I was sitting in the auditorium at Mercer Island High School last night at a presentation for parents of incoming ninth graders, when the school’s WiFi network popped up as a connection option on my iPhone. So I thought, what the hell, why not try it out and see if HA would load.
I already knew that the middle school’s network blocked HA, but I didn’t think much of it considering my occasional foul language, and the age of the students. But high school, well, there isn’t much four letter vocabulary I could teach kids that age. Yet sure enough, HA was blocked there too.
Ah well, no worry, I’ll be starting at The Stranger tomorrow so I guess my daughter and her friends could always read me there… but alas, The Stranger is blocked too. The Seattle Times loads fine, as does the P-I, two sites the average high schooler is unlikely to want to read, but The Stranger—a publication whose content might be remotely relevant to teenagers—no, that would be inappropriate. What are we trying to keep our kids safe from… quality writing?
And, of course, that’s the problem with censorship at any level. You could make an argument that some of the language in some of my posts is inappropriate for in-school reading, or that some parents may be offended by the blunt discourse of Savage Love, but in the process you’re tossing out a lot of insightful reporting and beautiful writing about art, music, philosophy and whatnot. Personally, I’m offended by the lies of omission that populate the Seattle Times op/ed pages, so why shouldn’t the high school ban their site too? Cater to every perceived offense, and I guess the district shouldn’t provide internet access at all.
Just seems kinda silly for an institution tasked with helping our teenagers grow into adults, to treat their students like little children.
Hasn’t Goldy banned commenter because he didn’t like what they had to say?
Also, I would guess schools block publications like the Stranger because of the adult ad section rather than the articles.
I think the reason the Stranger web site is blocked is likely the pr0n to be found in the personals section. HA? Maybe the BS spewed by the trolls is so toxic you can’t let the sweet kiddies near it.
Your assertion that public schools are tasked with helping children grow into adults is true, but not in the way you think. They’re designed to mold teenagers into adults – are compliant and obedient of the system. Access to publications which might present an alternative or subversive point of view, are too dangerous to give to teenagers.
Hmmm…I’d be curious to know whether they’re also blocking Al Jazeera.
Back when our kids were in school, most of the Catholic schools in Seattle used Bess, a managed Internet-filtering system provided at the time by a local company named N2H2. Since the company was remotely managing all their customers’ “filter appliances”, they were able to collect traffic data from them. This was supposedly used to “tune” the filtering, but as it turned out they were also selling it to the Department of Defense.
You live in Rainier Valley and your kid goes to school on Mercer Island? What’s up with that?
Steve @5
You must be new. He’s divorced, and his ex-wife lives on Mercer Island.
@1 As a rule, no, or you’d be long gone. HA isn’t like (un)Free Republic or other thin-skinned wingnut bloggers who ban anyone who disagrees with them. As you haven’t seen the unofficial HA posting rules yet, or have forgotten them, let me reiterate them for you:
1. This is a liberal blog.
2. Anyone can post here, except JCH.
3. There is no censorship.
4. As liberals, our mission is to verbally kick the living shit out of you un-American wingnut traitors.
5. No mercy for wingnuts!
6. Our terms are unconditional surrender, and there will be trials.
7. klake is a nazi.
Any questions?
No, I’m not new. I’ve just never asked this before. Is it a private school?
Reining In Activist Judges
When wingnuts say they don’t like activist judges, what they really mean is they don’t like liberal or centrist activist judges. But they LOVE rightwing activist judges like that guy in Florida who threw out the whole health care reform law, citing the Boston tea party as his legal authority, while ignoring key phrases in the Constitution and over 100 years of higher court precedents.
“His decision was heavy on rhetoric, light on actual legal reasoning and all but certain to be ignored by higher-court judges who understand their duty to follow the Constitution. When Vinson is remembered 50 years from now — if anyone remembers him at all — he will be remembered as one of the long line of activist judges who stood athwart history and got run over by it.”
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/02.....he-courts/
Roger Rabbit Commentary: My prediction is this activist judge will get reined in by SCOTUS, if not by a federal appeals court, even a conservative one.
Mubarak Says He’ll Leave — But Not Yet
“BREAKING NEWS: Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak says he does not intend to run for president again and will devote the next few months to the peaceful transfer of power.”
— News Sources
This won’t be enough to placate Egypt’s masses, who are demanding Mubarak’s immediate resignation. It does signal, however, that Egypt’s ruling military has decided that Mubarak is expendable.
All Mubarak said is he won’t run for “re-election” and that he plans to remain in power for several more months to oversee a transition to a new government. He won’t get away with this. Egyptians will see right through it. All he wants to do is install his cronies in power to succeed him. Dictators never give up power voluntarily. Would somebody please pull on the ejection seat lever!
This was Mubarak’s LBJ speech.
I’d get more worried about this issue, if this was 1996 (when lots of people didn’t have access to the internet), or if this was in a poorer area of town (where a significant number of students live in homes without internet access).
But Mercer Island???? I’d be surprised if the school computers got that much use – the computer access, laptops and I-pads they students have available at home are much faster and easier to use.
@4 Back when I was in school my district used an internet-filtering system called “the web hasn’t been invented yet, punk, so steal your dad’s stroke mags.”
LOL, is that a violin playing?
Seattle Times – New Tribune = Legit newspapers
Stranger = cheap porn…..Given away for free cause no one would ever pay for it.
Speaking of managing the message…
It appears that there are multiple leaks from the “Fair and Balanced” Fox News noise machine. Today Media Matters posted a leaked memo from Bill Sammon (then a Fox News editor), dated October 27,2008 which pretty much listed the talking points to be discussed on Fox News shows and “Fox and Friends”.
This might not be such a surprise – after all, one role of the editor or producer is to select and prioritize the subjects to be covered.
But this went quite a bit further. The subject was an expose written by none other than Bill Sammon who purported to be an expert on Obama and claimed that Obama sought out Marxists as friends, his real love was socialism, and his views were distorted by a pre-occupation with race. His “talking points” were incorporated, line-by-line, into the notes of each of the news anchors.
Of course, Fox News dutifully interviewed it’s own editor as an “expert” on Obama, and then expressed surprise and outrage over the “findings”, and then the Republican campaign of McCain/Palin went on to quote Fox News as a “legitimate news source” to introduce the subject into their own campaign.
Which is how Sammon planned it all along, as his memo clearly states.
You might also remember that Karl Rove had promised to GOP donars a few weeks earlier an “October Surprise” which he promised would turn the race around. Perhaps this is what he had in mind. If so, it had all the effect of a pop gun at a 4th of July fireworks show. Given the rapid collapse of the economy, nobody was very concerned about such rumor-mongering.
Hey Right Stuff @ 15,
The Seattle Times called me up at home last week. They wanted me to subscribe to their rag. Free subscription even. I told them to go away.
But think about it. They were going to give a subscription to me for free because I would not pay for it. That must mean the Seattle Times is cheap porn.
Meanwhile the subscriber base of the Seattle Times keeps heading toward single digits. Way to go, Seattle Times.
# 17: They don’t call me anymore, but I run into the Times at home shows,etc. They try to give me a free subscription for three months (sometimes six), if I sign up for a one-year subscription. But I can cancel at any time, thereby avoiding ever paying anything. They even offer to throw in a free gift (umbrella, water bottle, etc.).
So although the Times is apparantly padding their “paid subscription” figures with all these papers they distribute for free, the real value of my “subscription” is about -$5.00 to -$10.00), the value of the free gift which I don’t have to return when I cancel when the free trial period is up. What’s more, they don’t seem to care to keep track, I could keep racking up one free trial after another, and as long as I cancel in time there’s no cost to me.
But I always refuse it anyway. I can’t see perfectly good paper being wasted that way, smeared with the Time’s editorial garbage and then going directly from my front porch into the recycle bin without ever being opened.
We subscribe to the Sunday edition of the New York Times, which also affords us access to the passworded portions of their Web site containing all the content of the daily editions.
So, we’ve pretty much cut the cord with Fairview Fannie, except that they’re pimping out their ever-growing excess press capacity to print and deliver out-of-town papers. So, unfortunately, Frank’s still making a little money from us.
Shh… Nobody tell the folks at the Mercer Island School District that it’s the kids surfing and adding words to Urbandictionary.com, not the middle-aged readers and posters at HA.
@15
Seems to me that The Stranger’s doing better than The Times these days.
The Stranger, Seattle Times, Tacoma News Tribune, Spokesman Review, all total crap. We don’t have a good paper left in Washington State. The Trib used to be decent, but has been going down hill for the last few years.
By the way, something’s going on up in Snohomish County. I’m not sure if the Everett Herald is distributing the Times, or the Times is distributing the Everett Herald. Either way, half the newspaper delivery people are laid off as of today. (“Laid Off” isn’t the word they use, as newspapers continue to use the fiction that these are “independent distributors” who are not real employees).
I guess it’s more efficient, the distributors can deliver two papers in the same neighborhood at the same time. But I can’t get over the feeling that I’m watching the crew re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Lets get a FOIA query to Mercer Island and find the list of banned sites.
@15
You forgot The Columbian down here in Vantucky. Talk about a yellow rag. I swear the editor jizzes in his pants over the empty-headed Jaime Herrera…
@15
You forgot The Columbian down here in Vantucky. Talk about a yellow rag. I swear the editor jizzes in his pants over the empty-headed Jaime Herrera…
@26
You know, I don’t know a single thing about Vancouver. I pass though every now and again headed to Portland or the coast. Last time I was driving though I took a little detour and saw part of a pretty nice down town in Vancouver and some nice residential streets in Longview. But, that’s about it.
Most school districts employ one filter for the district server rather than just the high school’s. It’s a pain because I would like to be able to read HA or Slog while waiting for my daughter’s rehearsal to finish, but I understand the reasons behind the filter.
Funny thing is according to my daughter most of the HS kids know how to circumvent the filter to get on Facebook etc… I applaud giving the kids a technical challenge to overcome! It also teaches the kids to not accept censorship so it’s not too bad a lesson.
@9: I think he’s going to be appointed to the Supreme Court by the next conservative President, not reigned in by it. But I’m somewhat pessimistic about conservative appointments to the federal bench.
*As Sharron Angle says, if everything else fails, we can always resort to Second Amendment Remedies to re balance the courts.
*Note: this is wingnut type humor and to be taken no more seriously than when said by Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle or Glen Beck.
Now where is that Guns-r-Us store where you can buy AK-47s by the truck load for your own personal use? Texas, wasn’t it?
@27 Clark County is largely populated by conservatives who work in Oregon but don’t pay that state’s income tax, shop there to dodge the Washington sales tax, and spend a lot of time bitching about how they pay too much in taxes.
Perhaps the good folks on Mercer Island decided that it wasnt appropriate to let a meaningless rag who specializes if queer anonymous sex want adds to be downloaded at the high school.
seems reasonable to me.
@33: Yet you would be furious if the school decided to block Drudge (for his partisan hackery) or Fox (for their inflamatory material unrelated to reality), or god-forbid, Sarah Palin’s PAC website.
@34
Nope…you would be wrong.
Nice try dipshit….you only succeeded in making yourself look like a fucktard.
well done!
got any more assumptions to throw out there?
owned…………………………….bitch.