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Why am I (and others of an older generation) so horribly prejudiced against perfectly normal people covered head-to-toe in tattoos and piercings? Why do we cling to our outmoded beliefs that tattooing of that extent reveals low-life trashiness?
Well, cases like this, for one. Add in drugs (but of course drugs were involved) and it's a mess. Why, how can I look at the photos of this productive member of society and think to myself "that's a crazy dangerous person?"
Because he is a crazy dangerous person.
Also, while I'm at it, let me give out about the members of my own sex who hook up with crazy dangerous guys and still persuade themselves that this is the human equivalent of a velvet hippo cuddlebug pitbull who won't ever bite their own face off:
So let me get this straight: he's covered literally to his head in tattoos, he sells drugs, he's a drunk and a junkie, he's violent with the criminal conviction to back that up, and he just straight-up violently murdered a guy with a samurai sword over a disputed drug debt. But he's such a loving partner and father!
I honestly don't know why some women are so stupid. Yeah, loving and devoted up to the minute he swings at you with a sword, you silly girl.
Back to my main point: people covered in tattoos and/or piercings are the human equivalent of aposematism, change my mind.
The contradiction is not as irresolvable as it may, at first glimpse, appear; it is far more common than one would assume that someone will be benevolent to their family or close associates, while displaying unbounded cruelty to those they have convinced themselves deserve it.
This cuts across distinctions of personal appearance; the same pattern, with substitution of variables, describes the Nazi concentration-camp guard ('he's a sub-human weakening the Aryan¹ Race'), the Soviet gulag guard ('he's a wrecker trying to derail the Revolution on behalf of the capitalists'), the United-Statesian ICE agent ('he came into our country rather than obey our command that he quietly starve or be murdered in his place of birth'), the person of hair colour and pronouns in the cancel-mob ('he's a cishet-white-male schistlord who used a term² on the naughty-no-no-word list') and the seller of disfavoured substances ('he didn't pay me the money he owed me, thus violating the Non-Aggression Principle').
Focus less on "Which personal aesthetics mean that this person is or isn't safe to associate with?" (cf. Goodhart) and more on the Parable of the Good Samaritan³, as interpreted by Fred Clark. (Patheos, April 2017)
¹...despite him being of Romani origin, and thus more Aryan than the Germans.
²...which was actually the preferred nomenclature five years ago.
³If Jesus were telling the story today, would it be the Good Palestinian?
I think guys like this one aren't particularly benevolent to their families, they just haven't turned on them yet.
The allegation is that he and the victim were friends, and that's likely; the victim was buying drugs off him, after all. But when your friend is your dealer, he's not your friend anymore.
This is also dragging in another one of my hobbyhorses: "whaaat's the haaarm in a few druuuugs, bitta fun, should be legaaaal". Well, maybe legal drugs in this instance would indeed have kept the man from getting killed by the paranoid, possibly high, 'friend' who was claiming he owed a huge drug debt.
But the problem is the 'friend'. A junkie who was doing some minor dealing, probably dipping into his own supply, probably being leaned on by his suppliers (who are not nice people who think drugs are wonderful and everyone should have free access to them so we'll supply them) for the missing money, getting paranoid and trying in turn to lean on his customers with claims that they owed more money than they did. This was not somebody doing 'few druuuugs, bitta fuuuuun'. Drugs and guys like this don't mix well (neither does alcohol, I'll freely admit that). The drugs legalisers seem to push the idea that drugs are just harmless party fun and if legal nobody would ever have any bad outcomes.
Yeah, I don't think so.
Quite apart from the fact that this guy is plainly psycho enough/stupid enough that he can't figure out "don't walk into court on a serious charge grinning like it's a day out at the beach" in all the photos taken of him.
This is just not the right case to be making this claim. If drugs were legal, this guy would probably not be a drug dealer (because pharma companies have standards) and wouldn't be being leaned on by his suppliers to such an extent (because pharma companies that threaten to kill people stop being legal in a hurry).
The cases that actually do still arise from legal drugs are "addict (i.e. end-user) runs out of money and becomes a career criminal to get his fix" and "stimulant-induced mania/psychosis". These are cases which are unambiguously "this is not due to prohibition; this is just due to drugs being available at all". This is why I'm against legalising meth, for instance, despite being generally in favour of legalisation, because it's fucking notorious for doing the latter (the former is somewhat more tractable in other ways). But this case is not actually one of them, and you do your position a disservice by trying to cram it into that mould.
Both of these are made worse by prohibition -- the former by making the drugs more expensive, the latter because prohibition results in badly controlled doses leading to faster escalation towards mania-inducing doses.
There's also "drug user loses interest in anything but drugs, becomes criminal/welfare case" which I associate with pot. It's somewhat confounded by the fact that a lot of the people who ended up there would have been losers anyway, but I suspect that's not the only effect.
I mean, I knew about the first of those three, but the latter two are decent points. Thanks.
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