This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think you are typical minding someone who is not typical minded. There were dozens, if not hundreds of things Susan could have done differently in how she waged the culture war in her position of chief censor of one of the largest media platforms in the world to prevent this from happening. Not just for her own family, but prevent it from happening for hundred or thousands of other families. She did not. I do not expect her to change her behavior.
We'll see. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Youtube will adopt as capricious and neurotic a censorship regime against drugs as they have against guns, Republicans, COVID "misinformation", claims of election denial, etc. But somehow I doubt it. I sincerely doubt it.
I really quite doubt your culture war complaints against her (valid as they are) have anything to do with her freshman son probably accidentally taking some drugs laced with fentanyl. I also doubt if she was previously a YouTube drug warrior that would have saved her son's life.
More options
Context Copy link
You can't change human nature. Young guy (so risk taker), college age, smart (so thinks he has it all figured out and won't end up like the dumb addicts) and wants some fun. Drugs are no big deal, the whole war on drugs thing is right wing conservative Republican freakout. Plenty of people do drugs and have no problems. Heck, his parents generation, so there's a good chance his parents did too, did drugs in their time and they're successful, economically productive citizens. All his friends and the people he's hanging out with are trying different things. It's just fun, he's not going to become an addict.
You can tell your kids till you're blue in the face "don't do thing" but you can never guarantee it will catch, never mind if you're poor or a billionaire thought leader.
designed to tyrannize innocent BIPOC, of course.
See Portland moving to re-criminalise drug possession. My oh my, who could ever have foreseen that only nice, respectable, non-criminal, non-junkie drug users who confined it to the weekend for recreational fun, didn't need to steal or rob to feed a habit, and were perfectly rational about their drug use would not be the only ones using drugs under the scheme of de-criminalisation? Who could have imagined that making it easier to have and use drugs would mean the types who shoot up in public, beg, steal, and act like feral dog packs would also be out and about taking advantage of this? Such a shocking surprise, why did nobody warn them about it? No, it's all the fault of those right-wing conservative Republicans this utopia never materialised!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Indeed, this is what I suspect. Wojcicicki and Troper (yes, the kid had a father) will indeed try to do something, but they'll do it by flailing in ways that wouldn't have helped their kid, that probably won't help anyone else's kid, and will do general harm.
Apocryphally the billionaire Bill Ackman who was recently also behind ousting of Claudine Gay from Harvard may have gotten redpilled by his own daughter who is apparently very into Western Marxism and overall Social Justice, at least according to what she - a History Teacher - follows on LinkedIn.
More options
Context Copy link
This is depressingly true. So much activism is centered on "root causes" which often expresses itself as trying to isolate people from the consequences of their actions. And it only makes things worse and worse. Doing the wrong thing is much worse than doing nothing.
I hope I'm wrong and she comes out hard for criminalizing drugs again and locking dealers in prison. But I doubt it.
Good news: they are currently illegal to possess and dealers get locked up. That's true almost everywhere in the US, Portland and Seattle excluded.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm still a believer in the desirability of liberty, if too blackpilled to be an actual libertarian, so I can't endorse that. Fentanyl and other opioids and most stimulants remain criminal, so I don't know what you mean by "criminalizing drugs again"; certainly I doubt he died from pot. The drug warrior approach might have saved him from death, though perhaps he'd have preferred it to the life in prison or drug rehab drug warriors would offer. If his death was indeed due to adulterated drugs or just drugs of unusual purity, then the libertarian approach might have saved him as well.
In many places in the United States, it is the policy of the police not to arrest anyone for drug possession, and even drug dealing is tolerated. For example, you can consume and sell drugs with impunity in my hometown of Seattle. This is what is meant by "decriminalization". Recriminalization simply means that existing laws are enforced again.
Recriminalization certainly doesn't mean that a young person would be thrown in prison for life for possessing a small amount of drugs. That is an absurd strawman.
‘If you get caught doing drugs, your life is over, and we WILL catch you if you try doing drugs,’ sounds like exactly what’s needed to fix the opiates epidemic.
You like shrooms, LSD, cannabis, ok, I don’t approve but we can argue about legalisation or appropriate penalties. But for anything harder, don’t do them, don’t associate with people who do them. It cannot possibly be that hard.
Q.E.D.
(and also this )
I’m not @jeroboam, though. And even his position would be a significant improvement.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The charge gets upgraded to possession with intent to distribute, for all but the most trivial amount of drugs. Maybe you can plea-bargain it down, but if the prosecutor is in a law and order mood that week (re-election coming up?), no. You don't get life for that but you do get prison time unless there's a diversion program (rehab). The conviction disqualifies you from most white collar jobs, but fortunately still qualifies you for the kind of marginal labor you can do to make just enough to get a fix until you get tossed into jail again.
This is just so far away from the world I'm living in.
In my city, people who have committed literally dozens of violent crimes are being released same day only to commit more offenses. Meanwhile, more than 1 in every 2000 people in my county died of a drug overdose last year, and drug use is practiced openly.
I am honestly starting to even doubt how many of the abuses of the War on Drugs even happened. Whenever I hear a story about "he dindu nothin', just some weed", you dig deeper and find a criminal with a rap sheet a mile long, and so they stick him with some trumped up drug charge. A bad thing? Possibly. But its a far cry from the paranoid fantasy that smoking a reefer could land you in prison for life.
The number of people in U.S. jails for drug possession approaches zero.
Let's not let more than 100,000 people die each year, and millions more become addicted because we're worried about very rare police or prosecutorial abuse. And if they really wanted to get you, they could get you for something else anyway.
FWIW, back in my youth in a deep Southern college town in the early 2010s the local cops still took the War on Drugs pretty seriously and weed was still very much illegal. I had multiple otherwise law-abiding friends get raided by the local narcotics task force and/or go to jail for simple possession. I myself had my apartment get raided by five undercover cops (aka. roided up thugs) because one of my retarded roommates sold a few Xanax pills to a confidential informant (I didn't go to jail because I didn't have anything illegal but it was a thoroughly unpleasant experience.).
Amusingly, aside from the driver's license impacts, the conditions to get a possession charge dismissed are virtually identical to those for a first offense DUI, aka. having to go through the local drug court's CLEAN program (at the cost of several grand). My buddy who'd been caught with a gram of weed and maybe drinks a six pack of beer a year was having to attend AA meetings.
The drug task force had their Pickett's Charge moment when they did a big raid on campus. They must've arrested a fed's kid or something because the FBI very quickly busted the former head of the force for embezzling seized funds and wound up throwing him in prison for a year.
A decade later and you can legally buy Delta 8 gummies that are vastly stronger than weed used to be (I don't habitually smoke weed, but the last time I took some of those gummies I was too fucked up to drive 14 hours later.), so I guess the cops gave up on weed enforcement, judging by how nonchalant the normies I know these days are about having it in their vehicles/on their person. Hell, one of the former cops who frequents the bar I work at usually has a weed vape on him.
I agree that what happened to your friends feels silly and excessive.
After all, what's wrong with a couple of nice college kids doing some party drugs, and maybe doing some light dealing on the side? The kids can handle it (usually) and then they'll grow up to be nice married men with nice white collar jobs. That's mostly true. I knew two kids who dealt drugs in college and they weren't complete fuckups.
But a lot of people can't handle drugs. You can see then stumbling around like zombies in pretty much every major city nowadays.
And so I'm willing to send a few nice college kids to AA for smoking a join if that means 100,000 people don't OD every year, with millions more lives ruined by addiction. Everything they said about the slippery slope was true after all.
And, honestly, the explosion of weed culture post-legalization is nothing to celebrate either.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It turns out it's possible to make both types of errors. Anarcho-tyranny is nothing new. No, getting busted for smoking marijuana even when drug warriors were at their strongest wouldn't put you in prison for life. It would give you a quick ticket to the underclass however.
Because they always charge possession with intent to distribute, and the legal presumption is if you possess more than an absolutely trivial quantity you have intent to distribute.
This isn't that sort of abuse; it's not targeted. It's just the sort of thing where whatever goes into the system gets ground up. It's not rare; it's routine.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Your claim is that her son wouldn't have OD'd if drug content was banned from YouTube?
I mean, maybe? The King is never played by the actor playing the King, but by all the other actors around him. Lots of people say that drugs are bad, but look at how online communities treat drug content compared to how they treat content that they think is actually bad. /r/drugs still exists. /r/coontown and associates were nuked 10 years ago. Lots of social information here.
Reddit allows many gun subs even though most progressive elites hate guns. I think the difference versus racist subreddits is that advertisers don’t mind depictions or discussion of drug use (after all, AMC had ads on Breaking Bad) but don’t want to be next to racism.
And, of course, /r/drugs is probably one of the best deterrents against drug use on the internet. Scrolling down even the current main page there is horrific story after horrific story.
You're not wrong. They should quit the crappy 'drugs bad' PSA and show stuff from that subreddit instead.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
/r/drugs still exists, but the question is if drugs would still exist if /r/drugs did not.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link