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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10003 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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What options do the cops actually have otherwise?

Then we are left discharging this massive liability as soon as they sober up or whatever.

Kinda sounds like buck-passing all around. How can society deal with low-grade socially corrosive people? Without offending the bleeding heart types who do nothing to help but condemn anything that might?

Without offending the bleeding heart types who do nothing to help but condemn anything that might?

Here's the trick, you start with them.

How?

The answer is simple, but society refuses to accept it. Death. Life is not precious, it's cheap. Just execute these people. They don't add any value, they massively degrade the quality of life for all of society, they also take precious resources that could be allocated to more productive ends.

In the past, these people would have been outlaws, which means banishment and near certain death, and should an outlaw venture into civilisation it was legal to kill them.

You need us to make sure they don't die from intoxication or withdrawal? Fine. Cut themselves on a window breaking in, or got hypothermia? Fine. Need us to psychiatrically clear? Fine.

You'll see presentations that start this way though: "Patient brought in by police for threatening to push people onto the subway tracks while clearly high on a serious drug, two other incidents this week, and was brought to the hospital 14 times in the last 2 months for similar presentations but the police decline to press charges."

Probably not actually the police fault there but that's what the docs like to blame, but we see tons of dump jobs where we are just waiting for the guy to do something bad enough to not be caught and released and its an actuarial game. Seldom anything medical or psychiatric to do.

Big scandal in NYC recently after a state hospital cut someone loose and they immediately went and stabbed someone in a Macys. Doctor scuttlebutt is that the patient wasn't psychiatric - pure personality. Should have been a criminal matter front to back and now somebody is quite likely going to get sued out of the profession for something no physician has any control over.

Doctor scuttlebutt is that the patient wasn't psychiatric - pure personality.

How do you define this though? Not to cast aspersions on the doctors but the inherent nature of mental health diagnosis means that declaring somebody absolutely sane isn't the same as saying 'they don't currently have a broken leg'. The whole system is clearly creaking under an unwillingness/inability to actually handle whatever small % of genuine social defectors which then produces people rushing to palm them off on some other subsystem in order for them to no longer be their problem.

This means something very specific in a medical context, yes people can have personality problems in the sense that you mean outside of healthcare and end up in prison, but we have a specific suite of diagnostic identities called "personality disorders" (the most famous are probably: anti-social, borderline, and narcissistic) that represents a pattern of maladaptive personality features with a somewhat known cause that don't respond to medication and barely response to non-medical interventions like therapy.

Patients with these disease processes sometimes end up in a psychiatric hospital because of behaviors that are dangerous (towards themselves or others), but the purpose of a psychiatric hospital is to begin the acute stabilization process, if someone can't be helped by a psychiatric hospital and engages the in dangerous and illegal behavior than the correct location for them is prison, while in prison someone can try and treat comorbidities and begin loooooooooongitudinal therapy.

Probably not actually the police fault there

Yeah, I would guess this is a blue city soft on crime prosecutor problem. A crazy/drug-addled person threatening to kill people should actually not be left free to be a violent random encounter for the citizenry.

Exactly. The Modern West just struggles to deal with people who defect from polite society. Most of the punishments that can still be levied are more 'this derails you from polite society so don't do it' effects. Thus for committed defectors it quickly becomes a case of the latest fine simply adding to the pile.

Most of my work has been in blue locations but I'd wager that even red ones aren't great about this, I'd love to hear anecdotes or data to the contrary though.

You'd be shocked at how soft the legal system can be, even in red areas. You see this in stalking and DV cases - threats and implications are often not enough to do anything useful and things end up being too late.

The key word that twigged me there was "subway". Are there any places with both subways and Republican mayors? That actually seems like a good question for an LLM.

The Bing default search AI summary completely shit the bed:

The last five Republican mayors of American cities with subways are: Richard Riordan (Los Angeles, 1993-2001). Jean Stothert (Pittsburgh, 2013-2021). Corey O’Connor (Pittsburgh, 2021). Mike Mergner Bloomfield (Bloomfield, New Jersey, 2024). David Bronson (Anchorage, Alaska, 2024).

Richard Riordan is real, but Pittsburg has not had a Republican mayor since 1934. Mike Mergner Bloomfield seems to have been entirely hallucinated (hilariously so - "Yeah, the last Republican mayor was old Johnny CityName). Jean Stothert was the Republican mayor of Omaha, Nebraska. Corey O'Connor is the mayor of Pittsburgh, but he took office last week, not 2021, and is a Democrat. David Bronson is real. 3/5 fake answers.

Copilot did better, listing

  1. Michael Bloomberg - NYC
  2. Ralph Perk - Cleveland (1971-1977)
  3. Bernard Samuel - Philadelphia (1941-1952)
  4. William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson — Chicago (1915–1923, 1927–1931)
  5. Malcolm Nichols — Boston (1926–1930)

All of whom seem to be real.

Michael Bloomberg is real but a Republican in name only; he switched to the Democratic party partway through his mayorship and his most distinguishing feature was that he was all-in on government paternalism. Bloomfield, NJ is also real but lacks a subway, unless you mean the fast food chain, and has had only Democratic mayors in recent years.

This was an interesting exercise, actually kinda blows my mind.

You see this in stalking and DV cases - threats and implications are often not enough to do anything useful and things end up being too late.

True but you think those'd have more inherent grey areas than the litany of 'moderately violent homeless person is brought in 50 times until finally actually murdering somebody' if it's a defective relationship between two societally-functional people versus a person who is clearly just not beneficial whatsoever.

It's how our individual rights based system works. I'm usually okay with it but the problem is that many people have bought the progressive frame and never transition to actually managing the issue.

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