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I had originally posted this in the Friday fun thread but it turns out that it was killing the vibe in there. Not sure what I was thinking. Anyway...
Note: I will completely qualify Portugal Europe and Portland Oregon in this article because they're easy to mix up.
Is liberalism peaking in Oregon?
In 2020, the state of Oregon passed a referendum, ballot Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs(!) with a vote of 58% in favor.
Voters in Oregon (such as myself) believed this was the path to enlightened drug policy, being informed by the revered Portugal Europe model. Tacked onto the referendum was a bit of social justice theory as well: the police would be required to document in detail the race of anyone they stopped from now on for any reason. To ensure the police weren't disproportionately harassing the 2.3% of the population that's black.
As an occasional drug enjoyer, I do find it a relief to wander the streets of Portland Oregon squirting ketamine up my nostrils like I'm a visionary tech CEO without fear of police. But in broad strokes it appears to be a disaster.
Indeed, the ensuing data was an almost perfect A/B test, the kind you'd run with no shame over which kind of font improved e-commerce site checkout conversions.
By 2023, Oregon's drug overdose rate was well outpacing the rest of the country, so much so that the police officers regularly Narcan with them and revive people splayed out in public parks. Sometimes the same person from week to week. It's true this coincides with the fentanyl epidemic, which could confound the data and have bumped up overdoses everywhere but that wouldn't explain alone why deaths have especially increased in Oregon. The timing fits M110.
https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2024/02/21/fentanyl-overdose-rate-oregon-spikes
At some point someone decided to compare notes with Portugal Europe's system. Some stark differences!
https://gooddrugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PortugalvOregon1.pdf
Briefly, Portugal Europe uses a carrot and stick model with a lot of negative incentive, whereas Oregon just kinda writes a $100 ticket and suggests calling a hotline for your raging drug problem maybe.
In the first 15 months after Measure 110 took effect, state auditors found, only 119 people called the state’s 24-hour hotline. That meant the cost of operating the hotline amounted to roughly $7,000 per call. The total number of callers as of early December of last year had only amounted to 943.
The absence of stick appears to not be very effective in encouraging users to seek treatment.
Are the kids having fun at least? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/health/portland-oregon-drugs.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/fHxWk)
That's the brightest part of the article. The rest is pretty depressing and sad and sickening and worrisome.
After a few years of this, the Oregon legislature yesterday finished voting to re-criminalize drugs.
The NYT again https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/us/oregon-drug-decriminalization-rollback-measure-110.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/3zksH)
The governor has indicated that she would sign.
Critics are out in force, arguing that the legislature overrode the will of voters (remember it was passed by referendum) and that the state sabotaged the program by not efficiently distributing treatment resources to addicts. This poster believes the low uptake and missing negative incentives prove that drug harm reduction is not primarily about access to treatment, but about incentive not to use. I do sympathize that better public services and addiction resources that people actually trusted would help, but fentanyl complicates the situation substantially. People need to hit bottom before they seek help (or so goes the popular saying) but fentanyl is so potent and unpredictable that they're dying of an unexpected OD before they find themselves at bottom, ready to seek change.
Frankly, I'm surprised Oregon repealed this so quickly. Has liberalism peaked in Oregon?
As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.
I believe this shows Oregon is not quite as ideologically liberal as previously led to believe. Or, at least, not anymore.
If one compares drug decriminalization, or general decriminalization policies with countries that follow law and order, the later not only have less drug abuse but also don't have to imprison that many people. The influence of such policy of drug criminalization for most of the world with such policies is for people successfully be dissuaded from abusing harmful drugs.
Drug abuse is a societal scourge and it is another example how libertine policies and attitutes lead to greater suffering but also greater imposition on people's freedom than the sacrifice required from making good trade offs and abstaining from harmful behavior. For the loss of what is good by becoming addicted to drugs is quite greater.
At the end of the day the libertine's have a cope that their policy leads to worse consequences but people get good and hard what they choose. But we shouldn't accept this cope way off thinking. The worse outcomes and society sucking more under such policies is good reason to not respect this course.
Same could also be said with obesity, or even the long term problems of lack of children.
We live in an age where there is a crisis of lack of smaller self sacrifices, for ultimate a greater negative end. In line with the proverb "An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure".
Now, you can't force people to have children, or not get fat, in the same way you can enforce criminalization of drugs, although there are things you could do, but the moralists on these issues are correct. Contrarily the people who have been spreading apathy and downplaying have had a corrosive effect on society.
Beyond just policy, there is also a morality involved with society that does end up relating to what happens and pressures people and also affects the law. So we can judge and contrast the libertine morality with more conservative one on drugs and other issues.
The ridicule of the people trying to dissuade people from bad behaviors and such campaigns, especially on drugs have been one of the most unjust reactions and self destructive ones for society. That kind of judgementalism against wise moralism is disastrous. We need the right kind of moralism. A good society is one where there is moral pressure in the right directions. While a completely non judgemental society is impossible.
Now that we see decline in various important issues, we should appreciate more the conservatives of the past who maintained certain good mores and actually fought to preserve them. Of course you need the right balance of enforcement, or conservatism, but modern conservatives have mostly not been too much on the excessive conservative side in the recent past on such issues. Seeing the effect of liberals taking control I do appreciate actual conservatives more, while in the past I had more mixed feelings about them. People should go back and see what each faction was pushing and claiming, examine how things played out and praise those who got them right, and criticize those who got them wrong.
Oh and the point is good trade offs and knowing what you are doing instead of relying on wishful thinking. Drug restriction policies have had a good track record in modernity. So the idea is for a general ethic of societal discipline for long term good on important areas. Still, no reason to enforce restrictions in a manner that the excessive restriction is more damaging to society than the gain. Or at least to persist where it would be unwise. See covid lockdowns which have been the more excessive uncharted waters type of policy, although serious enough diseases could justify such impositions.
How do you explain the entire history of the failed War on Drugs, which seems to contradicts this?
The war on drugs policies in most countries that have been followed have resulted in low prison populations and lack of drug abuse.
In the case of the USA, from what I have read much of the drug related prison population was there related to more serious crimes and they got them related to the drugs. Or drug dealers who sell poison to people. USA is a more violent country with more violent crime and so a larger share of imprisonment actually does have a protective element.
We have seen indeed an increase of crime as decriminalization and reduction of prison population has become the goal.
A small percentage of the population commit the most violent crime, so rather than encouraging more people to join them by decriminalization policies (which will not lead to more people imprisoned as crime increases since we got decriminalization), I would side with the majority preyed upon by violent criminals and against the criminals.
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Are you sure you can put the blame for the obesity epidemic at the feet of morality? I don't know how thoroughly the Chemical Hunger hypothesis has been discredited, but it seemed plausible to me and a bunch of the issues they raised make it impossible for me to take morality based explanations for the obesity epidemic seriously - unless you want to claim that there's a correlation between altitude and moral fortitude.
Though that said I am actually open to a more mystical morality play interpretation. The idea that environmental damage caused by oil extraction (the same energy resource responsible for our current prosperity) is poisoning the population in a way that makes them more dependent upon extravagant energy expenditure propped up by fossil fuels is poetic enough that I want to believe it is true even if it actually isn't.
The chemical hunger hypothesis is not the default hypothesis for the rise of obesity. The default is that we have a rise of a more obisogenic environment but it is also hard not to see the rise in general of detrimental behaviors related to superstimuli and people avoiding better for long term health of society self sacrifice.
Anyway, the blame of the individual can be reduced by the fact that people are affected by society and by what habits it fosters. And part of the default thesis is that more addictive "hyper palatable" food is affordable and more available to people today.
People eat more calories, and have larger plates.
I think moralism of the kind promoted by certain people which is only about the individual is going to be inadequate and you need greater societal transformations which go further. Japan is an example of a place where the norms at such that promote lower obesity, while their cuisine still has plenty of tasty foods.
One of my points is that if people adopt good habits early, and a society under the reigns of sensible moralism promotes long term greater happiness with less of the worse outcomes that arise from a society that avoids the self discipline. We know for example that is much harder to lose weight after you become obese than to remain fit. Same with drugs, easier to not become addicted than to get rid of the habit. This also relates to the valuable ancient understanding of freedom which isn't the only way of freedom that matters, but it does. Which is about people being free from their vices and living a life that better fulfills their potential. The later also relates with modern understanding, which we have seen in various metrics a decline upon, even if in other metrics we have seen a rise.
Part of the hostility to this kind of moralism has to do also with avoiding blame, and responsibility, but it is true that the decline in such norms has lead to a more irresponsible society with worse consequences for it. So lets admit that unpleasant truth and seek pragmatic responses.
I agree with this, but I don't think that actually provides a justification for the "moral failing" hypothesis - the moral failing hypothesis just can't explain what's actually happening. There are just too many odd correlations and relationships within the data for the moral failing hypothesis to be that plausible - at most it can be a small contributor to part of the problem. What's the 'moral failing' explanation for why obesity is correlated with altitude/water-tables? Don't forget that this obesity epidemic is impacting animals as well - it doesn't seem plausible to me that the decrease in willingness to sacrifice for society has caused feral rats to start overeating and getting fat.
You mentioned Japan, but I found myself losing weight there extremely quickly and easily without making any changes to my moral behaviour or character. Similarly, shifts in my weight that occurred outside Japan seemed much more correlated to environmental exposure than to the specifics of diet/behaviour - I have personal experience with rapid weightloss, and the moral failure hypothesis just did not match up to my inner experience at all. I found that when I (accidentally at the time) lowered my exposure to the kind of environmental pollutants hypothesised to cause obesity what followed was a sudden increase in energy and a decrease in appetite. Previously I'd lost weight by caloric restriction and strict dietary control which required a lot of willpower, but that loss was correlated with a lot of negative side effects and lethargy (as the chemical hunger hypothesis would suggest) - whereas I actually had to exert willpower in order to avoid losing weight on the "cut out pollutants" diet, rather than the opposite.
I just can't see the justification for endorsing the morality hypothesis when there are so many facts that it just utterly fails to explain - and there's no real predictive power there either. If you're right, we'd be able to look back at other instances of societal trust/morality collapsing and find obesity epidemics there too - but to the best of my knowledge, this just hasn't happened. I'm more than happy to be convinced that your hypothesis has legs, but you're going to have to provide a bit more evidence and explain a bunch of the questions that chemical hunger raises before I can accept it as more than a small contribution.
I'm willing to believe that our society has less self-sacrifice in it - hell, I'm substantially less willing to shoulder sacrifices for the sake of my society, but I think that's in large part due to my society endorsing and encouraging things I morally disagree with. There are a bunch of corrupt criminals shoving their faces into the collective trough of society, and I see no reason to make personal sacrifices just to empower them and leave me and my family worse off - as far as I'm concerned, making personal sacrifices in support of the Global American Empire is far more immoral than restricting my circle of care to those close and dear to me.
Could you elaborate on this? What was the pollutant you lowered your exposure to, and how did you do that accidentally?
Sorry for taking so long to reply - I went on a holiday and don't post on the Motte when away from work.
As for the pollutant, I believe it was lithium. I got into drinking black cold brew coffee which required me to filter all of my water, and I discovered an incredibly tasty recipe for roast vegetables. Because I was peeling all the vegetables, I wasn't consuming anything that directly contacted food packaging without being washed. Similarly, the main source of nutrition for me was potato/sweet potato - and the weight just dropped off me with ease. This is exactly what the slime mold time mold people said would happen when I removed lithium exposure from my diet, but I did this accidentally (thank you recipetineats) and before I even heard the chemical hunger hypothesis.
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By living in a society governed by a different morality, you were exposed to a less obesogenic environment, with smaller plates, less hyper palatable food, I probably should have mentioned this too, but also food choices that are less calorie dense, and more satiating probably too. You probably also mimicked how other people behaved and how they ate.
Basically, you benefited by the fact that you were living among the Japanese in a society organized and ruled by their laws and public morality. Yes that does kind of change some of the calculus of individual vs collective influences which are the result of multiple individuals behaving in a way that promotes a certain dominant behaviors and habits.
Also, in comparison to someone consuming enough calories that would make them overweight, by behaving in a way that is better for your long term, you did change your behavior in a manner that was an improvement morally. The amount of self sacrifice once society adopts better norms might not be that great, indeed. This is a selling point!
It actually isn't that big of a sacrifice, to follow from the beginning the kind of habit that avoid harmful drugs, don't eat too much calories, you walk around (which studies have shown to reduce depression). The point is that it is a worthy trade off and the decline of moralism has lead to greater suffering that is definitely not worth it. I guess, it is debatable how difficult it is to do so once you have experienced the other habits, and what would happen if we put obese people in places like Japan on the long term and where their weight would stabilize at. I know what would happen if you replaced the Japanese with enough of the obese, Japan will become fat as they will be following those habits and norms and foods and the food industry, laws and public expectations, shaming, all will change.
But why are the pollutants the issue and not the fact that the available food you had to choose from was less likely to make you fat? Because lower calories and more satiating per calorie. Less amount of oils probably too.
Some foods are also inherently more satiating. Harder to become fat on them than on fast food. Hence, by changing the dominant diet and promoting more Japan style the norm that people should eat say balanced meals, not too many calories, prefer more satiating foods, the result will be a reduction in obesity.
Too bad for the fast food industry which will decline, but a type of food industry is here to stay even with people eating less.
Like the perceived impossibility of crime in places like El Salvador where Bukele was able to deal with it in a manner where the trade off was certainly worth it.
I guess, one could note that action is more effective than convinsing people. Maybe just changing the available food choices would end up resulting in less obesity than just talking about individual responsibility. Although there is a symbiotic relationship between big business and consumers consuming bigger plates, and more addictive hyper palatable food.
Well, I agree with you that the GAE isn't worth sacrificing your life for it and that is a hostile empire to you and yours. I sympathize entirely with that. I am also not a keen of the negative influence it has by trying to promote cultural marxism, or the warmongering and color revolutions. I am more talking about sacrifices for the greater good of the people involved.
Indeed, parts of the problems of GAE is anarchotyranny and decriminalization policies promoted by elites like Soros, biggest corporations endorsing BLM, etc, etc. The changes I advocate, including other changes not focused upon here will go against plenty of what the people in charge of GAE preach to the detriment of those under their influence.
I recall reading a lesswrong post linked in the old subreddit which argued convincingly against the chemical hypothesis and directly addressed the water altitude arguement.https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium
Ed Yudkowsky doesn't even accept the truth that is CICO, so don't take this as me endorsing rationalist thinkers as an authority. Just on its own merits I found then when I read it that article to be good and made a better case than the slime mold time mold blog.https://slimemoldtimemold.com/
That article would do a better job arguing specifically against the chemicals hypothesis than I would, so I would recommend you read it for the counter.
I ate vast quantities of extremely fatty and oily luxury cuisine, to the point that I had ¥9000 breakfasts five days in a row. I also had more than one occasion where native Japanese people told me that I was eating a lot. At the same time, I had much more oily and fatty food - ramen, A5 marbling wagyu, otoro tuna, bizarrely flavoured gourmet kit-kats, crepes, viennese coffee, montblancs, fried street food, etc. I still lost over 5kg in three weeks. At the same time, my subjective experience matched up to when I accidentally adopted a diet similar to the potato diet recommended by the chemical hunger crowd - I felt like I had vast amounts of energy and simply ate whenever I was hungry or wanted to taste something interesting. In contrast, when I used willpower to eat an incredibly restrictive diet consisting largely of unpalatable food (protein sparing modified fasting) I found myself with intense cravings and lethargy that I only overcame with the usage of caffeine and whatever other stimulants they included in preworkout powders). This is why I blamed the pollutants rather than any sort of moral difference - because that's how it matched up to what I actually experienced.
I recall reading that counterpiece and then the SMTM refutation of it - but I'm not too eager to rehash that argument given that I haven't bothered keeping up with the literature for the past two years. If there are any argumentative data/food nerds here, I'd love to read a serious discussion on this hypothesis! I took a quick glance at the SMTM blog and they are still doing research on the basis of the chemical hunger hypothesis, so I'm not too sure that it has been comprehensively defeated. But even if it was, my own personal experiences are not ones that match up to the moral failing hypothesis at all. That all said, I do think there is actually a moral element to societal influence on food choices. The biggest difference from my perspective was that if you try to eat cheaply in Japan without access to a kitchen you would largely be eating riceballs, seaweed, fish, soybeans and other largely healthy choices. Trying to do the same in western nations leads to eating some incredibly unhealthy products (HFCS, McDonalds, etc), and this is the kind of issue that I think a healthy government would step in and address - but god knows I wouldn't trust current western governments to do this well...
CICO is just a fact which we know from countless experiments of bodybuilders who count the calories they eat and from randomized control trials.
I guess this supports the fact that while the environment matters, people are also going to eat more out of their own desire and change the environment too. If there was a greater share of people with your desires over average Japanese, this would affect the Japanese food industry...
French fries are a food that was associated with obesity but potatoes are otherwise a satiating food.
The best diet advice is against people going with very restrictive diets either in terms of removing food categories, or dropping drastically calories. Going more smoothly down but keeping at it and not reverting back, until you reach the point where it would be a good weight to maintain. Of course if you go very restrictive in diet you will have significant cravings.
There are people who have success with more restrictive diets, but it isn't necessary. And it necessitates more investigation and effort to get all the vital vitamins, minerals.
If you examine the history of food, there have been restrictive fad diets that were unnecessarily restrictive. I am more about wise self sacrifice and willpower relating to that.
Also, the willpower required to turn things around is different one someone becomes obese. Becoming that changes your appetite. It is still worth it, even if harder and there are also always ways you can fall down worse. Avoiding getting diabetes, heart disease, and other problems is well worth it, or reducing the severity. But it is even more important to do things right early, so people don't become obese to begin with.
Anyway, you decided to buy the meals you mention, and same previously. Surely, willpower plays a role in that? Although it was still bellow what you usually eat in the USA if you lost weight. Maybe you also were more active.
I guess a part of this has to do with having the right norms individually and collectively, and the term willpower might not capture it entirely, because it also relates with correct knowledge and action relating to that. While another part of it does relate with self sacrifice for one's own greater benefit but also a will to promote this norm in general. Moreover, like it or not, how much individuals decide to consume does affect the industry. And what the industry tries to market and promote, does affect the consumer.
Yes, I agree.
I took a long break from posting to go on holiday so feel free not to respond to this post in an ancient thread, but I wanted to reply anyway.
Yes, and I'm not disagreeing with it at all. This particular sort of diet intervention involves tackling the CO part. The claim is that these particular diets change some part of your internal chemistry in a way that prevents calories out from decreasing along with calories in. If this hypothesis is correct you can essentially get a free ECA stack with no side effects by shifting food consumption patterns in ways that prevent you from consuming environmental contaminants. That's absolutely worth investigating, and it would be regardless of whether CICO is true or not (I think it is, for the record).
In the sense that I actively wanted to eat tasty food that I could only purchase and consume during my limited time in Japan, yes. I wasn't paying any attention to my diet.
I don't live in the USA (but I do live in a FVEYS nation so not much of a difference). At the same time, I stopped going to the gym and working out while I was there - so while I did walk a lot more, I'm not sure how the total amount of exercise changed beyond losing the lifting portion.
Ultimately the core of my disagreement with your view of willpower being the determinant is that I have lost weight both through a lengthy and sustained act of willpower (protein sparing modified fasting + intense exercise routine), and through a dietary intervention that required no willpower at all - and in fact actually required me to exert mental effort/energy in order to eat enough junk food that my weight was stable rather than falling. There was a very clear subjective difference in my inner experience between the two, and the second felt a lot "healthier" - I had more energy and was more capable in a variety of ways when going through that second diet, and having gone through both types of intervention I'm actively trying the potato diet because I found that something equivalent worked that much better for me.
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There are studies that show that the addition of vinegar in a carb rich meal lowers glucose and insulin response in healthy individuals, which is associated with weight loss.
My understanding is that Japanese food has a lot of vinegar in it, which may have contributed. I don’t know if it would offset 9000 calorie meals.
I had a lot of obviously bad food that didn't have any vinegar in it - but it probably was present. That said the meals themselves were 9000 yen, not calories (big difference).
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Doesn’t the phrase “law and order” assume the conclusion?
There is a trivial way to have a perfectly law-abiding society: just don’t have laws. Descend into the Hobbesian state of nature. The problems with this approach make it very unpopular, of course, in a manner I’d describe as lacking “order.” Thus, Portland.
I’m making this distinction because decriminalization has not, in fact, raised the prison population. This Laffer-curve equivalent is cute but probably not accurate.
No, it is disingenuous and anti-intellectual to pretend that the phrase law and order assumes the conclusion. The conclusion that law and order is different than decriminalization is a given, and it is an exercise in trying to promote confusion and misunderstanding of reality for political purposes to make this an issue.
The kind of gotcha split hairing that submits nothing that is out there to win everything that is bad for discussion and for societal norms. Not for the motte which doesn't matter in a special way, but for society which matters and is lead astray by any prominence of such approaches. You are trying to shut down discussion here since if we can't distinguish between decriminalization or law and order policies, we can't actually discuss the issue. Furthermore, we are also diverted to discussing what we shouldn't be wasting our time on.
Not everything is negotiable. If your approach is a decriminalization approach, you should own it.
There are sufficient differences between different approaches to earn them different qualitative descriptions. There is really a libertine, decriminalization approach on drugs that supporters value and a law and order approach that is valued by its supporters. Different supporters believe in different narratives, one of which is correct and the other incorrect.
And we should NOT be wasting time making this clear, but spending the time examining the trade offs and wisely choosing based on having wise priorities as a society.
Plus, it is especially unwise to raise this distinction in response to a post that argues that decriminalization drug policies lead to societal decay and drug abuse and law and order policies promote better functioning society. It is like you were hyper focused on winning a point.
But my comment was about non decriminalization policies. I wasn't commenting about decriminalization resulting in more imprisonment. I was claiming that drug decriminalization lead to destructive societally drug abuse, while drug criminalization policies don't end up having to imprison that many people.
Although, if drug decriminalization policies raise behaviors that are criminal but come along with policies of general decriminalization, including certain areas in a city lacking police enforcement and becoming den of junkies, that is also a problem. Effectively, you raised crime but aren't enforcing it.
You aren't really addressing the substance of the issue.
Of course if you don't have laws, you obviously don't have law and order but the opposite and someone defining this as law and order is promoting inaccurate labels and diverting understanding to a lower level. Plus distracting people through having them to discuss with their inaccurate description from the substance of what is happening. Actually, by not having laws you are obviously going to have huge problems with all sorts of crimes, and people in the state of nature societies are full of rape, murder, etc, etc.
The ideal of state of nature being idealic is just a falsehood that crumbles when meeting with reality and actually examining hunter gatherer societies. Civilization, and societal norms don't constrain people from an idealized state, but most of them tend to lead to societies that lack the kind of abuses found in hunter gatherer ones. So, I wouldn't even describe as philosophy but as a wrong concept the idea of an ideal state of nature that is undermined by civilization. I wouldn't describe the very idea of less strict law, if relating to a particular law as anti intellectual as it can be valid of course.
But you absolutely after a point too low and you got libertine norms and decriminalization, and after a point enforcement you got law and order and maybe after a point of strict laws you might even have totalitarian societies. There might be a subjectivity to any of these standards but they do exist and deserve a label so we actually understand the world. Only by disagreeing with an example should one disagree with the label, as general deconstruction is anti-intellectual.
In a similar note, understanding that perfection doesn't exist anywhere, I would distinguish a free society, from an unfree one based on degrees, with the free one having to pass a sufficient standard to qualify. And as always there are trade offs. I am willing to admit that some things I am willing to support might come at a cost of certain freedoms. For example, if I supported lockdowns on the basis of thinking the result to be worth it, I would be asking for a sacrifice of certain freedom, based on seeking a certain benefit.
I would be engaging in partisanship and sophistry if I didn't admit it. Which is part of our problem, people want to have their cake and eat it too. Still, certain trade offs are better in terms of other trade offs since the sacrifice is smaller versus benefit, and even in freedom there is also both a sacrifice but also a benefit. What fits in the proverb of an ounce of prevention, a pound of cure, where the sacrifice is less than the necessitating later sacrifice, including what people are going to have to do to treat themselves and we expect and know they will do to deal with. As the alternative of not caring about even treatment will be even worse. An idealized claim of libertine freedom doesn't deal with that pragmatically.
So when it comes to not admitting anything, I would just marginalize this kind of sophists who try to deconstruct us from useful understanding often in partisan directions, so this kind of fruitless debate is rare and also the public norm and morality is to look down to it and focus on reality. With having an understanding and distinction between sophistry and actual valid points. Indeed a lot of our problems relate with people preferring convenient narratives over what is true. Including politically correct narratives which are meant to shut down further analysis.
I don’t believe I’m pretending anything, thank you very much.
Up until 2020 Portland had law but not enough order. After decriminalizing in that year, it had less law and less order. But this didn’t magically give it “greater imposition on people’s freedom.” I don’t think you can show that decriminalization made people less free. It made them more free to make bad choices.
Portugal is the usual example. People became more free, and made bad choices. But they remained a law-abiding, ordered society. Their situation has improved a lot since implementing the policy. Decriminalization is compatible with order.
How does your theory explain Portugal?
The idea that not only the freedom to consume drugs matters, but also the freedom from addiction, or from crime, is not something that can be so easily dismissed as "magically" giving an imposition. It is a real trade off where there is a net loss for freedom. Similiarly a hunter gatherer society might lack certain rules, but the freedom of its members is undermined by all the crime, especially the murders and the rapes.
Not taking that seriously is an intellectual blindspot which makes policy failures inevitable. Especially a blindspot that is dismissive from you when I already made the argument. So what I would conclude is that you would just prefer those genuine problems of freedom relating to bad choices that affect others but also might result in a loss of autonomy for the person it self, to not be taken seriously. But they should be put on the scale, even if you prefer they weren't.
Now, the Portugal case is a more complicated one, and a case of a decriminalization that is closer to the center than what happened in Portland Oregon. Which isn't to say I consider it centrist, but definetly closer than Oregon's.
I don't have the one sidedly positive view you have about Portugal's reforms. See bellow for a contrary view.
https://www.dalgarnoinstitute.org.au/images/resources/pdf/dart/The_Truth_on_Portugal_December_2018.pdf
Even the Wanshington post which rather partisan in the liberal direction is willing to promote some criticism
Portugal still forces drug addicts to follow treatments and selling drugs is illegal. Even its supporters claim that "Cops still work aggressively to break up major drug gangs and arrest people committing drug-related crimes like theft. They also disrupt open-air drug markets like the ones that have emerged in some U.S. cities."
https://www.opb.org/article/2024/02/25/how-portugal-eased-its-opioid-epidemic-while-u-s-drug-deaths-skyrocketed/
Cops also pressure drug users to follow programs.
The reality is that the decriminalization side who bring Portugal as a positive example, or claim to be trying to do something similar, tend to be quite partisan and lacking in intellectual humility that requires genuinely dealing with trade offs. Ultimately, they operate based on tunnel vision. The end result is the negative story of the problems I mentioned of rise of drug abuse, violent crimes, certain areas becoming full of junkies. If this side were seriously trying to deal things in a wiser manner from various angles, some of these issues would have been ameliorated.
See also this: https://unherd.com/newsroom/blue-states-are-learning-the-wrong-lessons-from-portugal/
On all sorts of issues we have seen this vulgar excessive policy and movement as more representative of what you are getting in response to the more conservative and restrictive in those directions past, rather than a right balance between getting rid of only some conservative restrictions but only in a considerate way. Or even compensating by some new restrictions like forcing drug users to get treatment. Changing things while retaining the benefits of the more conservative time is really hard. At worst is like wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
Since this discussion is about Oregon, bringing up Portugal as a winning move is trying to find a loophole. When actually the vulgar policy is what decriminalization movement is more represented by today and pushes.
The pro decriminalization side in the USA promised in fact that they could push not only drug decriminalization but other policies of decriminalization, reduction of imprisonment without rising crime rates, and other problems. This failed to be the case. Contrarily those that wisely predicted the rising violence and social problems were proven correct.
This shows why it is so important that in practice we can and should distinguish between a law and order side and a decriminalization side whose approach does undermine law and order in outcomes.
The point of bringing up Portugal is that there must be more than one way to get to “order.” Going full Reagan is no guarantee, or America would look pretty different. Going full Portland obviously doesn’t work either. But there is a Portugal option where decriminalization with teeth improves the situation.
And it did improve—the Australia link makes a big deal out of going from 3.4% to 3.7% having used any drug. Never mind that those numbers went back down in the next five years. They’re doing the thing where picking the right endpoints lets them support whatever they want.
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