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[bursar42]

Summer is here! Wheee!

My startling lack of end-of-year examinations was a really great bonus to the normal presummer euphoria. Only Latin, Spanish, and English gave finals. This is a very good thing because I didn't know how to decline nouns in Latin until about seven hours before the final, and, really, I'm not in favor of two-day essay-based exams in mid-May. (Hurrah for dropping AP Comp while there was still time.)

A Rant Advisory has been applied to the below by the NRAAAS.

More interestingly, I've spent some time lately just sort of wandering the internet. In these wanderings, I came across this disgusting specimen. Now, you may think that radical racist websites are more disgusting, but, alas, this is not the case. Why? This site tries to teach you how to deal with children, but in a highly improper manner. First off, I especially enjoyed the phrase "vulnerable to news". Only in very rare circumstances are people "vulnerable" to the news and minority is not one of them. Sure, if you think aliens are secretly using broadcast media to give you orders to throw rocks at your second cousin's wife Betsy, maybe you shouldn't watch the news. Admittedly, there is an unhealthy obsession with the violent, the emotional, and the local in news coverage. However, any decent adult should be able to explain the situation to a child who doesn't know that murders are not common in that neck of the woods, and that's why it made the news. Someone might want to check me on this, but I think that by the time anyone is able to understand the words and format used in reporting news on TV (Let alone print!), they are capable of understanding points of view and have a vague idea that others might not have the same motives they do.

They say that seeing violence on the news desensitizes children to shocking images. Yes. I'm afraid I'm no longer very shocked when confronted with pictures of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. However, I believe that, if I had the misfortune to see it, I would be very shocked to see people jumping in droves to their deaths on the sidewalk where I'm standing. Even very young children can differentiate between news reporting and advertisements. (ref. unremembered) I should think they can differentiate between a picture of someone dying and actually being there.

Of course, violence isn't the only bad thing about news. It has sex, too. First off, You should look at the URL of that site. Its top-level domain is org. This indicates a US-based site (at least in theory), no? We know that the US' news is quite a bit less raunchy than other countries'. (Compare The Daily Mirror with a similar US-based tabloid-newspaper combo. Maybe, this? I'm not really sure of a good comparison.) The evidence presented by the site for their claims about the infusion of sex into today's news is that the phrase "oral sex" was used extensively during the Clinton-Lewinsky coverage. Well, the oral sex was a pretty important part of that whole thing, wasn't it? Not sex-obsessed, merely objective. However, we must also remember that the phrase "oral sex" is not going to traumatize anyone who does not already know what it means. Say the phrase "oral sex" in front of a six-year-old. I'll wager he'll either say, "Hehe. You said, 'sex'," or "Wha'?" Now, if you're too uncomfortable to explain (without any lewdness) that this action on the part of the president was inappropriate in his circumstances and a general idea of why he might get in trouble for it, that's your problem, not Viacom's.

Of course, you have to be careful about newspapers, too. Print media will also do bad things to children. Have to be sure they aren't developing improper views of the world by reading objective facts reported by professionals. Nope. Because the average article doesn't give much background information, it is better to ban the reading of newspapers than to, perhaps, engage in real discussion over the causes of the Middle East Conflict. After all, an article about suicide bombings isn't going to mention Balfour even in the most rudimentry way. So, rather than provide the background yourself, you should keep your children (especially ages six to ten) away from news and utterly in the dark for as long as possible.

I also enjoyed the suggestion that adolescents M's age (Not roseandsigil and not James Bond's M. The other one.) are "just beginning" to use the media to gain information, entertainment, or what have you. While this may be true in that the US average life expectancy is around 77 years and that 12 year olds are therefore "just beginning," I get the distinct impression that the authors of the site meant that younger people do not "use the media" in the sense that everyone else does. This is certainly untrue.

It's really kind of sick that I can still be that appalled by advice dispensed immediately after September 11, 2001... I may have found a cause. Oh, good Lord.

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[inuki42.livejournal.com]

You have some of the most amusing interests... And for some of them, there's only you and one or two other people, which is hilarious. *giggles*

Oh, go join www.ljmatch.com just to satisfy my curiosity, hmm? Please?