Unfortunately, it’s the same scenario applied to healthcare, education, transportation, and other industries. TPTB who are pro-profit don’t want to address the root cause of problems or solve anything. There is more money in pretending to address/consider the problem, making it worse, and having people pay for a series of temporary fixes that won’t work long-term.
Once the initial revenue stream is in place, they can increase the cost and frequency of the temporary measures to maximize profit. If someone comes up with an actual solution, they either prevent it from being developed/implemented, or take ownership/control of it to slow down acceptance until they can integrate it into the model of regular, increasing payments already in place. This is what happens when business controls the government instead of the other way around.
Here in America it is easier to sell the idea of having fake murderers storm a school and pretend to kill people, than to have a reasonable action to decrease the likelihood a real murderer will storm a school and kill people. Plus, it pays better to fake the killings than to stop the killings. PROFIT!
What would happen if a teacher went after one of these idiots during an “unannounced active shooter drill” and hurt or killed the cop “pretending” to be a bad guy? Complete insanity. I had never heard of these before reading this article.
Do they consider the possibility of unannounced active shooter drills intersecting with armed teachers? Rapidly devolving to airsoft rifles against poorly trained but real handguns. Actual, very poorly targeted projectiles flying around vulnerable children… Yeah, this sounds like fun…
If you’re into Foucault, you might check out Achille Mbembe’s take on biopower. He calls it necropolitics. The original article is paywalled, but there are interviews and stuff out there good enough to make the idea useful.
Good. As a neurotypical white cisgendered heterosexual male adult with no previous trauma related to this that did grow up around responsible gun owners in the West and Midwest, I walked out of a “mandatory” one in 2017 at work because it was it was too much to deal with mentally and emotionally.
I can’t even imagine kids or anyone with literally any sort of trigger (pun not intended) for trauma having to deal with this.
This the exact thought that occurs to me every time I see a politician tweet something that depends on a community being unsafe to make sense. It’s like “Vote for me, I’ll make sure you can have gun because the community is so dangerous that you need to be armed all the time. Not going to do anything that would make the community safe so that you wouldn’t need constant vigilance, heightened awareness and be ready to kill at any moment.” How is that seen as a winning message?
The way I see it, most of a fire drill is learning to evacuate a building in an orderly fashion instead of as mob. Beyond just a school fire, this is a good skill. Fires, earthquakes, building collapses, any type of scenario that requires a large group to exit a building quickly requires the same orderly fashion. It’s a good skill for a group to have. Unorganized stampedes can cause as much harm as the reason people are leaving as people are trampled in the commotion. Same reason exit doors open out and have push bars. So the person at the front isn’t crushed trying to open a door in or turn a knob.
But, that’s how I remember them and how I’ve done them at offices since school. It’s really just a drill to work on leaving a building in a calm orderly fashion. It doesn’t need any other embellishment.
It potentially had a practical outcome that would matter in a nuclear blast, just not at ground zero. As you head out from the center of the blast you pass through an area where structural damage and flying debris is possible, but the blast itself wouldn’t necessarily be fatal. Given that the bombs were more likely to be targeted at industrial and military facilities than residential areas, it is possible that intermediate distance could contain a lot of people.
I’m not so sure about this part. A lot of the kids I spoke who came out of the drills were terrified, of the cops.
You wanna explain to the parents why you’re not having a shooter drill? It’s “doing something”… since gun control ain’t happening any time soon…
(edited to emphasize that sometimes doing nothing is your best action)
Thanks for pointing out that dust-up. I have not been reading any recent “theory.” Prompted by your post. I’ve been reading through the exchange posted at The European Journal of Psychoanalysis. (I recommend it. It’s interesting.)
I’m only a little way through it, but what these discussions weren’t taking into account as far as I’ve read, is Trump’s response. I had to stop at Benvenuto. His points out the politically-expedient response to the 1918 flu was denial; that seems relevant. Foucault’s point, which Agamben insists on in a doctrinaire way, isn’t wrong. Crises allow governments the excuse to increase administrative power. But maybe that’s not always the most desirable use of the opportunity the crisis presents.
Trump for example. His administration is definitely opportunistic. But he’s basically refusing to govern. Loot, rant, lash out, sure. But not actually govern. And maybe that’s why the GOP finds him so useful, because the GOP strategy has been to avoid governing. The GOP’s grandest policy initiatives have been war and the associated profiteering and lowering taxes.
OK. I have to stop brain-farting and earn my socially-distanced, online education paycheck.
Much of the impetus for this sort of thing came from rural western counties too poor to support a police force capable of patrolling vast acreages of nothingness.
No matter where in the US, it’s still a poor message from someone running for political office. Why should anyone ever vote for the guy whose message is “I can’t do anything for you, it’s a lawless place, good luck.”.
It’s both wrong as a messaging statement from someone wanting to work in government, and wrong as a policy position.
Unless, their entire target audience is people who desire a lawless land where they can play militia.
That exchange was interesting. But I can’t help thinking that so much thinking in biopolitics is done in metaphors about biology, without trying to understand the biology itself.
A biologist can extend a theoretical concept by experiment, while a biopolitical theorist is reduced to extending an imperfect metaphor by linguistic analogy, and then being surprised that his extended theory does not necessarily match up with the biologist’s extended theory.
