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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27855 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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In the sense of 'the state sends guys with guns to shut down his weed dealer', or the sense of 'his friends try to convince him to stop being worthless'? Certainly the latter.

I meant the former, although perhaps less extreme. His friends have already tried to convince him, and it didn't work. Personally, the answer to "is it okay to let people degenerate, so long as every step is taken out of their own will?" in this case is...maybe? Depending on how you're defining "let" and what you've already done. If intervention from friends doesn't work, what's left?

what's left?

Assuming we mean using criminal law to discourage this? Armed government squads kicking in doors and dragging people like him off to the rape cages.

Or we could make it merely a civil infraction and then there'd be a small chance he'd have to pay a fine every now and then. Not exactly effective coercion or paternal guidance from the state. The state's tools are too crude.

Being in a community that could guide (or coerce) him could work. In a different, non-atomized world, this guy's church elders could have a man-to-man talk with him. But as a refugee in a foreign country he's left any possibility of that behind. Accepting the facts of modern anomie, traditional conservative community based solutions are irrelevant.

Or just fight 'the war on drugs' more aggressively. Like "it's impossible to fight an insurgency" - force any sophisticated modern state has could almost entirely stamp out drug-dealing, they just don't want to do it, for complicated reasons.

You don't need a 'non-atomized world' for smoking weed to be very shameful, or become less common. I have a few friends who smoke weed very regularly, and many more who do occasionally, yet none who smoke cigarettes. 80 years ago, it'd be reversed.

You don't need a 'non-atomized world' for smoking weed to be very shameful

Back in 1994 the CDC's Director of the Center for Injury Prevention said something about this:

"We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol -- cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly -- and banned."

Yeah, so maybe decades of propaganda and control over the schools could let them make smoking or owning guns dirty and low status. But then they already tried that for weed and it didn't work. And gun owners really don't like some bureaucrat trying to make them low status and ban their favorite stuff.

We could have a society where smoking weed is shameful and completely unacceptable for any upstanding person. But we don't and the government's attempts to push us that way didn't work.

Is Russia, let along Kyrgyzstan, a modern state with the capacity to stamp out things it really wants to, the way the US is? It doesn’t seem like it is.

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