“America is again seeing an epidemic of drug addiction, particularly
heroin. The surge is so great that for the first time in generations,
mortality among young white adults has risen. But the national attitude
toward drug addiction is utterly different. Even Republican presidential
candidates are eschewing the perennial tough-on-drugs speeches and
opening up about struggles within their own families.
More important, police chiefs in the cities most affected by heroin are responding
not by invoking military metaphors, weapons and tactics but by ensuring
that police officers save lives and get people into rehab. As one
former narcotics officer described his change of heart on addiction,
‘These are people and they have a purpose in life and we can’t as law
enforcement look at them any other way.’ In his inability to name the
change that allowed this epiphany, his words also capture our
cringe-worthy self-denial. Suddenly, police officers understand crime as
a sign of underlying addiction requiring coordinated assistance, rather
than a scourge to be eradicated.
It is hard to describe the bittersweet sting that many
African-Americans feel witnessing this national embrace of addicts. It
is heartening to see the eclipse of the generations-long failed war on
drugs. But black Americans are also knowingly weary and embittered by
the absence of such enlightened thinking when those in our own families
were similarly wounded. When the face of addiction had dark skin, this
nation’s police did not see sons and daughters, sister and brothers.
They saw ‘brothas,’ young thugs to be locked up, rather than 'people
with a purpose in life.”
- Ekow N. Yankah, “When Addiction Has a White Face”
[Photo description: A drawing in black, white and grays. Several disembodied faces are entangled in thorny vines.]
Researchers have taken a second look at the NSA SKYNET leaks, as well as the GCHQ data-mining problem book first published on Boing Boing, and concluded that the spy agencies have made elementary errors in their machine-learning techniques, which are used to identify candidates for remote assassination by drone.
These errors reveal the fundamental problem with secret science: that scientists will forgive their own corner-cutting and sloppiness when they know no one will ever check their work.
At root is the lack of good training data to use to establish “ground truths” for the data-mining technology. The techniques documented in the leaks show the researchers taking shortcuts to get around this lack – rather than holding back some known-terrorist profiles to test their models, they re-run the training data back through the system. This is an absolute no-no in machine-learning.
The system is geared to prefer false positives (innocent people who get killed) over false negatives (guilty people who go free). But the assumptions the NSA makes about how frequently these false positives occur are based on the idea that the training and modelling is done correctly. The shortcuts in the model-generation mean that the false-positive rate will be much higher, though.
A hospital is a computer we put sick people into, so when ransomware creeps infected the hospital’s IT systems and encrypted all their data, they asked for a whopping $3.6m to turn the data loose again.
In some ways, Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center got very lucky, as it seems the hackers haven’t taken over the firmware for things like CT scanners, etc, and bricked them.
But without access to internal systems, much of that equipment is offline, and patient records are being managed with fax machines and pen-and-paper. Patients are being transferred to other facilities.
The FBI and LAPD are investigating, but it’s likely that the attackers are well out of their jurisdiction, offshore and semi-untouchable. In the meantime, the hospital will continue to grind ever-slower.
I don’t want to dismiss the coercion aspect of assisted suicide. It is a hard problem to solve, and I don’t know how. But I also don’t want to live in a world where I can be arrested and institutionalized for being suicidal because other people value the quantity of my life over its quality and my right to make choices about it. There is a competing needs issue here, a big one.
I’ve thought it over and the solution I think is to legalize all suicide, not just the assisted kind.
Because really, is it helping ANYONE with it being illegal? It means you have to be scared of your doctors because if you say the wrong thing they have the power to lock you up. It means you can call the cops on someone to have them locked away, and sometimes it turns into suicide by cop.
If it’s fully legalized then it becomes less stigmatized and therefore easier to talk about. Imagine how many people wouldn’t have died because they never actually told anyone they wanted to die so no one was around to try and convince them not to.
Because honestly? a mental health person is never going to be able to talk me down. My friends do a good job though. I’m lucky most of my friends are ALSO mentally ill and get it and I can talk to them but a lot of people just don’t have that.
Having suicide be a scary thing no one talks about is not helping anyone but the funeral homes.
I agree. The reasoning behind making it illegal is supposedly so that it’s legal for police to enter your home and stop you, legal to force you into treatment - but that’s the kind of intervention I specifically wouldn’t want, the thing that I’d be keeping silent on to try to avoid.
I had some suicidal ideations when I was younger - only once as far as making a specific plan, and I never actually attempted to carry it out beyond getting the materials and preparing, but that one time I was close, and had been contemplating it on and off for years. I never talked about it because I didn’t want forced treatment. I would have loved to be able to seek help on my terms - trying a different type of therapy, changing my medications / increasing dosage / etc. - but there was too much of a risk that I’d end up in a hospital that would make my life much worse. As a teenager, I knew that I’d be subject to abuse when I got home for costing money; our health insurance would cover prescriptions at no or almost trivial cost but a hospitalization would still be expensive and my stepmother would not have tolerated that. In my twenties, on my own, I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep my job and housing and I’d have thousands of dollars to pay off without a job or home or anywhere safe to go upon release. I was also terrified of being declared incompetent and forced to have a guardian - and one of them was the aggravating factor that made my mental issues flare up so bad I wanted to be dead in the first place. (I’m still mentally ill, but healing from that damage at least got me to the point of strongly preferring being alive. It also took a lot longer to heal since I had to do it mostly without help.) I couldn’t risk it, and so I had to keep my mouth shut.
It’s only after a decade gone by, roughly ten years since I’ve seriously considered suicide, that I even feel safe discussing it, because the chance anybody would try to lock me up over things I thought that long ago is vanishingly small.
At the very least, I wish there was a way for adults to opt out of the “protection” of people being able to force one not to kill oneself. Because I’d have opted out immediately and then sought help in which I could retain the legal right to say “No, I don’t want to be admitted to the psych ward under 24/7 observation and decline that, but I’m willing to try adding another medication / going to group therapy in the evening / doing intensive daytime counseling on my days off work.” Almost any extra help would have been better than none, and if it wasn’t then I’d be allowed to discontinue and be no worse off.
Just FYI: suicide isn’t illegal in the US. In a few states it is sometimes treated as a common-law crime for technical legal reasons unrelated to forced institutionalization, but there is no statute on the books anywhere in America that outlaws suicide. However it is true that you can be involuntarily committed if you are believed to be a danger to yourself or others, so I assume that is what is being referred to.
If you call yourself an activist, and the only thing you’re doing for your cause is reblogging possibly misinformed posts to “raise awareness”, you’re not an activist.
I love it how anti-sjws underestimate the importance of awareness.
If all you do is “spread awareness” by reblogging posts, and you don’t do any research into the posts you’re reblogging, and you don’t come up with any posts on your own, and you never go to rallies or protests or charity events, you’re not an activist, you’re a person with a blog on tumblr.
Hey you know what isn’t cool? Saying that the people here on this website and their views and thoughts and reblogging mean nothing because they’re not doing the research. Did you ever think about those who actually don’t have a lot of time to relax because of the stress of school, work, maybe family members or even the chance that they are fighting their own battles within themselves? Maybe someone who is suffering from depression or maybe someone is just having a bad fucking day and they see something like this and all they can think about is the fact they aren’t good enough. By people reblogging they ARE doing something. They’re spreading awareness. Without the act of passing information on, a lot of things wouldn’t be where they are today. So instead of judging others by how much effort they try/can put in, mind your own business.
Gabby out.
Cool, but you’re still not an activist if all you do is reblog shit on tumblr.
What’s wrong with realizing that your reblogs aren’t going to solve anything in the big picture?
No, seriously, what’s wrong with that? Sure you’re spreading awareness, but that’s pretty much it, what happens when people are already aware? unless someone acts with the new information they have, spreading awareness isn’t doing shit.
And there is nothing wrong with that. there’s nothing wrong with recognizing that spreading awareness can only do so much. You are putting in the bare minimum of effort when it comes to activism, spreading awareness is the complete bottom of the pyramid. You’re telling people how much a situation sucks from your cosy chair in the comfort of your own home.
Tumblr’s “awareness spreading” Is basically like people sitting on the sidelines giving “Morale support” with a foam finger while other people do the dirty grunt work. If all you can do is give morale support, good on you.
But don’t pretend that it’s the same as going out there and pulling a load.
op is also talking about spreading potentially false information. they’re literally saying AT LEAST correct false information. its so funny watching people that think they’re amazing people because they post shit on tumblr and that’s all they do. also the work, school thing isn’t much of an excuse. if you are as passionate about your cause as you lead your internet followers to believe you are you’d find some sort of time or motivation.
Exactly. Bare minimum, folks. All I’m asking for is the bare minimum. If you actually care, you’ll do research. Having a blog means nothing, most of the time it’s just preaching to the choir.
It’s okay to not be an activist. Just don’t call yourself one when you’re not.
“It’s okay to not be an activist. Just don’t call yourself one when you’re not.”
