Oregon Backlash To Decriminalizing Hard Drugs

[tstorm823]

Does anybody besides particularly centrist libs ever fall for this kind of semantic argument?

The left has spent decades trying to make conservatism synonymous with Christo-fascism, and you think that maintaining an actual definition of the word is a semantic argument trying to deceive people. Nearly every argument from leftists is a stupid semantic trick, and disputing them with the actual meanings of words is the only way to get people to see the lies.

 

[Silvanus]

The comment was not "a conservative". It was just "conservative".

Fine, whatever. Do you think there's no difference between someone having elements of conservative thought, and someone being conservative?

The left has spent decades trying to make conservatism synonymous with Christo-fascism, and you think that maintaining an actual definition of the word is a semantic argument trying to deceive people.

If your 'actual definition' is one that includes anybody who has any minor element of conservative thought, then your definition is completely useless, and would classify almost everybody on earth as conservative, liberal, socialist etc all at once.

Plus, the ones working hardest to make 'conservative' synonymous with christofascism are the modern Republican Party. They're the ones who elect batshit religious extremists and then insist they're regular conservatives.

 

[Ag3ma]

This response from you doesn't really sync with the suggestion that it would be an admission from Phoenix to be conservative in contradiction to support for progressive ideas.

Which progressive ideas? He seems to repeatedly attack most policies aligned with those typical to current progressivism: pro-abortion, liberalised drug policy, anti-capitalism, transgender rights, affirmative action and frankly sort of even pro-Trumpish. Honestly, I find it incredibly hard to think about anything he discusses that he appears to be progressive about. If that is so, my conclusion is that he's probably not progressive.

He comes across to me as socially-conservative, anti-establishment / anti-elite working class.

 

[Ag3ma]

Nearly every argument from leftists is a stupid semantic trick

Projection, they call it.

 

[tstorm823]

Which progressive ideas? He seems to repeatedly attack most policies aligned with those typical to current progressivism: pro-abortion, liberalised drug policy, anti-capitalism, transgender rights, affirmative action and frankly sort of even pro-Trumpish. Honestly, I find it incredibly hard to think about anything he discusses that he appears to be progressive about. If that is so, my conclusion is that he's probably not progressive.

He comes across to me as socially-conservative, anti-establishment / anti-elite working class.

I mean, of your list of "progressive" policies, affirmative action is the only thing that actually has anything to do with attempting societal progress through government policy. The rest are some combination of liberal and transgressive positions.

I would agree that someone who opposes affirmative action on principle likely leans further towards conservative on that scale though.

Fine, whatever. Do you think there's no difference between someone having elements of conservative thought, and someone being conservative?

Yes, those are synonymous.

If your 'actual definition' is one that includes anybody who has any minor element of conservative thought, then your definition is completely useless, and would classify almost everybody on earth as conservative, liberal, socialist etc all at once.

Right, to different degrees on different topics. I don't care if that doesn't support your team sports style perspective on political positions.

 

[Silvanus]

Right, to different degrees on different topics. I don't care if that doesn't support your team sports style perspective on political positions.

It's hardly a 'team sports style perspective' to use descriptive terms that aren't so useless and broad that they apply to everyone. If you can describe everybody on the planet as conservative, then that term has lost any differentiating value and meaning, hasn't it?

 

[Phoenixmgs]

But we don't have very good metrics to suggest the drug problem actually did get worse due to decriminalisation.

Reported ODs increased, which could be down to people being more likely to report. Fatal ODs (a better metric) did not increase any more than neighbouring states where the activity is illegal. And the public consumption angle doesn't undermine the argument for decriminalisation, since decriminalisation doesn't necessitate legal public consumption.

The point is it didn't help and nobody actually wants this law either.

I agree with this entirely, and from this (correct) perspective, I don't think @Phoenixmgs will hesitate to agree that he's conservative to a degree.

This response from you doesn't really sync with the suggestion that it would be an admission from Phoenix to be conservative in contradiction to support for progressive ideas.

I'm for whatever makes the most sense. The ridiculous thing is that people here can't even admit when something conservatives are for is the better option. Because if you think what progressives are for is always the better thing to do, that's just admitting you can't critically think through anything.

Do you see no difference between having elements of conservative thought and being a conservative?

Being for copy/pasting Sweden/Denmark policies is conservative? I guess technically if I was a citizen of those countries, I'd be a conservative for being for those policies because that is the status quo there, but in the US, being for those policies here is definitely progressive.

Which progressive ideas? He seems to repeatedly attack most policies aligned with those typical to current progressivism: pro-abortion, liberalised drug policy, anti-capitalism, transgender rights, affirmative action and frankly sort of even pro-Trumpish. Honestly, I find it incredibly hard to think about anything he discusses that he appears to be progressive about. If that is so, my conclusion is that he's probably not progressive.

He comes across to me as socially-conservative, anti-establishment / anti-elite working class.

You can be for abortion but also for overturning Roe v Wade. Roe v Wade was a bullshit and nonsensical legal ruling regardless of what side of the abortion debate you're on. Why is it OK for an abortion before X weeks but then it becomes illegal afterward when the argument was that abortion (and all medical decisions) are based on privacy? Why is a 30 week abortion less private than a 10 week abortion? I'm for doing the liberal drug policies that other countries did that actually fucking work; Oregon's policy does not work. Because capitalism is so bad...? Regardless of what system you think is best, it has to be properly regulated so just switching systems is a dumb idea. Also, what socialist or communist country has ever been a good place to live? I'm in line with places like Sweden and Denmark for transgender rights (thinking it's not fair in sports and against minors getting medical procedures/drugs, doesn't make one anti-trans). Racist affirmative action is bad because it's racist (Sweden/Denmark have affirmative action and I'm for copy/pasting those policies). I hate Trump, but I think he's better than Biden currently, but that's just because of how bad Biden is (though I'm not going to vote for either of them). Voting for 3rd party candidates isn't progressive? How does that even compute?

 

[Silvanus]

The point is it didn't help and nobody actually wants this law either.

I thought you were arguing that it made things worse. If you're no longer arguing that, that's fine.

Being for copy/pasting Sweden/Denmark policies is conservative? I guess technically if I was a citizen of those countries, I'd be a conservative for being for those policies because that is the status quo there, but in the US, being for those policies here is definitely progressive.

I'm not the one here saying you're conservative. Tstorm is.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

I thought you were arguing that it made things worse. If you're no longer arguing that, that's fine.



I'm not the one here saying you're conservative. Tstorm is.

From the very 1st post:

It [Oregon open drug policy] really only copies another country's policy in intention only and doesn't actually copy the important execution stuff that actually allows the policy to make things at least somewhat better.

Literally my 1st response to you in this thread:

The video mentions overdoses and/or overdose deaths (forget which one or if it was both) didn't really increase (or very little). It's that people don't want to be walking around town with tons of people in public high on whatever drug they are high on (the reason why public drinking/drunkenness isn't allowed while alcohol is legal obviously). Also, the fact that even if drug use in actuality isn't getting worse, it's also not improving either.

See how I always get accused of strawmanning when I'm like never doing that?
---
That was Ag3ma.

 

[Silvanus]

From the very 1st post:

Uh-huh, but you cut out the line immediately preceding that, in which you very clearly said it was making things worse:

The problem in America is that democrats/liberals want to do shit that makes things worse. Oregon's decriminalization of drugs is the perfect example of this in action.

Honestly, why do you even try to fib about stuff like this?

That was Ag3ma.

No, Tstorm was the one here arguing that having conservative elements of thought and being conservative are exactly the same thing.

 

[Ag3ma]

...transgressive positions...

Yes, well, isn't that the issue? To a lot of conservatives, progress is transgressive.

 

[tstorm823]

It's hardly a 'team sports style perspective' to use descriptive terms that aren't so useless and broad that they apply to everyone. If you can describe everybody on the planet as conservative, then that term has lost any differentiating value and meaning, hasn't it?

A) Some people act on different philosophical premises that conservative or progressive. A revolutionary communist cares not about preserving the good things we have nor attempting to make what we have better, they want to destroy the current system in its entirety.
B) A term that describes literally everyone to different degrees in different ways can still be differentiating. Every person has a height, you don't say short people have no height, but you can still use that metric to differentiate, and have specific categories based on outliers in that metric.

I'm for whatever makes the most sense. The ridiculous thing is that people here can't even admit when something conservatives are for is the better option. Because if you think what progressives are for is always the better thing to do, that's just admitting you can't critically think through anything.

I might implore you to slightly change your perspective. "What makes the most sense" is a dangerous standard because people have flawed perspectives just as part of the human condition. Sometimes the thing that seems to make most sense to people is a terrible idea that leads to immense suffering. I far prefer the option that leads to the best results, even if it doesn't make sense to people that it does so.

But seriously, you can agree to the premise that you're somewhat conservative. Pragmatism requires a certain amount of conservative thinking. Agema agrees to thinking that way, and Silvanus definitely thinks that way whether willing to admit it or not. This is the sort of thing I try to get people to see the distinctions between philosophies. Even a staunch progressive has more philosophically in common with me than they do a communist, assuming they are genuinely progressive and not just coopting that word as cover for their revolutionary leftism. Likewise, conservatives have more in common with progressives in their reasoning than they do with theocrats or even libertarians. An American conservative and a libertarian will often find common ground in their conclusions, but the reasoning to get there is infinitely different. And instead of appreciating that, society as a whole has just drawn a line between right and left (where that line is drawn may vary), and treats one side of the line as one team and the other side as the other team, even though the line typically takes the whole ball of pragmatic people, cuts it in half down the middle, and hands each half over to fringe idealogues.

Yes, well, isn't that the issue? To a lot of conservatives, progress is transgressive.

Progress can be transgressive, and transgression can lead to progress. But there's a difference in intention. A progressive looks at the current state of thing and wants to attempt changes to improve outcomes. Imagine a park with a gazebo that has been there for years. A conservative position is likely to quite simply want to keep the gazebo. A progressive position could be to renovate it, or replace it, or maybe even just tear it down if its existence is causing problems and even having nothing there would alleviate those problems. The transgressive position is to tear it down because its part of the old culture and also because conservatives want to keep it.

"Anti-capitalism" was in your list of progressive positions, but that's just transgressive. It's just a "tear down the old" position, without any thought given as to what the consequences of tearing down the old would be, nor what alternative would they advocate to lead to better results.

 

[Seanchaidh]

There are second-order effects to that.

Oh, I remember broken windows theory. I remember explicitly that it hadn't been confirmed by experiment. That was a few decades ago. Anyway, has that changed?

Northeastern University researchers find little evidence for ‘broken windows theory,’ say neighborhood disorder doesn’t cause crime

Northeastern researchers have found that broken windows and other signs of disorder don’t cause people to break the law.

news.northeastern.edu

 

[Silvanus]

A) Some people act on different philosophical premises that conservative or progressive. A revolutionary communist cares not about preserving the good things we have nor attempting to make what we have better, they want to destroy the current system in its entirety.

Yet if a revolutionary communist wanted to conserve even a single little thing-- a network of public parks, say-- then your definition would plop them under 'conservative', alongside Glenn Beck and Reagan.

B) A term that describes literally everyone to different degrees in different ways can still be differentiating. Every person has a height, you don't say short people have no height, but you can still use that metric to differentiate, and have specific categories based on outliers in that metric.

But we're not talking about 'conservative' as a metric alongside additional specific details. We're talking about it as a descriptor, without additional specific details.

Else "I'm conservative" has as much meaning to you as "I have a height". Meaningless.

 

[Ag3ma]

"Anti-capitalism" was in your list of progressive positions, but that's just transgressive. It's just a "tear down the old" position, without any thought given as to what the consequences of tearing down the old would be, nor what alternative would they advocate to lead to better results.

I mean, this is a fascinating claim, because there's a vast amount of thought out there on anti-capitalism.

"Anti-capitalism" is a very broad umbrella term covering a lot of different ideas and strategies. Some of this is tearing down capitalism and rebuilding from scratch (and that's the view lots of media like to present because it's exciting and instills a visceral sense of threat for more views), but a lot of anti-capitalists are more looking at reform towards something moderate like social democracy.

Or of course, reform to sort of post-capitalism we don't yet have a word for because it doesn't exist. This is after all often how things develop - change occurs without a great plan, bit-by-bit and ad hoc to deal with the problems of the whenever and wherever, and at some point the end result ends up defined with a neologism.

I don't think many anti-capitalists are motivated by destroying capitalism for the sake of it. They tend have principled objections of many sorts - exploitation (of people and environment), wealth inequality, political inequality, etc. that you'll have heard a thousand times over because they're criticisms of capitalism older than you are. It might suit your political views to imagine anti-capitalism as an ill-considered mob out to wreck stuff for the sake of it, but it's also a fiction.

 

[Gergar12]

A) Some people act on different philosophical premises that conservative or progressive. A revolutionary communist cares not about preserving the good things we have nor attempting to make what we have better, they want to destroy the current system in its entirety.
B) A term that describes literally everyone to different degrees in different ways can still be differentiating. Every person has a height, you don't say short people have no height, but you can still use that metric to differentiate, and have specific categories based on outliers in that metric.

I might implore you to slightly change your perspective. "What makes the most sense" is a dangerous standard because people have flawed perspectives just as part of the human condition. Sometimes the thing that seems to make most sense to people is a terrible idea that leads to immense suffering. I far prefer the option that leads to the best results, even if it doesn't make sense to people that it does so.

But seriously, you can agree to the premise that you're somewhat conservative. Pragmatism requires a certain amount of conservative thinking. Agema agrees to thinking that way, and Silvanus definitely thinks that way whether willing to admit it or not. This is the sort of thing I try to get people to see the distinctions between philosophies. Even a staunch progressive has more philosophically in common with me than they do a communist, assuming they are genuinely progressive and not just coopting that word as cover for their revolutionary leftism. Likewise, conservatives have more in common with progressives in their reasoning than they do with theocrats or even libertarians. An American conservative and a libertarian will often find common ground in their conclusions, but the reasoning to get there is infinitely different. And instead of appreciating that, society as a whole has just drawn a line between right and left (where that line is drawn may vary), and treats one side of the line as one team and the other side as the other team, even though the line typically takes the whole ball of pragmatic people, cuts it in half down the middle, and hands each half over to fringe idealogues.

Progress can be transgressive, and transgression can lead to progress. But there's a difference in intention. A progressive looks at the current state of thing and wants to attempt changes to improve outcomes. Imagine a park with a gazebo that has been there for years. A conservative position is likely to quite simply want to keep the gazebo. A progressive position could be to renovate it, or replace it, or maybe even just tear it down if its existence is causing problems and even having nothing there would alleviate those problems. The transgressive position is to tear it down because its part of the old culture and also because conservatives want to keep it.

"Anti-capitalism" was in your list of progressive positions, but that's just transgressive. It's just a "tear down the old" position, without any thought given as to what the consequences of tearing down the old would be, nor what alternative would they advocate to lead to better results.

"However, the researchers did find a connection between disorder and mental health. They found that people who live in neighborhoods with more graffiti, abandoned buildings, and other such attributes experience more mental health problems and are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. But they say that this greater likelihood to abuse drugs and alcohol is associated with mental health, and is not directly caused by disorder."

Sadly social workers, therapists, and medication cannot eliminate the aftershock of trauma in people. They can do an okay job at managing it, but the government and US taxpayers don't want to spend money on mental health institutions or wards needed to manage this problem. Medications do different things for everyone who is neurodivergent, and you cannot assign a social worker to everyone who is mentally ill.

 

[tstorm823]

Yet if a revolutionary communist wanted to conserve even a single little thing-- a network of public parks, say-- then your definition would plop them under 'conservative', alongside Glenn Beck and Reagan.

You deny making this a team sport, and then you really, really try to make it a team sport.

I don't think many anti-capitalists are motivated by destroying capitalism for the sake of it. They tend have principled objections of many sorts - exploitation (of people and environment), wealth inequality, political inequality, etc. that you'll have heard a thousand times over because they're criticisms of capitalism older than you are.

That's still destroying capitalism for the sake of it. Destroying capitalism because you have objections to it is still very much destroying capitalism for the sake of it. Having reasons why you don't like something is not the same as having intentions for how eliminating it is an improvement. As I said, sometimes transgression leads to progress, if the thing you tear down is sufficiently rotten, what forms in its absence may be an improvement.

If you eliminate capitalism, would there be less inequality or exploitation? Nobody has the answer to that question, and should the answer be "no, those would get worse", I don't think any anti-capitalists are changing their mind about being against capitalism. Similarly, if you reformed capitalism to avoid those things better, but it was still capitalism, I don't see many anti-capitalists suddenly accepting that. They want to destroy the thing, that is the goal in itself. And were we not in capitalist societies, I bet a dollar all these same people would be opposing whatever we had instead, as there would still be inequality and exploitation in the world, and you can always blame the status quo for that if you want to.

 

[Silvanus]

You deny making this a team sport, and then you really, really try to make it a team sport.

Using terms in ways that actually have meaning is not unreasonable. It's necessary to have mature conversation.

Putting aside the fact that you're among the worst for the team-sport approach: you repeatedly claim that others would be conservatives or would abandon their stated positions if they were just honest, which is essentially a lazy attempt to lay claim to support for your 'team'.

 

[Seanchaidh]

I far prefer the option that leads to the best results, even if it doesn't make sense to people that it does so.

you may think that you do...

 

[Bedinsis]

Since when is being for probably at least 90% of Sweden/Denmark policy considered conservative? I've literally never voted for a republican...

What do you think of our drug politics?