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[nenjin]

I mean, some people are always going to hit the hard stuff, and it's going to destabilize their lives. The link between drug use and mental health is also quite real. And the link between mental health and homelessness. And between homelessness and drug addiction. They're all inter-related. People have been getting fucked up on stuff since the dawn of time. That's not a solvable problem nor should it be. But what we as a society permit people to get fucked up on should be measured and evaluated, constantly, in terms of its damage to the individual and society as a whole, and where society is at with it as well. The intersection of homelessness, mental health, drug addiction and crime in America means WE as a society aren't ready to handle everything being decriminalized. I actually love drugs, not gonna lie. Way more interesting, entertaining and in some cases, safer than alcohol. But even I believe there should be limits.

And if a guy really can do coke every day and not end up a junkie, then it's nobody's business just as it should be.

I mean...doing Coke every day means you're a junkie. Real talk, you wanna know why I quit coke? Because after about a month it straight up bored a hole into my sinuses. You can't sustain constant use of these drugs. I've worked at the Food Bank and seen meth junkies that were completely destroyed by the drug. I lost a good friend to drug addiction who frankly went crazy and killed themselves because they couldn't get clean and drugs had completely divorced them from reality. In an otherwise boring midwest town with plenty of friends, family and support available, not even the big city streets. Did drugs being illegal to even possess save him? Of course not. How many more might there be like him though, who grow up in an environment where it's not considered taboo, illegal, dangerous? It's not a risk I think is worth taking.

And if it's the cartels you want to kneecap, this is an essential step in doing so. Legalize everything that's reasonable to legalize to cut their funding, and decriminalize the rest to stop giving cops an excuse to go beating on psychonaut kids since it's easier than dealing with organized criminals.

I don't disagree that in order to defeat the drug markets, you have to bring them into the light. I'm happy to see that happen to the weed market, but it's not pot smokers you generally need to worry about breaking the law or causing entire communities to fall apart. There's just a line beyond which, to me, the one-size fits all attitude becomes dangerous and really an admission of defeat than a proactive solution to the problem. We tolerate cigarettes and alcohol and even sugar because their effects are slower, the dosages required to cause significant harm are much higher, their impact on society more complicated and subtle than outright crime and the obvious degradation of quality of life. Not so with many of the harder drugs.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

But it's not a one-size fits all solution. Some people want to legalize it all, and to be honest I'd take that over the drug war, but the Portugal method is both proven and discerning. It's just a solution that doesn't put individual use in the category of a crime on its own.

Alcohol is legal, but we punish DUI. And that's with a dangerously lax policy on alcohol, which is only so accepted because it was grandfathered in. I've known many alcoholics. I know what they're like, that they're beyond reason, that they're addicts, that they're killing themselves. That they put down gallons and gallons of beer and vodka until something in their body breaks or they go too far and something horrible happens. And I cannot think of a single fucking thing about any of that which would have been improved by treating them as criminals, for all that alcohol is dangerous.

Our lives fucking suck. Every nation, every social class. Even the rich blitz themselves out on drugs rather than live their lives. The drugs are not the basis of the problem.

And in the end, everyone's body will break down and die, no matter how carefully it was maintained. Am I to enjoy my own vices and deny those of others, just because mine aren't as offensive to the senses? Do I get to put the whole world in a bottle for their own good? Do I tell Colombians not to chew coca leaves because other people take it too far, because it rots their teeth? I simply see no point at all in doing that. It's the wrong ethos, and it leads to the wrong end. I'm not sure it's even possible. I think the population would revolt before their obsessive comforts get taken away, it's not as if there's much else for many people.

And it is that which is the problem - live to work, work to die, serve the ruling class until they die too.

[MrRoboto75]

TBH the state of mental health is a joke in the states.  You think normal, physical health is bad here?  Getting mental help is even worse.

There is a general malaise of mental problems here.  Some of it's the frankly degenerate, asshole individualist culture, some of it's the online social network people and society weren't prepared for, some of it's the fact that the economy is bad and the future's bleak.  A lot of men don't feel like they even have a place here anymore.  But instead of solving any of that much less admitting there's a fundamental cause, we're going to throw pills at it.  The stubborn true American Way.

My old psych doc honestly didn't care that my meds had side effects with sudden withdrawl from it.  Years later every now and again I think I still feel them, too.  And I got lucky with what mental institution I ended up in, though honestly half my fellow "inmates" were recovering addicts, because honestly it could've been far worse.

[nenjin]

And in the end, everyone's body will break down and die, no matter how carefully it was maintained. Am I to enjoy my own vices and deny those of others, just because mine aren't as offensive to the senses?

And what about when someone else's vices end up on your doorstep? Corrodes your neighborhood? Drives them to violate your right to safety and peace? If crack heads and meth and heroin addicts by and large could hold down jobs, own houses, have money and do drugs in the privacy of their own home....then a lot fewer people would be bothered by the idea. But that's not how it is, is it? It ends up in the streets, where you see it, where you have to stare at it, walk around it, tell your kids not to look at it or think about it. Alcoholics have bars, homes, money and privacy for their vice, except on the occasion when they get in fights in public, smash into people in traffic or commit domestic violence. And I've known a few of them too to go along with the other addicts I've known. They're all shit ways to go, but none so shit as the real hardcore drugs. "Everyone dies" isn't a valid excuse to me for turning a blind eye to the effect these drugs have on society as a whole. And again, good for Portugal, I guess I'll read up on it. But Americans aren't Portuguese. I don't trust my own country and countrymen to handle this responsibly, and provide the adequate support to prevent it from turning into a disaster. And certainly not with the police we have now, who are so butthurt on being called out on their decades of bullshit they would rather stand by and watch the worst examples flourish just to prove a point. Which is basically what's happened on the West Coast.

[SOLDIER First]

And what about when someone else's vices end up on your doorstep? Corrodes your neighborhood?

If crack heads and meth and heroin addicts by and large could hold down jobs, own houses, have money and do drugs in the privacy of their own home....then a lot fewer people would be bothered by the idea. But that's not how it is, is it? It ends up in the streets, where you see it, where you have to stare at it, walk around it, tell your kids not to look at it or think about it.

wow, this is some quality "i don't think drug addicts are humans who deserve basic human decency" right here

like, seriously, you can stop putting up a front at this point. "i think drug addicts are subhumans" would save you so much time typing and the rest of us so much time reading that doesn't need to be spent

[Reelya]

One point of the drug crisis is that it's people with money who are the target customers. The percentage who become homeless drop-outs are the fallout, they're not the target market. It's like pointing out dying alcoholics as the target market for alcohol and saying that's the whole alcohol market. It's really not even the smallest segment, and it's certainly not the business plan of the alcohol companies to turn everyone into homeless derelicts who are dying of cirrhosis. The actual median drug user has a good job so they can pour a ton of money into it. Relying on scabby people who break into cars so they can afford to buy the drugs isn't a reliable business model for a dealer network. You get people turning up trying to barter a car radio for drugs directly, that's the sort of shit dealers actually have to deal with daily with those types. It's like if someone came into your shop trying to barter live chickens for stuff, that's how that feels: "what they fuck am I meant to do with these car radios?" My pot dealer even have people trade him food bank vouchers for drugs, now, that shit doesn't fly with suppliers, you only accept those if you feel sorry for the person, so he had no pot, no money and a ton of food bank vouchers he didn't need.

There's a reason the direction of the drugs is into the richest country in the world from poor countries and not the other way around, and that's because the real target is the wealth. Hence it's logical that they're not really after the handful of bucks that homeless people have access to. An example of how the dominant mindset is wrong is how in Florida they drug tested tons of welfare recipients to kick them off the payments if they tested positive for drugs, and the cost of running the drug tests actually exceeded the money they saved from people they kicked off the system. no shit. Poor people aren't the target demographic, no matter what you're selling.

So yeah, "clean up the junkies" isn't really solving the problem, those are just collateral damage of the middle class' huge drug consumption. They'll target the poor and most obvious addicts while never doing anything that might upset the powerful apple carts that keep rolling along. Some very powerful people are working with these drug cartels, and their target clients are people with significant disposable income and nothing else to do with it, not some skanky street junkies, which is why periodically clearing out homeless drug addicts and the like never works for very long. They're are a handful of really skanky junkies in a lot of small towns, but those visible guys aren't really numerous enough nor reliable enough to maintain a profitable supply network, are they?

[misko27]

The race in Georgia has narrowed to 665 votes after the 2:45 update. The margin is really really bad for Trump. The math I did was something like 84% of the last batch.

[Max™]

I feel like there's gonna be a spike from people looking up what "edging" means due ot seeing it referenced so often regarding these counts by people who know what it is around people who don't.

Like three days of this shit without finishing, you're gonna need to see a doctor or something, seriously.

As for drugs, nenjin dawg, the fuck you supporting rich assholes pushing drug war propaganda for exactly?

That's what you're doing when you go into the whole "people take drugs and commit crimes and are scum of the earth out to rob you and ruin your communities" shit rather than "shit sucks and sometimes people get left behind by the system of sucking so they look for ways to escape even if only briefly where they can find them" which the vast majority of drug users are.

I've never stolen shit for drugs, when I break laws it's out of civil disobedience and general disrespect for unjust government, not for the fuck of it, though I have been poor enough that I've stolen food for myself and sisters, makeup for my little sisters, and whatnot.

I've done a variety of drugs, I'd prefer to have access to healthcare and freedom to live better but assholes keep fucking themselves over on behalf of rich shitbags that hate them on the premise of "I'll be rich one day too and then people like me better watch out" which is so fucking stupid it's beyond parody at this point, yet here we are watching a nailbiting election where far and away the most incompetent, corrupt, uncharismatic, unintelligent, unqualified, dishonest piece of garbage to ever hold office is BARELY losing out to an actual decent guy who gives a fuck and wants to try to make shit better.

Unfortunately if these two GA runoff races don't go the right way we'll be stuck with another two years of McConnell fucking over poor people he openly despises because of stupid fuckers voting to reelect him despite his actively fucking them over unapologetically not days before the election.

[JoshuaFH]

-

[delphonso]

Right Wing Wisconsinites are livid at the fraud where Biden jumped Trump in the counts. It looks a bit goofy that Biden's progress line takes a straight vertical leap, but I've been told that they counted some votes in batches - Biden and Trump's batches got dumped into the results at the same time - and were about 90% Biden.

[Max™]

I am personally recreating the Pachinko Arc of Kaiji: Gambling Apocalypse. The Pachinko Arc is famous for being roughly 10+ episodes of a man screaming incoherently at a machine as he watches metallic balls just ever so barely but not quite go into a hole. In this recreation, Kaiji is me, and the pachinko machine is the election, and the screaming incoherently is me screaming incoherently.

Please scream inside your heart.

Also how absolutely dare anybody blame any-fucking-one for seeing the failure to take any state houses for the next redistricting, barely holding the house majority, and relying on two runoffs set for early jan to see if we get cockblocked by the senate and NOT looking for some form of escapism over ya know... suicide?

Biden looks like he's gonna end up at best with a 306 vs 232 win, and almost zero additional gains beyond that, in particular the gains which would have been necessary to prevent the inevitable return of The Party of No once Biden gets in office.

This was a pyrrhic victory before we see what the big orange loser is going to do to salt the earth before he's out.

[Starver]

(@Delph)
If that's the graph I saw being posted around, with "but Trump went up by nothing - that's unpossible!", there was just a trick of the blue line overlaying the red one, you can see blue zooming over the prior end-point of the red in a batch that also took up the red line but behind, then both wobble onwards and slightly upwards, blue just happens to be so overlaying red that you could miss that there was a similar (though lesser) jump-then-coast in the red figures as it get near-totally eclipsed (as in obscured, not 'made insignificant' - i.e. almost exactly as significant).

Because graph-reading is hard. Perhaps an alternate layering with red jinking up to mostly overlaying blue would have ellicited no such conspiracy theory...

[Rose]

Biden overtook trump in georgia.

[delphonso]

Recounts will be grissly, get ready for those.

That's exactly it Starver. Also lol at the optimism that there wouldn't be conspiracies either way.

[wierd]

in the age of QAnon, you expect no conspiracy theory?  Are you mad?  Conspiracy Theory has been a thing with reading graphs since the infamous "Hockey Stick"