arthwollipot wrote: ↑Sat Apr 20, 2024 6:53 am
That idea is a couple of years old at least, and yeah it's absolute bullshit.
There's a new wrinkle this time, though.
Over the last couple of years, there were incidents where someone said at a school board meeing, "What next? People identifying as cats?" or, "I heard that there's a school where...." and ususally a statement about litter boxes.
This is different. This time there are a large number of students organizing a protest and saying "This happened to me".
https://www.abc4.com/news/wasatch-front ... y-protest/
Normally, I would take that as a sign that the story is true. I can't imagine a group of eleven year olds organizing a protest over some hypothetical thing that might happen, or that they heard was happening somewhere else. Moreover, there were students interviewed on the news stories that said they, personally, had been bitten and scratched by children who were pretending to be animals.
And yet, I also can't imagine a real school district actually allowing anything remotely like that behavior.
Another sign that it''s bullshit is that I can't find some of the same articles I found 12 hours ago online. A little bit of research and fact checkig may have happened overnight.
My current theory, reading between the lines, is that a few people started wearing cat ear headbands. In this case "headband means something that goes over the head, the shape of headphones. You can get those things I've seen young girls wear them. I imagine their might be dog or bear or mouse ones as well. A little clique of nerdy girls. And then some kids got bent out of shape. And then some parents heard of it and decided it was part of Americas moral decay.
And before you know it, "Compelled speech is not free speech". I'm still trying to figure out the connection between that slogan and this event.
And that's why I put it in "Planet America". I think it's a case where eveyone and everything is political, and where childish fashion accessories with no meaning whatsoever gets turned into a protest that makes national news.
But....maybe we'll learn more.....or maybe this one will just be buried.
ETA: One thing I also didn't get is the school's involvement. They seemed to take the side of the "furries". That seemed odd. Unless.....a clicque of nerdy girls starts wearing cat ears, and they start getting harassed and insulted or bullied by the "cool" kids. The kids who got in trouble for bullying complain to their parents, with a wildly distorted story. The parents get involved, beliebing the wild distortions of their perfect children who would never, ever, bully other kids, and they invent a political issue that matches their narrative. This is speculation, but when I see a story that makes no sense that's kind of what I do. I try to fit it to something that resembles normal human behavior. Not decent and positive behavior, mind you, but normal.