Last day of April, tomorrow, May

[silveradept]

First and foremost, everyone congratulate eleme on her graduation from the University of Michigan today. She comes out of the school of Education, and will be a fine teacher in her career. Our congratulations.

Unfortunately, I don't have any other happy news to work with in this department, so if you don't want your happy feelings crushed, then you can probably stop now. I assure you, you can come back later to finish it.

The other bits that came across my desk today were a woman who is being charged a significant amount of money for pay-per-view she claims not to have ordered. A 62-year old retired schoolteacher is being charged $1,400+ for pr0n and gangsta rap programming. Considering the only other regular visitor is her 81-year old mother, I think her cry of "zOMGhax!" is quite possibly justified, unless she has taste for both of those things. Might be that a number got switched around in the billing department somewhere, or that someone used her account number to charge up their own material. Either way, it's a red-flag, NC-17 rated affair.

The other definitely NC-17 affair is a followup from the case about the sodomy, bleaching, and now kicking and slashing case that I linked to earlier. The details of the story paint a potentially ethnically-motivated crime replete with violence, including kicking a sodomizing pipe. The victim has not yet died, but is in extremely critical condition after the beating. Both of the assailants are painted as following a white-supremacy ideals, marked as "skinheads" and such. I can wonder what would happen if the guy really did ty to kiss a 12-year-old girl, but the accounts described say that, even if that was the trigger, it seems like there's an extra layer of racial violence on top of it. More abuse and negative reinforcement of the swastika symbol, as well. It's not a pretty picture, the victim of this. I guess I can't yet fathom what kind of colossal rage it would take to overcome reason enough to commit all of these acts.

Anyway, meetings tomorrow and such. Going to bed now.

Comments

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

a 62 yr old woman ordered $1000 worth of Pr0n? Yeah, riiiiight. I mean, ok I guess it's possible, but really, really doubtful.

[wanderingbhikkh.livejournal.com]

Enough rage to mistake for love of the Great Nordic Race.

[przxqgl.livejournal.com]

1) that teenager who is the victim of this hate crime (i'm calling it that even though the official line is not to) may have been a great kid who was popular with his peers, but if he's experienced as much damage as they say he has, i don't care how much hoping they do, i don't care how much improvement his case goes through, and speaking from personal experience, the kid will very likely never be the same person he was before the attack.

2) the swastika, despite the popular "meaning," in fact, has exactly the opposite meaning from what most people expect, and if the swastika could speak, it would speak out as loudly against crimes like this as it would about it's misuse by the nazi party to begin with. as i said in my own journal about a similar, if less horrific experience of my own, people shouldn't be angry with the swastika because of the nazis, they should be angry at the nazis because of the swastika.

[silveradept]

I don't expect that teen to be anything but traumatized and furiously angry, depending on what day it is. We may be hearing from him again in the news when he goes out and exacts revenge on the kind of people who put him through this.

I agree that the swastika takes a bad rap because the Nazi party committed atrocities while using it as their symbol. Not that we should forget them, or deny their existence, but could we separate the people that committed the atrocities and note that they perverted the symbol they chose, rather than they created the symbol that they intended on using as if it didn't exist before then?