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?

How do you differentiate what you’re calling psychological torture here from just bog standard negative anticipation?

Is it psychological torture if I tell a child that we’re going to the doctor because they need to get their flu shot? They have to sit and live with that dread for the whole ride over.

If this is in some way a difference of kind, what differentiates them? What is the key characteristic that separates the two?

Is the only difference one of degree? That hurting someone in this way just a little bit is fine, but there’s some amount of damage that makes it unacceptable?

Or is it that the ends justify the means? That it is psychological torture to tell a child about the flu shot, but that the need to get the shot outweighs the negative of the torture? If so, and if someone truly believes that capital punishment is correct in a given case, why would the same argument not be valid?

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.

I’m betting 5-4 in favor of throwing this out.

Gorsuch came down hard on Bostock, which makes me think he’d be skeptical of overturning Obergefell (which he wasn’t on the court to rule on originally).

Roberts is married to process well enough that I don’t think he can find it in himself to violate stare decisis on a case he was actually chief justice for, even if he did vote against the first time. Plus a lot has changed since 2015, and the court took a hard swing right. The dude has always kinda been that middle man referee, so I think that’s another drop in the “would shoot this down” bucket.

That only leaves Alito, Thomas, Kavenaugh, and Barrett. Alito and Thomas will always vote for the craziest possible position, so they’re right out. Kavenaugh and Barrett are more of a coin toss, but I lean towards them having their own, separate dissent if Bostock is any indication (which Kavenaugh dissented on, but not with Alito and Thomas. Barrett had yet to join.)

So my gut is that this isn’t going anywhere. I’d honestly be surprised if the supreme court even took it up.

I think you’d be surprised at the number of people who would in fact say that Susan Collins is fair game, but that’s neither here nor there.

I think we’re largely on the same page honestly. I think our difference, if there is one, is the degree to which we think morality vs tribalism is the true influencer.

And this is a bit of a tangent, but I think this is exacerbated by the fact that morals are held to varying degrees of closeness. As an example, everyone agrees that cheating on your SO is wrong. Everyone also agrees that punching someone in the face is wrong. But if a husband cheats on his wife, and she slaps him, you will have people take (often very vehement) different sides on the issue, depending on which “sin” they consider to be worse.

And so, expanding that to the tribalism issues at hand, the majority of people on both sides are attempting to stand for and push for virtues that they believe are most important. Sometimes that’s inclusivity and caring for the poor. Sometimes it’s family unity and economic security.

And don’t hear me wrong, while any of that can be turned towards hate by malicious actors, it is clear that that is occuring on one side more than the other. But that doesn’t make the virtues themselves invalid.

Sure, but it’s equally as unenlightened to say that politics hasn’t devolved into tribalism.

And let it not be missed that your example has one group actively participating in illegal and violent activity and one group that isn’t. The two groups aren’t equivalent on their face.

A more apples to apples comparison would be joking about people at a Trump rally getting killed vs BLM protestors getting killed.

And it absolutely would be hypocritical to joke about the one and not the other, and justifying it to yourself as being fine because people who go to Trump rallies are racist is in fact just tribalism.

To phrase it another way, it sounds like you are saying, to some greater or lesser degree, that, “it’s fine because my morality is perfect, and therefore anyone not on team ‘me’ is obviously pure evil and therefore anything said about them or done to them is clearly and perfectly justified as they aren’t people deserving of moral consideration.”

Of course there’s nuance. Of course every set of jokes fall on a spectrum from universal to heinous.

And obviously a lot of factors go in to deciding if something is truly unacceptable, up to and including if the person truly believes what they’re joking about.

I’m not really arguing against any of that, and I think we’re in fact largely in agreement on that score.

The point I’m actually fighting is one of introspection. To what degree is your opinion on whether a joke is okay or not dependant on your personal political leanings?

How much are you using things like “whether they meant it or not” as a post-justification to make you feel less biased about why you took the position you did? If I provided a hundred different jokes by a hundred different comedians, would your “this is acceptable” vs “this is not” graph more align with a graph of how much they meant what they said, or with how left or right leaning the joke was?

And maybe for you, it wouldn’t be politically skewed at all. Maybe you truly hold an objective metric that can be applied across the board, without a bias towards accepting more things that align to your own beliefs. But you must admit, if so, that it would make you an overwhelming outnumbered minority.

And furthermore, surely you would admit, that most people who do have the “it was a joke against my candidate, and therefore it’s unacceptable, but it’s fine if the joke was about the enemy,” mindset, are quick to argue that they are in fact the most objective person on earth and only make decisions about acceptability based on cool hard logic and rules, not partisanship.

So, is there any set of jokes a comedian could make that are filled with enough punching down or hateful rhetoric that you would condemn, even if the comedian was adamant they were just jokes and that he doesn’t believe anything that’s actually racist/sexist/transphobic/pro-genocide/etc?

Or is it a “no true Scotsman” thing where, if the jokes are bad enough, you just decide that he must actually mean them for real, and therefore you can condemn them out of hand?

Fair, and if the guy I responded to was saying that this was a grey area due to PP psychosis, I would have just agreed.

But he was making the case that this was a grey area due to the abortion laws forcing her to give birth. That’s a much different stance, and the one I was replying to.

If Kyle Gass came out and said, “I meant what I said, I’d have been and would be very pleased if he was killed,” would you consider the reaction justified?

If Chappelle came out and said, “I absolutely don’t wish harm on any trans people. It’s all just part of the act,” would you find his jokes acceptable?

While all that is definitely reasonable, it’s a pretty big leap from “the law prevented me from getting an abortion” to “I’mma just yeet this baby out the window.”

Those ideas are so far apart as to not even remotely justify one another, right?

Like, if someone gets cut off in traffic, and they get mad and mow down a dozen pedestrians, it’d be insane to be like, “Well, you have to understand, he got cut off real bad. Mowing down pedestrians is clearly wrong, but there’s definitely some real grey area there.”