Congress to Censor Hip Forums!!!

sorry to butt in here but..

What if the poster went on to write exactly the same thing in a book, would that then be authoritative citation?

It just irks me that something has to be printed on paper or made into an 'everything you ever wanted to know about *blank*' website before it's considered a legitimate source. What's the difference between that and word of mouth, apart from some proof-reading, and the fact that if a mistake IS made (eg. saying that The Who didn't play at the 1969 Woodstock), it will take about 6 months longer to correct because people can't converse as easily with the author?

 

Don't you see any of the alternate point. Not so much the educational value this site may have but the more murkier aspect. This site seems to be brimming with positive attributes, no denying that [ok flattery over].

Is it about 'grooming' and 'protecting kids from perverts'

Not knowing the nature of this 'legislation' it is difficult to gain a broader perspective. We only have 'your word for it'.

 

They have authority over PUBLIC property...if government does not have control over public property, who does? Surely they dont have authority over private property.

Look, lets say we agree that there is a lot of useful and helpful information on the hippy.com/hipforum websites. There are still forums about illegal drugs and pictures that are pornographic in nature. That alone would get these sites banned from public schools.

 

I think this would be more appropriate as local school district or local issue... then again, most issues are so small that they really shouldn't be a federal decision.

 

because when you print a factual work it has to go through fact checking.

I can't just write a book on WW2 history saying it was a war between Martians and Alligators, i CAN do that on forums.

The internet poses all type of problems for citations...high schools may allow it since the rules are very slack, but the higher up the educational ladder you go, the less likely it is 'acceptable.' The few exceptions are things like lexis nexis...

 

well when i was in school the WHOLE ENTIRE internet was blocked. hell al gore hadnt even invented it yet. back then they just 'blocked' what you could carry on you. no 'bad' books, shirts that said 'bad' things. hell my dad was kicked out of school on a regular basis cause his hair was too long.

 

That does kinda suck that there is this kind of censorship.

Of course, if I were a parent, I would have parental blocks set up on my computer which unfortunatey would likely block sites like hipforums and myspace because there is sexual content.

At the risk of sounding cynical, what part of hipforums is educational? Other than the groovy name it's no different than other posting forums. Granted it's a fun place to post on occasion and maybe join the occasional chat, but I really don't see the difference in what's being posted here vs anywhere else.

I don't think that government brainwashing comes from censoring a few websites to minors - we should be more concerned with the fact that the school system hasn't been revised or updated in more than 50 years and it's so incredibly backwards that it's retarding our children.

 

kids get all the brainwashing they need from tv

 

agreed. What kids ought to have access to should be what's part of their education directly. If parents themselves have no problem with myspace and hipforums, then on a child-by-child basis, they can have all the myspace they want.

Skip, you're absolutely right. Let's give our kids full access to guns, child molestors, drugs... it's trial by error, right?

If they're raised properly, they won't.

I'd rather have my kids taught by SCHOOLS then what some random perve may be posting in some forum somewhere....

 

I don't know, why the whole discussion in this thread reminds me on this particular scene from the book 'So long, and thanks for all the fish' by Douglas Adams and that, what Wonko the Sane said about our totally gone mad world.
.........
Chapter 31

If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of the David Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the upper of the first two David Bowies and wrapped the whole business up in a dirty beach robe you would then have something which didn't exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would find hauntingly familiar.

He was tall and he gangled.

When he sat in his deckchair gazing at the Pacific, not so much with any kind of wild surmise any longer as with a peaceful deep dejection, it was a little difficult to tell exactly where the deckchair ended and he began, and you would hesitate to put your hand on, say, his forearm in case the whole structure suddenly collapsed with a snap and took your thumb off.

But his smile when he turned it on you was quite remarkable. It seemed to be composed of all the worst things that life can do to you, but which, when he briefly reassembled them in that particular order on his face, made you suddenly fee, "Oh. Well that's all right then."

When he spoke, you were glad that he used the smile that made you feel like that pretty often.

"Oh yes," he said, "they come and see me. They sit right here. They sit right where you're sitting."

He was talking of the angels with the golden beards and green wings and Dr Scholl sandals.

"They eat nachos which they say they can't get where they come from. They do a lot of coke and are very wonderful about a whole range of things."

"Do they?" said Arthur. "Are they? So, er ... when is this then? When do they come?"

He gazed out at the Pacific as well. There were little sandpipers running along the margin of the shore which seemed to have this problem: they needed to find their food in the sand which a wave had just washed over, but they couldn't bear to get their feet wet. To deal with this problem they ran with an odd kind of movement as if they'd been constructed by somebody very clever in Switzerland.

Fenchurch was sitting on the sand, idly drawing patterns in it with her fingers.

"Weekends, mostly," said Wonko the Sane, "on little scooters. They are great machines." He smiled.

"I see," said Arthur. "I see."

A tiny cough from Fenchurch attracted his attention and he looked round at her. She had scratched a little stick figure drawing in the sand of the two of them in the clouds. For a moment he thought she was trying to get him excited, then he realized that she was rebuking him. "Who are we," she was saying, "to say he's mad?"

His house was certainly peculiar, and since this was the first thing that Fenchurch and Arthur had encountered it would help to know what it was like.

What it was like was this:

It was inside out.

Actually inside out, to the extent that they had to park on the carpet.

All along what one would normally call the outer wall, which was decorated in a tasteful interior-designed pink, were bookshelves, also a couple of those odd three-legged tables with semi-circular tops which stand in such a way as to suggest that someone just dropped the wall straight through them, and pictures which were clearly designed to soothe.

Where it got really odd was the roof.

It folded back on itself like something that Maurits C. Escher, had he been given to hard nights on the town, which is no part of this narrative's purpose to suggest was the case, though it is sometimes hard, looking at his pictures, particularly the one with the awkward steps, not to wonder, might have dreamed up after having been on one, for the little chandeliers which should have been hanging inside were on the outside pointing up.

Confusing.

The sign above the front door said, "Come Outside", and so, nervously, they had.

Inside, of course, was where the Outside was. Rough brickwork, nicely done painting, guttering in good repair, a garden path, a couple of small trees, some rooms leading off.

And the inner walls stretched down, folded curiously, and opened at the end as if, by an optical illusion which would have had Maurits C. Escher frowning and wondering how it was done, to enclose the Pacific Ocean itself.

"Hello," said John Watson, Wonko the Sane.

Good, they thought to themselves, "Hello" is something we can cope with.

"Hello," they said, and all surprisingly was smiles.

For quite a while he seemed curiously reluctant to talk about the dolphins, looking oddly distracted and saying, "I forget ..." whenever they were mentioned, and had shown them quite proudly round the eccentricities of his house.

"It gives me pleasure," he said, "in a curious kind of way, and does nobody any harm," he continued, "that a competent optician couldn't correct."

They liked him. He had an open, engaging quality and seemed able to mock himself before anybody else did.

"Your wife," said Arthur, looking around, "mentioned some toothpicks." He said it with a hunted look, as if he was worried that she might suddenly leap out from behind the door and mention them again.

Wonko the Sane laughed. It was a light easy laugh, and sounded like one he had used a lot before and was happy with.

"Ah yes," he said, "that's to so with the day I finally realized that the world had gone totally mad and built the Asylum to put it in, poor thing, and hoped it would get better."

This was the point at which Arthur began to feel a little nervous again.

"Here," said Wonko the Sane, "we are outside the Asylum." He pointed again at the rough brickwork, the pointing and the guttering. "Go through that door," he pointed at the first door through which they had originally entered, "and you go into the Asylum. I've tried to decorate it nicely to keep the inmates happy, but there's very little one can do. I never go in there now myself. If ever I am tempted, which these days I rarely am, I simply look at the sign written over the door and shy away."

"That one?" said Fenchurch, pointing, rather puzzled, at a blue plaque with some instructions written on it.

"Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do."

The sign said:

Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.

"It seemed to me," said Wonko the sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane."

He gazed out at the Pacific again, as if daring it to rave and gibber at him, but it lay there calmly and played with the sandpipers.

"And in case it crossed your mind to wonder, as I can see how it possibly might, I am completely sane. Which is why I call myself Wonko the Sane, just to reassure people on this point. Wonko is what my mother called me when I was a kid and clumsy and knocked things over, and sane is what I am, and how," he added, with one of his smiles that made you feel, "Oh. Well that's all right then." "I intend to remain. Shall we go on to the beach and see what we have to talk about?"

They went out on to the beach, which was where he started talking about angels with golden beards and green wings and Dr Scholl sandals.

.....................................
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, the Universe, and Everything
So long, and thanks for all the fish
Mostly Harmless

“The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced”


"If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they're gonna murder
you in your sleep."

-- Frank Zappa, quoted from Whole Grains, an early 1970's book of quotations

"The establishment of a rating system, voluntary or otherwise, opens the door
to an endless parade of moral quality control programs based on things
certain Christians do not like. What if the next bunch of Washington wives
demands a large yellow "J" on all material written or performed by Jews, in
order to save helpless children from exposure to concealed Zionist doctrine?"
-- Frank Zappa, Statement to the Senate Hearing on "Porn Rock," 1985

"I think you should leave it up to the parent, because not all parents want
to keep their children totally ignorant."
-- Frank Zappa, in response to a question from Senator Hollings

 

The "protecting kids from bad guys" defense is bogus. Sure, now and again a child is stupid enough to meet up with a pedophile/murderer/whatever, and it's really unfortunate and a terrible thing to hear about. However, that doesn't mean that you can really stop it. I'm sure that many kids have been kidnapped at malls, on the street, from their own front yards... are we going to start banning kids from being in those places? Give me a break. You can protect people from everything, there has to be a point where the individual takes control and decides what is safe and unsafe.

Now, I can understand using filters in schools (at the school's own request, not the government's), because you can bet that kids will screw around when they're supposed to be doing their work. So yeah, I can understand that. Of course, the filters aren't very hard to get around, but that's another subject. Now as for libraries, that's just ridiculous and unacceptable. They definitely do not have the right to decide what is appropriate for people to see; that is OUR choice. If I want to get on the Hip Forums when I'm at a library, that's perfectly okay. And hell, if a 13-year-old wants to, that's fine, too.

This is a slippery slope that we really don't want anything to do with.

 

people need to learn the difference between private and public property....

 

Hate to point out the obvious (or maybe it's not so obvious to some of us?) that INTERNET falls under the category of MEDIA, and schools censor what tv programs and movies are shown during their classes - internet is available in schools, but thankfully there are parental controls over what internet kids are and aren't exposed to. Fortunately or unfortunately, some of the banning applies to sites like hippy.com, myspace.com, etc.

Could it be possible that some information may not be suitable to kids? Skip, with all due respect, if you don't want your site to be banned by schools, maybe you should reevaluate the more adult content on your site.

I agree, kids are being exposed to things much too young. But just because they've been EXPOSED to something, does it really need to be reinforced? Secondly, how do you know for sure that the 13 year old who registers is actually 13 and not 9? How do you know for sure that the 13 year old who registers isn't actually 40?

I would much rather have kids be over-sheltered than run the risk of having them deal with perverts.

Speaking of free speech... FREE doesn't just mean that you have the freedom to share it, but as adults and parents, we have the freedom to not shove it down our kids throats. You're free to express yourself, the school boards are equally free to censor it from their schools.

I've been part of this site for a while, I really don't see what part of this is truly educational.

And having access to a posting forum of any kind during the school day prevents them from being fucked up? Really? Are you kidding?

If children feel more at home on a website than human contact or their family, we should be more concerned about that rather than what does or doesn't get censored.

Right... If only we could get angry gun-happy students to turn to hipforums, lives could've been saved! What those Columbine shooters needed was parental guidance, not internet.

If you don't spend your school day posting on a machine, you're part of the machine. Good one. I'm now convinced, congradulations.

 

By the way, as cynical as I may sound, I really do like posting at hipforums. I just don't think that it's as 'educational' as you claim it to be. During the school day kids should focus on school. After school, posting in either hipforums or anywhere else is appropriate. Why not look at banning these sorts of sites at school as a way to better educate our kids in keeping them focused?