Another Epidemic

I think using recreational drugs (except for ethyl alcohol in moderation) is a bad idea and have never used them (except for ethyl alcohol usually in moderation).  I would prefer that others avoid them as well. However I am aware that my preferences in no way affect the rights of other adults to do as they like in this matter. Neither do the preferences of anyone else, including the preferences of people who happen to be employed by the government.  A meaningful  belief in liberty must include a belief in the right of people to make choices, take actions, and hold opinions others of us may see as wrong or self-destructive.  If an adult wants to use cocaine, tobacco, marijuana, opioids, meth, or whatever, it is his business and not my business  or the rightful business of any government officials to stop him forcibly.  This is a minority opinion held mainly by liberals, libertarians, and probably a bunch of dopers of varying political persuasions.  Most people seem to favor prohibition of one thing or another.

This is despite the fact that prohibition, whether of alcohol in the 1920s or of various drugs since then, has both failed to stop people from using the things that were prohibited and had awful side effects for both the users and suppliers of the banned products and the general public – including the corruption of public officials, the rise of vicious and dangerous criminal organizations, huge costs to taxpayers, and violations  of everyone’s rights and privacy.  One obvious reason for the popularity of prohibition is that prohibition agents benefit from prohibition and have incentives to convince others  to support it. Contrary to some people’s myths, government officials usually are not disinterested humanitarians. They have economic interests in their jobs and careers and personal interests in preserving and increasing their power over their fellow citizens. It is a common and often effective trick of politicians and bureaucrats to trump up  and drum up a crisis to scare the public into giving them more money and power.  It is not unfair cynicism to  wonder about the similarities in timing  between claims of a new opioid crisis now as the marijuana prohibition horse seems to be on its last legs and  the  reefer madness  scare being pushed  in the early 1930s when alcohol prohibition was  on its last legs.

People in the traditional media certainly have gone along with the theme of an opioid crisis.  Almost all stories are scare stories, with many going beyond “crisis” all the way to “epidemic” in their descriptions of the situation.  The number of deaths reported as being  by overdose  from or at least involving opioids  has increased in fifteen years  from about three per hundred thousand Americans in 2000 to about ten per hundred thousand  Americans in 2015, according to the government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With information  of this sort there are always questions about whether and to what degree things  such as differences over time in methods  of collecting and reporting  data  and  changing definitions of terms (such as “involved”) might have influenced or distorted the results.  However even if one takes the report at face value, that is one death caused by or connected with the use of opioids per ten thousand people.  Additionally misusing  opioids is neither contagious  nor something striking people in large numbers apparently at random. Those  who choose not to use the drugs are not at risk of coming down with the affliction.  This is not an epidemic in the usual sense of the term, and calling it one is at least confusing the issue and perhaps irresponsible fear mongering.

Regardless of that, misusing opioids is bad business, and there are many who are doing it.  It would be  good  to treat this as a medical and  public health problem and try to help people whose abuse of opioids is harming them and to do  a better job of letting people know the risks of using these drugs as a way of persuading them not to start.  That would be a far better way of handling the problem than being panicked into sending  the  drug warriors  off on a new or stepped up campaign  when their others have been distinguished so often by spectacular, expensive failure and really bad collateral damage.  

Crimes and Other Things

There are crucial distinctions separating  crimes, actions creating a civil liability, and simply sleazy or disgusting behavior. It is important to resist tendencies to blur or ignore them - whether by making crimes out of non-crimes, excusing bad actions  because they fall short of being criminal, or something else.  

 Taking examples from the news,  if Harvey Weinstein raped any of the women who say he did, he is a criminal and should be prosecuted as one.  If he went against policies or mutual understandings on harassment  in his treatment of women working or wanting to work at his  movie company, he  is liable to lawsuits for doing so. In the unlikely case he did neither but only behaved  for years as a crude, overbearing,  obnoxious lecher, he is still a lowlife whose company decent people might want to shun, but not someone who should be hauled into civil or criminal court.  If Kevin Spacey attacked and  tried to sodomize a fourteen year old boy, he is a criminal and deserving of prosecution (deserving even  if that is impossible due a statute of limitations). If he harassed fellow actors on the job, he is fair game for lawsuits. If he did neither but continually hustles and propositions the legal age men he meets socially without respect to their interests or inclinations, he is still a very  unpleasant character but not someone who belongs in court. If in his thirties Roy Moore felt up a fourteen year old girl, he is a criminal pervert who should be prosecuted (should even though can’t due to a statute of limitations).  If in his thirties he only trolled malls for and  tried to date legal age teenage girls, he is a creepy guy one would not want to hang out with but not someone who should be in court.

Not every bad action is a crime or even a tort. There are many things one  should disapprove of or condemn which are not matters for the government or the  law but rather for individual judgments base on one’s sense of decency and propriety.  

    

A Good Comic Book Gone Bad

NCIS Los Angeles is not really a drama or a dramatic adventure program. It is more a televised  version of what these days is grandiosely called a graphic novel, i.e. a long comic book.  With its outlandish  plots,  slam bang action, and colorful characters  with interesting origins or backgrounds, it has often been a very good comic book.  It has been one of only two or three network TV shows  that I have enjoyed watching. However I think I’ve had just about enough since comic books are better taken straight and unadulterated by political correctness. 

It was bad enough when a suspect’s high moral character was attested to based on her support for the Occupy Wall Street gang, but that was a while back and only a single incident.  Then a week or two ago an obnoxious under cover persona assumed by one of the characters was criticized as an example of white privilege. I  did not care for the gratuitous insult from that term and the claims and attitudes behind it to me, my wife, daughter, and grandchildren, most of the rest of my family and friends, and over two hundred million other Americans who do not deserve to be spit on. 

Last night on the show in a plot worthy of Lex Luthor or the Joker, a group of villains took over a group of ICBM silos and planed to launch the missiles and start a world war.   However these evil doers were all clean cut, ROTC trained, Air Force officers whose right wing politics had led them to decide to win the war on terror by nuking Mecca and most of the large Muslim-populated cities around the world.  There was even an evil professor – not quite a mad scientist, but close -  who had recruited  these malefactors based on their scoring as right wingers on some sort of survey of political attitudes.

We libertarians generally don’t buy the left/right political spectrum nonsense.  (We prefer a model ranking governments and political systems based on the degree to which they favor or oppose the liberal notions of liberty and individual rights, one  that places Nazis and Communists, and fascists and socialists together as opponents of liberty rather than as opposites who coincidentally behave in the same ways as each other.) However in the present political context in this country, “right wing” means conservative, and by making their genocidal maniacs right wingers, the show was smearing conservatives – pointedly, needlessly, and self-righteously.  

The conservatives have their faults, but  they don’t deserve that. It’s just dirty.  Besides, as the saying goes, some of my best friends are conservatives. So I think I may give the show a pass for a while.   

Nuts

“The Man who cannot afford to Speak his Thought is a Certificate of the Meanness of the Community in which he Resides”  -  Robert Ingersoll

Even in this country protected by the First Amendment and a with a strong tradition of upholding freedom of expression, there have been continuing attempts over time  and often successful ones to restrict or stifle free speech. Most of them fall into one or two classes – direct suppression by violence, mob action,  or law and suppression through intimidation by social pressures and threats of financial consequences or ostracism.  Blasphemy and obscenity statutes, Wilson’s imprisonment of dissenters during World War I,  and beatings and tarring and featherings of unpopular speakers are historical examples of the former.  The pressures on non-religious people in universities, most small towns, and many large ones well into the 20^th  Century not to let their opinions be known  are examples of the latter. 

The serious threats and attacks of the present time come from the American left.  It is fairly clear from things which have been said and written that many leftists actively and seriously want to prohibit discussion or advocacy of political or ethical opinions they dislike and that many more are at least willing for it to happen.  They try both methods, but apart from some college campuses and a few towns such as Berkeley where authorities cooperate with gangs of thugs to shut down speech and speakers the authorities don’t like, this is still a free enough country that the direct approach is not going to work very often. They are having much more success with the second method.  The canons and restrictions of so-called political correctness have become the rule in government, the traditional media, and many large companies and organizations of all sort  and have metastasized  throughout much of society to the point that  in a recent poll 58% of Americans said they were afraid to say what they really think.

In a column a few days age,  Robert Tracinski emphasized that social intimidation works only of a person allows himself to be intimidated.  If one stands up and says he does not give a damn if some or all  on the left sneer at him, call him some sort of “ist”,  lie about him, mischaracterize what he says, or label him as uncool, there is really nothing they can do about it. People need to realize that and enjoy the sense of liberation it can bring.

Of course there are people such as employees of Google, commentators at ESPN, actors, untenured professors,  and people with jobs  in  governments or many large corporations who would risk damage to their careers if they were caught deviating from the party line. One should admire those who dissent while understanding why many do not.  That leaves the rest of us (and especially the retired among us whose livelihoods the would be thought police literally cannot damage at all)  with the task to say what we think whenever we find it appropriate without worry or self-censorship  and  to be especially vigorous in opposing and repelling  the left’s attempts intimidation.

There is no need to be too rude or vulgar about  one’s opposition, just firm and clear and harsh enough. In December of 1944 German forces had units of the 101^st Airborne Division surrounded in Bastogne in Belgium.  Under a flag of truce two German officers and a couple of enlisted men brought  General Anthony McAuliffe, the American commander, an insulting written demand for surrender. McAuliffe’s  written reply was the one word  “nuts”.  As the Germans left the American positions, two American soldiers explained in German and English  to the German officers who were not up on American slang that it meant “go to hell.”  That is about right here for the lefties. Nuts to them.

Michelle Obama on the Self-Righteous

A couple of days ago Michelle Obama said men were "entitled" and self-righteous. This is false about men in general.  However, unlike some of her other pronouncements, it is  at least connectable  to direct and intimate observation in the same way as would be a statement from Kate Upton that men can throw a baseball really fast.