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I want to take this in another direction. - 'The universal empathy for the remaining life of a parent who has lost a child at a young age.' Susan is a billionaire with power, access and status. Everything you wish for, she has. And I am certain that she would give it all away to bring her son back.
Events like this hold up a familiar but often ignored mirror to the face of young people like me. My parents are still around. I will have kids one day. I have the one thing Susan has lost: time and agency.
No matter how much money I earn, it takes 1 not-so unlikely event to unilaterally turn me into a hollow husk of a person. Whether that be a permanent disability due to a car accident, death of child/spouse or slightly misplaced tap on my head.
From a utilitarian perspective, I am better off minimizing the
changeschances of a unilaterally disastrous event, than trying to get billions. Because the money only matters if these disastrous events don't happen. I could live an unimpressive life where my kids live tiil a ripe old age, and I bet Susan would trade my life for hers any day. The negative utility of losing a child is THAT high.Have kids, help them not kill themselves and you're already living a life that's the envy of many billionaires.
After a 24 hrs existential crises resulting from having the mirror held to my face, I shove it into the closet of 'things to think of when I have time.' I wake up, 2 continents away from family, 1 continent away from my partner, and innocently continue grinding it out in hopes of making a couple of millions in silicon valley at the expense of my 20s and 30s. Some people never learn. Hopefully, I won't stay this way for too long.
Even on this anonymous no-name forum, I feel the urge to say I'd never wish such a tragedy on anyone. I wish she finds the support and space needed to get through this difficult time.
I think you are typical minding someone who is not typical minded. There were dozens, if not hundreds of things Susan could have done differently in how she waged the culture war in her position of chief censor of one of the largest media platforms in the world to prevent this from happening. Not just for her own family, but prevent it from happening for hundred or thousands of other families. She did not. I do not expect her to change her behavior.
We'll see. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Youtube will adopt as capricious and neurotic a censorship regime against drugs as they have against guns, Republicans, COVID "misinformation", claims of election denial, etc. But somehow I doubt it. I sincerely doubt it.
Indeed, this is what I suspect. Wojcicicki and Troper (yes, the kid had a father) will indeed try to do something, but they'll do it by flailing in ways that wouldn't have helped their kid, that probably won't help anyone else's kid, and will do general harm.
This is depressingly true. So much activism is centered on "root causes" which often expresses itself as trying to isolate people from the consequences of their actions. And it only makes things worse and worse. Doing the wrong thing is much worse than doing nothing.
I hope I'm wrong and she comes out hard for criminalizing drugs again and locking dealers in prison. But I doubt it.
I'm still a believer in the desirability of liberty, if too blackpilled to be an actual libertarian, so I can't endorse that. Fentanyl and other opioids and most stimulants remain criminal, so I don't know what you mean by "criminalizing drugs again"; certainly I doubt he died from pot. The drug warrior approach might have saved him from death, though perhaps he'd have preferred it to the life in prison or drug rehab drug warriors would offer. If his death was indeed due to adulterated drugs or just drugs of unusual purity, then the libertarian approach might have saved him as well.
In many places in the United States, it is the policy of the police not to arrest anyone for drug possession, and even drug dealing is tolerated. For example, you can consume and sell drugs with impunity in my hometown of Seattle. This is what is meant by "decriminalization". Recriminalization simply means that existing laws are enforced again.
Recriminalization certainly doesn't mean that a young person would be thrown in prison for life for possessing a small amount of drugs. That is an absurd strawman.
The charge gets upgraded to possession with intent to distribute, for all but the most trivial amount of drugs. Maybe you can plea-bargain it down, but if the prosecutor is in a law and order mood that week (re-election coming up?), no. You don't get life for that but you do get prison time unless there's a diversion program (rehab). The conviction disqualifies you from most white collar jobs, but fortunately still qualifies you for the kind of marginal labor you can do to make just enough to get a fix until you get tossed into jail again.
This is just so far away from the world I'm living in.
In my city, people who have committed literally dozens of violent crimes are being released same day only to commit more offenses. Meanwhile, more than 1 in every 2000 people in my county died of a drug overdose last year, and drug use is practiced openly.
I am honestly starting to even doubt how many of the abuses of the War on Drugs even happened. Whenever I hear a story about "he dindu nothin', just some weed", you dig deeper and find a criminal with a rap sheet a mile long, and so they stick him with some trumped up drug charge. A bad thing? Possibly. But its a far cry from the paranoid fantasy that smoking a reefer could land you in prison for life.
The number of people in U.S. jails for drug possession approaches zero.
Let's not let more than 100,000 people die each year, and millions more become addicted because we're worried about very rare police or prosecutorial abuse. And if they really wanted to get you, they could get you for something else anyway.
FWIW, back in my youth in a deep Southern college town in the early 2010s the local cops still took the War on Drugs pretty seriously and weed was still very much illegal. I had multiple otherwise law-abiding friends get raided by the local narcotics task force and/or go to jail for simple possession. I myself had my apartment get raided by five undercover cops (aka. roided up thugs) because one of my retarded roommates sold a few Xanax pills to a confidential informant (I didn't go to jail because I didn't have anything illegal but it was a thoroughly unpleasant experience.).
Amusingly, aside from the driver's license impacts, the conditions to get a possession charge dismissed are virtually identical to those for a first offense DUI, aka. having to go through the local drug court's CLEAN program (at the cost of several grand). My buddy who'd been caught with a gram of weed and maybe drinks a six pack of beer a year was having to attend AA meetings.
The drug task force had their Pickett's Charge moment when they did a big raid on campus. They must've arrested a fed's kid or something because the FBI very quickly busted the former head of the force for embezzling seized funds and wound up throwing him in prison for a year.
A decade later and you can legally buy Delta 8 gummies that are vastly stronger than weed used to be (I don't habitually smoke weed, but the last time I took some of those gummies I was too fucked up to drive 14 hours later.), so I guess the cops gave up on weed enforcement, judging by how nonchalant the normies I know these days are about having it in their vehicles/on their person. Hell, one of the former cops who frequents the bar I work at usually has a weed vape on him.
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