Sure, but that can be said of pretty much anything?
Communism works great on paper too, shame no one ever tried it, amirite?
This does seem to be a particularly terrible ‘implementation’ though.
The problem near as I can tell is that people are ignoring the very real needs of the majority to not be miserable, and actively guilting the majority (you’re not allowed to not like these things because that would mean you’re a bad person) and that is winding the spring for an authoritarian backlash which we’ve already seen get very scary.
People care about their emotions, and when pressed will do almost anything to protect them. Including having people March ‘bad people’ off to ovens as long as they can pretend they’re awesome in the process.
Trump gets so much traction for this very reason, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
A ‘good idea’ where it is impossible to implement well, but easy to pretend to implement - in terrible ways - is actually a really bad idea.
As is a good idea (somewhere/some other time!) that no one can actually afford/doesn’t fit the circumstances where we are at, but we do anyway.
That is what I’m referring to. Communism, as an example, has a terrible track record beyond smaller communes (about 50ish, it appears). Folks I’ve met who push it as a good idea, call the larger scale failures problems with the implementation. It wasn’t done right.
It is also of course a common strategy for folks who are ideologically opposed to a new idea to sabotage the actual implementation of that idea, then declare the whole idea terrible.
I don’t know enough about the behind the scenes situation with the Oregon decriminalization to know if the treatment/rehab part of the effort was sabotaged or not, or actually went as well as could be expected, etc.
But time to design it and ramp it up, or evaluating if it would even produce useful/good outcomes or would even be effective (and what to do if it wasn’t) clearly wasn’t provided in the measure.
If they’re even now struggling to even get it ramped up, then that falls solidly under one of those three categories IMO. Feel free to pick which one.
Notably, these are the same issues that SF has been having with homelessness and drug use, among many other places.
