#mark bauerlein

[justinspoliticalcorner]

John Whitehouse at MMFA:

On July 9, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction Ryan Walters announced that a number of people — many of them key figures in right-wing media — would be rewriting the social studies curriculum in the state.

The list includes right-wing hosts with ties to Walters like Steve Deace, Dennis Prager, and Stacy Washington. Also included is Kevin Roberts, the head of The Heritage Foundation, which has organized Project 2025.

Walters announced an “executive review committee” to revise Oklahoma’s social studies curriculum. Members include Dennis Prager, Robert Pondiscio, David Barton, Kevin Roberts, Everett Piper, John Dwyer, David Goodwin, Mark Bauerlein, Steve Deace, and Stacy Washington. [Oklahoma State Department of Education, 7/9/24]

After implementing a mandate that the state’s public schools teach the Bible, Walters claimed that right-wing commentator and pastor Jackson Lahmeyer, who has promised to “embrace Christian nationalism” and previously ran for U.S. Senate in Oklahoma, encouraged him to implement such a policy last year. [Media Matters, 7/8/24]

Walters has approved PragerU Kids — which is widely criticized for pushing right-wing propaganda, such as including distorted histories about slavery in its history lessons — as curriculum for Oklahoma public schools. In one supposedly educational video, for instance, a cartoon version of Fredrick Douglass describes slavery as a “compromise to achieve something great.” [MSNBC, 9/7/23; Media Matters, 9/8/23; NBC, 8/10/23]

Dennis Prager is an anti-LGBTQ pundit who has hosted The Dennis Prager Show since 1999. In 2009, he founded the conservative nonprofit organization PragerU, which publishes short videos on political and international issues.

David Barton is a pseudo-historian and Christian nationalist well-known for spreading the idea that the country was supposed to be a Christian nation. Barton is the founder of WallBuilders.

Kevin Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank leading Project 2025.

Steve Deace is a host for BlazeTV who has made many anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ remarks.

Stacy Washington is a commentator, radio host, and Air Force veteran who has appeared in many right-wing outlets. She was formerly a host of a program aired on American Family Radio, the radio arm of extreme anti-LGBTQ group American Family Association, before the network culled much of its programming and its dedicated Urban Family Communications network.

Right-wing indoctrination artist Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Schools Ryan Walters announced that he is having a team rewrite the state’s social studies curriculum, with many of its names right-wing media figures such as Everett Piper, serial history revisionist David Barton, indoctrination mill head Dennis Prager, and pundit Steve Deace.

See Also:

LGBTQ Nation: Oklahoma’s head of education hires Christian Nationalists to revise social studies currciculum

[ncfcatalyst]

Board of Trustees shuts down faculty seeking tenure, community members: A deep dive into their most divisive meeting yet

First they came for former President Patricia Okker, then they came for the Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence (OOIE). And on Apr. 26, the New College Board of Trustees (BOT) continued its trend of disruption by denying five faculty tenure applications, despite all five meeting the full qualifications. Interim President Richard Corcoran had placed a memo recommending denial in all of…

[follow-up-news]

The Center for Investigative Reporting said Thursday it has sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its closest business partner, Microsoft, marking a new front in the news industry’s fight against unauthorized use of its content on artificial intelligence platforms. The nonprofit, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal, said that OpenAI used its content without permission and without offering compensation, violating copyrights on the organization’s journalism. The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court, describes OpenAI’s business as “built on the exploitation of copyrighted works” and focuses on how AI-generated summaries of articles threaten publishers. “It’s immensely dangerous,” Monika Bauerlein, the nonprofit’s CEO, told The Associated Press. “Our existence relies on users finding our work valuable and deciding to support it.” Bauerlein said that “when people can no longer develop that relationship with our work, when they no longer encounter Mother Jones or Reveal, then their relationship is with the AI tool.” That, she said, could “cut the entire foundation of our existence as an independent newsroom out from under us” while also threatening the future of other news organizations.

[catalystrelay]

Petition for Emory University to reconsider the tenure of Mark Bauerlein, one of the DeSantis appointed Board of Trustees members of New College. The details on why his tenure should be reconsidered are contained in the letter.

Please consider signing it, it is a chance to strike back at one of the people aiding in the destruction of academic freedom in Florida.

[mess18]

4 THỨ MÀ NGƯỜI THÔNG MINH KHÔNG BAO GIỜ HÉ LỜI

1. KHÔNG SUỐT NGÀY ĐI KỂ NIỀM VUI NỖI BUỒN CỦA MÌNH, LÀ TRÍ TUỆ Giáo sư Mark Bauerlein nói: "Một trong những biểu hiện của người trưởng thành chính là khi họ hiểu họ ra được rằng 99% những chuyện xảy ra với mình, với người khác, nó hoàn toàn không có ý nghĩa gì."

Sống ở đời, giống như con cá trong nước, nóng lạnh chỉ mình nó biết. Có một câu chuyện như này:

T. sau khi được thăng chức, đãi ngộ đã cao hơn trước kia rất nhiều, vì vậy mà anh ấy quyết định mời những đồng nghiệp thân thiết ăn một bữa. Vốn dĩ đã đặt 3 bàn ở nhà hàng, nhưng ngày hôm đó, đồng nghiệp lại có đủ mọi lý do từ chối không tới, cuối cùng chỉ gom lại đủ một bàn.

Trong bữa ăn, ai ai cũng nói cười vui vẻ, nhưng lời nói ra lại "tẩm ngẩm tầm ngầm":

"Tôi không nhận ra là cậu cũng giỏi phết đấy nhỉ!" "Sau này làm lãnh đạo rồi, đừng phớt lờ bọn tôi đấy nhé!" "Có đi cửa sau không đấy, bình thường tôi cũng không nhìn ra là cậu giỏi giang tới vậy!" …

Vốn nghĩ rằng sẽ nhận được lời chúc mừng chân thành từ mọi người, không ngờ bàn tiệc lại vương đầy những ngữ khí đố kị "Dựa vào cái gì mà cậu ta được thăng chức!"

T. nói rằng đó là bữa cơm khiến cậu cảm thấy khó xử nhất. Thực ra, bất kể chúng ta có thừa nhận hay không, luôn có một sự thật trần trụi tồn tại đó là: Trên thế gian này, ngoài ba mẹ ra, không có mấy ai thực sự hi vọng chúng ta sống sung sướng hơn họ.

Vì vậy, "khoe khoang" hạnh phúc của mình ra ngoài, nhiều khi là đang động vào chỗ đau của người khác, giống như kiểu bảo họ rằng "anh đố kị với tôi đi" vậy, rồi lại tự thêm phiền phức cho chính mình.

Đúng vậy, đời người 10 phần thì có tới 8,9 phần không như ý, nhưng chẳng phải là vẫn còn 1,2 phần là tốt đẹp ư.

Vui vẻ, chia sẻ với nhầm người, thì chính là "khoe khoang"; buồn phiền, tâm sự với sai người, thì chính là "làm quá".

Người thông minh sớm đã điều chỉnh quá trình trưởng thành sang chế độ im lặng, không tùy tiện chia sẻ niềm vui nỗi buồn của bản thân.Họ chia sẻ với những người bạn tri kỷ và cùng họ tận hưởng trọn vẹn khoảnh khắc ấy.

2. KHÔNG “ĐÂM CHỌC” VÀO CHỖ KHÓ CỦA NGƯỜI KHÁC, LÀ TỬ TẾ Nhà viết kịch người Nga Anton Pavlovich Chekhov nói: "Người có giáo dưỡng không phải là ăn cơm mà không làm đổ canh, mà là khi người khác chẳng may làm đổ canh, đừng nhìn chằm chằm vào họ."

Không "xé toạc" chỗ khó nói của người khác, lòng tốt trông có vẻ nhỏ bé này lại sưởi ấm cả cuộc đời của người khác.

Còn nhớ một lần, tôi và một người chị đồng nghiệp tan làm đi về nhà, chúng tôi ngồi trên cùng một chuyến xe, ngồi cách chị em tôi không xa là đồng nghiệp V., có vẻ như đang có chuyện gì đó buồn, vừa lớn tiếng nói điện thoại vừa lấy tay lau nước mắt.

Tôi và chị đồng nghiệp trông thấy, vì bình thường quan hệ đồng nghiệp cũng tốt, tôi hỏi chị ấy xem có nên qua bên kia an ủi cậu ấy một chút. Chị đồng nghiệp lắc đầu, nói tôi không đi.

Sau đó rất lâu, tôi mới nhận ra được rằng, ai cũng có một mặt yếu đuối cả, nhưng chẳng ai muốn để người khác thấy được sự yếu đuối đó của mình. Sống ở đời, sắc vàng sắc đỏ rực rỡ có, sắc đen sắc xám tất nhiên cũng tồn tại theo.

Nhiều khi, chúng ta không cần tới sự an ủi hay sự cảm thông nhất thời, mà ch��ng ta chỉ đơn giản muốn người bên cạnh không quấy rầy, không "đâm chọc", không lên tiếng, chỉ đơn giản là sự im lặng mà thôi…

Có người nói, đời người ai sống cũng không dễ dàng gì rồi, có những chuyện không cần phải bóc toẹt móng ngựa ra.

Đúng vậy, bạn vĩnh viễn không bao giờ có thể biết được rằng, một người trưởng thành trông thì có vẻ luôn vui tươi, chín chắn, bên trong họ nội tâm gào thét ra sao, nhưng họ luôn im lặng, đó là bởi vì, họ không muốn ai biết…

3. KHÔNG HẠ THẤP THỰC LỰC CỦA NGƯỜI KHÁC, LÀ GIÁO DỤC Bên cạnh bạn có một người như này hay không? Người khác sự nghiệp thuận buồm xuôi gió, họ sau lưng nói người ta đi cửa sau. Người khác xinh đẹp mỹ miều, họ ở sau lưng nói người ta là bình hoa di động không có tài cán gì. Người khác thành tích học tập xuất chúng, họ đi bốn phương tám hướng nói người ta là con mọt sách, không biết sự đời…

Kiểu người như vậy, luôn hạ thấp người khác để đề cao chính mình. Mà không biết rằng, quá trình nói xấu sau lưng người khác ấy cũng chính là đang phủ định chính mình; kính sợ đối thủ mới là tôn trọng bản thân.

Sống ở đời, ai cũng nên cố gắng để tỏa sáng, nhưng tuyệt đối đừng tỏa sáng trên cái nền là dập tắt người khác. Nhận thức ra được cái mình "không biết", mới là điểm khởi đầu của "biết". Thế gian vạn vật, ai cũng có những sở trường, sở đoản riêng.

Quang minh chính đại đối mặt với đối thủ, thắng, thắng cho sảng khoái; thua, cũng thua một cách tâm phục khẩu phục. Tặng người khác một tràng vỗ tay, là đang cho mình động lực để tiến bộ.

4. KHÔNG TỌC MẠCH CHUYỆN NGƯỜI KHÁC, LÀ TẦM NHÌN Con người ta nếu không có "cao độ", nhìn thấy đâu đâu cũng là vấn đề; còn sống mà không có tầm nhìn, vấn vương sẽ toàn là những chuyện tầm phào.

Sống ở trên đời, chú trọng vào bản thân, nhưng cũng đừng quên chấp nhận người khác.

Tiểu thuyết gia người Anh, Charles John Huffam Dickens từng nói: "Phép lịch sự tốt nhất chính là không tọc mạch."

Không tọc mạch vào chuyện người khác, không phải là lạnh lùng hay ích kỉ, mà đó là để chúng ta học cách mở lòng, cho phép bản thân mình không hoàn hảo, đồng thời chấp nhận những khuyết điểm vụn vặt của người khác.

Những việc nhỏ không động tới nguyên tắc, không cần thiết đâm chọt phê bình; những tiểu tiết không làm ảnh hưởng tới bố cục chung, cũng không cần phải "cầm tay chỉ điểm" cho người khác.

Chấn chỉnh, thay đổi bản thân, là thần. Chỉ trích, muốn thay đổi thế giới, là thần kinh.

Thay vì cố gắng đi mài mòn những góc cạnh của người khác, chi bằng "kinh doanh" cho tốt sự tốt đẹp của chính mình.

[nodynasty4us]

It will energize Trumpians, too, the 70-plus million who voted for him against the relentless pressure of their betters. Those Americans lost all trust in political institutions and D.C. figureheads a long time ago. The daunting language of the indictment won’t impress them. They don’t believe it; they’ll never believe it. What President Trump has undergone for seven years strikes them as blunt persecution, and this next step in the agenda only hardens their resolve.

Mark Bauerlein, senior editor at First Things, in POLITICO

[faiechilde]

I have actually read this letter to the editor (at the time I was writing a—not very good—paper about how “critical thinking” is a buzzword lol) that was a humanities professor partly talking about how the humanities insistance on labeling themselves as the *only field that teaches people how to think* has damaged the relationship between humanities and sciences etc.

So. You know. you may have been onto something, just not one lit ppl are totally unaware of

i was gonna make a post like “why don’t history majors go around making the kind of grandiose claims about how their discipline Teaches You To Think that the lit people are so prone to” and then i was like “well maybe it’s because we’ve been taught to be judicious about making claims” and then i was like “i suppose the presence of a numerically small if very annoying contingent of lit people online doesn’t really tell me anything about whether lit people are in fact more likely to engage in this behavior or whether i’m just more likely to see it because for example maybe lit people are disproportionately Online” and then i was like “i also don’t have any information about the relative numbers of history vs lit people and if lit people in general are overwhelmingly more numerous then they would be expected all other things being equal to have a larger number of Annoying Internet People.” fact-checked myself out of a shitpost 😔

[automatismoateo]

Ron DeSantis just declared war on my school. I need your help. What do we do? via /r/atheism

Ron DeSantis just declared war on my school. I need your help. What do we do?

TLDR: DeSantis wants to turn New College of Florida, a progressive free thinking college, into a bible school.

He wants Bible Schools.

We just got this info and everyone is freaking out. Here are some bulletpoints I got.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has appointed six new members to the New College of Florida's Board of Trustees, including conservative activist Christopher Rufo

The DeSantis administration's stated goal is to eliminate "political ideology" from public higher education and to refocus the college on its founding mission of providing a classical education

This move specifically targets concepts such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and critical race theory (CRT), which the DeSantis team has characterized as "trendy, truth-relative concepts"

The other appointments include Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein, Claremont-McKenna College professor Charles Kesler, attorney Debra Jenks, Inspiration Academy Co-Founder Jason "Eddie" Speir, and Matthew Spalding, dean of the Hillsdale College D.C. campus' Graduate School of Government

Hillsdale College, a private conservative liberal arts college, has been cited as a model for the DeSantis administration's vision for the transformation of New College

DeSantis has a history of taking a strong stance against DEI, CRT, and other controversial topics, which he refers to as "woke ideology"

These appointments are part of a larger effort by DeSantis to promote his conservative values within the education system, and could potentially lead to a shift in the direction and values of New College of Florida

The DeSantis administration's actions come at a time when enrollment at New College of Florida is already low, raising concerns about the long-term stability and viability of the institution

It is unclear what impact these appointments will have on the curriculum, faculty, and student body at New College of Florida, but there is reason to be concerned about the potential consequences for those who value diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus.

https://floridapolitics.com/archives/579522-gov-desantis-taps-christopher-rufo-5-others-to-transform-new-college-of-florida-into-classical-college/

These appointments to the New College of Florida's Board of Trustees could restrict certain areas of study and research, negatively impacting academic freedom. The DeSantis administration's stated goal of eliminating "political ideology" and its targeting of DEI and CRT raises concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion at the college. If the appointments lead to a shift in the direction and values of the college, students might feel unwelcome or unsupported, leading to a decline in enrollment and impact on education quality and access. These appointments are part of a larger effort by DeSantis to promote his conservative values within the education system and impact the education system as a whole.

What can be done about this? Do we petition? Are we fucked? I have no idea what's going on.

Submitted January 06, 2023 at 08:08PM by hearmeumbra (From Reddit https://ift.tt/mih6tKr)

[selfdiscoverymedia]

RG22-05 Mark Bauerlein, From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults.

RG22-05 Mark Bauerlein, From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults.

Raising our gifted children with Sara Troy and her guest Mark Bauerlein, on air from February 1st THE SEQUEL TO THE BOOK THE DEFINED A GENERATION From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous AdultsBack in 2008, Mark Bauerlein was a voice crying in the wilderness. As experts greeted the new generation of “Digital Natives” with extravagant hopes for their high-tech future, he pegged them as the “Dumbest…

[crystallllines]

"to develop intellectually you've got to relate to older people, older things: 17-year-olds never grow up if they're just hanging around other 17-year-olds" excuse me, mr. bauerlein, as someone who had limited access to other 17yos and an overwhelming amount of contact with 20-something+-year-olds at 17, i beg to differ

[ncfcatalyst]

BOT Academic Affairs subcommittee discusses tenure, admissions policies and a "representative and diverse student body"

The Academic, Student and External Affairs Standing Committee, a subcommittee of the Board of Trustees (BOT),  met on Apr. 17 to discuss upcoming items for the Apr. 26 BOT meeting, vote on a few small amendments and discuss reports from the college. Notice of this virtual meeting was not made public until Apr. 13. Materials for the meeting were not provided to the public in advance, and still…

[tieuduongnhi]

Có câu nói nào thực sự khiến bạn khắc cốt ghi tâm không?

1. Dazai Osamu《Chim di cư》:

“Người nhạy cảm sẽ thông cảm được với đau khổ của người khác, tự nhiên sẽ không thể tùy tiện mà thẳng thắn. Cái gọi là thẳng thắn, thực ra chính là bạo lực.”

2. Giáo sư của trường kinh doanh Havard nói với những học sinh tốt nghiệp về việc kiên trì ước mơ:

Nếu bạn muốn làm việc mình thích, thì họp lớp sau 5 năm tốt nghiệp, bạn đừng đi, bởi vì lúc đó bạn đang ở thời khắc gian khổ nhất, mà bạn học của bạn, phần nhiều là đang ở công ty lớn một một bước lên mây. Tương tự họp lớp 10 năm, bạn cũng đừng đi. Thế nhưng, họp lớp 20 năm, bạn có thể đi, bạn sẽ thấy, những người kiên trì ước mơ và những người nước chảy bèo trôi, cuộc đời sẽ có gì khác nhau.

3. Nguyên nhân bạn mơ hồ là do đọc sách quá ít mà nghĩ quá nhiều. －Dương Giáng

4. Cái gọi là trưởng thành, chính là độc lập về cuộc sống, có suy nghĩ và năng lực độc lập để tự mình phấn đấu. Cái gọi là chín chắn, chính là tự mình loại bỏ được sự ngạo mạn bên trong và thành kiến bên ngoài. — Thạch Thuật Tư

5. Bạn hỏi tôi có sự tiến bộ nào ư? Tôi bắt đầu trở thành người bạn của chính mình. — Alain de Botton

6. Một đời này của chúng ta rất ngắn, chúng ta cuối cùng rồi sẽ mất đi, vì vậy đừng ngại mà dũng cảm hơn một chút. Yêu một người, trèo một ngọn núi, theo đuổi ước mơ. Có rất nhiều việc không có câu trả lời.

7. Bạn mới 25 tuổi, bạn có th�� trở thành bất cứ người nào mà bạn muốn. —《 Vững bước 》

8. Bất hạnh của tôi, hoàn toàn là do tôi thiếu năng lực từ chối. Tôi sợ một khi từ chối người khác, sẽ để lại trong lòng nhau một vết nứt vĩnh viễn không có cách hàn gắn được.

— Dazai Osamu《 Thất lạc cõi người 》

9. Bạn có thể có tất cả, nhưng không thể đồng thời. — Marilyn Monroe

10. Học tập không phải để hùng biện hay bác bỏ, cũng không phải để cả tin hay hùa theo, mà để suy xét và cân nhắc. — Francis Bacon

11. Quan trọng nhất là, đầu tiên chúng ta phải lương thiện, thứ hai phải trung thực, tiếp theo mới là sau này vĩnh viễn không được quên nhau. — Dostoevsky

12. Nếu bạn có thể trong lúc lãng phí tìm được niềm vui, thì đó không phải lãng phí thời gian.

— Bertrand Russell

13. Ngoài thanh xuân trong tay, bạn cái gì cũng không có, nhưng chính những thứ ít ỏi trong tay bạn này, quyết định bạn là người như thế nào.

—J.M.Coetzee

14. Chỉ thông minh thôi chưa đủ, còn cần có đủ sự thông minh để tránh thông minh quá mức.

15. Tôi có lẽ sẽ nói với bạn, nhất thiết đừng kết hôn, trừ phi bạn không kìm lòng được, trừ phi bạn thực sự say mê. Đó mới là toàn bộ ý nghĩa của cuộc sống. — Robert Frost

16. Nếu ai cũng có thể hiểu bạn, thì bạn đã trở nên bình thường đến mức nào rồi.

17. Một trong những biểu hiện của một người trưởng thành, chính là hiểu rõ 99% những chuyện xảy ra với mình hàng ngày, những lời của người khác căn bản không có ý nghĩa. — Mark Bauerlein

18. Tiện tay nhấn like là đạo đức tốt. — Lỗ Tấn

19. Khi bạn già rồi, nhìn lại một đời, sẽ phát hiện: Khi nào ra nước ngoài học tập, khi nào quyết định làm công việc đầu tiên, vào lúc nào lựa chọn được đối tượng để yêu đương, khi nào kết hôn, thực ra đều là bước ngoặt của cuộc đời. Chỉ là lúc đó đứng ở ngã ba đường, nhìn thấy phong ba bão táp, ngày mà bạn đưa ra quyết định, ở trên nhật ký, vô cùng lặng lẽ và tầm thường, lúc đó còn tưởng rằng là một ngày bình thường trong cuộc đời của mình.

— Đào Kiệt

20. Tôi quay rất nhiều bi kịch, nhưng các bạn đều nói đó là hài kịch. — Châu Tinh Trì

21. Tôi dùng tất cả sức lực, sống một đời bình thường. —《 Mặt trăng và đồng xu 》

22. Lời nói dối tệ hại nhất, chính là người bạn yêu tin tưởng lời nói dối của bạn. —《 Horace and Pete 》

23. Hôm nay không muốn chạy, vì vậy mới chạy. Đây mới là cách suy nghĩ của người chạy đường dài. — Murakami Haruki

24. Con người sở dĩ lời nói chính xác, là vì hiểu biết quá ít. — François Guizot

25. Người ta thường nói thời gian có thể thay đổi rất nhiều thứ, nhưng trên thực tế phải do chính bạn thay đổi những thứ đó. — Andy Warhol

26. Tôi càng cô độc, càng không có bạn bè, càng không có sự ủng hộ nào, tôi càng phải tôn trọng bản thân mình hơn. — Charlotte Brontë

27. Tất cả đau khổ của con người, về bản chất đều là sự căm phẫn về những thứ bản thân không làm được. — Vương Tiểu Ba

28. Chúng ta chỉ là quá bận mà thôi, bận đến mức những chuyện tốt đẹp lướt qua người mà cũng không hay biết.

29. Khi tôi vẫn còn trẻ, chưa có sự từng trải, bố tôi dạy bảo tôi một câu, đến bây giờ tôi vẫn nhớ mãi không quên. 'Mỗi khi con muốn phê bình người khác', ông ấy nói với tôi 'con phải nhớ, tất cả mọi người trên thế giới này, không phải ai cũng có điều kiện tốt giống như con.'

— F. Scott Fitzgerald《 Gatsby vĩ đại 》

30. Cuộc sống chẳng có ý nghĩa gì cả, nhưng nếu sống thì có lẽ sẽ gặp được những chuyện có ý nghĩa, giống như anh gặp được đoá hoa đó, giống như anh gặp được em. —《 Naruto 》

Nguồn: Zhihu | Kim Anh dịch

[certaininternetdestiny]

Does digital dualism contribute to the incredulity of online threats against women?

[Image 1]

Popularised by Nathan Jurgenson (2011b), digital dualism is the belief that the virtual world and the real, offline one are two intrinsically separate realities. One would believe that in today’s digital environment, which is becoming increasingly enmeshed with people’s everyday “real” lives, the online-offline binary would finally be proved fallacious. However, current publications like Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, Morozov’s The Net Delusion, or even the blockbuster The Social Network show us that digital dualism is a concept still deeply entrenched in popular conscience (Jurgenson, 2011b).

The rise in cyber abuse against women in the public sphere, corroborated with the poor response from law enforcement when called into action (Sobieraj, 2020), has made me wonder whether the online-offline discrepancy plays a role in the lack of appropriate legislature against online threats. And if so, is this the right approach? Even though this post mentions online threats against women, the role of digital dualism in the skepticism against any type of virtual abuse could be extrapolated.

According to Sobieraj (2020), digital harassment against women is often trivialised for its lack of “real life” consequences. Looking at US legislature, offences such as defamation, stalking, harassment, or threats of violence could lead to severe repercussions in the court of law. However, when these happen online, they are given less importance. Moreover, since US law focuses on the suspects’ individual actions, the case of cumulative online abuse against women falls short of the mark when broken down into all the separate comments. Combined with the semi-obscurity of online harassers, enforcement against virtual attacks becomes even more uncertain, with policemen being more inclined to advise women to “just log off the internet” instead of taking any action against the perpetrators (Sobieraj, 2020).

[Image 2]

Indeed, it is the aura of anonymity which leads the general public and academics alike to wonder whether the online sphere transforms decent people into “trolls” (Rossini, 2020). It relates to the digital dualist misconception that the “real-world” person is the 1st self, whereas the online equivalent of the same individual is the 2nd self, a darker more unhinged version of the former (Jurgenson, 2011a). This notion often excuses the behavior of such “trolls”, seen as decent people getting carried away by online affordances.

I propose a different perspective on the issue. The ubiquity of technology in our lives and the increasingly intertwined online and offline social spheres prove that rather than a stark separation between the virtual and the real, the former should be seen as an augmentation of the latter. From employers inquiring your online presence, to more radical examples like the massacre committed by self-proclaimed incel Elliot Rodger in 2014 (BBC, 2018), it is now more than ever clear that online activity can have dire offline consequences.

Seeing that women in the public sphere conduct most of their professional activity online, virtual threats against them can impact their livelihood beyond the bounds of the screen. Silencing their voices also has far deeper antidemocratic implications (Sobieraj, 2020).

So I wonder, rather than seeing trolls as lost souls acting in a moment of recklessness, why should we not consider them people whose real intentions are revealed by online affordances, who pose a real threat to women?

[Word count: 533]

Sources:

BBC (2018). Elliot Rodger: How misogynist killer became 'incel hero'. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-43892189 [accessed: 20 October 2020]

Jurgenson, N. (2011a). “Digital Dualism and the Fallacy of Web Objectivity”. Cyborgology (blog). https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/09/13/digital-dualism-and-the-fallacy-of-web-objectivity/ [accessed: 20 October 2021]

Jurgenson, N. (2011b). “Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality”. Cyborgology (blog). https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/[accessed: 20 October 2021]

Rossini, P. (2020). Beyond Incivility: Understanding Patterns of Uncivil and Intolerant Discourse in Online Political Talk. Communication Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650220921314

Sobieraj, S. (2020). Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press

Images:

Image 1: https://www.behance.net/gallery/26296429/dualismi

Image 2: https://trendland.com/dan-bejar-illustrations/

[savegraduation]

Aaliyah Would Be Proud

I'm James Landau, known on the Internet as Savegraduation.

I am starting this blog, Aaliyah Would Be Proud, to discuss one of most important and flammable issues of our time: youth rights. There are civil rights (for African-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Arab-Americans, Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, Indian-Americans, Filipino-Americans, and others); there are women's rights; there are LGBT rights (for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender people, and non-gender-binary people); there are workers’ rights (for union laborers); there are disability rights (for the physically challenged, the blind, the deaf, the mute, the obese, arthrogrypotics, epileptics, CPers, autistics, Aspies, Downies, people with bipolar, people with borderline, schizophrenics, Touretters, obsessive-compulsives, ADDers, PTSDers, etc.); and then there are youth rights. The youth rights movement seeks to abolish or lower the age of legal restrictions, as well as change informal societal attitudes, that look down on people below a certain age (often 18, 21, or 25) as inferior and undeserving of even basic human rights.

We youth-rightsers aim to lower the voting age to 16. To lower the drinking age back to 19 or 18. To lower the age of majority and age of emancipation to 16. To protect students’ rights at the mandatory institution known as school. To abolish age-discriminatory store policies (”no more than two high school students in at one time”). To extend the rights of medical consent to all people old enough to wish for or object to treatment, regardless of age. To stop punishing parents for their minor children’s crimes. To abolish the draft. To ease restrictions on younger workers, and stop employers from viewing young employees as a liability. To allow people under 16 to get a job without adults bellowing, “Child labor!” To guarantee to every American the right to practice the religion she or he wants to and express her/his mind without her/his parents having her/him arrested for “insubordination”.

Age-discriminatory laws run a wide spectrum of enormity. At one end are age restrictions of things, such as drinking alcohol, smoking weed, or gambling, that the majority of Americans today believe are morally wrong for youth to do. Then come other status crimes like teen curfew laws. Then come laws like the laws in America preventing under18s from voting (even though Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Austria, the Crown Dependencies, Scotland, and Malta already allow 16-year-olds-to vote; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_age#Chronology_of_lowering_the_voting_age_to_16 ). Then come the oversteps of strict parents and Skinneresque faculty at K-12 schools, trying to prevent boys from wearing earrings, or censor the school paper because the principal doesn't like the angle of a particular student-written story or editorial. At the far end are stories of teens being abducted from their homes and taken into gulag camps simply because they have parents who don't like their nonconformity. Teens having their most beloved possessions destroyed or thrown away by their parents. Teens having to drive over state lines into states that will vaccinate them, lest they die before their eighteenth or even nineteenth birthdays because their parents refuse to let them have a vaccine . . . and also the less lucky teens who died already because a state legislature decided a parent's wishes trump a teen's concerns. 16-year-olds who have been seeking emancipation for a long time and then get kicked out to house by their parents (to their initial delight), only for the parents to then lie and report their child as a runaway, and having the mendacious parents rather than the truthful teen believed because of pervasive ageist attitudes and stereotypes, vitiating the minor's eligibility for emancipation. Gay teens undergoing the atrocious conversion therapy. Parents who take their 12-year-old sons to get circumcised against their sons' wishes. (And judging by their "Being a minor is only temporary!" argument, ageists seem to believe the boy's foreskin will magically regenerate on his eighteenth birthday.) If, when you hear the phrase "youth rights violations", you think simply of "You have to be 21 to drink", think again.

The title of this blog came from the R&B singer Aaliyah, who was born at the beginning of the Millennial Generation in January of 1979 and succumbed in a plane crash in 2001. In 1994, at the age of 15, Aaliyah released an album titled Age Ain't Nothing but a Number. Aaliyah lived her life to the fullest, not kowtowing to ageist laws and attitudes, and it was a good thing she did, because her life lasted only 22 years. I like to believe that if Aaliyah were to read my blog today, she would be proud of me for making the case for youth rights.

The seed of this Tumblr blog was planted several months ago, when a member of the NYRA Youth Rights Discussion Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/NYRAyouthrights/ told us about the Tumblr blog he had started on the topic of adult privilege (as analogous to male privilege, White privilege, straight privilege, etc.). Even though this blogger was an adult himself, he was swamped upon posting his first entry from people who wrongly assumed he was a kid who was upset because his parents wouldn't buy him an iPhone.

It is common among Gen-Xers (born 1964-1978) to be unaware that it's normal for Millennials (born 1979-2004) -- even the ones in our twenties or thirties, or who turned 40 this year -- to take many pro-YR positions, such as suffrage for 16-year-olds or restrictions on parental authority. These ignorant people assume that anyone starting a blog about ageism and ephebophobia (the fear of youth) must be "some kid", and that their concerns must be about positive rights (entitlement), rather than pressing negative rights.

Underlying this ignorance is a big myth surrounding generations that states every generation follows the same lifecycle as the Baby Boomers (born 1943-1957) did: they are innocent as children, then turn into wild, pot-smoking, socially liberal teen-agers who argue fiercely for youth rights, then go on being young and idealistic until they have children of their own and settle down . . . to then become "responsible", socially conservative adults who considered their younger selves to be irresponsible and misguided, raise their own kids strictly, start claiming "marijuana is illegal for a reason", and oppose youth rights. Or so the narrative goes.

But not every generation in Anglo-American history has followed this lifecycle. Take the Silent Generation (born 1925-1942), for instance. They began as Shirley Temples and Alfalfas amid the Great Depression and World War II, then spent their teens being a low-crime generation, despite all the Blackboard Jungle concern about juvenile delinquency and gangs. They married young. During the Postwar Era of 1950′s America, some of their members were beatniks, or invented rock-and-roll, or crusaded for the Civil Rights movement (after all, Chuck Berry and Martin Luther King, Jr. were Silents), but more often they kept their heads down, being grey-flannel-suit fathers who focused on their careers instead of activism, or barefoot-and-pregnant mothers who focused on being the perfect housewife. William Manchester wrote of fifties-era high school and college students: "Never had American youth been so withdrawn, cautious, unimaginative, indifferent, unadventurous -- and silent." They were indulgent parents, however, raising the Baby Boomers to the tune of Dr. Spock. Then they hit 40, and had their "midlife crisis", realizing they had wasted their youth being so un-rebellious. They started riding motorcycles and growing ponytails in middle age, and during the Vietnam Era, they generally raised their Baby Boomer and Joneser (born 1958-1963) kids permissively. It was a Silent, 1932-born Ted Kennedy, who proposed amending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to lower the voting age to from 21 to 18 at a national level, and argued in Oregon v. Mitchell that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment meant Congress could pass voting-age-related legislation at a federal level.

The "all generations are the same" myth notwithstanding, there is another, competing big myth prevalent today. This myth states that today's youth are "the worst" ever. Older Americans often indulge in saying that the Millennial Generation is the worst generation ever . . . or at least was until the Fifth World Generation (born 2005-today) came along. Memes posted by Boomers and Xers on the Internet say that when they were growing up, youth respected their elders, parents spanked their kids without fearing CPS, the spankings did no harm, and children freely "drank from the garden hose". Do they even remember the accusations during the sixties that teens had "no respect for their elders", "no respect for authority"? Older generations like to stereotype Millennials and Fifth Worlders as generations of Eloi, genetically attached to their smartphones, phones that are smarter than they are. Mark Bauerlein titled his book on Millennials The Dumbest Generation.

Are Millennials really the worst, dumbest generation ever? Nope. As sociologist Mike Males wrote in an LA Progressive article : "Imagine that a time-liberated version of vigilante George Zimmerman sees two youths walking through his neighborhood: black, hoodied Trayvon Martin of 2012, and a white teen from 1959 (say Bud Anderson from Father Knows Best). Based purely on statistics of race and era, which one should Zimmerman most fear of harboring criminal intent? Answer: He should fear (actually, not fear) them equally; each has about the same low odds of committing a crime." From 1982 to 2012, crime rates among African-American youth plummeted: property offenses declined by 51%, assault declined by 59%, robbery declined by 60%, rape declined by 66%, and even murder declined by 82%. And even though Donald Trump said in 2017 that "The murder rate in our country is the highest it's been in 47 years", the murder rate in America has in fact been halved since its 1991 peak. Far from the fabled heathens who have no morals because their parents didn't spank them, Millennial teens and twentysomethings, whatever their race, have too many moral compunctions to murder, rape, burglarize, or assault someone or set fire to someone's beloved belongings. Sadly, the stereotype that today's youth, especially boys and especially African-Americans, are "superpredators" persists, and has cops and security officers shooting and killing Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray. People often support their fears by using the thinnest of anecdotal evidence: “Look at Columbine, they were teens!”

And "kids have no respect for their elders"? So what. Just as Boomer youth were right in questioning their homophobic, pro-war elders from the Greatest Generation (born 1911-1924) during the Vietnam War, today's youth are not necessarily in the wrong for speaking out against a parent, uncle, teacher, principal, coach, or psychologist-they-were-sent-to-after-being-diagnosed-with-ODD when said elder tells them that boys shouldn't grow their hair long, or that it's "inappropriate" for two girls to kiss, or that only paranoid alarmists believe in climate change, or that George W. Bush must be followed, right or wrong, or that kids must never express disagreement with adults on even as subjective and trivial a matter as whether the weather today is nice.

And the accusation that Millennials and Fifth Worlders are stupid? Co-champions were declared at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 2014, 2015, and 2016, for only the fourth, fifth, and sixth times since the bee's inception in 1925. Then came 2019, when the spellers were so good that Scripps ended up with an EIGHT-way tie! Word lists got increasingly harder; the winning words from 1935 to 1941 were "intelligible", "eczema", "promiscuous", "sanitarium", "canonical", "therapy", and "initials", while the winning words from 2007 to 2013 were "serrefine", "guerdon", "Laodicean", "stromuhr", "cymotrichous", "guetapens", and "knaidel".

Other ageists listen to media frenzies over teens eating Tide Pods and snorting condoms. The moral panic over these "trends", however, has turned out to be a tempest in a teapot. Reports of being poisoned by laundry detergent pods were actually down in 2018, at the same time the media hype over this alleged teen fad was spiking. The trend stories were trend pieces reporting on previously written trend pieces, with acts of detergentophagy less common than the media would have their unwitting dupes believe. As the Washington Post wrote: "There's just one small problem, however: Those headlines were wrong. The only thing viral about the condom challenge right now is the moral panic about the idea of teens doing the condom challenge. In a matter of days, word spread from a single local news report to a small army of local and national publications across the world, all warning about a challenge that, in 2018, barely exists." As a Snopes page discusses, claims to fake "teen challenges" have been around for a long time. Sorry, but real youth are not as dumb as urban folklore makes them out to be. The media is simply getting more ephebophobic.

A common misconception among ageists is that the reason youth rights activists who are older than about, say, 25 still support youth rights is that they are pedophiles. The fact of the matter is that most adult youth rights activists are still fighting for youth rights because they faced some instance of ageism, or a repeated barrage of instances of ageism, during their childhood and/or adolescence that scarred them for life.

I am a young adult, soon to be middle-aged. I had many run-ins with, and undeserved attempts at discipline and sociaLIESation from, my parents, teachers, school administrators, psychologists, psychiatrists, and random adults in the neighborhood as a child, teen, and college student. I was also the victim of nonconsensual medical treatment, as I'll open up about in later blog entries.

When I was in kindergarten, the class learned the song "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly", of which I was horrified. I starting scraping my nails down my throat and sticking them out of my mouth whenever I heard the words "spider" or "goat". Over the next two years, the "purging" ritual I was developing went down to my groin, and more words (and objects!) were added from ages 6 to 22. Other words were dropped over the years.

Little did I know at age 6 that I was developing what I call "logaesthesia", or word-tasting. When I hear or read one of those terrible words like "scxxt" or "whxxps", I get the sensation that I have swallowed the word. It's as if it's inside of me, slumbering in my intestines and attracting intestinal slime. To hear or read a word is to take in. I can never read an article without feeling as if I'm taking a drink of that article's waters, feasting on a repast of bread, beef stew and almond roca from the article. The same with listening to conversation. The words, further, have specific tastes when I eat them. When I hear the word "whxxps", for instance, I immediately taste whipped cream. The whipped cream is there right inside of me, its cold creaminess sitting in the front seat of my pants. Would you like you have whipped cream in your pants? That's what it feels like to me. The word "mxss" tastes like oatmeal. "Scxxt" tastes like cooked carrot, like the carrot in pot roast. "Jxggle" tastes like red hots -- the candies -- while "jingle" as well as "t-ngle" taste like those tiny spherical hard candies you put on cupcakes. "Xll xver the plxce" tastes like pasta-ey soup, a soup like Spaghetti-O's perhaps. And "ice xxxxx", of course, tastes like ice xxxxx.

And it's not only the words that make me purge that have a taste. Many of the innocuous words do too. For instance, "trump" tastes like sautéed mushrooms. "Doodle" tastes like macaroni. "Kentucky" tastes like fried chicken. With my logaesthesia, I am a person to whom words do more than convey semantic meanings. To you, "tale" is just a word for a story, but to me it conjures up the taste of lasagna, the pasta in lasagna with a light sauce on it. Even names can have tastes to them: Greg tastes like chocolate Easter egg, while the name Kevin tastes of ice xxxxx cone and Tiffany of lemon meringue pie.

To avoid coming in contact with these words, I don't watch television, nor do I go to the movies. I avoid coming into chatrooms as much as I can, too. Logaesthesia affects my life when it prevents me from doing certain things such as these. I also used to suffer while surfing the Internet and had to copy-and-paste a lot of posts from the Net into Notepad and use Find & Replace on them. Now I have a Greasemonkey filter that replaces the offending words.

The object triggers in logaesthesia also affect my quality of life. To avoid coming across things that make me purge, such as spiders and cobwebs around my parents' house, or plastic silverware in restaurants, or Winnie the Pooh and Spider-man garbage in stores, I have to close my eyes, or at the very least cup my hand in front of my eyes so I only see the aisles in front of me. It makes it hard for me to make my way around a store when I can't allow myself to look around, and sometimes I even bump into shelves. I can't push shopping carts or wheelchairs when we go into public places, unless we're going to someplace where everything is safe, such as See's Chocolates.

I often go into rooms alone so I have a place to purge where no one will see that I am purging. I used to purge in public, but eventually the rituals got so deep into my groin that I had to unbutton my pants and couldn't do it in public anymore. I am not prudish about other people seeing me, but I am afraid that other people might tell me my behavior is "inappropriate" or "socially unacceptable" if they see me purging, so I need to hide my purging to save my fragile soul.

Because of my condition, teachers and other adults who had convinced themselves that I was masturbating, or even who insisted it was "inappropriate" even if it wasn't really masturbating, because of society's taboo against what they called "putting your hands in your pants" (ooh, how I hated that phrase) have tried to socialize me, talked down to me, and then told me I was wrong for contradicting an adult when I defended myself. All the "socialization" I received in high school, all the being forced to do things, all the fascist comments that my behavior was "inappropriate" or "socially unacceptable", haunt me to this very day. I still think back weekly to run-ins with authoritarian teachers that happened during my school years, triggered by the logaesthesia or other, non-logaesthesia-related events, causing me to yell, bite myself, punch my skull, and punch my abdomen as if slicing open a watermelon. If I had only been given the chance to stop going to school, to live away from my parents, to move to Berkeley, I may have been able to get away from it all before too much damage was done.

It doesn't help me much either that I have never heard of another person having logaesthesia. OCD? Yes. Lexical-gustatory synaesthesia? I've met a few such people online. But the two in synergy? I've never even read of it. It attests to the extreme rarity of my condition that I was the one who had to coin a word for it. And I feel lonely. People with ADD, Asperger's, social anxiety, Alzheimer's, or conduct disorder are a dime a dozen, especially on the Internet. But me? I really know the meaning of being lonely. Even the Ehlers-Danlos "zebras" have found each other on the Net.

Let me tell you more about myself. I am writing a rock musical about Millennials, called The Bittersweet Generation, and had an alternative band called Red Cilantro during my late teens and early twenties. I have a collection of music on my iPod that includes such artists as Nirvana, Third Eye Blind, Smash Mouth, Fastball, the Beatles, Pink, Sia, The Naked and Famous, Florence + the Machine, Gotye, Enya, the Cranberries, the Sundays, Of Monsters and Men, Shaggy, KT Tunstall, Avril Lavigne, Hole, Michelle Branch, Lady Gaga, M83, Muse, Ingrid Michaelson, Bastille, Depeche Mode, the Weeknd, and Xymox, and listen to my headphones when I am out and about to avoid hearing purge words. I do my hair like Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, and always wear a turtleneck, khakis and sunglasses. I love trying new foods and eating old favorites such as lasagna, biscotti, sushi, Chinese food, Taco Bell, spice drops, ravioli, manicotti, rice crackers, cranberry juice, challah, suman antala, dolmas, quiche, pomegranate juice, Brussels sprouts, banh mis, enchiladas, rambutans and piroshkis. When one of my friends was diagnosed with cancer, I tried to get everyone we knew to pray for her. I like spending time with my friends, both male and female, whom I love to a degree more typical of friendships between two females than of male-male or male-female friendships.

Another abnormality I suffer is a sensation I call That Feeling. I will be in the middle of an activity, or just lying down, when all of a sudden I feel as if spiders are going to fall down from the ceiling onto me. I begin constantly looking for spiders on the ceiling, and checking my own hands for specks of dead spider that may have gotten on my hands from handling objects -- again and again. I feel as if my eyes are going to cross. It feels as if I am using 110% of my brain. I notice every object and sound around me equally, and have a hard time telling my surroundings from my own thoughts. My eyes can't make sense out of the pictures I see online. This has been happening to me since 2009. I'll call my caretaker and tell him, "I've got That Feeling again", and he'll know what I mean.

I am cismale, bisexual, Jewish, deist, a beatnik, ENFP, 4w3sx, Virgo, Californian, anarcho-syndicalist, bearded, anosmic, and childfree, with dark brown hair and hazel eyes. I was born sunny-side-up with a single umbilical artery. On Simon Baron Cohen's tests, I got an empathizing quotient of 32, a systemizing quotient of 17, and an AQ of 24.

I've participated in, and read, many debates on the voting age, the drinking age, parental authority, school dress codes, medical consent, the youth rights movement as a whole, or just the whole concept of taking kids seriously -- I've seen them on Internet fora, on the comments sections of news websites, and in the emails I've received. And every place youth rights issues have been debated online, I've seen certain very shoddy and fallacious arguments against youth rights regurgigated again and again. If you're active in the youth rights movement, or even if you just read the comments sections at the Washington Post, you've probably heard them all: "Being a minor is only temporary", "You can wait", "16-year-olds will vote like their parents", "Young people think they're immortal", "I supported youth rights when I was younger but then outgrew that position", "You'll change your mind when you're older", "The only adults who still support youth rights are pedophiles", "If 16-year-olds are deemed incapable of signing a contract, how can they be mature enough to vote?" (the de jure fallacy), "My house, my rules", "Emancipation will solve everything", "Kids aren't oppressed -- they don't have to pay bills!", "Teens were eating Tide Pods a week ago", statements beginning "Society has decided . . .", and the red herring question "Bah, what about child labor?" Many of the posts in this blog will be centered around focusing on a certain argument and refuting it.

Then there are the scientific claims, published even by respected scientists, that claims teens have immature, underdeveloped, etc. brains, which first became trendy during the nineties. In a 2007 Scientific American article titled "The Myth of the Teen Brain", psychologist Robert Epstein exposes this as junk science. As Epstein points out, the studies that examine adolescent brains, teen-age pathologies, and teen angst do not distinguish cause from effect. Teen-age ills are caused by the restrictions on youth and segregation of teens from adults that got started in the early twentieth century. Teens in preindustrial societies do not show high rates of crime, and spend most of their time with adults. They do not feel teen angst. When Western-style schooling and television are brought to these societies, the adolescent members of these now Westernized societies begin to exhibit delinquency and teen angst. The Inuit living on Victoria Island, Canada had no problem with juvenile delinquency until their community was Westernized in the eighties, and by 1988 they had established their first permanent police department now that the worms had escaped from the can. Epstein also points out that brain imaging studies show only a correlation between age and brain anatomy, not a causal relationship. While the orthodoxy in the 1970's was that the brain reached its adult state at 18, and in the 1990's the line changed to "The brain isn't fully developed until 25", research in the 2010's now reveals that a person's brain in fact continues to develop and change for her/his whole life.

It's enlightening to see the kind of junk science that was used in its own time against women's suffrage, as in this recent article in the Atlantic.  Note that William P. Sedgwick, an outspoken opponent of women's suffrage who claimed voting would be bad for women's brains, was a reputable professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But all of that will be delved into in more detail in my blog entries in the weeks, months, and years to come. I've been writing about youth rights and ageism for more than two decades, and I do believe it is high time I had a blog on it. I have a moral philosophy I call bixochromatism (which in a nutshell states that the freedom to be in control of one's own decisions is more important than making what people tell you is a "good" or "wise" decision), which I will discuss in future posts. In the meantime, you can read my essay, 10 Reasons to Support the Youth Rights Movement, at http://khemehekis.angelfire.com/10reasons.htm , or even browse the website of the National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) at https://www.youthrights.org/

In solidarity,

Savegraduation