Teenagers, Social Media, and Terrorism

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Yard Dart, May 6, 2013.


  1. Yard Dart

    Yard Dart Vigilant Monkey Moderator

    Teenagers, social media, and terrorism: a threat level hard to assess - Yahoo! News

    Government good, your privacy bad........ :rolleyes: To me this sounds like a public conditioning message. "You really want us to look at everything your kids say because it is for the general publics' safety". Though I agree there are things that can be done to mitigate perceived terrorist ( the Boston bombers were in the fed's face and ignored), the message in this article struck me as a means to convince the public that our privacy is secondary to our security which I disagree with. Uncle Sam does not have the right to know unless the individual has consented to the search or been notified of their rights to shut up...
    If you have a probable cause to come and talk to me because of the things I may have written or said, get a judge to provide a warrant and follow due process and not circumvent my rights by using tools that are approved by presidential fiat.
     
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  2. tulianr

    tulianr Don Quixote de la Monkey

    It is a different world, is some respects, to the world most of us grew up in. Just as the reach of teenagers, via social media networks, is vastly larger than the reach most of us had as youngsters, the consequences of that reach is commensurately greater. Most of our actions as youngsters rarely went beyond our neighborhoods. Actions, or words, of today's teenagers can reach global audiences - something beyond our capacity to imagine thirty or forty years ago.

    It's not an easy question, I don't think, where the line lies between privacy and security these days. It largely depends, I think, upon the lines we ourselves (or our children) draw. If we don't want a reaction to it, we shouldn't put it out there. If we don't want to go to jail for terroristic threats, we shouldn't make them. We may feel the desire to choke the living crap out of our co-workers, fellow students, or politicians; but if we put it out there on a public forum, we have to expect a public (read: government) response.

    We can all look back ten, twenty, thirty years (or more) ago, and think, "Well it was different when I was growing up." And that's the point. It was different when we were growing up. If one of our fellow students in high school had said, "Those guys are going to regret messing with me. Wait until next week. They'll be sorry. The world is going to end for them." We'd have laughed, imagining that he was going to squirt superglue in their car door lock, or stick some sardines in their car air breather. After all of the Columbine style school shootings, we can no longer laugh off such comments. And more's the pity. Children are no longer allowed to be children in today's world.

    It's a more complicated world, and parenting is more complicated as a result; a prime reason that my wife and I find ourselves homeschooling. Life is different today and our childrens' childhoods are going to be different, and their adult lives are going to be different, than were ours.
     
  3. mysterymet

    mysterymet Monkey+++

    What is happening with our society today. So much violence for no good reason. These kids think its a game. I think we have lost our moral compass. (i'm not talking religion because I think you can be a moral person without it if you so choose.) I was reading yesterday about the 17 year old kid in salt lake city that punched a ref in the face over a bad call. The ref just died of his injuries yesterday... What does this say about us? Rome is indeed burning.
     
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  4. kckndrgn

    kckndrgn Monkey+++ Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    first off, I want to find the person that coined the phrase "zero tolerance" and smack them around a bit. ZT means I don't have to think about what happened and use any judgment at all, I can just react.

    Mr. Mullins - you are WRONG! that is not the price to pay to live in a "free" society. When one has to prove they are NOT something (not guilty in a crime, not a terrorist, etc) it is no longer a free society.

    Yes, technology has really changed our lives, mostly for the better, but in some instances for the worse.
     
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  5. VHestin

    VHestin Farm Chick

    I think there's good and bad in this. The good is that the kids get a wake-up call/reality check about consequences of their actions. The bad is that A: the kids were foolish enough to do it in the first place, and B: the government is beyond overreaching these days.

    I also agree that it is not the price to pay to live in a free society. It is NOT free. That's the whole point.
     
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  6. “If you’re not a terrorist, if you’re not a threat, prove it," he says.
    “This is the price you pay to live in free society right now" - quoting a police SGt who is head of the second largest police union in the city

    -----------------

    This must be more of that evidence that is supposed to prove to me that most police are the good guys. That there's really only a few bad cops who spoil it for everyone else, and that in reality stuff like this is not a bright line unmistakable indication that what we are actually dealing with here is a very systematic and institutional problem which strains the credulity of the "it's just a few bad apples" mantra.

    The guys at the top run the show and control their subordinates, and the guys who are in other high position such as representative organizations control the social narrative. Underlings will obey, or else they face official or unofficial sanction for their failure to play ball and be a team player. Don't cross the thin blue line. It's as simple as that. There tends to be very little room in tight-knit bonded fraternal type organizations and institutions for people who won't play ball and get with the program - the program being what the guys upstairs say it is (among other things).
     
  7. tulianr

    tulianr Don Quixote de la Monkey

    I can only speak of my personal experiences. I can't tell other folks the way things are where they live. Maybe some locales harbor an evil fraternity of law enforcement. I don't know.

    In my own personal lifetime of interaction with police officers, I have only dealt with one cop who I thought was way over the line and unprofessional, and he was in England. And even he was the rare exception to the other British law enforcement contact that I experienced while living there.

    I just don't think that it is particularly just, to paint an entire field of individuals with the same brush, whether you're talking about cops, military, or preppers.
     
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  8. Have the cops who shot at three innocent people in pursuit of Dorner finally been arrested? They weren't, last time I checked. Is that just another one of the latest of those funny "isolated incidents," instead of being what it really is, which is an institutional problem from top-to-bottom which applies a different set of moral and ethical rules for the legally privileged group that are not extended to us ordinary folk? How about accountability for the many mistaken raids that happen every single year (which sometimes led to the injury or deaths of residents in these "mistaken" raids). Make no mistake (pun), there's nothing "mistaken" about such raids in many cases; they are flat out negligence and recklessness which should be held criminally accountable to the same degree an ordinary citizen would be held accountable if they used similar kinds of force against innocent people and then tried to claim it was merely an "accident" (rarely does that fly in court - there's a fine line between bona fide accident and negligence or recklessness, and the legal standard for ordinary citizens is very much higher [stricter] than it is for public servants).

    The mere existence of qualified immunity (and the case law which has addressed that issue in the courts over the decades) is immutable proof beyond all reasonable doubt that the entire system is rotten to the core in a fairly substantial way. Qualified immunity has been used in countless cases to continue to let bad public servants get away with doing bad things which ordinary people would be held accountable for.

    This is not an isolated incident kind of issue, this is a feature (a defect) which is intentionally built into the system, by design. For a public servant to lose the shielding of immunity, they typically have to do something so awful that it goes beyond the pale of what even the system is willing to normally allow, which is saying quite a lot, considering the degree to which qualified immunity shields public servants from being held accountable for fairly atrocious conduct. And those rare cases where accountability does happen is just not good enough. They shouldn't just be held accountable only in the most shockingly egregious cases, but in all cases - just like the rest of the serfs are.

    No legitimate system would ever allow the existence of qualified immunity in the form it exists today. It's very purpose is nothing but an excuse to apply two entirely different sets of rules, one for the privileged elite, and another for the lower class serfs who if they were to do the same thing as the privileged elite who are entitled to qualified immunity, our butts would be in jail.
     
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