Quote: (07-24-2018 03:50 AM)Days of Broken Arrows Wrote:
Great comments on this thread. Someone mentioned that shootings have become more commonplace. That has less to do with people being different today and more to do with the way we handle the mentally ill. Here is a list of the ways things changed.
1). In the '70s, Geraldo Rivera did a big expose on the mistreatment of mental patients in state hospitals and the like. As a result, more and more doctors and family members refused to commit people who should have been locked up.
2). In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan signed off on a bill that "de-institutionalized" mental patients. This was another blow against the idea that crazy people should be behind locked doors.
3). Women invaded the psychology field. Women love word salad. Women love saying a lot and doing nothing. Women love using words to obscure points, not make them. If you've ever read the resume of anyone involved in counseling, you know its so filled with jargon it's almost unreadable. All of this jargon is there for a reason. It's to hide this simple fact: "He's crazy! Lock him up!"
4). The psychology field became drug-oriented. Everyone in this field think meds are a cure-all. But drugs all have side effects. When you play with drugs and the human mind, disaster often happens. Most of these killers are on some drug or another.
Put all these things together, and that's why you now have maniacs of all stripes running around shooting people. When our parents were growing up, these people still existed. They just existed in padded cells or locked rooms. Now thanks to "progress," we're all in danger.
Add one or two other things to this stellar analysis:
Governments of all stripes
love the fact all these three-aces-short-of-a-full-deck people are out in the streets and morons are wailing over "inadequate mental health resources in the community".
The main reason being that, while everyone beats their breast over the fact there's not enough money in the West to keep schizophrenics from shooting people, they don't realise the government determines the argument to be had in the public space. Simply put, while you're asking
how much money should be thrown at keeping mentally ill people tranked down in their own homes and possibly dangerous, you're
not asking why they are out on the streets at all.
Isn't it fascinating that Western governments have basically voted in the closest thing to a security state since Russia under Stalin, and that largely unopposed - but when it comes to a Moderate Proposal that you warehouse the mentally ill in hospitals rather than prisons as is now customary, every dumb fucker loses their minds?
The answer is simple. When you get down to it, security state apparatus doesn't actually cost that much more money to a government. A few more people, more cameras, yes, but for the most part, since it's mostly digitised snooping via Facebook rather than human intelligence agents, it's reasonably cheap and it gets the government further into your life.
By contrast, reopening mental asylums would cause massive budgetary blowouts and standing lawsuit risks that no government in its right mind will ever allow back in. You would basically be opening hundreds of new hospitals across the West, and look at the fucking cash that is blown on
that each year, chiefly via doctors' salaries.
It was not only Reagan who did this. State governments, i.e. those who usually ran the mental asylums, couldn't throw the mentally ill out of the hospitals fast enough - it meant they could close them up and assign them to shitbag halfway houses which didn't require standing teams of doctors and/or nurses. They shifted the bill from the States to the Federal government. Understand, the move to put idiots back on the steet was underway from the 1950s, this shit did not happen overnight and it wasn't one President who caused all this. The US Supreme Court also helped out with the 1975 decision in
O'Connor v. Donaldson, which held that a State cannot incarcerate a person against their will when they're not being violent and when they're capable of surviving for themselves. This single decision, and the philosophy that arises out of it, is one of the main reasons drug addicts cannot get the help their families scream for - involuntary incarceration, that is, which most ice addicts will never agree to and which is about the only tool families or police have to stop morons from killing each other or innocent bystanders.
It helped governments hugely that this was done, because it put the fruitloops back in the community and effectively made them disappear - mainly because the media couldn't show sinister pictures of creaky old mental asylum facilities anymore and the families of disabled and/or mentally ill people do not make up a constituency that's ever going to imperil a government.
However, the flip side of this are idiot disability activist movements. These arseholes are, by and large, a cancer on the public health system and directly enable this shit, because by demanding that you treat a disabled person basically the same way as you treat someone who's sane and can get along on his own, you make it more or less impossible to take that person out of the system when it's needed, and you let the government shrug its shoulders and not do anything to fix the problem.
In Australia there was a recent 60 Minutes program which showed, for one, the unflinching suffering that is laid on a family that has to care for a kid with profound autism. This shit is not pleasant little Rain Man antics or connecting dots on the chans, we are talking someone who is basically uncommunicative, with a violent temper and with an adult's strength and speed, which frequently,
daily, was exercised against his family. He was one of a family of three and the other young brothers and sisters had been beaten up by this guy. This was a very important image of mental disability and illness to get out there, to show that for carers of the disabled/mentally ill, it is a living prison sentence in many cases.
What did the morons in these advocacy organisations say?
They fucking went and criticised the show for "promoting bad stereotypes." I was livid, for personal reasons I won't get into. Autism has had so much lovebombing from the media it's become a joke; fucking aspies are all Sheldon Cooper or The Good Doctor now, if there's any stereotype of the heavily autistic, it's a positive one, such that it disguises how bad this shit can get. This guy was about as compelling a case as you can get for involuntary hospitalisation or putting his care in the hands of the State, at least partially.
And yet in Australia, the bullshit rolls on: unless you are a potentially embarrassing case to Disability Services, you generally don't get funding, and any funding you do get is massively insufficient. And the government plays on the fact that disabled peoples' families have strong bonds and generally don't leave them in the lurch. I have seen cases where an aged mother of a profoundly autistic adult kid got
no help or funding from disability services right until she finally, and literally, said "Fuck you. I have a passport, and I'm getting on a plane and leaving the country. Right now. You bastards will not help out unless there's an emergency, guess what, you got one." Only then did the lizards start scrambling and money was coughed up. That's how bad it gets in "deinstitutionalised" mental health care in the West.
The error was in dumb public advocacy groups saying "We can do this better" to the government rather than demanding that the government
do it better. Because they gave government all the excuses it needed to wash its hands of the mentally ill. This is one area where the fucking government
should be throwing money away on something that has little value. It will sound cold, but the lives of functional people are more valuable to the community than ones who aren't. And locking screwballs up in prisons is not solving the problem; if anything there will eventually be some case where some IQ 90 retard lawyers up and sues a State successfully that the imposition of a jail sentence exacerbated his mental condition, and when that happens, oh, the lions, the tigers.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm