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Tim Walz says he and Harris were too ‘safe’ during 2024 presidential campaign
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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politics
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And, again, – if you had even passing familiarity with disability circles – you'd know that there are many people who have criticisms of his this currently works. This isn't remotely a perfect system and its existence doesn't suddenly make it so.
You have an idea of a system that has already gained a complete understanding of human psychology and, also, is able to assess it without fail or error.
Think very hard and long about what that sounds like…
And disabled people have discussed, at length, of how jobs like these are heated towards abled people!
I have you that answer, in my first response. Can you guarantee that these tests won't get highjacked or used by opportunists? Can you ensure they won't unfairly exclude those who shouldn't be there (gay people had to struggle with the psychiatric community to get them to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; https://daily.jstor.org/how-lgbtq-activists-got-homosexuality-out-of-the-dsm/)? And these tests are not perfect, even right now (again, it isn't surprising you don't know this as many people don't; but continuing to ignore the erased disabled voices which have pointed this out isn't going to make them a smart idea).
And many people pointed out that this was wildly unprofessional and irresponsible (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/health/analyzing-donald-trump-psychology.html). It's common amongst psychiatric professionals to not do armchair diagnosis since there's no way you can get accurate assessment from that position. But it's a great example of the way even professionals can exercise bias and poor judgement! Again, how will you ensure this won't happen with a system you've now put in charge of gatekeeping what change is even possible?
That's a problem of other systemic issues, not because we didn't use an assessment of human psychology that's far from as black-and-white or accurate as you are presuming it is.
There are other means of detecting this than using psychiatric tests. And, while you've adjusted your requirements to include sympathy, can you guarantee that others will? Autistic people struggle with cognitive empathy, too; can you guarantee that a fear campaign won't start up, that influences those running these tests to just, well, play it safe and keep these people out of the decision-making, for now? I have no interest in spending another century arguing with people who don't belong to a marginalization while the supposed findings of psychology is used to justify civil restrictions and criminal proceedings while those groups don't get a say because, well, didn't you know that psychiatry has found those people to be antisocial and unproductive?
There are no guarantees. This testing was supposed to be unnecessary because the people were supposed to have a good enough BS detector to reject people like trump before they got to power. But look what happened. Or should I say, happened again. We know similar terrible humans have been elected in other places and times.
We could say 'oh, but trump was probably treated badly by his mummy so we should show him empathy' or we could be sensible and say that we fucked up by allowing him to get near to being in power. He should never have gotten on the ballot.
So how do we fix that fuck up? Who knows, it will probably be violence at this point.
But how do we handle this issue in future? By making sure this can never happen again. There's so much obviously wrong with him being a leader that its easy to see that he would be rejected by testing, even by a simple IQ test requirement of 110 or greater. Yes I'm aware of the issues with IQ as a concept etc, but its useful as a blunt tool.
I am aware of the criticisms of the mental health systems and testing - I'm one of those who criticises it.
I think you're missing the point in all this. Just like some roles eg astronauts are tested to the max - for safety - the highest authority in the land should also be subject to the maximum safety requirements. You don't agree? We should send someone into space who can't handle it and will freak out and cause their own deaths and maybe others too? Just because it's not fair to people struggling with any mental illness or whatever to not be able to do that job?
Anything can be subverted but that doesn't mean its a bad idea (so can democracy, elections etc), just that we have to make sure that protections are built into the system and learn from the past. Which is exactly what I'm advocating for.
Disabled people aren't a monolith, any pragmatic person would agree that not all disabled people are fit for any job, no matter what the accommodations and what I'm saying isn't intended to dump on disabled people. I do have empathy for all of the mentally ill/neurodivergent, even serial killers and paedophiles - they are choosing their actions, yes, but in an extremely unfair system, where they got fucked by genetics/environment. I still wouldn't let them around kids.
I'm not making blanket statements about mentally ill/ND being useless, untrustworthy or even bad leaders in all ways. There are some roles which are incompatible with the abilities and traits of certain people and from my experience cluster B's/traits in particular are not suited to power. Other mental illnesses/ND may be fine and a lot of this depends on the role, stress level etc.
We need to make it clear that we demand the utmost from our leaders/potential leaders in terms of morality and human values. This should be enshrined in law and not just tested as a barrier for entry but constantly judged.