In Mother Maryland You Dont Write Books, Books Write You...

...a ticket to the Gulag.

I gotta say I can see it, after hearing how some people should be evaluated before being allowed to partake of their constitutional rights, it only makes sense that the First Amendment would fall under the same rigorous scrutiny. After all, the pen is indeed mightier than the sword.

The guy has aliases, for god's sake. Call the bomb squad!

Love to have a serious conversation about this, but if you're going to play the Volpone Card in the OP, fuggedabout it.

That used to be my back yard, well not according to garamet, and those people in DELMARVA are very much about the constitution. Apparently they care more about the second amendment than the first.

Prose such as this requires prison camp. Besides, it's maryland, jake.

He does seem obsessed with school massacre. He's a teacher. He wrote this 3 years ago at the age of 19. Shrug. Better safe than sorry. If his rights have been stomped on he'll be vindicated and sell a lot more books. This ain't the soviet union.

This^. Plus one middle school =/= the entire State of Maryland.

Nobody is safe in this whole situation.

So, conviction of thought crime is double plus good with you? Got it.

If a teacher had a casual conversation about staging a school massacre that a third party overheard where would that have gone? In this day of zero tolerance, at best he exercised poor judgement choosing a theme given his choice of careers. We do have a double standard where our children's safety is involved.

Good think Stephen King didn't encounter this kind of mindset when he was a teacher.

Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, has everyone checked in their sense of humor lately? Deliver a shiny new thread with a little style and panache, and the "That's Not Funny" police descend on you like the Maryland Gestapo.

Of course no surprise that some people are already defending the police actions. Funny how they're only goose stepping fascists when you want them to be.

I've never read the story, it's probably shit, but that's not the point. One shouldn't have to explain artistic expression to an "artist", but people have been using it to work through their problems for as long as art has existed. Rap music, heavy metal, painting, and yes, fiction have provided the release valve for countless disaffected youth for the past few generations. But go ahead, treat it criminally, make them bottle it up, hide every impure thought from the powers that be, because once they do pop you'll gleefully have a few more bodies to parade in front of people on the internet that disagree with you politically.

It's an interesting parallel. Carrie (1974). Written when he was a teacher with a drinking problem at a public high school. Times sure have changed.

Nothing to see here. Move along. All is well.

What if, as a teacher, he had written a novel about pedophilia?

Is it a how to book?

Or is it a crime fiction of some type? Or it's not a novel but a true crime book.

You and Garamet are quite the fascists today......

More context please.

As to the Stephen King topic, I once read a King story in which the protagonist fantasized about being a Nazi officer in a concentration camp and raping a Jewish girl. Then of course there's "It" which basically indulges in a form of pedophilia in the final chapter. The topic is abhorrent, but has anyone been harmed?

It also bears similarity to the tricky topic of pedophiles having sex dolls made to resemble children. Ugh. But should it be illegal?

Bullshit. I'm looking at it from a purely capitalist POV, namely that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Notice I haven't said anything at all about whether this one little middle school is right or wrong here? (No, of course you haven't noticed, or you wouldn't be posting teh Stupid.)

I'm just laughing at the contortions evenflow's putting himself through to equate one little middle school with teh First Amendment!!!!1!

I can tell you this. I really did live in Maryland despite what garamet says and Maryland is is a beautiful state (at least on the eastern shore), but it has a shitty governor and a democratic senate. I'm pretty sure they have adopted common core so the districts have little to no say over the schools. Yay for centralized public schools.

And I'm pretty sure Common Core has absolutely nothing to do with how districts handle personnel issues.

Yeah, this sounds good, and passionately delivered. But might his writings be construed as a threat to the children in his school? Makes sense to investigate that. Teachers are often put on administrative leave when there is a concern regarding student safety. This doesn't strike me at all as a free speech issue, but as a workplace compliance issue.

And here again, I think you miss the point. Of course these books should be legal. The question regards the author's qualifications as a teacher, not his right to write.

Administrative leave? They went far beyond that. If all it was was administrative leave this would be a non-issue.

He wrote a novel. When he was 20. And got taken away against his will for it three years later.

On top of that not only did they place him on administrative leave they took him away for emergency medical evaluation. Something that's done to people acting crazy not to people who wrote novels three years ago. Locked him up in a hospital and won't tell anyone where he is. And now he's not legally free to leave where he's at as well.

They won't say if he's under arrest or if any charges have been filed.

That is some Soviet style shit right there.

That's what they locked this guy up for. A crap book that he wrote before he became a teacher.

And if it can happen to a teacher it can happen to anyone.

This is leftist shit. When someone does something you don't like accuse them of being crazy or mentally unbalanced.

And this post is why people think you're fucking retarded. COMMON CORE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS ISSUE.

You're a liar. We all know it.

I didn't say it did. I'm pointing the rediculous nature of the governance of the state.

Articles I've read said he was placed on leave. Didn't see anything about incarceration.

You are not only crazy, but also mentally unbalanced.

Didn't read the article in the OP?

Didn't look up other articles? To verify the OP article isn't bunk? Always a good habit.

Of course not. Typical stupid leftist Gul goosestepping along with the rest of the idiots to Police State America. With a smile on his face.

From the articles I've seen on FB, he's gotten locked up.
Secondly, if this is a public school he was teaching at, doesn't it make it a free speech issue, despite the very touchy subject matter (and the fact that minors don't have free speech rights)?

Yeah, um, did you miss the part where I mentioned other articles? As I said, the other articles I've read said he was placed on leave. The Atlantic is a trustworthy publication, so I have to give that some consideration, but mostly, I can only be sure that he was removed from the classroom, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Typical Wordforge righty, just bash the liberal without reading what he posted.

[edit]
Yeah, re-read article in OP, nowhere does it actually say he was locked up, though there is certainly some innuendo.

What information do we have about his being locked up? It is actually not unusual to lock somebody up temporarily for psych evaluation if he is deemed a risk to either himself or somebody else. Is that the case here? Or is he shipped off to Guantanamo? Let's cut through the hyperbolic and figure out what really happened.

As for your second point, what difference does that make? Workplace rules are workplace rules, regardless of who employs you.