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Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

theguardian.com

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Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#101

Post by nguoi »

werfds wrote: post #28
nguoi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do clear backpacks increase the risk of dying from cycling?

No, but if we're forcing the kids to have clear backpacks because of an infinitesimal risk, we should ban them from biking to school, being driven to school and playing in the school football team. Which is ridiculous.

That's a poor comparison though. Both of the others provide other benefits: a method of commuting to school or exercise. Potentially even scholarships.

Fashionable backpacks do nothing.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#102

Post by TheRealSteel »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #54
turk73 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather just shut down the schools than give up any more rights. If you haven't noticed, our Federal government is totally out of control and has gone rogue and I don't think it's a very good idea to cede any further power or individual rights to that monster. The right to bear arms was paid for in blood and not just once. Good men laid down their lives so we could have these rights. That a few kooks will shoot up…

> The right to bear arms was paid for in blood and not just once. And worse, gun restrictions only benefit criminals. There's plenty of people who legally own firearms and protect their homes and their property legally. They also avoid plenty of crime since criminals tend to run when a gun is pulled on them especially in stand your ground states. They've tried banning everything in England and criminals will still ki…

"gun restrictions only benefit criminals"

All the data from other countries that god rid of guns supports the opposite of this. Show some statistics or stop saying this.

"are you gonna make cars illegal too?"

Ones that can be easily used to kill people? Hopefully, eventually, yes. We already heavily restrict them, license them carefully, track them meticulously, require them to be registered, and constantly improve technology and legal standards to make them less likely to kill people -- unlike guns in America. Soon all new cars will have technology in them to make it very difficult to run someone over with.

"People who want to hurt people also don't care what laws there are, they can buy guns illegally."

So I suppose you're in favour of having no laws at all? Since people will just break them? This argument only works if you're in favour of total anarchism.

Both gun crime AND the overall murder rate dropped substantially since Australia heavily restricted guns in the late 90s [1] - i.e. people don't just switch to other weapons - murder, plus accidental death, actually decreases.

"They've tried banning everything in England and criminals will still kill people with just about anything."

Nope. Not having guns works:

Homicide rate per 100,000 people in 2017 according to UN-CTS:

United Kingdom: 1.2

United States: 5.3

[1] https://crimestats.aic.gov.au/NHMP/1_trends/

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#103

Post by wbronitsky »

systemtest wrote: post #46
mattlondon wrote: post #4

Unpopular opinion: make private gun ownership illegal instead of forcing kids to be monitored to make sure they're not carrying

Or just fix the underlaying issue. Switzerland has 2 million guns on 8 million citizens. Yet no school shootings. Why don't they have school shootings and can we apply the Swiss system to the United States?

This is a complete straw man. We are not discussing how many guns the Swiss have in absolute, not are we talking about how that could affect school shootings in the US. If we want to discuss the numbers, devices like ratios will serve us much better.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#104

Post by urbanjunkie »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #77
foldr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They've tried banning everything in England and criminals will still kill people with just about anything anything. First it's the guns, then knives, then machetes. If these alternatives are just as effective as guns, why do you feel that you need a gun? Of course, you know that guns are more effective at killing people - especially large numbers of people. That's why we in the UK have not had a mass killing in a sc…

> Of course, you know that guns are more effective at killing people - especially large numbers of people. A knife is quiet, you could probably kill more people with knives, a gun is loud and everyone nearby will hear it, probably what a crazy shooter would want is to strike fear into victims. > You're more likely to use the gun to kill yourself or a family member than you are to use it to kill an intruder. Since nei…

> A knife is quiet, you could probably kill more people with knives, a gun is loud and everyone nearby will hear it, probably what a crazy shooter would want is to strike fear into victims.

Dear sweet lord, you are a dumb cunt.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#105

Post by shadowgovt »

nieksand wrote: post #52
adamnemecek wrote: post #12

I dont get how the school can justify this.

People's views of the world have been drastically skewed by the news industry. Consider how much news coverage was given to the Las Vegas mass shooting. That resulted in 58 dead and 413 wounded. Compare that to how much national coverage is spent on car accidents. About 40,000 Americans per year are killed by cars. That's about two Las Vegas massacres worth of dead each and every day of the year. The news industry th…

Hypothesis on the specific topic of cars vs. guns:

The US has already done about all it can to regulate cars to maximize safety. There is, perhaps, more to be done, but since the Constitution doesn't include a right to keep and bear cars, regulation and law in the space of publicly-operated vehicles is already large and mature.

The same is not true for firearms, which is why it's such a contentious topic in the US.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#106

Post by jordanpg »

This looks like an XY problem[0] on a massive scale.

Because the grown-ups can't figure out how to solve the top-level problems, they are instead dealing with the low-level symptoms and applying band-aids.

It also reeks of political pork to me.

I admit that enumerating the top-level problems is politically fraught, but I think they can be neatly condensed into:

* that mass shootings occur, ever

* that we cannot control childrens' use of the internet in any meaningful way

* that children are seeing through the thin veneer of meaningfulness that life in the US is supposed to have (notably traditional career paths and religion)

I don't pretend to have easy answers, but see-through backpacks is security theater that is the stuff of Bruce Schneier competitions.

[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/66378/213169

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#107

Post by wbronitsky »

sojournerc wrote: post #82
mattlondon wrote: post #4

Unpopular opinion: make private gun ownership illegal instead of forcing kids to be monitored to make sure they're not carrying

First of all, making something illegal does not make it disappear, and you're also grossly overestimating the occurrence (as are the people calling for clear backpacks) of school shootings. The vast majority of shootings are between criminal gangs - making the guns illegal will not magically make criminals into upstanding citizens. Consider that the news cycle and FUD have created a terrible availability bias in our…

One school shooting is far too many. I reject your argument vehemently. We are talking about murdered children.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#108

Post by Mirioron »

shadowgovt wrote: post #78
JoBrad wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it is way over-the-top. Counterpoint to your conditioning point: kids tend to rebel against oversight, and will probably include this in the list of things they reject.

Or they will observe the world doesn't burn down around them with this level of surveillance in place and will come to find it normal. Which may very well be fine; perhaps it's a useful normal.

The problem is that it's very difficult to see the far-reaching consequences of policy that affects entire generations. People in the 1800s observed that using fossil fuels in abundance doesn't burn down the world around them, but we know now that that's not really true.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#109

Post by whiddershins »

wbronitsky wrote: post #94
im_with_stupid wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have people teaching nihilism. This is the result of nihilism. If you want to eliminate this problem, then eliminate nihilism. The solution to keep people from killing should focus on teaching others that life is not meaningless or worthless. Also, teaching kids humility wouldn't hurt either. Edit: Perhaps this should be obvious, but teaching about nihilism is not teaching nihilism. People teach nihilism more, if…

Can you explain who is teaching nihilism to whom and where? In school, while I did not have a clear backpack and quite obviously had internet monitoring on someone else’s network, I was never, not once, taught nihilism. In fact, in my education through grade 12, most everything was filtered through a compassionate lens. It’s not like I was taught that the Holocaust will happen again because humans are inherently bad…

[flagged]

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#110

Post by twodave »

mattlondon wrote: post #4

Unpopular opinion: make private gun ownership illegal instead of forcing kids to be monitored to make sure they're not carrying

This, or literally any other action that isn't crazy in the sense of attempting to suppress personal privacy or the idea of protecting oneself. People want to feel safe and capable, not guilty and dependent.
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