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ymeskhout  1yr ago (text post)   3219 thread views

The Bailey Podcast E034: An Unhinged Conversation on Policing

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In this episode, an authoritarian and some anarchist(s) have an unhinged conversation about policing.

Participants: Yassine, Kulak, & Hoffmeister25 [Note: the latter's voice has been modified to protect him from the progressive nanny state's enforcement agents.]

Links:

About the Daniel Penny Situation (Hoffmeister25)

Posse comitatus (Wikipedia)

Lifetime Likelihood of Going to State or Federal Prison (BJS 1997)

The Iron Rule (Anarchonomicon)

Eleven Magic Words (Yassine Meskhout)

Blackstone's ratio (Wikipedia)

Halfway To Prison Abolition (Yassine Meskhout)

Defunding My Mistake (Yassine Meskhout)

Recorded 2023-09-16 | Uploaded 2023-09-25

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@ymeskhout curious if you have thoughts on my parent comment? Essentially, from first principles I really don't see why the 'war on drugs' is unwinnable, it'd just take sacrifices that are (imo) very obviously justified when compared to 100k overdose deaths per year. However, first principles reasoning goes wrong as often as it goes right, so if my speculation is obviously wrong I'd love to be pointed to something explaining why.

The basic problem is that people love drugs and are willing to pay enormous gobs of money to get them. Other people are more than willing to accept the gobs of cash to supply them. Everything flows from that.

From first principles I agree with you that the 'war on drugs' is theoretically winnable, but I disagree the costs are worth it and also disagree with your cost estimates. The most obvious scenario I think you should consider is the number of prison inmates dying of overdoses. There were 249 overdoses in 2018 which is a mortality rate of 5 per 100k, whereas the population at large had an overdose mortality rate of 20 per 100k that same year.

I don't know if the cohorts are directly comparable but the stats can either refute or support your thesis. On one hand, you can cut the overdose mortality rate by 75%. On the other hand, everyone needs to live in a prison to reach that point.

but I disagree the costs are worth it and also disagree with your cost estimates

I think that management that's competent and willing to innovate, combined with using new technology, would bring down costs and reduce side-effects a ton. People as smart and self-driven as those that've driven SV innovation for the past decade could come up with, try, and iterate on new solutions. I'm not sure what it'd look like - of course - but here's another idea: Mass deployment of improved versions of actually-currently-existing opioid vaccines, which have been under development for the past decade. "Antiopioid immunopharmacotherapies (e.g., conjugate vaccines) that sequester drug peripherally, preventing opioids from reaching targeted receptors in the brain". Current versions seem to last for around a year. Maybe offer free drugs at a clinic for a week if you take a long-acting version of that at the end. Maybe there'd just be an arms race between novel synthetic opioids and the vaccines (which the synthetics would win). But my main point is that it's easy to imagine a stasis where the government's options are to keep doing what it's done for the past six decades, which is a losing position, but it's possible for intelligent people to create new techniques and social systems that change the rule of the game.

And prisons are the opposite of 'competent management and willingness to innovate and experiment'. (effective innovation in coercive government will look pretty different than tech innovation though, it's a lot easier to write a thousand lines of code and deploy it than it is to create new physical infrastructure and train a few thousand people).

But my main point is that it's easy to imagine a stasis where the government's options are to keep doing what it's done for the past six decades, which is a losing position, but it's possible for intelligent people to create new techniques and social systems that change the rule of the game.

Maybe it's easy to imagine it but I don't see any good evidence that it's likely to be implemented. I think it's plausible to expect "opioid vaccines" to get better, in which case cool. But vaccines are a different approach than the enforcement you described in your previous comment.

I didn't bring up prisons as an example of competent management, but as an example of extreme surveillance and enforcement and how much that can reduce overdoses.

Just as a out-of-left-field sanity check: what's your take on the Opium Wars? "Queen Victoria did nothing wrong"? How did the Chinese manage to get the addiction problem back under control? Was it worth the cost?

You're going to love my answer: I don't have enough information on that situation to form an opinion. Short of diving into the particulars, I'd be operating on crude and reflexive heuristic principles (banning drugs is bad, but responding with a military invasion is worse? etc.).

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