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Notes -
Hold on.
Didn’t we try “tough on crime” over and over again? Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, all spearheading different approaches to shooting the dealers and locking up the addicts. Okay, Nixon had a really confusing stance on remediation, but his admin popularized the “war on drugs!” So what were these guys doing wrong?
@JarJarJedi and @FarNearEverywhere posit that progressive idpol is holding us back from implementing harsh solutions. This train wreck of a wiki article suggests the same…but most of its examples are post 2010. There were massive race riots before Clinton was elected, yet the 1994 crime bill saw huge bipartisan support. Reagan wasn’t deferring to victim narratives. It’s plausible that today, progressives are unwilling to accept the trade off, but that doesn’t explain what happened in the 80s and 90s.
I’m sympathetic to the argument below: America is so damn rich that our drug-addled homeless don’t mind it too much. That demand curve makes it hard to suppress the supply of drugs. Maybe reinstitutionalizing would help make up the difference. I just have little confidence that it would succeed where two generations have failed.
In his Reactionary Philosophy in a Nutshell post Scott posited an "uncanny valley of half measures" and I kind of feel like that's the situation a lot of cities are in now regarding a lot of issues surrounding mental health and substance abuse. A completely laissez faire approach would mean tolerating misbehavior but also tolerating the train driver telling the masturbator to get off their train if they don't want to have their skull stove in by a tanker's bar or coupling tool. A tough-on-crime approach would mean removing the masturbator from the train by having the police lock him/her up. Either of these options is arguably preferable in terms of transit ride quality to the current status quo where individuals are allowed to misbehave but are not allowed to be punished for that misbehavior.
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Honestly, the Reactionary Philosophy in a Nutshell post is one of my favorite ones that Scott has ever written, possibly my very favorite. He convinced me that reactionary philosophy is correct far more than his followup convinced me that it's incorrect. Which is damn impressive considering he doesn't even agree with it. I think at one point it kinda went off the rails because I don't really agree that the solution to our problems is to install a king back on the throne. But the entire analysis of society's issues where he goes "if you're in a hole, stop digging" over and over was dead on.
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