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"I don't know if I buy the explanation in the article" Yea I don't know if the writer has ever talked to a progressive activist. Drug enforcement isn't poo-poo

"I don't know if I buy the explanation in the article" Yea I don't know if the writer has ever talked to a progressive activist. Drug enforcement isn't poo-poo'd out of some Libertarian ideal (let alone a Scottish one). It's poo-poo'd because it's seen as an ineffective fix for addiction. This is largely true, but the activists forgot that a lack of drug enforcement can ruin city centers. Reform should start in our incarceration system not in crime enforcement but I digress.

vlovich123 2y ago
City centers are being ruined even with places with stricter drug enforcement. I’m not entirely convinced the two are linked. If anything cost of housing and wealth of an area are better predictors.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Untrue. You don’t see these kinds of problems in Singapore, Tokyo, or even Bangkok, where drug enforcement is pretty strict. Likewise, if you don’t want people to poop on the sidewalk, make that a law and then strictly enforce it. It does work, it’s just that Americans are not very committed to the enforcement aspect, even in tough on crime red states (at least compared to Asia).
  - acchow 2y ago
    It is clear when looking at the history of policing in America, whenever you let the police be “tough on crime”, they abuse their power and particularly against certain minority groups. America is unable to figure out its systematic prejudices, therefore cannot adopt “tough on crime” policies (like Singapore’s)
    - lazide 2y ago
      Huh? Do you really think Singapore doesn’t have systemic prejudices?
      - acchow 2y ago
        No, I'm saying Singapore's systemic prejudices aren't exhibited as overtly biased violent police behavior. America's always are.
        lazide 2y ago
        It seems like you don’t know Singapore, or what it’s like for the Indian community in Singapore? Singapore is less violent only because the minority communities aren’t able to actually fight back, not because they don’t get smacked down. By the police. Conflict is inevitable when there is both misaligned incentives and either hope of victory, or such a lack of hope that there is nothing left to lose. Singapore is a good example of having-enough-to-lose-it’s-not-worth-fighting, and no-hope-of-success-in-getting-anything-else. Not an example of no-smackdowns-occurring. Much of the black/police and black/black violence in the US is caused by many of the communities being in the nothing left to lose state. At least for many of its members. And having enough tools at their disposal to cause violence, with a weak enough set of policing to not actually subjugate the communities entirely. Singapore is a small island with a quite authoritarian (defacto) dictatorship (I still love you Singapore, despite this! But you know it’s true.) with extremely heavy arms controls. Seriously, if you read the gun laws and saw how heavy enforcement was, you’d understand. Literally the best ‘bad’ folks can muster, even with concerted effort, is the occasional starter pistol, modified air soft gun, or some knives. The police have machine guns.
  - 0dayz 2y ago
    You're leaving out a big reason, those countries have a much more traditional "collectivism" and has a cultural phenomenon called saving face. Those bring down a lot of said drug problem... Externally.
    - zarzavat 2y ago
      People still do drugs but they do it behind closed doors because otherwise they would be immediately caught and sent to prison for a long time. Because drug use is forced into private spaces, the rest of society is able to maintain strong cultural norms against drug use and the system maintains a steady state. The west's approach is kind of the opposite: actively go after the sources of drugs, and to leave the users relatively alone. On a moral level this is appealing because the users are victims. However on a practical level it doesn't seem to work as well because it's swimming against the economic current.
      - 0dayz 2y ago
        Well yes and no but the big difference is that we used to do both, chase after the user and the seller. We have slowly realized this doesn't really work. Instead we are moving towards harm reduction but that's easier said than done and I think we will see a new approach towards drug selling.
kmeisthax 2y ago
Activists don't get listened to, they get clipped. They prescribe some set of policies X, Y, and Z; someone in power hears Y and likes it, and ignores the rest. In the case of drug enforcement, the idea was to decriminalize and destigmatize drugs so that persons addicted to them could seek treatment and rehabilitation. Problem is, that also requires public money be spent on rehabilitation programs. It's cheaper for the state to just get people high and let them die. Same thing with "defund the police", which had an implicit "and use the money to fund mental health programs" at the end of it, along with prescriptions to fund deescalation training for whatever cops we still needed. All the Twitter activists heard this, they chanted "defund the police" as if everyone else had too, but that memo didn't reach the desk of any of the mayors who actually tried these programs. To make matters worse, a lot of city police departments took this literally, deliberately, to discredit anti-police activism. So the cops effectively punished the city for speaking out against them. The underlying problem is that communicating these problems in a way that's succinct enough to resist malicious interpretation, without it coming off as a way to dodge the blame for your own problems, is very difficult. You are not entitled to make others think or speak the way you do. Concepts you invent will be reinterpreted however people like unless you drown them in so much French that only your own apparatchiks can understand them[0]. In other words, these are shibboleths - terms that exist solely for an in-group to identify themselves to one another. Here's the thing: this is great for MEGO[1] and terrible activism. When Louis Rossmann wants to point out how companies are retroactively changing the deal, he doesn't say it's wrong to do that, he says the CEOs have a "rapist mentality". When Cory Doctorow wants to talk about how Internet platforms get worse and worse, he talks about "enshittification[2]". These coinages work because they leverage the listener's existing understanding of those concepts. Semantic drift works to their advantage: someone misusing "enshittification" to refer to, say, inflation, rather than the gradual demise of Internet platforms, is continuing the analogy. [0] More generally, habitual insistence on the use of one's idiolect - especially one crafted to motte-and-bailey your unsavory opinions - is a sign of an abusive personality. Yes, that's a dig at RMS. [1] "My Eyes Glaze Over", aka "disguising heinous shit behind boring language" [2] Enshittification is a particularly funny one, because it's exactly the sort of fancy French word you'd expect, but with a nice Anglo-Saxon swear word in it.
- pj_mukh 2y ago

vlovich123 2y ago

City centers are being ruined even with places with stricter drug enforcement. I’m not entirely convinced the two are linked. If anything cost of housing and wealth of an area are better predictors.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago
Untrue. You don’t see these kinds of problems in Singapore, Tokyo, or even Bangkok, where drug enforcement is pretty strict. Likewise, if you don’t want people to poop on the sidewalk, make that a law and then strictly enforce it. It does work, it’s just that Americans are not very committed to the enforcement aspect, even in tough on crime red states (at least compared to Asia).
- acchow 2y ago
  It is clear when looking at the history of policing in America, whenever you let the police be “tough on crime”, they abuse their power and particularly against certain minority groups. America is unable to figure out its systematic prejudices, therefore cannot adopt “tough on crime” policies (like Singapore’s)
  - lazide 2y ago
    Huh? Do you really think Singapore doesn’t have systemic prejudices?
    - acchow 2y ago
      No, I'm saying Singapore's systemic prejudices aren't exhibited as overtly biased violent police behavior. America's always are.
      - lazide 2y ago
        It seems like you don’t know Singapore, or what it’s like for the Indian community in Singapore? Singapore is less violent only because the minority communities aren’t able to actually fight back, not because they don’t get smacked down. By the police. Conflict is inevitable when there is both misaligned incentives and either hope of victory, or such a lack of hope that there is nothing left to lose. Singapore is a good example of having-enough-to-lose-it’s-not-worth-fighting, and no-hope-of-success-in-getting-anything-else. Not an example of no-smackdowns-occurring. Much of the black/police and black/black violence in the US is caused by many of the communities being in the nothing left to lose state. At least for many of its members. And having enough tools at their disposal to cause violence, with a weak enough set of policing to not actually subjugate the communities entirely. Singapore is a small island with a quite authoritarian (defacto) dictatorship (I still love you Singapore, despite this! But you know it’s true.) with extremely heavy arms controls. Seriously, if you read the gun laws and saw how heavy enforcement was, you’d understand. Literally the best ‘bad’ folks can muster, even with concerted effort, is the occasional starter pistol, modified air soft gun, or some knives. The police have machine guns.
- 0dayz 2y ago
  You're leaving out a big reason, those countries have a much more traditional "collectivism" and has a cultural phenomenon called saving face. Those bring down a lot of said drug problem... Externally.
  - zarzavat 2y ago
    People still do drugs but they do it behind closed doors because otherwise they would be immediately caught and sent to prison for a long time. Because drug use is forced into private spaces, the rest of society is able to maintain strong cultural norms against drug use and the system maintains a steady state. The west's approach is kind of the opposite: actively go after the sources of drugs, and to leave the users relatively alone. On a moral level this is appealing because the users are victims. However on a practical level it doesn't seem to work as well because it's swimming against the economic current.
    - 0dayz 2y ago
      Well yes and no but the big difference is that we used to do both, chase after the user and the seller. We have slowly realized this doesn't really work. Instead we are moving towards harm reduction but that's easier said than done and I think we will see a new approach towards drug selling.

kmeisthax 2y ago

Activists don't get listened to, they get clipped. They prescribe some set of policies X, Y, and Z; someone in power hears Y and likes it, and ignores the rest. In the case of drug enforcement, the idea was to decriminalize and destigmatize drugs so that persons addicted to them could seek treatment and rehabilitation. Problem is, that also requires public money be spent on rehabilitation programs. It's cheaper for the state to just get people high and let them die. Same thing with "defund the police", which had an implicit "and use the money to fund mental health programs" at the end of it, along with prescriptions to fund deescalation training for whatever cops we still needed. All the Twitter activists heard this, they chanted "defund the police" as if everyone else had too, but that memo didn't reach the desk of any of the mayors who actually tried these programs. To make matters worse, a lot of city police departments took this literally, deliberately, to discredit anti-police activism. So the cops effectively punished the city for speaking out against them. The underlying problem is that communicating these problems in a way that's succinct enough to resist malicious interpretation, without it coming off as a way to dodge the blame for your own problems, is very difficult. You are not entitled to make others think or speak the way you do. Concepts you invent will be reinterpreted however people like unless you drown them in so much French that only your own apparatchiks can understand them[0]. In other words, these are shibboleths - terms that exist solely for an in-group to identify themselves to one another. Here's the thing: this is great for MEGO[1] and terrible activism. When Louis Rossmann wants to point out how companies are retroactively changing the deal, he doesn't say it's wrong to do that, he says the CEOs have a "rapist mentality". When Cory Doctorow wants to talk about how Internet platforms get worse and worse, he talks about "enshittification[2]". These coinages work because they leverage the listener's existing understanding of those concepts. Semantic drift works to their advantage: someone misusing "enshittification" to refer to, say, inflation, rather than the gradual demise of Internet platforms, is continuing the analogy. [0] More generally, habitual insistence on the use of one's idiolect - especially one crafted to motte-and-bailey your unsavory opinions - is a sign of an abusive personality. Yes, that's a dig at RMS. [1] "My Eyes Glaze Over", aka "disguising heinous shit behind boring language" [2] Enshittification is a particularly funny one, because it's exactly the sort of fancy French word you'd expect, but with a nice Anglo-Saxon swear word in it.

pj_mukh 2y ago