Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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It's now Spooky Season, for which I will be using these threads as an opportunity to write about scary movies I've (re)-watched over the next two weeks. If you've watched some good (or bad) horror movies lately, feel free to reply to this comment with your thoughts.
Last night I watched Snowtown, a dramatisation of a series of vicious murders which took place in Salisbury North (a suburb in the greater Adelaide area in South Australia) between 1992-9. Going in I was expecting a horror film: what I got instead was a social realist crime drama in the vein of Shane Meadows, which is more interested in kitchen-sink scenes of people smoking in grotty tract housing than the mechanics of murder and body disposal. The violence, on the rare occasions it's shown onscreen, is excruciating, but like Meadows, most of the film's copious discomfort comes from the implied threat of violence, when the ringleader John Bunting seems superficially friendly and yet there's a constant lurking sensation that he might blow his top at the slightest provocation.
Recently, notorious child rapist and former rock frontman Ian Watkins was murdered in prison. I'm not unhappy he was killed, and yet some of the crowing over his death and how he got what was coming to him makes me uncomfortable for some reason I found it hard to put my finger on. Perhaps the most provocative scenes in Snowtown depict John Bunting and his neighbours sitting around a kitchen table discussing their frustration with the authorities' refusal to properly deal with sex offenders and child molesters in the area, and how they ought to take the law into their own hands. And indeed, many of Bunting and co.'s victims were people he claimed were paedophiles and child molesters (also homosexuals and at least one trans woman, though the film doesn't dwell on this quite as much), often on the basis of extremely flimsy evidence or baseless hearsay. The obvious implication is that Bunting had extremely violent urges which he rationalised away by claiming that he was channelling them into pro-social ends, but that when the demand for "paedos" exceeded the supply, he simply invented new ones. Paedophiles, homosexuals, trans people and junkies were seen as deserving targets in the social milieu in which he lived, so he targeted them: raised in another environment, he would've targeted communists, apostates, witches, whatever.
The less obvious implication (and I have no idea whether the historical record would bear this out) is that one reason Bunting and his gang evaded capture for so long is not because they managed to intimidate anyone aware of their crimes into silence, but because they managed to persuade them that all of their murders were really vigilantism, meting out "justice" to those deserving.
I find that even in medicine I usually have to give a lecture about how it's our job to heal no matter the person when someone odious shows up. Students these days (and I think it has worsened) can't even treat someone obviously racist without losing their minds. A pedophile? Absolutely no.
This is with tolerance and acceptance baked into applications and course work at all levels.
Someone gives them the ick and they are no longer good doctors.
I can't imagine how much less professional fields without selection for this are (like the police).
Cops at least are on the radar and aware of the hypervigilance of anything resembling overtly ___-ist behavior and the repercussions that face them should they violate the Rules. Teachers on the other hand have essentially free rein to sanction, downgrade, or otherwise penalize students exhibiting (via essay or otherwise) views that they find personally repulsive (almost always this means anything right-coded.) Anything blatantly suggesting racism (imagine a well-written essay on Human Biological Determinism, without any use of epithets or slavery) could feasibly get a student reported to admin. There's a level of acceptability (I dislike using currently popular terms like Overton window) where things of this sort are treated the same as if a student were to write about the strategies in rape, or how to build some device that goes boom. I suppose a classroom is a relatively low impact environment, until of course it isn't and generations of like-minded groupthinked kids start waving flags and blocking traffic. Or worse.
Edit: I've strayed from the point.
edit 2: Sorry to sully the fun thread.
I think the way teachers have been in the last few decades is often on most of our minds, no worries.
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