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But think of all the money that the private prisons lose. Won’t people think of the corporations that require crime to survive?
If we treated corporate crime even half as seriously as drug offenses, we’d have plenty of prisoners to satisfy those corporations’ needs. It’s win/win!
But you can’t put companies in prison…
Ah, but you can put executives in prison!
Just putting it out there that when Bulgaria made executives personally liable for prison time if their company committed tax evasion, tax collection went up by 15%.
Suddenly executives we’re a lot more concerned with whether their books were correct.
I mean, they are supposedly paid gor all the extra responsibilities they have to shoulder.
shareholders. or owners if it’s a private company.
Why not? They’re “people” after all, at least according to my government.
Not with that attitude!
I think the main problem is that some countries have private prisons. Luckily, I live in a sane country where prisons are public.
I mean, what could possibly go wrong with privately owned prison system…
This can be offset by increasing penalties and enforcement of financial crimes by corporations and the wealthy.
Even the Dutch way of handling things isn’t perfect though.
There are plenty of heroin addicted homeless who have to travel daily between shelter and those clinics. The problem is that they are on opposite sides of Amsterdam.
So they need to travel daily through the entire city without money to get their fix and be back to the shelter before evening. Most end up somewhere along the way to get an illegal dose instead.
Also the limit of 3 means a lot of full addicts still need to get the rest of their other fixes somewhere else.
But it is definitely better than most countries.
Same with giving condoms to teenagers. They’re not going to fuck more because the have condoms. They’re going to fuck the same amount but get pregnant less.
I had a zealot of a coworker saying teaching them sexual education and safe sex practices is giving them “permission” to engage in pre-marital sex. So instead, the increased risk of EVERYTHING sex related is better because apparently punishment?
I hear that’s quite literally and openly what certain types of religious people believe.
That’s like telling them to cross a busy street at night in block clothing and no illumination. She’s going to go sideways easily. Those people just seem like the opposite of logic and intelligence and it baffles me how one can revel in it.
Religious people I know, think that STDs are a good thing to punish bad people who have non-marital sex, especially young people.
In America, people are extremely sex negative, and anything outside procreative sex should be punished, not just discouraged.
I never understood this train of thought. If you go into ANY situation not knowing what you’re doing, chances are it will end in a fuck up. Be it sex, driving a car, working with electricity, whatever, if you are untrained you can screw up someone’s life.
It’s simple, really. They believe ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are something you are rather than something you do. So there are Good People and Bad People. Good People only do Good Things and only have Good Things happen to them, and Bad People only do Bad Things and have Bad Things happen to them. So anyone who gets an STD deserves it, because those are Bad Things, so it’s just a case of Bad People getting properly punished for being Bad.
This is also why they excuse infidelity, cheating, stealing, and even sometimes murder in their own group, but scream about people in the ‘out group’ daring to wear a tan suit. Because as Good People, they only hang out with and support other Good People, and if a Good Person does a bad thing it was definitely for a Good Reason. Anything a Bad Person does however, even if it appears innocuous or good, is always done for Bad Reasons and is not to be trusted.
you forgot drugs.
going in without knowing the situation is half of most the fun
Without data from an intuitive standpoint I can see where she may think sex ed could lead to an increase in pre-marital (I assume teenage) sex, even if more but safer sex is still preferable to less but more risky sex. So I did a quick search and it appears that she’s just wrong anyway!
The premise still fails, it assumes teenagers are rational actors.
Are you really going to state that your Axiom is teenagers weigh risks and benefits from all available information?
I’m confused. What I’m saying is that without looking at data I could totally see someone imagining a teenager saying “oh, cool, I don’t have to worry about having a kid if I just use a condom” then having more sex because of that. And if I could imagine that for one teen, then I could imagine it for many. That doesn’t seem to be the case though based on the link I shared.
Are you saying teenagers are incapable of weighing pros and cons? Because that wouldn’t make sense. That’s exactly what they’re doing when they play CoD(teens still play that, right?) and decide using a shotgun is the best choice on the Cargo map. Just because their reasoning is less developed doesn’t mean it’s not there.
don’t have to worry about having a kid
No. The current situation is they
don’t worry about having a kid
Adding info doesn’t change the fact that they are not considering consequences, or value the consequences so low vs the immediate result.
It also assumes that people are dumber than the stupidest of animals. Who taught all of them to have sex? And some of them go at it like rabbits!
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090206081312.htm
teenagers consider the future less and prefer immediate rewards over delayed ones
I’m not disputing anything you said, I’m just adding on that “well, if they just don’t know what sex is” is a demonstrably false presumption. And sure, teenagers tend to not worry about the future as much, which only means that planning works better. If they might have sex and have condoms they will be far likelihood to have sex with condoms than either not having sex because they don’t have condoms or stopping in the heat of the moment to get condoms.
His argument isn’t based on any facts or logic, in fact this man was immune to it.
That’s because nothing that comes from a religion makes any sense. Don’t try to understand it. It’s not possible to understand delusions.
It does make sense when you consider their fundamental views and values
In their eyes, the only thing that truly matters is your relationship with god. They feel pre-marital sex is a sin harmful to that
Something like lifelong complications of STDs is nothing compared to that. Even if you died of AIDS as long as you’re going to heaven, it’s a better outcome than a long, happy life (to them)
I can understand their perspective when they truly believe it. The part I can’t wrap my head around is genuinely believing the religion
I’m supposed to believe there is an all-powerful god that made everything, and he personally cares what I do with my penis? He made everything in the universe, told us about it because he wants us to worship him, but also doesn’t want to prove he exists and will torment us for eternity for not believing in him. If true that would require unbelievable levels of narcissism
no sex ed isn’t permission for premarital sex, there’s no need for permission for premarital sex as long as they do it safely
I’d say the only permission is for all parties involved to consent, but can you truly consent if you lack the understanding of what the act could cause?
You’re looking at it from a rational actor side of things though. This guy was immune to facts and logic, anything counter his viewpoint he shrugged off, ignore, or just made some weird bullshit argument. God, guy was an insufferable prick. I’m glad he got his comeuppance at work. Too bad for his kids though, he was vehemently anti-vaccine as well and modern medicine.
So she certainly never engaged in pre-marital right?
Oh no, he as sure was a horn dog as he would talk about in his youth. He’s one of those found again Christian types that I feel are MORE dangerous than those who grew up that way.
“The young adults i made having sex is going to have sex!”
So tired of humanity
Is your Y key broken?
The us is a barbaric place in many ways. I have been preaching about drug policy like this for forever. Is a mental health issue, not a criminal one.
“But if we treat these people as human beings and not trash who am I supposed to demonise for all of society’s problems?” - My boomer parents
Themselves?
Nah, that’d require introspection.
Yeah, not likely then. The first act of revolution is contemplation.
Along with most of lemmy, I agree that drug addiction should be treated as a sickness and not demonized. But I wonder how people who share the same opinion would feel about treating their own rage triggers that way. For example, if somebody said Russell Brand has a psychological problem we should help him with and hope he gets over it, the predictable response would be “Fuck you for defending rape, you piece of shit!” But people face the same challenge when they think of addicts as irredeemably evil.
This is much more about being pragmatic than anything else.
First for your argument to be true you would have to assume that people lack complete agency over their actions AND decide that they should never be punished for it ONLY helped. This would than go for every single crime no matter who no matter what.
I hope that we both agree that people do have agency and i hope we also agree that people have to pay their debts to society and that the threats of punishment is reflected in the desicions thst people make.
Further I hope we also agree that our solutions to problems in society should be effective.
When we help drug addicts we reduce the harm to society on all fronts and we can of course also make a moral argument that drug users hurt themselves the most and that addictions are mostly a complex beast that didn’t come into beeing purely bc the addict wanted this to happen. We DO NOT ABSOLVE THEM of the crimes they commited bc of their addiction, they are still legally and socially punished for stealing or robbing or whatever else but we also reduce the need for these crimes by having these programms.
Rape on the other hand is a completely differnt crime, not only because of the harm they are doing to others but also because there is no actual dire situation where you need to do it and as far as i know, there is no "illness’’ that makes you a serial rapist. Rape is about control, they want to hurt others, the hurt is the point and even if you want to classify this as an illness there is no real therapy for that. They COULD HAVE partaken in consensual rape play if they wanted to and when we have a rich guy they had all the money in the world to do so.
For an example, a pedophile should get all the help there is BUT as soon as they do harm to others they kinda lost that priviledge because they have proven they aren’t safe for society. A pedophile does not NEED to rape a child they can live their whole lives without ever touching one, they might not like it but they absolutely can.
Not every crime is the same and not every bad person is mentally ill just because you think a normal person would not have done this.
No, those are the false assumptions of absolutism. Every crime does not have to be treated exactly the same way, and people don’t have to be ONLY helped and never punished. One-size-fits-all thinking is never worth debating because it’s just stupid. Humans use fuzzy logic to figure out what works. A solution that works doesn’t care if irrefutable social media logic says it can’t.
if somebody said Russell Brand has a psychological problem we should help him with and hope he gets over it
We absolutely should help him and hope he gets better. That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t suffer the consequences of his actions, and be kept out of society until he has done so, and ideally is judged to no longer be a threat.
I don’t get why the idea that someone should get some kind of psych treatment implies they shouldn’t also be punished. That’s a weird binary absolutism that I can’t figure out. People act like any criticism of any part of a point of view is the same as saying that POV is completely wrong and the polar opposite one is completely right. That’s just not how things work.
Those things are not comparable. We imprison people to safeguard society and most addicts are harmless to society. There is no rapist who is harmless to society.
People who think addicts are irredeemably evil are just irredeemably bigoted and hard of thinking. We should make that a crime.
The difference is that Russell Brand made people into victims. He harmed other people, and it’s an inherent product of rape. Same with murder and assault.
Addicts don’t inherently harm other people. In fact the addicts are the victims. Going after them is more akin to trying to demonize suicide victims.
If a person has a psychotic episode due to an undiagnosed mental illness and attacks someone, should they be thrown in jail or treated?
I don’t think that the existence of victims is what makes the difference, but rather our understanding of the underlying cause of the act.
It’s not unreasonable to put someone in jail to protect society if there’s no other option. However, it seems likely to me that some of the vile crimes we punish today are a result of either mental illness or neurological damage. While it is appropriate to take steps to prevent harm to others, we should not just automatically assume everyone who commits crime is irretrievably evil, even if our current understanding effectively makes that true.
Personally, I would rather see all crime as a disorders to be corrected rather than merely acts of evil people.
By way of support for my attitude, I refer you to this radiolab podcast episode:
Way to move the goalposts.
I addressed your point on drug addiction, so you dropped that for a different pivot.
And guess what? Your new pivot is equally as bad.
Pleading innocent by reason of insanity is a very risky legal defense. This is because it’s an admission that the defendent did commit the act. After that point, instead of the state having to prove guilt, the defendent then needs to prove inability to personally control themselves.
Either way, the defendant will be incarcerated, the only difference is whether they’re going to a psychiatric hospital or prison. The only deciding factor is whether they can prove they were insane.
But I doubt you’ll care actually care about my point. You’ve already demonstrated that you’re more than willing to argue in bad faith. Buh bye
I think you need to pay closer attention to who you’re talking to. I’m not the original poster. Therefore, you couldn’t have addressed my point previously, because I didn’t post in this thread previously. Also, I neither set nor moved any goalposts.
I was responding specifically to your point that the difference between Brand and a drug addict was the existence of victims. I don’t think that is the case. My example was to address just that one point.
I also wanted to point out my belief that most crime is related to some form of mental or neurological disorder. I did not suggest that criminals should plead innocent by reason of insanity, but rather that some future, more enlightened society could ideally treat criminals rather than punish them.
I think I offered pretty good support for my position, but I’m guessing you didn’t take the time to listen to the podcast episode I linked. Assuming that’s the case, here’s the TLDL for you:
The person who was the subject of the podcast had surgery to stop seizures. After the surgery, he had a sudden desire for CSAM. He was ashamed and too horrified to tell anyone. He got caught, and he was going to be thrown in prison. Then his neurosurgeon heard about his case and intervened to point out that it was all caused by neurological damage resulting from the surgery and it wasn’t his fault.
I can’t think of many things more vile than CSAM, but that was a case of a person who had no previous interest suddenly experiencing a horrible warping of his personality as a result of neurological damage. In his case he was lucky enough to have a surgeon who understood what was happening and could intervene. Think about how many people just go to rot in person, hated by everyone they know, because no one knew they had a neurological disorder causing their behavior.
The justice system should be about rehabilitation.
Drug addiction causes direct physical harm to the user. If you remove the monetary cost, the other social harms are mostly resolved. There is very little danger to anyone other than the user if we treat substance addiction as an illness in the way described in this Tumblr post.
Sexual assault, by definition, harms other people besides the person who has the psychological problem. There is not really a way to treat it as an illness that mostly resolves the social harms.
I think that violent offenders should be kept away from the rest of society to reduce their ability to harm others. I think some of them are truly remorseful and can be rehabilitated, and those people can and should receive treatment and be reintegrated after they are no longer dangerous to others. I think some offenders are psychopaths who cannot be rehabilitated, and the only way we protect our society is to keep those people imprisoned indefinitely.
All of these things can be true at the same time, but internet forums are usually not conducive to nuanced conversations about complex topics.
I haven’t followed Russell Brand’s legal case. Has he expressed remorse and sought help, or has he just denied having committed a crime? I don’t think we can help anyone until they admit that they need help.
Wrong on both counts - drug addiction harms anybody connected with the user, and sexual abuse behaviors harm the behaver, just in much less obvious ways. This is the exact kind of rationalization people create to deny reality.
edit: Every single response to this comment is “they aren’t the same thing” because drug abusers only harm themselves and sexual predators only harm others. Wrong on both counts. Drug addition hurts everyone involved with the addict, and any kind of violence hurts the attacker, just in different and much less obvious ways. Instead of trying to rationalize refusing to help perpetrators get over being the way they are - because doing that would just make you complicit, and you crave vengeance! - maybe try to get over seeing everything as a binary choice between good and evil.
Oh niice. Violence hurts the attacker, riight, yeah, sure
The harm to the people connected to the user, if you remove monetary aspects, is mostly grief about their loved one’s condition. Not physical harm (usually).
OTOH I don’t think addiction is an illness. It is a consequence of a poor decision which is hard to undo. Nobody is born an addict (unless your mother was a heavy addict too), and there’s no addiction germ. That said, consequences of a bad decision should be treated, not criminalized. If I decide to put my legs in the wood chipper, that’s a bad decision and I and my family will suffer from it. And I need medical treatment, not jail.
The harm to the people connected to the user, if you remove monetary aspects, is mostly grief about their loved one’s condition. Not physical harm (usually).
That was basically what I was going for in my reply, but it seems the person I was replying to was just looking for a straw man to attack. Thanks for reiterating.
I don’t know what to think in regard to addiction as an illness vs a series of choices. There’s so much we don’t know about our brains and our genes, and someday we may find that addiction is more attributable to biochemistry than to making choices. (Also, I’m a determinist, so I don’t believe “free will” can really exist. But I’m also a pragmatist, so I recognize that it’s useful for a society to operate under the assumption that people have agency and therefore can be held responsible for their actions.)
The claim I disagreed with was that drug abuse only harms the abuser, not that it only PHYSICALLY does. Don’t move the goalpost.
If you decided to put your legs in a wood chipper, I’d go out on a limb and guess your mind is pretty fucked up - and it would be a really short limb, like those legs.
Drug abuse and sexual assault aren’t really comparable things, though. Typically drug users aren’t hurting anyone besides themselves.
Well he has psychological issues and should seek help for them…but a lot of people have psychological issues and don’t rape. Yes, even people with sex addictions. So they’re kinda two seperate things
Any rate, part of recovery for addiction includes acknowledging what you did to get your hands on it and how damaging it was, and doing so in a way that gives you ‘useful’ remorse instead of spiraliing out again
And eventually…you as well.
Similar in Switzerland and Zürich specifically. There used to be a horrible drug scene in Zürich (look up needle park), which was improved with similar techniques.
Dutch person here, yeah that mentallity towards problems works non-surprisingly across the board. Demonizing a problem is a way to ensure you never solve it.
I guess most people don’t consider chronic pain.
Well of course, the Dutch are clever.
Handing out Methadone and in the harder cases even Heroin, with clean needles in protected spaces, is what finally properly solved the extensive drug issues in the 90s here in Zürich too. The repression approach they tried first just moved the scene from Platzspitz (known in English as “Needle Park” I believe) to Letten. Harm reduction approaches were the true solution.
Same thing in Portugal since 2001 by the way.
I was just about to mention Portugal. When you give people help and a safe option to quit then many do quit.
The British have had a system of heroin maintenance since the 1920s. For decades it supplied a few hundred addicts nationwide, most of whom were doctors themselves. It was de-emphasized considerably during the 1960s-1980s as a result of the U.S.-led war on drugs.
Sweden is doing the complete opposite. It’s the one thing all of our political parties agree on; drugs are evil, people who do drugs are evil, and need to be put in jail (except if you work in parliament of course because politicians are good so their drug use is also good).
We also have some of the highest drug related deaths in Europe. That’s to say, currently drugs are winning the war on drugs.
What the fuck is happening in Sweden? You guys used to be cool!
We had a good reputation, but I don’t know if it’s entirely warranted. We had many years of social democrats and strong worker rights, but I’ve not seen that in my lifetime. We’ve been pretty right wing for the past two decades, and the social democrats are sliding right.
During WWII, our neutrality meant cooperation with the Nazis. We were also all-in on eugenics, which harmed our native population. Last time a eugenics law was overturned was back in 2013, which was regarding forced sterilisation of trans people. The neo-nazi party Sweden Democrats voted against that, and they were the second biggest party last election. This past election I think they slid down to third.
I think it’s similar to the whole mythos around the American dream and all the freedom Americans supposedly have. It’s just mythical.
You may have heard of the widely unpopular Chat Control bill? It was initially put forward by a Swedish social democrat. They’re heavily in favour of mass-surveillance.
Easy, all of our parents and grandparents were subject to government propaganda non-stop.
When we learned of propaganda in (American) Public Schools, it was always during the WWII lessons and Goebbels. Uncle Sam and Rosie the Riveter do not like talking about themselves or their family (nor do Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima, for that matter).
I do remember learning the term “yellow journalism” in high school, in reference to fake news in the 1920s…but the lesson, as I remember it, compared it to modern conspiracy rags (i.e. The Enquirer).
Brace yourselves, because modern “yellow journalsim” is now individually curated based upon your purchases/browser history/driving habits/heartrate/what percentage of your oven cycles are 400F for 18-21 minutes/what color you set the mood-light to, and whatever else some billionaire put their grubby mitts into.
Man, we used to laugh at people who said “they” were secretly tracking us. The only crazy part turned out thinking that it’d be secret.
That’s assuming that it’s a problem that governments want to resolve.
They’d rather throw more money at law enforcement/fascist paramilitaries and make laws that criminalize everything up to and including breathing.
America was involved in that trade at one point just ask the CIA and who said they ever quit?
It’s crazy to me that “the CIA sold drugs to poor and minority communities to keep poor people down” is still treated like a conspiracy theory.
They FULLY ADMIT TO IT!
Like MKULTRA it doesn’t matter what the truth is.
Are we talking about Iran-Contra, or a different instance?
Iran-Contra was about raising dark money. They did it to poor and minority communities because they knew they were least able to protect themselves, not just for the sake of keeping them down
To be fair, they created crack cocaine, etc., and facilitated numerous other addiction crises both in the US and abroad. 🤢🤬
Wasn’t crack originally created by a low level LA dealer to make a bigger profit from the same product volume and THEN deliberately weaponized by the CIA to destroy (mostly black) neighborhoods?
Or did Snowfall take even bigger liberties with regard to historical accuracy than I realized?
TBF, they “investigated” themselves and found no criminal acts — despite admitting in “an internal report issued by the CIA” they were “at least aware of Contra involvement in drug trafficking, and in some cases dissuaded the DEA and other agencies from investigating the Contra supply networks involved.”
While I’m sure that’s technically factual, (ie. via “classifying” anything they don’t want to reveal to the voting public), damning evidence showed that the CIA’s "Contra drug links included, among other connections, payments to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras, and in some cases “after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies”
So, even though keeping themselves free of blame is essential to their agency’s very existence, we’re left with what “facts” they allow to be published.
tl; dr: They’re notorious for facilitating crime while technically staying clean of criminality themselves. They may not have cooked it up in their own labs, but they clearly funded and paved the way for those that could, instead.
Ergo, much as a parent is charged in shootings by a minor (finally!)(US), they are wholly complicit at best. 🤢🤕
ACAB, and ofc AFAB, too.
keeping themselves free of blame is essential to their agency’s very existence
Depending on your definition of blamelessness, that could logicallymean that it never actually existed 😉
The conspiracy theory is that it was to keep poor people down.
The reality is that they didn’t directly sell drugs, they just protected people who did to financially support terrorists, or prevented interdiction to protect traffickers who gave them information that could be used to stop drug trafficking.This was acceptable to them because they considered poor minority communities unimportant.
It’s kinda worse, but it wasn’t an attack on the poor. They weren’t considered important enough to attack.
They were just an acceptable loss if it meant some people had the money to machine gun Nicaraguan civilians.The poor were seen as an acceptable loss, but I think the most important specific point is they were seen as the most vulnerable group that was least able to defend themselves
I mean, selling for profit during Iran-contra, sure.
But to pretend the CIA wasn’t directly attempting to hurt working class people and furthering class warfare is far too forgiving and naive.
I’m not sure it’s forgiving to say that they killed them out of expediency.
We have literal recordings of the motivations behind much of it, or cases where they documented the decision plainly. Poor communities don’t have the political pull to get a serious response, so directing traffickers they want to have continued funding there is a way to protect that trafficker.
The war on drugs was structured to target black people and anti-war groups.Is it really better to say they weren’t trying to hurt them, they just didn’t view them as people so were entirely unconcerned with what happened to them?
They didn’t sell drugs on the street. But they did take over the British cash-cropping system of opium production in Asia and ran large scale trafficking operations.
The conspiracy theory is that it was to keep poor people down
Which it was, however directly or indirectly.
The reality is that they didn’t directly sell drugs
Yeah they did. Bought drugs too.
they just protected people who did to financially support terrorists
And right wing foreign governments, and right wing guerillas. And to combat left wing governments, and left wing guerillas.
it wasn’t an attack on the poor
Yeah it was. A coordinated worldwide mission to oppress the left wing is a coordinated worldwide mission to prevent the poor from rising up and taking what’s rightfully theirs from their rich oppressors.
The implication was that they sold drugs to poor communities in America to keep poor communities in America surpressed. Recasting it by saying CIA activities in opposition to anything left of Pinochet are a directed attack on the poor is both shifting it to where I don’t think the statement was intended, and also reducing the complexity of their objective.
They didn’t give a shit about poor people. They cared about supporting the power structures that employed them. Hurting poor people was just an expedient means towards that end.
Yes, the power structures they supported were largely aligned with financial means because obviously they were, this is America.I lumped right wing dictators and guerilla groups under the umbrella of terrorism. If the shoe fits and all that.
Citation needed on the CIA directly buying and selling drugs.
The implication was that they sold drugs to poor communities in America to keep poor communities in America surpressed
They did that too.
CIA activities in opposition to
anythingeverything left of PinochetFixed it for you.
are a directed attack on the poor is both shifting it to where I don’t think the statement was intended, and also reducing the complexity of their objective.
On the contrary. I’m saying that attacking the poor was one of many goals of a multifaceted strategy, not the only one.
They didn’t give a shit about poor people.
That’s not quite true. They had no love for them, but they were not stupid enough not to fear them.
They cared about supporting the power structures that employed them.
And to do so is to actively suppress dissent from and agency of the poor
Hurting poor people was
just an expedient meansan absolutely crucial factor towards that end.Fixin’
Yes, the power structures they supported were largely aligned with financial means because obviously they were, this is America.
Yet you refuse to acknowledge that this necessarily means that they were opposed to poor people, or you’re just denying their awareness of it.
Citation needed on the CIA directly buying and selling drugs.
Operation Paperclip. Explains it all.
Oh yea we are totally still into that shit
Hey! It’s almost Christmas and I’m tired of asking via unencrypted email drafts on a commercial client.
I need drugs and operational funding if you want the stochastic chaos, my guys. Tell the Director it’s about time to flip back to chapter 1 on the playbook, we always found the last chapter the most boring part of the re-reads.
You and every other operative out there. Drumpfs been hosing us on funding
Do you guys have any of that government acid from the 60s left?
Nah we ran out during the Regan admin, Nanci was a beast!
Boooo
I would offer some ketamine but musk took all that shit too. I do have some THC gummies and a subway punch card with 7 punches.
Hook. It. Up.
Daily reminder:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
To my knowledge, it was Portugal who pioneered this approach and it was championed by police forces, demanding they had more important rhings to do than chase down drug users. And it worked.
90’s as well; I was a teen then and it was lauded throughout schools.
Regardless, if the policies worked, let’s be happy for it and strive to improve them.
But then they can’t blow up stuff and commit war crimes!
Let’s cut to the chase: those that don’t employ effective solutions like this are in the drug trade.
They put up a “fight” against drugs, etc., but only as a legitimizing façade. This is the case with pharmaceuticals in those nations as well, of course. (No, their interests don’t stop at their national borders, either.)
Oh please.
I’m sure most public officials do genuinely want to improve peoples quality of life, but “giving away free heroin” is not a good election platform.
Yeah, that’s why most politicians are capitalists that have been degrading all of society for decades.
I mean look at France, they throw grenades at kids and get them mutilated and amputated, but it’s for their own good.
Americans are confused, vulnerable people are for exploitation, not compassion in America.
Well put! Took a few tries to read, perhaps add a
;there next time.So, poorly put. Like good sentiment but they did not ‘put’ it well since it took a couple rereads.
Not polite that way
Lol sorry had a late night last night
angry upvote
Here’s how science works: you collect data, use it to determine what’s effective, then you tell the politicians so they can implement a solution. Most of us would consider giving free heroin to people a bad thing. What we consider it is completely irrelevant because it’s based on our emotional reaction.
If the data shows that this approach is effective, especially if it’s more effective than what you’re currently doing, that’s what you do.
The only thing that matters here is: does it work?
At the most basic level: yes it really is that simple.
But there is some nuance here.
Science can tell you how to efficiently achieve your goals, but it can’t tell you what your goals should be.
And we have certain constraints that we want to uphold, even if they limit how effective we can be in achieving our goals. (Eugenics is a prime example there.)
And finally, the assumptions that we start with, the questions we decide to ask, and the explanatory models that we build are all culturally-defined. They aren’t completely arbitrary, but they do involve a degree of personal judgment.
I say this not to disparage science (I fucking love science), but to make sure that we understand that we aren’t off the hook for having moral agency even if we believe we are merely pursuing efficacy. We’ve seen regimes that decided to value efficacy above all else, and the inhuman results that can occur.
Also, Dr. Fatima’s videos have programmed me to think about this stuff automatically.
Some good ones:
thanks for the insight and the video recommendations!
Apparantly it does, it’s been done since 1998. The quality of life gets better for the addicts, and about half gets clean within five years. The program seems to be only for addicts above 35 years old with a habit for over 5 years, and only if earlier attempts to get clean (without medical heroin) failed.
What we consider it is completely irrelevant because it’s based on our emotional reaction.
Politics is all about emotional reactions though. Is it more important to you to reduce the harm of drug taking, or do you find the idea of drug taking to itself be so immoral that harm as a result is actually desirable?
do you find the idea of drug taking to itself be so immoral that harm as a result is actually desirable?
I find people taking this stance, shortighted and stupid. They complain about drug addicts, on the streets and stealing their shit, and all sorts of problems caused, harming themselves. And then they want even more of that, as a solution!
Yes, people often hold one thing to be negative, while finding a potential solution to that negative thing being even worse. That isn’t really stupid.
Fair! In this case I just think it is idiotic, since there is an alternative offered, that fixes a lot of the problems. But no, they do not want that, but rather suffer more. Not believing in scientific results, nor logic, is stupid! But yes, people often are, when it is about beliefs and emotions.
All drugs should be legal and regulated. The War on drugs causes more harm then the drugs they prohibit.
I guess it depends on what you mean by legal & regulated.
Available in clinics with strict licensing for things like HAT? Sure.
Plus, this stops lots of violent crimes from happening. Addicts don’t have to come up with fast big money just to not feel sick, and dealers won’t be fighting for turf.
