10-Year-Old Muslim Boy Probed For 'Terrorist House' Spelling Error (bbc.com) 315
AmiMoJo writes: A 10-year-old Muslim boy who mistakenly wrote that he lived in a "terrorist house" during an English lesson at school has been investigated by police. The pupil, who attends a primary school in Lancashire, meant to say he lived in a "terraced house." The boy was interviewed by Lancashire Police at his home the next day, and the family laptop was examined. The 2015 Counter Terrorism and Security Act means that teachers have been legally obliged to report any suspected extremist behavior to police since July. Miqdaad Versi, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, the UK's largest umbrella group for Islamic associations, said he was aware of dozens of cases similar to that of the schoolboy.
News for Nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:News for Nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
They should change the slogan to "Half-Story Clickbait to Bring the Foaming-at-the-Mouth People to the Site". Not catchy enough?
Nerds are frequently concerned with stories about rights and injustice.
Re:News for Nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:News for Nerds? (Score:5, Funny)
However AmiMoJo has a special relationship, so he can post whatever he wants.
It's true. Years ago I bought a $5 subscription to get rid of the ads on mobile (before adblock was available). There was actually a problem processing it and I felt most embarrassed having to get support involved to process it. Strung that baby out for years.
Ever since then I've enjoyed a special relationship with the /. editors. They grudgingly tolerate my impertinence, and occasional wrath directed at them (especially around the who beta era, when my signature was less than cordial). They know I'm cheap, the kind of bastard who subscribes for $5 once a decade, but they also know I spend more time posting here than working and these days that's becoming a rare thing.
Thing is, I just love the down-votes I get whenever I post some SJW bullshit, so I'm kinda addicted now. Sometimes I travel and get withdrawal because I'm stuck on an aircraft with no internet for 12 hours. Well, I mean they have internet, but I'm too cheap to pay for it.
I used to come here for the insightful commentary and interesting debate, now it's mostly just to annoy MRAs and anti-feminists. I can see you have a rather high ID so are probably a millennial who joined yesterday, but the trick is to learn to let go and not read every single story. Just skip over it if you don't like it, or go to firehose and vote for something else. You could even submit some bullshit of your own, and I'll happily down-vote it and then re-submit a more click-baity, left leaning version myself. Your welcome.
Obligatory xkcd. [xkcd.com]
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[claps]
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Yep. I really did have a $5 subscription. I keep forgetting to do another so I can see stories before they hit the front page.
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Right. But in 2001, that fucktard Bin Laden went and crashed 4 planes into the US. And then that fucktard George W Bush went and overreacted to it.
And here we are, still dealing with terrorist bullshit and western democracy pants-wetting. I don't like it any better than you do, but it is the world we live in.
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Re:News for Nerds? (Score:5, Funny)
Everything changed that day! Including the flow of time.
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it is relevant to tech if it's an autocorrect error. maybe the boy meant tourist house, like a boarding house.
Re:News for Nerds? (Score:4, Informative)
The pupil, who attends a primary school in Lancashire, meant to say he lived in a "terraced house."
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Can you not even read TFS?
The pupil, who attends a primary school in Lancashire, meant to say he lived in a "terraced house."
I guess people presume that terrorists can't have nice things... :-)
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maybe that was another autocorrect, or maybe the kid was talking to reporters and the reporters didn't understand properly. What's more likely - a 10 year old boy is conversant enough in home design terms to describe his home as a terraced house, or that he said tourist house, which is the kind of oversimplification that a 10 year old would make, and then the reporter mis heard him? hmm?
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His parents likely have spoken about it in front of him. I knew by the time i was in first grade that i lived in a aframe colonial house and my cousin lived in a modern ranch style house just from my parents talking in front of me.
But it doesn't really matter. This is a non-story anyways. The kid admitted something, a quick investigation happened and it was determined to be a mistake. If your 10 year old went to school and said you beat him or you leave your crack pipe out when you pass out and your his si
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But it doesn't really matter. This is a non-story anyways. The kid admitted something, a quick investigation happened and it was determined to be a mistake.
Except the part about the family laptop being examined, I would agree.
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I'm not going to be browbeaten by somebody named Jizz Lad.
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I'm not going to be browbeaten by somebody named Jizz Lad.
But will you be meatbeaten by him?
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Well it's not a million miles away from the schoolboy's clock mistaken for bomb story. Although I'm pretty sure someone would have said that didn't belong on this site either.
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Clockboy at least had a tech angle -although a flimsy on when you realize why he did it.
I'm not seeing the problem here (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't doubt that it OUGHT to be checked out no matter whose kid it was that wrote it. If my blonde-haired blue-eyed kid had written it, I still think the responsible thing would be to check it out.
OTOH, I'm also pretty sure the "check it out" is likely to be carried out a lot more respectfully on a rich white kid's family than on a relatively powerless poor immigrant's family. Particularly if they are from a background that has a rep for producing terrorists. Not that this isn't to be expected too, but i
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Does this really need to be checked out? I mean, more than just the teacher asking if that's what he really meant. Are we so paranoid about terrorism that we need to follow up a 10 year old's spelling mistake? Do we really think that terrorists call themselves terrorists at home and in front of their kids?
Kid might have seen something "odd" ... (Score:2)
Do we really think that terrorists call themselves terrorists at home and in front of their kids?
Its not merely whether the parents utter the word "terrorist". Its also whether the kid sees items *he* associates with terrorism in his mind. What might a child who saw the AK-47 in the house of a Paris attacker think? What might a child who say the pipe bombs in the house of the San Bernardino attackers think?
One does not know what put the word "terrorist" into the kid's mind. One has to investigate. And who in our society are trained investigators for possible criminal acts? He was **interviewed** at
Re:I'm not seeing the problem here (Score:5, Insightful)
if any kid had written that they live in a terrorist house, it would be checked out.
Even if that were the case, it's still outrageous that teachers apparently feel they are required to report obvious spelling errors and that the police feel they are worth investigating. At any point someone could have said "this is stupid, it's clearly a mistake, let's not waste time and money or cause unnecessary grief for this family", but no one had the guts. This is what happens when you create a climate of fear, where if some kid decides to go to Syria because J1hadi2011 told him to his teachers get blamed for not spotting it.
Even worse, where is the judicial oversight? Shouldn't searching the family laptop require some kind of check, especially when it is based on such incredibly flimsy evidence? It seems like if someone outside the school/police had looked at it, there might have been a chance for a sane outcome.
In any case, I really doubt the probability of unfortunate spelling errors being reported to the police is the same for a nice 99% white school in rural Hampshire as for a 99% Muslim school in Birmingham. We need to do a test like those identical CVs with Christian/Muslim names on the top, but with two kids called Dave and Mohammed.
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Even worse, where is the judicial oversight? Shouldn't searching the family laptop require some kind of check, especially when it is based on such incredibly flimsy evidence?
For police to examine a laptop by force, they would require a search warrant. But in this case they probably asked the family to hand it over voluntarily, which the family agreed to do to make the police go away and stop hassling them.
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Most people don't know what pedophile means and think it means child molester, which is on the same level as thinking heterosexual means rapist.
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You failed to highlight "suspected extremist behavior". It doesn't say they are legally obliged to report every damn meaningless thing.
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What the fuck? Really? Did we not learn the lessons of Columbine, 20 years ago?
Whenever a kid says something, adults need to take action. NOT to take action is depraved indifference. We had too much of that already, that's how Columbine happened. No matter what the kid says or how crazy it seems - because it CAN happen here. Seriously, did you miss the whole "learning lessons" thing? It sounds like you did.
If it were an Irish kid -- same thing (Score:2)
... that teachers apparently feel they are required to report obvious spelling errors and that the police feel they are worth investigating ...
How is it an obvious spelling error rather than motivated by a kid seeing things around the house he associates with terrorism? How might a 10 year old describe a house of one of the Paris attackers where an AK-47 may have been seen, or the San Bernardino attackers were a pipe bomb may have been seen? In our society the police are the trained investigators of possible criminal acts, not teachers.
Shouldn't searching the family laptop require some kind of check
You assume the owner did not grant permission. The police can ask, the owner can say yes.
I really doubt the probability of unfortunate spelling errors being reported to the police is the same for a nice 99% white school in rural Hampshire as for a 99% Muslim school in Birmingham.
If he were an Irish kid
Re:I'm not seeing the problem here (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is legally the teachers had to report it to the police. Failure to do so could lead to prison.
The other thing is that children are horrible at keeping secrets and will grass even themselves up all the time. Therefore it was appropriate to investigate and the fact that he was from a Muslim household in my view makes it extra worthwhile following up. Now that the Irish terrorist threat has all but gone in the UK, statistically that fact makes it more likely that it was not just a mistake and hence worth investigating.
Imagine his family had disappeared to Syria in a couple of months to join Daesh?
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The thing is legally the teachers had to report it to the police. Failure to do so could lead to prison.
I'm sorry, what law results in prison for unreported spelling errors?
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This is not a case of profiling, no matter how much the Muslim Council of Britain tries, without actually saying so, that it was targeted at a Muslim.
I don't see anything in TFA to suggest that anybody is claiming it was anything to do with "profiling". Just that it was an over-reaction. Just in case this needs a UK-to-US translation: "terraced house" is British English for "townhouse" (but usually smaller). I'm not sure "terrorist house" makes sense - but it seems like a highly plausible Autocorrupt* or speech recognition goof for something like "terrised hosue".
Of course, we are relying on the clickbait media, so maybe it will emerge in a few days (a
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Why did they mention the boy is Muslim, if not to imply that he was reported because he was Muslim?
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Exactly, the only profiling here is being done by the press, otherwise this stuff happens all of the time. Even back in my day, I grew up as a middle child a little less than 18 months from my older brother. I kid you not, every other week one of us would come into school with a black-eye or a busted up lip. Was it because our parents were beating us? No, it was because one was getting back at the other for the previous week. Eventually, by law, the school had to investigate and the only thing they found is
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Sure he'd be checked out. It would go like this:
Teacher: Hey Johnny, what makes your house a terrorist house?
Johnny: It has houses on both sides that go allllll the way down the whole street, Miss!
Teacher: Terraced houses look really cosy all snugged up to one another!
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A side lesson: If you actually do plan on running a terrorist house, don't have little kids living in it. They're really bad at keeping secrets.
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I'm pretty sure he would be.
Tim McVeigh, The Unabomber, and most recently the yahoos up in the American Northwest who want property "returned to its original owners" - not, incidentally, the tribes who lived there before the white people arrived.
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And they the American Northwest "YallQaeda" folks are being allowed to come and go from the Federal land as they please even after it was found out that they are wrecking havoc on the lands. So you have armed folks taking over Federal lands, ruining them, and they are allowed to come and go without being arrested? Do you really think they would be treated the same way if they were 150 armed black men or 150 armed Muslims?
Re:I'm not seeing the problem here (Score:5, Informative)
2000 1 June: Real IRA bomb on Hammersmith Bridge, London.
2000 20 September: Real IRA fired an RPG-22 at the MI6 HQ in London.
2001 4 March: Real IRA detonated a car bomb outside the BBC's main news centre in London. One London Underground worker suffered deep cuts to his eye from flying glass and some damage was caused to the front of the building.[21] (See 2001 BBC bombing)
2001 16 April: Hendon post office bombed by the Real IRA.
2001 6 May: Real IRA detonated a bomb in a London postal sorting office. One person was injured.
2001 3 August: Real IRA bomb explodes in Ealing, West London, injuring seven people. (See 2001 Ealing bombing)
2001 4 November: Real IRA car bomb in Birmingham.
If you want, you can go back to the beginning of the '70s - just a bunch of white terrorists until July 2005.
Re:I'm not seeing the problem here (Score:4, Funny)
They would investigate anyone. The UK has a LONG history of dealing with non-muslim, non-arab terrorists.
2000 1 June: Real IRA bomb on Hammersmith Bridge, London. 2000 20 September: Real IRA fired an RPG-22 at the MI6 HQ in London. 2001 4 March: Real IRA detonated a car bomb outside the BBC's main news centre in London. One London Underground worker suffered deep cuts to his eye from flying glass and some damage was caused to the front of the building.[21] (See 2001 BBC bombing) 2001 16 April: Hendon post office bombed by the Real IRA. 2001 6 May: Real IRA detonated a bomb in a London postal sorting office. One person was injured. 2001 3 August: Real IRA bomb explodes in Ealing, West London, injuring seven people. (See 2001 Ealing bombing) 2001 4 November: Real IRA car bomb in Birmingham.
If you want, you can go back to the beginning of the '70s - just a bunch of white terrorists until July 2005.
OK, so apart from the the Paddies, the Taffs, the Muzzies, animal rights protesters, working class, anarchists, communists, and people from a criminal background; would they have investigated? No. Clear discrimination.
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They would investigate anyone. The UK has a LONG history of dealing with non-muslim, non-arab terrorists. [snip, sorry :)]
If you want, you can go back to the beginning of the '70s - just a bunch of white terrorists until July 2005.
Whilst yes, this is true there have been a disturbing number of over-reactions like this one directed against Muslims specifically that stand out from the increasing number of general over-reactions by the UK's various constabularies. I think that is the problem here.
During the troubles, when Ireland was sending bombers to England, were ordinary Irish harassed? When anti-GMO protests went on, did they stake out vegans?
It was a 10 year old boy who malpropped a word. The correct thing to do (and what wo
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I'm pretty sure he wouldn't be. None of your examples have anything to do with the UK either.
Do you have children? Although I suspect your transexual dig was directed at Barbara Hudson, When my son was in school, there were cases of white children who would write or draw something, and it would be checked out.
Did someone make this a UK only comment section?
I have no problem with them looking into the boy's comments either. It isn't infringement. Could even have been a cry for help, and imagine if we ignored a cry for help.
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Well I have a lot of imagination. Since you're mindlessly supporting a ridiculous situation you must be trying to divert attention away from yourself. Therefore you must have something to hide. Let's investigate that laptop of yours. I mean, just imagine the things you might be hiding!
The moral is, police should have A LOT of reasons in order to investigate you. If any silly hint is enough you get an obscenity.
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I concur. Too often, a whole shed load of busybodies go stomping in for trivial reasons. And probably 90% of the time or more, if a kid says he lives in a "terrorist house", it's kids being ingenuous.
On the other hand, he may have been literally repeating a "joke" heard by his elders - "We're a terrorist household". That may or may not be literally true, since it doesn't take a whole lot to get you added to the witchhunt these days. But in the off chance it is true, and the kid's living in a house full of b
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No I'm not in favor of casting a wide net and discretely investigating things on the off chance that it's true. I'm in favor of not investigating people unless you have very good reason to.
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I'm pretty sure if the kid was a white transsexual suburban boy he wouldn't be investigated. He only was investigated because he was Muslim and Muslims have a terrorism problem.
I'm pretty sure you are wrong. Children and their families have long been under scrutiny if the child says or does something in school. Some times it gets goofy, such as when a child draws a picture that causes concern, and it might have only been a character in a video game, but I can tell you, if they suspect malfeasance or abuse, they take a good long look at it.
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And then again, a teacher worth his salt would have asked the boy after class what he meant when he wrote it. Just to verify what was actually going on, you know. Instead of sending the police to raid their house...
This is almost a case of "swatting", by accident.
Re: I'm not seeing the problem here (Score:2)
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I'm pretty sure if the kid was a white....
I printed a copy of the terrorist handbook back in bording school... and they search my room very week! (or maybe they were just checking up on my cleaning)..
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Dude... take those meds. You need 'em.
Re: I'm not seeing the problem here (Score:2)
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When I was about his age, I couldn't tell the difference between "Skull" and "School". They just sounded identical to me, so I would use the spellings interchangeably. Note that I don't have any learning deficits or other disabilities, and I wasn't the only one I knew who had similar word mixups. Young children just sometimes hear words as being the same. Especially with an accent, Terraced and Terrorist can certainly sound similar enough that he could mix up the spellings. This definitely sounds like an ho
Re:I'm not seeing the problem here (Score:4, Funny)
...Note that I don't have any learning deficits or other disabilities...
Umm. I hate to be the one to break this to you...
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Plot twist (Score:2)
Even though the boy made a simple mistake, it won't take the great British press long to find some super tenuous connection to an act of terrorism and link him to it.
Re:Plot twist (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, yeah. It's like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon [wikipedia.org].
If you try hard enough, you can likely find a super tenuous connection to an act of terrorism to almost anybody.
Somewhere there's a bizarre chain of crap which says "Rik Sweeney went to school with a guy who went to the same mosque as a guy who washed the floors where a guy was in the same English class with the guys who delivered pizza to guys who did the Boston Marathon shootings". Ta da, you're linked to terrorism.
If you go chasing shadows you can make up any old crap. It doesn't make it evidence of a damned thing.
The problem is both the press and the idiots who claim they're trying to protect our freedoms treat these tenuous links as if they are meaningful.
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Don't forget the public pressure. Perceived cost of doing nothing about something that turns out to be dangerous: huge. Perceived cost of getting up all in arms about nothing: tiny. We hardly have a concept of risks we should accept . Deliberately doing nothing is hard to sell.
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The data is there, all known terrorists show up in one or more of those groups.
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Apart from a mexican with no legs, a gluten intollerence, and who is scared of the monsters lurking in the shadows.
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For some odd reason, that almost exactly describes a chihuahua. ;-)
A quivering little ball of acid reflux, hostility, and fear. Are they supposed to shake like that?
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It's likely that some terrorist at one point lived in or near a terraced house. That should be connection enough for the super sleuths at BBC news.
Damn autocorrect (Score:5, Funny)
I am so sorry Bob. I've been riddled with guilt and I have to confess. I have been helping myself to your wife, day and night whenever you're not around. In fact, probably more than you. I do not get it at home, but that's no excuse. I can no longer live with the guilt and I hope you will accept my sincerest apology and with my promise that it won't ever happen again.
The man, anguished and betrayed, went into his bedroom, grabbed his gun, and without a word, shot his wife and killed her.
A few moments later, a second text came in:
Damn autocorrect! I meant "wifi, not "wife" . . . . .
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Such things happen. I tried telling my girlfriend I was an ecoturist via text, and now I'm stuck in a hut in the Amazon basin!
Terrace (Score:4, Interesting)
I live on a street called a 'Terrace' ... when I first moved here, and changed all of my magazine subscription addresses... one of them came next month addressed to "S.E. Terrorist"....
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Was this a few years ago? Because if it was recent then I'd worry whenever there was a knock at the door.
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The story doesn't say but I'm wondering if this is a spell checker mishap. Carelessness or lack of reading skills and clicked on the wrong thing. I'm moderately literate and I've done it as an adult.
Officials (Score:5, Insightful)
Terrorist attack...
Constituents: "Why didn't you stop all these people from dying? Do something to keep it from happening again."
Does something...
Constituents: "Why are you attacking the freedoms of all these innocent people? You are being racist and evil."
Terrorist attack...
Constituents: "Why didn't you stop all these people from dying? Do something to keep it from happening again."
Re:Officials (Score:4, Insightful)
You can either be free or you can have the illusion of safety. Most people willingly choose the latter.
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Implying that politicians listen to constituents?
Occams razor says this is just a conspiracy against the people. That's a far more likely scenario than a politician listening to constituents.
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Out of the mouth of babes.. (Score:3, Funny)
When I was a little kid I wrote "When I grow up I want to be a scientist and work in a lavatory". I did grow up to be a scientist but, fortunately, I work in a laboratory.
Re:Out of the mouth of babes.. (Score:4, Funny)
Are you surrounded by chrome and tile? Running water nearby? Odd smells? People stopping by, crapping all over you, then leaving? Do people drop off pieces of paper to you?
You might be in that lavatory you wrote about.
Sad Commentary (Score:2)
It's a sad commentary on society when:
A) We assume it's natural for police to stop by after a kid's spelling mistake. (My 9 year old makes similar mistakes all the time.)
and
B) My first instinct was to praise the department for the "measured" response of not hauling the kid into the station in handcuffs, interrogating him for hours without his parents, and then (when they realize the deep trouble they're in) leaking a story that the kid/family is secretly evil in some way.
This boiling water is feeling much
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B) My first instinct was to praise the department for the "measured" response of not hauling the kid into the station in handcuffs, interrogating him for hours without his parents, and then (when they realize the deep trouble they're in) leaking a story that the kid/family is secretly evil in some way.
Yeah, it's sad.. that we have to happy there was no attempt of cover up... Granted that mostly an American thing.
Relevant Terriorist Video (Score:2)
Terriorist [vimeo.com] attack imminent.
Fucking hell, the comments here are awful. (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's how you "investigate" the problem. Here's how teachers would have "investigated" things before laws saying that anyone saying something slightly wrong had to be reported to the police.
Teacher: What do you mean by "terrorist" in this sentence?
Boy: Well, the houses are joined together in both sides.
Teacher: Are you sure you're using the right word?
Boy: Um well I'm not sure how to spell it but I thought that was it, I heard it yesterday.
Teacher: Yesterday we used [these words], was it any of these?
Boy: Ohhh! it was "terraced".
Here's how teachers are expected to behave now:
Teacher: A likely spelling error! I MUST CALL THE POLICE OR I CAN GO TO JAIL!
I would not have children in the UK today. I'm terrified by this environment. My father was brought up in a dictatorship, and taught in a school under that same dictatorship, and not even he was supposed to monitor kids like this.
John Brown's body (Score:2)
... liies a smolderiin' [moulderin'] in the ground.
When I was young, I thought the lyric was "smolderin'," and I wondered what John Brown did to make so many people happy that he was smoldering in hell.
Of course the song laments the death of John Brown and the the lyric is "moulderin'."
Kids use the words they hear most often.
Unfortunately, "terrorist" is a much more common word than "terraced."
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Really? I thought it went:
eeee jumped thirty thousand feet without a parachute
eeee jumped thirty thousand feet without a parachute
eeee jumped thirty thousand feet without a parachute
an' eee ain't gonna jump no mooooo-ooo-ooore
What's all this about John Brown?
Anyway as for errors of spelling and hearing:
http://www.inspire21.com/stori... [inspire21.com]
I didn't believe it, but a teacher assured me it was 100% plausible and likely true because there'd really be no need to make up answers rather than use real ones. I didn't ac
Of course they should check it out (Score:2)
Yeah but did he have a ... (Score:2)
Home Made Clock?
THAT would have been a whole different story.
Thanks Obama! (Score:2)
For protecting us from these dangerous spelling errors and ensuring fat paychecks for the private swat teams, security services, and cheesy gadget manufacturers who rely on your steadfast gaurd to line their pockets.
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This is in England. They don't have a president.
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I noticed some link a friend had posted with a news parody site with the headline "Schoolboy anxiously spellchecks homework after writing about the iris in his garden".
Re:Of course its gonna get checked (Score:4, Insightful)
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Christianity still is promoting murder in Africa, with government support. Christianity is still fighting against gay, lesbian, and transsexual rights, and also promoting violence against lgbt. Christians are still promoting hate, intolerance, and fear based on the bible, even to the level of the presidential race.
The bibie:
One Book to rule them all,
One Book to find them,
One Book to bring them all,
And in the darkness bind them.
Saying that someone else is worse nowadays is not an excuse.
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Instead of just mindlessly name calling, why dont you actually address my points with an intelligent counterargument?
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Because the short reply pretty well covered it? As did some others, but lets try again:
The Bible establishes the fundamental tenets of Christianity. No christian will disagree with the statement that literally believing and following everything in the Bible is absolutely fundamental to being a "good" christian.
http://www.1stap.com/en/html/t... [1stap.com]
The Bible includes many passages on torture and death to all non-believers, and treating women like chattels.
http://www.whatchristianswantt... [whatchrist...toknow.com]
http://othersidereflectio [blogspot.com]
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No, sadly, the brownshirts of today are the SJW's who would happily abolish basic freedoms like free speech, freedom of association, and freedom of religion in favor of enforcing their own ideology by force of law. And they're not in waiting. They're already here.
And I say that as a former liberal who is no longer welcome in the movement due to my belief in the freedom of expression above all.
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And I say that as a former liberal who is no longer welcome in the movement due to my belief in the freedom of expression above all.
Do you believe that I should free to legally say "I will pay $1,000,000 to whoever murders $PERSON"? Note: I've got no intention of paying up, so it's speech only.