"
Future progress	"Half empty"	"Half full"

Regender: In Which Gwen Tells The World About Something Really Quite Cool

2005-08-06T14:47:00.000-07:00

Someone has created a hack where you can browse the Internet and have genders switched throughout each page. Not only does it change pronouns like him to her, and common words like girl to boy, but it also changes first names (and occasionally last names as well- ever heard of famous civil rights activist Mary Lucille Queen, Jr.?). It's kind of surreal to, for instance, look up feminism in Wikipedia, or to read the Book of Genesis (although Eden keeps getting changed) in the Queen Jamie Bible, or to read where a certain feminist has posted all the hate mail she gets (here). And, of course, to check out my blog, George's Spot.
It's very thought-provoking, especially the anti-feminism people who say things like "If a person believes in the bible, [sic] it is quite obvious that masculism began in the garden [sic] of Edwin when Evan was away from his wife by choice." Or "Hello all you stinking masculists. Do you ever read your bible [sic] it say's [sic] that a woman is to rule over the [sic] man. Even Goddess is sexist she does'nt [sic] want men to be preachers or do any activities in worship except sit there and listen and take ladies supper. I dread the day when a men is elected president were [sic] doomed for hell. [sic] I think that the lady [sic] wants only women to be the [sic] president. If masculist want to be as equal than why don't you gals make the men sign up for [sic] draft of [sic] fight for them to. [sic] I think that men in the ARMY is a dicrase [sic] to our contry [sic] why do they even join any way [sic] they wont [sic] even be able to fight in a war. I can only imagine a man with a gun he would'nt [sic] be able to fire it or shoot someone. I [sic] says in the bible [sic] women are supperior [sic] than [sic] men and goddess [sic] makes it that way for a reason. I sure can tell you gals are'ne [sic] nottin [sic] but yankees [sic]". (Unfortunately, it isn't a spellchecker as well.)
For some gender-bending fun, check out regender.com.

Texas Instruments Contest Thingy: In Which Gwen Loses Her Mind

2005-08-06T13:37:00.000-07:00

Recently I discovered something on the Texas Instruments website that allows you to design a calculator cover with their admittedly very limited design tools. Being bored, I did so, then discovered that I have an opportunity to win $1000 and a bunch of calculators for the school of my choice (and not in the You Could Win One Million Dollars! way either). All I have to do is get more people to vote for me than anybody else can. (Doubtful.)
So, go here and vote for me! You can vote once per day, but you have to be over thirteen (stupid adultist age restriction mutter mutter grrr). Or you can vote less. I really don't care all that much. But it would be nice to win.

Edit: Apparently the qualifying round is over, so voting will commence on the semi-finalists (one of whom I'm not) from 1 October to 15 October. Good luck, other people who from the looks of some of them just got all of their friends to get a whole bunch of different e-mail addresses/birthdays and vote more than once per day!

Happy Anniversary!: In Which Gwen Does Something Sweet, And Hopes Everyone Forgets About It

2005-08-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

Today is my parents' ten-year anniversary. They have been happily married since 5 August 1995 and are still going strong!
Due to all the crazy things going on right now, mostly building a house, they couldn't celebrate their anniversary as planned (going to Las Vegas to renew their vows with Elvis as the preacher) and in fact, both of them completely forget about their anniversary until Mom saw something with the date on it. (That's got to signify something...)
They went out and had lunch together, but other than that it's a pretty ordinary-seeming day.
Everyone wish them a happy anniversary and best wishes for the next ten years!

Me with my buddies Max Planck and Albert Einstein: In Which Gwen Goes Groupie

2005-07-27T15:03:00.000-07:00

Left to right: Max, me, and Al

Note: The "Read more- click here" for this post is pointless, because this is the entire post. So don't click.

Supreme Court Land Decision: In Which Something Happens, And Gwen Talks About It

2005-07-16T12:19:00.001-07:00

Okay, this is actually kind of older news, but it happened within the last month and I haven't gotten a chance to be on here recently...
The Supreme Court recently decided that it should be up to states and municipalities to decide their laws on eminent domain, if a private commercial owner wanted a private property, whether or not to give it to them. Basically, this means that if you have a nice summer home on a lake, and a casino or hotel chain decided they wanted your view, they could tell the city or state, and the city or state could tell you to get out and find a new place to live. If you have a family business and a McDonald's decides they want your property, they can get it legally through the state.
Now I think that if you aren't hurting anyone, you should basically be able to do what you want on your own private property. This was the basis for the eminent domain laws that were in place. For instance, someone owned a whale in South Dakota (I've heard, may just be an urban legend, but it's still a great example). They could not get enough water or food to keep the whale alive, so it died and stunk up South Dakota for miles around. Would the state be within its rights to say "Get that whale off your property, it smells horrible and it's bringing down people's property values, not to mention all of the people allergic to rotting whales"? Absolutely. Or, to take a more common example, someone who has a rotting-tire, rusting-traincar, old-rusting-car collection sitting out in the middle of his yard, along with a half-ruined couch covered in mold and an old box-spring mattress. Should the city be allowed to say "Clean that up"? Yes.
But to allow states and cities to take away perfectly normal, harmless residential properties, only to turn them over to private companies, seems like a huge violation of Fourteenth Amendment rights. (No state shall deprive a citizen of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, don'tcha know.)
Thousands-of-years-old question: What is this world coming to?!

ABC's Brat Camp: In Which Gwen Takes On A Major Corporation, And Loses

2005-07-16T12:19:00.000-07:00

ABC has a new reality TV show called Brat Camp. This show, which is apparently "entertainment" subjects teenagers, some with learning disabilities or developmental disorders, to Turn-Around Ranch, a ranch where the teenagers are not permitted to have free time, must wear their hair in a pony tail if female, must keep their beards or mustaches non-existent if male, follow other ridiculously unnecessary rules, do forced, unpaid labor against their will, and follow their strangely level-up, cult-like program, completely against their will, supposedly for the purpose of "counseling" and getting them back on track in life.
One teenager has dyslexia. One teenager has Attention Deficit Disorder. All of them could benefit from true, confidential counseling and therapy. Instead, their parents have decided to send them to be enslaved (yes, that's what I call forced, unpaid labor without due process of law, viz. Thirteenth Amendment), have their rights to freedom of expression curtailed, and denied any free time (which, I note, could not be good for anyone's mental health, let alone of those whose mental health is supposedly so precarious to begin with). Commercials for this program depict teenagers battling their way uphill with snow-laden wind whipping them in the face and a girl who has, predictably, broken into tears at her treatment.
The idea that any place which considers its patients "brats" and vilifies them constantly could be in any way considered helpful to mental well-being is quite frankly ridiculous. The idea that forcing these teenagers to suffer in this way before millions of people against their will could help them in their future life- can you imagine trying to get a job when you have been humiliated in front of possible future employers like this?- is delusional. The idea that ABC could consider this popular entertainment, or that anyone could watch this show in good conscience, is unbelievably disgusting. At least SOME of the gladiators in the Colisseum chose to have their suffering entertain their fellow countrymen. The idea that these parents could subject their children to such a place, and condone promotion of the forced behavior modification industry (in which dozens of children have died of abuse or neglect) is abhorrent.
Walt Disney, I'm sure, would have been wonderfully pleased to hear that his company, which owns ABC, would allow this kind of disgusting show to air. I cannot believe that Disney, who supposedly has a mission of making children happy, not tortured, would stoop so low as to create this program simply to line its pockets, especially when ABC has very high-rating-ed shows such as Desperate Housewives to line its pockets in a much more ethical manner.
If you think that this show is great, comment. If you think that it is horrible, comment, then write a letter to ABC letting them know your opinion. I know I will.

My Essay on Adultism: In Which Gwen Takes On Adultism, And Adultism Loses

2005-06-21T12:18:00.000-07:00

Since I'm pretty pro-youth-rights, anti-adultism, I'd thought I'd give any readers out there a heads-up to what adultism is and why it should be fought (conveniently the name of my essay). I wrote this for a persuasive essay requirement in English and decided to look up the idea of ageism, a word I had coined (or so I thought) to describe discrimination of people on the basis of age, specifically against those under eighteen or the age of majority. When I looked it up, first I kept finding stuff about the discrimination against old people- definitely also a problem, but they can vote and no one tries to pass curfews or compulsory education laws on them- then I found out that the other word for it was adultism. This got me started in NYRA and the rest, as they say, is history.
Jennifer Leo
Mrs. Mozone
English 1
November 7, 2004
Adultism: What It Is and Why It Should Be Fought
Adultism- the discrimination of a group of people on the basis of less age- is a harmful oppression that can and should be fought.
Imagine that a certain group of adults- for instance, blue-eyed people- was treated in the same way that under-eighteen-year-olds are. Blue-eyed people would be told that they could be whoever they wanted to be- and yet most would be restrained from having any kind of job whatsoever. Blue-eyed people would be lied to from very early years about such mythical creatures as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the stork, and yet would be expected to trust the people who lied to them. If a blue-eyed person wanted to know about things like politics, economics, and sex- things that would govern their lives in the future- they would be told that they didn’t have the right color eyes to learn about it. If a blue-eyed person were to try to find out about these subjects over the Internet, they would have to hope that their brown- or green-eyed guardian did not have AOL, because the Blue-eyed setting would not let them go to any sites such as the Americans for a Society Free of Eye-color Restrictions or the National Blue-Eyed Rights Association (Wishnetsky). They would not be allowed to smoke, drink, vote, or in many cases hold a job or drive, yet they could pay taxes such as sales tax. Any money they made would be considered the property of some brown-eyed or green-eyed person.
They would be required to spend their life as a blue-eyed person at an education center which was taught by people with non-blue eyes, and where the curriculum would be as much that blue eyes are inferior as that George Washington was our first President. In history and civics, they would be taught about the rights that belong to all American citizens, yet they themselves would be denied these rights. Enrichment activities could include finding out about the laws for voter registration, or writing an essay about how important it was to our founding parents to not have taxation without representation, yet blue-eyed people would be denied the right to vote and be forced to pay taxes. They would be required to start each day with the Pledge of Allegiance, with some places giving punishment if they did not, and try not to see the hypocrisy in saying “with liberty and justice for all” when it would be clear that they themselves were not counted in the “all”. In some states, the education centers would have the right to randomly drug test the blue-eyed people, search their backpacks and lockers at any time, and use corporal punishment when they misbehaved. In some states, laws would be passed requiring blue-eyed people to address their brown-eyed or green-eyed teachers as Sir and Ma’am (Baron). Even progressive teachers would expect blue-eyed people to call them Mr. Smith or Mrs. Smith, and yet call blue-eyed students John and Jane, even though in no other service industry on Earth would those providing the service considered superior to those served. After all, no one would expect a store clerk to receive more respect from the customer than vice versa; the same with a waiter or a waitress and the person patronizing their restaurant! Yet in school, this would be considered standard.
At home blue-eyed people would be expected to do chores, not stay out past curfew, and do whatever they were told, including eating, dressing, and speaking the way the brown- or green-eyed people told them to. If they protested, their privileges- what few ones they would have- could be taken away, or they could be hit or beaten. This would of course be legally sanctioned. Even undisruptive blue-eyed people could be sent to gulag schools, euphemistically called behavior modification centers, where rules would include not looking up, not crossing your legs or your ankles, and not speaking unless spoken to; if they disobeyed, they would be forced to lie on their stomachs with their hands behind their backs and not move or speak (ASFAR). Brown-eyed presidents would support these schools, though PETA would not support such treatment of dogs. Brown-eyed presidential candidates would speak of forced, unpaid volunteerism for blue-eyed people, despite the Thirteenth Amendment (Bank of Knowledge). The media would exaggerate blue-eyed crime; books and movies would continually put blue-eyed people down, even when supposedly catering to them, by showing them hit, shoved aside, and even raped, for no crime at all except being blue-eyed- and this would be called justice. Even the books and movies showing a blue-eyed hero would show him or her as being unable to fend for themselves, defend themselves, or be intelligent enough to even just find ways around restrictions placed on them by their eye color. Non-blue-eyed people would consider themselves superior, their thoughts, desires and dreams more important, and deserving of more rights.
If we all agree that blue-eyed people would, in this scenario, be completely and thoroughly oppressed, why do we expect every single person alive to have to go through this oppression for eighteen years?
There are restrictions on under-eighteen-year-olds that find their parallels in sexism and racism. For instance, they are not allowed to vote. Keeping them with the same amount of say in laws that govern their lives as pets keeps it legal to treat them like pets, or in some cases- like in gulag schools- less than pets, just as women not being allowed to vote until 1920 and blacks not being allowed to vote until 1870 kept them legally inferior. Old laws that kept women from owning property, or where they were allowed, made that property their husband’s as soon as they were married; and laws that outlawed the owning of property for blacks, or in cases of slaves or even former slaves, considered property find their parallels in laws that make sure that people under eighteen are not allowed to open a bank account without their guardian’s signature and their property is legally considered the property of their parents or guardians. Even when they are allowed to own jobs, the money they earn is only considered theirs when they are paying income and sales tax or when their parents or guardians let them keep it for themselves. Legal emancipation for women was limited to not marrying or divorcing; slaves had to be freed by their owners; youth today must apply through a court and prove an ability to be on their own, not required of over-eighteen-year-olds. Slaves were returned to their owners under the Fugitive Slave Laws, which are strangely parallel to runaway laws, except that there is little outcry over runaway laws, and there is no convenient North or Canada to which young people can run away. And the list goes on.
The most-used argument in favor of adultism is that young people deserve it somehow- they are stupid, their fears and desires unimportant and petty, or they are violent criminals that should be punished. However, this argument is statistically invalid.

Fig. 1. Graph of Juvenile and Crime Rates over Time from statistics from the FBI site.

Crime rates among people under eighteen are below those of adults and are falling at a faster rate (FBI). Simply put, without facts to back up these accusations of these “criminal kids,” they do not hold water.
Other common arguments are that adultism is universal for the oppressed as a group and temporary for each of the oppressed individuals. However, these points do not make it less valid or oppressive; in fact, they make it worse.
The universality of adultism means that there is nowhere that a youth can go to get help or rights. There may be less oppression in certain states, countries, or cultures, but there is still oppression everywhere. Despite what some people might try to make you believe, commonality does not mean acceptability no matter what the oppression.
The temporary condition of adultism makes it worse. As Brian Dominick explains in an online essay:
At a certain point, we're supposed to look back at all the concerns and all the terrible
experiences we had when we were young -- bad experiences we had because we were
kids -- and deem them all petty. All of the indoctrination, all of the invalidation, all of
the abuse, all of the deprivation, all of the coercion -- it's supposed to vanish. But does
it?
As we pass through our twenties we start to forget certain things. If you are poor
now and you were poor then, you don't forget the poverty. If you are a female now and
you were female then, you don't forget the sexism. But since you're older now, but you
were young then, the ageism [another word used for adultism but also used in age
discrimination against seniors] fades away. (Dominick)
The temporary condition is also worse because it is often used as an argument against youth- “you’ll grow out of it”- but this is ridiculous. Eighteen years of oppression is certainly nothing to be simply waved aside. Furthermore, turning into one of the oppressors does not make you liberated. Try suggesting to feminists that women can simply get a sex-change operation to get equal rights with men, and see the reaction you get. “Growing out of it” is a temporary solution to what is so far a permanent problem.
Adultism is harmful because it causes internalization of oppression. Young people who try to rebel against the system are punished, and any behavior that adults approve of- such as obedience to all adults- is praised and rewarded in a way similar to the ways of training a dog. Young people are expected to jump through all of the hoops adults and society put up for them and act as though they like it, or they are branded “rebellious” or “disrespectful.” Even the usually rational adults expect younger people to respect all adults simply because of the amount of years from birth, regardless of intelligence, kindness, maturity, or integrity. Experience is certainly important, but in a world where 83% of murdered children, 50% of murdered teenagers, and 85% of murdered adults are murdered by people over twenty, can anyone claim that it always equals wisdom? (Pro-Youth Pages.) “Look around you- it’s the way life is,” people are told from birth, and when they do, all they see is other people who have also internalized the oppression. They are expected to ignore, of course, the fact that this was an argument used to argue for every oppression humankind has ever created.
If you have been told that you were worthless on the basis of nothing more than the time from your birth, you are much more likely to accept the idea of being worthless on the basis of nothing more than the melanin in your skin or the arrangement of your 23rd chromosome. Adultism is indoctrination into irrational inferiority, and a chisel creating a crack to allow the wedges of other oppressions in.
It is a clinically proven fact that abuse creates abusers. Bullies have been bullied. Adultism is indoctrination into irrational superiority as well- if I am better because I am older, then why am I not better because I am whiter? Adults need to create an increasingly elaborate system of justifications to accept adultism as legitimate in the same way that under-eighteen-year-olds have to internalize their oppression.
Clearly the line between the oppressors and the oppressed is less clear in adultism than in sexism. After all, there are no graduated genders. There is, however, a parallel in racism. Mark Twain shows the normal attitude to part blacks in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson: “To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a Negro. She was a slave, and salable as such. Her child was thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave, and by a fiction of law and custom a Negro” (Twain, 32-33). Despite the fact that she is a slave like all of the other slaves, she considers herself better than them because she is whiter, enough to pass for white. This same hierarchy exists among non-adults: the “big kids” are better than the “little kids.” Even one year is enough of a barrier to consider the younger as inferior to the older as the adults are to the older, showing how easily adultism is recreated among the oppressed. However, no matter what the ages of the oppressors and the oppressed, there is still a clear line separating each, at least during the oppression, allowing an analysis of the harms to each.
Adultism is harmful to the oppressed because they learn to internalize abuse and accept it as a way of life. They are continually reminded, “Life’s not fair. Get used to it.” Often this oppression leads them to lash out in violent or hostile behavior towards others or violent behavior to themselves, like cutting. Some of them spend their time alone and avoid others, or seek to fill their time with too much activity to avoid thinking about it or in some cases even illegal substance abuse. Adultism also leads them to become the oppressors because it is simply considered a way of life.
Adultism is harmful to the oppressors as well. It may cause self-esteem or feelings of superiority; however, like any feeling of happiness that does not stem from one’s own self-worth and self-esteem, this sense is unhealthy and leads to a dependency on what causes it- in this case, putting someone else down. This leads to insecurity- “I’m not good unless you are bad”- which can lead to racism, sexism, homophobia, and other oppressions.
For all of these reasons, adultism- harmful, oppressive, leading to other oppressions- should be stopped. And it can be stopped. The outlook may seem bleak, but it is possible to break the cycle, simply by practicing and encouraging more equality for all rather than discrimination on the basis of age.
There are many ways to combat adultism on an individual level. For instance, try not to talk down to those younger than yourself or treat them as inferior. Before you take something from a child or touch them spontaneously, ask yourself, “Would I treat someone my age that way? Would I like to be treated that way myself?” Of course, there are cases in which your No is backed up with reasons- for instance, expecting a four-year-old to hold your hand when you cross the street- but if you do not have any reasons for it, do not do it. More actively, if someone else makes an adultist comment or joke, treat it as you would a racist or sexist comment- explain to them that you do not appreciate that comment. Often the person does not realize that he or she is being adultist- or may not even know what adultism is- which is when you can tell them. You could also join a youth rights organization, such as Americans For A Society Free of Age Restrictions, the Freechild Project or the National Youth Rights Association, or start your own. Do research on this topic and try to educate the people you know about adultism. Avoid being pushy or rude, because that would turn people off even more, but remember that knowing that there is a problem is the first step to finding a solution.
It may take a while, but we can fight to put a stop to adultism.

Works Cited

Americans For a Society Free of Age Restrictions. Schneider-Joseph, David. 23 August
2004.
Baron, Dennis. “To Sir, or Ma’am, With Love?”
Dominick, Brian. “Refusing Adulthood: Notes on ‘Aging Out.’” 2 February 2000
“Federal Bureau of Investigation: Uniform Crime Reports (Crime Index Spreadsheet).”
Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2003.
“Kerry: A New Era of National Service.” Bank of Knowledge. 2004.
Pro-Youth Pages, The. Medic, Bill. 27 November 2004.
Twain, Mark. The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson. Hartford: American Publishing
Company, 1900.
Wishnetsky, Susan. http://www.oblivion.net/

So there you have it. If you actually read through the whole thing without falling asleep, you now know why I'm against age discrimination. I've been against it for a long time, refusing to simply blindly accept that "life's not fair, get used to it," but this essay represents the first time I consolidated my thoughts, did research, and put my arguments into cogent form.

New Freedom?: In Which Parents And Kids Take On Big Brother Together, And Lose (Just Like In 1984 With That Guy And Julia)

2005-06-20T12:16:00.000-07:00

Someone posted this editorial/article this morning on the NYRA (National Youth Rights Association) forums:
Mental Health Screening in Schools Signals the End of Parental Rights by Nancy Levant
Aside from that ending jab at those who cannot afford private schools, I'm in agreement with the author. This is a pretty frightening proposal, the kind of thing a conspiracy theorist might come up with to show how Bush et al are pushing the world into 1984. But no one had to come up with this conspiracy, because it already exists. A Google search collaborated the information (with a more objective article in New Standard, for example)- this is not a joke. This is not a test. This is for real.
That said, it's hard to believe that anyone could support this initiative. This is a violation of privacy, of search and seizure rights, of rights to choose your own medication, of, if nothing else, parental rights to decide what is best for your child. (Not to mention the child's rights to choose what's best for themselves.)
Unfortunately, this is not a solitary event. Here you can find a story about a girl, Katie Wernecke, being taken from her parents and forced to undergo radiation treatments against both her own and her parents' wishes. After undergoing four chemotherapy treatments, she and her parents decided to forego radiation treatments out of fear that it will cause other cancers, stunt her growth, and cause other problems. They made a video in which Katie says, "No one asked me what I wanted. It's my body."
That's right. Not only is it HER body, her parents agree with her as to what should be done, and no one is being hurt by their choice except perhaps her. This doesn't even touch on all of the problems in the abortion debate, or the parental rights vs. youth rights. There should be no, I repeat no, interference on the part of the government, or even a question about it. This disgusts me.
So you take a solitary event like this (which has its duplicates in other isolated events of parents being chased across the country by CPS for refusing to give their kids Ritalin because some stupid doctor decided that the kid had ADHD because he was suffering carbon monoxide poisoning, or she couldn't read well, or whatever) and multiply it by millions of kids across the country, and what do you get? Apparently, the New "Freedom" Commission. Remember everyone:
Freedom=Slavery
War=Peace
Ignorance=Power.
Bill of Rights=Fancy Napkin
Common Psychiatrist (there are good ones, this is just the horror-story one): Carbon-monoxide poisoning? Dyslexic? ADD. Unwillingness to sit still and watch TV? ADHD. Questioning authority at all? ODD. And do you have any of those? Autism? Asperger's? Pretty much any PDD? There is one magical answer to your problems: medication, medication, medication. Pills, liquid, automatic implanted capsules, the magical remedies come in many different forms, and several are based off of less legal magical remedies like cocaine. Got a problem? Pop a pill. And, kids, just say NO to drugs.
And no, we're not living in Orwellian times.

Welcome to my blog!: In Which Gwen Welcomes Her Imaginery Audience To Her Blog

2005-06-19T23:16:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone, this is my blog. (As I'm sure you've guessed.) You probably didn't mean to come here, but if you did:
My name is Gwen or Jennifer (depending on whether you met me online or in person). I'm a fifteen-year-old Gemini born in the Year of the Horse. My favo/ourite colo/our is blue. I have a habit of spelling words two ways to make European visitors feel comfortable (except that I will always spell jail jail, not gaol, and I will also always spell grey grey, not gray; this is for aesthetic reasons). I'm a member of the National Youth Rights Association because I have the radical notion that children are people. My lucky number is thirteen. I have never before had a blog.
Okay, that's all for now. I'll probably end up posting a lot of stuff on here later, but this is just the "hi, how are you" post.
How are you?