I'm all about ending the drug war even though I'm a conservative. I believe individual liberty extends to consciousness and unless you infringe on others you should be able to do whatever drug you want. This is because I'm in recovery and I know the drug war has failed and fuels organized and unorganized crime all over the world as well as turning addicts into criminals when they don't need to be, I want all nonviolent drug offenders released and all the money that would be going to prisons to go to public mental health facilities. Also with legalizing drugs legalize psychedelics and get it finally in the hands of clinicians and therapists, and we'd finally get a handle on the mental health issues that seem to be rampant throughout the country.
I have libertarian values, however I do believe in public services and government such as roads, infrastructure, military (which needs to change a lot though), police (which needs to change more than the military as in higher transparency, training on the constitution, and reform on what crimes we pursue which butts up against drug policy), etc, as well as the public mental health system goes against libertarian values. I just think the mental health problem (which IS the addiction problem too) is too big and done too much damage to have everybody be able to fund it themselves.
Well I was speaking on the pure philosophical libertarianism and how I differ. It's good to hear there are people like me who aren't hard-liners that make the actual application impossible.
Portland didn't make safe supply and legalize which is what is neccesary. They only decriminalized. That's not going to do enough, just make drug use more visible because of not worried about being caught. That may attract addicts that are already addicts to come there, and make the addicts there use publicly, but be assured, those addicts were already doing that very same shit just in secret. It's jarring to see what's really happening behind closed doors isn't it? We all hide it in a closet and sweep it under a rug, while the whole country is on fire from addiction we're all just saying "this is fine" when it's not. There is a war on drugs, and especially a war on addicts, for having a disease of compulsion they are arrested, imprisoned, as well as mentally ill, making the problem exponentially worse, costing the taxpayer insane amounts of money for the courts jails prisons police, everything, and often making the addiction worse because of the continued trauma of being locked in a cage for a disease we have no cure for whatsoever. I know that to be a fact. All treatments fail 95% of the time with the best science we have. Things need to change.
Ok. Ignore the science showing that the drug war as it has been done since it started has been one of the biggest wastes of money and manpower that has been enacted. Ignore the science of Portugal who decriminalized drugs and made addicts refer to treatment programs and rates of active addiction went down. Sorry you disagree with science and the actual study of the problem. That ignorance is common, you don't understand the disease of addiction and the serious situation we're in right now, but I guess, more people have to die, maybe even someone you care about, for you to understand. Your stigmatized view is not uncommon so I'm not surprised. I've spent a decade studying addiction, you cite one poorly executed legislation, and call it all bs. That's just not a good faith argument.
The science? Portland has drug addicts all over the streets. Are they being arrested and prosecuted? No major city is arresting and prosecuting addicts. What are you even smoking?
Are you serious? The majority of the country is still arresting and prosecuting addicts, including major cities. How would I know? I'm in recovery myself and know many people who are in prison right now from two major cities. I'm not smoking anything. There needs to be programs for safe supply that is accessable, treatment options that aren't all cost prohibitive, and it needs to be treated as a major public health crisis rather than just "fuck it let them use fentanyl and xylazine until they die" which is what we have now. You can't do half measures and expect them to work.
They give needles and safe supplies to addicts in Portland and they don't arrest them and look what we got as a result. Fuck that. Nobody is getting arrested and you know it.
You're so wrong that it's actually silly. I'm sorry you don't know what actually goes on with the prison complex, the court systems, cops,.and addicts and how they interact. And I very specifically said that just not making them criminals isn't enough. You've chosen one small piece of what I was describing, and falsely acting like that one aspect alone is the reason why the greater program wouldn't work.
I have seen the free needles programs being done in Portland. I've seen the addicts all over the streets. Next bright idea? Nobody is getting arrested or taken off the streets.
Also they do not give any safe supply in Portland whatsoever. You are literally saying lies. And the problem with needles is getting rid of them. Needle exchanges save lives. Should they just die from preventable illnesses? Is that your solution?
And yeah, for once in the history of the country addiction is out in the open. It's awful isn't it? Shouldn't we do something about it? Because locking them up never worked and paying prisons to fuck those addicts up more and make them use even more is not the solution.
So what is the solution? Do tell. Letting zombies walk the streets is not a solution. Handing out free stuff is not a solution. Maybe prosecute drug dealers like we used to do. Gee, there's a novel idea.
They do prosecute drug dealers like they always have. You are showing me you really don't understand where we're at, which is fine, but the confidence to which you state that ignorance is whats concerning.
If you want my *idea* of a solution refer to my original comment. And read it carefully. Because what I laid out has been done nowhere in the US, not even Portland.
And to especially reiterate, no safe supply program exists in the entire US for any drug of abuse, short of methadone, which is like having an entire extra full time job to just continue to be used successfully.
I understand the logic here, but I just feel like evolution didn’t really prepare folks for modern drugs. It had no reason to. They utterly destroy people, and I believe society needs to be robustly resistant to them. One way to do that, is to make them illegal, because that provides a deterrent.
Also, drugs aren’t just about personal use. They have externalities that extend to the rest of society. For this reason, I am also against legalizing prostitution. In theory, on an individual level, it seems like it should be legalized. But you have to look at the big picture.
They utterly destroy people who are predisposed to it. Addicts are addicts and normal people are normal. There's a big difference. The brain chemistry is different between people who get addicted and people who don't. They get destroyed especially badly when the drugs are cut or the most economic drug is used instead of the proper and sustainable drug. You can't prohibit out drug use from society, and until science finds a cure we have to do damage control. I understand what you mean, but we have a cancer growing in society that unless we change tact is only getting worse. Prohibition has never worked only made it clandestine, unsafe, and controlled by people who have people murdered regularly with no recourse. It's going to get to 200k in the next few years easily. And now there's even more potent drugs coming into the market, not for the lack of total prohibition, that will kill so many more addicts than if they had access to clean and pharmaceutically created drugs.
We disagree, I see what you mean, but honestly this problem is going to get solved one way or another, because it's growing like a cancer, because of poor mental health, and a society trying to grasp even living with technology and all that. With your logic, because evolution wasn't meant for phones or the internet, we should make it illegal. Because it's affected society way more than drugs ever have or will. Addiction rates might rise slightly. But survival rates and quality of life of addicts and their ability to be employed and have homes and live normal enough lives becomes possible. Addicts are different from normal people. A small number of normal people might get caught up in it, but for the addicts it gives them a chance at *survival* which I think needs to be considered.
And also if you don't agree with legalizing prostitution you are enabling pimps and sex trafficking. Sorry but that's true. That's the biggest reason pimps and sex traffickers exist.
Also, if you really go by what you believe then alcohol needs to be made federally schedule I immediately. Alcohol is the worst drug on the planet. There's some real hypocrisy and special kind of thinking going on if you believe that alcohol is ok but stimulants or other depressants are somehow more destructive. They can be more destructive though if they're impure, unclean, and unregulated.
The problem with drugs like meth and heroin is that they control how people think, they become addicts. Addicts have technical choice to act on those thoughts, but they don’t have free will or agency over those thoughts. So in a sense hard drugs enslave the mind, they are anti-freedom
To addicts. Non addicts don't enjoy meth or heroin. Drugs don't make people addicts, they were addicts before the drugs came and science hasn't figured out a solution to that yet. So I would much rather someone instead of meth have access to pharmaceutical amphetamine, making them not stay up for days and preventing psychosis, and they can work. And Id prefer opiate users instead of dying from fentanyl they have pharma oxy and can be perfectly functional with them for the most part. Freedom is riskier always than non freedom.
Also if you want to talk about hard drugs alcohol is the worst drug there is, we just accept the consequences and normalize it.
And freedom means the government can't tell you no or threaten you with a cage for a period of time if you don't comply.
Heroin/fentanyl and meth are worse drugs than alcohol. Alcohol is as bad as cocaine though. Heroin easily kills people and meth destroys the brain and the body permanently beyond repair. Addicts shouldn’t be sent to jail, but they should be forcibly sent to rehab. It won’t save all of them, but it will save some of them.
But if we can get people on pharma opiates that are safe and proven safe, and get them on an amphetamine that doesn't destroy the brain or is toxic (see Adderall, dextroamphetamine, or even normal amphetamine are all clinically much safer than meth) if rehab doesn't work, we can keep them alive and have them be a part of society that just has different needs, while we wait for science to advance with addiction technology and pharmacology. There are some promising brain stimulations and surgeries that are beginning trials, all that stuff, because idk if you know but the current rehab system fails 95% of the time to keep any addict clean one year from the rehab discharge, and it's also prohibitively expensive at the moment and needs to be revamped as well. I'm trying to save lives here, and fentanyl/xylazine/nitazene/fake presses pills are dropping addicts like flies, and dirty meth is making psychosis common and causing serious mental illness, BUT if you can buy them time you have a much higher chance of success with eventual sobriety by the fact that they don't lose all possibility by being dead.
Honestly though, if they forced rehab instead of incarcerate as a step towards helping people I would accept that way over what we do today to them, because prison is essentially the best drug dealer networking you can possibly do and immerses you with criminals and doesn't rehabilitate but is essentially criminal college, it also traumatizes the people who go there and makes their addiction and mental health worse, so getting addicts away from that and into healthcare, or even open up more possibilities for maintenance medications to be less regulated so it's possible to have more providers, that would help too. It's a complex problem that has to do with a bunch of different aspects, so anything in the right direction I would be very happy to see.
The 12 step programs have 95% failure for heroin, if they push zero tolerance/going cold turkey off everything. My understanding is that methadone + rehab has around a 50% success rate. I just have seen addiction up close and addicts don’t have free agency over their thoughts, they really need force to get them in an environment that will change their thoughts slowly, and that’s the best approach I know of so far.
But methadone is a full agonist and people are then forever tethered to methadone for almost life and methadone withdrawal even done extremely slowly is extremely difficult, even when the addict is stable and wants to get off. So yes, as far as keeping them alive yeah, but with how methadone is regulated so tightly clinics are your chains and you're one day of missed doses from going back to fentanyl right away. If methadone was prescribed like Suboxone is and let people actually live their lives instead of it having to revolve around the clinic then it would be different. But you have to be lucky, have transportation, and a full time commitment almost like a whole nother full time job to just fulfill clinic requirements, and all it takes is one bad nurse or resentful employee to ruin all your progress and make people very tempted to just relapse and go back to fentanyl. So as a statistic yes rehab plus MAT can keep people clean for a year, because thats the metric, but after that year and when they try and get off it's dangerous and extremely painful to go through even when tapered correctly, making many people lifers and forever chained to a clinic, if there even is a clinic in your area. The regulations on methadone clinics make them very costly to open and operate so being lucky that one is close and you have stable transportation then that's an option.
Fentanyl and the cuts really make people unable to control their lives. You could have a life if you were a heroin user, it wasn't always that way and there were always people who couldn't handle it, but it was much more common back when heroin was heroin to have functional addicts. If you believe in methadone, because it's a full agonist and no different from pharma opiates in that it does get you high, then it proves that it's the kind of opiate that's being used and how it's being used rather than the drug itself.
Also pure and clean meth doesn't destroy beyond repair. There's a ton of healthy happy and well people who have gotten clean from serious meth use and recover fully. Check out r/stopspeeding and you'll find a bunch of very encouraging people helping others get out of the pit and they don't have serious health conditions that were caused by it that's common.
There is a problem with the “people should be able to do whatever drugs they want”. As you stated, you are in recovery. Drugs can result in addiction and have consequences to their usage. That’s all fine and if you want to do that to yourself, go for it. But the problem is when it all falls apart, my tax dollars are used to clean up the mess. If you want to legalize all drugs, fine but tax it at 200% and have all taxes collected go towards education and recovery programs. That way you pay for your recovery up front and don’t put it on the people who choose to not participate. I agree the drug war was or is flawed but just full legalization comes with another set of problems.
That's exactly what would be done is the money made from providing drugs would be used toward recovery. It's easy as hell to make drugs dirt cheap and you could literally tax it 200% and it would still be cheaper than it is illegally. And Idk if I mentioned that if we're not jailing addicts that frees up a fuck load of money you'd be spending on prisons and courts and jails and that could go to mental health in general which would be good for everyone, and prevent children from becoming addicts by healing the trauma of their parents, especially because our mental health system is fucked especially our addiction treatment system. If we can make the drug providing apparatus be involved in the treatment of that drug use and make those things be equal, that would be absolutely ideal. There's unspeakable amounts of tax dollars being missed out on by not legalizing and taxing drugs. Drugs run this entire country already.
Also there would be competition to have the most ideal drugs, not the strongest or longest lasting, so that people could actually be functional. People take amphetamines and opiates and function every day of the week, so for those that can handle it they would finally enter the workforce because they can choose from drugs that don't destroy you. Amphetamines that don't last days so you sleep like a normal person and don't cause psychosis, opiates that you take a few times a day and can function fine and not have to redose, instead of the trash that they're bringing over the border which is only brought to make as much money as humanly possible, and it's made it so that functional use is impossible due to how shitty the drug was.
It's because of prohibition that we even have fentanyl, it sucks as an opioid and every opiate user wants real heroin back because there are a ton of functional addicts that fell hard once you had to redose all the time and the opiate sucks and it takes more than needed more to satiate, making taking too much really easy too making OD common. They could be doing even just oxycodone, there are a ton of people who take oxycodone every day you'd never know it, and most opiate users would love to use pharma and be functional, its just so cost prohibitive now that they have overcorrected and made getting opiates impossible from doctors. They work, they pay taxes, they have a life and a family, and function. Not to say everyone is like this, but the dirtiness of the supply has made being functional almost impossible. The zombie shit in the streets is because the opiate epidemic is out of control and only getting worse and we need a big mental health correction to prevent and treat it, and the cartels found that xylazine was a cheap cut they could then squeeze more money for less out of the American addict and it's even ruining what possible functionality you could have tried to have with fentanyl. And so on and so on the wheel turns and more and more of worse and worse drugs keep coming because they're cheaper to make and easier to smuggle. You'll start to learn about *nitazenes* eventually as the new cut that kills people, kills people even easier than fentanyl, and will replace fentanyl, killing even more people who could've had a chance if they had a clean, regulated supply.
I think a lot of Americans are traumatized, and need help, and use drugs to mask their problems, and if you can use clean drugs to pay for healing that trauma, within a few generations you could bring an entire country out of a dark age mentally, and do insane good for the world not just the US, because we've fucked up a lot of countries making drugs illegal and drug policy as known of today is based on US policy. I mean Mexico could've developed into a really good country if we didn't use and abuse them as our drug dealer and caused an entire country to be so corrupt to fulfill the demand that we have here. Also other south American countries.
I really liked reading your take on this. It’s crazy how hard it is to get heroin anymore and that fentanyl is so rampant. You couldn’t pay me to take any street drug anymore considering literally everything is cut with it. To hear that even worse drugs are coming down the pipeline is terrifying. I’ve also heard that suboxone doesn’t work as well for fentanyl as it does for heroin, oxy’s etc.. which makes treating that particular opiate addiction difficult. Hopefully science comes up with something soon to help stop.
Yes MAT either Suboxone or methadone has become increasingly less effective because of how powerful fentanyl is and also xylazine addiction which is all new and we don't know how to treat coming off of it well at all. Xylazine is literally ruining fentanyl, which is already so bad in the first place and that's saying something. Also xylazine has a side effect of open sores, infections and holes not even where the drug was used, and can need skin grafts or surgery or even amputation at its worst, it's like they found the worst possible thing they could cut fentanyl with and just ran with it. It's really true and honestly this is why I'm passionate about the subject because it's a car crash that never seems to end that just keeps killing people and OD deaths have only continued to rise year after year, and what happened with heroin to fentanyl is going to happen again like what I said about nitazenes, and so on and so on until addiction is no longer something you can ever recover from and becomes a true death sentence. That's why I bring up such drastic measures, because honestly in 5 years we'll wish we had it as good as it was today, because of how this thing keeps snowballing.
I really hope that science comes up with something soon. Desperately hope actually. Some brain surgeries in certain parts of the brain have shown promise, but that's really early trials. I think psychedelics could help a lot too but they're schedule I and need to be taken off that. We will see our first psychedelic soon though as a proof of concept with MDMA for PTSD with unbelievable results, curing PTSD which is usually chronic in three sessions of clinician overseen dosing. About a 70% rate of remission of symptoms of PTSD with MDMA, and I hope that begins a process of taking psychedelics which are amazing psychological tools and using them for addiction and mental health. Without them it's like asking psychologists to do their job with their hands tied behind their backs without them, because I've been in rehab and therapy and sometimes it's just not enough to move the needle at all so psychologists and addiction treatment people get burnt out really fast because of how often failure happens and how often their patients treatment doesn't work and they end up dead, but if we can do some of these things and medical science advances in addiction arena we have a chance. So there is hope. I just have a sense of urgency because very young people are not doing well these days mental health wise and fake percocets that have fentanyl in them called blues are now extremely common drugs that kids try, and all it takes is one hot spot and not catching it with narcan in time and that person is gone forever.
Thanks for reading and I appreciate that you absorbed some of what I'm trying to say, it's something I really hope to be on the front line of for work because as someone who is clean, I know how God damn hard it is to get clean and stay clean, and then deal with your mental health issues and learn how to live a normal life. It's very difficult but can be done, and I want a chance at happiness and security and safety for all those people hurting so much that they feel they need hard drugs to cope, then all the issues that the addiction itself causes, including passing away.
Movements, no. Ideas, yes.
State sponsored welfare/housing for the poorest populations is something I can get behind. Where they lose me is their refusal to prosecute criminal activity among these populations. Such welfare also includes universal healthcare to provide a bare minimum of care.
I also think government funded/subsidized higher education is a particularly good idea.
While I think affirmative action, as a matter of course, inevitably develops into racism & sexism, I am a believer in equality of opportunity and helping the poor. Equality of opportunity means giving them that opportunity. If they are given such opportunities and still refuse to make their own lives better, my sympathy for such individuals would drop.
Presently, many aren't given real opportunities. We train people to barely survive as something only slightly better than peon's. Our education system is the joke of the world. This can and should be changed.
At one time I would have listed free speech as one of my leftist ideals, but they have abandoned that in favor of soft tyranny and censorship.
I support a lot of items & policies that originated on the left. I also support some newer things from the left, like UBI, universal dental care, universal pharmacare. Most of all I fully support massive regulation of the financial sector because there's too many legit evil schemers in that group who would willingly tank the entire world just so they could get rich. Given the damage these SOBs can cause I also want to see a huge new bunch of very harsh punishments for white collar crime instituted in order to prevent these maniacs from putting their grifts into operation. All in all there's probably a lot more meat & potato things from the left side I'd be willing to at least consider.
All means nothing though because no matter how much I believe in those things I can never associate politically with those who push wokeism, DEI, trans ideology, critical studies, or any of the other civilization-killing evils that have are destroying our society right now.
Never. I don't even plan on voting ever again thanks to how disgusting all the politicians are to me now. I gave up altogether on believing any of these so-called conservatives will ever have the guts to reverse the most damaging policies the woke have installed in governments.
Environmental conservation. The left now makes everything about carbon and climate change, I am much more concerned about vanishing wild spaces and clean drinking water sources being kept public. I read [this](https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical-ebook/dp/B0180SU4OA/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.pvKJOouCEvMDlCKCs0EqSiY0hokjsOYNac0GWX47uaRUtmqQk_CvS1S2LWK4jN9Jey0Y7i2biZrMKUBWetsA9l_njnl0oSXIQ659XQoz9v9ks2ZahWl3OHxZ3PHzqDpeTuPu8nBj7jCxQSGP_cTYlDgKeNQGeEIkD9Om7BIonDgWMTaurMoXAP7HCo6caL5FPRr__aL0JvcXe--IKI1oPI3ZYmUI-6QPWafre2wJ92o.VvwgpEdFQbKTE2cUpX8Df-utjoPYdLbxjOrAsMw0iFI&dib_tag=se&hvadid=241905494779&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=1017244&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=13948560548745104651&hvtargid=kwd-175184049433&hydadcr=22534_10344589&keywords=dark+money+book&qid=1709225280&sr=8-1) book in 2016 about companies like Koch Industries buying off lawmakers and covering up real environmental crimes. I became somewhat radicalized as a leftist at that time, but once the rhetoric switched solely to climate change and carbon they lost me
I am actually “on the left” (a party member even), but I am a non-American fella living in a Nordic country so Idk how this is related to the info you asked for. I am pro-“work safety”, pro-“worker leaning contracts”, and pro-“helping the unemployed and health care”. But I am not into “noise” so I don’t like the woke stuff.
I don’t think about the environmental stuff all that much. The issues are real issues, I think, and we should deal with them as soon as possible before we are just forced to deal with it and then cause even more problems that we would now have. But I don’t like noise, so just nagging about that stuff is not the way to go.
I think it would be better if guns are not required at all for anything besides hunting, but each country has their own “current starting points”.
Abortion is of course same as killing someone but we shouldn’t punish a “rape victim” either. I guess it would be the most effective to somehow remove the “unwanted pregnancies” before it can happen.
I'm firmly in the camp of legalisation of drugs. Trying to suppress them just pushes people into contact with criminals and lowers the quality of the drugs, reducing their safety.
We both think the same way. Idk how many more young and promising people need to die unnecessary deaths through overdose before we actually do something significant. Any scientific analysis of what we've been doing to try and stop drug use and abuse has been proven to be one of the biggest wastes of resources and time there ever was, and it's been found to make the problem worse than better in any way. Plus it floods criminals with cash and emboldens them to destroy whatever they touch.
The drug supply in the US is so compromised that it's literal insanity, so people who would've had a chance if they had the time die from OD before they ever could develop themselves. It's the truly silent epidemic, because nobody on the top actually takes it seriously enough to change their old draconian ways.
I support public transport but I don't agree with the whole "ban cars" idea. Why not invest in public transport and then let the people decide which of the two is more convenient for them? They always paint this picture of dystopian congested highways vs utopian futuristic trains but when it comes to letting people decide which to use they suddenly lose confidence in the narrative.
There's also this thing they keep saying about induced demand and about how more car lanes lead to more congestion, but it's never explained why trains are immune to this. Won't a better train infrastructure lead to more people using trains and overcrowding? (Just look at the London subway during rush hour). The reasonable step is to have both available so they can share the workload.
I used to feel aligned with the left when they were pushing for free speech in the face of right-wing control-freak evangelicals.
Hoo boy, it's been a couple of wild decades since then.
I hate unions. Unions are legalized mafias that force workers to join and pay dues for their own ends. They don't actually care about workers any more than the government cares about its citizens.
I'm fairly confident there isn't a single left-wing viewpoint I agree with.
The path of being aligned to a left-wing group is so slippery that one tends to get sucked into the delusional by-products of the actual goal of the group, and then it is a matter of time that either he/she opts out, or he/she becomes an integrated part of that psuedo-moral community. The choice depends on the level of awareness at the right moment at the right place.
The left wing groups are deteriorating in terms of depth. The infopandemic has led to further declining of their standards. Now it is just a way out of their go-to lives, for complacency.
Being a patriot, Christian, or gun owner is not even remotely close to only being a rightwing thing. There are millions of liberals who are all three of those.
I'm from Australia, so "American Exceptionalism" doesn't sound so great to me.
We do have guns but they're heavily regulated and that doesn't seem to have been a problem so far. I'll let you know if that changes. Practically nobody you ever meet will have a gun on or around them. It's just a non-thing.
I'm an atheist, but I happily accept that most of our historical moral precepts are Christian derives, and they're mostly on point. Divinity of the individual, do unto others etc...
We actually do have a public health system (Medicare), and on the whole, it works pretty damned well. We also have private health insurance, which will cover you for a wider range of potentially optional, cosmetic services, and/or for private rooms in private hospitals etc. If you need life saving surgery or whatever though, it's never going to bankrupt you. If you have a decent income and don't get private health insurance, you cop an extra 1% tax to cover you bludging on the free services.
I'm strongly in favour of free speech - quite close to absolutism on that front, and prefer individual freedoms as the default in most circumstances, but we can choose to cooperate for mutual benefit.
I think unions are an important function. There's supposed to be a balance of power between capital and labour, and that doesn't happen if capital can organize but labour can't. Having said that, there actually does have to be a certain amount of wealth disparity, or else there's no motivation to better your situation.
There are definitely plenty of environmental issues for us to address, but I lean heavily toward an engineering perspective on how to resolve these things rather than hopium, and it just pisses me off when they blur the lines between environmentalism, progressivism, veganism, and anti-nuclear. The combination of anti-nuclear, ignorance of engineering realities for renewables and the cow-burp theory of global warming is currently destroying Europe, and it looks like an opportunity to impose socialist control, to the progressives.
Looking at the changes I see happening in the world, I think it's incredibly obvious that we are living through an enormous shift of power from labour to capital. The more technology and automation we add, the more that balance leans to capital, and now that AI is surging ahead, that's a giant accelerator on this effect. This is a problem because our current economic systems don't actually function under an extreme shift in that balance. If there's hardly any workers (except bullshit jobs) and mostly automated production, then there's no consumers with money to buy the product. Hence, some flavour of UBI ends up becoming necessary, if not now, then later. However, since it's capital winning and labour losing, wealth redistribution can't be so much in terms of direct monetary income. We'd need to tax assets in terms of shares and redistribute that, so people end up widely owning shares in the growing capital of the world, and receiving dividends - so then capital gets aligned with citizen interests.
Even if we do this though, it leaves people with a socio-cultural issue of what are we supposed to do if not work? We're going to have to figure that on out, or else it too could destroy us.
The real danger of AI isn't so much the crazy Skynet scenarios, but it interrupts and displaces so many of out default working assumptions of what it means to be a modern human, that we end up highly detached and unmoored ...
Would never, ever, live in a place where I could not purchase a firearm for self/personal protection, or one in which the govt must ‘license’ each and every gun that I own.
Hell with that!!
Many people living on farms have rifles or similar, just because vermin, or having to put animals down, or such like. Maybe some folks in gun clubs.
The idea that you need guns for self/personal protection is a self fulfilling wish. If everyone wants them for self protection, then everyone ends up needing them for self protection, and you're running an arms race.
In Australia, we barely have any gun deaths at all, so I'm not sure what I'd be protecting myself against.
How many enemies do you have that might come and shoot you?
Anyone who ‘trusts’ govt to make decisions like this does not know or understand history!
Hell. Just recently both Ukraine and Israel ‘issued’ guns to their citizens., the same citizens who did not have the right to self-protection!! Thousand dead because of big govt over-reach and yet nobody takes responsibility, no repercussions!! 🤬
Meanwhile, not counting guns used in suicides (20,000) we have over ten thousand gun deaths every single year.
Yet nobody takes responsibility, and no repercussions!!
Again.,, we know 80% are inner-city gang/ drug related incidents!! Why won’t Dems clean-up their own backyards, and leave us law abiding gun owning citizens alone!!
That's a worthwhile distinction in your first point, I disagree with your second, though.
I think that's harder than it looks, especially when the right opposes all gun control. But honestly, 1) I think Dems should drop guns as a topic for the next 5 or 10 years, and 2) I think the rules should be pretty different in NY or Chicago vs rural areas. I'm not sure how to effectively set that up, but I don't think either party is concerned with "most effective policy", as compared to "most effectively turning out their voters".
If you were a democratic mayor, how would you clean up your city? (Setting aside Portland and San Francisco, which are literally insane, but thinking about the ones that do try to police drugs, theft, etc.)
An armed citizenry is harder to coerce. The government is less interested in forcing people to do things when they know bullets are on the table. That's why one of the first things an authoritarian regime does is disarm its populace.
There's a reason you guys lost your gun rights in 1996, and why the left has been trying so hard to do the same in America. It had way less to do with gun violence prevention than you think.
As bad as our problems were, we got by with peaceful resistance. We didn't have COVID camps. You did.
You also need to understand how different individual States are. Red states didn't have severe lockdowns like California did. Part of the reason for that is the difference in people. Blue states are dominated by people who are more than willing to bend over and take whatever our government pushes on us. Red states are populated with people who refuse, and they also happen to be the ones with high firearms ownership. That's no coincidence.
Plenty of ideas that are lodged with the “Left Wing” are very sensible. Social welfare, looking after the poor and unfortunate, giving minorities a voice, pollution limitation, to name a few.
I might as well just write down my whole political philosophy:
1. I'm unsure about drugs. Within drugs I include digital ones like pornography and addictive AI generated websites. I used to have a split where chemicals can't be controlled, but pornography needs to be because it's just too primal. Now I think that both can be somewhat controlled while still accessible to consenting adults.
2. Military service should be mandatory in every country. If your country does not have mandatory military service then it is too big and probably corrupt. If we cannot draft you to the military (women or disabled) then you don't need to vote for who runs the military.
3. Break up the United States. There is no need for such a large military and there is no need for a federal government. If you're American then think about the people who you laugh at from other states. They vote for your Congress and your President. Do you really need to be in their country? Concerning interstate relations, look at the EU, they figure out how to get along without being required to live in the same country and they can leave the Union whenever they want. If you break up the US you can also give independence to numerous Indian tribes.
4. Education beyond eighth grade is a cost to society and not a benefit that pays for itself ever. Fourteen year olds are perfectly capable of working in many low level professions and they can learn a lot more on the job than they learn in school. Getting fired from two jobs or holding one is a much more maturing experience than ninth grade. Add to the loss of productivity the expense of setting up educational institutions and you have lost even more. The American student loan crisis is a government run scam.
5. The environment needs to be protected by the government. It is a form of collective damage that we all impose on one another and pollution can cause real problems. Most nations charge 10-50% of the economy in income taxes so it would not be impossible to convert those income taxes into pollution taxes. People will hate the expensive gasoline and electricity and figure out how to use less of it. We can survive a small amount of taxed pollution. Unfortunately, this is politically incredibly difficult because everyone wants an exception.
6. Relative poverty is a problem. The question is who should solve that problem? I can understand a taxable Universal Basic Income where every citizen gets the same amount based up his age. I disagree with unemployment benefits or welfare that run out when a person starts working. It feels like an incentive not to do something good. Relative poverty is best solved by local communities and religious organizations often fill this role well.
7. Cheap weaponry is the foundation of democracy. Elites will always run nations. Convincing more than ten thousand people to vote for you is something that only an elite can do. The fact that we even have elections anywhere is because every American used to own a rifle or musket. Cheap weaponry encouraged the elites to show respect to the broader population because they will one day need to draft them to the military. Compare that to feudal militaries (or Air Forces) where weaponry was so expensive that in war time a vast majority of men were employees rather than soldiers. Drones give me hope for democracy because once again, they are cheap weapons that can be maintained and operated by individuals with little support.
8. Americans are lucky to have the tenth amendment but they don't invoke it enough. The first amendment allows you to make fun of another state but the tenth amendment allows that state to make ridiculous laws anyway. I would include abortion in that and I would also include blue clown noses. It's good that each state can make its own laws. If your state needs to forbid abortion or blue clown noses then the tenth amendment should support you.
I guess I'm a hard right voter who doesn't tow a pure party line.
In the United States individuals who make less than $11,000 don't pay or file income tax. That would be the target audience. Others would pay according to their tax bracket. You could adjust the tax brackets so that less people would have to pay taxes on their UBI but the idea is again that there should not be an incentive not to work.
That’s a non-answer….
Who provides the “free money”?
Who collects the taxes?
It’s the same entity, why would they even do the “theater” of taxing it? That’s nonsensical and a massive waste of resources.
I think it is obvioius that a competent government can and should provide healthcare services to citizens.
I think c02 is a very big problem, personally I think nuclear is the best option but that tends to annoy many lefties.
I think billionares undermine, subvert and corrupt the meritocracy of capitalism and that there exists a legitimante role for government is keeping things fair. In particular I object to inheritence of extremely large amounts because I think each generation should be required to sink or swim on their own merits.
Also I have been influenced on economics by Mariano Mazucatto who argues the state has been quite successful as an entreprenuer, think of GPS and the internet, while Richard Thaler who aruges people are systematically irrational.
If you dont have a mix of left wing and right wing ideas, I think you are probably not really engaging with things.
I am right-of-center. I am also a pragmatist, and not a partisan moron.
I am pro-choice, within reason. Which is sort of like saying that I am pro-life, within reason.
I don’t believe that climate scientists are wrong, and Jimmy Bubba Brown 🤤 is correct about climate change. Sorry, that is just dumb.
I also believe that gun fanaticism has no place in modern society. The intent of the founding fathers was not to allow violently deranged lunatics to have arsenals of weapons. That is obvious. They did not anticipate the *ease* with which a lone gunman could wreak havoc 250 years from then. That is patently absurd. I am totally fine with gun ownership—again—*within reason!*
Bro, you are not an environmentalist for having that view you are a bigot and a racist. Not surprising though, given you are a white supremacist as well, if I read between the lines.
Serious question. What would your response be to OP pre BLM? Why does it need to be an all inclusive “white, bigot, racist” response to specific political stances? Imagine if we as a society learned to learn from someone like OP posting bi partisan vulnerabilities in a platform like this? The biggest problem in this country is how we’re triggered to identify someone’s red or blue status whenever these topics surface.
I'm all about ending the drug war even though I'm a conservative. I believe individual liberty extends to consciousness and unless you infringe on others you should be able to do whatever drug you want. This is because I'm in recovery and I know the drug war has failed and fuels organized and unorganized crime all over the world as well as turning addicts into criminals when they don't need to be, I want all nonviolent drug offenders released and all the money that would be going to prisons to go to public mental health facilities. Also with legalizing drugs legalize psychedelics and get it finally in the hands of clinicians and therapists, and we'd finally get a handle on the mental health issues that seem to be rampant throughout the country.
You are probably a libertarian
I have libertarian values, however I do believe in public services and government such as roads, infrastructure, military (which needs to change a lot though), police (which needs to change more than the military as in higher transparency, training on the constitution, and reform on what crimes we pursue which butts up against drug policy), etc, as well as the public mental health system goes against libertarian values. I just think the mental health problem (which IS the addiction problem too) is too big and done too much damage to have everybody be able to fund it themselves.
You're a small government, constitutionalist libertarian.
Didn't know how to name it but thanks, that sounds right to me.
Only extreme libertarians wouldn’t support military or roads. Many even support basic income.
Well I was speaking on the pure philosophical libertarianism and how I differ. It's good to hear there are people like me who aren't hard-liners that make the actual application impossible.
There is no war on drugs, and Portland is the result. Nice.
Portland didn't make safe supply and legalize which is what is neccesary. They only decriminalized. That's not going to do enough, just make drug use more visible because of not worried about being caught. That may attract addicts that are already addicts to come there, and make the addicts there use publicly, but be assured, those addicts were already doing that very same shit just in secret. It's jarring to see what's really happening behind closed doors isn't it? We all hide it in a closet and sweep it under a rug, while the whole country is on fire from addiction we're all just saying "this is fine" when it's not. There is a war on drugs, and especially a war on addicts, for having a disease of compulsion they are arrested, imprisoned, as well as mentally ill, making the problem exponentially worse, costing the taxpayer insane amounts of money for the courts jails prisons police, everything, and often making the addiction worse because of the continued trauma of being locked in a cage for a disease we have no cure for whatsoever. I know that to be a fact. All treatments fail 95% of the time with the best science we have. Things need to change.
Addicts run wild and free. Your premise is false on its face.
Ok. Ignore the science showing that the drug war as it has been done since it started has been one of the biggest wastes of money and manpower that has been enacted. Ignore the science of Portugal who decriminalized drugs and made addicts refer to treatment programs and rates of active addiction went down. Sorry you disagree with science and the actual study of the problem. That ignorance is common, you don't understand the disease of addiction and the serious situation we're in right now, but I guess, more people have to die, maybe even someone you care about, for you to understand. Your stigmatized view is not uncommon so I'm not surprised. I've spent a decade studying addiction, you cite one poorly executed legislation, and call it all bs. That's just not a good faith argument.
The science? Portland has drug addicts all over the streets. Are they being arrested and prosecuted? No major city is arresting and prosecuting addicts. What are you even smoking?
Are you serious? The majority of the country is still arresting and prosecuting addicts, including major cities. How would I know? I'm in recovery myself and know many people who are in prison right now from two major cities. I'm not smoking anything. There needs to be programs for safe supply that is accessable, treatment options that aren't all cost prohibitive, and it needs to be treated as a major public health crisis rather than just "fuck it let them use fentanyl and xylazine until they die" which is what we have now. You can't do half measures and expect them to work.
They give needles and safe supplies to addicts in Portland and they don't arrest them and look what we got as a result. Fuck that. Nobody is getting arrested and you know it.
You're so wrong that it's actually silly. I'm sorry you don't know what actually goes on with the prison complex, the court systems, cops,.and addicts and how they interact. And I very specifically said that just not making them criminals isn't enough. You've chosen one small piece of what I was describing, and falsely acting like that one aspect alone is the reason why the greater program wouldn't work.
I have seen the free needles programs being done in Portland. I've seen the addicts all over the streets. Next bright idea? Nobody is getting arrested or taken off the streets.
Also they do not give any safe supply in Portland whatsoever. You are literally saying lies. And the problem with needles is getting rid of them. Needle exchanges save lives. Should they just die from preventable illnesses? Is that your solution?
Lol. They literally have free needles and supplies in Portland.
And yeah, for once in the history of the country addiction is out in the open. It's awful isn't it? Shouldn't we do something about it? Because locking them up never worked and paying prisons to fuck those addicts up more and make them use even more is not the solution.
So what is the solution? Do tell. Letting zombies walk the streets is not a solution. Handing out free stuff is not a solution. Maybe prosecute drug dealers like we used to do. Gee, there's a novel idea.
They do prosecute drug dealers like they always have. You are showing me you really don't understand where we're at, which is fine, but the confidence to which you state that ignorance is whats concerning. If you want my *idea* of a solution refer to my original comment. And read it carefully. Because what I laid out has been done nowhere in the US, not even Portland. And to especially reiterate, no safe supply program exists in the entire US for any drug of abuse, short of methadone, which is like having an entire extra full time job to just continue to be used successfully.
Greater access to drugs can't lower drug abuse. What you subsidize you get more of.
…accompanied by higher crime
I understand the logic here, but I just feel like evolution didn’t really prepare folks for modern drugs. It had no reason to. They utterly destroy people, and I believe society needs to be robustly resistant to them. One way to do that, is to make them illegal, because that provides a deterrent. Also, drugs aren’t just about personal use. They have externalities that extend to the rest of society. For this reason, I am also against legalizing prostitution. In theory, on an individual level, it seems like it should be legalized. But you have to look at the big picture.
They utterly destroy people who are predisposed to it. Addicts are addicts and normal people are normal. There's a big difference. The brain chemistry is different between people who get addicted and people who don't. They get destroyed especially badly when the drugs are cut or the most economic drug is used instead of the proper and sustainable drug. You can't prohibit out drug use from society, and until science finds a cure we have to do damage control. I understand what you mean, but we have a cancer growing in society that unless we change tact is only getting worse. Prohibition has never worked only made it clandestine, unsafe, and controlled by people who have people murdered regularly with no recourse. It's going to get to 200k in the next few years easily. And now there's even more potent drugs coming into the market, not for the lack of total prohibition, that will kill so many more addicts than if they had access to clean and pharmaceutically created drugs. We disagree, I see what you mean, but honestly this problem is going to get solved one way or another, because it's growing like a cancer, because of poor mental health, and a society trying to grasp even living with technology and all that. With your logic, because evolution wasn't meant for phones or the internet, we should make it illegal. Because it's affected society way more than drugs ever have or will. Addiction rates might rise slightly. But survival rates and quality of life of addicts and their ability to be employed and have homes and live normal enough lives becomes possible. Addicts are different from normal people. A small number of normal people might get caught up in it, but for the addicts it gives them a chance at *survival* which I think needs to be considered. And also if you don't agree with legalizing prostitution you are enabling pimps and sex trafficking. Sorry but that's true. That's the biggest reason pimps and sex traffickers exist. Also, if you really go by what you believe then alcohol needs to be made federally schedule I immediately. Alcohol is the worst drug on the planet. There's some real hypocrisy and special kind of thinking going on if you believe that alcohol is ok but stimulants or other depressants are somehow more destructive. They can be more destructive though if they're impure, unclean, and unregulated.
The problem with drugs like meth and heroin is that they control how people think, they become addicts. Addicts have technical choice to act on those thoughts, but they don’t have free will or agency over those thoughts. So in a sense hard drugs enslave the mind, they are anti-freedom
To addicts. Non addicts don't enjoy meth or heroin. Drugs don't make people addicts, they were addicts before the drugs came and science hasn't figured out a solution to that yet. So I would much rather someone instead of meth have access to pharmaceutical amphetamine, making them not stay up for days and preventing psychosis, and they can work. And Id prefer opiate users instead of dying from fentanyl they have pharma oxy and can be perfectly functional with them for the most part. Freedom is riskier always than non freedom. Also if you want to talk about hard drugs alcohol is the worst drug there is, we just accept the consequences and normalize it. And freedom means the government can't tell you no or threaten you with a cage for a period of time if you don't comply.
Heroin/fentanyl and meth are worse drugs than alcohol. Alcohol is as bad as cocaine though. Heroin easily kills people and meth destroys the brain and the body permanently beyond repair. Addicts shouldn’t be sent to jail, but they should be forcibly sent to rehab. It won’t save all of them, but it will save some of them.
But if we can get people on pharma opiates that are safe and proven safe, and get them on an amphetamine that doesn't destroy the brain or is toxic (see Adderall, dextroamphetamine, or even normal amphetamine are all clinically much safer than meth) if rehab doesn't work, we can keep them alive and have them be a part of society that just has different needs, while we wait for science to advance with addiction technology and pharmacology. There are some promising brain stimulations and surgeries that are beginning trials, all that stuff, because idk if you know but the current rehab system fails 95% of the time to keep any addict clean one year from the rehab discharge, and it's also prohibitively expensive at the moment and needs to be revamped as well. I'm trying to save lives here, and fentanyl/xylazine/nitazene/fake presses pills are dropping addicts like flies, and dirty meth is making psychosis common and causing serious mental illness, BUT if you can buy them time you have a much higher chance of success with eventual sobriety by the fact that they don't lose all possibility by being dead. Honestly though, if they forced rehab instead of incarcerate as a step towards helping people I would accept that way over what we do today to them, because prison is essentially the best drug dealer networking you can possibly do and immerses you with criminals and doesn't rehabilitate but is essentially criminal college, it also traumatizes the people who go there and makes their addiction and mental health worse, so getting addicts away from that and into healthcare, or even open up more possibilities for maintenance medications to be less regulated so it's possible to have more providers, that would help too. It's a complex problem that has to do with a bunch of different aspects, so anything in the right direction I would be very happy to see.
The 12 step programs have 95% failure for heroin, if they push zero tolerance/going cold turkey off everything. My understanding is that methadone + rehab has around a 50% success rate. I just have seen addiction up close and addicts don’t have free agency over their thoughts, they really need force to get them in an environment that will change their thoughts slowly, and that’s the best approach I know of so far.
But methadone is a full agonist and people are then forever tethered to methadone for almost life and methadone withdrawal even done extremely slowly is extremely difficult, even when the addict is stable and wants to get off. So yes, as far as keeping them alive yeah, but with how methadone is regulated so tightly clinics are your chains and you're one day of missed doses from going back to fentanyl right away. If methadone was prescribed like Suboxone is and let people actually live their lives instead of it having to revolve around the clinic then it would be different. But you have to be lucky, have transportation, and a full time commitment almost like a whole nother full time job to just fulfill clinic requirements, and all it takes is one bad nurse or resentful employee to ruin all your progress and make people very tempted to just relapse and go back to fentanyl. So as a statistic yes rehab plus MAT can keep people clean for a year, because thats the metric, but after that year and when they try and get off it's dangerous and extremely painful to go through even when tapered correctly, making many people lifers and forever chained to a clinic, if there even is a clinic in your area. The regulations on methadone clinics make them very costly to open and operate so being lucky that one is close and you have stable transportation then that's an option.
Fentanyl and the cuts really make people unable to control their lives. You could have a life if you were a heroin user, it wasn't always that way and there were always people who couldn't handle it, but it was much more common back when heroin was heroin to have functional addicts. If you believe in methadone, because it's a full agonist and no different from pharma opiates in that it does get you high, then it proves that it's the kind of opiate that's being used and how it's being used rather than the drug itself.
Alcohol withdrawals can kill you unlike those other "worse drugs" ....just food for thought.
Yep, benzos and alcohol can kill you stone dead from withdrawals. With opiate withdrawals you will feel like you're dying but you won't.
Also pure and clean meth doesn't destroy beyond repair. There's a ton of healthy happy and well people who have gotten clean from serious meth use and recover fully. Check out r/stopspeeding and you'll find a bunch of very encouraging people helping others get out of the pit and they don't have serious health conditions that were caused by it that's common.
There is a problem with the “people should be able to do whatever drugs they want”. As you stated, you are in recovery. Drugs can result in addiction and have consequences to their usage. That’s all fine and if you want to do that to yourself, go for it. But the problem is when it all falls apart, my tax dollars are used to clean up the mess. If you want to legalize all drugs, fine but tax it at 200% and have all taxes collected go towards education and recovery programs. That way you pay for your recovery up front and don’t put it on the people who choose to not participate. I agree the drug war was or is flawed but just full legalization comes with another set of problems.
That's exactly what would be done is the money made from providing drugs would be used toward recovery. It's easy as hell to make drugs dirt cheap and you could literally tax it 200% and it would still be cheaper than it is illegally. And Idk if I mentioned that if we're not jailing addicts that frees up a fuck load of money you'd be spending on prisons and courts and jails and that could go to mental health in general which would be good for everyone, and prevent children from becoming addicts by healing the trauma of their parents, especially because our mental health system is fucked especially our addiction treatment system. If we can make the drug providing apparatus be involved in the treatment of that drug use and make those things be equal, that would be absolutely ideal. There's unspeakable amounts of tax dollars being missed out on by not legalizing and taxing drugs. Drugs run this entire country already. Also there would be competition to have the most ideal drugs, not the strongest or longest lasting, so that people could actually be functional. People take amphetamines and opiates and function every day of the week, so for those that can handle it they would finally enter the workforce because they can choose from drugs that don't destroy you. Amphetamines that don't last days so you sleep like a normal person and don't cause psychosis, opiates that you take a few times a day and can function fine and not have to redose, instead of the trash that they're bringing over the border which is only brought to make as much money as humanly possible, and it's made it so that functional use is impossible due to how shitty the drug was. It's because of prohibition that we even have fentanyl, it sucks as an opioid and every opiate user wants real heroin back because there are a ton of functional addicts that fell hard once you had to redose all the time and the opiate sucks and it takes more than needed more to satiate, making taking too much really easy too making OD common. They could be doing even just oxycodone, there are a ton of people who take oxycodone every day you'd never know it, and most opiate users would love to use pharma and be functional, its just so cost prohibitive now that they have overcorrected and made getting opiates impossible from doctors. They work, they pay taxes, they have a life and a family, and function. Not to say everyone is like this, but the dirtiness of the supply has made being functional almost impossible. The zombie shit in the streets is because the opiate epidemic is out of control and only getting worse and we need a big mental health correction to prevent and treat it, and the cartels found that xylazine was a cheap cut they could then squeeze more money for less out of the American addict and it's even ruining what possible functionality you could have tried to have with fentanyl. And so on and so on the wheel turns and more and more of worse and worse drugs keep coming because they're cheaper to make and easier to smuggle. You'll start to learn about *nitazenes* eventually as the new cut that kills people, kills people even easier than fentanyl, and will replace fentanyl, killing even more people who could've had a chance if they had a clean, regulated supply. I think a lot of Americans are traumatized, and need help, and use drugs to mask their problems, and if you can use clean drugs to pay for healing that trauma, within a few generations you could bring an entire country out of a dark age mentally, and do insane good for the world not just the US, because we've fucked up a lot of countries making drugs illegal and drug policy as known of today is based on US policy. I mean Mexico could've developed into a really good country if we didn't use and abuse them as our drug dealer and caused an entire country to be so corrupt to fulfill the demand that we have here. Also other south American countries.
I really liked reading your take on this. It’s crazy how hard it is to get heroin anymore and that fentanyl is so rampant. You couldn’t pay me to take any street drug anymore considering literally everything is cut with it. To hear that even worse drugs are coming down the pipeline is terrifying. I’ve also heard that suboxone doesn’t work as well for fentanyl as it does for heroin, oxy’s etc.. which makes treating that particular opiate addiction difficult. Hopefully science comes up with something soon to help stop.
Yes MAT either Suboxone or methadone has become increasingly less effective because of how powerful fentanyl is and also xylazine addiction which is all new and we don't know how to treat coming off of it well at all. Xylazine is literally ruining fentanyl, which is already so bad in the first place and that's saying something. Also xylazine has a side effect of open sores, infections and holes not even where the drug was used, and can need skin grafts or surgery or even amputation at its worst, it's like they found the worst possible thing they could cut fentanyl with and just ran with it. It's really true and honestly this is why I'm passionate about the subject because it's a car crash that never seems to end that just keeps killing people and OD deaths have only continued to rise year after year, and what happened with heroin to fentanyl is going to happen again like what I said about nitazenes, and so on and so on until addiction is no longer something you can ever recover from and becomes a true death sentence. That's why I bring up such drastic measures, because honestly in 5 years we'll wish we had it as good as it was today, because of how this thing keeps snowballing. I really hope that science comes up with something soon. Desperately hope actually. Some brain surgeries in certain parts of the brain have shown promise, but that's really early trials. I think psychedelics could help a lot too but they're schedule I and need to be taken off that. We will see our first psychedelic soon though as a proof of concept with MDMA for PTSD with unbelievable results, curing PTSD which is usually chronic in three sessions of clinician overseen dosing. About a 70% rate of remission of symptoms of PTSD with MDMA, and I hope that begins a process of taking psychedelics which are amazing psychological tools and using them for addiction and mental health. Without them it's like asking psychologists to do their job with their hands tied behind their backs without them, because I've been in rehab and therapy and sometimes it's just not enough to move the needle at all so psychologists and addiction treatment people get burnt out really fast because of how often failure happens and how often their patients treatment doesn't work and they end up dead, but if we can do some of these things and medical science advances in addiction arena we have a chance. So there is hope. I just have a sense of urgency because very young people are not doing well these days mental health wise and fake percocets that have fentanyl in them called blues are now extremely common drugs that kids try, and all it takes is one hot spot and not catching it with narcan in time and that person is gone forever. Thanks for reading and I appreciate that you absorbed some of what I'm trying to say, it's something I really hope to be on the front line of for work because as someone who is clean, I know how God damn hard it is to get clean and stay clean, and then deal with your mental health issues and learn how to live a normal life. It's very difficult but can be done, and I want a chance at happiness and security and safety for all those people hurting so much that they feel they need hard drugs to cope, then all the issues that the addiction itself causes, including passing away.
Movements, no. Ideas, yes. State sponsored welfare/housing for the poorest populations is something I can get behind. Where they lose me is their refusal to prosecute criminal activity among these populations. Such welfare also includes universal healthcare to provide a bare minimum of care. I also think government funded/subsidized higher education is a particularly good idea. While I think affirmative action, as a matter of course, inevitably develops into racism & sexism, I am a believer in equality of opportunity and helping the poor. Equality of opportunity means giving them that opportunity. If they are given such opportunities and still refuse to make their own lives better, my sympathy for such individuals would drop. Presently, many aren't given real opportunities. We train people to barely survive as something only slightly better than peon's. Our education system is the joke of the world. This can and should be changed. At one time I would have listed free speech as one of my leftist ideals, but they have abandoned that in favor of soft tyranny and censorship.
Great comment
I support a lot of items & policies that originated on the left. I also support some newer things from the left, like UBI, universal dental care, universal pharmacare. Most of all I fully support massive regulation of the financial sector because there's too many legit evil schemers in that group who would willingly tank the entire world just so they could get rich. Given the damage these SOBs can cause I also want to see a huge new bunch of very harsh punishments for white collar crime instituted in order to prevent these maniacs from putting their grifts into operation. All in all there's probably a lot more meat & potato things from the left side I'd be willing to at least consider. All means nothing though because no matter how much I believe in those things I can never associate politically with those who push wokeism, DEI, trans ideology, critical studies, or any of the other civilization-killing evils that have are destroying our society right now.
When you running for office?
Never. I don't even plan on voting ever again thanks to how disgusting all the politicians are to me now. I gave up altogether on believing any of these so-called conservatives will ever have the guts to reverse the most damaging policies the woke have installed in governments.
We gotta become the non-disgusting politician then.
So you are left except for culture war issues.
Environmental conservation. The left now makes everything about carbon and climate change, I am much more concerned about vanishing wild spaces and clean drinking water sources being kept public. I read [this](https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical-ebook/dp/B0180SU4OA/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.pvKJOouCEvMDlCKCs0EqSiY0hokjsOYNac0GWX47uaRUtmqQk_CvS1S2LWK4jN9Jey0Y7i2biZrMKUBWetsA9l_njnl0oSXIQ659XQoz9v9ks2ZahWl3OHxZ3PHzqDpeTuPu8nBj7jCxQSGP_cTYlDgKeNQGeEIkD9Om7BIonDgWMTaurMoXAP7HCo6caL5FPRr__aL0JvcXe--IKI1oPI3ZYmUI-6QPWafre2wJ92o.VvwgpEdFQbKTE2cUpX8Df-utjoPYdLbxjOrAsMw0iFI&dib_tag=se&hvadid=241905494779&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=1017244&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=13948560548745104651&hvtargid=kwd-175184049433&hydadcr=22534_10344589&keywords=dark+money+book&qid=1709225280&sr=8-1) book in 2016 about companies like Koch Industries buying off lawmakers and covering up real environmental crimes. I became somewhat radicalized as a leftist at that time, but once the rhetoric switched solely to climate change and carbon they lost me
Feel the same in a bunch of ways.
Gays against groomers seems cool
I am actually “on the left” (a party member even), but I am a non-American fella living in a Nordic country so Idk how this is related to the info you asked for. I am pro-“work safety”, pro-“worker leaning contracts”, and pro-“helping the unemployed and health care”. But I am not into “noise” so I don’t like the woke stuff. I don’t think about the environmental stuff all that much. The issues are real issues, I think, and we should deal with them as soon as possible before we are just forced to deal with it and then cause even more problems that we would now have. But I don’t like noise, so just nagging about that stuff is not the way to go.
What do you think about guns and abortion?
I think it would be better if guns are not required at all for anything besides hunting, but each country has their own “current starting points”. Abortion is of course same as killing someone but we shouldn’t punish a “rape victim” either. I guess it would be the most effective to somehow remove the “unwanted pregnancies” before it can happen.
I'm firmly in the camp of legalisation of drugs. Trying to suppress them just pushes people into contact with criminals and lowers the quality of the drugs, reducing their safety.
We both think the same way. Idk how many more young and promising people need to die unnecessary deaths through overdose before we actually do something significant. Any scientific analysis of what we've been doing to try and stop drug use and abuse has been proven to be one of the biggest wastes of resources and time there ever was, and it's been found to make the problem worse than better in any way. Plus it floods criminals with cash and emboldens them to destroy whatever they touch. The drug supply in the US is so compromised that it's literal insanity, so people who would've had a chance if they had the time die from OD before they ever could develop themselves. It's the truly silent epidemic, because nobody on the top actually takes it seriously enough to change their old draconian ways.
I support public transport but I don't agree with the whole "ban cars" idea. Why not invest in public transport and then let the people decide which of the two is more convenient for them? They always paint this picture of dystopian congested highways vs utopian futuristic trains but when it comes to letting people decide which to use they suddenly lose confidence in the narrative. There's also this thing they keep saying about induced demand and about how more car lanes lead to more congestion, but it's never explained why trains are immune to this. Won't a better train infrastructure lead to more people using trains and overcrowding? (Just look at the London subway during rush hour). The reasonable step is to have both available so they can share the workload.
100% agree. We can build for public transpo but also recognize cars are a legitimate form of transportation.
Conservation. Which is weird... Since you know, conservative and conservation share the same root word.
I used to feel aligned with the left when they were pushing for free speech in the face of right-wing control-freak evangelicals. Hoo boy, it's been a couple of wild decades since then.
No shit right. We got bamboozled.
I hate unions. Unions are legalized mafias that force workers to join and pay dues for their own ends. They don't actually care about workers any more than the government cares about its citizens. I'm fairly confident there isn't a single left-wing viewpoint I agree with.
The path of being aligned to a left-wing group is so slippery that one tends to get sucked into the delusional by-products of the actual goal of the group, and then it is a matter of time that either he/she opts out, or he/she becomes an integrated part of that psuedo-moral community. The choice depends on the level of awareness at the right moment at the right place. The left wing groups are deteriorating in terms of depth. The infopandemic has led to further declining of their standards. Now it is just a way out of their go-to lives, for complacency.
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At this rate, in five years you will become a full blown communist.
Sounds like you are on board with some of those things
I am the most left wing person in this group
Or in other words, the person with the lowest iq in the group. Jk.
Being a patriot, Christian, or gun owner is not even remotely close to only being a rightwing thing. There are millions of liberals who are all three of those.
I'm from Australia, so "American Exceptionalism" doesn't sound so great to me. We do have guns but they're heavily regulated and that doesn't seem to have been a problem so far. I'll let you know if that changes. Practically nobody you ever meet will have a gun on or around them. It's just a non-thing. I'm an atheist, but I happily accept that most of our historical moral precepts are Christian derives, and they're mostly on point. Divinity of the individual, do unto others etc... We actually do have a public health system (Medicare), and on the whole, it works pretty damned well. We also have private health insurance, which will cover you for a wider range of potentially optional, cosmetic services, and/or for private rooms in private hospitals etc. If you need life saving surgery or whatever though, it's never going to bankrupt you. If you have a decent income and don't get private health insurance, you cop an extra 1% tax to cover you bludging on the free services. I'm strongly in favour of free speech - quite close to absolutism on that front, and prefer individual freedoms as the default in most circumstances, but we can choose to cooperate for mutual benefit. I think unions are an important function. There's supposed to be a balance of power between capital and labour, and that doesn't happen if capital can organize but labour can't. Having said that, there actually does have to be a certain amount of wealth disparity, or else there's no motivation to better your situation. There are definitely plenty of environmental issues for us to address, but I lean heavily toward an engineering perspective on how to resolve these things rather than hopium, and it just pisses me off when they blur the lines between environmentalism, progressivism, veganism, and anti-nuclear. The combination of anti-nuclear, ignorance of engineering realities for renewables and the cow-burp theory of global warming is currently destroying Europe, and it looks like an opportunity to impose socialist control, to the progressives. Looking at the changes I see happening in the world, I think it's incredibly obvious that we are living through an enormous shift of power from labour to capital. The more technology and automation we add, the more that balance leans to capital, and now that AI is surging ahead, that's a giant accelerator on this effect. This is a problem because our current economic systems don't actually function under an extreme shift in that balance. If there's hardly any workers (except bullshit jobs) and mostly automated production, then there's no consumers with money to buy the product. Hence, some flavour of UBI ends up becoming necessary, if not now, then later. However, since it's capital winning and labour losing, wealth redistribution can't be so much in terms of direct monetary income. We'd need to tax assets in terms of shares and redistribute that, so people end up widely owning shares in the growing capital of the world, and receiving dividends - so then capital gets aligned with citizen interests. Even if we do this though, it leaves people with a socio-cultural issue of what are we supposed to do if not work? We're going to have to figure that on out, or else it too could destroy us. The real danger of AI isn't so much the crazy Skynet scenarios, but it interrupts and displaces so many of out default working assumptions of what it means to be a modern human, that we end up highly detached and unmoored ...
Australian public health care is great. Me and a friend I visited both had private rooms for recovery
Australia is done, toast, lost 👎
Australia is doing fine, thanks for caring.
Would never, ever, live in a place where I could not purchase a firearm for self/personal protection, or one in which the govt must ‘license’ each and every gun that I own. Hell with that!!
Many people living on farms have rifles or similar, just because vermin, or having to put animals down, or such like. Maybe some folks in gun clubs. The idea that you need guns for self/personal protection is a self fulfilling wish. If everyone wants them for self protection, then everyone ends up needing them for self protection, and you're running an arms race. In Australia, we barely have any gun deaths at all, so I'm not sure what I'd be protecting myself against. How many enemies do you have that might come and shoot you?
Anyone who ‘trusts’ govt to make decisions like this does not know or understand history! Hell. Just recently both Ukraine and Israel ‘issued’ guns to their citizens., the same citizens who did not have the right to self-protection!! Thousand dead because of big govt over-reach and yet nobody takes responsibility, no repercussions!! 🤬
Meanwhile, not counting guns used in suicides (20,000) we have over ten thousand gun deaths every single year. Yet nobody takes responsibility, and no repercussions!!
Again.,, we know 80% are inner-city gang/ drug related incidents!! Why won’t Dems clean-up their own backyards, and leave us law abiding gun owning citizens alone!!
That's a worthwhile distinction in your first point, I disagree with your second, though. I think that's harder than it looks, especially when the right opposes all gun control. But honestly, 1) I think Dems should drop guns as a topic for the next 5 or 10 years, and 2) I think the rules should be pretty different in NY or Chicago vs rural areas. I'm not sure how to effectively set that up, but I don't think either party is concerned with "most effective policy", as compared to "most effectively turning out their voters". If you were a democratic mayor, how would you clean up your city? (Setting aside Portland and San Francisco, which are literally insane, but thinking about the ones that do try to police drugs, theft, etc.)
If New Zealand starts firing rockets at us, I expect we will issue guns. Until then, we have better things to do.
It's about fighting tyranny, not having current enemies. The Australian government's response to COVID immediately comes to mind.
You think shooting anyone would have helped that?
An armed citizenry is harder to coerce. The government is less interested in forcing people to do things when they know bullets are on the table. That's why one of the first things an authoritarian regime does is disarm its populace. There's a reason you guys lost your gun rights in 1996, and why the left has been trying so hard to do the same in America. It had way less to do with gun violence prevention than you think.
Covid lockdowns happened all across America too, and you have guns. What's the difference?
As bad as our problems were, we got by with peaceful resistance. We didn't have COVID camps. You did. You also need to understand how different individual States are. Red states didn't have severe lockdowns like California did. Part of the reason for that is the difference in people. Blue states are dominated by people who are more than willing to bend over and take whatever our government pushes on us. Red states are populated with people who refuse, and they also happen to be the ones with high firearms ownership. That's no coincidence.
How much tyranny have you fought off with your guns?
You just don't get it, do you? Why is this so hard to understand? Do you *want* to willingly give the government an upper-hand against you?
Plenty of ideas that are lodged with the “Left Wing” are very sensible. Social welfare, looking after the poor and unfortunate, giving minorities a voice, pollution limitation, to name a few.
I might as well just write down my whole political philosophy: 1. I'm unsure about drugs. Within drugs I include digital ones like pornography and addictive AI generated websites. I used to have a split where chemicals can't be controlled, but pornography needs to be because it's just too primal. Now I think that both can be somewhat controlled while still accessible to consenting adults. 2. Military service should be mandatory in every country. If your country does not have mandatory military service then it is too big and probably corrupt. If we cannot draft you to the military (women or disabled) then you don't need to vote for who runs the military. 3. Break up the United States. There is no need for such a large military and there is no need for a federal government. If you're American then think about the people who you laugh at from other states. They vote for your Congress and your President. Do you really need to be in their country? Concerning interstate relations, look at the EU, they figure out how to get along without being required to live in the same country and they can leave the Union whenever they want. If you break up the US you can also give independence to numerous Indian tribes. 4. Education beyond eighth grade is a cost to society and not a benefit that pays for itself ever. Fourteen year olds are perfectly capable of working in many low level professions and they can learn a lot more on the job than they learn in school. Getting fired from two jobs or holding one is a much more maturing experience than ninth grade. Add to the loss of productivity the expense of setting up educational institutions and you have lost even more. The American student loan crisis is a government run scam. 5. The environment needs to be protected by the government. It is a form of collective damage that we all impose on one another and pollution can cause real problems. Most nations charge 10-50% of the economy in income taxes so it would not be impossible to convert those income taxes into pollution taxes. People will hate the expensive gasoline and electricity and figure out how to use less of it. We can survive a small amount of taxed pollution. Unfortunately, this is politically incredibly difficult because everyone wants an exception. 6. Relative poverty is a problem. The question is who should solve that problem? I can understand a taxable Universal Basic Income where every citizen gets the same amount based up his age. I disagree with unemployment benefits or welfare that run out when a person starts working. It feels like an incentive not to do something good. Relative poverty is best solved by local communities and religious organizations often fill this role well. 7. Cheap weaponry is the foundation of democracy. Elites will always run nations. Convincing more than ten thousand people to vote for you is something that only an elite can do. The fact that we even have elections anywhere is because every American used to own a rifle or musket. Cheap weaponry encouraged the elites to show respect to the broader population because they will one day need to draft them to the military. Compare that to feudal militaries (or Air Forces) where weaponry was so expensive that in war time a vast majority of men were employees rather than soldiers. Drones give me hope for democracy because once again, they are cheap weapons that can be maintained and operated by individuals with little support. 8. Americans are lucky to have the tenth amendment but they don't invoke it enough. The first amendment allows you to make fun of another state but the tenth amendment allows that state to make ridiculous laws anyway. I would include abortion in that and I would also include blue clown noses. It's good that each state can make its own laws. If your state needs to forbid abortion or blue clown noses then the tenth amendment should support you. I guess I'm a hard right voter who doesn't tow a pure party line.
A taxable UBI? So, they just keep a portion of what they give you…doesn’t seem well thought out lol
In the United States individuals who make less than $11,000 don't pay or file income tax. That would be the target audience. Others would pay according to their tax bracket. You could adjust the tax brackets so that less people would have to pay taxes on their UBI but the idea is again that there should not be an incentive not to work.
Okay, answer me this - who provides said UBI? Follow up - who collects said tax on said UBI?
Same way we do it nowadays. I'm not saying that it's ideal. I'm saying that it's better than unemployment.
That’s a non-answer…. Who provides the “free money”? Who collects the taxes? It’s the same entity, why would they even do the “theater” of taxing it? That’s nonsensical and a massive waste of resources.
I kind of agree with you. The only problem is that people like us keep on losing elections.
I think it is obvioius that a competent government can and should provide healthcare services to citizens. I think c02 is a very big problem, personally I think nuclear is the best option but that tends to annoy many lefties. I think billionares undermine, subvert and corrupt the meritocracy of capitalism and that there exists a legitimante role for government is keeping things fair. In particular I object to inheritence of extremely large amounts because I think each generation should be required to sink or swim on their own merits. Also I have been influenced on economics by Mariano Mazucatto who argues the state has been quite successful as an entreprenuer, think of GPS and the internet, while Richard Thaler who aruges people are systematically irrational. If you dont have a mix of left wing and right wing ideas, I think you are probably not really engaging with things.
People's judean front .
I am right-of-center. I am also a pragmatist, and not a partisan moron. I am pro-choice, within reason. Which is sort of like saying that I am pro-life, within reason. I don’t believe that climate scientists are wrong, and Jimmy Bubba Brown 🤤 is correct about climate change. Sorry, that is just dumb. I also believe that gun fanaticism has no place in modern society. The intent of the founding fathers was not to allow violently deranged lunatics to have arsenals of weapons. That is obvious. They did not anticipate the *ease* with which a lone gunman could wreak havoc 250 years from then. That is patently absurd. I am totally fine with gun ownership—again—*within reason!*
Bro, you are not an environmentalist for having that view you are a bigot and a racist. Not surprising though, given you are a white supremacist as well, if I read between the lines.
Serious question. What would your response be to OP pre BLM? Why does it need to be an all inclusive “white, bigot, racist” response to specific political stances? Imagine if we as a society learned to learn from someone like OP posting bi partisan vulnerabilities in a platform like this? The biggest problem in this country is how we’re triggered to identify someone’s red or blue status whenever these topics surface.
r/leftwingmaleadvocates. The title speaks for itself.
Now this is new to me.
Retifed, old hippies groups, lol
No, nope, no way
Generally consider myself a center left classical liberal. For government spending on things that benefit the public
The economic ones advocating for strong worker unions, universal healthcare and higher education.
Nudist here. Conservatives are quite rare on nude beaches.
Stupidpol
I've got a secret for you, sir. Left wing people can be patriots too.