The pro-gun lobby, by and large, seems these days to consider mass shootings to simply be the unavoidable price that America must pay for unfettered gun rights and the Second Amendment. There isn’t even a concerted effort on their part to stop such shootings anymore. They just shrug and accept them, and want the rest of us to do so as well. Not all are this way, but some actually seem quite comfortable with having a Parkland, Columbine, or Sandy Hook every few months.
The pro-life lobby generally doesn’t deny that if abortion is banned nationwide, there will be some women who will seek out illegal back-alley abortions or DIY abortions and suffer serious, possibly fatal, medical consequences as a result. This fact is readily acknowledged by most pro-lifers. They may argue that the number of fetal lives saved vastly outweighs the number of women who will die from such abortions, but they don’t deny that such abortions will happen, and that they will be dangerous.
Supporters of affirmative action don’t deny that AA leads to a wide disparity in admissions standards, such that, for instance, some races will have to score several hundred points higher on the SAT than some other races in order to have the same chance of admission to Harvard. They consider this to be an acceptable side effect.
Radical pacifists (such as the Jeannette Rankin variety) don’t deny that their stance will often encourage enemy aggression. They just consider pacifism and the morality of not going to war to be important enough to be worth it anyway.
Supporters of expanded welfare don’t deny that this will result in some people getting benefits they don’t deserve, and likewise, opponents of welfare don’t deny that this will result in some people not getting benefits that they need.
Supporters of the Electoral College generally don’t deny that this results in lower voter turnout, a lopsided imbalance in voter representation and occasionally an EC winner prevailing over a popular-vote winner.
What is the “acceptable collateral damage” of other causes/movements?
(Note: It is not “collateral damage” if something is a feature, not a bug. For instance, supporters of traditional marriage generally want gay marriage banned - that’s one of the central points of the platform. The banning of gay marriage is therefore not collateral damage. It has to be a side effect in order to be collateral damage.)
The anti-mask crowd doesn’t seem to care that in the good old US of A more 560K people (and counting) have died due to Covid-19. A small price to pay for exercising your freedom to be a self centered A-Hole.
Those who favor legalizing drugs, and I include myself in this group, accept that it would lead to an increase in people who abuse drugs. I believe it’s worth the tradeoff it it means people can buy their cocaine at CVS or Walgreens instead of from a dealer who probably got their supply from a Mexican cartel. The benefits would include a massive drop in violence and incarceration.
This is a good example of where different people will have differing interpretations and opinions.
I know some people who are anti-mask because they want COVID to spread, as a way of acquiring antibodies and reaching herd immunity faster. They do accept a certain number of deaths as acceptable collateral damage, but their feeling is that the number could have been smaller if no one wore masks. They feel that the masks did indeed slow the spread of COVID, but that increased the number of deaths because not enough people had antibodies yet.
I am not among those people, but I know some who do feel that way. I am mentioning it here to demonstrate that a view which is “collateral damage” to one perspective can simply be a different strategy to another perspective.
Wow, that is just about the most twisted logic I can imagine. Lets let the virus spread and let the already overwhelmed health care system just let those that couldn’t be admitted into a hospital because of over crowding just die. How do they think the numbers would have been smaller? It would have been mass slaughter.
And they were correct. We don’t have to worry about the executives of Anheuser-Busch, Miller Brewing Company, or Coors Brewing Company sending armed men after each other for control of territory. The same could be done with other drugs that are currently illegal, and my guess is the results would be similar. Better to deal with guys in suits who negotiate using lawyers than the current day versions of Al Capone or Bugsy Siegel who negotiate with automatic weapons.
I often explain to my kids that in a perfect world, The Law® would be based purely on what’s right and wrong. But in this world of humans, it is also based on what is expedient. Even if someone is totally opposed to a certain thing, they might find that regulating it is more effective than banning it.
And that’s what this thread is about: How much tolerance can the regulations handle.
To avoid getting bogged down in specific issues, I’ll phrase it with abstract numbers: If the regulations are very restrictive and allow only 5% of whatever, then we might imagine the 95% to be protected and safe. But if those 95% feel pressured and restless then they might actually still be in danger. If we relax the regulations to allow 20%, then the 80% will be more comfortable, and it will be less of a tinder-box, but 20% might be an UNacceptable level of collateral damage.
It’s all personal opinion. In a democracy, that means finding a consensus about what level most people will accept for each issue.
The benefits of legalizing drugs might also include fewer overdose deaths since the drugs won’t be adulterated with fentanyl and the like. Of course, that is not guaranteed. It is interesting to note that pot legalization in Canada has not led to a large increase in usage and, in fact, businesses that geared up expecting that are going broke, according to an article in the Times on Sunday.
That might very well be the case. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the result. The only way to find out is to run the experiment, but I doubt it will happen in the current political atmosphere.
Can the usage levels of marijuana in the US when legalized vs. not be extrapolated by looking at data from states that have legalized the drug vs. states that have not?
I’ve always heard the Republican/conservative party line about COVID and masks to be that essentially it’s more important to prevent government intrusion and overreach as far as mandating that people behave a certain way (i.e. requiring masks), than it is to prevent what they perceive as a relatively small number of deaths. By their way of thinking, they don’t want people to die, but that in essence, it’s more important to keep the government from getting up in people’s business about how they behave, than it is if some relatively small number of people die. They’re effectively collateral damage in their fight against being told what to do by the government.
Meanwhile, the opposite side essentially thinks that certain behaviors can and should be mandated with the goal of reducing deaths. Which is about 180 degrees off from their opponents on the other side of the aisle. In their thinking, the freedom/liberty/precedent is the collateral damage from their attempts to save lives.
My suspicion is that we have this division primarily because of the relatively low death rate that’s also concentrated primarily in senior citizens. If this was something like smallpox that kills 30% of everyone who catches it, we’d see a VERY different tune out of the conservatives.
The 4 trillion dollar a year health care industry accepts that the system causes a lot of stress, anxiety and financial hardships for the public, however thats a price they’re willing to accept.
Disagree with the freedom/liberty/precedent phrasing. All the rest was spot on.
-No where does the constitution list unfettered freedom nor freedom to be a public health hazard.
-“Liberty” being highly subjective
Precedent - Oddly enough, looked at a copy of my Grandfather’s discharge papers with the notations of “Typhoid prophlylaxis completed June 29, 1917.”
I’m not sure that in most cases people consciously think of these as collateral damage.
In the case of the anti mask crowd, most of them IME would dispute the death figures. They’d say you must have got the data from CNN, and that they know a guy who knows a guy who died of, I dunno, leprosy, and it counted as covid
More generally, don’t forget how many talking points assume that the US is the world’s only country. So, on the healthcare thing, it’s not that the inefficiencies and expense are collateral damage. It’s that there is no other possible way . No other system could possibly work.
I dispute this. The point of affirmative action is to have a more equitable distribution of races in higher education. The fact that some (I dispute that it’s widespread) institutions take the lazy approach and alter admission standards is not “acceptable”. But it is, nonetheless, a sad fact.
Likewise, I dispute that pacifists* believe that pacifism “encourages” enemy aggression. The whole point of pacifism is to discourage aggression from all sides.
You have a confused idea about what the proponents of certain philosophies find acceptable. In most cases “collateral damage,” as you call it, is extremely unacceptable. But you fix the big problem first and then you go about fixing any fallout.
*And what does it say about society that pacifism can be considered a radical idea?
I don’t think it’s “unfair” that a lot of people will vote for Trump. Merely “unfortunate”.
Most of the examples of “collateral damage” that come to mind are already in the OP. I’ll add that, with regard to the gay marriage point, the “supporters of traditional marriage” (as rather charitably labelled above) also claim that allowing SSM causes “collateral damage”. Their argument has yet to be validated, but nonetheless they do keep making it.
