Comment by Clubber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Clubber | Hacker News Reader

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>The percentages are higher for Black Americans, but White Americans still make up the majority of people shot by police[1].

Yes I never understood this tactic. If you really want citizen support (which is required), you need to show that all citizens are subject to this type of injustice. If leaders just say one group is affected and don't show that all citizens are affected, you won't get change as fast, if at all.

It's almost as if there is an ulterior motive to actually solving the problem, or perhaps the leadership just won't look past their own environment. Either way, the shiz is way out of hand and everyone should be afraid of it.

I remember reading an article where police were serving a warrant and they straight up shot the guy next to his pregnant girlfriend through the window while they were sleeping. They justified it by saying the room was boobytrapped. The guy was staying at his parents house when this occurred. It was very suspect, but I never saw national media attention it deserved, and I find it highly unlikely a kid living with his parents would place a active, lethal booby trap in his bedroom inside his parent's house. It was an actual murder squad. Pretty crazy. I wish I could find the article (it was local.)

Indeed. If I'm advocating for a project that will bring $10 million in to Town A that has a population of 5,000, and $50 million in to Town B with a population of 50,000, I'm going to be telling both Town A and Town B how the project will benefit them. I'm not going to be telling Town B that this project is only for Town A, and it's not an issue that affects Town B. If someone was saying that, you would expect that they'd be advocating against the project.

It's hard to believe that anyone who's actively downplaying the way an issue affects the majority of the population is actually interested in solving the issue.

I'm relieved that I'm not the only one who has come to this conclusion! It's so annoying and sad listening to all the people out there with good intentions who are failing so hard they actually drive people in the opposite direction. They would further their cause more by removing themselves from the discussion entirely.

>Yes I never understood this tactic. If you really want citizen support (which is required), you need to show that all citizens are subject to this type of injustice. If leaders just say one group is affected and don't show that all citizens are affected, you won't get change as fast, if at all.

It all makes sense if you start from a cynical assumption that the real point of most political activism is exclusively to acquire political capital, then spend it on acquiring power, rather than fixing the issue. In fact fixing the issue would be counterproductive, as that stops power accumulation and requires finding some new issue.

Of course, you have to plausibly pretend to actually care about fixing the issue. What's the solution? Demand unworkable and absurd fixes, like 'defund the police'. The social engineering in it was remarkable - its planned ineffectiveness relied on extremist demanding complete abolition of the police to make it unworkable and scare people away, while at the same gaslighting opponents of the absurd extreme it's _really_ only about small redirection of funds to health services and similar.

What would a real solution look like? It would try to solve the root of the issue rather than symptoms. One major current cause is that new meth is significantly neurotoxic due to unknown impurities from currently dominating synthesis methods. Good article about the issue:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

The most effective solution would be to legalize meth and ensure only pure, pharmaceutical grade is being sold. Pure meth isn't especially neurotoxic - and in small doses it's actually neuroprotective due to hormesis. Amount of people with damaged brains would plummet, fewer people would be homeless, fewer people would be violent. Which is exactly the reason it's never going to happen - nobody would gain politically.

Same logic for fentanyl and heroin deaths - cheap, pure (consistent purity = much lower risk of accidental overdoses) heroin would reduce fentanyl deaths to near zero, virtually eliminate health damage (pure heroin is relatively safe and can be used for decades) and reduce crimes committed by addicts to near zero (by virtue of being cheap).

I agree with your assessment of "defund the police," but that was an unfortunate slogan that got converted from "reappropriate funds from police to other services like mental health, counseling, etc." I think that was also politicized. I believe many police departments are entities that also fall into the category of self service and self preservation.

Our medium town spends $500 million on police and barely a fraction of that on drug rehab, mental health, etc. It certainly seems misappropriated.

I don't know much about meth, but concerning the opioid crisis, our solution was to "crack down," on prescriptions, which sounds good to someone who doesn't give it much thought. The actual outcome was people went from using a drug with a dosage printed on the side to stuff made in people's bathrooms and kitchens including god knows what which resulted in many, many more deaths.

Your drug legalization proposals might have the side effects of increasing the number of people who start taking those drugs. People respond to incentives and you can't both say that restrictions aren't making drugs harder to find and that they're driving addicts to dangerous substitutes.

Who knows? (Really, does anybody know?)

If you decriminalize, you do make drugs more approachable. You also make treatments more approachable, and health research actually possible.

Besides, there are other ways to fight the use of something than sending the police to lock people down with other addicts. And well, all that police involvement does put money on the drug sellers hands, to use on their marketing.

Overall, it seems that the highest damage (by orders of magnitude) those substances cause is due to the police involvement. So I'm quite for taking that involvement away. But there are other damages, and I have never seen anybody with a believable enough model of what will happen to those after drugs are legalized. (And, of course, it will certainly depend on all the details, so any "yes or no" answer is guaranteed to be bullshit.)

>Overall, it seems that the highest damage (by orders of magnitude) those substances cause is due to the police involvement.

Most of the damage done to a cancer survivor was done by chemo, but that's not an argument against the treatment. The right level to stop at is where adding one more unit of police damage would stop less than one unit of drug damage but like you say nobody knows where that is.

We've had a 50 year case study on what harsh criminal penalties for drug use results in. End result? Sky-rocking drug use with increased potency, cheaper prices, and a skyrocketing prison population. I'm not sure you could find a worse outcome.

Not only did we worsen the problem we were trying to solve (drug use), but we created two new ones with increased potency of the drugs leading to more deaths, and booming prison population, the largest in the world. It boggles the mind that any rational person would think that to continue going down this path will lead to some sort of improvement. I suspect it's just poor justification for the institution to preserve themselves. Cops gotta have their pensions.

What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.

Aren't there countries that have decriminalized drug use? Have those policies resulted in a higher amount of drug abuse? They haven't.

>It all makes sense if you start from a cynical assumption that the real point of most political activism is exclusively to acquire political capital, then spend it on acquiring power, rather than fixing the issue.

I suspect that's the case. I mean at least Huey Long got things done for his constituents while lining his pockets. It seems today's political class just want to line their pockets and ignore their constituents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long

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