#i know i oversimplified and omitted a lot of stuff

[takingontheworldtogether]

my friends who don't know shit about taylor swift requested a pre-album explainer of wtf is going on so i wrote them a little newsletter... if you want something to send to your non-swiftie friends it's beneath the cut

Good morning team,

Why do we need a Swiftie newsletter?

I mean, no one really needs this. But she’s dropping a new album (“The Tortured Poets Department” or TTPD for short) in three days and I’m here to provide you with the information you need before the album comes out. I’ll be back with a post-album review letting you know 1) what juicy gossip was revealed on the album, 2) what tracks you should listen to, and 3) a few things you can say to your Swiftie friends to sound cultured.

What’s this album about?

Okay, I know this is ancient history, but cast your mind back to 2016. Kanye and Taylor Swift are beefing, and Kim Kardashian posts a clip of a phone call that makes Taylor look like a liar. Taylor gets canceled on social media and disappears for a year. 

While all this is going on, she meets her boyfriend, the British actor Joe Alwyn. I have no clue what movies he was in at the time, but since then he was in The Favorite and Harriet, and also Conversations with Friends (I think, I haven’t seen it because Normal People put me off Sally Rooney). Here’s a quick timeline:

Late 2017: Taylor comes back with “Look What You Made Me Do” and reputation. People think reputation is a bad bitch album, but it’s actually an album about finding love in a time of despair.

2019: She drops Lover, which is about many things but primarily about how she loves him and wants to spend the rest of her life with him. 

2020: Pandemic. Taylor writes two quarantine albums, folklore and evermore. These are primarily fictional, but there are a few love songs about him. He co-writes some of these songs pseudonymously.

2022: Midnights. This album becomes wildly successful. It occupies all of the top ten slots on the billboard hot 100 in the week it comes out. It breaks a bunch of sales records.

2023: The Eras Tour starts! Two weeks in, they announce the break up. Taylor briefly dates Matty Healy of the 1975, who is by all accounts a total asshole. This appears to have been a shitty rebound. A bit later, she starts dating the football player Travis Kelce and everyone loses their minds about it. 

It looks like this album is going to be about the end of a relationship of six years and possibly rebounding/moving on. 

Okay, but like… why did they break up?

I mean, I don’t know any of these people, so all I can offer you are guesses based on song lyrics:

1 - He was really big into his privacy, which is kind of difficult if you’re dating Taylor Swift. 

2 - A lot of songs on Lover are about wanting to get married. There’s a song on Midnights that implies that she wanted to get married and he refused. Yikes. 

What’s the promo situation for this album?

The most notable thing to me (and what is this if not me rambling about my opinions) are some playlists curated by Taylor on Apple Music. Each playlist focuses on one of the five stages of grief in mourning a relationship, and they contain songs from her past albums. There are copycat playlists on Spotify, if you’re interested. My favorite is “am I allowed to cry?” which is the playlist for the bargaining stage. 

There’s also a wall in Chicago with a QR code that leads to a video of the words “Error 321 13” and a hidden message in her song lyrics that spells out “Hereby Conduct This,” which is presumably a message that will be finished by the time the album comes out. 

What do we already know about the album?

16 tracks with 4 bonus tracks. There’s a song with Post Malone (yes, really) and a song with Florence + The Machine. I agree, this is not an intuitive combination, but I’m excited. 

Two of the songs are over five minutes long. Two songs are entirely self-written, five are written with Aaron Dessner (from the National), and eight are written with Jack Antonoff (the producer who works with all the pop girlies). Her collaborations with Aaron Dessner are some of my favorite songs of hers, so this is good news to me. 

That’s my preamble to the Tortured Poets Department!

I hope this was informative, but I barely scratched the surface. You have no idea how deep this goes. Also, I need you all to know that I sat down and wrote this in one sitting without Googling anything, which probably means I know too much about this subject. 

In the meantime, I���ve been listening to “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter which is a very stupid song that is fun to listen to. I’ve also been listening to girl in red’s new album, I’m Doing It Again Baby! which is aggressively mid. If you want to listen to a song on it, I recommend “Pick Me.” 

See you in three days!

[onecornerface]

Some criticisms of Washington Post's terrible article about Portugal's drug decriminalization

About a month ago, the Washington Post ran a terrible article about Portugal’s drug decriminalization. There are numerous bizarre and unreasonable aspects to the article. I can only make a first-pass overview of the problems here

To be clear, I think many pro-decrim people oversimplify the situation of Portugal, and overstate its importance to the case for decrim. Moreover, there is a lot I simply don’t know about Portugal, especially regarding developments in recent years. So I can’t currently insist, with much confidence, that the article is factually incorrect about many of its particular claims. Nor can I confidently give my own well-grounded overview of what exactly is going on in Portugal or why. Also, I don’t know the authors’ policy views or intentions. Anthony Faiola at least does not seem to have a track record on WP of conservative fearmongering, but that’s what this specific article ultimately is.

Here's what I can say confidently right now. From start to finish, the article has a certain strong pattern—in what topics it mentions vs. omits, what questions it asks vs. erases, what statistics it provides vs. omits, whose concerns it emphasizes vs. marginalizes/ignores, what proposals it spends more time discussing vs. less time, what experts it cites at length vs. briefly or not at all, etc.

Regardless of intent, and despite a few counterinstances to this trend, the article overwhelmingly functions as propaganda which will predictably encourage its readers to think irrationally, to support vicious agendas, and to make the world even worse for people who are already among the worst-off.

From start to finish, the article continually insinuates that Portugal’s police should be allowed to drastically increase how many drug users they can arrest. The details are mostly left unspecified, and the rationale is mostly left unspecified. But basically the idea seems to be (1) the police should be able to arrest drug users on a wider variety of *grounds* (mainly but not limited to public drug use/possession), and (2) after arresting them, the police should be able to coerce these drug users in more ways or to a greater degree.

In any case, the end result is supposed to be some serious reduction in prevalence of various actual or putative bad stuff—e.g. addiction, public drug use, drug-associated crime, homelessness, and/or suchlike. Supposedly, all or many of these problems have increased in recent years. And supposedly, the only solution requires that police be enabled to drastically increase their coercive powers—presumably as a route to force drug addicts into addiction treatment. I’ll call this, roughly, the pro-crackdown thesis.

The authors don’t directly argue for the pro-crackdown thesis. But the overall pattern of the article is clearly to promote the pro-crackdown thesis regarding Portugal—and I think, by further implication, to suggest something in the ballpark of the pro-crackdown thesis for other reform-leaning countries such as the USA. The article should be read in context of the broader conservative “tough on crime” backlash which has been occurring in the USA & Canada for the last couple of years.

To a first approximation, the article alleges that Portugal’s drug problem (or drug-related problems) has gotten worse in recent years. This sounds to me like it is probably basically true and largely agreed-on, so I don’t challenge it, although I note that the article fails to much explain or clarify it. The article mostly relies on anecdotes, and occasionally on a smattering of no-context statistics, which don’t allow much of a sense of what exactly has gotten worse, or over what timeframe—let alone why. Still, actual experts do seem to agree that things have gotten worse overall.

The article insinuates that the police need to arrest lots of drug users in order to seriously mitigate the problem. But the article provides extremely little evidence that this is true. Most of the article’s evidence is too vague and decontextualized for us to interpret its relevance to the pro-crackdown thesis.

Throughout much of the article, the pro-crackdown thesis sounds vaguely like repealing decriminalization, though occasionally it is (very slightly) clarified that it isn't supposed to repeal decriminalization outright but only implement some more limited re-criminalization. Again the details are left remarkably vague. I’m not certain without further research, but it sounds to me like fake moderation that provides cover for extreme changes. The article is obviously pushing for the arrests of quite a lot of people who aren’t currently being arrested.

Most shockingly, the article occasionally mentions evidence which (if true) challenges or even refutes its own pro-crackdown thesis—yet the article mostly ignores the relevance of all this.

On a preliminary note, the article never specifies whether police enforcement powers have actually changed in recent years, in terms of what the police are and aren't allowed to do. Has there been any contraction in the grounds on which police can make arrests? Has there been any reduction in what police can do to coerce those whom they’ve arrested? I don’t think the article indicates any such thing. If the police’s powers stayed the same, but the drug problems got worse, then it would be at least a little surprising if the solution is to change the police’s powers. Of course, decriminalization itself reduced the police’s powers—but decriminalization occurred some 20 years ago, whereas things only started getting worse in the last several years or so. So decriminalization in itself can’t be the cause. So then, what was the cause?

More significantly, the article occasionally mentions that a decade or so ago, Portugal suffered an economic crisis and then drastically cut addiction treatment funding. Near the end of the article, this is briefly discussed in a few paragraphs—but then the article continues and concludes as if this discussion never happened.

So, if and insofar as drug problems got worse in the last several years, the article presents no evidence whatsoever that decriminalization or enforcement changes had anything to do with it. But rather, the article actually presents an obviously salient and severe set of events (economic crisis + funding cuts) that could easily account for the increase in drug problems—seemingly meeting conditions of (1) plausible causal mechanisms & (2) relevant timeframe.

This is not mentioned until late in the article, and the article concludes by ignoring it. The large bulk of the article instead argues for (or insinuates, implicitly arguing for) the pro-crackdown thesis.

If the pro-crackdown thesis is true, how would it work? How would arresting lots of drug users solve the problem? Mostly the article avoids any exploration of the mechanisms that would need to be involved. But insofar as the article *does* suggest a mechanism, it is that the police need to arrest drug users specifically in order to force them into addiction treatment.

The argument presupposes that addiction treatment is crucial for solving the drug problem, and that Portugal needs to get lots more drug users to attend treatment, and that the best way to increase attendance is by empowering the police to arrest lots more of them, on a wider variety of grounds, and coerce them more severely.

Now, there are a lot of unspoken empirical premises that need to be true in order for this argument to have any chance of succeeding. Many such empirical premises are already false or dubious, which I will ignore. But notice that the argument requires, at minimum, that the addiction treatment system be capable of taking in many, many new patients within a short timeframe—i.e. the many addicted drug users whom the police should be newly allowed to arrest & coerce.

So here’s where the argument gets even worse and dumber. Very briefly, early on, the article seemingly mentions that Portugal’s addiction treatment system is basically at capacity, cannot take on new patients readily, and has extremely long wait-lists.

Here’s the key quote: “there are year-long waits for state-funded rehabilitation treatment even as the number of people seeking help has fallen dramatically.” There are tons of variables left unspecified, but the picture given here (and indirectly supported further on, in the section on funding cuts) seems to be a serious problem in treatment capacity. Another quote: “The number of users being funneled into drug treatment in Portugal, for instance, has sharply fallen, going from a peak of 1,150 in 2015 to 352 in 2021, the most recent year available.” Why did this happen? Obviously there could be many variables involved, not suggested by the article.

The drastic funding cuts would likely cause a severe reduction in capacity. And the article never mentions any relevant post-decrim changes to drug laws. There’s no indication that the police used to be allowed to force many people into treatment and no longer are. So, for all the article says, this sounds mostly due to funding cuts. Yet the article barely suggests increasing funding, and rather spends most of its time supporting a drastic increase in police powers.

But the article’s own arguments suggest there needs to be a drastic increase in addiction treatment funding FIRST. Otherwise, what are the police supposed to do with all the drug addicts they’re expected to arrest? They CANNOT force them into treatment, because there is NO CAPACITY for so many new patients.

For the moment, let’s ignore the facts that (1) many scholars have cast doubt on the benefits of forced treatment, (2) many scholars argue that forced treatment causes many direct & indirect harms (which may compete with or outweigh the benefits), and (3) many scholars argue that forced treatment would be unethical or ethically dubious even if it worked and did not cause other harms. (These facts are easy to forget, because the article never mentions or remotely alludes to any of them, other than selectively quoting some vague and easy-to-dismiss appeal to rights.)

Even setting all this aside, the simple fact—acknowledged or strongly implied by the article itself—is that Portugal’s addiction treatment system cannot presently take on many new patients. So, by the article’s own lights, arresting lots of drug users to force them into treatment is *impossible*. Or at least it is impossible unless there were a drastic expansion in addiction treatment capacity first—which the article barely discusses, and clearly considers much lower priority than empowering the police to crack down on drug users. To the extent that any actual experts on drug policy (such as Alex Stevens) have commented on the article, they seem to agree that Portugal needs to re-invest in treatment and/or social programs, not any kind of re-criminalization.

It is at best an open question whether arresting people would be a good way to improve treatment attendance *after* drastically expanding addiction treatment capacity. Perhaps the expansion of addiction treatment would be enough by itself, or perhaps not. But the article’s own brief discussion of Portugal’s history during ca. 2000-2010 suggests the already-successful solution was expanded addiction treatment *without* police coercion. Now, this may or may not be accurate. And I think it is plausible that all sides are inclined to overstate the importance of addiction treatment. It wouldn’t surprise me if other changes to Portugal’s society, e.g. investment in infrastructure other than addiction treatment (e.g. housing, healthcare, etc.), played a bigger role than the addiction treatment itself. But setting that aside, by the article’s own evidence, everything here tends to logically support the solution of expanding addiction treatment without empowering the police. Yet the article instead insists, illogically, on empowering the police and putting treatment at a distant second-place.

One of many elephants in the room: There are also many possible policy domains OTHER than police OR treatment, which could well have a big impact on drug problems—such as housing, job programs, etc. The article avoids all these topics, of course, despite the obvious opportunity presented by the mention of the economic crisis. And so far I have ignored the matter of homelessness, which I’ll briefly return to further down.

In the meantime, absent such a big expansion of addiction treatment capacity, the suggestion of seriously increasing police powers as a way to increase treatment attendance is OBVIOUSLY INSANE. If the police were to empowered to arrest lots of drug users immediately, without other massive changes first, then it would just lock most of them up without treatment anytime soon.

But I think that’s the real agenda here, regarding the thrust of the article in itself and in the broader ongoing context. The real agenda supported by the article, at least functionally, is to support a combination of policies that prioritize getting (some) drug users off the streets and out of sight of wealthy people—that’s basically it. This agenda may need to be artificially propped up by vague appeals to the notion of helping the drug users by forcing them into treatment. But it doesn’t really matter whether this is logistically feasible in terms of scale (it’s not) or typically overall beneficial to the user (it’s not) or ethical (it’s not). The agenda, first and foremost, is to remove some marked underclass of people from the sight and mind of a more wealthy and powerful class of people.

Those are some of the main problems with the article. Even without knowing much about what’s really going on in Portugal in recent years, I can recognize that the article is making an invalid argument for an insane conclusion that obviously clashes with the evidence already provided in the very same article—and in the service of moral priorities that are vicious. But even beyond this, the problems with the article go much, much deeper.

The article is continually unclear about the exact targets of its complaints. Most of the discussion is ostensibly on drug use and/or addiction—but a ton of the article seems really to be complaining about homeless people (possibly even including homeless people who don’t use drugs). I have been simplifying my discussion for the sake of argument as if this were about “drug users” or possibly “addicted drug users,” but a great many aspects of the article simply cannot be interpreted other than being about homeless people.

This raises layer upon layer of issues that I haven't even touched on, all of which make the article worse and worse. Among other things, it raises the question of whether and how much homelessness in Portugal has increased, and why. Although I need to research this a lot more, there are all kinds of debates on the causal relation between homelessness and addiction. The article is clearly premised on the notion that addiction is pretty much the main cause of homelessness—despite the fact that any simple version of this theory cannot be true. The article avoids discussing any other contributors to homelessness.

This in turn is obviously an opportunity to discuss housing policy. I have many serious questions about all this, which I’ll need to research at length. But the article has no interest whatsoever in any of this—except to repeatedly encourage the reader to find homeless people scary and insinuate that the police should be given more power to arrest them en masse.

Yet more problems abound. The article continually casts aspersion against harm reduction services—without acknowledging (or, at most, barely acknowledging) that lots of research and health authorities support these services on the grounds of consistently positive evidence. No evidence or arguments are presented against harm reduction services, nor does the article directly condemn them—but it consistently depicts them negatively, largely using emotional rhetorical techniques.

Notably, the article provides no reason whatsoever to reconsider decriminalization. And, while I’ll need to look into the specifics more to say for sure, I don’t think there is any serious chance that its vaguely described “limited re-criminalization” has any merit.

I have many more complaints besides these, and a lot of possible elaboration on many of these. I have multiple complaints about nearly every paragraph. Nevertheless, by reading it I have gained a better sense of where I need to do more research into Portugal’s policy and society, especially over the last 15 years or so.