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crime and punishment

Prisoners All

The logic for drug prohibition is direct: to keep people from hurting themselves with recreational drugs, we must prevent them from accessing those drugs.

Voilà!

There are a number of things wrong with that, though, and one is this: governments cannot even keep illegal drugs out of prisons

In California, nearly 1,000 men and women overdosed last year in “an alarming spike in opioid use by those behind bars,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle

Steven Greenhut, writing in Reason, notes that confinement centers are “among the most tightly controlled environments on Earth, yet correction officials can’t figure out how to deal with dramatic spikes in the number of inmates who are dying from drug overdoses and alcohol poisoning.”

Doesn’t this make the prohibitionist “solution” absurd?

“If they can’t keep heroin off of death row,” Greenhut concludes, “then maybe they should rethink their ability to control the rest of us.”

There is a problem, here, though — it is easier to control “the rest of us.”

As with gun control laws, it is the law-​abiding folks who fall in line. It is the edgier, less civic-​minded people who tend to rebel. 

But the two issues remain distinct: generally lawful and level-​headed citizens still need to defend themselves from criminals, but do not feel a need to take drugs that can be deadly even in innocent hands. Thus the War on Drugs seems a bit less obviously tragic than gun control. 

Which is why conceiving of the War on Drugs as unworkable prison policy writ large remains important.

Why would we want to make our society more like drug-​ridden prisons?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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First Amendment rights ideological culture media and media people Regulating Protest

James Woods, Parody, and a Pillow

The beginning of the end of actor James Woods’s time on Twitter likely occurred on July 20, 2018.

Only recently discovering a tweet that he posted then, Twitter has locked Woods out of a forum where his right-​leaning messages have been followed by 1,730,000 people.

His delinquent tweet forwarded an image of giddily grinning guys promising to abstain from voting so that a woman’s vote would be “worth more.” Woods tweeted: “Pretty scary that there is a distinct possibility this could be real. Not likely, but in this day and age of absolute liberal insanity, it is at least possible.”

Twitter told the actor that if he agreed to the deletion of this fake-​news tweet — simple enough — it would let him tweet once again.

Woods refuses.

“Free speech is free speech — it’s not [Twitter CEO] Jack Dorsey’s version of free speech,” Woods says. “The irony is, Twitter accused me of affecting the political process, when in fact their banning of me is the truly egregious interference.… If you want to kill my free speech, man up and slit my throat with a knife, don’t smother me with a pillow.”

There’s lots more where that came from, but you get the idea. I don’t, um, strictly agree with everything Woods says here. But I can only applaud the spirit of his refusal to submit to Twitter’s arbitrary standards of acceptable speech.

Oh, and one other thing: somebody tell Twitter that parodies are inherently fake.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment free trade & free markets general freedom media and media people moral hazard responsibility

Blame the App?

Who spreads “fake news”?

Gossips, politicians, publicity agents, Twitter eggs, partisan bloggers, lying news journalists?

Or … the medium of communication they use? 

Do envelopes, stationery, telephones, email, and messaging apps have moral agency?

And who commits the crimes that news (true or false) is used to rationalize?

A New York Times story discusses “How WhatsApp Leads Mobs to Murder in India,” which is like saying that civilization, flying lessons and boarding passes “led” terrorists to 9/​11.

The Times reports that fake news about children being kidnapped — dramatized by doctored video clips and forwarded via WhatsApp, a messaging app — provoked anger and fear in many Indians. Some were then willing to attack anyone who “seemed” about to kidnap children. 

In recent months, dozens of people have been murdered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Without social media and the mega-​popular WhatsApp, the murders probably would not have happened, at least not the way they happened. That seems certain. But this doesn’t mean that without WhatsApp, nobody in India would spread false stories or assault innocent people. 

Mob violence in the country antedates the Internet.

Perhaps a thousand material circumstances directly or indirectly enable any particular act of wrongdoing. But no such prerequisites “lead to” anything without individual choices.

If someone pretends it’s okay to kill innocent persons — or persons whose guilt or innocence he doesn’t care to know — he, the killer, is the guilty party. The telecommunications network or messenger app used to provide grist for excuse-​making is innocent.

Apps don’t murder people. People murder people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 


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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy Regulating Protest Second Amendment rights U.S. Constitution

Brownells Defends Itself

I’m glad to be able to say this: Brownells has, present tense, a YouTube channel. Especially glad because, on June 9, Google had shut that channel down without warning or explanation.

Brownells is a family-​owned supplier of firearms, firearm parts and accessories, gunsmithing tools, and emergency gear. Well-​known and well-​regarded by shooters, hobbyists and gunsmiths, the company has a website and a YouTube channel that serves as a “portal to everything shooting and hunting,” as Pete Brownell explains.

Brownells’ YouTube channel is substantial, with almost 1,800 instructional videos and some 71,000 subscribers. Patrons stress that there’s nothing outré, radical, or offensive about the offerings — unless you’re reflexively anti-​Second Amendment, I guess. 

We’ve got no smoking gun in the form of an explicit admission from Google. But we may plausibly suspect that the firm terminated this YouTube channel for ideological reasons. Perhaps Google shot from the hip here in reaction to the recent spate of school shootings, without pausing to properly distinguish between promoting responsible gun ownership and promoting murder.

We may also never know whether Google expected Brownells to meekly accept the arbitrary snuffing of a resource it had spent so much time and energy developing. In any case, Brownells used Twitter and other forums to urge supporters to call Google and object.

The self-​defense paid off. On June 11, Google undeleted the channel. The protests against injustice must have been too many to ignore. 

YouTube is no longer a mere platform for video sharing. It has taken political controversy and complaints as excuses to editorialize.

Were it a government, I’d say “censor.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 


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