14 Comments
founding

The case for a surveillance state and for gun control have both gotten weaker in the last several years. Every institution who gets a turn in the limelight shows a staggering level of incompetence or corruption, (FBI, WHO, FDA, CDC, IRS, even the military in afghanistan). These are the people we give surveillance powers to? On the gun control side, defund the police & the resulting rise in crime have grown the ranks of gun owners. Everyone with a soul is tortured by these recent incidents, but I don't see any movement towards the obvious "mainstream" solutions.

Someone who wants to kill kids is a broken person. Someone living on a tent on the sidewalk is a broken person. How do we fix broken people? That is the underlying question.

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An easier way to explain this:

Let's say that knowing nothing, 1 in 100,000,000 people will become a school shooter

Now track everyone's social media, telephone calls, texts, and construct an algorithm that predicts the likelihood of becoming a school shooter. Your best Algorithm can identify that someone is one thousand times or 10,000% more likely then the general population to become a school shooter. That's a pretty good model you have there.

Except that for every individual your algorithm selects, only 1 in 100,000 will become a school shooter.

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Surveillance is probably a big stressor. What are the odds such surveillance increases the odds someone goes off the deep end and starts a bloody rampage? Would the benefits outweigh the costs along this one dimension alone? I doubt it.

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May 26, 2022·edited May 26, 2022

When particular crimes happen in certain areas, the police know who to go and call on. School staff know which pupils have a reputation. Fellow pupils know a wrong’un in their midst.

Curiously schools know which pupils have ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’, which children require ‘special needs’, or are ‘autistic’, or need the school counsellor to talk about their attitude, transphobia, covet racism, homophobia, etc but nobody can spot a mentally disturbed pupil with a propensity for violence, threatening behaviour, criminal activity and imagine he might just be the next school shooter and give him (it usually is a him) counselling, talk to his parents.

Too busy I suppose ticking all the correct busybody boxes.

This does indeed need surveillance but not in the spying-on sense, but alert professionals who should be dealing with real situations not manufactured woke problems.

As for privacy issues - a stumbling block? Ha! That ship sailed years ago.

Every three letter agency is surveilling you, a Disinformation Governance Board is on ‘pause’ but will come back and insinuate itself into everyone’s private thoughts, text messages; apps on your phone check up whether you have been vaccinated or passed near to a plague victim, and where you are going, what you are doing.

The truth is getting to the cause of the problem (mass shootings) requires intelligent thought and competence, and has no political mileage in it whereas the emoting about guns, guns, guns covers the political, the ideological and State power over the individual.

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For the fictionalized version, read Philip K. Dick's "Minority Report" (or see the movie starring Tom Cruise).

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Brin’s solution was to subject government actors to the same surveillance regime as they employ themselves….not better institutions as I recall

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I know that a portion of the blame is apportioned to violent video games. I just watched the 4th in a series of movies of the “Purge” theme, one night of government sanctioned violence. If that series doesn’t promote violence in young minds, I don’t know what would.

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May 26, 2022·edited May 26, 2022

The problem with the algorithm would be to differentiate between someone being stupid and someone being serious. I am not sure this would be insurmountable. For one, social network size would more than likely be a good indicator. Responses to the posts would be another. This is ripe for abuse, but it could also identify people that need help - maybe they won't all be future mass shooters, but they probably would all need help. I still would not trust the government with this, progressives patholigize any dissent from their orthodoxy.

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These are good ideas as far as they go. However, both history and present day relevant situations tell me that the desired objectivity by the audit agency is impossible ever to achieve.

Consider government treatment of two groups in the past ten years -- the "right wing racist extremists" that are officially blamed for 1/6 and for the earlier "Unite the Right" riot; and Antifa/BLM, which have been conducting an "unstoppable" reign of terror in Portland and other places. The "right wing extremists" are largely if not completely imaginary, and most of them are entrapment operations conducted by FBI and other corrupt agencies in order to rob real dissidents of the ability to conduct peaceful demonstrations anywhere (by hijacking those events and smearing the people involved). But in the case of BLM/Antifa the opposite holds true -- that is, Antifa/BLM members also are recruited if not hired by corrupt law enforcement agencies, but those same agencies make sure the police and prosecutors don't prosecute or even bother them, and instead, protect the terrorists from any self-defense by their victims. The malicious prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse was a typical example.

It seems to me the right answer is to give the general population the power to correct the problems themselves, meaning: (1) keep guns legal and avoid creating gun-free zones, so that when someone does try a mass shooting, someone else present will likely be armed and stop them; and (2) legalize private prosecution, so that the kind of deals that are giving Antifa and BLM terrorists a free pass can no longer work.

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