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Luckily they haven't been able to implement such laws well. Enshrining the same logic however is a great step to helping it happen!
Well yeah, people who choose to use drugs in a bad way hurt others/themselves. The same thing happens with guns and bullets.
Some people sold a gun by a gun shop will go home and use the gun to kill themselves or another person. That is not victimless, people died from the gun being sold. But is the gun shop responsible for that? Apparently yes, according to this logic, the seller is responsible for what the buyer chooses to do!
There is no discussion to be had with such a victim complex. If you're so emotional about it as to actively admit you're making up your strawman ideas about me, then it's not gonna be productive. You don't change emotions with rational arguments, "no, I support due process with you as well and believe in personal responsibility for everyone" would not change a single thing that comes out of feelings.
WE implemented laws perfectly well to preclude such lawsuits. Blues found those laws inconvenient and chose to ignore them, and have successfully done so. Perhaps you might have argued that doing so was a bad idea, and would undermine necessary norms, but if so it appears your arguments did not carry the day. Alternatively, you believe that it is my tribe that should adhere to norms, and your tribe that should adjudicate exceptions. It hardly matters which is the case; you cannot now argue that Reds should not do a thing, because otherwise Blues might do the thing they've repeatedly done and are currently doing. One cannot endorse a compromise that has already been repeatedly violated.
I reiterate that all evidence indicates that such detente does not exist and never will. Blues will do and have done what they want to do. Neither law nor custom nor social norms restrain them. Trading off my tribe's values in pursuit of some mythical compromise is evidently unworkable; such compromises last until Blues find them inconvenient, and then they are swept aside.
The way my tribe will keep our guns is by systematically undermining and removing the legal and social mechanisms that might be used to take them, which we are currently well on our way to doing, and by making it abundantly clear that we will burn the country to ashes before we allow Blues to disarm us, which we are also well on our way to doing. At no point is any degree of cooperation with Blues required for this process. At no point do formal legal mechanisms determine this process; we already know that the Constitution and the laws supposedly based upon it are a sham.
"Bad way" and "hurt others" are terms of no fixed meaning, and I have no reason to believe that you and I share a common understanding of them sufficient to draw comparisons in this way. More generally, there does not appear to be an objective measure of social harm, and Blues have already demonstrated that they are willing to abruptly and drastically redefine what is and is not actionable social harm overnight.
I do not agree that this is a valid chain of causality, and I do not believe that you would accept chains of causality much, much less ambiguous if they cut against your tribal interests. For example, Judges frequently release prisoners convicted of multiple violent felonies who then commit additional violent felonies. Would you agree that the judge more directly causes such violent felonies than the employees of the gun shop in your example? Do you support the recent push to hold judges accountable for the crimes of convicts they release? If not, why not? Such releases are absolutely not victimless, and the judge has far better evidence of the nature of the convict they release than the gun store owner does of a random customer.
It seems to me that the fewer valid uses a buyer has for the thing being bought, the more this logic obtains, and the more valid uses they have, the less it obtains. Guns have numerous valid uses to the degree that, if we are currently pretending that it matters, legal ownership of them is specifically enshrined in the Constitution. "getting super high and physiologically addicted" is not nearly so valid a use as "defending myself and my family from illegitimate violence."
Assessing the values and motives of others based on what they say and do is not a victim complex. Your rhetorical strategies do not appear to me to be particularly complex. You pick an issue and frame it in whatever way is maximally-convenient to the argument you wish to make at this particular moment, with no apparent regard to arguments you've made before or will make in the future. You do not appear to have principles deeper than "Who, Whom". And I disagree, there is much discussion to be had: see above. I appreciate that this may not be the discussion you particularly wish to have, but that is your business, not mine.
In any case, it does not seem to me that pointing to clear examples that contradict your statements constitutes "emotional argument" or a "victim complex". You are arguing that my side should stop doing bad things. I am disagreeing with you that what we are doing is bad, and further that your side does worse than what you accuse us of, much less what we have actually done.
Politics is not so simplistic that there's just "red tribe" and "blue tribe". Political parties may coalesce around it as compromises, but political philosophies don't. Also "person disagrees with me on topics" is not "person is in other tribe and should not be listened to and inherits the sins of the outsiders"
This black and white thinking helps to underline how your argumentation here is backed by emotion. You push your grievances with others onto me.
This is actually a great example of how political philosophies aren't so tribal. Try saying "the constitution is a sham" to your average Republican and they'll firmly disagree with you. There are lots of proud and patriotic conservatives who believe in the constitution and traditional American classical liberal values.
Most citizens are not in some cultural war obsessed "burn everything down, fuck the constitution, we're at war" mindset.
Ok here's a big example then
Google says
In raw numbers, that's about 6.5x as deadly as fentanyl in terms of how many people die a year! And some of those are secondhand smoking, people who didn't choose to be harmed by cigarettes unlike an addict ODing.
Why aren't we drone striking the tobacco companies? They kill half a million citizens a year, and there's not a "legitimate use" for cigarettes.
And yet, opinion on most political and social events of significance splits into two rough clusters parsimoniously described as "Red" or "Blue", and this split and the density of the clusters grows more pronounced as the sorting of the population continues along the arc it has been travelling for at least the last decade. Or perhaps you would care to describe the evidence you see that this trend is reversing itself?
Of course not. If I were not listening to you, how would I be able to address the points you are raising, or to point out how they are very clearly wrong?
Both Tribes routinely coordinate meanness against things they consider socially hazardous, always have and always will. A supermajority of Americans consider hard narcotics the central example of socially-hazardous goods against which meanness should be coordinated, and have for at least the better part of a century. You argued that people don't take this attitude toward guns, so they shouldn't toward drugs. The problem is that Blues do, in fact, take exactly this attitude toward guns, to the point of successfully defying federal law in their efforts to coordinate meanness against a good that is both legal and explicitly protected by both federal law and the Constitution itself.
You argued that people don't do this in a case where they very obviously and publicly do. I have listened to your argument, and am pointing out how foolish it is.
You argued that people shouldn't do this in the case of hard narcotics and the cartels smuggling them, because it might result in the logic being applied in other areas like guns. I have listened to your argument, and am pointing out that this logic is already being applied to guns, has been for decades, and has been pushed about as hard as it's possible to do, so the concern you raise is laughable.
You appear committed to arguing that social hazard logic is ridiculous, specifically for the social hazards of your outgroup. It seems to me that this is a very silly thing to argue, but you are free to chase this dragon as far as you please. From my perspective, it is obviously true that social hazards exist and must be coordinated against, and likewise that not all arguments for social hazard are valid. Particularly, it is obvious to me that comparing tobacco and cigarettes to fentanyl, meth and heroin is laughably absurd. Cigarettes do in fact kill half a million citizens a year, and it is in fact true that there are very few legitimate uses for cigarettes. That does not change the fact that there is no cigarette equivalent to the "fentanyl zombie" or any of the other numerous, horrifying outcomes that hard narcotics reliably produce with appalling regularity. Lung cancer can kill you, but all men die sooner or later; narcotics can and frequently do destroy people on a level deeper than the physical, in addition to frequently killing them young and quite suddenly in a way that cigarettes absolutely do not.
Your argument would be slightly less absurd for alcohol, and I would more than welcome your efforts to convince Blue Tribe to revive prohibition if this is an argument you seriously wish to pursue. But as it stands, you appear to be deploying a fully-general argument against government restriction of any good; if we're not willing to drone-strike the Marlborough headquarters, we're not allowed to lay hands on agents of TdA or else you'll call us hypocrites.
This would at least be a colorable argument if you were endorsing full legalization of all narcotics, and also we abolish the ATF and legalize machine guns, cannon, rockets and high explosives, AI-generated child porn, homophobia and the N-word. Most of us have experienced the siren song of Radical Libertarianism, and I too am mildly sympathetic at least to the concept of the recreational McNuke. If this were your argument, my reply would be Is and not Ought: that the evil generated by the distribution and use of hard narcotics is sufficiently vast that it must be confronted by anything even distantly approaching a civilized society. The moral outrage thus generated has heretofore been channeled away from the users, who we have for many decades agreed to consider largely as victims, and toward the dealers, producers and cartels.
Your argument demolishes this venerable settlement, and the logical consequence is a renegotiation of our social response to addiction, for which your opening bid, in your own words, is that the users have chosen to commit suicide of their own free will. It seems to me that there are many who would be entirely content to take you at your word in this matter, write the users off completely, and finalize the end of life you claim they've consciously chosen. I would not hurry to such a conclusion, but would note it is a result I could be willing to accept.
On the other hand, the actual, compact that our society has long settled on is that the Cartels and their agents down the distribution chain receive full responsibility both for their own crimes and for the evils generated by the addicts' victimization, and as a consequence they have essentially forfeited their membership in the human race. Consequently, what restraint exists in our treatment of them arises only from practical, utilitarian concerns of the second-order sort. Perhaps this compact really is wrong; again, I can think of few political developments I would welcome more heartily than a Blue Tribe commitment to publicly argue for and defend the poor, maligned drug dealers and Cartels. Here, though, I'm going to point out that your arguments appear to be to be poorly thought out, low-effort, and motivated by partisan ideological commitments. If you perceived principles that you cared dearly for at stake here, you might demonstrate that by engaging with any of the context above yourself, thus showing that you actually cared enough to give the matter a bit more thought. Instead, this exchange is necessary.
Many citizens are not, surely. Most, perhaps. Many are distracted or detached from politics. Then too, many are mistaken, even badly mistaken, about what has happened and the realities of our situation. For example, I'm given to understand that some people actually vote for Liz Cheney.
And yet, half the country backed nation-wide riots, partisan suspension of law enforcement, arson, brutal assaults and murders based on Blue-tribe lies. Half the country backed the various partisan abuses and lies of the Covid years. You are correct that many millions are still deceived or deceiving themselves that the Culture War is a distraction from matters of true import, that our systems are in fine form, and that everything will continue in the future as it has in the past. That does not make the Constitution any less of a joke, or make our society any more viable in anything but the shortest of terms. Many millions of Americans of both tribes continue to publicly salivate at the thought of their political enemies being harmed, jailed, even murdered, and this number does not appear to be decreasing. Political norms and the concept of rule of law continue to erode, and at a steadily increasing pace. At some point in the not-so-distant future, Blues will regain the reins of formal power, and then we will see how things go.
Actually, no. I've read a number of your comments that seemed notable for what I perceive as, to put it charitably, argumentation that really ought to be given a detailed response. It has merely taken a while for recency and free time to converge, but I've got your "Nazi Republican" posts and your analysis of the jan 6th events in particular saved to revisit when time permits.
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