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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36201 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Small Red towns like my own would have a rash of car bombings and the like.

What about flooding them with opiates? Car bombings are a dumb way to kill. Expensive, high-risk and don't scale. Opiates are profitable, legally low-risk and easy to distribute.

https://www.herald-dispatch.com/news/pillbillies-oxycotinville-emails-from-drug-exec-reveal-mockery-of-appalachians/article_03619647-b096-5b49-b675-6f8be7613fec.html

Or what about destroying their jobs by exporting them overseas? A certain kind of contempt bleeds through.

He says a focus on domestic manufacturing is simply a “fetish for keeping white males with low education in the powerful positions they are in.”

https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1578130142655905816

Stupid, poor people kill with knives, guns and bombs. If you're smart, rich and powerful, you kill with laws and regulations. The pen is mightier than the sword, Mao killed more than even the worst serial killers/warriors with words alone. You can make it look legitimate by some meme you invented like 'manufacturing and energy production is ugly, polluting, needs to be heavily regulated' and 'let's have trade liberalization with foreigners who don't care for regulations' plus 'let's intensively market these non-addictive painkillers in these communities'.

Or what about destroying their jobs by exporting them overseas? A certain kind of contempt bleeds through.

That has been one of the decisions that has gutted the areas like the one I live in yes. But that happened in the UK and other developed nations too. That is was targeted rather than simply being financially expedient does not seem to fit the evidence.

Gotta give credit where it’s due, the fentanyl epidemic is to the credit of forward-thinking cartels, not Purdue pharma et al. Fentanyl is complicated to manufacture compared to heroin but far easier to smuggle, and should be understood primarily as an innovation in the illicit drug market. It’s still contentious how big an impact easy access pharmacy opioids had compared to the counterfactual standard progression of heroin use incidence, but ultimately we’re 10 years past peak Oxy abuse. Gotta blame the markets, my guy.

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