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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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I wouldn't be surprised to find someone here immediately start debating whether each particular thing counts as meaningful harassment rather than 'mere' teasing, though given that Burgess and the ACLU listed them as serious offenses I don't think it particularly matters at this point.

Yes, there are kids who get relentlessly bullied (and serious harm is done) but that seems like an outlier and not applicable to this incident. The examples given were common (to just about anyone) when I was in middle school. Kids can be mean, but so is the world. Some kids need to learn to harden up and others need to learn empathy for people who are different. School is when you can learn these lessons/make these mistakes in a relatively safe environment (compared to IRL).

Saying that this is a moot point is odd. I don't understand why the ACLU gets to decide this.

Edit* Interesting write up tho... thanks for posting

I suspect that these things follow a power law...for both bullies and victims. There are some bullies who are really good at being bullies and bully a lot; there are some poor motherfuckers who are simply bait for said assholes. You've got some mix of voluntary bad conduct AND immutable characteristics in there. That mixture varies. On one end you've got the guy that genuinely is an asshole, on the other you've got the guy who's IDK black in an all-white school in the middle of nowhere. Admittedly - that is becoming dated, but 40 years ago that was very much a thing that happened.

I think there could be some interesting conversations in the general sense, about what extent each particular matter requires intervention, if any, and what those interventions would be. I'd argue that there are some that I think are unusual enough that they should require intervention -- even if "I'm going to rape you" was an outdated Dragon Ball Z Abridged joke, and contextually I'm pretty skeptical that it was, it's the sorta thing you at least need to mark down so you know if the kid's learning when to stop -- but I probably could be persuaded a lot on what extent that intervention needs to take, especially.

I don't think it's relevant for discussion at this stage. None of the current OCR complaints are about punishing the students. Regardless of when the ALCU or OCR should be deciding things, both the ACLU-PA and the teacher on site believed that these incidents were enough to justify federal investigation, and indeed investigation about insufficient response to this bullying. Even if the ACLU and teacher wrongly believed a strong and immediate intervention necessary, it's valuable to notice that they weren't consistently behaving as if they believed that.

I'd argue that there are some that I think are unusual enough that they should require intervention

I agree. But it seems they're pushing it to the point where everything requires intervention.

There's definitely a line and rape threats are past it; even if it's trolling, joking, whatever... And that's something kids should be taught. But a federal investigation?

Perhaps that shock causing me to miss the nuance of all this...