Comments | andrewducker: Interesting Links for 31-03-2016

andrewducker

Interesting Links for 31-03-2016

Mar 31, 2016 12:00

Schools charging parents for children to eat their own packed lunches | News (tags: food children school OhForFucksSake money ) Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10 | ZDNet (tags: microsoft linux wtf ) Is the War on Drugs really a war on black America? (tags: drugs racism society usa ) The US radio market is on the ( Read more... )

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Comments 27

bart_calendar March 31 2016, 11:47:23 UTC

Here's my understanding of the initial causes of the war on drugs - and, yes, much of it is racist ( ... )

andrewducker March 31 2016, 12:41:35 UTC

That makes a lot of sense to me.

(Although there were probably a bunch of other things also going on.)

bart_calendar March 31 2016, 12:51:55 UTC

Oh, I'm sure.

I suspect that Giancanna and the CIA were to a large extent exploiting American puritanism and American racist attitudes that already existed.

danieldwilliam March 31 2016, 13:48:18 UTC

The US seems to have had a large stripe of temperance attitudes going back to the frontier days of the 19th century.

Many rowdy young men getting drunk in frontier saloons and causing trouble or just drinking the profits.

It wouldn't surprise me if that prohibitionist mindset was pretty deeply engrained as a part of USian culture.

Thread 5

danieldwilliam March 31 2016, 12:35:38 UTC

If there were so many lesbians in the US military were there any anywhere else?

andrewducker March 31 2016, 12:41:54 UTC

Why be anywhere else when the US government was going to offer you a way to serve your country _and_ get laid?

danieldwilliam March 31 2016, 13:44:17 UTC

All this? And a paycheck too?

cartesiandaemon March 31 2016, 13:47:51 UTC

And as many incoming bullets as you could eat!

Thread 9

gwendysmile March 31 2016, 12:42:00 UTC

I'm pretty excited for the Star Trek makeup.

andrewducker March 31 2016, 12:43:19 UTC

Yay!

(I was beginning to think that I'd misunderstood my friends when nobody comment on Facebook.)

hano March 31 2016, 13:26:37 UTC

Just to add to the Skorzeny story. It's not so unusual. Legend has it, a lot of Waffen SS ended up in the French Foreign Legion after WW2. Specifically the regiment that was wiped out almost to a man at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the battle that saw the end of French power in Vietnam. There's an irony there somewhere.

danieldwilliam March 31 2016, 13:43:54 UTC

Perhaps the last time German soldiers brought French imperial aspirations to an end.

bart_calendar March 31 2016, 14:29:08 UTC

My understanding was that many countries, the US included, were more than happy to hire Nazis who had useful skills.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that one of the main jobs of the U.S. Naval Intelligence Service at the end of WWII was to find Germans who were particularly good at killing and torture and extracting information because we wanted to put them to work in South America.

Lots of curiously blonde people in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay today where there were almost none 100 years ago.

cartesiandaemon March 31 2016, 18:01:42 UTC

Yeah, I'm not at all surprised. I watched Doctor Strangelove :)

But OTOH, it wouldn't be surprising if Israel had more of a "execute for war crimes first, ask questions afterward" attitude to Nazi defectors than most other countries either.

Thread 6

gonzo21 March 31 2016, 13:55:35 UTC

If I had a school that wanted to charge my hypothetical kid for taking in a packed lunch, I think I would tell them to take a long walk off a short pier. Because that's just insane.

brixtonbrood March 31 2016, 16:03:31 UTC

It seems unenforceable. If you refuse to pay for school trips then they can leave your child at home. If you refuse to pay for school meals (and aren't entitled to free ones by means of age or income) then they can give your child bread and cheese for a couple of days and then let them go hungry. If you refuse to pay for after school club then they can call social services fifteen minutes after end of school and tell them you've abandoned your child (schools do do this if they are given no alternative).

But what would they actually do if you didn't pay the packed lunch charge? I guess they could forbid the child access to the lunch room and the class room and the place where their pack lunch bag has been left during the lunch break. That would work. You'd need to have some pretty hardcore lunch supervisors though.

gonzo21 March 31 2016, 16:10:01 UTC

And that takes the school into denying a child sustenance territory, at which point I would think, as a hypothetical parent, I could start calling the police and social services to say the school is abusing my child by starving them.

drdoug April 1 2016, 12:00:46 UTC

Happily, if the DES keep on with their line as quoted at the bottom of TFA ("absolutely unacceptable" for schools to do this), it'd be pretty much unenforceable anyway.

But if not, there's not a good way of stopping it.

I doubt the police and social services would be terribly impressed.

There's no need for a school to go in with a nuclear option like taking food off the kid. The school starts with letters home. Escalating to meetings with the Head. And so on until ultimately they get to exclusion of the child for parental refusal to abide by the parent-school contract and/or irretrievable breakdown of the school/home relationship. For some parents, sure, that's hardly going to be much of a sanction, but for most, it's a very big one.

The other option would be civil debt proceedings.