Fair Use of Your Own Baby?

. . .I'll link this and also this, because I really am on side of the individual parent-child team, celebrity or not. Parents and their children deserve privacy and our assumption they will handle it well, at least as much of both as we demand for ourselves, and far more than most of us get of either these days.

IF and WHEN that private trust is abused by a parent(even if the baby isn't, quite) or when any parent asks for help, it's a different matter. Otherwise, why wouldn't we focus on helping them not need us to help them with their own lives?

You need to get out more and relax. I think brad and angelina did a noble thing. Some photographer would have eventually taken a photo of the baby and published it for their own profit. I think it is quite noble that they choose to take their child's photo and benefit the world. If 1 baby can be saved because a program was started with the funds that the charity got from brad and angelina then their action was justified. They will raise over 4 million dollars to help the worlds poor.

All they are doing is allowing a couple of photo's to be published for the ultimate benefit of poor children and others in need. They are not selling the child's blood merely a photo of the child and photo's of themselves.

to be posted here, because it helps make the contrast clearer, between doing good and self-serving do-gooderism.

I'm thinking it would've been a helluva lot smarter as well as more noble, to give something back to the workaday fans who made them rich in the first place by sharing their photographic "joy" for free, and then offering that same huge children's charity donation directly from all that fan-bestowed wealth they command, in the honored name of their privileged newborn.

. . .critically are what's not right in many cultural problems. Law seems better at preventing individual harm than creating collective good, and copyright seems more important --but less enforceable-- socially and intellectually than it is economically or legislatively.

It's not what you think as much as "how" you think. And most parents once were curious children, young and willing students who COULD have learned to think critically and SHOULD have been helped to do so, if society that's both free and progressive is what we really want. Wish we had more teachers like the one I wrote about to friends back in January:

One great thing about helping an unschooled, not-yet-driving 15-year-old go to local college classes is that you get to hear all about it, just
for the gas. All I do is drive and then drink (it all in) LOL. I'm having the best time, it's like this sudden fountain of new impressions and ideas and experiences I get to tap into, or let wash over me, without having to do any schoolish stuff myself to earn it.

Or maybe it's like guiltless desserts, indulging in all the best bits without the downside, is this what being a grandparent will feel like, wow!

But I digress. . .
This is real life learning, not test-prep.

Yesterday was all about doing your own work, and crediting others fully when needed. Not for their benefit, though, as in respecting commerce and copyright. It's really for YOUR benefit as the thinker and writer -
so that your communications work is very clearly about your own self-examination and experience, your own development and thoughts and ideas.

The whole point is doing original, creative "work" . . .The bulk of what he's trying to get kids to rise above seems to be brainless cutting and pasting, echoing and yes-man going along because it's easy, joining the chorus or just hiding in the back -- instead of taking full responsibility for one's OWN thinking and expression and experience, based on careful, widely read and diversely interpreted input and influences, to be followed by critical examination, synthesis and triangulation of ideas.

I got to thinking about what he's emphasizing for these students poised on the cusp of independence, in light of what I see going on among real adults supposedly engaged in critical public arena communications of mutual interest and benefit.

These are lessons not learned. And desperately needed.

Is it too late for us and thus teaching the kids are our only hope, or is there anything we might think of to do, to help ourselves as a society
full of intellectually inept and self-absorbed parent-citizens?

It's not about copyright. It's about choosing to not copy-wrong, not following the crowd and not WANTING to follow, wanting to push yourself to greater enlightenment, finding the ideas more fascinating than the gossip and games, not taking even the best text as gospel* without original thought.

No one's permission is required for all that, except your own. Set yourself and your own power of reasoning and understanding FREEEeeee!
* gos·pel /n.
/
*4. * A teaching or doctrine of a religious teacher.
*6. * Something, such as an idea or principle, accepted as unquestionably true: "My parents' rules were gospel."

Speaking of Jodie Foster, her mother's decision to put her in Taxi Driver to play a prostitute at a tender age may not have been exploitative in retrospect, considering how well this Yale grad and fluent French speaker turned out.

Her commencement advice to University of Pennsylvania graduates was beautiful, at least in the opinion of this radical unschooling mom:
[quote]

You pick up bits and pieces of treasure and trash, pain and pleasure, passions and disappointments, and you start throwing them in your bag, your big bag of experience. You do some dumb things that don't work out at all. You stumble excitedly on little gems that you never saw coming. And you stuff them all in your bag. You pursue the things you love and believe in. You cast off the images of yourself that don't fit. And suddenly you look behind you and a pattern emerges.

You look in front of you and the path makes sense. There is nothing more beautiful than finding your course as you believe you bob aimlessly in the current. Wouldn't you know that your path was there all along, waiting for you to knock, waiting for you to become.

This path does not belong to your parents, your teachers, your leaders, your lovers. Your path is your character defining itself more and more every day, like a photograph coming into focus.[/quote]

Probably OT but here ya go --

Part of last night's talk at our home was 13-yo DS explaining what he meant by "pandering to the lowest common denominator" to 11-yo DD.

Is it saying something about all of us that that is part of my son's vocabulary??

Nance