Sunday, September 23, 2007

College Newspapers

I'm sure plenty of us would like to sit back and view college newspapers as the starting point for the reporters of tomorrow. Under strong and impartial faculty guidance, our budding university reporters learn the finer points of the journalistic profession.

And then we read these:

Bush or Bin Laden, Who Is More Evil?
Taser This: F*** Bush (without the asterisks)

I had a former student come visit me at school on Friday. He's become a Troofer. Bright kid, great person, but *sigh*.

I've posted many times on here about the crazy things that go on at universities (click "higher education" at the end of this post to read more). I'm sure there were people that had 'out there' beliefs when I was in school (but they probably didn't go where I did), but was it as bad as it is today?

17 comments:

Ellen K said...

How timely. I just borrowed a post from FoxDFW that discusses the personlity trends that could be applied to the readership of certain large urban newspapers. It made me laugh anyway.
http://sumofallthingsaccording2me.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

Please, pleae tell me that most of these kids learn a few things when they get out into the real world.

Anonymous said...

CCSU

“One thing I have realized from these videos is that while Osama bin Laden remains free, Americans are slowly becoming bound by the decisions of the president to remove and restrict the rights given to us by our knowledgeable forefathers, without whom we would not be here. I can only hope that Americans will open their eyes and see what is in front of them, in order to prevent things from getting out of hand any further.”

This must be a pre-law student by her ignorance of this country's founding. I love that “Dead White Males” she probably abuses in other columns now “give” us rights. I know many a college student and professor think they are the Almighty but at least for most of the college students’ reality will eventually hit them!

Darren said...

We can hope, Neko. And you know what's been said about hope: "Hope is all you have left when you're tired of being afraid."

MikeAT--excellent comment as always. I thought the Creator gave us inalienable rights, and that governments were instituted among men to ensure them.

Have you lost any rights to this government? Besides the "right" not be harassed by idiots before getting on an aircraft, if that ever *was* a right, I can't think of any that I've lost.

gbradley said...

This is the first time I have read the term Troofer,
Here is what I came up with:
Troofer: (n.)* a unique breed of conspiracy theorist who is part of a pack mentality known as the "9/11 truth movement". A troofer only offers coincidence as evidence without ever providing proof of a theory, demands others to disprove him/her, and upon being disproven, labels opponent as a government agent and part of said conspiracy.
I can't find an etymology.

Anonymous said...

“Have you lost any rights to this government? Besides the "right" not be harassed by idiots before getting on an aircraft, if that ever *was* a right, I can't think of any that I've lost.”

When I get into discussion with some of my more leftist friends I ask them just that. “What rights have you lost? Doesn’t former Enron advisor Paul Krugman make an ass out of himself twice a week in the NY Times Idiotioral Page…isn’t that moron on MSMBC Keith Overbite, err Olbermann nightly still calling Bush and Cheney the latest versions of Darth Vader and the Emperor…isn’t the Democratic presidential field filled with jackasses who in the 1940s would have been shipped off to Canada and an interment camp for the duration like FDR did. I don’t see that here?” I generally get the usual stupid looks

Darren said...

I don't know the etymology of "troofer" either, but you've got the correct definition.

Anonymous said...

Troofer:

Hey, that’s Dan Rather in his bold faced lie of a Bush National Guard story.

Coincidence as evidence, yep. More to the point everytime you bring up an issue challenging that crap Mary Mapes and him only say “No one has proved it wrong…” Sorry Mary and Dan, you two lost your credibility a long time ago.

Finally they say the White House (i.e. the government) pressured CBS. I thought the UFO crowd was nuts!

I gotta remember this term!

Ellen K said...

Perhaps it's Ebonics. "Troofer: noun-one who tells the "troof."

Darren said...

I've only heard it applied to the 9/11 crowd.

Ellen K said...

On the topic of censorship, it seems that in trying to cover a story on the infighting in the Hillary campaign, GQ caved in killing the story over fears that their selected cover boy, Bill, would suddenly be inaccessible. If they squelch stories from a magazine that would probably be more fawning than say, The Wall Street Journal, then can we assume that there is trouble in Hillary Paradise? Stay tuned.....courtesy of the Dallas Morning News blog board.

Cameron said...

Rights that have been lost? How about all of the stories from my Persian friends about being detained before being allowed on airplanes? I'm not talking about being asked to step through the metal detector twice. I mean being taken aside, privately, and interrogated, in some cases for long enough that they miss their flight. Never mind once they get on the flight, and everyone is looking at them like they've smuggled a bomb on board.

It's absolute bigotry, is what it is.

I'm not even going to start about gay rights because people are going to whine that I hate Jesus and that they don't deserve any rights anyway. It's one of the reasons that military recruiters are despised. We don't hate the troops, but we do find offense with the idea that the government is still intolerant of homosexuality.

By the way, I'm at UCSC now, the worst school in the country according to Fox News :)

Darren said...

Cameron, get a grip. Hell, I've almost been strip searched before getting on a plane--and I was a West Point graduate flying with checked baggage on a round-trip ticket with *my son*. Not quite the profile of a hijacker, is it?

Military recruiters don't recruit gays because the CONGRESS passed a law that said they couldn't--and it was a DEMOCRAT-controlled Congress. A DEMOCRAT President signed the Don't Ask Don't Tell law. Get your facts straight (pardon the pun). If "the government" is intolerant of homosexuals, perhaps your friends who now run both houses of Congress will change things, but I highly doubt they will. Democrats are as intolerant as anyone, they're just too arrogant to admit it.

Your anger and hatred are misplaced, Cameron.

Ellen K said...

Cameron, you may want to have a few conversations with some Kurdish friends on my husband's soccer team. I don't think they would be half so gentle if they suspected someone was promoting terrorism at their expense. I think we should adopt the El Al system and search everyone. This stupid "we can't profile" strip searching of grandmothers while wild eyes ayatollahs dance through security all in the name of avoiding the appearance of profiling.

Anonymous said...

Not every rectangle is a square, but every square is a rectangle.

Not every Persian is a plane hijacker, but every plane hijacker is a Persian.

Anonymous said...

Why am I now picturing big, fluffy cats with really flat faces trying to hijack planes? =^..^=

Darren said...

Because you're smoking the good stuff? :-)