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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34124 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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What are some actionable ideas, things that might actually help, whether it is some sort of viable plan for forming a vigilante militia or a plan for influencing local elections?

  1. Organize with your local neighborhood association to raise money to hire private security. I have seen this done moderately successfully.
  2. Less effective: Attend community meetings with police, community meetings with politicians and make your voice heard.
  3. Potentially most effective, but very high effort, haven't seen it done: Start a political advocacy group that creates a scorecard for all politicians on how well they are doing on public safety issues. Publicize your scorecard, publish endorsements, so all the citizens in your city know who to vote for if they care about public safety. Once you have enough of a following, you will be able to command meetings with politicians to get your greivences heard.

What stops me is that I quite simply disagree with the laws against recreational drugs on a very fundamental level. I am sure that I am not the only one. I cannot in good conscience side with the cops who enforce such fundamentally illiberal laws.

If someone was stinking up a park with marijuana, and a woman with children asked you to get them to stop, would you have a bad conscience about that? If a street had become notorious for open air dealing and people shooting up and leaving needles around and the police chief told you to make arrests and clean up the street, would you feel bad about that?

AFAICT, urban police in the 2020's are not in the business of arresting people for private use of marijuana in their homes. Their not in the business of jailing people for personal use amounts of marijuana. They police drug problems only when it becomes a major public nuisance.

My problem with the drug war is not just rooted in my libertarian-esque attitudes about the proper bounds of government. It is also rooted in me seeing that the war on drugs turns the banned drugs into a highly valuable and easily produced form of underground currency and thus directly leads to the growth of drug gangs and cartels that are, clearly, responsible for a good share of the street crime that I am seeking to curb.

I think this was always motivated reasoning on the part of left-liberals. They wanted the cause of crime to be something that they opposed anyways, and so such arguments got signal boosted. But in you look at it, Singapore and China don't have a crime problem because of drug prohibition. Loosening up on drug prohibition hasn't reduced crime in the United States. And frankly, the strictness of drug prohibition was always overblown. I recommend this old blog post ( https://devinhelton.com/drug-crimes ) and specifically this excerpt from a news article about policing drug dealing:

That’s just talk to officers, who say the revolving-door punishment makes for an unwinnable game. They know the dealers and users they arrest today probably will be back tomorrow, selling the same drugs and prompting the same neighborhood complaints.

“The dopers know it, too,’’ says Sgt. Rick Lehman, a 26-year veteran who supervises the District 4 Violent Crime Squad. ”They’ll say, `I’ll be back out in a couple hours.’ "

The real drug war was never tried. Those dealers should have been getting a half-dozen whacks with a cane then put in a workhouse until they were able to move to gainful employment.

Singapore doesn’t have a drug problem, but it’s also a tiny island with a long history of state capacity. Much easier to control imports and exports. China might be a closer fit.

Either way, a call for harsher punishments is a call for lower standards of evidence. China is presumably fine with that. Here, the same civil rights which shape the rest of our national character are in the way of punishing obviously bad things.

Helton waffles on this. He acts like weapons searches justify the pretext of drug searches, then asks why we don’t make more drug arrests. He follows a careful explanation of how easy it is to pursue weapons charges by complaining that 25% of Obama’s commutations involved a weapons charge. I think he wants to have his cake and eat it too.

We can’t just look at people and tell whether they’re ready to get out of the workhouse. We certainly aren’t capable of ensuring gainful employment for newly freed individuals. C.f. Scott here. A policy that says “just hit them until they are ready to work” is missing all the important bits.

C.f. Scott here. A policy that says “just hit them until they are ready to work” is missing all the important bits.

Terrible essay. "If your plan doesn't have every single detail that will cover every single situation, in ways that pie-in-the-sky Bay Arean progressives will find acceptable, stop complaining and accept the status quo" is one of the precursor steps in that adage about "If liberals insist that only fascists will [do something], then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals refuse to do."

The real drug war was never tried. Those dealers should have been getting a half-dozen whacks with a cane then put in a workhouse until they were able to move to gainful employment.

The dealers should be getting the Singapore treatment. They won the drug war there.

People who call it the "war on drugs" seem to forget that in a war we mercilessly vaporize the enemy with thousands of tons of explosives.

If the US is going to keep drugs illegal, then perhaps the US really should invade Mexico and destroy the cartels using overwhelming force. As you point out, is it a war or isn't it? The Mexican government would protest but I have a hunch that most actual people who live in cartel-run communities would be glad.

The current situation, where drugs are illegal yet easily available and are being used by extremely savage organizations like the cartels to grow themselves, seems extremely sub-optimal.

People who call it the "war on drugs" seem to forget that in a war we mercilessly vaporize the enemy with thousands of tons of explosives.

I too support the complete and lethal destruction of all banks, hedge funds, government bodies and media outlets - those cocaine users need to be taught a lesson. The NYSE can get blown up for that matter as well.

Potentially most effective, but very high effort, haven't seen it done: Start a political advocacy group that creates a scorecard for all politicians on how well they are doing on public safety issues. Publicize your scorecard, publish endorsements, so all the citizens in your city know who to vote for if they care about public safety. Once you have enough of a following, you will be able to command meetings with politicians to get your greivences heard.

You left out step 4, get labelled a hate group by the SPLC. Or get infiltrated and coopted by activist who then turn the purpose of the organization into the exact opposite of what you founded it to do.

If you are reasonably careful, you can probably avoid getting labeled a hate group. However, you may do an enormous amount of work, have a partial victory, then five, ten years later when the public is safe and less concerned about crime they will retroactively demonize your group for criminalizing poor people, and so for all your work, you will be seen as a villain instead of a hero. This is what happened to some of the 'tough on crime' folks from the 80s and 90s.

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