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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32892 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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Many of these people are poor unfortunates.

But every society in history has figured out that harsh views about people who are merely unfortunate is a necessity of having a functional society. You can have the public and public institutions be unfair to people- indeed, it's impossible for them to be perfectly fair- they just need to work. And unfortunately being nice to drug addicts doesn't work.

Yes, some people fuck their lives up beyond redemption in this life and it's deeply unfair to them that their efforts to reform are for naught. I'm not saying it isn't. But other people don't need to be made to suffer because of it. Most heroine addicts never really get clean, try as they might, and when they get a batch with fentanyl in it and OD many other people breathe a sigh of relief and that's not because they're monsters. It's because that heroine addict, even a well intentioned heroine addict who really struggles to get clean, is creating negative externalities for everyone else, all the time. Asking us to deal with it is even more unfair; after all, we stable functional people didn't recommend him to get into drugs, and probably told him not to.

It's a rather bad idea to give wide masses of average people the impression that society will be harsh towards them should they simply have bad fortune. The view that society is merciless and unforgiving incentivizes drug addiction, crime and all sorts of social degeneracy.

What you punish you get less of, what you subsidize you get less more of. If society is merciless and unforgiving towards drug addicts, we will get less drug addiction, not more.

And calling drug addiction obtained through chasing a high "bad fortune" is spitting on those who really have experienced bad fortune.

What I disagree with is the proposition that "harsh views about people who are merely unfortunate is a necessity of having a functional society".

It is, though. The mechanism is that as soon as you decide that it's unacceptable to have hard views about the unfortunate, everyone in a bad spot gets called "unfortunate" because it would be arrogant and rude to say otherwise ("There but for the grace of God go I"). So because you cannot protect "unfortunate" from the creep of inclusion the self-destructive, you must allow harsh views of the unfortunate or people will assume you'll save them from their own self-destruction.

What you punish you get less of, what you subsidize you get less of

That second "less" should be "more" instead, no?

Yes, oops.

That is far from obvious to me. I could see the possibility that falling on harms times sans safety net leads to drug use, but I can’t see the causal mechanism of “if I don’t have a social safety net then bad times will follow so might as well drop out and drug up ensuring bad times”

I’m increasingly aware of just how much suffering and sin is caused by our belief that the world is hard and merciless. This belief—which can express itself as despair, or as the fearful drive to protect oneself above all else—makes it impossible to trust others. It makes social solidarity and even marriage extraordinarily difficult. The belief that we will be brutally punished if we set a foot out of line, that nobody will look out for us or help us or try to understand where we’re coming from, promotes abortion. It fuels addiction, by making us unwilling to admit where we’re needy, weak, or at fault.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-stillborn-child-leads-to-a-murder-charge-with-threat-of-life-in-prison/

"Unforgiving" would imply that society would remain harsh even after you got your act together, and I don't see anyone advocating for that. As for the rest I really don't see how it would incentivize it.

So does the view that society is endlessly tolerant and supportive of destructive behavior, and the view that society owes a debt to each meritless individual and deserves destructive behavior as a sort of retributive justice. And right now I'm fairly certain that various western societies are failing on the side of being excessively tolerant and enabling.

But the soul is still oracular, amid the market's din/List the ominous stern whisper, from the Delphic cave within/They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.

"It’s not a ‘compromise with sin’, per se, just discarding certain people who happen to be a net loss to us."

"Exactly what do you think a compromise with sin is?"

It's sin all around. It's a sin of omission to allow these people to prey on others and generally shit up the place (often literally). And it's a sin of commission to use the power of government to protect those people from their victims.

Enshittification of public spaces has massive knock on consequences regarding social cohesion that are unquantifiable by econometrics. Diminished prosocial trust in neighbours to look after ones property and kin willingly, much less competently, results in private sector security and care solutions that take away theoretically optimal agglomerated public services. Property value disparities due to unspecified 'concerns' (crime. its crime) about neighbourhood populations cause inefficient capital utilization and rectification measures, or outright capital destruction. Worst of all, faith in public institutions faltering causes underinvestment and thus under capability of theoretically optimal outcomes.

Good outcomes flow from good societies. You can't build a utopia and bring in street trash and expect them to magically shape up. There are no CCS chargers in shitty neighbourhoods because tweakers steal the copper, and there are no grocery stores in food deserts because shitheads keep stealing stuff.

I certainly do not condone anti-social behaviour in public, nor the ignoring of it by municipal officials. However, the response to it needs to be one that acknowledges all people, including the least of these, as human beings.

That passage just demonstrates that Christianity is indeed at the root of these problems. None of those people is Jesus Christ, and taking them in and feeding and clothing them will result in nothing but destruction of one's home, food, and clothing. Certainly one can acknowledge they are human beings; that makes them worse, not better, because they didn't have to become what they are.

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