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Take I wrote on increasing calls in Republican and bi-partisan spaces for a Military intervention into Mexico against the Cartels, and why this would inevitably lead to armed conflict within America itself, along with a possible death spiral of instability in the wider North American region.
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Notes -
On the one hand, I agree that US counter-insurgency '''doctrine''' is abysmal and the political dimension would be even worse. Other powers would be eager to fuel this conflict. China and Russia would love to tie the US down in their own hemisphere and so they might aid the cartels. Arguably, they already have been, China sending precursor chemicals to the cartels. A very reasonable argument.
On the other hand, I strongly believe that drug gangs are no match for state power, if used effectively. States have large forces of better equipped, better trained troops. The US has the surveillance infrastructure, wiretapping, hardware backdoors, drones, satellites. The US is (in theory) united while the cartels are divided. At bare minimum you don't see the FBI torturing their competitors in the CIA to death on Liveleak. The US has a stranglehold over drug financing - is it so hard to arrest the drug dealers? Drug dealers have to be contactable by the lowest-IQ, chemically unbalanced dregs of society - how can police be unable to find them and work their way up the distribution chain? They usually have huge tattoos all across their bodies! How could it be that a military acclaimed as the world's strongest is unable to root out some thugs on their own border, thugs that are effectively killing hundreds of thousands of US citizens?
Now I check, cartels are expanding into Europe, so it's not just an American problem: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230116-latin-american-cocaine-cartels-bring-violence-to-europe
If it is impossible for the US as is to defeat the cartels, surely this tells us something important about liberal democracy. China would whisk these people away, perhaps never to be seen again. That much is beyond doubt, China wiped the floor with its opiates problem in the 1940s and 50s, when it was much poorer and less technologically advanced than the US. Addicts were sent to compulsory camps to get clean. Drug dealers disappeared. They did a similar intensive suppression operation as soon as some Uyghur separatists got violent. The insurgency was crushed. China has a similar kind of serious viciousness to the cartels in that they don't pull their punches. The post assumes a half-baked, ill-planned hesitant series of reactionary operations, where the cartels get to adapt to drones and each new tactic the US deploys in series, rather than being overwhelmed. Cartel tactics of assassinating leaders would also be effective, causing oppressive checkpoints and blowback. Incompetently targeted US drone strikes would also cause militias to form against the government, he says. This is fairly believable.
In contrast, Afghanistan, under the new Taliban government, has pretty effectively smashed poppy production. Afghanistan was 80-90% of world heroin production! They just ban it and enforce the ban and It Just Works, even though there are a million good reasons why it shouldn't.
https://www.usip.org/publications/2023/06/talibans-successful-opium-ban-bad-afghans-and-world
In Helmand, by far Afghanistan’s largest opium-producing province, the area of poppy cultivation was cut from over 129,000 hectares (ha) in 2022 to only 740 ha as of April 2023.
(I personally interpret the rest of the article as disguised seething at the Taliban's success where the expert-led US approach failed, from one of said US experts. Maybe he's right and the ban will fail.)
The cartels, the Taliban and China seem to have a level of viciousness that pays off for them, while the US doesn't. Even El Salvador even managed to suppress the cartels fairly effectively, despite tiny resources. If El Salvador can win where the US would lose, the US model is seriously flawed. There's no straight tradeoff between liberty and safety in this issue - if the government can't keep you safe and free from cartels as in 30% of Mexico, then you're just living under a different and worse government. No safety, no freedom.
I think you're misunderstanding... The US probably could cripple 50% of the domestic US drug trade by 5x-ing the US prison population, which in and of itself might start a hot ethnic conflict on a par with the 1970s (not all Americans use drugs equally, and of those that do they're certainly not equal in their likelihood to get caught)...
The challenge is Hostily imposing this on another country of 126 million, where something like 30-50% of the local government is just pretending to be an ally whilst taking bribes and actively integrating with the cartels.
China has a problem like this, it's called corruption, and Chinese Corruption is absolutely impossible to root out not least because there isn't really a non-corrupt faction and every arrest for corruption is really just backdoor purging by the various factions.
So lets say America goes balls to the wall in Mexico, Full invasion of Iraq. HALF A MILLION US military personnel and then 200-400 thousand continuously once established, This is basically all the US can spare, with 1.4 million active-duty military personnel total, this is everyone but the people actually maintaining the bases and operating the Ships back in the US and around the empire...
The thing is that wasn't enough in Iraq. There was the entire war during the occupation which was only reduced down to a dull roar with the surge.
And this was Iraq with a population one third the Size of Mexico, a Shia Majority, and Kurdish minority that were being empowered by the US intervention against their hated Sunni minority rival who was the one actually fighting the US... And even then it didn't work, and Sunni ISIS arose within a decade, and the country is still divided between militias and local warlords.
You do that in a country with 3x the population, 2x the GDP, several massive cities, and insurgent networks that are basically already adapted to resist US surveillance (these guys have been paranoid about cellphones since the 80s, many cartel bosses simply do not allow cellphones within 200 meters of them, since they assume the NSA is already going full tilt spying on them, and that will be all of them instantly if the ones that don't start getting picked off)...
And also 10 cities with populations over a million where drone strikes basically can't be done, one of which is a ten-million-person mega-city that will just devour an army that tries to occupy it...
Oh ya and it's a permanently profitable trade. So you have to maintain this, for decades... because there's no way you're getting rid of all the corrupt Mexican officials, many of whom are popular and elected, and many of whom are the military... and it will instantly replace itself the second you leave.
Rand had a paper to the effect that The golden ratio for hostile occupations of conquered people is 1 soldier per 50 civilians... that's what was used in Germany after WW2 and Kosovo, America's 2 successful occupations.
America would need 2-3 million to do that in Mexico, or twice the number of people in the entire military... so you'd need a draft, which would be resisted, the resistance of which would be funded by the cartels... which would require further military force and straining of America's already stretched thin police to put down...
You see how this quickly becomes the American state itself being stretched thin, across AMERICA, even if the government magically bites the bullet and goes full force from the start, instead of making the easy call like they did in Vietnam and Iraq and massively under-committing thus letting their enemy organize and create networks, and adapt to the hardest hitting tactics, whilst the politicians are still calling their forces in country "Advisors" and telling the American people they're not at war, whilst various military planners are actually kind-of secretly hoping something will happen and dozens of Americans will be killed so they can have popular support to actually do something that might be kindof effective...
It'll inevitably be something America sleepwalks backward into with some minor commitment, turning into casualties, turning into bigger commitments, turning into more casualties, turning into outrage, turning into a war, turning into a Quagmire... turning into Vietnam...
Except America would never be able to pull out of this Vietnam because it's RIGHT THERE, and the conflict would immediately be inside America's border.
El Salvador succeeded in its campaign because it's a country that was both unnecessary to the drug trade (so once the margins got high enough the trade could go elsewhere), it had the security force fully committed, it had local political will... and it did vastly less than you're thinking because they took out only 3 specific gangs not the trade itself (strongly suspect the El Salvadorean regime is backdoor participating in the international trade for personal profit just like Noriega, and their policy is just making a deal with the people to not let it affect El Salvador directly... so there was a massive profit motive in El Salvadorean security forces crushing MS-13, they were probably their rivals)
Agreed with the general direction of your argument, but nitpick concerning post-war Germany: Firstly, the presence of the Soviet zone with Soviet occupation methods provided an additional "good cop/bad cop" dynamic. Secondly, it's not like the West German state was built ex nihilo without any relation to pre-war regime (probably it would have been impossible as everyone who strove to be someone had no option than associate with pre-war regime or become resistance fighter, a heroic but also often a dead-end career choice; random google result.)
The point is, replicating the feat that was "post-war Germany" would require more than 1 to 50 ratio of soldiers, but also a big stick in form of a "worse option" (better yet, a common enemy) and a buy-in from the prominent members of civil society and state apparatus. The case for post-war Japan had many similarities; less sure about post-war South Korea, but they had a military dictatorship. Conclusion: If wants to run an occupation with sheer force only, counting sufficient soldiers, one would need to study other case studies, from someone else's books. Maybe Soviet methods, which generally worked for maintaining the Soviet control for some time (at a cost which they finally were no longer willing to pay, thus not lasting a full century).
And all of the above is ignoring the difference between fighting a state or a polity (who have state-like-goals) and fighting a drug enterprise (which have other kind of goals). What good is sending 2m soldiers to fight the War on Drugs in the enemy territory if the enemy general's reaction is "many potential customers have moved closer to supply, saving on the logistics costs"?
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There's 400000 Mexican soldiers and national guardsmen the US could train, plus a few hundred thousand more from the police.
And, like the Afghan Army, the Mexicans know that when the US leaves, they’ll have to stay and deal with whatever system follows. This is why US full-invasion imperialism can never work, everybody knows that the Yankee will go home when the political winds in Washington change, leaving his local collaborators to the wolves.
Mexico is different to Afghanistan - it's right on America's border and as a result, America has a strong interest in it (it wouldn't even the the first time it's been invaded). Whereas there was no US interest in Afghanistan once OSB was gone, and indeed it was on the backburner less than two years after the invasion.
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Why not just get rid of the drug dealers? The people who everyone knows are massive crooks? The ones out on the street with guns at 3 AM? The ones in the open-air drug markets? How hard is it to find these people? Plus they're already in the US, already right under the nose of the police.
The US 'fought' its 'campaign' grossly incompetently. Catch and release was official policy. It was in the Hanania Afghanistan papers tweets (that I can't easily link to now thanks to Musk), there was this unofficial reminder from some officer that it was the third time they'd captured this particular terrorist, so really they should just shoot him. The USSR and UK rolled right over Iraq and Iran back in WW2 like it was a doddle, while they were doing a dozen other things at the same time. Nobody dared to resist armies that were serious about fighting.
Anyway, invading Mexico is unnecessary and a mess. Even so, if the US decided to do things correctly, they could win. The British ruled India, a far bigger population at far greater distance with far worse technology with a skeleton force and ran a profit. They knew how to delegate (something the US could learn, as opposed to stuffing money into corrupt, worthless puppets) but also how to be tough with people who defied them, blowing mutineers apart with cannons. Heaven help the civilians who resisted the US occupation of Germany - they probably would've just been starved to death even more than the others who weren't even being targeted.
You can't just get rid of the drug dealers because drug users expand into the role as opportunity and demand allows.
I've know dozens of people who've used drugs (Marijauna, coke, psychedelics, etc.) and fulfilled the dealer role at various points, some near professionally.
Basically Supply-side drug enforcement doesn't work, you can maybe get the trade to shift or change shape or increase the marginal price of drugs by 50% but the structural margins keep new cartels, smuggling networks and gangs forming...
To have any success without turning to nation into a totalitarian police state you'd have to start going after users, for being users.
Start arresting randomly for disruptive behaviour, public drunkenness, etc. then Drug test immediately, then charge with possession and consumption, with follow on charges... and you'd have to do that to millions... And heaven help you if middle-class white kids aren't being caught up into it and there's now a massive racial dynamic and revolt, and heaven help you if you actually make upper-midlde-class white American's suffer the consequences of their preferred policies and have THEIR kids dragged off and imprisoned for years... or they'll revolt.
Basically any intervention you could do is either completely ineffective or would be totalitarian in some manner that would start a revolt.
Singapore simply hung the dealers. Seemed to work pretty good.
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It worked in Davao.
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Kill enough drug dealers and you can make drugs sufficiently difficult to get that normal people don’t have access to them anymore. There’s always going to be a few weirdos doing drugs, sure, but you can keep it far enough away from anyone who doesn’t opt in that it doesn’t matter on a societal level.
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Because for fuck's sake we have civil goddamn liberties! [Insert incoherent libertarian jumping up and down and screeching here]. We have a magnificent Constitution that, while somewhat anemic of late due to the metaphorical blood-sucking of various state's attorneys offices who all swear that this latest outrage upon the Constitution is what will finally this time for good let them get all those nasty criminals (and when it doesn't this latest outrage is somehow never rolled back), provides certain protections. Among them is that we can't just round people up because we "know" they're crooks, or because they're out on the street with a gun at 3am, or because they're in a high-crime environment. Because this wonderful, beautiful Constitution provides even the scummiest of scumbags, the most worthless of oxygen-thieves, the same protections as anyone else. We can of course argue theory vs. practice until the cows come home, but while we're speaking in broad generalizations let's speak in broad generalizations.
You cannot just round up all the bad guys because we have decided as a society that that's not okay, and frankly I value my right to not be rounded up because someone thinks I look like or act like a bad guy vastly more than I value... well... literally anything to do with Mexico. Don't get me wrong, I like keeping up with the various "oh my gawsh can you believe they did that?" goings-on in Mexico as much as, if not more than, the next murder-porn watcher, but that's all it is. It's murder-porn. My life is not appreciably worse because people buy fentanyl and overdose. I have the fullest of empathy for those people, and sincerely wish for a better system than the one we currently have for dealing with addiction, but downtown Baltimore, for example, is going to be a shithole no matter if the local dealer is slinging crack vials for $10 or fentanyl caps for $8. In part because of those civil liberties that I adore so very much. That's the trade-off. We get to sit on this forum and bitch about the US government without being tossed into an organ farm, and various scumbag drug dealers get to be scumbag deal drugs without being tossed into prison.
What kind of liberties do you have in America?
Seriously! The Christian baker does not have a choice, he MUST bake the cake for the homosexual couple, regardless of what he thinks or wants to do. Go near an airport - oh that's a liberty-free zone. Privacy? Not if the NSA has anything to say about it. Don't have the right demographics in your company? Civil rights violation (and a big payout if too many of the right demographics fail your test). Disliked by the government? Get ready to be de-banked.
Be a world-renowned researcher and have consensual sex with someone in the workplace? That's it for your career, the moment she decides it wasn't appropriate: https://www.thefp.com/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cancer-researcher
Stupid, violent criminals get free housing on probation and then a $100,000/year prison cell after they murder productive members of society: https://www.karlstack.com/p/his-name-was-seth-smith?s=w
Under the latest innovation of US 'civil liberties' the parole searches that caught the killer would now be illegal.
And of course drug dealers are at perfect liberty to go around wrecking people's lives with impunity to the state, turning urban centres into massive shitholes?
I don't see how getting rid of drug dealers has anything to do with policing dissent (which we know the US already does a great deal of, thanks to the Twitter papers). It's pure, textbook anarcho-tyranny. The way the US constitution is implemented in practice today works primarily to protect and patronize the scummiest and most worthless oxygen-thieves, at the expense of ordinary (and especially productive) members of society.
And society does affect you. If you're paying taxes, some of it will go towards the costs of overdoses and drug crime, social, economic, medical, political. If you're enjoying public services, they'd be better if the US didn't have this problem. If you enjoy the fruits of industry and labour, you'd be better off if those people were working jobs as opposed to doubled over in a ditch.
One can say essentially anything - even something as extreme as "I want to kill every last fucking jew in this country" or "Zoomer Hitler should overthrow the US Government and institute white racial rule" on an anonymous website and be constitutionally protected from legal action. And that's not just theoretical, thousand of people say things like that on the internet and face no consequences whatsoever. You might be banned from the website - maybe (incredibly unlikely) you'll be fired if you make your name public - but that's about it.
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I have the right to go on a website like this and say "holy shit I hate the government and the President so much it's almost unreal, I sincerely hope every single edifice comes toppling down" and I will not have my IP backtraced, I will not be subject to the Eye of Sauron, I will not be imprisoned, and I will not simply disappear off the face of the earth. This is a freedom that is enjoyed in a vanishingly small number of other countries. This is not a freedom enjoyed by subjects of the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany (where I will note it is also illegal to make disparaging remarks about other nations' heads of state), Iceland, Italy, The Netherlands, or Spain. I'm deliberately limiting myself to those nations in Europe, as trying to discuss Asian, African, or South American nations would just be me extending this dramatically and unnecessarily. To quickly dive into the other two North American nations, this freedom is also not present in Canada or Mexico. Despite all the efforts of cancel culture, despite all the efforts of those who loudly cry out that "hate speech isn't protected speech" - we still have freedom of speech. It is a precious, wonderful thing.
I have the right to own a gun. Is this right completely uninfringed? No. It's not. But is there a single other country in the world where I can take a 15 minute drive to my local gun shop, buy a brand new top-of-the-line semi-automatic rifle, and walk out with it not ten minutes later? Maybe Yemen, but Yemen has its own problems.
I have the right to an attorney if I am to be prosecuted for a crime, I have the right to freely practice my religion which has been suppressed by so many countries so many times that it is a literal meme. I have the right to a trial by jury, the right to confront my accuser(s), protections against compelled self-incrimination and double jeopardy. I cannot be enslaved, I have the right to vote, I cannot be poll taxed. These are all things that we take for granted because we simply assume, well yes of course we have those things. These are incredible, wonderful things that simply did not exist for the majority of human history.
The Christian Baker does not have to bake the cake. Not for the gays, not for the trans. He does not have to bake the cake.
If you are within 100 miles of the border you are subject to generally more lenient requirements for routine searches, so long as they are associated with that border crossing. Despite what various memes may say, this does not mean that if you are stopped two miles from Boston Logan or DCA or LAX or what-have-you that you suddenly have no civil rights and the government can do whatever it wants. This is why the TSA can x-ray your luggage before you get on a plane, it doesn't mean that CBP is patrolling downtown Portland because it's within 100 miles of an airport. It is a very limited exception. A routine stop and brief questioning by CBP by the border? Sure. Searching your car? No. See Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, 413 U.S. 226 (1973).
Yes the NSA is a horrible awful no-good government overreach that should have been strangled at birth. See my previous point about "anemic of late."
That is certainly a view, the opposing view is that maybe the government should make sure that companies aren't engaging in routine aggressive hiring discrimination. The NYC public schools exam case has been discussed on this very forum in detail, especially here so I'll just recap the salient point:
"IQ testing job candidates (even if/when there are outcome differences between groups) is 100% legal in the US. The military does it. Countless civilian employers do it (those famous ‘Google interview questions’ are IQ tests). Police do it. There are companies like Wonderlic, Pearson etc who make a lot of money selling these tests to employers."
I'm drawing a blank on this one, what's the context here? It's not Operation Chokepoint is it? Because that's not what happened there.
What does this have to do with civil liberties?
From your article: "The main reason for this manslaughter plea, then, had nothing to do with mitigating circumstances. The entire reason for is that Walker initially pled no-guilty to murder, and all the evidence against Walker was circumstantial. There is no DNA linking Walker to the case, just testimony. So the charges were downgraded to ensure a conviction."
Yes, when the prosecution is unable to prove, in a court of law, that someone is guilty of Charge A, they do not simply wave a wand and magically convict them of Charge A, instead they try for (and get a conviction of) Charge B. It may be a lesser offense, it may not ensure that the best justice is done, but thank fucking god we do not live in a society where the prosecuting attorney can wave such a wand. That's one of those pesky civil liberties I was talking about. They apply even to scumbags and criminals. They apply especially to scumbags and criminals, because as a much smarter man than I once said:
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
You do not have to like the scoundrels in question, you do not have to think that they are good people who deserve the benefit of the doubt, but they do get the same protections of the law that you or I get.
While I see that the substack article says that, I don't see that in the linked tweets discussing the reforms. The only mention of "parole" in that thread is that officers will no longer ask about parole/probation status, which is incredibly trivial when those officers can and will ask for your name, which they can put into the computer in their squad car, which will then show if you are on parole or probation. The officers in question only got Walker on their radar because of a tip, not because of a parole search, while they did later conduct a parole search, I assure you that it was simply the quickest way to conduct a search. I have little doubt that a Judge would have signed a search warrant, given that there was probable cause all over the place. There was a littany of circumstantial evidence including a witness who said that Walker confessed to him. That is, by any jurisprudence I'm familiar with, more than sufficient for a warrant.
If you have a solution beyond "fuck it just lock everyone who looks kinda funny up" I'm willing to consider it.
I'm not sure what the thrust of this is, could you reword it please?
And as I said, I would love a better system for dealing with addiction than the one we have now. But I quite simply would rather live in a somewhat scuzzy rundown democracy with civil liberties than a nice orderly police state. That's my personal preference, not a statement on overall morality, ethics, or right and wrong. You are free to disagree, you are free to say that you would rather live in the police state, but I simply don't believe the tradeoff is worth it.
But the photographer must take the photos. She advertised her artistic livelihood as a business instead of an art, a public accommodation for commercial purposes instead of a custom contract with each client.
Worse, though the baker could create and deliver cakes without ever being a part of the ceremony, the photographer must insert herself into every part of the ceremony without expressing disgust or disagreement with her clients’ decisions, or risk ruining the event itself and being sued out of business.
This is akin to forcing Catholic doctors to choose between losing their licenses or performing abortions and gender-affirming surgeries. It was not a moral hazard when they started their training, often accumulating high debt loads with the assumption they would be in that career for life.
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You may be yelling into the void here with this comment, but I’d argue this deserves one of the monthly top comment awards.
Everyone should yell into the void at times. It places you in good company.
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Great comment, deserved more votes.
The contrast between what you say and gp's comment speaks to the utter detachment from historical context that possesses most reactionaries (ironic given their yearning for historical politics). Historic people mostly did not have the sort of universal freedom and capability that modern americans have, either in the 'negative' or 'positive' senses. Any reactionary politics has to find higher values than individual liberty and lack-of-oppression, instead of just claiming that 'liberals are the real
racistsoppressors' and claiming a nebulous illiberal reaction is the only way to protect people from cherry-picked grievances that are rarer than any point in history. And while reactionary politics has exploded over the last ten years on the internet ... almost all of its popularizers have similarly incoherent grievances to OP's. Even if one has far-right sympathies ... do we really want to select the most capable social climber among these people and give them absolute power? I don't think the net effect of that is positive, even if we can acknowledge race and IQ or whatever. And this practical impotence extends to areas where I think they're correct in theory. The far-right can meme about eugenics and killing the weak all they want (based on racial or martial criteria for reasons that were the most legible / practical criteria in 2000 BC but no longer are today), but it's the progressives who are actually doing something useful or good with things like embryo selection.More options
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Multiple court cases have declared that that is not true.
My understanding is that the baker's local and state governments have smiled and nodded at his wins in court, and then continued attempting to ruin him. Is your understanding different?
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OK, I amend it to baking the trans cake:
https://www.cpr.org/2023/01/26/colorado-baker-loses-appeal-over-transgender-birthday-cake-jack-phillips/
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Except it wasn't for over a hundred years. Perhaps the understanding of "civil liberties" which obtained during those times was better? E.g. Miranda is a comparatively-recent innovation which correlates with a significant reduction in police efficacy, particularly among those with prior felony records (Leo, 1996). Since multiple-recidivists are responsible for a vastly disproportionate share of the crime in society, including large numbers of un-reported crimes (Farrington et. al. 2021), Miranda's effect on public order - particularly in high-crime and low public order communities where cooperation with law enforcement is significantly depressed - is probably undersold by the subsequent literature.
It takes effort and incentives to create a high-trust, orderly society that can have nice things like beautiful and civilized city centers.
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