Lots of wannabe authoritarians out there in educationland.
All those decades that the schools just -couldn’t afford- more (well-educated) teachers and smaller class sizes. Lots of low-end look-good.
And then along came tech, and lo-and-behold, IT was going to be the savior. Let’s buy into that! We may not be able to teach them to read, write or think, but they can learn to kneel!
“Sometimes you have to look at the trade for the greater good,” said Board of Education member Anne Costello in a July 2024 board meeting.
No no no no.
You know what really grinds my gears? This shitty dystopia completely eschews any potentially cool aspect of invasive exploitative authoritarianism. The (not so) secret police is patching together their own “uniforms” by browsing the bargain bins at the local tacti-cool mall-ninja outfitters. Where’s the black leather trench coats, stylish sunglasses worn after dark and slicked back hair? If they’re going to ask me for ‘ze papers’ all the time, the least they can do is look cool doing it, godamnit. At least get Hugo Boss to design your attire; that’s just about the only thing that worked out well for the last bunch of pricks.
I mean, where’s the towering brutalist architecture? Where’s my mandatory daily dose of SOMA? Or my idiotically wirelessly hackable cyberware? Hell, they can’t even do bread and circuses right anymore. The bread is CO2-pumped flour glue and the circuses is an endless stream of more Marvel projects and Disney violations of Star Wars.
And don’t get me started on the quality of our dictators these days. They sure don’t make them like they used to.
What is sad is that an environment like this ruins someone’s mental health and ironically increasing the overall risk of violence.
Don’t remember whose quote it was, maybe Hannah Arendt, that the real tragedy of tyranny is not when people self-censor what they say out loud, but when this leads them to filter out those thoughts from arising at all
Holy shit, the amount of surveillance the teens are under is ungodly and people blame the chatbot? And there wasn’t even a human kind enough to speak with the girl before calling the fucking cops? I see a lot of blame to place here, but it’s not the chatbot who is to blame.
- The kids for bullying her for her tan
- The school boards implementing the surveillance
- The parents who allowed such surveillance in the first place
- The person screening what was flagged for not sending the school counselor to talk with the kid
- The person calling the cops
- The cops for arresting an 8th-grader and DOING A STRIP SEARCH AND KEEPING HER OVERNIGHT WTF instead of handing her over to her parents
Everyone of them failed a 13 year old girl. All of them should be ashamed.
The cops for arresting an 8th-grader
This is America, that’s what they do. They love overreacting to small problems.
I was arrested for self-defence in a highschool fight, the actual bully who attack me did not get in any sort of trouble. If I didn’t have citizenship, there was a chance that incident could’ve led to my deportation, even tho I was a minor. (USCIS can see all your arrests, including those that did not led to a conviction, or even expunged or pardoned offences, and they could retroactively revoke your legal status if they find out you lied.) But luckily charges were dropped because of couse they don’t have the evidence to prove it and I have a clean record so they didn’t bother prosecuting.
There is probably an alternate timeline somewhere out there in the multiverse where I got deported and had to learn another language that I haven’t spoken for over a decade. Depressing to think about.
(Well that is still technically a possibility, all they have to do is make up some bullshit about “being a spy” and put me in gitmo)
One of my possible theories is that the alternate timelines diverge for each of us at moments we could have died. The timeline diverges and one continues on with us and one without us; sometimes while “dying” timelines merge back together resulting in stories like reddit’s r/glitchinthematrix
So if it’s any consolation, your bully probably died in your deportation timeline.
