Two Boys Suspended For Pointing Pencils

[ramesees]

It's bloody stupid to micromanage political correctness, especially to this degree. Our schools are turning into a sissified world akin to that in Demolition Man.

Which will make future generations so much easier to control and manipulate once you breed any notion of resistance out of them from such a young age.

[Breach]

"A pencil is a weapon when it is pointed at someone in a threatening way and gun noises are made" - Really??? Next time a 7 year old points a water gun at me I'm calling the po-lice!

"Some children would consider it threatening, who are scared about shootings in schools or shootings in the community. - Yeah, and I am intimidated by teachers giving me the evil eye.

Way to tackle gun violence - punish kids for doing what kids do and brainwash them into the perfect victims of the real world out there. The kind of mentality I see in many schools is just... sickening.

[tbarnett]

I'd like to point out that pencils are not designed to shoot bullets. They do not come out of a person's index finger, or for that matter, a chicken bone.

Also, a student could stab someone with a pencil so we need to ban pencils from schools. A student could beat someone to death with a chair, so we need to get rid of chairs.

Hmmm...

Someone could hurt another person with just about anything, even jello (if they are truly creative), so we need to ban schools in general.

[Elessar]

So we're just crushing kids' creativity and imagination shortly after they enter school now? Nice...should bode well for this future generation

/sarcasm

[mudslag]

Nope im serious. No such thing as common sense. I remember our teachers telling us we were forbidden from drawing pictures of guns... yes i'm serious but then I come from a sans gun nation,

There is such thing as common sense, it's just subjective. Kids acting as kids shouldn't be discouraged, if anything it should be guided and the school is doing a **** poor job of it.

Will somebody please think of the children?! We clearly need to ban pencils from school, not to mention erasers, that could as well be used to emulate hand grenades!

When I was in grade school we did the wimp test were you rub the erasers on your arm as many times back and forth as you can before wimping out. Granted it was as stupid then as I remember it now and it left a blister on my arm for a long time. BURN THE EVIL ERASERS.

[SiCKX]

Now kids cannot be kids huh...yea, I love how the world is turning out...

Someone in UK said kids should not have best friends.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22383453

[FloatingFatMan]

Someone in UK said kids should not have best friends.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...gazine-22383453

I wish they'd hurry up and colonise Mars. I want to get off this stupid planet.

[compl3x]

get them while they're young... :rolleyes: This is just the beginning

Of?

This is just something stupid, not the start of a grand conspiracy.

Someone in UK said kids should not have best friends.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...gazine-22383453

Unbelievable drivel. I don't think I've read so much garbage in my life.

[Ph1b3r0pt1c]

Sure you have. You read your own posts on neowin don't you?

[He's Dead Jim]

I bet they'll grow up to be serial killers, or even better, proper anarchists :)

[ramesees]

Of?

This is just something stupid, not the start of a grand conspiracy.

You can back that claim up yes ?

[Growled Member]

I wish they'd hurry up and colonise Mars. I want to get off this stupid planet.

Me too but I'm not sure Mars is far enough away.

[Hum]

Will somebody please think of the children?! We clearly need to ban pencils from school, not to mention erasers, that could as well be used to emulate hand grenades!

Don't forget smoking doobies the the boy's room. :shifty:

[Richteralan]

I'm glad people point fingers at the school immediately, without knowing that the school will get in big trouble if other kids' parents complained.

Point fingers at (stupid) parents, please.

Someone in UK said kids should not have best friends.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...gazine-22383453

Before I read that, I'm guessing it's written by a female author.

edit: yep.

[nrjperera]

Most hilarious thing I've read today. lol :D

If I were to get punishment for all the crazy things I did in school, I would be spending a life sentence in Jail. :D

[DAOWAce]

Now kids cannot be kids huh...yea, I love how the world is turning out...

"Just take your permanently damaging mind altering drugs and do your schoolwork!"

Yeah, schools have needed a reform for many years now. Shame they don't seem to be changing.

[Sylar0]

kids can be kids still, just because they can't emulate a gun doesn't mean that's not being a kid. No one would run away, its preventive behavior conditioning that is preemptive in nature.

This an atheistic amen to you brother. I worry about America and its gun culture.

Maybe the teacher should have taken the boys aside and told them what they did was not allowed in school and please not do that again?

Agree.

One last comment...glad the mother of the kid told him he did nothing wrong. I played with toy guns as a kid and went around the neighborhood acting like I was shooting my friends. No want I wanted to shoot someone for real. Probably because I had good parents that taught me right from wrong, real from fiction.

What a different world this is tho...

Yes it is move with it. No reason to have males to be cultured to become violent aggressive and venerating weapons.

You don't want your child to look up to you? Also, what's wrong with being a soldier?

No not really I want it to be its own person and understand my mistakes. Its not my child it would be the child I created its not my property to mould If I had one. As for soldiers a lot of reason but more so with the idea that no solider wants war travialised

Which will make future generations so much easier to control and manipulate once you breed any notion of resistance out of them from such a young age.

People like you worry me my friend resistance from what I live in the UK and its no utopia but I do not need to resist anything. Unless your a criminal you have nothing to fear.

There is such thing as common sense, it's just subjective. Kids acting as kids shouldn't be discouraged, if anything it should be guided and the school is doing a **** poor job of it.

When I was in grade school we did the wimp test were you rub the erasers on your arm as many times back and forth as you can before wimping out. Granted it was as stupid then as I remember it now and it left a blister on my arm for a long time. BURN THE EVIL ERASERS.

Define common sense then without meaning "the stuff I believe" and yes the school should have been shut down for allowing children to hurt themselves

Someone in UK said kids should not have best friends.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22383453

That's just sad but then school is for leaning not socialising but id allow it.

I bet they'll grow up to be serial killers, or even better, proper anarchists :)

I do love anarchism

[Growled Member]

If I were to get punishment for all the crazy things I did in school, I would be spending a life sentence in Jail. :D

I hear ya. They would have stuck me up under the jail. :D

And I'm still that bad now. :)

[W32.Backdoor.KillAV.E]

Now kids cannot be kids huh...yea, I love how the world is turning out...

You mean U.S. I knew from the title that this would be in that backwards place.

[M_Lyons10]

Maybe the teacher should have taken the boys aside and told them what they did was not allowed in school and please not do that again?

The teacher acknowledges that she asked them to stop and they did. She then proceeded to take them to the Principal's office for suspension...

Just another example of the total lack of common sense and reasoning of our school faculty... This is just absolutely ridiculous.

[techbeck]

You mean U.S. I knew from the title that this would be in that backwards place.

There are stupid people everywhere...not just the US like many non US citizens like to comment in threads like this.

Yes it is move with it. No reason to have males to be cultured to become violent aggressive and venerating weapons.

I, and all my friends, played like this growing up. None of us are in trouble with the law and have good jobs and are upstanding citizens. Its not things like this that make people violent.

[Original Poster]

'Merica

[compl3x]

Sure you have. You read your own posts on neowin don't you?

Care to point to anything specific, troll?

You can back that claim up yes ?

Prove a negative? I'll get right on it.

[ramesees]

Prove a negative? I'll get right on it.

Ah yes that old chestnut - I've made a claim, but have a wonderful get out clause in that its about something I cant prove so I have no responsibility whatsoever. I can then use this get out clause to act smug around those that attempt to see "behind the curtain" so to speak and rally support from all the other supposed "thinkers".

The laughable thing is, and it is laughable, that people can make comments such as "There is no grand conspiracy" on anything really and that is practically the end of it.

No further discussion needed as though the very thought of conspiracy is almost impossible and should be immediately dismissed so we can all get back to whatever else we were doing. No attempt to even look into it or try and see if a conspiracy could indeed be taking place - but no, instant dismissal gets the job done with a "Nothing to see here people".

As an example, take the relatively recent LIBOR scandal in which a lot of international banking institutions were found to be conspiring to fix lending rates amongst themselves (with a report in the Financial Times stating that manipulation of this had been happening for at least over 20 years).

Now if say in 1998 someone suspected that this was taking place, how many people would have immediately jumped up with a "There is no grand conspiracy" response, almost as if they had been conditioned to react that way? I'm guessing quite a large number, and no doubt are the same people or types of people today who dismiss talk of conspiracies in other sectors as well - and expect that dismissal to be a satisfactory answer to someone's or some group of peoples' suspicions about the world we live in and its institutions and members.

As an exercise to the reader, take any revealed conspiracy from the past 50 years and think how you would have felt if someone had told you "there may be more to this" at the time before the big reveal came - same principles apply.

Now of course there is an argument that can be made that not everything is a conspiracy - things sometimes can just happen without anyone or a group of people acting as a guiding hand - but can you say this is definitely true in all cases ? Should not at least a cursory investigation take place to examine the merits of whether a conspiracy is taking place or not before being immediately written off ?

Or must we all take the view point that "Conspiracies never happen" except when shown years later that that is false and have been happening all along. No doubt at some point I'll be hit with the Occam's Razor notion as well - which a lot of the people mentioned in the opening of this post like to use as well - again to stifle any sort of debate.

The simplest theory - the one with the least assumptions may not always be the correct answer. Again you are dealing with humans and human systems which we know from daily experience to be overly complex - eg the banking system, the systems of government, multiple levels of bureaucracy - how can you choose a "theory" which is the most simple to explain the inner workings of complex systems - this is how conspiracies can take place - they rely on the masses to accept a simple answer without ever doing the digging to find out if this simple answer is a cover for something deeper.

It really does grind my gears in the worst way when I hear someone whether in person or in an Internet debate on message boards / forums say something like "Which is more likely ... some simple reason for an outcome, or a deep conspiracy involving multiple government departments, institutions and companies across a single city / country / continent to make that outcome happen" without ever considering that in some cases yes the complex answer is the correct one, but using the notion of "well the first one has the least assumptions it must therefore be right" every time.

If the people of this planet, regardless of where in the world they are from, would stop accepting the bull***t that is foisted upon them every day by media outlets, governments, "the great and the good" and always choosing the simple answers and explanations for outcomes and situations we could start to have a much better world for everyone.

We know that politicians are corrupt, we know that media organizations hide and distort the truth and have no problems lying to their citizens (and I am talking about media companies on all points of the compass), we know bankers are thieving parasites that have no problems feathering their own nests at the expense of people being thrown out of their homes. We know that at the end of the day certain personality types are attracted to certain positions and a greater than average number of people that run corporations and that are in positions of power show the same traits as psychopaths who have no remorse and would do whatever it takes to further their own goals - whatever they might be.

But as soon as suggestions are made that these same people use their connections and resources to collude in conspiracies that is immediately rejected ? Someone is being rather dishonest if they don't take into account the full range of human traits, and stop approaching the situation from a "well I wouldn't do that, so therefore it cant happen" position.

[compl3x]

As much as I'd love to read that wall of text, I'm not going to. I scanned it and your point seems to be "conspiracies can totally happen". I never suggested they can't and/or don't happen. I was trying to decipher a comment made in this thread.

Someone said:

get them while they're young... :rolleyes: This is just the beginning

I wanted to know what it is the "beginning of". Stupid teachers/admin overreacting to kids playing with imagery guns is just that: stupid. Not an Obama, left wing, socialist plot take your guns. Or an attempt at re-education. Or anything else of the sort.