site banner
PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29325 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Portland is not quite progressive enough. Why not go all the way like Canada and have MAID for drug addicts? Now that's a compassionate way to handle social issues.

As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of.

Don't worry, there is still time for even more deaths for your buck.

  • -23

Antagonistic, we've asked you many times not to do this. Last time was a 3 day ban.

7 day ban this time.

Wow ... . You're just <negative outgroup stereotype 1> and <negative outgroup stereotype 2>. There are a hundred thousand comments like this every day on twitter, and I like that this forum is a break from that.

Which 'negative outgroup stereotype' are you referring to? Is MAID not an existing policy? Is drug tolerance not also an existing policy? What bothers you specifically, that I refer to these 2 existing policies and associate them with the people who generally support them, or that I refer to these 2 existing policies in conjunction?

Are we not allowed to talk about specific policies if somebody can hypothetically infer that these policies lead to bad outcomes?

This sort of extremely sarcastic and antagonistic writing style is against the rules of this forum.

Why not go all the way like Canada and have MAID for drug addicts?

This feels mostly boo-outgroup. Setting aside both the moral arguments and factual issues of how Canada uses MAID, it's obvious that most of the drug addicts already have access to effective lethal injections if they wanted to use them, so the ones who are alive are probably ones who don't want help dying.

it's obvious that most of the drug addicts already have access to effective lethal injections if they wanted to use them, so the ones who are alive are probably ones who don't want help dying.

Yet fentanyl is a notoriously lethal drug. It appears hard to argue that somebody voluntarily taking fentanyl or products routinely laced with fentanyl is not somewhere, seeking death.

Perhaps I just have a tendency to find slopes slippery, but a community that chooses to turn a blind eye to this type of practice seems to be practicing some form of soft MAID. If supporters of 'soft-MAID' are uncomfortable with calling it MAID, why is that? Is there something wrong with helping people end their suffering?

I don't really know about this fuzzier sense of "seeking death". Maybe that is what some of them are doing. Speaking as guy who fully expects to take his eventual death into his own hands but doesn't expect to ever abuse opioids, it's not what I would do if I were seeking death, but I can see how it could be that way for some. Certainly it's not a thing to do if you're unwilling to risk death. Regardless, I don't think most of the ones who are alive are seeking death in the immediate sense -- the sense in which they would actually choose to make use of a MAID kit if it were offered to them.

I grant there's not a bright line between

(1) "refrain from taking away the means for people to kill themselves"

(2) "actively give people the means to kill themselves",

(3) "kill people at their request",

(4) "kill people people at your discretion"

It's appealing to try to erect a fence between (1) and (2), which separates decriminalization of potentially lethal drugs from MAID. A fence between (1) and (2) looks like making it generally permissible to possess but not to distribute. But of course this runs into problems with the presumption of "intent to distribute", and with the substantial overlap between users and distributors.

Personally, I don't care so much if people who want to die actually do so, and don't believe it's possible or desirable to spend a lot of effort to prevent this in general. It is worth spending effort to make people less inclined to self-destruction in the first place, and maybe keeping them from initially getting their hands on substances that set them off down the spiral is an important part of that. Ultimately I just don't know enough about why these people are abusing these drugs in the first place -- hard to believe it's that they don't know what road they're stepping into when they start.

I suspect the root of the problem is that we don't know how to build the "rat park" mentioned elsewhere in this thread, neither can we actually stop the movement of the fentanyl, so none of this going to get "solved" in any way that doesn't look like brutally grinding a bunch of unfortunates under society's heel. It's not surprising that this is unpalatable enough for people to try just looking the other way.

Where do you think "not providing free Narcan" would fall on that scale?

I consider the whole thing itself as just another aspect of a sick society. It is valuable to go and attempt to rescue some of these poor souls, like a one-man Rittenhouse crusading against urban Covid super-spreaders, but ultimately, it's like bailing out with a spoon.

It's hard to say exactly where charity should be placed, but there does appear to be some more effective approaches to drug containment, namely in El Salvador or the Philippines, we don't necessarily have to throw our hands in the air. 'Aaaah these people are just desperate, no can do, drugs will just keep flowing' Which I suppose would still largely be included in

"solved" in any way that doesn't look like brutally grinding a bunch of unfortunates under society's heel.

Whether your child OD's, cuts their genitals, becomes a girlboss dogmom, a journalist, join the reddit volunteers for Ukraine or immolates themselves for or against Israel... It's all some failure of parenting that's unfortunately incredibly common because overcoming the odds requires some serious skills in this century.

It's cute we can still laugh at the "A|B testing" ravaging our cities like this is all a Sim City game and we can load after the aliens destroyed the map.

It's cute we can still laugh at the "A|B testing" ravaging our cities like this is all a Sim City game and we can load after the aliens destroyed the map.

It is cute but I think it's actually good to run experiments? Don't we bemoan vetocracies and general unwillingness by politicians to take risks? Initiative petitions (referendums) appear to be a good outlet for some direct democracy.

We do get some good outcomes from time to time and the fact that we rolled back so quickly is a credit.

If you asked this question two years ago I'm sure the sentiment would have been that the West Oregon leftists that dominate state political power would never roll back such a pro-drug law that was wrapped in racial justice.

Sick society, sure, hard to argue with that, but I can't believe a Philippines-style approach makes it any healthier -- what's the evidence that executing however many thousand people there even improved the problem at all? Last I heard, the outgoing Duterte government didn't make much of an attempt to quantify the positive effects the several-year "reign of terror" had on stopping drug crime. Certainly haven't heard the compelling evidence that it worked well enough to justify normalizing the "shoot a guy and sprinkle some meth on him" tactics that police were empowered to use against civilians (and maybe civilians against each other).

I don't know who's laughing about how the need to test our policies to see if they work entails the risk of making people's lives worse, and I'm certainly not seeing how some Judge Dredd approach is so self-evidently superior that it wouldn't need to be empirically evaluated.

Many of us are living proof.

Courts imposed the death penalty more and more often and, by the late Middle Ages, were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many offenders dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, the homicide rate plummeted from the 14th century to the 20th . The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication, or extreme stress. The decline in personal violence is usually attributed to harsher punishment and the longer-term effects of cultural conditioning. It may also be, however, that this new cultural environment selected against propensities for violence.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470491501300114

It looks like it took the police killing at least 6k people, possibly up 12k or even higher, to reduce the number of murders over that period by ~15k cumulatively. Probably a fair bit of "substitution" there, assuming drug gangsters were murdering each other at high rates before -- some of this must be criminal-on-criminal killings being replaced by cop-on-criminal killings. Still, it does look like it was plausibly a net win on that measure -- have to be believe at least that police killings were better targeted at criminal elements than the background murders were. And it sounds like Filipinos broadly supported the effort. Still not sure how much it cut down on the actual drug use, but cutting down on the associated crimes is probably more important.

El Salvador, yeah there it does sound like they made big gains with locking up all the gangsters, don't know if they had to kill a lot of people to do that, or if US accusations that Bukele cut deals gang leaders are true. Easier to know who to go after in a place where the criminals are basically tattooing their criminal affiliations on their faces.

High-end organised crime produces mid- and high-level leaders where everyone knows they are guilty of all the crimes, but they can't be prosecuted due to some combination of plausible deniability that they are ordering the crimes committed by their subordinates and the ability to prevent prosecution by bribing or intimidating some combination of cops, prosecutors, witnesses, juries and judges.

If you have a problem with that kind of organisation, going Judge Dredd/Nayib Bukele is going to improve things, even if it violates rule-of-law principles. The same is true to a lesser extent of full-on lawfare - there is a whole load of things which Federal law enforcement does which are tyrannical overreach when done to a small-town doctor accused of overbilling Medicare but which became SOP for good reasons during the period when the Feds were fighting the Mafia.

Policing disorganised crime is harder because effective deterrence relies on distinguishing between the chavs who are actively criming and the chavs who are just chaving.

Fentanyl is only lethal because illegal manufacturers and distributors can't control the dose well enough. In terms of therapeutic index, it's safer than other opiates -- that is, the ratio of a lethal dose to an effective dose is high. The problem is that the absolute amounts of both are low.

Sure, but, what do with this information? Have the state manufacture pure fentanyl and dose junkies up in safe use sites?

I stick with the libertarian answer: legalize drugs, enforce only purity restrictions. But as @iprayiam3 notes above, this requires not socializing the costs of addiction either. At most socialist they would be paid for with taxes on the drugs. Otherwise the addict's addiction is his problem and any problems he causes he's liable (civilly and or criminally).

Fentanyl is only lethal because illegal manufacturers and distributors can't control the dose well enough.

I imagine it stems more from a lack of trying than an absolute technical problem, a certain carelessness perhaps, or an outright malevolence.

Drug dealers don't generally want to kill their customers as a general class. Some, specific customers, like ones that are extorting drugs from the dealer at knifepoint, sure, but as a general class no. Dead people don't buy more drugs, and drug dealers want to sell drugs.

The problem with fentanyl is that the lethal dose is so small (LD50 is like 1-3 mg) that "a grain was passed through whole rather than dissolved" or "a grain stuck to the apparatus instead of being cleaned off" can be all it takes (note that LSD does not have this problem, as while active doses are tiny it has a fuckhuge dose ratio and as such lethal is still ~1 gram).

It's not impossible to counteract this, but you need big batches, high-quality equipment with fine tolerances, and nobody messing with the product between the fine-tolerance dilution and the end-user - which works fine in the hospital system, but which is very difficult for illegal supply chains to do, as the people further up the distribution chain can't dilute it without increasing the volume and ruining fentanyl's notorious ease of smuggling, and the people at street level don't have the scale to do big batches or afford high-quality equipment (not to mention that the people at street level don't always follow "manufacturer recommendations").

And sure, they could maybe do it anyway and jack up their prices to account for the much-greater risk and expense, but the safety of illegal drugs is quite illegible to the end-user, so there's a collective-action problem there.

Drug dealers don't generally want to kill their customers as a general class. Some, specific customers, like ones that are extorting drugs from the dealer at knifepoint, sure, but as a general class no. Dead people don't buy more drugs, and drug dealers want to sell drugs.

No offense but have you met many drug dealers? Like everyone has their cool guy that hooks them up with the best LSD imaginable like it's some sacrament but that is not the norm at all. My Ayn Rand view of them was shattered when I bought drugs on the street a few times. They often don't know what they're selling, in the concentrations that they're selling. They don't particularly care about repeat business. They don't care if they kill you. They're also generally too dumb to even think about testing their stuff or weigh things. If they are smart enough to weight things they're probably not going to buy the $300 milligram scale when the whippet shop sells some that advertises milligram precision for $20. They may be addicts themselves. They are not rational economic actors.

Drug dealing doesn't primarily attract smart entrepreneurial people who to make a fortune. It attracts rather unsmart, not well people who have very few other options for making money.

Sure, I’ll believe they cut corners and accept that drug users have a high mortality rate. But even quite dumb people with undiagnosed mental illnesses generally understand that repeat business is good for them, personally, and want to maximize their cash flow that way.

I believe you're substantially overestimating how smart street dealers are. They might want repeat business but they probably don't understand how to get it and also give up immediately if posed with even a slight challenge because they run out of brain juice. Measuring and mixing a potent drug like fentanyl into your supply of meth (or whatever) seems easy to manage to us, but given people with (e.g.) 80 IQ can't even microwave food I wouldn't trust street dealers to do this well at all.

More comments

As an alternative theory, fentanyl may be both an extremely pleasurable and extremely addictive substance that (desperate and not especially well-informed or conscientious) people try without grasping the full consequences of what they're doing.

That said, the people who are most hands-off on fentanyl proliferation do not appear to give one crap about the people suffering from addiction to it. It's decentralized MAID. Naively a misanthrope might consider it an effective way to get rid of undesirables, but even that makes no sense: its an addiction that reproduces itself for each new doomed-to-die cohort.

(desperate and not especially well-informed or conscientious) people try without grasping the full consequences of what they're doing.

So we need some kind of public awareness campaign? That would improve the issue? I do believe that some of the issues with the Drug War was that the government was doing fear-mongering and not really providing accurate information, but still. I think a lot of people take it because it's the best they can get. Perhaps if the most desperate of sinners were provided safer high quality drugs then they would not resort to fentanyl? Or perhaps we need to refashion society in such a way that constantly seeking a new high is not a marginally acceptable alternative to being a semi-productive member of society.

Naively a misanthrope might consider it an effective way to get rid of undesirables, but even that makes no sense: its an addiction that reproduces itself for each new doomed-to-die cohort.

Does it really? A lot of these addicts seem to have quite a decent life expectancy, what with all these good samaritans going around with Narcan. The addiction itself is accessory. Desperate people would become addicted to something else if fentanyl and the other street stuff was completely eradicated. They are just a symptom of a sick society and they rightfully pile up in these progressive cities, in front of the very eyeballs that need to connect some dots, but that has not worked so far.

Last year, over 800 people died in San Francisco to overdose. Compare that to 56 homicides and 27 traffic deaths. Or, heck, the ~700 COVID deaths from 2020 to the end of 2021.

Addicts have a shockingly low lifespan. And fentanyl is the key component of their mortality: approximately nobody dies from crack or meth, the usual drugs of choice. Which isn't to say they're not damaging or that I don't want to see them off the streets, but fentanyl stands out as particularly evil.

Nitpick, but "approximately nobody dies from crack or meth overdose". I'm guessing methamphetamine addiction would have been involved in a decent chunk of those murders, even if the numbers are still obviously lower than those from fentanyl.

I think some of that might be substitution effect, too- meth users who would eventually OD on the stuff die from fentanyl first.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats