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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 -
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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