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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   37387 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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I mean, who is “one” in this “one might think” construction? You might think that, but actually it appears that the vast majority of people have a very different conception of liberty than the maximalist conception that you are using here.

Not really. The truth is that, by and large, Americans don't actually care about liberty as a goal in and of itself. If you were to press a normie who doesn't think cocaine should be legal, you could pretty easily get them to admit that it would increase liberty to let people consume cocaine. They just care more about "cocaine is bad" than they do liberty.

I think a big part of this is a product of the way modern academics strategically equivocate between "freedom" and "liberty", using one when they mean the other. Kind of similar to the whole "positive" vs "negative" rights formulation, liberty implies some level of rights, and rights by extension imply responsibilities. Even if they might not frame it this particular way, I think the average person is smart enough to recognize that while letting people shoot up heroine on the street might increase "freedom" it's not going to make their town a nicer place to live because junkies as a class are not responsible, and thus their presence is incompatible with "liberty".

Freedom is being able to do whatever you want.

Liberty is being able to leave your property unattended and let your kids roam the neighborhood without having to worry about them being taken.

No, it's that a normie American doesn't care about liberty to the exclusion of all other values, including second-order impacts. Sure, decriminalizing cocaine would allow more liberty to use cocaine, but it would also have second-order effects on safety, which directly impinges on other people's liberty to make choices unimpeded by crackhead violence. Posing this as a simple "yes/no" on the liberty question is a false dichotomy; the value that normie Americans place on a particular choice being available or not depends on a substantial amount of context.

Freedom is important.

One of the most important freedoms that the USA trample on is freedom of association.

If I were allowed to keep my family away from the kind of people that desire the freedom to do cocaine and other mind-altering substances, then it would not be that bad if these substances were technically 'legal'.

If I had a choice, when sending my kids to school, to pick the teacher they get trained by, why should I care that it's legal to hire gay pedophiles?

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