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Comment by stanleykm | Hacker News Reader

> The idea that trauma and violence can have repercussions into future generations should help people be more empathetic, help policymakers pay more attention to the problem of violence

This seems like a pretty charitable read on policymakers. We inflict violence all the time that has multigenerational downstream effects without a genetic component and we don’t really care about the human cost, why would adding a genetic component change anything?

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I'll quote Michael Douglas from Traffic, "If there is a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I don’t know how you wage war on your own family". His daughter was knee deep in heroin addiction as he was tasked to criminalize everyone. By the end of the movie he was changed imo.

We have no way of giving such an experience to those in power. The best we can do going forward is pick more well rounded people, and no, that doesn't mean great schools and great wealth. You must be experienced in life.

That was a good film. I always remembered del Toro’s recommendation about bulling more lighted fields for kids. Chinese society could learn a lot about how gaming is actually not that addictive when you look deeper into the problem.

Getting off the rails here but I never get to talk about this movie!

When first watching that movie, I really didn't like it right until the last scene, with Michael Douglas and his daughter in rehab, with the line "My name is Robert. And my wife, Barbara and I are here to support our daughter Caroline. And we're here to listen."

It was such a simple yet clever way to end the movie and highlight a central theme in the movie, which is that the way to solve our problems isn't to demonize the people that caused them, but instead to listen to them.

It was weird, because it sort of retroactively made me really like the rest of the movie.

I feel like I'm willing to put up with a lot of the more slow-paced stuff if I know it's going somewhere. If I know that this is building up to an interesting theme, then I don't get bored.

It's now become one of my favorite films.

War on drugs != War on drug users.

Shouldn't it be War on dug dealers?

It’s shouldn’t be a war at all. That framing is unhelpful to solving the actual policy and societal problems.

I agree, and I think the militarization of the police has been a net negative on the US. It should be police action. East Asian countries have very low drug use rates because they deal with drug use appropriately. Meanwhile in San Francisco, a comparably far richer place, drug use is tolerated and the problem proliferates.

And you don’t need armored vehicles and SWAT teams to get to a better place.

The point of the "war" framing is to manufacture consent for the chronic inflammation that is patriarchal domination via semi-martial law.

> the chronic inflammation that is patriarchal domination via semi-martial law

What does this mean?

It can be some legal actions, for sure? If it's illegal polices should move forward to clean them up?

No, patrolling your streets like you would a warzone is bad for everyone. It’s not a war. Any allusion to it being a war is bad. It is policing.

You are changing the framing to excuse drug dealers. Most of the people with harsh lives don’t become criminals.

No I am not. Who is excusing drug dealers?

But, making things illegal that (clearly) people will buy anyway just pours billions into criminal enterprises. The vast majority of crime is funded by drug money in one way or another. The same thing happened during US prohibition: people did not stop drinking alcohol, but all the money from alcohol suddenly poured into the criminal economy. This is a well-trodden path and we should know better by now.

Has "the war" worked out? We're several decades in with no win in sight.

It shouldn't be a war on anything. Because we insist on treating adults like children, we're taking money that would have gone to tightly regulated pharmaceutical corporations like Bayer[1] and funneling it into violent criminal syndicates.

The "War on Drugs" is just a massive subsidy for the cartels via US markets. A sane approach to actually reduce drug use and fentanyl deaths would be to mirror the policies that have brought American tobacco use to a historic low and invest the tax revenue from legal narcotic sales into addiction treatment centers.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin#History

That hasn’t been the implementation applied in almost all cases.

The imaginary clean dichotomy between the two is one of the convenient fictions that serves to make the war on drugs semi-palatable.

Portugal seems to legally distinguish between distributors and consumers just fine.

Perhaps there's some weight to the idea that demonization of distributors harms consumers—but this doesn't seem to be an ideological barrier between being aware of the harms to users and the obvious economic boon of taking advantage of regulation to exploit the market advantage.

I mean not to fan the flames of war on drugs - but its supposed to be targeting supply chain and large distributors

It's a 24 year old movie. Around that time the history of the drug war involved a lot more petty criminalization (look how far we've come). This discussion can veer.

I don't think there was any moment of history where that was true.

Besides, on a practical note, the war on drugs is what created large distributors. There weren't any when it started.

A simple policy could easily end those supply chains and large distributors. Just legalize it. Coke, meth, heroin. Legalize it, only allow it to be sold retail (no more street drugs), only allow licensed manufacturers to produce it, only allow them some very modest (capped at 2% over cost, maybe) profits. You get to choose where it's sold (out of liquor stores, most likely, instead of crack houses). You get to starve the cartels to death (they're cut out completely). No cops dying in shootouts, no dealers dying in shootouts, no bystanders dying in shootouts. And if you want tweekers to stop stealing copper wiring for scrap, just get rid of piss tests too... if drugs are so awful that people who give suck dick for it, then they're also so awful that people will get a minimum wage job scrubbing toilets for them. It's just that they can't because of piss tests.

Instead, we'll get another 100 years of half-assed decriminalization, where it's still illegal to sell, dealers are still motivated to kill cops, deadbeats, and rivals, where 100,000 people die because it's laced with fentanyl and even decriminalized illegal street drugs can't be regulated. I eagerly await all the downvotes this opinion will get.

100%. Decriminalizing possession only solves part of the problem: not ruining users lives even more than they have already done. Cracking down on dealers just incentives them to substitute stronger and more dangerous drugs in the pipeline.

One more change I would like to see: get rid of advertising this stuff. Giant billboards pushing alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis, are bad for all of us.

Even if it were just doing that (and I don't believe that's either the objective or the practical application, minor possession offenses targeting users are the vast majority of convictions), your street level dealer is so far down the chain to have no effect on supply and is a member of the community that you're hoping to help by imprisoning.

GPT is floating out nearly 8 million arrests for drug possession in America between 1990 and 2010.

No, that seems far too low. I'm getting disillusioned with GPT answering everything.

I don't find exact numbers for 1990-2010 but the number from 1996-2015 was over 32 million according to drugpolicyfacts.org [1]

https://www.drugpolicyfacts.org/table/total_arrests

Law enforcement doesn't typically target itself and the ruling class.

Former Senator Bob Menendez would be very surprised to learn that

Ignoring the fact that the word "typically" was highly operative, he's a great example of the point you're trying to undermine. The government never would have gone away empty handed with no conviction of any sort like they did the first time they went after Menendez in the late 2010s. A normal peasant would have had their life ruined and been just barely scraping by in the 2020s when he was doing the things that ultimately got him put away.

"Typically" being the key word here. Morons exist in every economic class. See: Eric Adams.

Anyway, Menendez has gotten off extremely lightly and everyone can see this.

I just find it odd to describe something that happens at the federal level on average once a year[1] as atypical. (And I'm sure even more frequently at the state level).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_federal_polit...

Once a year at more than 500 lawmakers and some number of senior executive branch appointees is <0.2%.

How many lawmakers, judges, and executive appointees do you imagine are in the habit of committing crimes? Less than 250K people are convicted of crimes every year among the entire population. That's <0.075%

Now do cops

Convictions seem like a distraction from the narrative here: Menendez fucked over his constituents. Obviously every politician that does so should be equally castigated. The court is irrelevant in this context and should be considered a trailing symptom.

Yeah, but that "supposed to" is propaganda more than policy, and is quite far from a description of the consequences on the ground.

Typical policymaker: "noted, so we have confirmation for condemning whole generations"

> we don’t really care about the human cost

Humanity risks a global return to a state of gleeful cruelty. "Lupus est homo homini". [1]

The well-being of people is a characteristic of successful society. And labour is fundamentally valuable. For those who seek economic pre-eminence, it makes perfect sense to invest in the people doing the work.

However, there are narrow-minded groups and individuals who see another equation: put workers in an exploitable condition and keep them in such condition over generations. Wars have been fought to preserve the investment in maintaining such conditions.

Labour is valuable, but the individual cost in human life is usually dismissed through demagogy and populism. We had broken the historical cycle of misery, but we now risk the achievements of our civilisation.

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_homini_lupus

Maybe the only way to get out of a cycle is, trying to get out of the cycle?

Sure but I think if an appeal to empathy was going to work we’d already have seen it work.

Progress if often gradual and the result of continuous pressure over long periods of time. Not everyone will respond to an appeal to empathy, but I don't think "we'd have already seen it work" is a framing that makes sense.

Is it even desirable to avoid something nature selected for? The biggest assumption here is that these epigenetic mutations aren’t desirable for survival in a chaotic and violent world

It's only undesirable under the assumption that a chaotic and violent world is an acceptable state of affairs.

I could swallow that argument but in isolation this feels like using the abused as lab rats so we can more thoroughly destroy them at some future date

Progress is completely random and arbitrary. Sometimes it zooms forward, other times it regresses. The universe has no mystical rules that demand that it continue.

>Not everyone will respond to an appeal to empathy

I don't even think we use the word "empathy" correctly. It makes sense to me when we're talking about a non-general empathy, where you see a particular person close to you (physically, if not emotionally) and you feel for them. You can't have empathy with some abstract hypothetical. You can't even have empathy for some large loosely defined group of people of the non-hypothetical sort. And, most of all, it's largely spontaneous. If you go into it having already decided you feel empathy for them "just on principle", then what you're feeling isn't empathy. It's performative. It's virtue signaling. Pretending that is empathy does empathy no favors, and it does no favors to the people who are supposedly being empathized with. Because it is performative, it's always just this thin veneer of compassion over an inadequately hidden contempt. Worse still may be those who lie to themselves so successfully that they believe that it's real empathy, the hatred is buried deeper but festers all the more for it.

Appeal to pragmatism instead of empathy. You can make rational arguments if you're trying to be pragmatic. Appeal to justice. Appeal to anything but empathy. When I hear the word "empathy", I know that I'm about to have a load of horseshit dumped on me. You all know it too, even if you're worried that other people will shun you if you admit it out loud.

Would you accept the argument that someone who for whatever reason doesn't have empathy would also not be able to recognize it? For example, watching someone cry over current events would be unrecognizable to a sociopathic person. They may even accuse the person of lying or putting on a performance. Could you also accept the possibility that even if such a person could recognize empathy, they still lack or block the capacity to feel the empathy, and therefore the only use the recognition has is in manipulation (use it to corroborate a point, or use it to spread an attack, or just fuck it, just use it for anything since you can't actually feel it). You don't have to actually do anything with empathy, you can literally just sit there and cry. If you think empathy has a use first and foremost, then sure, I can see why you think someone is using it in a performance. You see, some of us cry because it hurts us.

To get a better understanding, let's use something very analogous - Cringe. When we watch someone do something cringe, we feel it. The same is true for empathy you see, that's what it is. We feel someone else's pain. Psychologists say those that don't feel it are sociopaths.

"Worse still may be those who lie to themselves so successfully that they believe that it's real empathy"

Again, you have difficulty identifying real or not real empathy. This is not a problem for people that were raised without confusion. You can just say I'm from environments where I couldn't figure out if anyone cared about me or not (common). Is there a universe where you can accept this diagnosis or are you pure? We are all a constant work in progress.

The gene expression of apathy needs to be studied as well.

>Would you accept the argument that someone who for whatever reason doesn't have empathy would also not be able to recognize it?

I don't bake cakes, so I of course can't recognize a cake. Everyone knows this. Magical thinking demands that it be true. You have an immaterial soul that connects you to the universe, Jeebus, and the ghost of Elvis Presley.

>watching someone cry over current events would be unrecognizable to a sociopathic person. They may even accuse the person of lying or putting on a performance.

Sure, they might do that if they were lying. Which in many cases they are. So much of the real world around you is inexplicable, isn't it? There are these secret sociopaths all around you, they look just like anyone else and they're all serial killers waiting to Hannibal Lecter you!

Or maybe, everyone's like this, but some large fraction of the population is engaged in this weird cultural phenomenon where you all compete to appear more virtuous to each other than you really are. But admitting it would just ruin the fun, eh? And what if you admit it, and then everyone else doubles down and insists it was real for them, outting you as the serial killer? Can't have that.

Empathy is only possible for people within your Dunbar number. Everyone beyond that only requires and only gets whatever civility is merited for diplomatic purposes. In your way of thinking, these so-called sociopaths... every single human is one. At least to the other 8 billion people who don't happen to be in their Dunbar circle. This explains how the cops can be so callous to the wrongly accused and to the victims alike. How soldiers are so quick to run off and commit war crimes (with or without sanctioning by superiors). Why those schoolteachers abuse the little kindergarten kids. And on and on and on. To you it's mysterious. Invisible monsters out there ready to pounce and eat you. It's why you can't fix any of this, why all those problems seem to grow out of control. Too busy trying to get everyone to pretend they have empathy which they don't.

>We feel someone else's pain.

You pretend you feel it. You don't. This isn't Star Trek, you don't have telepathy. This isn't Harry Potter, you don't have magic. But again, people will look at you weird if you admit you can't.

>Again, you have difficulty identifying real or not real empathy.

I don't at all. I have a superior talent for recognizing it. As in, you have no ability to recognize it, no potential to develop such a skill, and can't even think about it rationally enough to appreciate your shortcomings.

>You can just say I'm from environments where I couldn't figure out if anyone cared about me

"Please humiliate yourself so I can go back to competing in the Virtue Signaling World Championships! Your mama didn't love you nyah nyah nyah!"

Except she did. And I've had a few people in my life over the years who did care about me. I'd say instead it's people like yourself who have the confusion. Constantly complaining about narcissists that you somehow don't see coming a mile away. Constantly begging for updoots on reddit, your entire generation, for whining about how you might have to go no contact with your parents because they won't acknowledge your new puppy as just as important as their actual grandchildren. Hell, the most extreme of your sort have invented entire new crackpot pseudo-religions where you're not allowed to eat food because you're supposed to have empathy for it.

>Is there a universe where you can accept this diagnosis or are you pure?

Are you a licensed psychiatrist? Please private message me about the state you are licensed in, and which business name you practice under. I will accept your diagnosis if I have these details.

"You pretend you feel it. You don't."

Plenty of research out there that investigates and shows nervous system/heart beat co-/dys-regulation amongst strangers. Not that I need any of that to know how I am feeling with others, totally random strangers. I cannot turn it off. Oh boy, I often wish I could. You can choose not to believe me, sure, I'm just inventing this to lie to your face for the kick of it. Or you can choose to look at the research. Or actually experience it for yourself, e.g. in a NVC practice course.

Edit:

Okay, I understand you. You are wrong, but that is the nature of expression when it comes to agitation and anger. It’s not necessarily your entire being, but such forces can co-opt a person for quite some time. Some people get addicted to indulging in righteous indignation (which somewhat corroborates your point about performance, but I’ll amend the point to include that it’s happening to extremes on both sides. You yourself have wholesale invalidated the emotions of the other side, possibly reciprocally).

Sometimes just acting like something becomes you. So there is your mindfuck. You ever had to fake it a bit until you caught your rhythm? It’s in us to truly feel, just try.

Experiment:

https://youtube.com/shorts/j4TVuoicPrY

Watch that after taking a deep breath and calmly try to tell yourself that “this is a woman who is probably more emotional than me, and I have seen women cry before over a lot of things. She is also of Hispanic origin and may have additional emotions here. She is also American and is a beneficiary of the labor of these people. I have to try to believe these are real emotions, even though even though my entire being is telling me she is a liar”.

You have to fucking try.

If you walk out with “I still think it’s performative”, then FINE. At least you tried, we’re all still here talking to you right?

I will say one thing though, you sound batshit enough for the two of us to become friends.

The nature of the changes aren’t well understood. It seems dangerous to assume that they are unhealthy, or somehow destructive when the opposite could just as easily be true. The children of those experiencing violence may be more robust in some ways rather than the opposite. It’s an interesting finding, and something to be understood better, but jumping to the conclusion that it’s a bad thing it’s just dismissive of the robustness of humanity in general.

Because later generations shouldn't be forced pay the cost for such violence that they didn't perpetrate or perpetuate.

To make it real when there's no compassion, loving kindness, or the golden rule:

War reparations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_reparations

I think you may want to re-read parent. They are saying that the reason you gave ( all of which were provided before ) barely restrained human kind from doing what it /was/is/will be doing.

If compassion and war reparations are insufficient to deter unjust violence, what will change the reinforced behaviors?

You have to reach the children and rehabilitate them. This is the type of damage the children are growing up with (HBO documentary from 2004 which I highly recommend people watch, the journalist got fatally shot filming it):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isa5TRnidnk#t=30m30s

Counting on your fingers the dead. This has to be a rehabilitation effort, because it's just no way for children to talk and be.

Family therapy > Summary of theories and techniques: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_therapy#Summary_of_theo...

Expressive therapies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_therapies

Systemic therapy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemic_therapy :

> Based largely on the work of anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, this resulted in a shift towards what is known as "second-order cybernetics" which acknowledges the influence of the subjective observer in any study, essentially applying the principles of cybernetics to cybernetics – examining the examination.

"What are the treatment goals?"

Clean Language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_language

...

In "Jack Ryan" (TV Series) Season 1 Episode 1, the children suffer from war trauma in their upbringing and that pervades their lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ryan_(TV_series)#Season_1...

In "Life is Beautiful" (1997) Italian children are trapped in war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Is_Beautiful

Magneto from X-Men (with the helmet) > Fictional character biography > Early life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto_(Marvel_Comics)#Early_...

"Chronicles of Narnia" (1939-1949) > Background and conception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia#Backg...

Ironically, the ability to reciprocate with violence is the only thing that has reliably deterred violence.

This seems like the flip-side of the argument that eschewing violence makes you honorable only if you're actually capable of committing violence in the first place. Eschewing violence because you're incapable of committing it just means you're weak.

If Country A knows Country B can't defend itself, it's natural to assume at some point A may attack B. If the countries are relatively equally armed and skilled in the use of those arms, it would take a lot more for one country to attack the other.

War reparations gave us the Nazis, so they clearly don’t work. And compassion has given us everything we have seen thus far in history so we can conclude that too is ineffective.

Reparations certainly deterred further violent fascist statism in post WWII Germany.

Unfortunately the Berlin Wall.

WWI reparations were initially assessed by the Treaty of Versailles (1919) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations

Dulles, Dawes Plan > Results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawes_Plan

> Dawes won the 1925 Nobel Prize, WWI reparations obligations were reduced

Then the US was lending them money and steel because it was so bad there, and then we learned they had been building tanks and bombs with our money instead of railroads and peaceful jobs.

Business collaboration with Nazi Germany > British, Swiss, US, Argentinian and Canadian banks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Na...

And then the free money rug was pulled out from under them, and then the ethnic group wouldn't sell their paintings to help pay the debts of the war and subsequent central economic mismanagement.

And then they invaded various continents, overextended themselves when they weren't successfully managing their own country's economy, and the Allied powers eventually found the art (and gold) and dropped the bomb developed by various ethnic groups in the desert and that was that.

Except for then WWII reparations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_reparations

The US still occupies or inhabits Germany, which is Russia's neighbor.

Trump was $400 million in debt to Deutsche Bank AG (of Germany and Russia now) and had to underwrite said loan himself due to prior defaults. Nobody but Deutsche Bank would loan Trump (Trump Vodka, University,) money prior to 2016. Also Russian state banks like VEB, they forgot to mention.

Business projects of Donald Trump in Russia > Timeline of Trump business activities related to Russia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_projects_of_Donald_...

It looks like - despite attempted bribes of foreign heads of state with free apartment - there will not be a Trump Tower Moscow.

"Biden halts Trump-ordered US troops cuts in Germany" (2021) https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-military-f...

> art (and gold)

"The Monuments Men" (2014) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monuments_Men

Not sure that the guy who thinks "future generations shouldn't pay the cost for something they didn't do" is thinking his position when his very next thought is "we'll make the great-grandchildren of the warmongers pay cash to the great-grandchildren of the victorious warmongers".

You could argue that’s the trauma expressing itself through derivative real experiences into the future.

It is the purpose of criminal and civil procedure to force parties that caused loss, violence, death and trauma to pay for their offenses.

We have a court system that is supposed to abide Due Process so that there are costs to inflicting trauma (without perpetuating a vicious cycle).

The actual study is about exposure to pretty extreme violence during pregnancy having epigenetic effects beyond one generation to F4. This is the first study to ever present such evidence in humans since some caution is warranted here with any conclusions.

If you're in a violent environment, that environment will be so antithetical to survivability, it's prudent for your genes to transcript you were in a violent environment for multiple generations.

Future generations aren't voting in the next election.

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