So the mentally ill have no agency? A person with autism is no better than an animal, unable to rise above their condition in any way?
It seems to me that proclivity is an explanation, not an excuse. The same way that upbringing or bad influences are an explanation, not an excuse.
Why is some who’s “demanding respect they don’t deserve” an asshole as opposed to just someone who’s suffering from mental problems that make them act that way?
How would you differentiate “someone with mental problems” from “someone who behaves in a way that is opposed to what I believe is ‘right’”?
It doesn’t have to not hit pedestrians. It just has to hit less pedestrians than the average human driver.
That is what we’re debating, yes.
If it could be conclusively proven that a system like this has saved a child’s life, would that benefit outweigh the misuse?
If not, how many children’s lives would it need to save for it to outweigh the misuse?
Sure, maybe, but I’d also say you shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Yes, we should absolutely have better mental healthcare safety nets. Yes, false positives are probably a pretty common prank.
But this isn’t a zero sum game. This can work on tandem with a therapist/counsellor to try and identify someone before they shoot up a school and get them help. This might let the staff know a kid is struggling with suicidal ideation before they find the kid OD’d on moms sleeping pills.
In an ideal world would this be unnecessary? Absolutely. But we don’t live in that ideal world.
That argument could be expanded to any tool though.
People run people over with cars or drive drunk. Ban cars?
People use computers to distribute CP. Ban computers?
People use baseball bats to bludgeon people to death. Ban baseball?
The question of if a tool should be banned is driven by if its utility is outweighed by the negative externalities of use by bad actors.
The answer is wildly more nuanced than “if it can hurt someone it must be banned.”
You say “the last time this happened” as if this wasn’t a generalized trend across all schooling for the past decade or so.
Out of the tens of thousands of schools implementing systems like this, I’m not surprised that one had some letch who was spying on kids via webcam.
And I’m all for having increased forms of oversight and protection to prevent that kind of abuse.
But this argument is just as much of a “won’t someone think of the children” as the opposite. Just cause one school out of thousands did a bad thing, doesn’t mean the tech is worthless or bad.
This article feels pretty disingenuous to me.
It glosses over the fact that this is surveillance on computers that the school owns. This isn’t them spying on kids personal laptops or phones. This is them exercising reasonable and appropriate oversight of school equipment.
This is the same as complaining that my job puts a filter on my work computer that lets them know if I’m googling porn at work. You can cry big brother all you want, but I think most people are fine with the idea that the corporation I work for has a reasonable case for putting monitoring software on the computer they gave me.
The article also makes the point that, while the companies claim they’ve stopped many school shootings before they’ve happened, you can’t prove they would have happened without intervention.
And sure. That’s technically true. But the article then goes on to treat that assertion as if it’s proof that the product is worthless and has never prevented a school shooting, and that’s just bad logic.
It’s like saying that your alarm clock has woken you up 100 days in a row, and then being like, “well, there’s no proof that you wouldn’t have woken up on time anyway, even if the alarm wasn’t there.” Yeah, sure. You can’t prove a negative. Maybe I would usually wake up without it. I’ve got a pretty good sleep schedule after all. But the idea that all 100 are false positives seems a little asinine, no? We don’t think it was effective even once?
Could also be a correlation due to people who actually get diagnosed with dyslexia/dysgraphia being more likely to live in places that are more affluent or with better mental healthcare.
That would tend to correlate with generally more accepting populations.
I don’t believe this poll on the grounds that I don’t think a large majority of Americans know what the Electoral College is.
Russell Moore is awesome. Been a huge fan of his for a long time. Got me to actually buy a subscription to ChristianityToday when he became Editor in Chief.
He got kicked out of the SBC ages ago though. He was the head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Council, which is the public policy arm of the SBC. The Executive Council ran him out back in 2016 for saying refugees were people and that maybe the SBC should be doing more to combat internal sexual abuse.
If you haven’t read some of his stuff from around that time, I highly recommend it. Some of the stuff that went down is absolutely insane, and I have made mad respect for how he managed it all. Hugely upstanding dude.
Well, not every metric. I bet the computers generated them way faster, lol. :P
To be clear, harassment and defamation are crimes in the US as well. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you can harm people with your speech with impunity. It’s a prohibition on the government from meddling with political speech, especially that of people who are detractors of the government.
I think the issue is that, while a country is certainly allowed to write it’s own laws, the idea that it is deeply fundamentally immoral for the government to prevent someone from saying something (or compel them to say something) is very deeply baked into the American zeitgeist (of which I am a part.)
So in the same way that a country is perfectly within its sovereign rights to pass a law that women are property or minorities don’t have the right to vote, I can still say that it feels wrong of them to do so.
And I would also decry a country that kicks out a company that chooses to employ women or minorities in violation of such a law, even if that is technically their sovereign right to do so.
Printing Nazi propaganda isn’t illegal in the US.
And I realize this isn’t in the US, obviously. But I think that the idea that the government shouldn’t be able to ban people from saying things, or compel them to say things, is so baked into the American zeitgeist (of which I am a member), that it feels wrong in a fundamental moral sense when it happens.
It’s the old, “I don’t agree with anything that man says, but I’ll defend to the death his right to say it,” thing.
I can see both sides on this one I think?
Out of curiosity, would you feel differently about this if it had been a print newsletter or physical book publisher that was printing Nazi propaganda that got shutdown because they refused to stop printing Nazi propaganda?
If so, what’s the substantive difference? If not, are you affirming banning people from publishing books based on ideological grounds?
Obviously banning books is bad, but obviously Nazis are bad, and that’s a hard square to circle.
Here’s the note taking and editors page of awesome-selfhosted. Looks like there are a few contenders in there. DailyTxT looks decent for your use case.
https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/note-taking--editors.html
Why not just compare the model 3 to an 18-wheeler then? Those weigh way more. Would have made his point better.
And it’s a completely meaningful comparison, as long as you throw away the fact that different vehicles are used for different things.
Okay, first, autism is in the DSM. It’s just as much a mental illness as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or any other thing in the DSM.
And to be clear, as with literally any other mental illness in the DSM, you can be affected by it to different degrees. The autism banner isn’t just the people who struggle with social cues. It covers everything from that to people who are non-verbal and can’t leave their house by themselves.
All that said, it feels to me like you’re drawing the lines in the sand where they make you feel good, not where they make objective sense.
It feels like you’re saying that we shouldn’t hold autistic people accountable for being a particular type of asshole because they “just can’t understand.” That’s dehumanizing my guy. I know a lot of autistic people. The vast majority of them have learned good social etiquette. Is it harder for them? Sure. Are they always perfect? No. But they recognize that to be a good member of society they’ll have to work harder in some areas to overcome certain things.
It’s not about hating a blind person because they can’t see. It’s about hating a blind person for repeatedly and unapologetically kicking you in the shins. The solution to reduced capacity isn’t to ignore and excuse it. It’s to be understanding and patient as they do the work to overcome it.
There are plenty of people with narcissism or schizophrenia who are excellent, fully functioning members of society who are just as good of people as you or I. Who love their friends and neighbors and don’t lean on their condition as an excuse for their behavior. Is it a god-aweful amount of work and introspection to do so? Absolutely. Is it easy? Absolutely not. But they have agency the same as you or me. The same as someone with autism. But some people choose to overcome. Some choose to embrace the treatments and therapies needed to allow them to be a good neighbor and friend and citizen. And they have the agency to do so.