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I'm committing a major faux-pas by posting a second consecutive top-level comment, but it's been 12 hours and people need to post more. (Seriously, post a top level comment. Do it now.)
What's something that you were wrong about?
I'll start. I was wrong about marijuana legalization. It was a bad idea and we never should have done it. Marijuana is, contra urban legend, actually pretty addictive. And it makes productive people into unproductive people. The benefits, such as they are, are best enjoyed in moderation. But legalization has resulted in a whole new class of junkies that wouldn't have existed otherwise. Also, weed culture is gross.
Scott, as always, says it best:
In any case, what were you wrong about?
Legalization of marihuana brought into my view something that I myself have not seen before. And that is the fact, that many people just support it from first principles, you have these liberal or libertarian assumptions about the world and legalization of marihuana is just part of it. It is first principles thinking - people should be able to do what they want and therefore legalization of marihuana is good. That's it.
Since then I had some discussions with pro-legalization people and they are kind of stumped by a simple question: what good will legalization of marihuana bring to the country? What benefit will you have if your plumbers and doctors and teachers can go about their lives high as kites without any legal repercussion or stigma? What I found was that they do not even think about it this way. Weed should be legalized, because legalization of weed is "good". Smoking weed is just some apriori human right, no matter what. At best, they can point out to a good caused by people not being fined/jailed for making it illegal. Which is generalized argument for legalization of anything: if you legalize murder, then murderers would not have to suffer in jail. That is an argument I guess, but what good will legalization of murder bring to the rest of the society besides people engaging in this activity?
As for what I was wrong about, count me into weed legalization as well as many other liberal causes. I thought I was the enlightened one, smashing old superstitions and bringing new light to humanity as some avatar of Prometheus. I was wrong, I did not realize that I was implicitly holding religious adjacent beliefs, and that I used semantic stoppers such as "X is human right" without actually understanding where I am coming from. I thought I was above mere mortal faults, while I was the most gullible of all the people, because I did not even stop to think where my moral premises such as "human rights" and myriads of slogans such as "taxation is theft" come from and how are they grounded.
If a plumber, doctor, or teacher causes injury or damage due to being intoxicated on the job, he can be sued for negligence in civil court, even if the intoxicating substance (whether alcohol, marijuana, or some other drug) is legal.
It's not such an easy to do thing as with breathalyzer, in fact legalization of marihuana makes drug testing for manufacturers very hard, as they can no longer have zero tolerance policy as it is hard to analyze if you had a dose an hour or a day ago.
But again, this is even besides the point. What are those incredible positives this legalization brings to the society?
Civil court uses a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, not the stricter beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard that criminal court requires. The plaintiff can call witnesses who observed the doctor's intoxication on the day of the harmful act, and the jury can convict on that basis, with no breathalyzer required.
Victimless crimes that harm no one should not be crimes. This is not "a generalized argument for the legalization of anything".
This is just a slogan, not an argument. It is exactly what I mentioned with the first principles thinking. Plus it is interesting that you say this right after you talk about how jury can convict somebody who did something criminal under influence. Victimless crime, right?
Punishing activities that harm no one is nothing but a waste of resources. When you want to deter negligent car crashes, punishing drunk driving separately just because it may lead to negligent car crashes is unnecessary.
Driving intoxicated: No victim
Hitting someone with your car while sober: Victim
Hitting someone with your car while intoxicated: Victim (extra penalties for negligence)
It is a slogan as it just steers the discussion into what is crime, if it has to have some violent or social impact component, what is victim and all that. Plus I am unwilling to accept the premise of your slogan before we even begin the discussion.
I put it into GPT and apparently trespassing, prostitution, gambling, public intoxication, loitering, public nudity, vagrancy, unlicensed hunting or jaywalking are all examples of "victimless crimes". So yeah, I will bite the bullet and just admit that actually victimless crimes should be crimes. Because I do not want to have a society where intoxicated nude vagrants trespass and loiter on streets outside of pedestrian crossings, hunt local birds and sell their gambling scams and their bodies for everybody else to see. Go bark your slogan up somebody else's tree.
I don't see any upsides of legalizing weed, there may be only hidden downsides. Exactly how Scott Alexander now realized.
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