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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34408 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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That you wrote six paragraphs to vent a simple emotion that you could have stated in one sentence does not lure me into thinking that you are making a rational argument. I am not that much of a Motteizen. Plenty of people disagree with your idea that the greatest current failure of American civilization are the violent homeless drug addicts. There are so many other options. For example, the endless foreign interventionism... the NSA domestic surveillance... the war on drugs...

You are a Singapore-style authoritarian but I am not. If you want to move to Singapore, I doubt that it would be difficult.

"Lock the addicts up, slaughter the dealers, forget about the problem."

Aha... but in this authoritarian utopia of yours somehow you think that The Motte would still exist? You think that a government that literally kills people for selling substances that people consensually want to consume is going to... let people post on a forum that allows free speech?

"Lock the addicts up, slaughter the dealers, forget about the problem."

...

"Lock the free-thinkers up, slaughter the spreaders of dissident thoughts, forget about the problem."

No, fuck you.

  • -10

I’d prefer a libertarian paradise.

However, given the choice at the margins between a consistent authoritarian government versus one that’ll consistently fuck me and my family members in favor of the criminally-inclined, I’ll choose consistent authoritarianism.

Tyranny > Anarcho-tyranny

Their rules applied evenly > Their rules applied capriciously against me

No, fuck you.

This is not a good post, Goodguy.

Your argument here is mostly personal vitriol when you could have stuck to the ways in which you disagree with the OP's premise.

Banned for a day. We do not want disagreements expressed in this way.

I will echo both the other posters here and myself and say that, if we want public transit to be shiny and attractive to all of a city's citizens, the city's government must get Lee Kuan Yew-like to some degree before a Rodrigo Duterte comes along to force the issue.

Lee Kuan Yew

Rodrigo Duterte

Both eminently respectable men. Lee Kuan Yew was the greater of the two but Duterte has been extremely good for humanity too. May we (humanity) be blessed with more such people.

This but unironically.

Who says I was being ununironic?

I think you have neglected to not include an un-positive prefix.

Fair point. Corrected.

It is my impression that in the vague direction of the general left people are not in favor of things like climate change, and the driving of cars that encourages such processes. If people don't feel safe taking public transit because of addicts and dealers, is that not a problem? Is it not an injury to the public to have one's public spaces smelling of urine and strewn with stray needles?

The new urbanist movement is attempting to shame people into using public transit, at the same time it refuses to make it usable and safe. Revealed preferences shows that it is a bipartisan consensus that one should not expose one's children to schizophrenic lunatics and drug dealers, and women prefer not to go home late at night around the urban lumpenproles.

And somehow they cling to the notion that it's a 'car-centric culture', when it is so clearly a output of clear material incentive. How could so many smart people be so stupid?

Authoritarianism is not 'whenever the state uses force'. If the government is not going to solve these social cancers with its monopoly on force it is weak and ineffectual and the people are not bootlickers or Hitlerites for wanting it fixed. Imprisoning addicts and killing the dealers is preferable to the status quo of letting them do whatever they want, and as populists in other countries have proven: if liberal governments don't solve the problem and just waffle in useless progressive policy a strongman will eventually come along and do it for them.

The frustration is reaching a boiling point: it is a warning to people of progressive, libertarian ideals: you are running out of time to implement policy, and you do not have infinite time or public resources to waste. Sadly, I doubt anyone in power will heed it.

And somehow they cling to the notion that it's a 'car-centric culture', when it is so clearly a output of clear material incentive. How could so many smart people be so stupid?

They're not, they are trying to change the incentives. The sensible way, for them -- don't try to make public transit better, it would suck even if you cleared the noisome and violent homeless people from it. Instead, make cars worse, which is a much easier task.

The frustration is reaching a boiling point: it is a warning to people of progressive, libertarian ideals

Excuse me? These are not libertarian ideals. Libertarians drive.

The people I know who hate cars don't think public transit would suck. Perhaps it wouldn't meet their needs, but that's considered a reason to expand coverage, not to avoid public transit.

Penalizing cars is a way to skirt the cognitive dissonance of dealing with the noisome and violent. Maybe this is empathy, maybe it's a more libertarian unwillingness to apply force when soft interventions fail. Raising the cost and inconvenience of cars fits much more comfortably into a normal worldview. It's like the daycare late-pickup fee from the other week: cars have a clear monetary value, so they're seen as fair game.

It is possible to have a public transport system free from homeless drug addicts even without becoming as capable as Singapore. It's done in Australia and much of Europe. I used the public transport system for my whole life, my (wealthy) family live carless in a major Western city.

The US faces a situation akin to a wealthy man who undermines his own house, resulting in it collapsing into a pit. He then observes that it's very inconvenient climbing out of that pit to go to work, there are issues with rainwater. He then complains at the cosmic unfairness of having to move his whole house out of the pit, the expense, the cranes, the time, the noise. Yet this is the consequence of his own actions, deliberately going against logic and reason to worsen his own condition.

Oh no doubt that it is possible! I agree with you. I just disagree with 2rafa's murderous fantasies. It is not that I do not have murderous fantasies myself. I do, plenty of them. But I regard them as fantasies that allow me to vent my animal emotions, I do not actually want to implement them. There is plenty of political room between the current state of the US public transport system and 2rafa's "slaughter the drug dealers". I want to operate somewhere in that in-between space. Preferably on the side that is a bit further away from 2rafa and her ilk.

You think that a government that literally kills people for selling substances that people consensually want to consume is going to... let people post on a forum that allows free speech?

First of all, did she say anything about killing?

Secondly - why not? The same government that turns a blind eye to crime, homelessness, and public drug usage, has no issues shutting your business down for giving people a haircut without a loicense. Authoritarians have no issues being arbitrary in what they enforce, so what's wrong with lobbying for slightly saner authoritarian priorities?

First of all, did she say anything about killing?

What do you think the word slaughter means?

First of all, did she say anything about killing?

slaughter the dealers

looks pretty explicit to me

That's what skimming instead of reading gets me.

I, for one, would gladly sacrifice the existence of any online forum for an authoritarian utopia. It's a no-brainer.

I have zero faith that an authoritarian government would implement anything I might consider utopian.

I can sympathize. On the other hand, if authoritarians cannot implement anything wortwhile even when in power, there isn't much point in discussing the culture war or anything related on an online forum either.

"Emotions" aren't fundamental, independent causes of human action, they're contingent, useful adaptations that coexist with the rest of thought. If I see homeless and drug addicts on a subway, and "feel scared and vulnerable", and then stop using the subway, am I being irrational? What if instead, I see homeless and drug addicts on the subway, know from personal experience that homeless drug addicts have a significantly increased risk of violence, theft, and unsanitary conditions, and rationally decide to stop taking the subway? Yet the 'feeling scared and vulnerable' from the first example is entirely informed by the judgements in the second example - the reason you're "afraid" of homeless and not normal people is observations of the way homeless act that indicate they're a risk to life or health, for the same reason your fear of 'a gun being pointed at you' comes from knowledge that 'guns shoot bullets, which can hurt you'. But aren't all 'emotions' like this, being evolutionary adaptations to survival?

The same thing applies to large-scale policy. If a small group of people causes significant harm to everyone else in a nation, and I emotionally feel for the plight of my countrymen, and advocate for policy to restrain the small group ... or I rationally observe that my countrymen are being harmed, and add up all the expected utilities, and advocate for policy to restrain the small group ... what's different here?

Also, consider "lock the murderers up, slaughter permanently imprison mass murderers, forget about the problem" or "lock the fraudsters up, forget about the problem". We already do this to large groups of malign or harmful people, and it works! It's bad for 'free thinkers' because free thinkers are (sometimes) good/useful, not because hurting people is, in every context, bad.

You think that a government that literally kills people for selling substances that people consensually want to consume is going to

The government uses force to prevent all sorts of consensual activity. You want to buy food from a restaurant with poor hygiene? Want to do unlicensed, shoddy maintenance on other peoples' cars? Sell unlicensed pharmaceuticals? Take out large, predatory loans? These aren't edge cases, these are large potential areas of economic activity that are prevented.

I'll spare everyone my libertarian rant about the extreme licensing requirements to cut hair in a number of states.

I don't quite know how to put my thoughts in order given the vitriol of your response. On the surface, I agree with you.

But there are plenty of societies that aren't authoritarian hellholes that somehow don't have this problem. As well as plenty of societies that are authoritarian hellholes with decaying or depreciated social fabric/lunatic homeless.

I feel like the logic here doesn't quite hold.

I am not quite sure what it is, but I think it's something unique about Americans that makes them believe shared social anything is inherently a scam, or for suckers. A scam because it won't work (despite many examples of it working) or for suckers, because how dare anyone else benefit from something they pay for (because people paying for something they won't partake in is by definition, being a sucker). Then again, the game America as a country plays better than anybody aside from basketball is socializing their failures while privatizing the gains, so maybe it's genuinely cultural.

Aha... but in this authoritarian utopia of yours somehow you think that The Motte would still exist?

Yes? The Motte is not banned in Singapore.

Through a relatively unimportant happenstance of contingency. The same kind of mindset that would kill people to prevent them from consensually putting substances in their own bodies is the kind of mindset that would kill people to prevent them from disagreeing with them.

The same kind of mindset that would kill people to prevent them from consensually putting substances in their own bodies is the kind of mindset that would kill people to prevent them from disagreeing with them.

If you consensually put a substance in your body that then causes you to try and shove someone under a train or attack them with an icepick, I think your rights end at the point where you're doing the shoving.

This is the entire chasm in understanding right there: I'm a nice guy who likes to consensually use fun substances and I don't shit on the street or try and shove people into traffic, therefore I should not be prosecuted (debatable up to that point but not incorrect to hold this view) and this kind of legislation or enforcement could be used against me (perhaps) and anyway it's wrong because it disapproves of fun stuff and thus condemns my choices and makes me feel sad about myself and therefore it is bad and wicked and Nazi Fascism! (okay, no).

The people talking to themselves, attacking other passengers, and pissing themselves in public are not the nice people like you who responsibly use fun stuff, and fuck 'consensually putting substances into their own bodies'; I think they've rotted their brains to the point where "consensual" is a very dim signpost in the past, and they certainly are not harmless by their 'choices' and when it comes to hurting other people, that's where the interest of the public good overrides "but it's my natural human right to get high!"

The same incentives which lead the police not to enforce other laws against the homeless people also results in them not enforcing drug laws against them, though. So you make more drug laws or increase their penalties and you still have a bunch of crazy homeless people but now you're putting the mostly-harmless pot-smoker in jail for longer. You can't solve anarcho-tyranny with new laws that will be enforced anarcho-tyrannically.

The same kind of mindset that would kill people to prevent them from consensually putting substances in their own bodies is the kind of mindset that would kill people to prevent them from disagreeing with them.

Except for that this is demonstrably untrue, because you have posters like @2rafa and myself who, say what you will about either of us, are obviously in favor of the existence of a forum such as The Motte, as evidenced by the fact that we are participating in precisely such a forum! Now, you might argue that the difference is the fact that neither she nor I have the power to implement our most extreme authoritarian visions, and that if Rafa or I became Supreme Dictator tomorrow, the temptation to go whole-hog and start banning pro-criminal online discourse would be too seductive to resist. I don’t have any way to falsify such a claim, but I feel like it’s fairly simple to just point out that the harms produced by a violent or filthy drug-addicted lunatic on public transit are qualitatively different in very important ways from the harms produced by speech I don’t agree with; the harms I wish to target are immediate, tangible, and have a single easily identifiable perpetrator, whereas the harms created by bad ideological memes are distributed and abstract, with difficult-to-demonstrate causal chains.

Some might argue we're already getting the latter in America, why not have the former while we're at it?

To be less glib, I'm not so sure this is actually proven. Yes, authoritarianism probably does track with social conservatism (even the Soviet Union disliked gays and Jews), but your argument is more an argument against tyranny in general, and one argument against tyranny is that the tyrant's rule is governed by his personality. The more concentrated power is, the more dangerous it is generally--so I suppose you are right, but not quite so directly.

prevent them from consensually putting substances in their own bodies

The west already prevents me from consuming whatever antibiotic whenever I want on threat of jail for both me and the people who supply the antibiotic to me.

Yeah, get back to me about legalizing smoking fentanyl on the train after I get to legally buy raw milk.

I sympathise with your position, as someone who supports legalised drugs and criminalised vagrancy. Most people seem to treat them as a package deal, so it's understandable that you'd defend one in order to protect infringements upon the other.

It's unfortunate that things have to be like this, though. We're left with a policy that accommodates the moral non-negotiables of liberals and conservatives, at the cost of screwing up everything else.

You can have legalised drugs and criminalised vagrancy, just how it's fine to shit in a toilet but doing it in public comes under public indecency laws (and for good reason). Drugs should be legal but their consequences being publicly displayed should get the whip broguht down on your back.

So you think TheMotte's DDOS provider and server would be shut down by government goons if it were registered in Singapore? Is that your argument?

You misunderstand. It's not about people "consensually putting substances in their own bodies", it's about the violence taking place on many subway systems in America such that people will stop taking the subway.

I personally do not care if someone does consensually put substances in their own bodies, provided that this is done in the privacy of their own home, apartment, or other private room. Under this condition, it simply does not affect other people. However, when this is done in public, it creates a risk for violent behavior. Then this violent behavior deters people from using the subway. People not using the subway is bad because they might drive instead, and driving is bad for things like climate change and whatnot. Hence, the argument for prosecuting drug usage in public.

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