It’s entirely possible that [Police Chief] Storti is telling the truth as he understands it.
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Well except for the sending a plain clothes officer to investigate part. There was nothing for the police to investigate. The claim that he had no choice once the complaint was made is false, and he knows it’s false.
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Definitely time to be reporting a lot of stuff to this police department.
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… they really rely on the corporate media to never ever fact-check that excuse
but of course if we want them to do something and they don’t, it’s back to “no special duty” 
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Schools should think about salting their online catalogs with books that either don’t exist or they don’t have. It’d be a good tripwire for these campaigns.
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That’s because their idea of fact checking is to present opinions from both sides. Even the WGBH article does this, and that’s not corporate media. On some issues, like whether or not Trump can be kept off the ballot under the 14th Amendment, presenting arguments from both sides is appropriate, because there’s not, legally, a clear right answer. But that’s not true here. There is a right answer. The police are not bound to investigate every complaint made to them. And we know this in part because yes, when they haven’t, and people complain about that, they fall back on the fact that they have no particular duty to do much of anything. Now, if someone complains about something that’s a crime, then yes, they usually investigate, even if it turns out that there’s no crime. But that’s not what happened here. Here, someone complained about something they found offensive. There was never any indication of anything remotely criminal. Really, the police shouldn’t have even taken the complaint to the school. They should have replied to the complainant with, “You’ll need to take that up with the school. That’s not a police matter. Have a good day.” Which is why I suspect whoever complained knows the police chief personally and called him directly.
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Ya.
It’s also very suspicious that the alleged complaint allegedly mentioned seeing an offensive illustration, but that translated into police looking for a specific book…
If the complainant complained about that specific book, like you said, it should’ve been easy for police to determine, “that’s allowed on our school grounds.”
And if they didn’t mention the specific book, now we’re just getting farther into whackadoodle land. Imagine if a kid draws a naughty picture and leaves it in the library and somebody sees it, the cops come busting in?
I really feel for the kids and the school staff who just got sent this very scary message.
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Kids have had disciplinary actions taken against them for drawing pictures of guns, even if they had been asked to draw something that happened in their lives and that’s what they were doing. Zero tolerance is often an issue.
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On a side note:
If people don’t feel like contributing to buying Bezos another yacht, here’s a handy bookshop.org link:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/gender-queer-a-memoir-maia-kobabe/14914528?ean=9781549304002
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I have been very pleased with my Bookshop purchases. They usually aren’t even priced that much more than Amazon.
I think this book probably needs to go on our home Red Shelf.
The entire way this went down was so fishy. The “anonymous” complaint about a not-crime, the “anonymous” complainant being from the school community.
I think someone has not just a problem with Gender Queer but that particular teacher. The teacher must have felt scared of at least very stressed.
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or a few more people’s homes
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It’s another of the kind of case which gives off “police state” vibes. Only a couple of months ago the police raided that newspaper and the magnificent lady proprietor died of stress. Texas is demanding a hospital in Seattle release medical records on their teenage trans patients.
This kind of stuff isn’t just in America. The UK government is slip-sliding a law through to allow the police to search the entire driver’s licence visual database for faces. 50 million people who can be scanned by AI in case they might have joined in a climate demo or something.
What has gone wrong with everything?
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I’ve been wondering that myself.
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Short answer? Power shift.
The balance of power is shifting and they fear their loss of power as well as the retribution they believe will come from those they held down so long.
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Another one you may like is Heartstopper. I read the webcomic, but didn’t know it was a TV series as well. I had the option of buying it at my local(-ish) Comic book Shop, but if I buy any more books the house may fall down. As it is, I have to get rid of some just to make room on the shelves. Anyway, Heartstopper is so great, the webcomic made me cry. Several times.
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Nah. Everybody needs a vice. I don’t smoke, don’t drink to excess, books are my vice, and if i need an addition to house them, so be it! 
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And if you stack them close to the outside walls they make great insulation!
(I never understood that scene in Day After Tomorrow where they burn the books at the NYC public library. After all there miles and miles of dry, hardwood shelves and all of that furniture, which would have lasted for weeks and books just burn too fast and hot.)
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when was everything right to go wrong?
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Don’t you think that’s kind of a glib shot. 10 years ago things weren’t perfect, but in free countries women had the right to abortion care, LGBTQ+rights were advancing, voting and protest wasn’t being supressed, and we weren’t in a proxy war with Russia.
Things aren’t by any means the same now as they were.
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it really wasn’t meant to be flip.
often people will callback to earlier times as if they also didn’t have unique problems. ten years ago we had just exited iraq, were still in afghanistan, places like sudan were and are experiencing what seem like proxy wars. gay marriage wasn’t yet legal nationwide. the housing bubble collapsed fifteen ish years ago. ( i don’t know when was the “best” moment for voting rights has been. voter suppression techniques seem different each decade. it’s super unclear to me. )
that said, i do agree the things you highlighted are bad, they’re harming people, and they need to be fixed.
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