On October 15, 1951, the first episode of I Love Lucy aired. Interesting fact that you probably already know: Lucille Ball was pregnant on the show with her second child and wrote the pregnancy into the show, but the censors would not let her say the word “pregnant.”
- Rapists, Beware: Detroit Prosecutor IDs 21 Attackers in ‘Rape Kit’ Investigation – From Bug.
- 3 Plane Crashes and Amazing Survival Stories
- Scenes From Antarctica – I’ve already saved half of these for my desktop.
- Amanda Todd: Bullied Canadian Teen Commits Suicide After Prolonged Battle Online And In School – From 9bar.
- Skydiver Breaks Sound Barrier During Jump Into Stratosphere 24 Miles Over New Mexico – Of course, I know you all probably watched this live (I did).
- When Good Intentions Go Bad – “Two studies—one on genetically modified corn and one on climate change—demonstrate how scare tactics can backfire.”
I’m sorry, but your linking to an article by Bjørn Lomborg? Mr Climate-Change-What-Climate-Change-And-Anyway-We-Can-All-Live-With-It-Well-Except-For-Those-Brown-People-But-Who-Needs-Them-Anyway himself? Sweet Jesus. I didn’t realise the pro-GM wing was so desperate.
The Amanda Todd story is just tragic.
I can’t help but view those that bullied her as monsters, especially that guy that tried to blackmail her. What sort of fucked up mentality does it take to do that to someone? I can’t understand it.
Those that bullied her will now have her death on their conscience, if they have one. And I hope the guy that tried to blackmail her will get caught and do time in prison.
I also hope what we can take from this is to find much better ways to help someone that faces shit like this, before the victim pays the ultimate price.
I was treated the way Amanda Todd was treated in school, only I was lucky enough not to have the internet around where they could harass me still. If they had I probably wouldn’t be here. I don’t understand why the teachers would tell me things like “It’s just kids being kids” or “there’s nothing I can do” or “you guys just have to work it out”. There wasn’t anything TO work out, the other kids were assholes and I was an awkward dork. I am glad they’re coming down on this.
It’s clearly all your fault. If you hadn’t been an awkward dork, the bullies would have picked on someone else. </sarcasm>
Seriously, telling anyone to just work it out with the bullies is pure victim-blaming.
I feel you there.
It also infuriates me how often people blame “society” for the misdeeds of bullies. I’ll tell you how society’s to blame for this: we enable bullying by blaming everyone BUT the bullies.
I know someone’s going to cite how teenagers and children don’t have developed brains, and thus shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions. Bull! It doesn’t take a genius or a paragon of emotional maturity to realize that verbally abusing, slandering, assaulting, shaming and other wanton cruelty is WRONG. This isn’t rocket science. This is BASIC. EFFING. MORALS. We teach them in kindergarten. And, I suspect, a lot of children and teenagers actually get the message.
In fact, I suspect nearly all of them do. Being imperfect, a lot of them mess up here and there, but in the end, their conscience is given its due. Bullies are different. The sort of people who tormented Amanda Todd did what they did because they thought the rules didn’t apply to them. They gamed the system, exploiting prejudice and weakness to give their cruelty a veneer of legitimacy. They understood morality, I suspect. But it was inconvenient, so they ignored it.
Of course, they may have felt genuine anger towards Amanda, or have felt threatened somehow. They may have truly justified their behavior to themselves. Society’s expectations may have been a catalyst. But that doesn’t make them any less culpable. It just means that in addition to being cruel, vindictive, callous and malevolent, they were also delusional.
So, in the unlikely event that any of Amanda Todd’s murderers-by-proxy are reading this: shame on you. Shame on you all. And you’ll never be forgiven, because you killed the only person with any right to do so.
It’s odd how they say there isn’t anything they can do. Retaliate and all of a sudden it IS a big deal and there are things they can do.
Lomborg claims that the global warming study he cites only attributes between 10 and 40 million deaths to global warming since 60% to 90% (depending on how much overlap there is between the subsets he splits out) of the 100 million deaths are actually due to warming and not non-CO2 pollution. Okay, I only shot you once (or 4 times), not 10 times, so what are you complaining about?
I couldn’t verify any of his figures because his link to the study is broken.
I think the analogy to the GMO study he draws is false. The GMO study was scientifically inept and draws a false conclusion from no valid data. The AGW study may have overstated the problem (I can’t tell from Lomborg’s summary), but even Lomborg admits there is a very serious problem (at least 10 million deaths over the next 18 years) due to climate change.
Lomborg’s “solutions” in his penultimate* paragraph don’t address CO2 at all, just other forms of pollution, and so would do nothing to address the exponentially growing AGW problem.
False analogies seem to be the theme for the day. In the video accompanying the Amanda Todd story, an anonymous comment asks, in “Dear Muslima” fashion, why everyone is paying so much attention to bullying when there are so many worse problems in the world.
[*] Saw Marian Call last night… I’ve been a nerd ever since my first 5 syllable** word.
[**] Okay, penultimate is only 4 syllables, but I’m still grateful for a chance to use it.
No, look: there’s simply no need to read a single word Lomborg writes. He’s a liar, a manipulator, a fabricator, and a climate change denialist of the same breed as the Holocaust denialists: he tries to wrap his rubbish up in reasonable-sounding papers, but he’s just simply a tool of the entrenched corporate powers. There’s no reason to accept a single thing he says, any more than one should pay the slightest attention to David Irving.
He’s been thoroughly discredited over years numerous times. These bastards are like zombies: they keep coming back to life every couple of years, because nobody seems to have a memory anymore.
Go to RealClimate and search for Lomborg, if you feel the need.
“The GMO study was scientifically inept and draws a false conclusion from no valid data.”
Buzz, have you read in detail the two Seralini papers and compared them to Hammond et al 2004 (the Monsanto work)and then looked at the criticism of Seralini by actual scientists?
The scientists have shot holes in Seralini’s study, sure, but they have not rejected it outright.
Look, I am the first to say that his papers are awful in many ways. The figures cause me to cry and the translator needs a good smack for “creatinine clairance” in two places!
Yet many of the flaws are common to all the studies. Much is made of the choice of Sprague-Dawley albino rats, for instance. Which strain do you think was used in the original Monsanto work? Yep.
My conclusion is that the OECD guidelines are clearly inadequate. Some scientists even say that rodents are inappropriate models as corn is a minor part of their diet.