LawTalkingGuy (u/LawTalkingGuy)

LawTalkingGuy commented on Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats businessinsider.com/socia... · Posted by u/thunderbong

kouru225 · 2 years ago

There was an early art collective called the videofreex that defined what you’re talking about in terms of channel direction. Basically they defined media in the 1980s as being one-way channels where there was no response from the audience whatsoever, and they saw this as a form of control that strengthened class divides. They were excited about creating a two-way channel communication network because they thought it would break down the social hierarchy.

I think what you’re talking about is sort of like the recreation of the one-way channel within a two-way channel. Technically we can respond, but the amount of power our voice has has been lessened dramatically over the years.

I talked to one of the members of the videofreex recently (which is how I know about them), and his attitude was the classic “bittersweet nostalgia for my overly idealistic youth” attitude. He still thought he had a point, but he also felt like he underestimated A) the amount of problems that would come from disinformation and B) the amount of control that the old powers would still retain. I think he saw the structure of the media as reinforcing the social hierarchy, but now it’s looking like the structure of the social hierarchy was what was reinforcing the structure of the media… or maybe just a little feedback loop between the two… anyway the point I’m making is that just cause the media changed doesn’t mean the social hierarchy has.

LawTalkingGuy · 2 years ago

> 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.

LawTalkingGuy commented on ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08... · Posted by u/mantiq

bloopernova · 2 years ago

It's annoying that they're trying to remove your comment via downvoting.

It's amazing to me that some people are so determined to defend KF when it appears that the best defense they have is: "no suicides have been definitively linked to KF." I know their public reason is all about censorship etc, but I'd like to know what their private reason really is.

LawTalkingGuy · 2 years ago

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.

LawTalkingGuy commented on ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08... · Posted by u/mantiq

digging · 2 years ago

> 'Inclusive' is also incredibly easy to abuse.

How? Seems to me that, like with corporate accountability, you're either doing it and it's good or you're not doing it but lying and saying you are.

LawTalkingGuy · 2 years ago

Inclusive of who into what?

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.

LawTalkingGuy commented on ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08... · Posted by u/mantiq

tracker1 · 2 years ago

Thank you, and I definitely agree to all points. From my own observations, I feel that the right is often wrong on many things, but the far left has gone off the rails, and most of the left is either, willing, blind, useful idiots or outright evil. There's definitely a few racist, violent right wing assholes in the world, but they don't even compare to the numbers the far left weild.

It also irks me to no end, when people refer to leftists as "liberal" when they are no such thing at this point. I can deal with liberals, and as a libertarian share most of the values. More like Progressive past the point of usefulness to society.

LawTalkingGuy · 2 years ago

> 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.

LawTalkingGuy commented on ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08... · Posted by u/mantiq

ToucanLoucan · 2 years ago

> That's all projection and appeal to emotion to justify censoring and bullying people into submission.

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. A response being largely emotional does not make it inherently less valid, and not everyone is required to discard half of the human experience in order to be taken seriously.

> How many people have had their characters assassinated, ostracized and fired, sometimes commiting suicide as a result, just because they said the wrong thing now or in the past according to the current moral fashion police.

I would say far too many, but also I would caveat that by pointing to the other pile of corpses from people who did the same thing for just being themselves in the wrong place. Or worse still, had the violence inflicted upon them by another's hand.

So clearly, at the very least, we can agree that it's not just "words on the internet?" They clearly have dire consequences for all parties involved.

> How many are self censoring and falsifying preferences to appease the authoritarians.

"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? And given what people are happily not only saying, but being paid to say, (usually while whining about how censored they are but I digress) I'm frankly incredibly skeptical of this position.

> They say it's about kindness and respect, inbetween destroying the next individual's life. Authoritarian bullies cloaking themselves in a veneer of kindness is not new.

Again though, while there I am certain are some examples of people being bullied to that point, I have a hard time seeing it. I personally have carried friends through that mess and to that, I can testify first party. However on the opposite side, all I really see is people complaining about how censored they are, on public platforms, to a wide audience, and usually in some way monetizing it: book sales, shows, public speaking engagements, all the while moaning about how they can't speak their minds... while speaking their minds. Repeatedly. For profit.

------------------ I'm rewriting this because the comment above changed substantially since it was originally posted. Below is the original thing I wrote which I'm leaving up because I'm proud of it:

This notion that "well what's objectionable is subjective and therefore having any standard is having an agenda" is frankly, bullhockety. Yes, it does vary from person to person. Different people will have different tolerances to different things, and part of community building is all of those people coming together and, through trial and error, through difficult conversations, through awkward moments, etc. slowly constructing a line in the sand where upon one side is beyond tolerance, and the other side is not, and that line in itself being subject to change based upon new cultural events, new people joining the community, other people being removed from the community for infraction, etc. etc.

We have been doing this since roughly the taming of fire. The only thing that's changed is the mode of enforcement. Now instead of chucking people out of our tribes and telling them to piss off, we block them on social media and revoke their access rights. Same exact thing. If you want to participate in a community, that participation has always, always been conditional upon agreeing to a mutually agreed upon set of rules, that yes, change over time and that can mean you by virtue of being an imperfect human can stumble over them without meaning harm. The differentiator from that point is how you handle that situation and if your reflex is to post on your own social media about how everyone involved in the community you have transgressed against is censoring you and you have a right to say XYZ, then that community in all likelihood is going to reject you in a more permanent fashion. If your individual liberty to say XYZ is more important to you than membership in that community, then that's the choice you make. I don't judge you inherently for that. I have joined and left many communities over the years as my and those communities' values shifted around. This is just how social organizations work and have always worked.

And you in turn are free to demand access to whatever space but that entitlement needs to be articulated, and I am inherently suspicious of this almost reflexive "well I guess I just had the WRONG OPINIONS" response, which almost universally is presented without the opinions attached. (Including in this comment.) What were the opinions? Why were they "wrong?"

And I will grant: in the digital age, the enforcement of being rejected is much easier with a much lower emotional energy gate than it was previously. Now you don't need to confront people, to have conversations, if you don't want to and that makes a certain kind of person perhaps itchier on the trigger finger than is ideal. And that's unfortunate. But on the flip side of that, sometimes the transgression involved is too extreme. Sometimes the transgression makes the people who would confront an individual feel unsafe to do so. Sometimes there is no path to resolution and there's nothing to do but block and move on.

LawTalkingGuy · 2 years ago

> 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.

LawTalkingGuy commented on Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging theatlantic.com/politics/... · Posted by u/slapshot

seadan83 · 2 years ago

Up front, I think Portugal has the right idea. Decriminilize drugs and do proper treatment with long term support. That is _not_ _at_ _all_ what the US does.

Generally, forcing people to give up drugs fails miserably. That further fails if there is no support post-detox. If a person is not willing, their relapse is exceedingly likely.

In the US, release from jail is pretty much literally the door is opened and you get to walk out with what you had when you came in. There's effectively zero post-release support in the US.

What's more, not all drugs have blockers that a person can take (eg: Meth, cocaine, nicotine), and not everyone can get access to those blockers.

Blockers are great things, but if a person does not want to do the blockers - it will not be effective. That is the point, it's not effective to just stick someone in a jail to treat them of their drug addiction, blockers or not. (US jails don't detox people with blockers, it's the hard way and often without medical supervision. That is even assuming they don't find drugs in jail, US jails notoriously have prolific black markets within them, many people leave US jail more addicted than when they came in)

What's more, blockers are just one part to deal with the chemical dependency (which, as tough as that part is, is arguably the easy part of it all [which is just to say how hard it is to change your lifestyle to develop healthy coping mechanisms, to learn how to live without drugs). Thus, teaching someone new coping mechanisms for stress, particularly when they are leading a very stressful life - is an immense challenge. The US has not instituted anything like Portugal, let alone job programs for people that are not having substance abuse problems. The scale of the two problems are different too. The US has 30x the population and virtually no willingness to spend money on social programs (a ton more people, and even less money to go towards the problem)

For some stats:

"As of 2020, over 37 million people 12 and older actively used illicit substances... 25.4% of all users of illicit drugs suffer from drug dependency or addiction."

https://www.addictionhelp.com/addiction/statistics/#

There are more people in the US that could use treatment compared to there even being people in Portugal! (population of portugal, per some quick googling, is 10M)

>> "Mandatory Rehab and Relapse"

>> "Researchers compared relapse rates for those in mandated opioid addiction treatment to those in voluntary centers. They found that almost 50 percent of the mandated patients relapsed within a month of their release, while only 10 percent of voluntary graduates relapsed." [1]

> 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.

This is not what I'm saying. Detox is one part of the journey. Undoubtedly detox is hard, but the sustained effort to stay clean is more what I was referring to. If a person does not want to change their lifestyle, or if they are busy escaping their life - then something is needed like the Portugal example.

It looks like Portugal has long decriminilized all drugs (since 2000). [2]

> It needs to be jail, but your choice of jail with rehab or just jail

To be sure, I'm speaking from a US centric perspective where the full offense is often simple possesion. The chance of re-offending there is particularly high because jail is not treatment, mandatory detox is also not treatment.

Which is kind of interesting the model example is how Portugal does it, yet they did full decriminalization 20 years ago (so jail is not even part of the picture).

[1] https://recovery.org/is-relapse-inevitable-with-forced-sobri...

[2] https://substanceabusepolicy.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...

-------------------

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

LawTalkingGuy · 2 years ago

> 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.

LawTalkingGuy commented on Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging theatlantic.com/politics/... · Posted by u/slapshot

rvcdbn · 2 years ago

You're probably right about the Portugal example, I don't know enough about it to know if it is the solution for sure. I was just grasping for what I could only think of as the best possible solution. Perhaps there truly is no solution.

But criminalization certainly isn't the solution. Hiding the problem in order to allow the rest of society to ignore it more easily is obviously (to me at least) less desirable than having it in the open where we are all forced to share at least some small part of the burden, the hope being that this will push us to find real solutions.

Re: ketamine - the point is that many these folks are seeking an escape from an unbearable life. In that position, there is really no desire to neuter the drug. I'm pretty sure Suboxone availability is not the issue. Ketamine on the other hand might provide a similar escape without most of the harmful side effects. It's pretty obvious that ketamine is much less harmful in every way than heroin.

LawTalkingGuy · 2 years ago

> 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.

Opioids don't have to be a life sentence.

LawTalkingGuy commented on Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging theatlantic.com/politics/... · Posted by u/slapshot

pugz · 2 years ago

This was me too. I had used many substances (cannabis, ketamine, benzos, cocaine + every other stimulant under the sun) and was able to keep them in my possession and only use them at most once every 4-6 weeks, and only ever in the company of others. This lasted for many years. I was arrogant and thought I was above addiction. I tried heroin and was addicted before I finished my 1g bag.

I think your point about "stop[] scheduling every drug as equally dangerous" is very salient. I really don't want to shift blame anywhere but myself, but if society had been honest about treating heroin as much more problematic than (for example) cocaine or amphetamine, maybe I would have listened. But when they were all considered equally bad and the others didn't form a grip on me... you can see how I ended up where I did.

Thankfully, I had every advantage one could need: a loving spouse, a lot of savings and a medical system that treated it as a health problem, not a criminal one. I told my doctor about my addiction and he prescribed diazepam for the withdrawal. He wrote a referral to admit me to a psychiatric hospital. I was able to take a month off work (and keep my job) while under the care of professionals. Without all of those, I'd probably end up dead in a few years.

LawTalkingGuy · 2 years ago

> my 1g bag

How much did you end up using?

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?

Congratulations.