Baraka_Guru

I will reiterate: Satire is dead.

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Plan9

Because we like to play up petty issues and talk big!

Is fun.

Oh, I use small words and poor grammar.

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Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

roachboy

there's almost no way to hit this softball of a setup without sounding mean, so i'll watch it track into the catchers mitt behind me and say:

i meant apart from that.
beyond that.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Plan9

Yes, and so is sarcasm.

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Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

Mojo_PeiPei

I don't get it nobody censored him. It was printed.

They knew it would piss people off thats why they executed it in the manner they did. They admittied they wanted to be provocative, I don't know how else one would attack apathy.

School papers are funded with private donations, no big secret. Are people actually saying the businesses are out of line for choosing not to allocate their money sponsorship/money to a paper that prints something they see as unfit? What are you people actually arguing about, what is the real issue? Nothing has happened to the kids as of yet, right(?), thus they said they don't care if they are fired, but they won't resign.

Mountain out of an ant hill.

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To win a war you must serve no master but your ambition.

Elphaba

IDIOTS! Yes, I do feel better. Thank you, rb.

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"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." Molly Ivins - 1944-2007

Plan9

Hah.

I bet their MOM goes to college!

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Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

pig

and that is one of the biggest piles of shit they ever did. bribery should not be a protected freedom. but perhaps that's a threadjack. so.

i support the right of these kids to print the editorial. i didn't think it was well phrased as it could have been, but still. i think the advertisers have the right to pull out - but it would be nice to see other advertisers pick up their places. regardless, i think that the public school newspaper should stand up for the philosophical / political point it's editorial board put up instead of cowering to advertisers. that's the rub when you make your business so heavily involved in spreading the news and journalistic integrity. it seems the flip side, where the newspaper is 'just another business' is the bullshit we have now...where all news is basically propaganda.

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The_Jazz

I think you folks are forgetting that I have a constitutional right NOT to hear the phrase if I choose. The news can't broadcast the phrase without altering it somehow to comply with the law.

Decency laws are constitutional, but just barely.

I agree that I'm disappointed that the school didn't stand behind the editor, but I also wonder if they get any editorial approval to start with. Somehow I doubt it. That makes the school's stance less problematic for me since they're treating it more like a stand-alone business.

This isn't about individual rights. This isn't even really about the First Amendment since no one's been arrested or fined. You don't have the right to say whatever you want whenever you want, even here. That's right, the First Amendment doesn't apply to TFP. And you know what, you're all damn glad that your perceived "rights" are "trampled". If they weren't this board would have spam everywhere.

Out in the real world, you can't start screaming "fuck" in a church or shopping mall. If you do, the owners of the property have every right to curtail your little free speech experiment and kick you to the curb. And you could get arrested and convicted of disturbing the peace in some locales.

That said, the editor printed what he wanted to print. He's been neither arrested nor fined. Everything else is a business transaction. Where's the issue?

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"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin
"There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

JumpinJesus

Some here are asking what is wrong with what happened. He wasn't arrested. He wasn't fined. He wasn't censored, etc. The staff of the paper was punished by having their wages reduced, so one could argue that they were fined.

Jail isn't the only form of punishment there is. If someone is punished for utilizing what is a constitutional right, then what weight does that hold if a business can use money (or, according to the Supreme Court, "free speech") to punish them?

At this point, though, we're at loggerheads since we can't seem to agree on what constitutes free speech and what constitutes violating one's right to free speech.

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"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am" - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

The_Jazz

Good point, JJ, but I'll also add that we need to pin down WHO does the violating.

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"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin
"There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

Plan9

It seems Americans pull the "Oh, my amendments!" card when they do something silly or foolish.

Justify, justify, justify.

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Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

shakran

They have the right to say it. They exercised that right. They didn't get arrested for it. The first amendment remains untarnished here.

Their bosses also have the right to stop them from saying it, and the right to fire them if they do say it. Freedom of speech does not mean you get to use someone else's newspaper to say whatever you want without any response from the owner.

I don't see a problem here, save that the student "journalists" are idiots. This ad, if it were a post here, would be deleted and the poster given a stern talking to because it fails to spark even semi-intelligent discussion about the issue that was raised. In fact, the issue that was raised isn't even logical. Bush had nothing to do with the kid getting tased. If you want to write a strongly worded editorial, you should at least try to be semi intelligent about it, lest the rest of the world think you're a vacuous moron.

Plan9

Now I wanna use a taser on the Bill of Rights.

See if it screams.

"Oh, you're violating me!"

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Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

roachboy

if you take seriously what the writer or the edito said about the piece, it was a simple act of agitprop.
the piece was 4 words long.
the idea of it was to challenge complacency about freedom of speech.
that's all fine--you play the agitprop game, you accept what follows from is, ESPECIALLY if what follows is an exact demonstration of the extent of the problem the agitprop is designed to point out.

so i do think there are idiots involved here, but those idiots are not the editorial staff of the paper: the trail of idiocy begins with the (conservative? coors?) advertiser(s) who "pulled adverts", moves through the public statements of the paper's business manager and then percolates outward to include the whole of conservative "harumph harumph" responses and extends to a number of posts within this thread.

so there are idiots involved here, yes. i just think people are mistaken in who the idiots are.

to wit:

1. the argument that there is some "right" not to hear the word fuck would seem more coherently directed at the major-media shitstorm than at the edito in the csu student newspaper. so blame the conservative set for this one, jazz: the conservative reaction, the taking of the bait. if there is a structuring moment of stupidity in this sea of it, that moment is the conservative responses. *they* are the asshats here. and in terms of getting this lint national exposure, *they*--and not the student who wrote all 4 of those words--are the problem.

so your "right" no to hear the word fuck has been violated by the people who are all "MY GOD! THOSE KIDS USED THE WORD FUCK."
if they had not reacted, you wouldn't know about this trivial story.
so your "right" would not have been violated.


2. crompsin keeps posting stuff that trivialize the notion of freedom of speech and then proceed to claim that referencing freedom of speech in this case is accidental--but that's ridiculous--the point of each of the 4 words was freedom of speech. this is about freedom of speech. that you think the relation strange has to do with you, not the situation.

3. so i dont agree with baraka guru: satire isnt dead. it turns out that satire is not only alive and well, even in kinda disappointingly crude form--but the american right has once again demonstrated that it is a sitting duck for satire because even when you say "THIS IS SATIRE" or "THIS IS A POLITICAL ACTION DIRECTED AT COMPLACENCY REGARDING FREEDOM OF SPEECH" they dont get it. or maybe conservatives only understand satire when it is directed at populations which are marginal, powerless or nearly so--you know, the pj o'rourke school of smug travel writing "i go around the world and all i see are wogs"...or the fine, sophisticated ouevre of ann coulter.....that kinda thing.


what would killl satire is indifference.
with a population of hyper-sensitive control-freak reactionaries out there, satire is alive and well.
if there's a problem with it, that problem is that satire is too easy.


4. to make separations: seaver's positions here seem to me much more thought out than the retro-sponses to the edito itself.
but basically, i am saying the same thing as mojo and shakran, but with a turn insofar as the arguments over where the vacantness lay.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Cynthetiq

Thank you.

that's the crux for me in everything in life. the fact that you get freedom doesn't absolve one from the consequences and responsibilities that are associated with excercising those freedoms.

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The_Jazz

RB - The use of the "*" or an auditory "beep" negates your argument. It is possible to discuss the use of the word without naming the word itself. Hairs are split. The slippery slope is oiled.

It seems that you are arguing that this became a story because people got offended. If so, that seems to be incredibly self-evident. It was intended to offend. If not, the word wouldn't have been used. Your mythical *they* includes the entirety of the population that is not the editor. Clearly you and I have no problem with the word - we've used it freely in this thread. Your *they* subset, however, does not end with us. *They* have the right to protect themselves from what they think is unwarranted use. While *they* all knows what the word is, it is possible to dicuss it's use without actually using it.

Whether or not this paper is major media smells of a red herring. They publish their paper for students, some of whom are minors and some of whom are most certainly local high schoolers. It is also sold without proof of ID. Either this is media or not, which makes them responsible to the community standards. Like it or not, they must abide by that. The courts have always upheld that test.

No one's speech was reduced here. It was said. Advertisers pulled their money. The paper suffered for it. Exactly where does the First Amendment really come in to play here? No where that I can see.

__________________
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin
"There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

roachboy

except that we continue to perform the relation and in so doing we legitimate the claim that there is a relation.

personally, the freedom to use speech is an actual right: the "freedom" to not hear things is a negative right. i dont see them as being on the same level, so i dont see them in a kind of classic liberal dilemma kinda conflict.
you could redirect this onto a discussion of "community standards" in response, but we'd have to know something about fort collins, the usual "town/gown" conflicts, how they play out, etc. to do it in more than a hand-waving way.

i dont know anything about fort collins co. except that the atomic clock is there and so, apparently, is colorado state.

btw:

i was exploring options for not using that bad word by way of asterisk substitutions. here is a little array:

f***
*u**
**c*
***k

now, if you want to avoid the term but still reference it, i would think that using another letter than the first would be better. but which one? maybe switch em each time. keep the modest reader guessing.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Willravel

I think the only real failing of the message is that it doesn't instantly and directly bring attention to wrongdoing. It's too ambiguous. "Fuck Bush" really only communicates an emotional response. One would be saying more if they said "Bush is a bad dresser", frankly. I've seen articles called "Bush Illegally Bypasses FISA" or "Bush Admits No WMDs", which clearly outline wrongdoing and allow the reader to have the emotional response. It's better that way. Instead of it seeming like you and your buddies drinking beers and watching CSPAN (which I do), it's more like an authority outlining facts and allowing you to draw your own conclusion.

My own emotional response? Fuck Bush. But, if I'm going to be writing about Bush, it doesn't really do anything but act like a high five between people who can't stand Bush. That's great for your back porch during a BBQ, but in media it lacks substance.

As for the use of an obscenity? I couldn't care less. I do see that as free speech, as it does communicate free opinion on a leader. If someone said something like "Fuck Martin Luther King" I'd be pissed as hell, and they had better back it up, but I shouldn't be able to stop him from saying it. I can tell him to run and hide, though.

mixedmedia

But the realization I came to (late) is that the point was not 'Bush' it was the word 'Fuck.' It could have said 'Fuck You' and had the same intent. In fact, now that I think about it, 'Fuck You' would have relayed a much more powerful message from my perspective.

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Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

Plan9

Man, I really shouldn't bite at this.

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Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

filtherton

Aye, i think a large resounding FUCK YOU is what america has earned for itself.

Even so, FUCK BUSH is a very succinct representation of an increasing portion of american political thought. I think the fact that they didn't feel the need to contrive a bullet-point justification of the sentiment suggests a refreshing faith in the intelligence of their readers.

Most people, even if they don't agree, understand at least some of the impetus behind the sentiment of a phrase like "fuck bush". It isn't something that really needs elaboration. You could consider the phrase obscene, but in the context of the actions of the president and administration it references, the obscenity of "Fuck Bush" is really actually very trivial. It's like if somebody standing next to a mass grave pointed towards it and said, "This is fucked up." and the reaction of everyone else was, "Dude, you shouldn't swear, there are kids that might hear you." Never mind that there are kids in the fucking grave.

I would argue that if there were any justice in the world, the obscene member in the phrase "Fuck Bush" wouldn't be the word fuck.

Plan9

I did both theaters overseas...

I concur.

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Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

pig

filtherton: sometimes i love you so very very much.

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You don't love me, you just love my piggy style

Sun Tzu

While a different context, Frank Zappa sums it up in a way I relate to.

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To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.- Stephen Hawking

filtherton

Aw geez, pig. You know we're homies.

Bill O'Rights

Absolutely.

And to those that persist in claiming that this is, in fact, a violation of their First Ammendment rights, then why is the following not a violation of these kids' Second Ammendment rights?

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"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony

"Hedonism with rules isn't hedonism at all, it's the Republican party." - JumpinJesus

It is indisputable that true beauty lies within...but a nice rack sure doesn't hurt.

Plan9

Because people are afraid of inanimate objects.

Ever wonder why our infinitely wise forefathers decided to put speech first and guns right after? They could have put firearms much, much father down the priority line.

Their reasoning makes sense to me.

...

This thread kinda goes with the "Fired By Satan" thread... in that it isn't a violation of freedom of speech, just a lack of discretion by a small entity that represents a larger entity.

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Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

Master_Shake

Personally, I wouldn't fuck Bush.

His daughters on the other hand...

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You know something, I don't think the sun even... exists... in this place. 'Cause I've been up for hours, and hours, and hours, and the night never ends here.

smooth

I really don't think this is the state of the law. I'd like to know, I'm not claiming I do. But when you are referring to rights not to hear something over the public airwaves, that is a different animal than print media. And in so far as decency laws are concerned, I *believe* they apply to publications rather than print news sources. And I *think* that our courts have differentiated between classes of speech and afforded a number of tests of constitutionality of suppressing them. Political speech and in particular, print news, has traditionally fallen under the most protected speech.


Which begs the question?
What kind of right is a "right" if methods to suppress are sloughed off as consequences?

How does losing one's job or wages *not* constitute censorship?
Perhaps we should start at "What is censorship?"

I think that if someone wanted to have a "proper" response to this piece it would have been to ignore it or enjoy it. Of course corporations are *fully* within their rights and even may have an expectation to react and pull their ads. They are, after all, responsible to a different party altogether: the consumer.


But what should *not* happen are people making excuses for what shall and shall not formally be considered censorship, when the responses are specifically and solely intended to suppress the speech. Those responses are what I imagine the editorial intended to bring out in order to highlight the ludicrous response of tazering things we don't want to hear (or the people who voice them).

It wasn't brilliant expression by any means, but I don't think it needed to be to test the point they wanted made. They basically took a nonsense word, one loaded with symbolism in this country, and placed it next to the president's name.

What if they had wrote "Hang Bush"?


EDIT: BoR, at first blush that second case *does* appear to violate their 2nd amendment rights. So *I* wouldn't agree to what I think your unspoken premise is. That said, I've already pointed out different classes of speech (eg, political, religious, commercial) have been protected at different levels. So I'd think gun laws (on campus, in courthouses, public spaces) follow the same trend. From my understanding, the Supremes have always balanced what they feel the "value" of the right against the potential "harm" it could produce. So we end up with valid (or at least reasonable?) limitations on gun toting and reasonable limitations on scaring the shit out of people in crowded theaters.

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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman

Bill O'Rights

That was my point. Thank you. Of course we have limitations. I don't think that too many would argue that a college campus, or a shopping mall, is no place to be carrying around a rifle. Now, the freedom of speech thing does go a little further than just scaring the shit out of people in crowded theaters. Just because you have a right to say something, doesn't mean that I have to provide you with the soapbox upon which to say it.

Look, this kid was, in my best estimation, just looking for attention. So...he got it. I really don't see a point in him doing what he did. But, he did it. So, as with anything else, there may be some consequences. Deal with them.

And, if newspaper boy is so adament, about getting his word out, then let him fund his very own newspaper. Though I doubt that he's going to garner much revenue, if all he does is print "Tase This. Fuck Bush." Don't they teach journalism, in journalism school? Or is it all just sensationalism?
Or, maybe I'm wrong and this kid'll become the next Rupert Murdoch. I'm not holding my breath, though.

__________________
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony

"Hedonism with rules isn't hedonism at all, it's the Republican party." - JumpinJesus

It is indisputable that true beauty lies within...but a nice rack sure doesn't hurt.

roachboy

if the statements made after the fact are anything more than ex post facto rationalizations, the edito was a political action.
maybe not a very interesting one in terms of content, but one nonetheless.
that's what makes this whole teapot tempest ironic....

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Plan9

The best interpretation of this four line headline headache yet!

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."