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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27864 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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How hard is it to simply shoot the drug dealers? Their whole revenue model is based upon getting access to the least valuable, least intelligent sections of society. That's also the recruiting base for the rank and file. In one case I'm aware of, the idiot drug dealers did their whole meeting/buying and selling under a visible, working CCTV camera.

The stupidest, drug-addled people are able to find drug dealers! Why can't police, with their wiretapping, forensics, drones, satellites, training and organization?

I've brought this up before and people say 'it can't be done', that we can't credibly threaten death for anyone who doesn't rat out their supplier, that billion-dollar bureaucracies can't just force their way up the supply chain and root out the whole network, killing anyone who doesn't comply.

Well it can be done! Shooting drug dealers is not hard. Rival gangs understand how to do it, that's how they secure their market share. They intimidate dealers from other gangs so they won't sell in their turf. States can do it, the Chinese did it. Opium is not a big problem in China anymore.

War on drugs (started century ago for openly and proudly racist reasons and on completely false pretenses that make WMDs in Iraq look like pinnacle of transparency) is worse by several magnitudes, on every metric you can imagine.

The war on drugs is not a serious effort, I agree. But it does not follow that serious efforts are impossible.

It is simple and easy to root out drug trafficking for rich, well-organized countries if they make a genuine effort. Even a moderately wealthy, organized country can manage it. It is only that American-style liberal democracies struggle with this fairly simple concept - these are the same states who managed to lose a war against impoverished, illiterate Afghan goatherders with no backing from anyone. That's because we didn't know what we wanted to do or why we were there, it was a clusterfuck of trying to manipulate the media, massage interest groups, make things look good, spend money on clients, reduce casualties. The war on drugs is the same.

How hard is it to simply shoot the drug dealers?

Easy. Without shooting whoever-is-disliked-by-local-police? Hard.

We already have 'shooting whoever is disliked by local police and planting weapons on the body'. That's why they put body cameras on police, to prevent that sort of thing. I'm not saying that body cameras are a bad idea. Maybe there should be a camera drone with a recharging port on the car that police can use as well. It could also provide another angle for oversight - all too often these cameras are turned off when they're actually needed.

Why can't police, with their wiretapping, forensics, drones, satellites, training and organization?

Because that'd be, like, kinda scary. A police officer is going to make the same money and advance on seniority no matter how well or poorly he does. Why should he actually do a good job of anything, when he can instead hit on rando women, harass low-class people, go CAF on the poor to get a new water cooler for the department, and write speeding tickets?

Cartels and gangs presumably aren't overly worried about getting the wrong guy once in a while.

We're already getting the wrong guy once in a while, it's rather similar to the 'collateral damage' in Afghanistan. There's collateral damage, yet no chance of victory. We're already reaping the rewards of drug addiction, organized crime, policing costs, second order impacts. There are enormous numbers of youths leaving society via overdose. More and more new and exciting drugs are coming online - fentanyl and similar. There's no obvious sign that this trend will change.

If we turn the 'war' into a war, we would be able to win as opposed to spinning our wheels in the mud, wrecking a great many people's lives without even achieving our ostensible goals.

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