Sunday Roundup – Vikings and Security Guards

Posted on By David Perry

My semester has begun and I’m working on a book proposal. I’ll tell you all about it if it goes anywhere. These things are eating up some of my writing time.

Still, it was a pretty lively week on the blog.
The story I didn’t tell yet is on Medicare rules for speech devices. The story here is that tablets with good apps and add-ons are much, to my mind, better than dedicated medical speech devices. But the latter, thousands of dollars more expensive, are the things that are covered. I’m going to try to figure out a way to tell this story this Fall.
I wrote two blogs on the incident of the mock-frisking of a boy with Down syndrome in Syracuse. It’s bullying, the guard was fired, but I still want us to do some thinking about the culture that enables such behavior.

The most fun piece to write was on Viking Women Warriors – History is not a straitjacket for fantasy. But we do need more diverse books.

I’m deeply concerned about academic freedom and I wish more scientists would get involved in this case in Illinois. I offered some opening thoughts on how to persuade our scientist friends who think it’s just not their concern.

Finally – two stories of involuntary commitment. The details of both remain unclear to me, but I’m watching them and the broader argument that says the solution to police killing folks with disabilities is to lock up the folks with disabilities for their own safety.

And that’s the week on the blog! See you tomorrow and happy Sunday.

2 Replies to “Sunday Roundup – Vikings and Security Guards”

  1. Jack says:

    Of all the disciplines, I think science has a much more restrictive allowance for critical thinking. By current definition, science requires hypothesis and repeatable experimental evidence before a declaration. However, there is also a strong fear in the community of losing credibility, so when evidence points toward a result that does not conform to mainstream thinking, it can sometimes be discarded and utterly ignored. Many reputations have been ruined based on asserting a conclusion that went against the grain, even when later history revealed that that assertion was correct. We all know some of the prime examples (e.g., Gallileo.)

    I know this is not exactly what you are pointing to, but the culture of staying "within bounds" of current thinking has been so engrained in scientific community, that it is not surprising that they would be the last group to push against the administration on issues of individual opinion and academia.

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