In the past, we’ve had issues with women suffrage, slavery, and sanitation, among many other things.
Today we have gun control, AI, intended/unintended false information, vaccines, etc. as consistently hot topics.
In a few decades’ time, what views do you have now that may spark major social debate in the future? What conservative and/or progressive stances do you take today that might be too far on either extreme in the far future?
I fervently believe that the best if not only way to reliably reduce crime (including that committed by abusive cops) is restorative justice, but the vast majority of people still consider the necessity of penal justice (and in some places like the US even penal SLAVERY) to be so absolute that it might as well be a law of nature rather than the system that best serves the rich and powerful.
I had a long talk about this with my dad recently. He’s a conservative Catholic, and also a professor of philosophy and ethics. He just could not wrap his head around the idea that someone could commit a crime and not be locked up for it. He believes that justice cannot be served without the perpetrator suffering, or at least being denied their freedom for a period of time. I told him that empirically speaking, that’s not how criminals are reformed, but he was stuck on it.
Punishment is rewarding to the punisher. This distorts almost all human thinking on the subject.
You habe to have both. People mold their behavior around incentive structures. If you give them the incentive to commit crime, they will commit crime. If you give them the incentive to do better, they will do better.
Then again you also shouldn’t have bullshit laws that punish people for things that hurt no one but themselves, like the war on drugs. If they do something to hurt someone while doing drugs, that’s what we have all the other laws for.
You really don’t have to have both, though.
Incarceration and (in especially barbaric jurisdictions) penal slavery, torture, and state-sanctioned murder are largely ineffective disincentives against doing bad or otherwise undesirable behaviour that do nothing to incentivise good or otherwise desirable behaviour.
In fact, they often directly or indirectly CAUSE more of the former while making the latter much more difficult if not impossible.
By taking drugs, people are teaching children that drugs are cool, incentivizing them to ruin their lives. And they give money to drug dealers, who try to get as many people addicted as possible.
That’s a pretty short sighted view. One that relies very heavily on drugs are bad, never do drugs. And takes all discussion away from types of drugs and the differences between them.
Some drugs have the potential to ruin your life, anyone who has witnessed that knows that these drugs aren’t “cool.” Watching someone struggle with addiction is terrifying. Other drugs have risks, but can be fun and taken with relative safety.
We should be teaching personal responsibility, safe use, and moderation of these drugs. It’s your consciousness and should be your right to alter it as you choose.
Any addictive drug has this potential.
The problem is that people, usually children, are introduced to drugs without knowing the dangers of addiction. By who? By dealers and new users.
Yes, I find it so terrifying that I’d like to prevent it from happening.
If you mean non-addictive drugs like psilocybin, I was obviously not talking about those and I support them being fully legal.
People don’t exist in a vacuum. Our actions have consequences for others.
Some drugs can help people and heal them physically, emotionally, spiritually, and some drugs will destroy your life in a downward spiral of physical addiction.
Kids reading this: don’t do heroin, meth, cocaine, opioids, random prescription meds, alcohol, or cigarettes.
Do however do pot and magic mushrooms. Buy federally legal hemp flower if you live in non-legalized pot state and grow your own mushrooms from spores. DARE and the war on drugs was a failure, use your own judgment and be responsible adults.
Yeah, even your own absurdly reductive logic didn’t even survive to the end of your first sentence.
What?