Insulting people, however, tends to derail any useful discussion.
Also, let's cut out the criminality when it comes to drugs. The rationality this rests on can be chopped out from under it if we just regulate the drug industry better. Give drug users the drugs with limitations, which is better than having them served via some barbarous criminal enterprise.
Just locally where I live I've watched the total state moving forward. Police are moving in unmarked/low marked vehicles a la Gestapo, intersections all suddenly have cameras, I've read articles about how LE have tracked people via their cell phones--there is a "digital fence" that the police automatically get notified if someone prohibited enters with their phone. Is that not total surveillance state? When you can't even move around without someone tracking you? Granted, they can turn off the phone or put it in a Faraday bag, but the point is, we should not have to!
Slippery slope may be a fallacy, but damn, it sure doesn't seem like it when all the dots start getting connected.
I'm not on board with any of it. I am not some kind of serf, peon, or resource to be exploited. If some shit has to burn down to make that point, well, that's what will have to happen.
> a la Gestapo
In 2013 Tom Scott made an incredibly prescient sketch of our grim surveillance-state future. It absolutely terrifying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIuf1V1FhpY
It's terrifying because it's the power of Stasi-style informants modernized into a simple Uber-like app. No more scary clandestine meetings, now you can inform on your friends, family, and neighbors with one click from the comfort of your own home.
Similar to the "social credit" system, Tom's "Oversight" could work, because they both efficiently incentivize close peers against each other. "You should stop spending time with your friend John. I heard him talking like a dissident recently... that could damage your Social Credit rating!"
> enters with their phone
Which is exactly why I follow Dan Geer's advice[1] and don't carry around a tracking device. He's been trying to warn us for years[2], and we still aren't listening[3].
[1] https://www.wired.com/brandlab/2015/06/cia-cybersecurity-gur...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI (transcript: http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt )
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbDEbfijxNY (transcript: http://www.bsidesdc.org/history/geer.html )
If you think otherwise, I'd like to see an example of an large, open internet forum having intelligent no-holds-barred political debate. In my opinion you're underestimating how dumb that gets, and how quickly. For the sort of conversation you're talking about to be high-quality, you need a community that is closed and vastly smaller. This has been the case with that sort of debate in the past—for example, exchanges in journals or between writers in opposing journals.