Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
It's almost never about the personal impact of the transgression on the transgressor themselves; it's about modeling and justifying the behavior to people for whom it would very much be harmful (i.e. the mass of the hoi polloi).
Supah_Schmendrick
10d ago
Does anyone know why they named it to have the same acronym as Biden's "Build Back Better" plan? It feels like a deliberate choice, but I'm not sure why.
Trump calls lots of things Big and Beautiful. In his 2016 campaign the border wall was "big, beautiful." He's called the U.S. a "big beautiful department store"; an EO dedicated to eliminating information siloing in the government promised to build "one big, beautiful dataset", the various diplomatic initiatives his administrations have undertaken have promised "big, beautiful deals," etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
12d ago
I seem to remember that the Drug War of old included an element of "it's your own fucking fault, just don't do drugs" and it still failed horribly.
Your memory is at least partially incorrect; drug use fell precipitously during the peak of the DARE era:
On the question of drugs themselves, it seems like Americans, especially teenage Americans, really did change their minds about how dangerous drug use was. Gone were the days of cocaine paraphernalia on magazine covers. For example, high-school seniors (the group for which we have the most data) in 1979 were relatively sanguine about cocaine: only 32 percent said there was “great risk” in trying it. By 1994, that figure peaked at 57 percent. Support for drug-law reform also sputtered out. In 1977, 28 percent of Americans said marijuana should be legal, a 16-point gain over the preceding eight years. In 1985, though, support was back down to 23 percent, and it rose only barely to 25 percent in 1995. The dream of marijuana legalization was dead for a generation.
Initially, the War on Drugs also had a remarkable effect on the total number of people using drugs. The share of high-school seniors using any illicit drug peaked in 1979, at 54 percent. It then fell more or less continuously for the next decade, bottoming out in 1992 at 27 percent. The class of 1992, in other words, was half as likely as the class of 1979 to use illicit drugs. Similarly heartening trends obtained in the adult population. In 1979, there were an estimated 25 million illicit drug users, including about 4.7 million cocaine users; 4.1 million had ever used heroin. By 1992, those numbers had fallen to 12 million, 1.4 million, and 1.7 million respectively.
Supah_Schmendrick
15d ago
Yeah my comment was more along the lines of a neutral point of information. Any excuse to tell the weird story of Ian Samuel (RIP First Mondays; you were a good podcast while you lasted) and plug ALAB, which is wrong about most things but funny.
Supah_Schmendrick
15d ago
We have been over this - the bill wasn't really a compromise; it was a back-door way of legalizing the hitherto-flagrantly illegal stunts the Biden Administration, like the Obama administration before it (but more so) had been using to throw the borders open.
Supah_Schmendrick
15d ago
Scalia was, in fact, semi-famous in the legal world for always hiring at least one "counter clerk" (aka, someone who disagreed with Scalia on significant issues) in part so that he'd have someone smart in the room to play devil's advocate.
Of course, he didn't always pick winners; one such "counter clerk" was Ian Samuel, who later as a professor admitted to perving on his students, was broadly disgraced, but appears to have clawed his way back to respectability as an in-house regulatory counsel for big corps.
Supah_Schmendrick
15d ago
If you're using the latter ottoman and tsarist empires as your models, that's kinda telling. Neither was a particularly fantastic place to live, were intellectually and culturally stagnant, and were so politically unstable they suffered fairly frequent and serious revolutionary insurrections.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
The rationing systems during WWII I think were a success.
Yes, but the objectives of the market change between war and peacetime in highly relevant ways.
Do they, though? What with AI and grade inflation, they increasingly can't really read or do basic math. I don't think this stereotype is as universally applicable as it was before.
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