So . . . I’m the only person who takes this as an indication that the Scouts are more interested in Indoctrinating the Children to the State Religion of Corporate Capitalism than they are in teaching them tolerance for others?
Not having been brainwashed by the cult of “intellectual property”?
Looks like it*. It’s only one patch, and apparently a regional or local one at that. Which isn’t to say that it couldn’t become a national one. It’s an activity, or a series of them, which can be done in between tying knots, camping in the woods, and canoeing. And one can teach tolerance for others in a great many ways-- including by downloading (legally) information about world religions or music or history.
If you want to complain about ways in which the BSA don’t teach tolerance to others, especially in their attitudes towards gays, I’m sure you could get a thread full of responses, many of them pro-gay and anti-BSA.
But I can’t see that this is a major step towards “indoctrinating the children in the state religion of corporate capitalism”, or a major statement of the prioirities of the BSA.
*Although, if so, it violates my belief that the answer to any question posed on a message board about opinions, beliefs, and behaviors which asks “Am I the only one?” is NO. You are not alone.
I just came in here to say that I thought this thread involved the Birmingham Small Arms Co.
Anyway, whenever I think of the Scouts now, I immediately think of the episode “Scoutrageous” of the British TV comedy The Goodies, in which Tim and Bill become these Evil Scouts, extorting money off people NOT to perform “jobs”, and trying to earn Merit Badges for things like Global Domination and Building Your Own Atomic Bomb. 
Sounds like you have an axe to grind to me. Can’t see why anyone would object to this particular patch. If you find the Scouts in general offensive, then just say so and don’t pin it on an innocuous activity patch. My two cents, since you asked.
Oh. Well, I, and the other guys I knew, were all smart-ass enough that these days we would have started bringing up everything from NetHack to Firefox to OpenOffice and anything else that is both copyrighted and open-source or freeware. Heck, even shareware. Or WinAmp or iTunes or ZoneAlarm Basic or Spybot or–well, the list goes on and on, and trust me, we would have brought up every single example we could think of. Same for music.
I don’t think many boys would be “brainwashed”, either by that requirement in the merit badge or this stupid idea for a patch.
I agree it’s a tad silly, but no moreso IMO than teaching scouts to help old ladies cross the streets or somesuch. I can’t get as worked up about this as I do about the scouts’ continued ban on gays, for instance.
It was the contrast–the context of “isn’t this the same group that teaches its acolytes to shun homosexuals?”–that I was commenting on; note the “priorities” of the thread title.
I’m glad I live in a country where a private organization is allowed to choose its members. However, I’m also glad I live in a country where I can choose to reciprocate the discrimination by freely saying that I feel, personally, that the BSA is, at heart, anti-democratic and–wait for it–anti-American, according to my understanding of what America “stands for.”
I understand that Capitalism–like Democracy–is the worst system there is, except for all the others. I am a lefty, but I’m not a Socialist. However, I think the RIAA is an example of one of the worst aspects of capitalism run amok, and this “patch” thing just serves to lower the BSA a notch further in my estimation.
But you might just as well have made the same comparison with any other merit badge. “Am I the only person who takes this as an indication that the Scouts are more interested in teaching the children how to pull defenseless fish from a mountain stream than they are in teaching them (the Boy Scouts, not the fish) tolerance for others?,” you might also have posted. There’s a merit badge for golf, for bird watching, for basketry, for environmental science, for swimming, for bugling, for canoeing, and for rifle shooting. You could craft a similarly befuddled OP comparing each of these to the BSA stance on homosexuality. And each would seem a bit of a red herring.
If you have a bitch with their stance on gays (many do, of course), say so. Why this activity patch would have set you off is what seems incongruous, to me at least.
You might have expanded on this in the OP. Not sure why you’d feel that way re: the RIAA.
I was going to make a joke that the merit badge would be a copyright symbol. But as it turns out, that really is what the merit badge will look like. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Copyright infringement is wrong (educational and fair use exceptions and such aside) but isn’t it kind of super-lame to earn merit badges for just agreeing that a tort is a tort and then taking a Universal Studios tour? (According to the article this would, technically, meet the badge requirements.) Merit badges used to be about actually learning to do something. It’s like earning a merit badge called “Shoplifting Awareness” by agreeing that shoplifting is wrong and then visiting a Wal-Mart.
Forget about politics or whether you think capitalism is evil. It’s fucking lame.
But despite those views, based on supreme court ruling of fair use, I believe we have a reasonably clear definition of what is acceptable at this time.
And I have yet to see a reasonable, logical argument that allows for economic activity and at the same time whose conclusion is that content should have no protection. How and why would content be created if the creator doesn’t get compensated?
Because the RIAA’s draconian position on copyright law is not in service to the artist, as it claims, but in service the profit margin of the conglomerate labels, explicitly at the expense of the individual artist. The RIAA pays only the most transparently disingenuous lip service to the rights of the artist, while constantly pushing legislation whose sole purpose is to keep the profit margin of the major labels. To sell any opposition to that self-serving interpretation of copyright law as “theft”–in other words, to equate the major labels’ stranglehold on the music industry as something akin to a divine right–and to indoctrinate this as something of a moral imperative to children–strikes me as especially horrifying coming from an institution that is also indoctrinating the children with a hatred for gays.
Draconianer and draconianer.
I thought someone established earlier in the thread that this is NOT an official Boy Scout merit badge. But if that’s a quibble, let me acknowledge that there are some easy merit badges and some really hard ones. Always has been, and the boys know which ones are which. Our boys got “fingerprinting” by sitting through a half-hour presentation and getting fingerprinted. Emergency Preparedness, OTOH, is a bitch. Eagle requirements tend to go toward the tougher end of the spectrum.
shrug If an easy merit badge bugs you, so be it.
It’s a good thing, then, that I personally have never seen anyone arguing for “no protection.”
I’m sure you’re right that the profit motive is the primary driver for them. That doesn’t mean that intellectual property rights aren’t valid.
Well, then, again, it’s a good thing that no one is saying any such thing.
I guess the bottom line, for me, is that it saddens me that an institution like the BSA, which purports to be teaching values to children, elevates corporate commercial property above human dignity and rights. It saddens me that these are the core values with which they indoctrinate the children that parents hand over to them, in part, to learn such “values.”