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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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The answer to drug use appears to be legalization and "freedom."

The war on drugs has been an unmitigated disaster, the amount of money spent chasing weed farmers and purveyors of psychedelics as if they were the same as heroin producers is insane. Legalizing and regulating the production and sale of illegal drugs would solve a whole lot of problems. Junkies do suck though, and some drugs are legitimately dangerous, so i can't get on board with universal drug legalization, but we have a long way to go before being too permissive becomes remotely concerning.

The answer for social alienation

this isn't the government's job, and as far as i can tell the right's prescription to the problem is to go to church. this doesn't work well for a country with a very large and growing atheist population.

Assimilation is racism

don't confuse the progressive avant garde for the platform dem position. 20 bucks says if you ask joe biden if assimilation is racism he will say no.

Spreading democracy is colonialism

same here, but i'm actually a bit more sympathetic to this one. Democracy is great, but if some other country wants to be a monarchy or whatever, how would you describe strong arming them to do otherwise?

my mental model of "the left"

"the left" is not a political party, but a diaspora of actual politicians and activists and twitter users etc. By and large the more zealous progressives have very little actual political cache, and garner far more twitter likes than votes.

As for wether the left wants things solved, i'm sure that having every dem-proposed initiative that makes it to congress get tanked on arrival might have something to do with the image of dems not getting shit done.