Nov 18, 2008
A new school had been named after General Vang Pao, in order to represent the local Hmong community. Unfortunately, this was immediately before he was sought for trying to overthrow the government of Laos; it looks possible that, whatever the Hmong think about him, he is a less than savoury character. After meetings devoted to deciding whether to rename the school after someone who was not a war criminal, further meetings were devoted to deciding what rule to adopt about naming schools that would avoid future embarrassment (my suggestion, which was to name schools only after characters in AA Milne’s books, on the grounds that it is highly unlikely that any of them will turn out to be a war criminal, rapist, murderer, military coup-leader, or slave-owner (well, Christopher Robin should probably be excluded just in case) was not taken seriously for some reason).—Harry Brighouse
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A quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.
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