Excellent discussion about teasing

http://rm.livejournal.com/1978191.html?nc=66

What it can be like to be teased by a random stranger, possible responses, teasing and non-teasing subcultures......

Related: Cat, Dogs, and Jerks, a description of human social interaction.

One more thought on the whole thing-- it occurs to me that people of good will from teasing sub-cultures don't get reliable feedback on when teasing isn't working out well because a lot people who don't like being teased have been told "If you react, you'll just be teased more", or actually been treated that way by teasers who weren't of good will.

If you tease someone, and they seem to freeze or to be working really hard to come up with a response, this is probably a good time to pull back.

ACLU vs. the TSA

Please forgive the wonky formatting-- I used Page Source (found under View in Firefox) so that I didn't need to put the links in by hand. If you want to read a clean copy, just use the Radley Balko link.

Radley Balko:

In May, Matt Welch noted a storm of criticism from the right toward the ACLU for not defending some kids who were sent home from school for wearing shirts depicting the American flag to a Cinco de Mayo celebration. The problem was that the ACLU had intervened on the kids' behalf. The conservative critics just didn't bother to check. I'm working on a column that'll look a bit more at the right's oft-mistaken "Where's the ACLU?" syndrome, but I thought I'd share a pretty glaring recent example I found while researching it.


Here's Rush Limbaugh, while interviewing John "Don't Touch My Junk" Tyner about the TSA pat-downs on November 15th:

Oh, yeah, and where's the ACLU on this?  I mean unless
there's a Muslim being patted down, they don't seem to care about
the Fourth Amendment or anything else.

Plug "TSA" and various incarnations of "where's the ACLU"
into Google, and you'll get a long list of similar complaints from blogs, comment threads, and discussion groups. A flury of conservatives on Twitter made the same compaint. Many linked to this November 16 post by William Teach, which appeared on the
self-explanatory blog, Stop the ACLU and was cross-posted on the popular conservative site Right Wing News. It's titled, "Finally, The ACLU Is Concerned About TSA Groping…. Oh, Wait, They’re Not".

Here's an excerpt:

Leave it to the ACLU to ignore an issue that has Americans, both Left and Right, up in arms. Have you ever noticed that the ACLU tends to ignore the real issues 90% of the time? And the other 10% of the time, they usually do the right thing for the wrong reason(s)...

If you search the ACLU website, there is zip. Nada. Zilch. Nor any complaints from the national ACLU in the news about people getting groped and abused.

So I actually did search the ACLU website. My search kicked back 303 hits. I guess it wouldn't be fair to hold Teach accountable for items posted to the ACLU after he wrote the post above. So here's a partial list of the TSA-related items that appeared on the ACLU's website before November 16, all of which Teach should have found:

( Quite a long list )