I Don't Think It's The Lesson You Intended, Though...

...and let's hope any future employers thinking about offering you a job take it to heart: 

“If I never posted that video, nothing would have ever happened,” he said. And because the internet never forgets, the clip will always be available to watch.

“I’m going to remind myself, you started something,” he said with satisfaction. “You taught someone a lesson.”

Let's hope that Jimmy Galligan soon learns that internet mobs are a two-edged sword. 

And that in casting a light on the supposed 'crimes' of his white classmate, he's also cast a light on the smug, self-satisfied and frankly psychopathic way he handles what he considers a 'wrong' done to him.

The internet does indeed never forget. Jimmy. You might have cause to curse that, rather than praise it...

H/T: CathyYoung via Twitter

And The 2014 Pontius Pilate Award For Hand-Washing Goes To…

Thousands of foster families are being put at risk because some councils are withholding vital information about the children they agree to take in, campaigners have warned.

Quite vital information, too, for the safety of the carer’s family:

One foster carer, a former manager for a fostering service, told of a child who had been placed in a home with six cats.

"We weren't told he had killed them [cats] previously."

And not least for the foster children’s safety:

And she recalled a girl she had fostered "where it hadn't been shared that she was going to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train. We have a railway at the back of our house".

The councils, of course, shrug their shoulders and say ‘Not us, guv!’:

Responding to the concerns, David Simmonds, chairman, Local Government Association's children and young people's board, said: "There will be examples when it is not possible or appropriate for councils to disclose everything about an individual child, for example children in the middle of complex court cases or when a child is placed in an emergency foster placement."

Yes, there will. But neither of these examples seem to fit that bill, do they?

"I once talked a guy out of blowing up the Sears Tower but I can't talk my wife out of the bedroom or my kid off the phone."

The Roundhill Tunnels near Folkestone were closed last night because police were worried about a man who was spotted in the road, a spokesman revealed this morning.

The London-bound carriageway of the tunnel on the A20 was shut from 10.45pm to just after 1am leaving queues of traffic trapped inside.

This is becoming a typical response to these incidents.

Police officers and Highways Agency employees turned the vehicles around while a trained negotiator spoke to the pedestrian and eventually persuaded him to accept medical assistance from paramedics in a waiting ambulance.

Which probably explains this:

Can't have the public expressing their displeasure at the police actions, can we?

H/T: anon in comments

Doreen St Felix – The True Face Of Modern ‘Activism’

On Tuesday, we engaged in public discourse.

Heh! Yes. Just the sort of 'public discourse' we can expect from the modern student, as taught by the modern lecturer, as David Thompson has so exhaustively documented...

Discourse facilitated, legitimized, and moneyed by the few in power is not true "discourse" at all. Those who asserted themselves in protest – an organized, deliberated and strategically executed protest, to be clear – exposed the falsity of these terms. As a young black woman, I am proud to be a part of this community.

Really? I can't think why. Even at CiF, most of the comments (and there's only 43 at time of writing!) point out just what a hopeless, losing tactic it was.

When organizers spoke with Taubman Center officials, they were told that it would not be cancelled. This is not surprising. The institutions comfortably occupying the uppermost echelons of our unequal society seem to only recognize a particular type of conversation, one in which there is only one microphone.

These intellectually rigorous, fearsome ‘speak truth to power’ activists wanted the talk cancelled. Yes, cancelled.

I saw Kelly assume his position of power on that elevated platform. We saw this, and we got angry. As planned, the young black man in front of me stood and raised his fist in protest, and we followed suit. We read a statement, demanding accountability from the Brown institution for bringing Kelly to the university under the auspices of a "successful policing policy" and for its role in perpetuating systematic oppression. For the next 30 minutes, people in the audience stood up – some heckling, some reading prepared statements, until the talk was cancelled.

So, you got your way, through force, and by showing yourselves up to be afraid to counter his argument by anything but force. Go, you!

And then you find out that, instead of being hailed for your bravery, you are almost universally condemned. Hoe unfair!

Since Tuesday, the responses to the action show unambiguously the dangerously circumscribed place of true discourse and conversation in this country. Dozens of posts on my Facebook news feed from former and current students expressed shame at a "minority" group for their "screeching", their "uncivilized behavior", and for their disregard for "freedom of speech". Intelligent individuals wielded bluntly the "civilizing" project that sanctioned centuries of oppression. The Daily Beast, among other outlets, diluted the situation to a false dichotomy of campus liberals and free speech.

Oh, how that must sting! The truth always does.

And most disappointing to me, my own university president both misunderstood the true nature of educational discourse, chastising not only students but hard-working individuals in Dare as "disruptive". President Paxson failed to mention the racist and unconstitutional nature of stop-and-frisk in her statements – she could only reduce and allude to the policy as an "opposing view".

Because it is. Weren't you listening in any of your lecture? Did you learn nothing? Why are you even at university anyway?

A community forum attended by over 600 students held at the university Wednesday evening did not include, and furthermore did not even acknowledge the achievements Dare and other organizations have reached through decades of activism against racial profiling.

Because they are as sick and tired of your pathetic attempts to foment revolution as the 'establishment', perhaps?

To frame the protest as an "infringement of free speech" for one of the most influential white men in America, is to deny what the protest so powerfully communicated: protest is discourse on the terms of the oppressed, and it takes a "disruption" for marginalized communities to have their voices heard.

We've heard your voice. And dismissed what it has to say. So, I guess you did learn something, after all. It probably won't do you much good in whatever job you manage to get once you leave university, though...