Decades of criminalisation has demonstrated that punishment is completely ineffective, you mean? Because welfare programs which give money to impoverished people have been demonstrated to be very effective. It’s spending money on crap like DARE that’s a total waste of time and money.
people using drugs has zero effect on neighbourhoods, what you’re talking about are the knock-on effects of drug use, pretty much all of which are easily solved by just providing people with necessities like shelter, food, healthcare and education.
the largest contributor to drug use is poverty, so if you want to see a reduction in drug use, start advocating for expanding welfare programs
Thanks for the well-considered and thoughtful response - I appreciate it.
Just to clarify, I’m not trying to make some typical liberal argument that China is evil or anything like that - I’m very far left and I’m not here just criticising China just because that’s what the mainstream media has told me to do. I just think it does leftists like myself no favours to pretend that China is perfect and that we shouldn’t criticise it - and the essay linked above, in my opinion, seems to be a bit of a reflexive defense of China, rather than actually considering the criticism - to me it seems they are choosing arguments to support their position rather than letting the facts and their beliefs lead them to a conclusion.
I don’t think we have to accept that any amount of imbalanced transactions of value necessarily guarantee that billionaires are inevitable - plenty of systems exist where there are “winners and losers” but the system itself reaches an equilibrium state. There are so many solutions which could be implemented to prevent billionaires from existing, and I would say that billionaires can only ever exist when there is a fundamental flaw in the society which produces them. It should be impossible to so thoroughly capture and centralise wealth and power to a point where an individual can have that much.
I’ve re-read this comment and your previous comment multiple times and I’m not really clear on what you mean.
My point is that the essay’s argument is weak because it completely ignores scale and proportionality. It uses the language of marxism to justify capitalism.
I don’t personally agree with it, but I was willing to consider the notion on its own merits rather than in contrast with ideology - but even when I do, I find it a wholly unsatisfactory justification
This is pretty typical self-justifying bullshit. They’re justifying pre-held beliefs (china is good; china has billionaires; therefore billionaires must be good) rather than actually considering the claim based on the merits. (is it actually a good thing that china has billionaires, and what does that say about socialism/marxism as practiced in china)
You can believe that people have different needs and that we don’t all need to be absolutely 1:1 equal in terms of our material possessions etc. and that having some goal to work towards is beneficial to society (ambition) without having billionaires.
This essay is like trying to justify genocide by pointing out that sometimes, for the benefit of society, the death of an individual is preferable to the suffering of many. The issue with billionaires isn’t one of inequality in the micro - it’s the magnitude of that inequality, and the power it brings, which is the issue.
C’mon mate, this is decades old fossil fuel industry propaganda - making people blame themselves for the mess they got us all into. There’s no benefit from beating ourselves up - as individuals we hold no power over the industry. We need to work together and build an organised movement if we want to change things, we can’t change our behaviour individually to change the system.
Voting for a third party is the opposite of laziness and apathy. You’re intentionally spending the time and effort to place a vote which you know will not succeed, entirely because you believe in doing the right thing, even when it isn’t popular.
The US needs a revolution, the current system is impossible to change without it. All you can do is harm mitigation.
The problem with the government is that it’s a top-down hierarchy that’s dominated by thugs and criminals.
I absolutely 100% believe that the US wanted to replace Maduro with a president favourable to them. But if the claims that the election results are fraudulent hold no water, it would be trivial for Maduro to simply release the receipts. I can’t think of any reason why he wouldn’t do so other than to cover up that he lost the election.
Now there’s a whole other conversation about whether US propaganda led him to lose the election, but that’s immaterial to the outcome. As much as I believe all of these systems are flawed, by their own measure, he should publish the receipts or step down.
I feel that that it’s very difficult to formulate any real statistically significant findings from this data because you’d need way more information than we have available to us from the WADA report, personally. Your point that China has a very low rate is completely fair, and I agree with you on that, but there are just so many variables in the mix and the sample sizes are so low, I’d be uncomfortable in making a real conclusion with the data available - all you can really do is point to correlations.
I’m not arguing with you or saying you’re wrong or anything, just to be clear - just saying it’s really messy and complex. And I agree that the US is broadly pushing sinophobic propaganda as per usual.
Slightly more recent version of the same document, as well as the ADRV report
https://www.wada-ama.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/2022_anti-doping_testing_figures_en.pdf
https://www.wada-ama.org/sites/default/files/2023-05/2020_adrv_report.pdf
While China’s WADA positive test rate is indeed low, it’s higher than the Chinese anti-doping agency (CHINADA) positive test rate, by quite a significant amount, which may suggest that the national agency aren’t policing doping as closely as WADA. The USA’s national anti-doping agency (USADA) has a higher positive test rate than WADA’s, again, by quite a significant amount. Additionally, WADA has significantly higher sample rate in the US compared to the sample rate in China - despite the fact that CHINADA has a much higher sample rate than USADA.
My point isn’t that the US is better or more honest at handling doping than China, just that the analysis of doping test rates has quite a lot of variance, and it’s difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from them.
This is a great question! I’d say that the reason is to actually protect the athletes, rather than protect the “purity” of the olympics. If they changed the rules so that people could do all the drugs they wanted to, then it would basically mean that you’re required to do drugs to effectively compete - those without the drugs would have a big disadvantage against those who use them.
We know that many performance enhancing drugs can have very harmful side-effects, so that would ultimately lead to athletes harming themselves to be able to compete.
That would not be a good outcome for anyone, I don’t think.
Yeah, it’s not at all a compelling argument.