[Vision2020] How Many More . . .

[Kenneth Marcy]

On 8/18/2012 9:31 AM, Gary Crabtree wrote:
> Since you are absolutely convinced that detailed lists are totally 
> benign, let's make available a roster of everyone who has ever sought 
> or been given treatment for any and every mental health condition? 
> After all, it's all for the greater good and what could possibly go 
> wrong? Why track a tool when you can track the potential user?
> Heck this detailed list idea is so good why not expand it to 
> organizations, books, movies, and music. Absolutely anything that 
> might even hint at inspiring violence. I'm sure that a community 
> conscious individual such as your self couldn't possibly object to a 
> little bit of scrutiny in exchange for a small measure of potential 
> safety, right?

Computer science types are watchful that they don't trap themselves into 
attempting to compute something that would take very long periods of 
time (longer than a human lifetime, for example) to compute. Sometimes a 
different algorithm can render a problem more computationally tractable, 
and sometimes not.

Analogously, making the lists you are suggesting here would be an 
administrative burden not unlike attempting to calculate every facet of 
everything. Practically, i.e., within reasonable time frames, not to 
mention with any sort of logical clarity, it just can not be accomplished.

Let's take, for example, your phrase "absolutely anything that might 
even hint at inspiring violence." OK, let's consider just a triple of 
tomes: the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qur'an, and those 
who read and adhere to one or more of them in some fashion. The 
administrative result is a list of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, three 
groups of people about whom it is true to suggest that some among them 
have been inspired to violence by what they read in one or more of those 
volumes.

What are we to do with such a list of people? Declare them all mentally 
ill, and then refer them for psychiatric treatment? Oh, by the way, how 
is society's supply of secular humanist psychiatrists and religious cult 
deprogrammers? Oops. Analogous to the electronically ancient computer 
with one processor operating at a slow clock speed, the process for 
accomplishing all that work would take an unacceptably long time, and 
since we know that in advance of starting such a process, we won't start 
the process.

These practical considerations, plus the rights of people to pursue the 
happiness of their own brands of insanity in the privacy of their own 
homes, or places of worship, such as movie houses screening Disney 
flicks, opera houses presenting Wagnerian almost anything, or book clubs 
discussing romance novels with pink covers and numbers on their spines, 
means that it is highly unlikely that anytime soon anyone is going to 
attempt to pry a Bible from anyone else's cold dead fingers. So, relax.


Ken
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