Texas high school costume rules

@werehatrack Okay, we might have somebody in the House or Senate using a wheelchair, but asking for the other four from our current Gubernator is looking to get walked by a teeball.

@werehatrack So, you support Beto? Go read the story he wrote about running over kids. I don’t think that’s the kind of ‘red flag’ mind we need running our state, and no, I’m not an Abbot fan.

@Tadlem43 @werehatrack

“Doesn’t like Abbott” does not imply “Beto fan”.

Some will be. Some won’t be.

@f00l @Tadlem43 @werehatrack
Lesser of two weevils…

@2many2no @f00l @Tadlem43 @werehatrack Ugh, I’d hate to see the greater one!

@Tadlem43 Beto wrote that as a fantasy short at the age of 15. It is nothing more, and certainly irrelevant to the task at hand, which is electing a governor who will actually govern instead of seeking to rule.

@werehatrack What 15 year old fantasizes like that?? If we had red flag laws, he would be on the list…rightfully so.
It takes a type of mental illness to allow someone to go into graphic detail of ‘committing acts of love’ by running over children and enjoying the ‘ecstasy’ of it, esp. a 15 year old.
That isn’t the kind of mind we need leading the state. We already have enough whackos in Austin.

@Tadlem43 “What 15 year old fantasizes like that?” is the wrong question when it comes to evaluating someone who’s now over 40 and has years of exemplary public service behind them. Yes, he was participating via BBS and FidoNet with a group that called itself Cult Of The Dead Cow, which later went on to feature hacking and phreaking activities once those became “counterculture mainstream”, but he has neither tried to hide nor to justify what he wrote then; instead, he has said that he’s “not proud” of what he did. And it’s also noteworthy that the story closely echoes the kinds of attitude that were already surfacing among deep-fringe right-wing adults of that era, something that I witnessed directly, having been there. No, not about running over kids (unless they were black or brown, and I wish I was kidding about that, but I’m NOT), but about deep-seated resentment of anyone who was happy, who was part of a group that the individual found unworthy. I can well imagine that there were creeps like that in his range of experience, and trying to get inside the head of your terror figure is one of the things that kids may do as a way of trying to defang the nightmare. I do not know if that’s what he was doing there, or if it was just the result of an adolescent one-upmanship competition among the group’s members to write the grossest and most disturbing thing they could come up with. The latter seems far more likely to me. But in any event, the story is still unremarkable as a stand-alone incident, and extensive digging has failed to find the kind of pattern of expressions that would actually have merited the “red flag” which wasn’t even contemplated in those days. Of course, this has not kept the likes of Faux “News” from trumpeting it loudly, over and over again, when they’ve singularly lacked anything to follow it up with that might have leant a milligram of weight to their Chicken-Little-worthy screams of alarm over it. But as they owe their entire success to keeping their viewers in a constant state of unrest and outrage (which is a marker trait for the leadership of one particularly pernicious type of destructive cult), it’s even less surprising that we keep hearing about it.

@werehatrack Actually, he only denounced the hacking, not the story.
You can make excuses for him all you want, but the bottom line, no matter how many other people were disturbed at the time, is that he has a sick mind. That doesn’t go away without treatment.
I don’t even get Fox, so you can stop with that. I cut the cord years ago.
If he were to write this today with the red flag laws that they want to put into place, he would be going to therapy…which is a really good idea.
I haven’t made this political. For some reason, you have found it necessary to do so, which speaks volumes about your perspective. The only thing I said was a mind like that doesn’t need to be governor…and it doesn’t. You need to step away from the political toxicity and look at this more objectively. They guy needs help, not votes.

@Tadlem43 I’ve had the chance to actually talk to him. Small sample size, but my evaluation is that he needs votes, not help. I’ve seen kids do much worse things than write a shock piece who really did need help, but that story would be merely considered a classic of the horror genre if it had been written by Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote much worse things as an adult, and really was nuts (by the declaration of a number of people who knew and studied him), and yet… Classic horror.

And it’s not possible to bring up that Fox “talking point” (and that’s all it is) without going into politics. If he wasn’t regarded as a genuinely viable competitor in the race, even they wouldn’t bother with it.

I’ve looked at it from the standpoint of a direct observer of a great many nasty-looking online activities of that era, and I find it utterly unremarkable for something a 15-year-old posted to a forum where that kind of thing was not just the norm, but not even a particularly outrageous example. Kids (and even adults) will do one-ups of crap that they’d be embarrassed about ten minutes later in a different forum. It’s the ones who aren’t embarrassed about it outside its context that you have to worry about. There is zero evidence that such is the case with Beto.

@Tadlem43 @werehatrack Good grief. Let me tell you what the 4, 6, 8 and 9 year old dreamed up, all by themselves, with sidewalk chalk over the weekend in the bus turnaround in front of their house. First they drew haunted houses with witches on roller skates (roller skates were the 4 year old’s idea, drawn as a triangle), hanging skeletons that were stabbed and bloody, spiderwebs that caught tricker treaters, etc. (I had to ask what some of the pictures they drew were as it was hard to tell LOL, I got very graphic descriptions), and they then decided they wanted to create a crime scene. So then they lay all over the bus turnaround tracing around each other and in the houses they drew they did the same thing. Then they drew crime tape. They thought is was hysterical. They hoped they’d scare the bus driver on Monday. There is nothing wrong with those kids despite being morbid with sidewalk chalk.

@Kidsandliz @Tadlem43 That, too.

@werehatrack I think it’s pretty sad that you work so hard to rationalize it. But, hey… whatever.

@Kidsandliz @werehatrack It’s Halloween. That’s completely different from dreaming about running over innocent children and being delighted by it. That’s just sick.

@Kidsandliz @Tadlem43 who said he was dreaming about it? He wrote a piece that was published in an online forum that specialized in that kind of crap. Yes it’s a regrettable thing to have in your background, but at the time it was just hanging out with the crowd. This whole discussion about it is absolute fucking bullshit. There is nothing here. And any mental health professional would tell you that Beto shows no signs of sociopathy but both Abbott and Patrick do. Particularly the latter. So who are you going to support, the provable sociopaths? I sure as hell won’t.

@Kidsandliz @werehatrack I guess you missed the part where I said I’m not an Abbott fan. This isn’t about Abbott. This isn’t about politics, as a whole. This is about Beto’s story and the mental issues that come with writing something like that. YOU are the one making it about politics.
I’m done. I can’t believe the extremes you’re going to to justify this kind of crazy.
Have a good day.

@Kidsandliz @Tadlem43 I’ll have a good day when the Texas government isn’t headed by someone who actively demands persecution of people who have done nothing wrong, and no longer denies access to medically essential services that the leadership happens to disapprove of. And I’ll say it again; if this wasn’t about politics, would anyone including you even know about that irrelevant bit of foolishness he did while a teenager? No. Nor would anyone be bringing it up. I know a sealion when I see one.

@werehatrack

someone who actively demands persecution of people who have done nothing wrong

Except that’s exactly who you are promoting! Beto is part and parcel of a Nanny State (telling people what to do). His PAC tried to gather more personal information than allowed.

Texas AG warns PAC about unlawful collecting data

Using Covid for political purposes:

Beto over politicizes minors

He also is well known for conflating AR-15’s with actual assault rifles (AK-47’s). And the misuse of Red Flag laws (see Minority Report). As well as getting Banks and Credit Card companies involved with our personal purchases! Talk about a Red Flag on persecution of people who have done nothing wrong … that’s Beto.

Texas Scorecard 2nd Amendment Rights

Also seems like Beto is also a sociopath, but worse a Narcissist Sociopath!

@MarkDaSpark @werehatrack Thank you!.. But good luck getting the blind followers to understand this.

@MarkDaSpark @werehatrack @Tadlem43 Wow, i thank sweet baby Jesus that Stephen King didn’t listen to amateur psychologists like you, or i wouldn’t have had anything entertaining to read as a kid!

@ircon96 @Tadlem43 @werehatrack

Entertaining? The Shining scared me so much, I could only read it during daylight hours! Too bad so many of his books were made into really bad movies!

@MarkDaSpark So what you cited is worse than ordering the arrest of parents of transgender children? Worse than making it a felony to provide a woman with transportation to a place where she can get crucial medical treatment? The list doesn’t stop there, but I will, because I know you won’t change your mind or your position, and neither will I; it’s a waste of time to continue the discussion.

@MarkDaSpark @Tadlem43 @werehatrack It’s funny, the only time that reading something kinda freaked me out was the scene in 'Salem’s Lot where the vampire scratches at the window, but that was only because i was alone as a kid in my family’s camper in the pitch-black woods, surrounded by windows. I quickly got up & closed all the curtains, which helped…a little. Good times!

@macromeh
You have a point, but maybe for more reasons than you expected…

Chewing gum may be considered rude, maybe even disruptive. But in some Texas schools, it is a class C misdemeanor.

Full article…

https://www.texastribune.org/2011/03/29/lawmakers-want-fewer-tickets-for-students/

@macromeh And yes, the article is old, but given that our Legislature tends to move with geologic swiftness when repealing things that have been on the books without good reason for many decades, I suspect that the rules still persist.

@macromeh And after additional research, the law finally got taken off the books two years later, which is absolutely blinding speed for this kind of thing.

@werehatrack Holy fucknuggets, whatever happened to demerits & detention?? For a state that makes such a big deal about getting the government out of their lives, they sure do seem to LOVE policing things like uteruses & school stuff… Unless school stuff happens to involve risking their lives to save little kids from the 2nd amendment!

@ircon96 They’re back to less publicly documentable punishments now. I doubt that they’d have done it if there hadn’t been some public pressure to stop using a sledgehammer to swat flies.

@werehatrack Yeah, they’ve replaced it with book banning, quashing the rights of any group they consider inferior or scary or an abomination, obsessing over who gets to vote & how, etc, but it all comes from the same pathetic attempt to cling onto power & pining for “good ol’ days.”

@blaineg Yeah.