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0 pointsfreehunter7y ago0 comments

Just because the overarching goal of a project is awful doesn't mean every detail about the project is awful. There are lessons to be learned from every failure, and like it or not the war on drugs funds itself quite well through asset forfeiture.

Case in point: no one would argue the Nazi regime was anything approaching "good", but when the war was done, we didn't throw away the V2 rocket and start research from scratch. We threw out all the horrible shit the Nazis did but kept their wildly successful rocket.

Likewise, it's possible to throw away the racist bullshit that perpetuates the drug war but use it's funding mechanism to fund prosecution of other crimes that would otherwise be financially infeasible to prosecute otherwise. If someone is convicted of insider trading, take all the money they gained from it and use it to prosecute other insider trading crimes.

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5 comments · 2 top-level

mulmen7y ago· 2 in thread

Wow, edgy. The end justifies the means eh?

What about the part where the war on drugs doesn’t actually reduce drug use? Sure it funds itself by sealing money from innocent people but that’s just another negative externality.

It was not necessary for the Nazis to kill millions of people to develop rockets. Oversimplifying that period of human history doesn’t make reusing failed law enforcement programs a better idea.

freehunterOP7y ago

I don't understand what exactly you're arguing. I would appreciate it if you'd explain clearly exactly what you are arguing for or against and how it relates to the comments you're replying to.

Neither I nor Animats ever stated that the war on drugs (or Nazism for that matter) were good things. I think that's entirely clear from even a cursory reading of our comments. In fact, I even stated that you can throw away all the bad stuff but keep one good thing.

It sounds to me like you're arguing that since the war on drugs is bad, we should never do anything affiliated with the war on drugs again. That's silly, and isn't an argument to anything anyone even came close to saying. Computers and cell phones are used in the war on drugs, should we get rid of them too?

Again, you're massively misrepresenting every argument that's been stated in this thread and using it to hold the moral high ground with the easy "Nazis are bad" argument. Of fucking course they are. Maybe read past that? Because it's not edgy. It's not "ends justify the means". It's an actual fucking argument that you're completely ignoring for an easy win.

Shame on you. You should aspire to be better than that.

mulmen7y ago

I’ve been very clear in my statements in this thread and I stand by them.

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UncleEntity7y ago· 1 in thread

> ...but when the war was done, we didn't throw away the V2 rocket and start research from scratch.

But we did throw away all the research they did on unwilling human subjects even though it could conceivably have lead to better science if we ignored all the "racist bullshit"...

fosk7y ago

No, we did not. Introducing you to Japanese Unit 731 [1] that was conducting atrocious human testing during World War 2 and whose information was happily collected afterwards with the promise of “forgetting” about the crimes committed.

> Shiro Ishii, as the chief of the unit, was granted war crime immunity from the US occupation authorities, because of his provision of human experimentation research materials to the US.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

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