June, 2013 archive

In Der Spiegel, German Minister of Justice Sabine Leutheusser reflects on the surveillance state and marvels at America’s surrender to fear. A nugget:

On the weekend, President Obama reacted by saying that it is impossible to have 100 percent security and 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.

I don’t share this view. The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is. In a democratic constitutional state, security is not an end in itself, but serves to secure freedom.

No scans unbarred. Mike Nichols reports in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Count Frank Schadt among those of us who believe government — and not just the federal government — is taking extreme liberties with our liberties.

Schadt owns OB’s Brauhaus, a successful restaurant and bar in Appleton, where police have developed a habit of asking local establishments to use police-issued scanners to collect information on patrons.

At least some bars now scan every person who comes in on certain weekend nights — proof that the program is about a lot more than deterring underage drinking. At the end of the night, the bars return the scanners to police along with all the information about who showed up to have a beer or, God forbid, a shot with their buddies.

Police say the program is entirely voluntary.

Voluntary, just like renewing your on-premises license is voluntary.

Part of being privileged is not having to hear about being privileged, because your being privileged is, well, it just is.

It’s being able to get a popular, effective, and challenging teacher reassigned because you don’t like the lesson.

Students study speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and invite local community leaders to speak in the class. They are prompted to talk honestly about racism, class disparity, and privilege in their day-to-day lives at the start of every session. Assignments include analyzing “the way media and society fetishize both women and people of color.”

But the provocative discussions that Meyer found so revelatory abruptly ended a few months ago when a female white student accused the teacher of creating an “intimidating educational environment.”

Here’s a bit from another report, this one from one of the teacher’s former students.

Greenberg was hesitant to speak on the record, but he would tell me that he’s never gotten a parent complaint before this year, and he feels that the finding by the district was based on limited evidence—evidence he hasn’t seen. That he was ordered to immediately halt his curriculum “assumes that the materials are objectionable until proven otherwise,” he says, and he’s upset that a single family would have the ability to shut down classroom work so swiftly and entirely, without input from any other students or families.

There is another, larger story here that I don’t feel qualified to tackle. The established press doesn’t seem to have noticed this story of censorship.

I learned about it by listening to amTWib.

It would appear that the Republican Party got its sex education the same way that I initially did–in whispered conversations with equally-ignorant peers in back alleys and locker rooms.

I, however, later decided to read up on the topic. So did Dick Polman.