denkrishna

This, and also not "doing drugs" and going to college are also difficult. Mind altering substances can become a normalized part of social interaction (I live in America and my favorite illustration of this is talking about caffeine. Sure, the chance of developing an addiction is lower, and the consequences of a dependency are less severe, but telling a kid "don't have caffeine ever, it's bad" is just insane, they might be able to avoid it for a while but the environment itself is trying to shove it down our throats).

College doesn't have the same issue but it's got its own set of issues. And all three of those things become more difficult when you stack their problems.

Framing things as either falling into "a choice" vs "not a choice" ignores the fact that pretty much all things have at least some elements of it that we can and can't control.

Uh, that's not the definition that biologists use. Kingdom animalia includes humans. (along with fish, birds, reptiles, insects, etc.) We're mammals.

Also, a vast majority of people use this definition of the word "animal" when referring to the animals themselves and only tend to use other definitions (which typically ends up referring to non-human mammals or sometimes humans the speaker find distasteful for whatever reason) specifically when contrasting them to so called "civilized" humans.

You can look up the word "animal" in a dictionary and I garuntee you the kingdom animalia style definition will be the first one you see under the noun form of the word with all other definitions (the ones that exclude humans or insects) coming later. Dictionaries typically order their definitions by usage when there are multiple definitions of the same word.

I understand the point here and agree with it. It also feels a bit small and irrelevant to me in the grand scheme of things.

Idk about schools outside the US but at least here, schools already have pretty extensive security camera systems that have the same issues. They are presumably only to be used by first responders during a school shooting or something like that (god our nation is f***ed up) but they do end up getting used in many schools to enforce random rules and stuff that are definitely not emergencies.

There was one time that my sister paid for an apple during lunch but asked the lunch lady if she could keep it so that my sister could come back for it later. She got called in for questioning by the police for "stealing" because the security guard saw her taking an apple after lunch had ended.

There was one guy that was running in the hallway after-hours between two different after school clubs to get information or something like that the other club's teacher. He was talked to the next day about not being in the school after-hours unless he stayed with his club and that even if no one else was in the hall he shouldn't run.

The security camera usage by staff seems like a much bigger invasion of privacy to me but trying to argue about it with anyone inevitably leads to discussions on gun violence because even people for gun control seem to think that the privacy invasion is "worth it in the mean time".

The incidious persistence of many systems of oppression can often be at least partially attributed to people in the "middle tears" actively participating in the system simply to avoid being the bottom rung...

To some, a candidate that will prop them up at the expense of a different group is a subconscious survival adaptation

So I wouldn't say they're dumb necessarily, just that they've been indoctrinated from childhood into the same system that keeps them down

(I say this as an Asian American that has had to really struggle with the duality of how I treated black and indigenous people in the past, during times when I understood and personally experienced the ill effects of racism. Time when I recognized and accepted that racism exists and claimed it unfair when it happened to me)