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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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W.H, liberal morality, and why co-existence is undesirable

A little while ago, I read a story of a recent scandal which I think conclusively shows that the Dems have finally gone too far. You see, the state legislature of Massachusetts passed a prisoner rehabilitation weekend pass program, in which prisoners with good behavior could obtain leave to spend time unsupervised in society and then return to serve their sentences. Unfortunately they forgot to exclude first degree murderers serving life without parole sentences who, for obvious reasons, could not be trusted to return. As such, the court said they must be allowed to participate unless the legislature specifically excluded them. The legislature passed a new bill to do so, but the Massachusetts governor vetoed the bill.

Enter inmate W.H, who with his 2 friends got bored robbing a cooperative teenage clerk, so they stabbed him 18 times and threw him in a dumpster. Sentenced to life without parole, he was furloughed from prison and escaped. But normal life was of course boring. So predictably, he broke into a woman's home with a pistol, tied up her boyfriend, stabbed him, and then raped her in front of him.

Perceptive readers will have guessed by now that by recent, I mean 36 years ago. You see W.H is Willie Horton, the governor was Michael Dukakis and this was the scandal that helped sink his campaign for president. or as the Times covered it back then:

"Foes accuse Bush campaign of inflamming racial tension": https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//www.nytimes.com/1988/10/24/us/foes-accuse-bush-campaign-of-inflaming-racial-tension.html#site-content

Now, as much as i'd like to dunk on the Times they didn't cherrypick random nobodies. Their sources for the accusation of "inflaming the nation's racial fears", Dukakis' running mate, Jesse Jackson and the future DNC chair, Dona Brazille. And of course, if you look up Willie Horton today, basically every non-conservative source including your high school teacher will tell you about the "infamous"... ad, which unlike unleashing rape and murder on your innocent citizens violates the sacred values of our Democracy or something. Some degree of deliberate unrestricted warfare is going on here, but I don't think this fully explains it. I'm reminded of Amy Biel who went to South Africa to fight apartheid, only to be pulled out a car by a black mob which slaughtered her despite the protests of her black friends that she was on their side. And then her parents flew into the country to testify a the "truth and reconciliation committee" in favor of releasing her murderers. They then started a foundation and hired these murderers.

Hlynka, I'm sure, will find a way to call them hypocrites. Moldbug will ask, 'but don't these elves eat great food'? As for me, I neither desire nor expect cooperation with these people, whatever their thought process or culinary habits. I wanna see the conservative movement* draw a clear unambiguous moral line between us and them, accept those that will cross over, and to crush the opposition permanently and with the same concern they feel for their pets' victims.

Added:

*Of course they are more concerned with saving the enemies' feti.

Added:

Here are the two ads Bush ran on the issue.

Willie Horton ad https://youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y

Revolving door ad https://youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y Note how in the second one, the campaign goes out of it's way to find white criminals for it's footage.

This is it.


WELL THIS IS IT BOYS. I've been Permabanned. I appeal to the other mods not for "a second chance" but for an outright acquittal, as I believe this charge to be a travesty. Paging @naraburns, @ZorbaTHut, @TracingWoodgrains

Commenters who are tempted to draw conclusions from this ban should... do exactly that. Seriously, read @Amadan's rationale and try to defend his integrity. There are people who place no value on your life, and others who, whatever their pretensions to the open discussion of ideas and others who find pointing this out intolerable. The outer party lives on, laundering gross atrocities into respectability by demanding that you not be outraged by them. And so, in this eternal re-run of the scene from "politics and the english language" releasing monsters to slaughter innocents becomes, "a policy that resulted in a criminal doing some crime." Depicting the criminal becomes "racialized imagery", and the promise of open discussion becomes, "I'm not sure how you'd make it relevant today without being pure "boo Democrats,"...

  • -19

I think you could make posts identical to this with regard to almost any ideological leaning. So for every conservative that would cite released criminals murdering again, so could someone else cite the various cases of suicide after DWP withdrew their benefits of the depravity of their enemies, or Trump's pardoning of war criminals etc. etc.

I'm reminded of Amy Biel who went to South Africa to fight apartheid, only to be pulled out a car by a black mob which slaughtered her despite the protests of her black friends that she was on their side. And then her parents flew into the country to testify a the "truth and reconciliation committee" in favour of releasing her murderers. They then started a foundation and hired these murderers.

It's not like Truth and Reconciliation was entirely one-sided though, see for instance Brian Mitchell.

Not giving someone welfare isn't the same as releasing criminals from prison (let alone when they're clearly a career criminal). Having your soldiers kill the wrong people overseas in fundamentally ill-conceived ventures is also very bad but ties into a large and complex problem with thoughtless foreign policy.

US cities have many crazy homeless people who go around harassing and sometimes killing random people. For example: https://abc7ny.com/woman-killed-subway-push-times-square-man-arrested/11471944/

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-suspect-arrested-fatal-stabbing-penn-station-20211206-j6fdh4kjjvg2laq5hilh7dgfay-story.html

Whenever we have a public transport related post, it gets filled with Americans who will refuse to give any ground to an energetically efficient, compact and economical transport system because in their experience, train stations are where drug addicts go to enjoy drugs and harass other people. In my experience outside America, train stations are for catching trains. There are many large costs with having your very rich cities filled with these problem people, breaking into cars and houses, killing people, encouraging emigration. How much immensely valuable real estate is rendered uninhabitable by this 'urban decline'?

Now, this isn't one of the US's biggest problems. Bad diet is probably worse, in terms of general social harm. But this is an egregious and easy-to-solve program. All the US security forces have to do is get rid of the open-air drug encampments, they only have to outwit and overcome mentally ill homeless people! You can put them in an institution, you can enforce higher standards of behaviour by beating them up if they disrupt the public (Singapore doesn't have these problems), or you can shoot the problem people rather than letting them rack up lengthy criminal records. Drug dealers (by which I mean fentanyl and the like) are a net malus for society, they have only a very small chance of making positive contributions and have many bad effects. They should be killed.

Things tend to reach an equilibrium. If you don't maintain your garden, it gets filled with weeds. The problems compound on eachother and it gets much harder to do anything about them. Much better to solve problems while they're small. Imagine if the US was genuinely tough on crime, if they made a serious effort to kill or detain serious criminals, permanently remove them from circulation. Take a leaf out of Bukele's book and arrest all the people with obvious gang tattoos. There's an immediate cost but a long-term gain from not having these people running around causing problems.

If people simply appeal to the 'better ten guilty go free than one innocent be imprisoned' platitude forever, what is to stop the richest cities in the world turning into uncivilized eyesores? What is the point of the legal system, what is the point of our principles if they lead us here? Murder should be very low - the US is a very rich country. Medicine is very good now. There are cameras and drones and sniffer dogs and forensics and so much more! And yet it's going up: https://abcnews.go.com/US/12-major-us-cities-top-annual-homicide-records/story?id=81466453

Drug dealers (by which I mean fentanyl and the like) are a net malus for society, they have only a very small chance of making positive contributions and have many bad effects. They should be killed.

Dealing drugs does not violate anybody's rights. Consuming drugs does not either. Please be careful before calling for the deaths of innocent people.

Drug dealers provide positive contributions to drug enjoyers.

If you had a choice between living in a society where 0% of the population used fentanyl and one where 80% did, which would you choose? Which is better?

At the end of the day, rights are there to get or avoid certain results. If the results are bad, one option is to change rights.

If you had a choice between living in a society where 0% of the population used fentanyl and one where 80% did, which would you choose? Which is better?

If 80 percent of people would use fentanyl if it were permitted, then I would rather live in the society which allows it because I would probably be one of the people using it.

At the end of the day, rights are there to get or avoid certain results. If the results are bad, one option is to change rights.

The real question is if the results are worse than if those rights were not there. Even if you think it would be better if an exception to property rights was made to ban drugs in order to decrease the rate that they are consumed, exceptions to a right beget more exceptions, some of which could personally harm you. For example, there are parallels between the arguments for banning drugs and the arguments for banning firearms, so if I want to own a firearm but do not care for drugs, I could ally with people who want the freedom to consume drugs under the banner of respecting property rights.

The real question is if the results are worse than if those rights were not there.

I am totally certain that a society where 80% use fentanyl is grossly dysfunctional. The more fentanyl use you have, the more dysfunctional it gets. You'd be living in a shithole. The roads would be very bad, the medical system would be very bad, housing would be very bad. And where is the food coming from? What kind of industry goes on there - not very much aside from the production of fentanyl I'd expect. What kind of cultural life goes on there? Not a very well-developed one. Are the fentanyl addicts working together to make well-coordinated, long-term projects like computer games or book publishing industries?

The most plausible way such a society could exist is parasitically relying upon some more functional civilization, like your average US inner city drug precinct in the 1990s.

Why would good, sober people stick around providing services to drug addicts who then steal from their vehicles or break into their homes looking for something to sell? Even liberal-leaning, wishy-washy women are coming around to the 'hang them' solution, publicly on twitter.

https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/1645067621191286784

I don't even live in such a society, dysfunction is not stressing me out night and day.

firearms

Firearms don't cause significant social harms in and of themselves and have many redeeming characteristics. Drugs can't help you overthrow an authoritarian govt, quite the opposite. I've still not read Brave New World but drug use was one of their foremost means of social control, of pacifying the masses.

Something in between Fremdschämen and Vernichtungswahn.

I am totally certain that a society where 80% use fentanyl is grossly dysfunctional. The more fentanyl use you have, the more dysfunctional it gets. You'd be living in a shithole. The roads would be very bad, the medical system would be very bad, housing would be very bad. And where is the food coming from? What kind of industry goes on there - not very much aside from the production of fentanyl I'd expect. What kind of cultural life goes on there? Not a very well-developed one. Are the fentanyl addicts working together to make well-coordinated, long-term projects like computer games or book publishing industries?

Legalizing fentanyl would lead to a increase in rate of use among the population and however high it reaches, as long as property rights are enforced, people who do not want to use it can live pretty close to the way they would if it were nonexistent. There would be less workers to some extent, but those who do work would earn proportionally higher wages so it would not lead to impoverishment for us.

Why would good, sober people stick around providing services to drug addicts who then steal from their vehicles or break into their homes looking for something to sell? Even liberal-leaning, wishy-washy women are coming around to the 'hang them' solution, publicly on twitter.

I have no problem with hanging violent criminals, my point is that selling or consuming drugs is not a violent crime. There are plenty of drug users who are peaceful and for whom drug dealers provide an important service.

Firearms don't cause significant social harms in and of themselves and have many redeeming characteristics.

You are right. Perhaps alcohol would be a better comparison, you don't support banning that too do you?

You are right. Perhaps alcohol would be a better comparison, you don't support banning that too do you?

There may be health benefits from moderate consumption of wine, so I'm inclined to wait for further information. Alcoholism can be a very serious problem though - look at Russia during the 1980s and 1990s. Context is important.

Legalizing fentanyl would lead to a increase in rate of use among the population and however high it reaches, as long as property rights are enforced

But you pay a price for enforcing property rights. How many extra policemen do you need to keep people's catalytic converters from being taken? What if the police are too busy to prevent you being robbed or murdered by people who are out of their minds? In a civilized society, people shouldn't need to carry firearms to protect themselves in major urban centres.

people who do not want to use it can live pretty close to the way they would if it were nonexistent.

The lady from San Francisco begs to differ, as do those who flee from these deteriorating areas.

I have no problem with hanging violent criminals, my point is that selling or consuming drugs is not a violent crime. There are plenty of drug users who are peaceful and for whom drug dealers provide an important service.

There are drugs and there are drugs. Caffeine gives you a bit more energy but nobody is worried about people on their fifth cup of coffee going on a coffee-fuelled rampage. Certain quantities of THC can really mess you up but lesser amounts aren't too bad. I want to target people who sell serious, damaging drugs, hence my initial qualifying phrase 'Drug dealers (by which I mean fentanyl and the like) are a net malus for society,'. Biochemistry only improves with time, we need to lock things down now before we get new and worse drugs.

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