My head is spinning.
Yeah, calm kiwi, I agree with you.
That being said, I think that I can see a twisted sort of logic in the school’s decisions:
From the POV of the board, kids are going to need a strong disincentive to discourage them from smoking pot. A significant percentage of people consider it to be an acceptable, even attractive, thing to do.
They are no doubt taking it as granted that their student body, by-and-large, has an unambiguous opinion about sexual assault, and don’t imagine that other kids may take it into their heads to commit assaults, if the school doesn’t make an example of offenders. (This is largely predicated on the hope that the four accused are going to be facing a police investigation.)
School administators aren’t likely to think as much about what (we would hope) is an isolated incident, but you can bet your ass that managing the “cancer” of weed smoking is something that gets them good and worked up.
All the same, even when you consider to the two things in isolation from each other, they’re both outrageous. Either one warrants its own thread. Sheesh.
Boo Boo Foo You don’t have to be a dealer to get expelled for smoking weed. Most schools have a no tolerance policy about drugs… get caught once and you are gone!
These 2 events are linkable because it goes to show that sex offenders are given less harsh punishments than dope smokers. That girl might have some emotional problems from being assaulted… Shit, what they did was 1 step away from rape.
You are right in saying that the kid who smoked dope wouldn’t be in the news if the sexual assault case wasn’t made. but the simple fact is, the article is NOT about him, it’s about the girl who was sexual assaulted.
Stop talking so much about the dope smoker, you have totally missed the point of kiwi’s argument by a mile.
So yea the dope smoker knew the punishment for breaking thier no-tolerance rule… so he deserves what he gets. But you can sexually assault another student and get minimal (yes, suspensions are stupid punishments, sit home and watch tv for 4 days, wohoo) punishments.
Actually Trevor my dear boy, you DO need a whole new legal system to deal with such cases.
I have no problem with that at all. I have no problem agreeing that the kids who assaulted the girl should be punished more severly than the kid who smoked pot. What you guys have a problem with is that you can’t accept that there was no need to mention the dope smoker’s case to begin with. If the sexual assault case is as serious as the linked article would have us believe, introducing the dope smoker’s case merely demeans the plight of the poor girl. In my eyes, the article managed to reduce the matter to a tacky form of tabloid journalism.
Hence in my eyes, either, the sexual assault case was not as serious as the paper would have us believe, or it was and the school has fucked up. Either way, I didn’t need to know about the dope smoker’s case to feel a sense of sympathy or moral outrage for the poor girl. I didn’t need to know about the dope smoker’s case to somehow make the sexual assault case more worthy of news time.
But none of you can see that can you? The article was deliberately designed to push a hot button emotive angle, and THAT is the subtle observation which is beyond most of you. Ask yourself this… would you still be writing what you’re writing if the article had mentioned the sexual assault case in isolation with NO MENTION EVER of the dope smoker case?
I suspect some of you would have, but I doubt that this thread would have had the moral indignation that it did. It would have been more a case of “that’s just so wrong” and it would have hovered at that level of outrage. But by introducing the dope smoker case, the matter has been elevated ABOVE what it would normally have achieved. And I suspect there are many other cases of sexual assault in New Zealand in the last month which are far more serious that never got the same airtime. Hence, you can’t eat your cake and have it too - you can’t lambast me for NOT displaying the same amount of moral outrage whilst you yourselves largely go uninformed about more serious cases which aren’t making the airwaves.
I’m sure, given a few days of research, that I could come up with a litany of sexual assault and domestic violence cases within New Zealand in the last month which way, WAY outdo either of the matters listed in this thread in terms of deserving moral outrage. And yet, I’m not seeing any threads dedicated to them, am I?
And in the interests of fairness, I’m sure that there are even more cases of injustice happening here in Australia too. But the problem is, in terms of shipping units of newspapers, not all of those cases make for a quick, convenient 15 second sound bite of moral indignation - hence, they don’t make the front page so easily.
But not this one. This one was written straight out of NewsPaper Mannah From Heaven mode.
My issue here is the cynical tone of manipulation which the story is using to get the media proprietors more airtime. But none of you can see that. It’s as though you’ve all been programmed to think exactly what the newspaper wants you to think, and that’s as far as your powers of observation can go - anything beyond that falls into “does not compute” territory. You guys who are spilling your buckets or righteousness on my head from great heights can’t cope with the fact that in myself, there’s someone who’s looking beyond the cynical manipulation angle and calling it for what it is - a circulation booster.
You guys are all making the same flawed assumption - anyone who doesn’t IMMEDIATELY say the exact same thing as you in this thread, by default, must be a cold heartless bastard - and that isn’t the case. The poor girl has all the sympathy in the world from me - but I also have pure disdain for the media proprietors who have exploited this matter - and have done so smiling all the way to the bank.
I’d just like to say, as quickly as possible that the comments in my last post were generally addressed to the posters in this thread prior to the last 30 minutes or so.
The two posters who contributed in the last 30 minutes were eminiently reasonable and I recognise you as being such.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH Okay so now I am officialy not-so-calm-kiwi. YES fucking newspapers add a slant to sell papers, YES we all act morally outraged when the media tells us to from time to time. Yes the media does it’s level best to manipulate public opinion
But JESUS FUCK that was not the point of my OP and you are the only one that can not grasp that concept. You are so full of anti-media venom (I’m starting to wonder if you had a nasty brush with the paparazzi that you might like to share) that you can’t see the fucking woods for the trees. The school was WRONG and I don’t need the fucking media to wave a dope smoker at me in order to recognise that point.
Tell ya what- you start a “Don’t you hate it when the media manipulates public opinion” thread and I will be right there with you. In this case I’m still saying the school had their head up their fucking arse!
K deep breathing commencing to regain my calm status 
oh but then you added this (seeing it on preview…
“I’d just like to say, as quickly as possible that the comments in my last post were generally addressed to the posters in this thread prior to the last 30 minutes or so.”
The two posters who contributed in the last 30 minutes were eminiently reasonable and I recognise you as being such."
I seriously don’t know how I managed to crawl up your arse and “push your hot buttons” but let me out! I made perfectly reasonable and logical rebuttals to all the points you made…hmmm maybe I just smell funny
Well calm kiwi, you might think they were perfectly reasonable and logical, and that’s your right. I gotta say though, for all your assertions that I have supposedly missed your point, the unbiased reader here will acknowledge that I’ve never actually disagreed with you - merely that the methods used in this thread, both by yourself and the paper in question are open to scrutiny. It’s your right to disagree with my position - it’s no skin off my nose.
But you know something… I suspect that only one of us is actually getting upset at the moment. No one in this thread has pushed any hot buttons regarding myself. The only hot buttons were those which were cycnically provided in the original story.
Sometimes, on a debating messageboard such as this - ya just got to learn to roll with the punches and not get too worked up.
So, this thread hasn’t worked out exactly as you expected? Big deal. Nothing which has been written in this thread is even remotely going to adversely affect any of the parties which the thread relates to. I don’t have any problems with you - none at all. These are just words on a screen.
As I said, I’ve never actually disagreed with you. I simply chose to talk about aspects of this matter which went beyond the immediately obvious. Sadly, my lack of FORTHRIGHT “HELL YEAH” agreeance with you has kinda done your head in.
I chose to talk about what I wanted to talk about. You didn’t like it. It’s no big deal. I don’t hold grudges. If we come across each other in another thread I assure you I’ll be extraordinarily civil.
Likewise Boo Boo. I don’t think I said anything that disagreed with you either, other then your inevitable “But the media was twisting the situation” point. Which btw I didn’t disagree with…it just wasn’t a valid point to the OP.
In reguards to your point about the thread “not working out exactly as I expected” . HMMMMM I didn’t know I had to have an expectation in order to post. I have clearly failed in that respect cause I done went and came expectationless.
I didn’t give myself the moniker calm kiwi for nout, I enjoy reading diverse opinions hence my time-since-registered vs post count low ratio. I rarely read something that sends me into a fit (and prefer to lurk actually)…and yep that includes this thread. All calm on the Southern front. Relax baby, no heads were “done in” in the making of this thread.
You are very civil (if a little condescending) and you feel free to keep debating point B while point A is being discussed.
calm kiwi…rolling while waiting for the punches 
well <B> Boo Boo </B> first let me make it clear that not everyone in the world is a moron to think exaclty the way the newspapers want you to think.well i agree the newpsapers might spice up things to boost circulation but they certainly dont force you to take their point of view and stick to it.
if u read the linked article you can easily see what a foolish thing the school in question did.Boo dont you think its is absurd to let rapists/molestors away by awarding a 4 day suspension ( a holiday they might have enjoyed as well!) and asking them to write a letter of apology.well i feel its absurd just by its own merit and when you compare the harsh action against the doping kid you really feel that (to quote <B> calm kiwi </B> )“the school is having its head up its arse”.the op just called attention at the gross injustice the school is doing on the doping kid and highlighting the schools head in the arseness by letting serious offenders get away lightly.
to sum it all up i think <B> calm kiwi </B> is right with her point of view and i am with her on her stand.
Boo Boo Foo says it’s unfair for the newspaper to bring the dope smoker in when considering the severity of the penalty for the sexual assault. But if any story had been posted saying “A school gave a punishment of XXX for YYY” then one of the first things people would have asked - or at least should have asked - is “Give me some context: so how does this punishment rate compared to other crimes?” Because you need to know that to make sense of the school’s discipline policy. Maybe the newspaper could have done its report comparing the sexual assaulters with a kid who talked in class or who cheated in a test rather than a dope smoker. But would that have been a better comparison or have made it any nicer a story?
That’s a rather weak position. Any fool can tell, regardless of what happened to the dope smoker, that the punishment meted out to the sexual assault perpetrators was wholly underwhelming.
Indeed, by such logic, we could actually implement a philosophy of diminished responsibility in the future… for example, School X has a sexual assualt problem - they hand out a punishment which is wildly under strength - they get hauled over the coals for it - and in an effort to excuse their behavior, they argue “But we’ve never had these sort of problems before and as a result, we didn’t have a sliding scale of relativity to use as a yardstick oh how much punishment to apply…”
Most reasonable people would agree that such an excuse would be lame in the extreme - as it is here in this instance. Even calm kiwi conceded that they didn’t need to know about the dope smoker’s plight to recognise that the school had it’s head up it’s arse.
The issue then is why mention the dope smoker’s plight? My cynical response is because it allowed the story to get greater airtime than usual, and all of us have bought into it.
A whole day later and you are still arguing point B I see
Oh well, people keep mentioning my name… what’s a guy supposed to do? It’s a point of honour! But yes, I fear that I’m beginning to resemble a broken record…
Still, whilst my point is a subtle one in terms of having to distinguish issues when making a judgement, I offered it for a reason… imagine how hard it is sometimes for a magistrate or a judge to come down with a correct finding when such innately emotive issues are manifest? Imagine if a judge presided over a trial regarding this sexual assault case, and if the prosecution kept trying to introduce the dope smoker’s plight into the evidence? It would be a hard role for the judge I suspect.
And with that I shall wish you au revoir…catch you on the next thread