Expecting our citizens to not poison themselves, hell, expecting anything from them, that isn’t what America’s about! When you hear people say “we’re a nation, not an economy,” know that this is the kind of nation they want, a nation of dysgenic losers incapable of taking the most basic steps toward self-preservation.
The Democrats share some blame here, for they feed into the same culture of helplessness, treating drug addicts like they’re victims of a medical ailment. If you put people in the mindset that 80,000 Americans a year are dying through no fault of their own,
I would guess that this part and some other parts of the post are too sneering. It is FAR harder to quit an addiction than to prevent it in the first place. I suspect that the user becomes addicted once some combination of the user's willpower and knowledge that addiction is bad becomes eroded through hard circumstances, random events and misaligned propaganda and the user gains access to the unhealthy stuff.
Transgender-related comment
Conservatives like Abigail Shrier also apply similar logic to issues like transgenderism. SOTA understanding of gender issues implies that being transgender is to be affirmed, not that it is usually a misalignment with the person's longer-term goals. However, we had the case of Fiora Starlight who transitioned due to being felt trapped and seeing transition as a way to escape, then regretted the transition.
What parents can do is to raise their kids' willpower and instill a coherent value system into kids, and the culture seems to undermine both.
Fair enough to doubt that states' attempts in paternalism often fail, and maybe in many cases OP points out, a laissez-faire is on net leading to less harm. Yes, NYT not emphasizing the obviously crucial drug issue, is totally annoying - and that issue obviously makes it extremely more difficult to help them. Yes, Trump's apparent capture of a bit of Fentanyl or what have you is a joke.
But: Using this sort of events as a basis to seemingly advocate for a full laissez-faire fells strawmanny, and while helping the weak is truly difficult, I do not believe taking the inherent human weaknesses seriously enough leads to the conclusions OP seems to have arrived at:
We are humans, weak flesh and blood creatures, not made of steel. In the wrong environment, all or most of us will fail to resist bad temptations. OP seems to advocate for leaving it all up to individuals, but it does not demand very much imagination to realize this is not a generalizable maxim itself.
To the degree that you really seem to think, it's all almost by definition only the individual's duty to save herself, this begs the question, purely as example: Which share of people would have to be accumulating unhealthy amounts of fat in our bodies for you'd agree the state might ideally consider supporting the fight against it - with whichever means may be promising some sort of effectiveness or efficiency?
The New York Times recently published an article entitled “Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of L.A.’s Figueroa Street?” The article, worth reading in its entirety, details the struggle to “rescue” the girls:
After interviewing each girl, Armendariz kept her company for hours until someone from the Department of Children and Family Services came to pick her up. In theory, D.C.F.S. staff would take the girl to a hospital for a health screening and then to a temporary housing placement, before ultimately finding her a new foster household or group home. But time after time, the agency reported back to Armendariz that the girl had jumped from the car as soon as it pulled out of the station. The agency estimates that three out of four rescued preteens and teenagers go back to their traffickers.
Why do they return to their traffickers? The article attributes some of it to fear, but also claims that most of the prostitutes feel “a deep psychological tie to their traffickers, the most consistent authority figure they had ever known.” Given how many of these girls are runaways, I rather doubt that the issue is excessive deference to authority. Do they have a sense of “love” for their traffickers? Perhaps, the article describes one such girl, in what might be an excerpt from poorly-written BDSM erotica:
Earlier that night, officers pulled Ajena, 15, from the Blade for the third time. Armendariz had never met a child with such street loyalty. Ajena’s trafficker had just hours earlier split her lip, because she smirked at him, and threatened to shoot her in the leg if she walked away. She still spit on the officer who asked her to share his identity, and when her cellphone rang, his contact came up as “Daddy.”
The central case study, “Ana,” who the article explicitly states returned willingly to her trafficker, hints at what I suspect is the more common reason: (emphasis added)
When he left, Ana plodded over to her own trafficker to ask for a break. The answer was no. Ana took some Percocets and chased them with Hennessy to numb herself. The temperature dropped, and soon she felt herself longing for another customer’s car, just to get out of the cold.
{snip}
Ana didn’t know it, but Forsythe [Ana’s former foster parent] had been thinking about her all this time. She had visited Ana in the hospital four times and was riddled with guilt that she couldn’t invite Ana back, but she had already taken in a 12-year-old in her place. She tried to stay in touch with Ana, but when she confronted Ana about stockpiling opioids, Ana cut her off.
The article never explicitly states she, or any of the other girls, returned to prostitution due to drugs or alcohol. Probably because had they said these women work as prostitutes because it’s the only job they can do while drunk or high, they’d have been accused of victim-blaming. I’ve seen this pattern in other New York Times articles. They use all the politically correct terminology (”trafficking”, “rescue”) while giving the reader enough information to see that the narrative isn’t quite right. Crumbs that the intelligent, open-minded reader can follow, while the person who just wants the narrative confirmed can see that too. Some people learn something and no subscriptions are cancelled.
As frustrating as this is, it’s preferable to the approach taken by most of our right-wing media. Had Fox News or Breitbart commissioned such an article, it would have been something something Democratic cities bad, something something sex trafficking, something something illegals. Pure comfort food for its audience. The NYT at least introduces its audience to novel information, information that might even challenge their preconceptions and make them feel uncomfortable.
Recall again the title, “Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of L.A.’s Figueroa Street?” Per Betteridge’s law of headlines, the answer is no. The police and social workers seem to be doing the best jobs they can in an unfixable situation. The only people who can rescue the girls are the girls themselves, of course, the NYT doesn’t say that. For that would be “victim blaming.” It feels mean to “victim-blame.” Much kinder to tell the girls they’re victims of the traffickers, blame the traffickers, not the victims! Of course, the traffickers are not going to stop trafficking because the New York Times called them misogynists. It does nothing to help the victims, but hey, it makes the rest of us feel good.
One of the things the New York Times is willing to say is that the Democratic state legislature is making the police’s job harder:
Their jobs grew even more challenging when California repealed the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution. The repeal, known as SB 357, was intended to prevent profiling of Black, brown and trans women based on how they dressed. But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them. Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage — but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell. One girl told vice officers that her trafficker had explained things succinctly: “We run Figueroa now,” he said.
Most counties swung toward Trump in the 2024 election, but some of the greatest swings were seen in big, blue metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, probably because of anger at Democratic tolerance for urban disorder. This didn’t have to be such a big disaster for the Democrats. Had they embraced a libertarian attitude that consenting adults can dress how they want and sleep with whoever they want, even if money changes hands, they might have received hearty support from California’s not-very-religious population. Instead, they shot themselves in the foot by embracing the moral panic around sex trafficking. When you tell people there’s a horrific problem in the city you govern, some might expect you to fix it. While the GOP won’t be winning LA, Chicago, or NYC anytime soon, the internal migrants from these cities will swell the populations of the booming sunbelt, bringing with them a lasting distaste for Democratic rule.
Political self-interest is a powerful motivator. The flow of congressional districts from blue states to red states motivated some blue-state politicians to finally start repealing their NIMBY housing laws. Perhaps this is what led the NYT to publish that article, the hope that Democratic politicos will read it and won’t make the same mistakes they made in California. And the red tribe shouldn’t rest on its laurels. Their areas have fewer of these problems because their police forces haven’t adopted the don’t-blame-the-victim mantra and put prostitutes into jail, not social workers’ cars they can escape from. While this may or may not help the prostitutes, it certainly removes them from public view. Yet an increasing fraction of the coalition buys into Sound of Freedom sex trafficking hysteria. If they get the police to behave according to blue-state ideology, they’ll wind up with blue-state results.
The same theme, don’t blame the victim, never demand responsibility, can be seen in other parts of American life. Just look at the Vice President, who was propelled to fame by writing a book about how his people, “hillbillies,” are harmed by a culture of blaming others and refusing to take responsibility for oneself. And when he entered politics, rather than challenge this culture, he embraced it, always blaming foreigners and the government for his voters’ problems. While running for the Ohio Senate, Vance said, “instead of trying to trigger WW3 with a disastrous no fly zone in Ukraine, we should secure our own border to stop the fentanyl killing our kids.” This taboo on personal responsibility was given a sleazy twist when Trump returned to the Presidency, as his administration started putting out press releases about how he saved “over 119 million lives” by seizing enough fentanyl to cause that many overdoses. You see, without Daddy Trump, we would have been powerless to not inject ourselves.
What started with laughter soon turned to murder. As of November 2, 67 people have been murdered on the high seas by the Trump administration. “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,” Sleaze Jr. a.k.a J.D. Vance posted on social media. Expecting our citizens to not poison themselves, hell, expecting anything from them, that isn’t what America’s about! When you hear people say “we’re a nation, not an economy,” know that this is the kind of nation they want, a nation of dysgenic losers incapable of taking the most basic steps toward self-preservation.
The Democrats share some blame here, for they feed into the same culture of helplessness, treating drug addicts like they’re victims of a medical ailment. If you put people in the mindset that 80,000 Americans a year are dying through no fault of their own, some will respond positively to the Trump solution of stopping it by murdering scary foreign people. It won’t work, but nor will the Democrats’ solution of offering “treatment” that most addicts will refuse. Just look at San Francisco.
One could imagine a different, more Nietzschean Democratic Party. Imagine a newly elected President Gavin Newsom getting up on that lectern and announcing that America is a country for winners, and that henceforth, Americans are expected to participate in their own survival. The Federal Bureau of Prisons gets the DOGE treatment, being ordered to release all drug offenders. States would still be able to prosecute drug crimes, but they’d need to pay for it themselves. There’d be a massive backlash, but good ole’ Gavin could just smile with aristocratic contempt and say “don’t like drugs, don’t do drugs,” applying the same mantra to other “problems” in American society like unhealthy food and pornography.
Of course, real-world social change doesn’t happen with one man going up on a lectern; it’s a gradual process, as old topics fall out of fashion. Hopefully, our current infantilizing culture will go the way of prior fads, as it gradually dawns on people how ridiculous they sound.
