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So what? Send a black kid from a nice family to an all white school in a trailer park in West Virginia, middle of nowhere Quebec, a shitty part of Ohio. They're going to have a bad time.
You're right: Poverty is bad. A relative lack of morality or culture or whatever you want to call it is bad. Crime is bad. Drugs are bad. African Americans don't have a monopoly on any of these things, but we have double standards for crack-dealing superpredators/innocent white victims of opioid overdoses. Unemployed whites in the midwest are innocent victims of globalization who had their jobs ripped away from them, while blacks living in deprecated inner-city slums are shiftless, lazy and sucking at the welfare teat.
Do we? Does the rap sheet of the mean or median "crack dealing superpredator" actually resemble that of the average "opioid overdose?" If it doesn't, if the behavior of these two groups is actually significantly different, why should we assess them identically? I'm pretty sure most or all the murder-capitol-area contenders are majority-black. Most of the current massive spike in the murder rate is black-on-black.
Suppose you had solid evidence that the former communities were once flourishing, and then decayed into hellholes, while the later communities were hell-holes from the start. Would this not, again, be valid grounds to assess them differently? The Projects were a project, an intentional expenditure of vast resources and effort in an attempt to ameliorate the evident social problems of the Black community. Did Appalachia get Projects? Did the Midwest? These questions aren't purely rhetorical, but the evidence I'm aware of leans pretty heavily in one direction.
I wouldn't ask you to assess them identically. But one is viewed as a threat to society, whereas the other is a victim. The crack-dealing superpredator was born wicked, while the opiate-addicted had wickedness thrust upon them by their opiate-happy doctors and the globalists.
There must be 'opiate dealing suprepredators' profiting from the decay of society in the white areas too, no? Overdoses from prescription drugs have been more or less flat since ~2006 (figure 4) so someone is dealing street drugs. Why don't we talk about them?
Progressives sympathize with blacks and sneer at rural whites. Conservatives...sneer? look down on? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but my impression is that they look down on poor black communities and sympathize with rural whites. I don't think their plights are identical, but I'd argue that there are significant parallels and that should be reflected in our discussions about them.
Watched this the other day and it was wild. It's remarkable how much better substack and randos on youtube have become at informing us about the world relative to the MSM. I feel better informed about the violence in Chicago after 20 minutes watching that than years reading bullshit takes from both sides of the aisle.
That first sentence contains multitudes. You say Appalachian whites were flourishing and had it snatched away by the globalists, progressives would say that in the era Appalachian whites were flourishing, Blacks were still overtly being discriminated against. Each of those arguments deserves an essay that I probably couldn't do justice.
That being said, there were significant numbers of black workers in the auto industry, the other big employment opportunity often brought up in the context of globalism destroying American middle-class communities. 20% of Ford's workforce between 1920 and 1950 according to this source, although it seems too high and I can't really find a corroborating one (this article cites the same number).
I don't know, nor would I even be sure how to answer that question. Do massive farming subsidies to the Midwest count as equivalent to the projects? What about the fact that, ironically, roughly a third of the State budgets of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia are federal aid? It's not clear to me if your point was that America invests more in the rehabilitation of poor inner cities relative to the rust belt or coal mining regions or something else.
...So from the start, one is a dealer, and the other is an addict. You chose these two as the basis for a comparison, but they're actually not comparable at all. One is straightforwardly a perpetrator, the other is almost universally considered to be a victim.
Because even once you adjust to comparing crack dealers to opioid dealers, my original question reasserts itself.
The opioid epidemic manifests itself by lots of people quietly ODing in their bedrooms. Their dealers play it relatively cool, judging by the local murder rates. Most of them are white, and their deaths were largely ignored for, what, the better part of a decade before people started actually talking about the problem?
The crack epidemic, meanwhile, manifests itself not only in large numbers of ODs, and not only in brain-burned armies of homeless people destroying any concept of public safety, but also in hideous rates of murder and other violent crime. Our crack capitals are also our murder capitals, and have been for decades running. And since most of the victims of this violence are themselves black, people actually care when they die, and are willing to expend significant resources to try to solve the problem! Which is why hundreds of thousands of Americans have spent their whole lives explicitly trying to solve these problems, financed by uncounted dozens of billions in public money, over the course of decades, only to see all those efforts fail, with many of them being rewritten in the history books as examples of explicit racism.
So you've got one narcotics market that produces lots of tidy, private, discrete OD fatalities. And you've got another narcotics market that produces private ODs, public ODs, general social blight, and five decades of the worst violent crime in the developed world. Even leaving aside a racial angle that seems to run directly counter to the way you're framing it, it does not seem difficult to me to grasp why the later receives more attention than the former.
Personally, I don't think "sneer" quite captures the emotion.
This poll is the end result of a protracted, coordinated, and highly intentional Progressive propaganda campaign. That propaganda campaign, the latest in a very long line of similar efforts, succeeded in kickstarting the BLM movement and the Floyd Riots and the Defund the Police movements. I and many others predicted well in advance that the end result would be rampant violent crime and lots and lots of extra murders with, and stop me if you've heard this one, blacks hardest hit. I personally predicted, well in advance, that Blues would then blame us Reds for the violence they themselves instigated. We were right, straight up. The national murder rate spiked 30-40%, and has stayed up for two years. Blues are now attempting to blame us for the increase in violence.
(The mention of "school boards" is an especially nice touch. You've got to admire the artistry on the finer details.)
I know for a fact that progressives will blame us Reds for all the people they helped murder, just as they have many, many times before. And I know for a fact that Blacks will let them, just as they have many, many times before. I am highly confident that I know how this will play out over the next few decades, because I've seen it play out before, over and over again, and I see no reason why the pattern should change.
Blacks are fucked. They are fucked because, in the main, Blues fucked them. Nothing we Reds can possibly do will help them, because they'd rather blame us for the harm Blues have done them, and the harm they do themselves, than cooperate with any of the steps necessary to prevent those harms. They don't want police and prisons, which do in fact help at least a little. They want education and rehabilitation and restorative justice and equity and economic revitalization, which have all failed with absolute, flawless monotony for decades, and none of which are even slightly likely to work better in the future.
Blues consistently promise these things, fail to deliver, and then blame Reds for the failure. Blacks choose to embrace these lies because they hurt less, and they flatter Black bigotries. So the murder rate goes up 30-40%, and it stays up, and the people who intentionally tore down the walls that kept that violence in check get a rock-solid vote base for the next few decades. The entire situation is so far beyond hopeless, so saturated with pitch-black despair and metastasizing malice, so utterly inimical to any possible conception of good faith, and so vastly removed from any meaningful Red influence on any scale beyond the purely personal, that there's simply no point in hoping for a happy ending any more. There is nothing we can do to help them. Any attempt we make will fail, and then be rewritten by Blue propagandists as a dastardly scheme to harm Blacks further. The less we interact, the harder it is to blame us for the fallout of the choices Blacks and Blues have made, and the more accountability for those outcomes Blues and Blacks accrue. Maybe someday, if we can get to be fargroup enough, the realities of the situation will assert themselves, and some hope for a brighter future might emerge. Or maybe Blues keep the grift going straight into the embrace of the unrelenting night. Who can say what the future holds? In the meantime, I'll continue conversing with people who two years ago were explicitly advocating the destruction of American policing about whether disapproval of TV casting choices might be the cause of Black America's miseries. One must find a way to pass the hours.
(Perhaps the above is pessimistic. Call me when the Black Community is willing to admit that a black person going to jail for killing another black person over contested narcotics profits might perhaps not be the fault of white people neither have met or interacted with in any way, and that such a murderer being apprehended and sent to jail is a benefit to black people generally. Call me when Blues are done pushing the nakedly dishonest idea that disparity of outcome, even in systems entirely conceived, designed, built, staffed and run by Blues is evidence of Red racism.)
By contrast, we haven't actually tried all that hard to fix the opioid epidemic, so some hope remains. Probably not a lot of hope, but some.
It does. But if a community once thrived, that's evidence that it can possibly thrive in at least one circumstance. If a community has never thrived, hope grows far more remote.
I don't think so, but I'd be open to the argument.
The former. We've invested heavily and for a very long time in the rehabilitation of poor inner cities, not just in terms of general welfare but in specific, brick-and-mortar infrastructure and heavy-duty social engineering specifically aimed at ameliorating the crime rate. I'll readily agree that the war on poverty and the various social nets have been a disaster as well, and, judging by the results of the cities, it's certainly arguable that the opioid areas should thank the graces that our elites haven't tried to "help" them more than they have.
That drill video is quite something, probably worth an effort post in its own right.
Someone is dealing opioids, and that someone elides the calls for law and order most of the time. Whether those neighborhoods are peaceful, orderly idylls where now and then someone dies quietly in a bedroom is a question that I can't answer without trying to dig into county-by-county crime statistics. I doubt it's as bad as inner cities, but I'm also skeptical of the rosy picture you're painting.
You frequently make unsupported arguments and force me to do the legwork for you.
I'm far from an expert, but Google trends shows that discussion about the opioid epidemic really took off around 2016 when fentanyl started flooding the market; this tracks pretty well with figures 2, 3 and 5 that I linked you previously. It seems like overdoses caused by prescription opioids don't elicit much discussion, but they also don't contribute much to the overall toll of overdoses in the US, so...maybe that makes sense?
Of course this ignores regional trends in overdoses, socially erosive drug habits that didn't end in overdoses until fentanyl hit the scene, etc etc but it seems to me that you've overfitted on 'nobody cares about white people problems.'
The feds spent $3.3B and $7.4B on the opioid crisis in 2017 and 2018 respectively (table 2). It disproportionately went to red states (Figure 5 and 6) outside of Vermont, NH and Maine for some reason. It's confusing to me why the south was ignored, and I'm too lazy to try and overlay it with overdoses per capita to see if it matches the funding levels. Looks like $7.6B in spending in 2019. I can't find data on how much the government spends on crack cocaine which makes me think it isn't much. The majority of federal spending seems to go towards dealing with the health consequences of drug abuse. Untangling whether there's bias in that system towards black people at the expense of rural whites is, I think, a bit beyond what I can be expected to do.
They did want police and prisons back in the 80s and 90s, no? The law and order approach didn't seem to work out that great either.
Poverty rates have more or less steadily improved since the 1960s and throughout the civil rights era. Maybe you could attribute the drop from 1994-2000 to this, but it seems like that argument would take a lot more support than anything you provided.
But what do you mean, nothing reds can do will help them? You've split control of the federal government for about as long as I've been alive. You control the governorships of places like Mississippi, Iowa and Arkansas which have some of the worst poverty rates among blacks even after normalizing for the slightly higher white poverty levels. Maryland, Washington, Virginia and New Jersey have some of the lowest (intentionally omitting states like Vermont and Utah which have negligible black populations). Your best argument is that local government is the most important for combating poverty, which is an argument of the gaps that you failed to proactively provide evidence for, and is incongruent with conventionally blue states having lower poverty rates.
This argument of Dems as neo-plantation owners is largely bullshit. There are ugly things like white elites who lecture us on multiculturalism, equity and climate change while flying their children to the Alps on private jets while on holiday from their boarding schools. I get that. But extrapolating that to the median Democrat is just as silly as assuming that you're anything like Lindsay Graham or the Koch brothers or something. If you're going to tell me that Republicans have this One Neat Trick to address poverty and social ills that the wicked Democrats don't want you to know about, tell me what that is and provide some data showing me that it works when the data I've seen largely points towards the opposite.
It's not pessimistic, but it's fundamentally an emotional argument. You're angry, because you feel like you and your tribe aren't in control but you're being blamed for problems you haven't created and you feel like you don't have much of a say in addressing. I don't think it's entirely false, but it does seem to be far from the truth in places. But I also don't think pointing out the ways in which you're wrong is the goal, nor is it likely to be productive, is it?
At some point I feel like people around here want 1) affirmation of their feelings of alienation and frustration by ingroupers with similar biases to them, 2) a free therapy session or 3) a chance to rail against what they see as their oppressor (me?). Usually I just say I'm sorry you feel that way man, I can commiserate, I think we have more in common than the media would have us believe. Indeed, that would normally be my response to your post rather than picking holes in it, but lately I've been accused of being smarmy, concern trolling and disingenuous. Asking how I'm supposed to converse with You (not you personally, the royal You) is often ignored. So tell me, how do you want me to reply to what you've written? I could easily write such a screed with the script flipped about how the Evil Republicans block all our bills that would have led to a post-scarcity utopia with equality between the races and sexes, we could both get angry at each other and move on with our lives hating the outgroup a little bit more, but that strikes me as the worst outcome.
1/2 (Goddammit.)
If you disagree with a claim, you can state your disagreement simply and I'll be happy to go digging for the supporting data. No need to take legwork upon yourself. On the other hand, on questions this wide-ranging, I think it's a better idea on both ends to simply state one's understanding, and then focus on the questions of fact that emerge from the clashing perspectives.
I'm certainly emotional about it, furious, in fact, but that does not make it an emotional argument. It is the bare facts, as best as I understand them, based on a considerable amount of evidence assessed over decades. This is my best understanding of a particular slice of the reality we all live in, as best as I can express it in a short post at 3am.
By all means, point them out and let's try to discuss them.
Over time, it has grown increasingly difficult for me to take conversations across the isle at all seriously. The "national conversation" about race, like most culture war issues, necessarily involves a number of fairly nebulous ideas, like "white supremacy" and "implicit bias" and "structural racism" and so on. These terms frequently have uncertain and changeable definitions, weak supporting evidence, extremely poor predictive value, and a considerable history of falsification, but any conversation more or less demands that I accept them as the null hypothesis unless I can marshal strong evidence to the contrary.
the BLM movement was one of the most sudden and intense political campaigns in living memory. I have never seen a political issue pushed harder, more political capital spent, more extreme demands made, more people mobilized, conformity enforced more zealously, ever in my life. The current murder spike appears to be blatantly correlated with BLM's efforts, and was predicted well in advance.
We try to discuss things using evidence and reason. It seems to me that there is more evidence and more reason, by orders of magnitude, to blame the current murder spike directly and solely on Blue Tribe than for any Blue Tribe social theory we've ever discussed here. The consequences have been more dire, by orders of magnitude, than any social issue we've ever discussed here. BLM was based on a fictitious epidemic of murdered black men. We now have an actual epidemic of murdered black men. If causation can be deduced, if reason can extract meaning from the chaos of events, this is it.
And blues, you among them, appear to me to be completely blind to this momentous event, and seem to expect us to all go back to discussing theories about implicit bias from names on resumes. It's as though we're expected to simply grant a mulligan, and pretend the awkward events of the last two years didn't happen. But then, what's the point in any of this? Why go on pretending we're even attempting to engage with reality?
And sure, perhaps I'm wrong in my assessment above. Perhaps I'm blinded by my own biases and bigotries. But I've noticed that this never actually gets argued, despite this being one of the most significant political events of the last fifty years. It just... doesn't pierce the fog, somehow. I have my theories as to why, mainly involving the effects of media bias, but that's a whole other rabbit hole.
I think there's a fair bit of that going around, sure. On the other hand, and I say this with what I sincerely hope is all possible charity, you seem to want to talk about the Culture War, but only from a perspective where conflict is simply ruled irrational as an axiom. That is not a perspective that I, or indeed many reds here, can actually share in good faith.
Suppose for a moment that I'm right. Suppose Blue Tribe did actually engage in a propaganda campaign to convince people of a fictitious murder epidemic of innocent black men by the police, that this did in fact lead to a massive, coordinated attack on our system of policing, and that this attack successfully collapsed large parts of our law enforcement apparatus, that the result has been an unprecedented increase in the murder rate, and that Blues stand to derive significant political gains from this sequence of events. If all that were true, when you ask why we can't find common ground, what am I supposed to say to you?
Tell me I'm dead wrong, and why. I don't mind being contradicted, and I am readily willing to admit error or fault when the evidence goes against me. Alternatively, tell me that these conversations seem unproductive, and I'll make a good-faith effort to avoid engaging on this general topic in the future, and go back to that nice conversation we were having about values and the good things in life. I liked that one a lot.
I don't want to paint a rosy picture, but I think we can at least agree that this is a factual question where the evidence should be reasonably clear, yes? If one looks at the data and rural/white/opioid areas see significantly less violent crime than the inner-city/black/crack areas per-capita, then it seems that the disparity in treatment is founded on factual differences rather than bias, yes? If they're pretty similar per-capita, then I'd happily stand corrected, withdraw my claims, and endeavor to modify my understanding of the world to match the available evidence.
Quick googling results, with excerpts:
10 US counties with the highest murder rate
Data from 2017, but since this conversation is about long-term attitudes, I'm not sure that matters.
So the regional divide lines up fairly well with the demographic prevalence of blacks.
Sure.
...And there you go.
Orleans Parish, New Orleans - urban
Coahoma County, Mississippi - rural
Philips County, Arkansas - urban
St Louis City, Missouri - urban
Baltimore City, Maryland - urban
Petersburg City, Virginia - urban, but small.
Macon Country, Alabama - rural
District of Columbia - urban
Washington county, Mississippi - urban?
Dallas County, Alabama - urban?
Four of the ten are major urban centers. Most of the rest are urban as well. All are heavily black.
Here's a paper on the opioid crisis; I have no idea if it's good or not,it's the first relevant result I came across. from the abstract:
Emphasis mine.
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The evidence I've seen is that the "opioid epidemic" is a distinct social problem from other forms of narcotics use, that it involves different drugs, different users, different dealers, and a different culture overall with minimal attendant violent crime. My understanding is that one of the differences is racial, where the "opioid epidemic" mostly involves rural whites and very few blacks, while traditional drug and gang culture features very heavy (but by no means exclusive) black involvement, and a whole lot more violent crime. Your original claim appeared to be that such differences didn't exist or were incidental. I think the above goes a fair way to establishing that this is not the case.
Where are you getting the conclusion that they didn't contribute much to the overall toll? The orange line in fig 2 appears to diverge rapidly and significantly, and between '99 and '07 the OD rates roughly double. "Significant" is a nebulous term, but unless I'm reading the charts wrong, it looks like by 2009 prescription opioids are killing more people than all other drugs combined. Am I missing something?
I'm looking at a chart that appears to show that (predominantly white, based on the previous links) people ODing on prescription meds came to dominate total drug fatalities, total fatalities doubled, and no one cared. I'm not particularly dedicated to phrasing this as "nobody cares about white people problems", but neither am I willing to accede to your original accusations of bias. Black drug problems come with a heap of violence, and get massive social interventions. Peculiarly white drug problems do not involve similar levels of violence, and were in fact ignored for more than a decade, even as they came to dominate an issue that is never far from the public eye.
If I'm reading the charts wrong, please let me know.
Probably because those are the states hardest hit by this specific drug problem, which by 2017 had gone parabolic. We're coming up on a fivefold increase in the OD rate over the last two decades, and almost all of that increase appears to be prescription opioids before the transition into into fentanyl. One imagines it might have been a good idea to try and get a handle on things before the fent arrived in quantity, but our leaders apparently had other priorities.
From a look at the counties by OD rate, it's because the south, and particularly the deep south, didn't have as much of this specific problem. Again, this isn't generic war on drugs stuff, it's a fairly unique pattern, albeit a quite large one.
I do not think it is proper to attempt to sum this up through the lens of federal spending on crack in particular. We care as much as we do about crack because it hits black Americans unusually hard, and we care about black Americans quite a bit. A huge percentage of the war on drugs has been aimed at Black communities, often at the explicit request of those communities, in an attempt to protect them from the harmful effects of drugs and the violent gangs dealing them. Education, housing systems, both projects and section 8, affirmative action... the list goes on at some length. I'll readily concede that much of this quickly escapes the bounds of the present discussion, though.
The law and order approach got the murder rate back under some semblance of control, at great cost and through grueling effort, with bipartisan cooperation being a necessity. The term "superpredator", explicitly in reference to Black criminals, was of course coined by none other than Bill Clinton. This effort never succeeded in closing the racial gaps, but it did manage to bring the overall murder rate down for blacks and whites both. It was the best we could do, and now it appears to have been undone.
The gap in poverty in particular went from 30% to 20% in forty years. This actually is surprising to me, as I'm used to a very consistent narrative that these gaps simply aren't closing. On the one hand, this indicates that closing the gap completely might in fact be possible, perhaps even in less than a century. On the other hand, Blacks and Blues don't seem to see this as acceptable progress, and are evidently willing to flip the table if a better deal is not offered.
I mean that I have no hope that any practically-achievable intervention I can imagine will actually close these gaps within the foreseeable future. That is to say, I have no hope that armistice is possible on the racial front of the culture war, even if my side had enough social and political dominance to enforce our policy preferences, at least under anything like present conditions. I don't think we have the tools necessary to fix this problem, so it's just going to get worse. We do not actually know how to eliminate poverty or its effects. We don't know how to educate black kids so they get the same outcomes as white kids, much less Asians. We don't know how to prevent black people from committing disproportionate amounts of crime, or using drugs at disproportionate rates. I'm highly confident that Blues can't solve these problems either, not even with total dominance, but they have shown that they can effectively scapegoat Reds for them, and that Blacks will play along even at the cost of their own futures.
That isn't my argument; I have no idea where you're even getting it from. I have no idea how to solve poverty, and I certainly don't think that local government can do so unilaterally. I am, in general, skeptical that the problems that face us can be solved under anything approaching current conditions. My wife spent a good chunk of time living in a midwest state with a predominantly white population and a fairly red-dominant political system. She worked six part-time jobs trying to make a living, before moving away because there simply wasn't any work. Detroit collapsed, despite all efforts to the contrary. Offshoring our industrial capacity seems to have been a bad move, but even there I can't refute the economists, other than to note their predictions and try to judge the outcomes.
I disagree. Blacks have bad outcomes. Blues occasionally make those outcomes significantly worse; the legalization of no-fault divorce, along with the rest of the sexual revolution, seems to be one of those cases, and BLM is another. Neither Blues nor Reds have much power to make them significantly better, and most of the largest concentrations of black misery exist in the seats of blue power. That drill video you linked, those unfortunate souls have been living in deep-blue country for generations, roaches and piss-soaked elevators and multiple friends murdered and all. The people who speak for them blame Reds for their misfortunes, and those among them who can vote reliably vote blue. The misfortunes don't change, the resentments don't change, and the political allegiances don't change. How are these facts "largely bullshit"?
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Most of what you write doesn't register to me as 'facts,' particularly if you're drawing on personal experience. When you say things like so-and-so was involved in a leftist terrorist group in the 70s and is now a university professor it comes across as an unsupported fact but one that I can easily check by wikipedia. When you say Blues are responsible for the plight of black Americans with no supporting data, it strikes me as an opinion that may or may not be true and is complex enough that even if superficially true is the tip of an iceberg. It contains about as much information as me saying that Reds are responsible for the plight of black Americans, no? My response could easily have been that, we both likely would have been wrong and could have gone in circles eating our own tails. It reminds me of mock debates in high school classes where nobody could ever win and indeed determining the truth of the matter wasn't even the point.
But then, maybe that's just my pathological obsession with data.
And I could point out sacred cows on the right that are just as nebulous. You talk to me about the value of "Christian Morals," "patriotism," "respect for the military." Yet I try to take you seriously nonetheless, and avoid things that I know would trigger you.
I think you're right about the BLM protests. As far as I can tell, the consequences have not been good. The crime wave in America, although still historically not that bad (things were worse in the 80s and early 90s), was not shared by Canada, Mexico or the EU as far as I can tell. I'm fairly confident I've said as much to you before, although maybe it was gattsuru or someone else, I'm not sure. From my perspective, every debate inevitably makes it way to the BLM protests because the easily available evidence around increases in crime is on your side and you want to just keep scoring the same point over and over again.
So, at least so far as your conversations with me go, how do you want to handle that? I can sympathize with your perspective and it seems like it has been self-destructive.
That being said, there are some problems with your narrative. Namely, the increase in violent crime and murders weren't restricted to black or urban neighborhoods. How do you draw a line between urban BLM protests and people in almost completely white rural counties murdering each other more often? I don't think the data is available yet, but I'm curious to see if there was a proportional increase in white and black perpetrators, suggesting some other factor.
Insofar as you insinuate that the BLM protests were orchestrated by democrats, I'm less on board. They were certainly involved, white liberals were definitely present at the riots, democratic politicians sympathized with the protesters. At the same time, I'm skeptical that a counterfactual world where white liberals said 'Hey, I know that cop killed your boy but he was on drugs and actually police help you on net' or facebook, twitter and the NYT actively censored stories about George Floyd would have stopped black Americans from rioting.
It's not clear to me hat you mean by this. Are you suggesting that from your perspective, conflict is rational and desirable? And what do you mean by conflict?
I agreed that the inner cities were likely worse, but I disagree with your characterization of opioid addicts peacefully dying in their bedrooms without any crime or damage to society. That's largely based on discussions I've had with friends from these areas, although I can't find any actual data supporting that, so who knows. Maybe you're right and these people studiously follow the law and are good members of society right up until they overdose on fentanyl. Maybe their drug dealers scrupulously stop at red lights, and people suffering withdrawal who can't afford a score are too morally righteous to rob that house down the road to buy more drugs.
From 1999-2006 prescription ODs went up 3x (3500-10,000) while total ODs slightly less than doubled (19k-30k). From 2014-2016 synthetic ODs went up 5x (4000-20,000) while total ODs went from 52,000-60,000. I'm not surprised that the latter got more attention.
Whether the former got any attention I suppose is hard to say since google trends only goes back to 2004, and is unfortunately relative. I could search for news articles from the time, but that's not very quantitative either. I'm not sure how we'd settle that question.
You're right that prescription opioids were a big issue in the mid 2000s though, I was thrown by the different y-axis scales.
There's a reason China affirmative actions the fuck out of their minorities. Having a permanent underclass, along racial lines or otherwise, does not seem like a particularly stable social structure to me. Nor a desirable one. I'm willing to trade some inefficiencies in the economy for welfare.
You said:
You also go on to say:
I pointed out that black Americans are doing better in states with blue governance than red governance. So relatively speaking, if Blues fucked the Blacks, did Red politicians in Mississippi and Arkansas and Missouri double fuck the Blacks? You're not responsible for Chicago, but it's also pretty clear that if we elected Republican leaders in Illinois and they enacted similar policies to other Red states the outcomes for Blacks would get worse. So...the conditions are not good on an absolute scale, but it's rich to criticize Chicago when states that you control are doing significantly worse. You skated past this argument in your response.
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