You forget, my friend, that for some conservatives government intrusion is only a BAD THING[sup]TM[/sup] when it involves taxes.
Scylla, I’m workin’ REAL hard here at making sure I don’t misunderstand you, so I do hope you’ll work with me, here.
I suspect we DO agree that rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin. Want rights? Accept responsibilities. No responsibilities? Minimal rights. I do believe children have a right to some manner of food, housing, and not being abused, but that’s a whole 'nother can of worms. I never suggested that we expand children’s rights any further than what the law allows right now.
But I must respectfully disagree with your repeated comparisons between minor sorts of searches and examinations, and the requirements for a successful drug test. There is VERY LITTLE reasonable comparison between a person’s reaction to walking through a metal detector… and a person’s reaction to being forced to yank his or her pants down and pee in a damn cup.
One is a minor inconvenience. The other is a major breach of one’s body privacy.
You argue that such things are the cost of the society we live in, the price of safety, security, and so on. I suspect the Germans were saying something pretty similar, back around 1939 or so. Please note that I am NOT comparing you (or anyone else) to Hitler – I am, however, making it pretty clear that I consider your attitude an essential one for the population to have, in order that it may be more easily controlled by its government.
It is a dangerous attitude, sir, and one that practically invites the loss of freedom.
And this is my primary objection to this whole stinkin’ circus!
If I thought that my local public schools were so drug ridden that mandatory testing was the only way to clean out the pushers – AND IF THERE WERE NO LESS DISTURBING ALTERNATIVE – I might reconsider. But as far as I can determine, this is not so. Regular sweeps with drug dogs are a highly effective means of enforcing existing drug laws and policies, without requiring anyone to drop his damn pants… at least, not without some sort of probable cause.
We got dogs. We got cameras. We got random locker searches. We got a zillion methods for watching the children, folks.
Scylla, your last several posts sound downright scary. “Whatever the government thinks is necessary to keep us safe, that’s the price we pay, and that’s okay.” Like I said, I’m working very hard at not misunderstanding you, so do correct me if I’m wrong, here. I freely admit that I may be way off.
Again: there are alternatives, and those alternatives work. Why the support for this procedure? The only function I can see that would be served by random piss testing for thousands of innocent Americans… would be to reinforce the idea that it is the government’s right to force us to pee in cups before we may be allowed to do much of anything. For our own safety. For our own good.
And that’s an attitude I frankly hope that posterity does NOT adopt. It sets an extremely bad precedent for any OTHER cockeyed notions a politician might get that would require further erosions of our liberties…
I’m really very disappointed in this post. I cannot call it a response. In the past, you’ve declined to respond to people who were rude and confrontational, calling you names etc (which is your right to do), and have been accused of weaseling etc. etc.
You’ve supported in this thread a program (as talked about here) that would cost quite a bit of money (are you aware, for example, the cost of such tests? I’ll admit that it’s been years since I priced them out but we used to spend over a hundred every month just monitoring a dozen folks, and that was just the cost of the tests themselves, let alone the staff required to monitor the testing procedure, and process the specimins) without any specific rational for why it’s necessary (let alone a ‘good’ idea) save for statements about drug use by kids being bad, that people can get addicted, do bad things, get hurt etc, yet refusing to substantiate the level of the problem.
here again you put words in my mouth. I’ve specifically never claimed ‘drugs in schools are safe’. What I’ve repeatedly asked for from you is justification that ‘drugs in schools’ are at a level that would require draconian expensive programs such as this. this is the second time that you’ve dangled a red herring from my mouth - and I want you to stop. It’s a dishonest debate tactic and I believe that you know it.
I’m done. Your refusal to support your position in any concrete way, coupled with your repeated reframing my statements into the mount everest of strawmen makes it pointless to continue. I am sorely disappointed. I feel that I deserved better from you.
Wang:
Ahhh Now you’re on to something. I think that the “right” to privacy that children don’t have being manufactured to argue against this is fallacious. I think the whole “degrading” thing is fallacious, under the grounds that if you can translate the objection into a concern about somebody else’s feelings, it’s usually not valid.
What you find degrading, I may find fun. There is nothing inherently degrading about peeing in a cup. You have to learn to think it’s degrading or decide to act like it’s degrading. I have no use for this kind of induced psychosis
I have to confess that the granting of totalitarianistic powers to the government in a case like this gives one pause. It’s the old “are we building the shackles of our own enslavement” argument.
Any time we give the government a new power we do need to ask that question.
Though what you are talking about is a slippery slope argument, I think it has some validity because the slope is slippery and the penalties for falling off are high.
I’m not worried about it here and in this instance though. We’re talking about something that is highly compartmentalized. We are talking about common public institutional ground. Courthouses, hospitals, government buildings, schools, military bases, airports are not our homes.
These are the areas where, for the common good we are no longer exercise freedoms that we are allowed on our private properties our elsewhere. This is done for the common good.
When you step into an airport, you no longer have the right to bear arms. This is for obvious reasons that I’m sure you can accept. You forgo that right and the government has the responsibility to make sure the airport is safe for you.
Same thing goes for schools. When you step inside, the normal rules no longer apply.
Few people have objections to innoculations being mandated for children in school, though those carry risk. Few people object to scoliosis screening. Few people would object to a throat culture being done in a flu epidemic. Few people would object to an eye test being performed.
I was under the impression that drug addiction was a disease. I truly believe it is, and I think it spreads like a disease.
So, while I understand the objection of granting sweeping powers to the government as being a generally bad thing, I think this one falls into some pretty clearly established precedents.
It is common public ground.
It is the enforcement of the law of the land.
It is testing for a disease.
You have however, latched onto what I think is the only real objection I’ve heard.
You seem to agree that drug testing could be valid if the situation were dire enough, but we are not there yet.
You may be right.
On the other hand, I’m not a social engineer. The way I try to raise my children, run my business, live my life, train my dogs, brush my teeth, or address any problem is not to wait until that problem reaches deadly crises proportions (though I think we’re there in the inner city’s where drug use is destroying the lives of millions, and the education of a generation) is to use a little bit of overkill on the really important problems.
For example, if my daughter steals an extra popsicle when she only had permission for one, chances are she’s going to slide. However, when she insists on picking up a large knife when told not to, the reaction she is going to get from me is going to be both extreme and memorable.
I happen to think that kids and illegal drugs are one of the scenarios in which a little overkill isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I mean, Christ, we go overkill on sensitivity training, and making sure we have no Ten Commandments and don’t offend anybody because of religious beliefs… But we’re not going to go with a little overkill when it comes to kids and drugs?
I’m in the financial business (can’t say exactly what) but we make a pretty big deal about money laundering. We all know exactly how it works. We all know exactly how to do it. We are in fact, taught how to do it.
Then we are shown all the controls and monitoring and processes that are in place to catch us, all the draconian and invasive forces and powers that are in place to catch us if we try. This is done for two reasons. The first is to co-opt us into the process. If we know what to look for we can prevent it. We will not exactly become a part of it. The second reason is because we are relatively intelligent human beings. If we know how badly the game is rigged against us, we are unlikely to play.
I really can’t see why the school system shouldn’t be similarly rigged against children’s use of illegal drugs. I really don’t see how the consequences to our children aren’t a thousand times more terrible than a little money laundering (and ftr, the money laundering is generally drug money that we’re talking about.)
I find it interesting Bush wants to put in play a test he wouldn’t have passed himself.
I’m sorry you feel that way. I think it’s outside of the scope of this pit thread to have the discussion you want. I don’t think I’m putting words in your mouth, though. If I am to attempt to prove what you would like me to prove (and I’ve thought about it, and might still participate in a GD on the subject,) I see it as inevitable that we are going to quantify just exactly how dangerous drugs are to children.
We will have to list illegal drugs, argue about whether alcohol is to be included or whether the dangers of intoxication studied from alcohol can be rationally applied to other drugs. We will have to examine drug usage by children of school age, and the effects that each drug has on children and the dangers it represents. We will have to examine whether those dangers apply in the school environment as well as outside of it.
In short, in order to prove what you are asking, I will first have to prove that drug use is dangerous in schools, and quantify exactly how dangerous it is.
I am starting with the assumption that drug use is dangerous in schools. For the scope of this thread, I don’t want to have to go back and prove it from scratch. We have all been exposed to the data. It is public, and we are capable of making our own judgements. I think my assumption that it is both dangerous and a problem is a rationale one and should be accepted as such without a need for the overly burdensome proof that you require.
Then, assuming we can reach some kind of common ground upon the total scope of the danger in quantified form we will then have to examine the potential effect that a drug screening program will have on this usage. Since we don’t really know what the drug screening program is specifically, we will have to design it and test it.
I’m sorry, Wring, but that’s a big headache. That’s outside the scope of the debate and not a reasonable request. While it’s true that you never said that drug use in school is safe, you are taking that position implicitly when you require an unusual and burdensome level of proof to what should be rationally accepted in principle if not in degree.
Another thing that stops me is that we’ve done this before. I remember spending trying to produce evidence and logic to show that a person going ten miles per hour in a motorized vehicle was more dangerous than a pedestrian to other pedestrians, and I was required by your flat refusal to accept even the most basic and fundamentally sound reasoning which I offered, such as comparative statistics to vehicles of other weight, arguments to the ergonomics of degree of control of these vehicles, and even simple arguments pertaining to the mass and weight of these vehicles providing greater momentum through impact. This last being pure physics.
I was quite frustrated by your insistant refusal that nothing had been proven or was acceptable according to you, and that therefore there was no increased risk. Even when an actuary attempted to point out to you the fallacy of this position of yours you simply insisted there was no proof.
So, I know from experience the level of detail and proof that will be required from you to achieve satisfaction. That level will be, I’m sure, nothing short of absolute. This debate is interesting to me on other levels. I’m not interested particularly in trying to demonstrate the obvious to you, in mindnumbing detail. I don’t have the time, or the interest, and I suspect the outcome will be simple stonewalling, here.
I often enjoy debating with you but I have come to think that you can be pretty stubborn and unreasonable with the level of proof you require, and I feel that sometimes you wield this expectation of proof as a rhetorical weapon, rather than as a simple question.
Finally, I don’t want to do it in the pit, because of idiots like Desmostylus and such. Experience suggests to me that the conversation will devolve and it’s hard to argue intellectually when you’re being called names (at least for me it takes the fun out of it.)
But I’m sorry you feel that I’ve put words in your mouth. As you know, I don’t particularly like when it happens to me.
Upon second consideration I think you are right. What I have earlier argued as being implicit in your argument (concerning drugs being safe) isn’t necessarily there, but is simply a condition that needs to be satisfied. It was wrong of me to attribute it to you as if it was, and I apologize for that.
If it were not for dope in school, I would have offed myself by the time I reached the 10th grade. And I may have taken a few people with me.
I completely agree with Wang-ka. Making school into a police state will not solve any problems. We’re talking about children and young adults here - treating them like criminals will only encourage them to act like criminals. Do I have to find the cite for the study in psych textbooks where children randomly labeled as ‘gifted’ did better than those not?
Personally, random drug testing would be an absolute humiliation to me, a kid who never touched drugs. Plus, if you’ve noticed, drug testing is mostly used in today’s society as a humiliation tactic - to put you in your place. I have never had to take a drug test, and I’m an engineer building bridges that you’ve probably driven over. Yet if I wanted to work at Wal-mart, I’d have to piss in a cup. You can’t tell me the purpose of drug testing in the workplace in this case is really for safety. It’s to put you in your place. Who’s to say the same motivation won’t happen in schools?
Oh, yeah, and the government has this annoying habit of not funding the bills it passes. If drug testing in school ever became legal, the funding for it would never materialize. Then it’s goodbye, extra-curricular programs. Drug testing would be way overkill, but it’s not worth it. The biggest substance abuse problem in schools is admittedly alcohol, which isn’t picked up in drug tests.