> the amount of problems that would come from disinformation
When we used to say disinformation I imagined deep webs of false references, faking critical data.
Now I can lookup most "fake news" and find the truth of it, generally a too-broad take on quoting someone, within minutes. It's just that for partisan reasons people don't look, and when they have it pointed out they tend to say "yeah, that might be wrong but it's still mostly right in spirit" and keep on going.
It seems like hyper-partisanship or tribalism instead of being primarily based on bad data because the data so rarely comes into question.
It's not that we want to defend KF, it's that we want to have a discussion on the merits of the issue not the reputation of the participants.
KF is ultimately an archive site. It "keeps receipts" in their words. If storing someone's posts is bad, is archive.org bad for performing the same function?
If KF supports harassment campaigns then make that case, but they seem not to. I've seen more harassment and threats on Twitter (literally!) than on KF threads.
If suicide is your metric, are you also against storing the words of people you find objectionable in case they commit suicide when discovered? What if a neo-nazi was recorded being a nazi and killed himself, is that bad?
I personally support storing the speech (because it's censorship not to allow it) and I support legal charges for people who go beyond - let the courts sort out the fine lines.
Comcast has an all-women Open Source Program Office, which sounds like a way to include females in engineering. But they define women as "females and males who want to be seen as female" which doesn't help women actually get jobs.
The Scottish National Party has sex-quotas to achieve more-equal representation by men and women, but they let men who claim to be women take these seats.
Are either actually inclusive? Are they inclusive of women? If you have a daughter, do either of those measures better her life.
And yet both actions meet the 'Social' criteria of ESG scores, and serve to boost a company's rankings and thus lower its interest rate on sustainability linked loans.
> From my own observations, I feel that the right is often wrong on many things, but the far left has gone off the rails
The difference, I feel, is that I know many people whose identity is "leftist" or "progressive" and I don't personally know anyone who identifies as a "rightist". The right is a centuries-old boogeyman of the left, and it encompasses everyone who disagrees with the critical-analysis class-based views of the left.
The worst term the left has is "far-right" which just means very-heretical. The worst thing you can do is let your opinions diverge from the groupthink.
> It isn't an "appeal to emotion," it is emotion. Emotion is not this ephemeral second-class citizen in your mind. It's you. It's the part of you that cares about things
Regardless, it's not an argument. Your emotion has no direct weight on the correctness of an outcome you're arguing for, and trying to appeal to other's emotions in an attempt to sway them is attempting to bypass their critical analysis.
Argue the facts and let emotions happen. They "are you" but should not drive you.
> "Everyone agrees with me but they're too afraid to say it" is a convenient excuse to hold reprehensible beliefs that you don't want to take responsibility for. If everyone is afraid to say something, maybe that's because it's disgusting?
No, likely outcomes and consequences for discussing something are rarely aligned. You're discussing hounding people out of work/home/politics because of your emotional take on what they're saying, without any actual analysis of it or how actionable it is.
In my mind, that's incredibly dangerous (and thus, if I chose to use emotional language - disgusting) but I'm not advocating taking away your right to say it.
> Again though, while there I am certain are some examples of people being bullied to that point, I have a hard time seeing it.
James Damore is a great example. He didn't broadcast his views - he responded privately to questions in a hiring review panel at Google, discussing how the company could improve its hiring of women by understanding the roles it was offering in the light of modern psychological analysis using the "Big Five" traits model.
Specifically, he did not say that women were worse engineers in any way, either holistically or in individual skills, OR less suited to engineering than males. He argued that Google's roles were less suitable for "traditionally female" interests. Again, this was privately, in the context of a panel trying to evaluate why Google wasn't great at hiring women engineers.
His communications were leaked, with the context stripped, in an edited form without any references to gawker-style media who were prompted with the lead 'white guy says - "Don't hire women"' to prompt them into the "right" emotional headspace to write an attack piece.
To tie this back to emotion, obviously someone read his words and let their emotion at those words (I myself don't like psychobabble) override their analysis of what was said. Their emotions are "valid lived experience" but the attacks they called for, and lies used to do so, are not helpful or justified.
> As of 2020, over 37 million people 12 and older actively used illicit substances...
And yet our cities are being destroyed by having a mere 2-10k junkies in an extreme state of decay, using the hardest drugs and living, robbing, and dying in the streets.
> many people leave US jail more addicted than when they came in
That'd be hard in this case. They're already on all the drugs they can get, but especially the hardest. But they also don't need hard prison, they could be kept in a wet paper bag if you gave them their drugs. Initial cleanup wouldn't be hard.
> What's more, not all drugs have blockers that a person can take (eg: Meth, cocaine, nicotine),
Those aren't the drugs that are being abused in the street-drug camps. (Not to minimize meth, but it's no Fentanyl...)
And even without blockers, there is regular assisted detox which is better than death.
> and not everyone can get access to those blockers.
We'd make sure they could though, that being the point. For the price we spend on clean needles we could give every junkie their blockers. Jail and programs are cheap compared to dealing with the ongoing mess, crime, and death.
> The US has [...] virtually no willingness to spend money on social programs
Canada and other countries are also having this problem, but even the USA spends a lot on social programs. The people are just getting tired of those programs being counter-productive such as the "safe" drugs supply and decriminalization.
> US jails don't detox people with blockers
We're talking about fixing things though, so that could change as easily as anything else. Certainly more easily than hiring enough ambulance attendants to continually revive the dying.
> Blockers are great things, but if a person does not want to do the blockers - it will not be effective.
Yeah, jail never polls well. That's why it's not an option though. There are many laws they're breaking, even leaving out any drug and drug-predicate crimes, and the sentence for those easily covers any authority needed to require, and time to administer, the treatment.
> It looks like Portugal has long decriminilized all drugs
No, though. Or not the related crimes, such as possession and public intoxication. They use the criminality for force you into treatment. But you don't come out with a criminal record for the drug crimes, so if that was all you did it is sort of decriminalized... Michael Shellenberger interviews João Goulão, head of Portugal's drug program, who says with a chuckle that the legal force is part of the voluntary program.
> I think this conversation also goes to why the term 'addiction' is often no longer used. Detox is one thing, but teaching someone how to deal with stress takes more. When I was a heavy tobacco user, the habit part was a distinct and big part of the overall "addiction." It was one thing to get off of nicotine, it was another to learn that the way to deal with stress was not to go
We're talking about street use of fentanyl though, where you've got at least a 25% chance/year of death. That they don't reach full recovery through one intervention isn't a problem. Once we've saved their life, and the lives and prosperity of people they were dying near, we can get to work on their stress.
Also, the people who want to redefine the terms and reshape the conversation are, to a large part, the ones who have gotten us where we are.
> But criminalization certainly isn't the solution.
There are many ways to see criminal law - as a punishment, or as a tool.
Portugal uses it as a tool. They know, because many of the founders are ex junkies, that junkies can't say no to another dose. They have to remove the dangerous option and that's handled by taking you off the street, for which they use the crimes as an excuse to remove your autonomy temporarily. Critically, they don't stick you with a criminal record for anything self-harming - when you get clean your record is also clean.
As a parent I believe in talking to kids, explaining, making them allies. But if they misbehave dangerously you simply pick them up and carry them away. You don't pretend that a 3yo, or even an 8yo, can understand everything well enough to just the dangers in a situation so sometimes you just take control.
Given that junkies have less reasoning capability and willpower than a 3yo, I think that trying to reason with them "Oh come on, don't you want to put down the drugs and not feel awesome? Don't you want to sign up for a 'meaningful' life with a 9-5 job?" is going to work because drugs are engineered to take that ability away.
IMHO the correct response, for where we've let ourselves get on the West coast, is to take everyone who ODs and throw them in an ambulance when narcan-ing them rather than leaving them on the street. To give them suboxone when we get them to a holding facility. After a day or two of good food and TV and smokes, etc, etc, but no more hard drugs - but also no more desire for them or detox pain from not having them - you ask if they want to continue the program. The trick is that both paths lead to the program - one directly and one via a bit of a cooldown in a more traditional jail (though still super low-security) until they come to the conclusion on their own. This is where you use the criminal charges, from whatever they did to obtain those drugs, to justify the captivity.
There's a good documentary (Vancouver is Dying, I think) where one of the government guys helping people, pushing for new laws, had spent five years on the street himself as a casual habit took him to rock bottom from a high-status life, so he knows all sides of the issue, and he thanks the people and the systems that gave him the opportunity to live again. There are many such stories, but his - juxtaposed with the misery people are currently in - was heartwarming and breaking.
And did you notice it abstractly, similar to "I've been using food delivery too much recently", or did it have a physical or mental toll before you noticed?
> All drugs have long been decriminalized in Portugal
Portugal did not decriminalize use of drugs! Public use of drugs, and being uncontrollably high in public, is criminal and they use the court system to force people into voluntary rehab (the other choice is prison) where they use an evidence-based drug treatment system and up to a few years of job skills and counseling before releasing the person. Decisions are made by a panel of doctors and ex street-junkies who know the truth of the situation and what the addicted will say and do.
Portland Oregon on the other decriminalized the drugs - as in you can buy and inject anything in front of a cop and pass out in your own vomit in the middle of the sidewalk and the police can't even move you.
Regrettably they knowingly chose to reference Portugal as if they were following its advice while using the terminology to describe a completely different system.
> Actually one thing I would be curious to try is to substitute ketamine for opiates. It might work out that some people prefer it and it’s far less harmful on the body.
That feels like the joke about Freud trying to cure Cocaine addiction with Heroin and merely inventing the speedball.
What do you think of Suboxone? It blocks withdrawal symptoms and the further effect of opioids, making users not suffer or want more drugs during the process. At the end, the user is not dependent or addicted, and is ready for actual rehabilitation.
> Nobody starts using because they have a great life but they’re just curious what a bit of meth feels like and then accidentally get hooked.
No, I know people who've been hooked meth and heroin (all different people) who not only tried them for the high, but used them "safely" for years before they lost control.
This single anecdote disproves your "nobody starts" claim.
> They do it because there’s no better life path open to them. It’s really a form of suicide.
No, less than one in twenty at most wants to die or has circumstances that would make the average person want to be dead if they had the addiction treated. (Which with modern drug-based methods is actually pretty easy.)
> Criminalizing will make the suicide process faster and less visible to you.
It's not suicide though, that's just want you're saying. It's your opinion. Given that most people recognize this isn't suicide, and most users did not and do not want to die, it should not be treated flippantly and the responses shouldn't be denigrated.
Banning hard drugs is like banning unsafe food or medical products - it's what we expect our government to do.
> Making it illegal would be like criminalizing sugar because of the obesity epidemic.
That would work and would save a lot of lives. And fwiw, the argument isn't if we should criminalize sugar which we already do in many goods and forms, it's about at what point the FDA should set the allowed value.
It doesn't sound friendly the way you say it, as if the "general audience" can't think for itself and needs to be convinced and tactics (ie, not facts) are needed to do so.
How about: "It's a technique to connect with a general audience."
It feels like it was common practice until just recently.
> Unfortunately about half the population doesn't have empathy for anyone they don't grow up with, and some of those have empathy for no one at all.
You know, everyone feels the same but they think it of a different 50%...
But it's not that - it's that I want to have a discussion of alternatives and feasibility without being hampered by either side's forced emotional manipulation instead of policy points.
I live in a drug city and I hear the "think of the pain of the junkies" all the time - as if I've never had drugs impact my family. As if we didn't reach this point through 20y+ of only thinking about the short-term interests of the druggies. As if me not falling over and sobbing with the person delivering the message is a sign of my massive inhumanity.
And then I go to a different meeting and I hear "think of the family of the random-attack victims", etc. As if I've never considered crime victims until they showed me how and my failing to sob along with them and adopt their policy decisions is because I hate the common man.
I really just want to discuss options. How much does jail cost vs street life vs treatment, how much greater or lesser risk is someone at on this drug vs that. Only once we know what we could do can we actually decide what we should do.
> I know a thing or two about these folks and they're all suffering before they started using. They often start by self medicating because they were traumatized or incredibly impoverished due to a series of unfortunate accidents.
fwiw, none of the people I know who have died or had their lives ruined through drugs have been the type of suicidally circle the drain. They're a seemingly random subset of people, of all political and economic stripes, and levels of abuse of disforture. Many were addicted via medical opioids and many via casual party usage. They aren't a special subset, they are us. There but for the grace of not encountering a laced joint, go I.
I don't doubt that many of the worst off people have significantly more pain that the average person, but I don't think that's relevant - they need treatment not because they're worthy for having a large enough victim card, but because it's not only doable (the options I want to discuss) but because I believe it's the best moral action for society as well.
> So, yes, I believe it's the right thing to do to treat rather than imprison.
Of course, but where our cities went wrong is people sabotaging the system under a false pretense of kindness by rejecting any imprisonment or coercion as part of treatment. Their drug and mental problems are used to prevent them from being charged with their crimes where we could enforce treatment.
In the short term it's always better to have another hit. We've proved rats will push a cocaine button all day until dead, why we need to witness it in people is beyond me. We need to remove the button.
> You cannot 'treat' those people. Nobody can un-addict the drug addict except the drug-addict themselves.
This isn't true. You give them opioid antagonists such as Suboxone. It's not a one-and-done thing, true, but while on these meds they do not want and could not enjoy the drugs.
A full treatment plan, such a Portugal uses on anyone caught uncontrollably stoned in public, can take up to a few years and involves eventual job programs, etc, to leave the person happily employed and housed.
> but the hard work has to come from the person them-self.
No, this is old stigma-based thinking, just from the other point of view. There's no need for someone to do the monumental task of detoxing and through shear willpower, deny any future hits. The antagonists take effect almost immediately, blocking the need, and quickly the desire.
> "go to treatment, do 30 days of parole - or go to jail." The effectiveness of this kind of treatment AFAIK is tantamount to a joke.
True, that is nonsense. It needs to be jail, but your choice of jail with rehab or just jail, and it needs to be until a body of experts (many themselves ex users of the same drugs) feels you are ready to be released based on evidence-based treatment plans. Then, back to jail to serve your remaining sentence if applicable or released into the public if your crimes were only drug related and you're unlikely to re-offend.
> Turns out, it's usually better to be fast and break things
In terms of # of correct guesses, sure. In terms of damage from guessing incorrectly over time, usually not.
The trick is to separate processes - A CSS update probably isn't very risky, and an auth or login update probably is. Don't bundle them into "website updates".
Run ahead with the layout changes and spend some time on failure-planning for the auth change.
> Literally every single one of your claims about what trans people believe are false; I count at least 7 distinct ones. (I can enumerate them if you'd like.) It's honestly impressive how little your world view overlaps with reality.
Which trans people did I mention? I called out Susie Green and "Dr's" Kinsey and Money. If I didn't talk about trans people, just "doctors" and advocates, how could I be claiming anything about trans people's beliefs?
But sure, please do list out those mistaken beliefs you think I touched on.
> Given that genital surgery for children is not something that transgender activists are advocating for
If it isn't happening, why not just agree with me? If it doesn't need to happen, why not support laws banning it?
> I must ask you why you seem so fixated on the topic?
That's straight out of the narcissists prayer. "That doesn't happen, but if it does it's no big deal, and why do you care so much anyways?"
I'm a parent and this is infesting our schools. I care because I have had kids, I have been a kid, I have empathy for other people and their kids, I want useful schools, and I don't want my tax money spent hurting people.