(Yes, it made my head explode.)
Hot on the heels of the news this week that owners of the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square, San Francisco’s largest hotel, occupying an entire city block, is being abandoned by its owners because that woke city has become such a hopeless hell-hole that they can’t see the convention and tourism business rebounding comes New York City’s health officials installing the city’s first free drug paraphernalia vending machine in Brooklyn. It features all sorts of goodies for users and addicts, like crack pipes, “Safer Sniffing” kits, drug testing kits and the anti-overdose medication Naloxone. The vending machine also has hygiene kits for the special problems addicts face (like cracked lips) and safe sex kits. Anyone with a New York City ZIP code can claim any of the contents for no charge. The Brooklyn vending machine is the first of four machines that will be installed in neighborhoods that were hit hardest by the opioid crisis.
Wow, what a great idea. I think it’s a great idea. Don’t you think it’s a great idea?
The vending machine was an huge hit instant hit with local addicts, who emptied it overnight. The free crack pipes and Narcan ran out first. “Yes, I love it,” addict Evelyn Williams told The New York Post yesterday while standing by the new machine. “They put it in yesterday, and it’s empty already!” A drug-prevention-program worker was restocking the machine after midnight, and opined that it could need to be refilled maybe twice a day, depending on which items go quite quickly. Willaims agreed. “We have a lot of addicts and heroin users over here,” she said. “They should re-stock it immediately!”
Yeah, get on it, you guys! What is she paying taxes for? Chop chop!
Crack smoker Minoshi Calpe, 56, helped herself to a fentanyl test strip but complained that the glass used in the free pipes were not up to her standards. “I like the Pyrex because it’s a little thicker,’’ she said.
“We are in the midst of an overdose crisis in our city, which is taking a fellow New Yorker from us every three hours and is a major cause of falling life expectancy in NYC,” said Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan in a statement. “But we will continue to fight to keep our neighbors and loved ones alive with care, compassion and action. Public health vending machines are an innovative way to meet people where they are and to put life-saving tools like Naloxone in their hands.”
He also said that future machines may include syringes used to inject heroin and other drugs as he added, “We’ll leave no stone unturned until we reverse the trends in opioid-related deaths in our city.”
Hey, turning stones! That’s another terrific way of stopping drug abuse! Seriously though, there’s no better way to stop people from doing something harmful to themselves and society than for the government to make it easier for them to keep doing it. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I promised myself that I would not get started on this; after all, I’m still super-gluing my head back together.
Now: who is going to convince me that this is competent, rational, responsible public policy? And no, the fact that, as Fox News tells us, similar machines in the U.S., Europe and Australia have allegedly reduced overdose rates and the spread of infectious diseases is not a winning argument. Handing out special beaten-up spouse care kits to abusive husbands would probably reduce hospital stays and deaths for battered women, too.
(Jeeez, don’t give them any ideas, Jack, you idiot…)
Ethics Alarms 
Yet another scoop by the Babylon Bee strangled at birth. Next they can put coupons and lottery tickets in too
Okay, I want to try to be a little objective.
I think there is a legitimate problem.
Those on the right tend to want to uphold a standard.
Those on the left tend to be more empathetic; if someone falls below the standard, they want to help those who fall short.
The problem here is that empathy drives things down to the lowest common denominator. There is never a safety net that is low enough to catch everyone. The lower you make the net, there will always be someone who falls lower. To catch everyone, you will have to keep lowering the net until all crimes are free and there are no consequences for any bad behavior.
The flip-side to that is the “race-to-the-bottom” that liberals complain about. Liberal states become welfare magnets because people will move to places where they can get money more easily (damn capitalism!). And, states will spend less if they can (right Mississippi?). So, there is a disincentive for liberal states like Minnesota (right Minnesota? Hello, Minnesota?) to provide generous welfare benefits because it will just attract people from hard line right wing places like Chicago who are tired of their prolific 2nd Amendment gun-right zones.
But, if everyone goes to Minnesota for their welfare state, the welfare state will collapse to the lowest common denominator (Mississippi). Liberals don’t like that. (Frankly, I like the meme: “Minnesota: come for the parks; stay because your car won’t start.”)
I think this a big part of the reason why the Left wants FEDERAL solutions to things. One: it gives them greater power; Two: you can’t sink below a federal standard (which raises the standards for all boats).
Then, if everyone in Mississippi can get their free Narcan, they won’t have to go to San Francisco to do it.
Of course, you still won’t be able to poop on the street in downtown Biloxi (yet!!); you still need to travel to Frisco (they love it when you call it Frisco!) if you want to do that.
-Jut
Didn’t San Francisco essentially do this? They even had supervised ‘shooting up’ spaces for people to do drugs with workers observing in case they overdosed. Look how great San Francisco is now!
This reminds me of the political candidate who came canvassing at my door and said his key issue was improving education. When I asked him how he was going to improve education, he answered “Get them more money!”. I asked if anyone had tried that before and if it worked. He admitted he hadn’t checked. I told him it had been tried a lot and it mainly just made things worse. Chicago used to be one of the most highly funded school systems in the country.
It’s possible that more funding was necessary but insufficient to raise the quality of education. Many problems and solutions have multiple factors. The politician was still wrong for a) only looking at one factor, and b) not doing any research before coming up with his platform.
The thing that human progressives never mastered is the revolutionary technique of pairing short-term solutions with long-term solutions. The short-term solutions address the immediate side-effects of long-term solutions (e.g. the economic problems caused by people trying to prevent climate change through regulations on businesses), while the long-term solutions make it so the side-effects of the short-term solutions won’t build up into larger problems (e.g. the perverse incentives created by poverty relief programs that are supposed to just prevent people from starving while they get back on their feet).
Now, before any conservatives start feeling smug, I must point out that it is well within conservatives’ capability to point out the above to the progressives. “Let’s do a short-term and a long-term plan together to make sure things won’t fall apart in the long term or at any intermediate step in the process” seems like something that would get their attention. In this case, the long-term solution is identifying the fears that drive people to start and continue drug abuse, and addressing those fears, so they’re not afraid to enter rehab and will be able to maintain a constructive lifestyle once they’re done detoxing.
Let’s also not forget that any stupid plan can become the status quo if it takes longer than 50 years to ruin the community. (Or if it ruins someone else’s community who can’t retaliate.)
I think the general ineptitude of human civilization as a collective is because most humans are only taught how to hold one perspective in their head as “valid” at a time. Any goals or priorities which can’t be obviously and immediately reconciled with the ones that people are currently focused on get the sour grapes treatment. “Virtuous people don’t care about those things. Nuance? What’s that?”
So yes, this is a symptom of the Great Stupid. It’s just that the Great Stupid is a more fundamental problem than it first appears, with an equally fundamental solution.
I think it would be more accurate to say that these plans only consider first order consequences and discount second order consequences entirely. It’s not that the plans do not consider the long term consequences, but more that they deny any possible consequences could occur other than the intended outcome. Most second order consequences do tend to come at some interval of time lag, but not all. There is very little time lag between providing free needles and finding dirty ones discarded in public parks, the streets, or playground. There is a distance parameter rather than a time parameter for that particular second order consequence. There is also very little time lag for providing tool kits for taking fentanyl and drug overdoses spiking. That is why many of these vending machines offer Narcan right up front, rather than waiting for the overdoses to occur. It is a twisted attempt to address a second order consequence right off the bat. I suppose a pile of dead people directly in front of these vending machines would be bad optics.
People don’t avoid rehab because they are afraid of rehab, they avoid rehab because they like getting high. Taking drugs is enjoyable and stopping taking drugs is unpleasant. No policy position is going to change that.
That’s a good point; sometimes the side-effects which people prefer to ignore show up very quickly.
“People don’t avoid rehab because they are afraid of rehab, they avoid rehab because they like getting high. Taking drugs is enjoyable and stopping taking drugs is unpleasant.”
That’s what I mean. People addicted to drugs fear not only the withdrawal, but that without drugs, they will have no strong enough source of joy (or other intrinsic motivation like dedication to a cause) they can build their life around, something to make their efforts worthwhile in some way. They also fear they won’t be able to hold themselves together in order to sustain a new lifestyle.
Addiction is, after all, a stagnation problem. People’s motivations are locked into a particular pattern that weakens them and prevents them from pursuing goals they may otherwise care about. To break out of the addiction, they need not only support, but also to be challenged to search themselves and see if there isn’t still something else they want more than drugs.
Can you explain what you mean by “addiction is a stagnation problem“?
Stagnation is the word I use to describe the fundamental liability of predictable motivational limitations. Addiction falls into that category, specifically as a form of underregulated stagnation, or “decadence.” On the other side of the spectrum is overregulated stagnation, or “dogma.” There’s a lot of intercultural and intracultural conflict based on where a culture falls along that stagnation spectrum, because it’s difficult to reliably get people to rise above it by applying the constructive principle of “transcension” (or “challenge”), wherein people can freely contemplate and discuss easy and tempting options and resist them in favor of more difficult options that lead to stronger character.
Does that make sense?
Your explanation of the concept makes sense. That was not the concept I thought you were referring to, so I’m glad I asked you to explain.
While I understand what you are saying, and think at a high level it is as good an explanation of drug addiction as any, I’m not sure how it is actionable. What government policy could possibly fix hundreds of thousands of people’s different motivational problems that lead to addiction? Government is inherently dogmatic, no matter which ideology is being imposed on a nation by its rulers. Government policy is quite often the cause of motivational problems, usually intentionally so in the case of progressivism. Progressivism is almost centered around the Marxist idea that humans can all be trained to be interchangeable widgets and deliberately seeks to break anyone who doesn’t wish to be a widget. Breaking people leads to motivational problems, which leads to drug addiction. This is not to say that any other ideology is going to be much better at fixing motivational problems. People are not uniform, and no one size fits all government strategy is going to fix all or even most motivational issues. Government is really only good at one size fits all policy, and is ill suited to addressing these sorts of issues. Reducing government control is the path most likely to improve the most people’s lack of motivation by allowing them opportunities to pursue personal growth rather than limiting options to a select few that benefit the ruling class. More options will still not help everyone.
To be sure, the government is not always going to be the best entity to implement a solution to a problem. Sorry, I should have clarified that.
I define four aspects of society that are broadly geared towards handling different liabilities. They are most effective when they are able to work together to at least some extent, since most significant issues have aspects described by more than one liability.
Generally, a functional society will have an economy that handles scarcity, academia that handles disaster (by figuring out how things work and thus how to prepare for them), culture that handles stagnation, and government that handles conflict.
Again, plenty of problems involve all four liabilities, so I would expect, for example, culture to help develop people who can participate responsibly in government, or government to help resolve conflicts that arise from the economy’s allocation of resources.
In the situation at hand, I would expect human culture to help people avoid addiction by supporting them in challenging themselves. The economy, academia, and the government can support culture in this issue by enabling the allocation of resources, studying addiction and techniques for overcoming it, and restricting addictive substances, respectively.
How does that sound?
I think there are hundreds or thousands of human cultures across the world, and humans cannot be trained to believe as others would like them to by coercion or force. Culture evolves of its own accord based on the values and challenges a particular culture faces. Top down approaches for forcing cultural change are doomed to failure. Any serious attempts at cultural changes will only occur if the culture in question chooses freely to accept them. That takes time. A lot of time. Centuries or millennia worth of time, depending on how slow to accept change a particular culture is.
Government is not a force for good. At best government is morally or ethically neutral, at worst, and more typically, it is psychopathic. Government does not serve the citizenry it rules over. Government serves itself. Pretending otherwise serves no one but the government. Government thrives on cultural chaos and weakness. It is motivated to exploit those weaknesses and chaos to empower and enrich itself.
Any solution to problems in a complex system has to acknowledge operant conditioning and the interplay between operant conditioning and the forces inside the system to push people in different and unwanted directions. Humans are not intrinsically good. They are a variable array of both positive and negative character traits and biological differences. Culture is layered on top of that. It has evolved over thousands of years to maximize the survival of its members. It is a complex system. Government is a complex system. Combine the two and you add orders of magnitude more complexity.
No simple solution can ever possibly address the complex problems in a complex system, especially one as complex as humanity.
I appreciate your idealism, but I don’t believe the conditions for your plans will exist without thousands of years worth of natural evolution of the human race. You will have to wait for sociopathy, avarice and deception to be bred out of the species.
It is an epic example of the great stupid. It is also a sign that the decades of one party rule of our cities have finally led into a final spiral for some of them. They used to say that wherever America’s cities were going, Newark would get there first, but it looks like the West Coast has Newark beat.
Certain American cities are almost impossible to destroy. New york, being the financial and arts capital, is one of them. Los angeles, because it is the home of the film industry, is another, Washington DC is a third. However, that’s about it. Almost any other city in this country is entirely dispensable. That’s why there is no stopping most cities from their own self-destruction if that is what they want.
None of them will say that they want self-destruction, because that period however their actions speak louder than their words, and the actions of most American cities are saying that they do not care about keeping businesses or indeed people.
I’ve told this story before so I will tell only the short version of it this time, Camden New Jersey destroyed itself by driving away the main employers. It’s my understanding that Johnstown Pennsylvania did the same. Detroit is slowly shrinking, and I am surprised that Seattle and Portland are still alive. Chicago had a chance to save itself, but voted for the farthest left candidate when it was a far left mayor who had gotten it to where it was.
I don’t believe that elected officials from the Democratic Party are so stupid or so clueless that they cannot read the tea leaves and see where a city is going when businesses leave and people move out. They are not so stupid that they do not know that a store closed means 20 or 30 jobs lost and a large hotel closed means a couple of hundred jobs gone. They know that every job gone is another person dependent on governmental largest who will vote for whoever says they will keep those checks coming for not working. They also know every small business that closes means the end of yet another business owner who might not be inclined to vote their way. They also know that those who are able to move out of cities typically are those who have some kind of money and therefore might not be lockstep Democrat voters who just want more and more money from the government for not doing very much. They know when this process is over that the city will consist almost entirely of poor democratic voters who they can keep asking to give them four more years and four more years to work on their problems.
The dirty Little secret is that they don’t want to solve the problems. They want the problems to stay out there so that they can keep campaigning on them and stay in power until such time as they decide it’s time to move up or time to retire. It’s a really great arrangement when you think about it, be mayor of some crap hole for as many terms as you want or as many terms as they will let you be, then wait for a spot to open and become a congressman or a senator and have the ultimate do nothing job. Or, if you’re ambitious, wait for your party to be term limited out and try to move into that spot. It might even lead you to the White House one day, but most of these people do not have the drive for that.
In the meantime, the city falls to crap on your stewardship, but because you’ve got the right letter next to your name, the people will keep re-electing you because you keep whipping up their fear for what those icky Republicans might do if they get back into power. Who knows? They might actually require them to work, or stop those checks coming or, heaven forbid, make it less easy to run around like a sleazy Casanova or carry on like a cheap whore on a busy weekend without awkward consequences.
A black author once wrote in an article recently that white men were one part stoicism, two parts anger, three parts lust, and four parts controlling women. If he looked in the mirror, he would find that black men are 1/3 lust, 1/3 violence, and 1/3 laziness, with no work ethic in sight. It’s just that some folks are smart enough to channel that and parlay it into permanent political success.
Until people decide they can be better than that and want to be better than that, these cities will just keep sinking while they serve as springboards for another generation of democratic politicians.
This ^^^^^. All of it.
My single reply would have been “they’re doing it on purpose.” But Steve did a much better job at writing out my thoughts. Thanks, Steve.
Yw, Alicia.
Are you talking about this article? https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/20/bud-light-dylan-mulvaney-masculinity/
If so, the author’s description was not race-specific; the article doesn’t once address race. He lists a bunch of allegedly effeminate behaviors (wearing sandals, using sunscreen or umbrellas, cat ownership, apologizing, the color pink, playing a wind instrument, crossing their legs at the knee, putting their hands on the hips) and then arrives at this conclusion:
“If conventional views of manliness could be reduced to a recipe, I’d guess it would be one part stoicism, two parts anger, three parts lust, four parts control over women.”
“I’d guess it would be one part stoicism, two parts anger, three parts lust, four parts control over women.”
And I’d counter: John Wayne. The Duke wasn’t stoic (that was Gary Cooper’s schtick…also Randolph Scott, he was seldom angry, his lust was understated , if not gratuitous, and more often than not, women controlled him (“The Quite Man,” “Rio Bravo,” “Red River,” etc.) John Wayne spent his career building a masculine template consisting of independence, courage, fealty to principle even in the face of danger and powerful opposition, personal responsibility, honesty,enmity to bullies and power-abusers, respect for women and dedication to caring for children. It’s still a good model.
Perhaps the best character displaying those traits: “Hondo.”
There is some scholarly work on the “Curley Effect.”
Mayor Curley of Boston gets the phenomenon named aft er him.
Coleman Young in Detroit is a paradigmatic example.
The talk radio journalist Bob Lonsberry (perhaps a local version of the late Rush Limbaugh” said that Andrew Cuomo was doing the same thing to New York State–the Republican Party supporters in Upstate NY leave the state, driven out by the state policies which are (arguably) hostile to the interests of Upstate. Debatable, but a provocative hypothesis.
Anyway, the link the Curley Effect is here.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w8942
I was taught that you cannot prove a negative. There is absolutely no argument that will allow this approach to be anything but a virtue-signaling band-aid. I worked in public health in the projects of Brooklyn back in the late sixties. The same approach surfaced then as the “clean needle” program. It solved nothing. The rate of drug use, as we have seen, has skyrocketed.
The hard reality is this issue, drug addiction, is self-limiting. Do nothing but pick up the clutter of their corpses and the issue will come to its predictable end.
Make it easier to use drugs, and more drugs will be used/
This quote immediately came to mind when I read this blog post…
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
No matter where that quote originated, it’s a good description of what ignorant drug use enablers do and it’s based partly on the ignorant rationalization on Jack’s list #58 A. The Utilitarian Cheat or “If it saves just one life”.
These insane drug use enablers simply can’t see beyond their tunnel vision rationalizations.
“Now: who is going to convince me that this is competent, rational, responsible public policy?”
I will argue that this policy is rational, but it is far from competent or responsible public policy. To understand why this policy is rational we have to look at the motivation of the politicians who enacted this solution. Since 2013 drug overdose death from synthetic opioids other than methadone, primarily fentanyl, have risen sharply every year except the years 2017-2019 (Trump’s border crackdown years).
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db428.htm#section_2
During the 2020 election cycle, there was a clamor from the electorate about the drug overdose epidemic. To appease the voters’ politicians, need to do something so what options did they have?
Get addicts off drugs via rehab? No. Low success rate, costly, and takes a long time to show results. Typical Politiciann’s planning horizon is the next election cycle.
Keep drugs from entering the US? No. Tightening the border with Mexico while doable, would disrupt the progressive’s goal to fundamentally change America by flooding the country with illegals thereby diluting the power of and culture of white citizens of northern European ancestry.
Pressure China, to stem the flow of fentanyl and/or precursors for its manufacture to Mexico? No. While China probably couldn’t stop all the flow, I think China’s leaders can crack down and control anything they want within their borders. Admittedly the US government has attempted this with very little success. Probably China does not see it in its best interest to do so.
So how do you quickly reduce the overdose deaths quickly and cheaply? Make illegal drug use safer and easier via vending machines and safe shooting sites. So yes, from the politician’s perspective, it is rational. Overdose deaths are reduced for very little cost and the addicts appreciate the enabling. They show they are caring people and that they are doing something. All are very rational and only irresponsible to people capable of critical thinking. Who probably wouldn’t vote for them anyway.