Category: philosophy

Opiates of the Masses

Posted in morality, nature, perception, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, religionTagged , , , , , , , 1 Comment

No, really.

Memories are fallible. I’d thought I had written on this topic of opiates and public policy at length. And perhaps I have. Just not here. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Searching my blog for my take on opiates, I find that I cite Marx’s ‘Religion is the opiate of the masses‘, four times—make that five. But nothing more.

Carl Hart recently published a book on his heroin use—Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. By some accounts, Carl might appear to be the stereotypical heroin addict in the United States. Well, he’s black, so there’s that. But that’s where the stereotype ends.

Carl Hart is a professor of neuroscience in the psychology department of Ivy League, Columbia University—at least before he published his book. I’ve not read his book, but at my blog I’ve provided a link to the Guardian article, which prompted this post.

The gist I get from having read the Atlantic article is that the public health narrative surrounding heroin and other illicit drugs is akin to the hype of the days when Reefer Madness was all the moral outrage. And make no mistake—this outrage has everything to do with moral one-upmanship and nothing to do with health outcomes. This is pure and simple cultural performativism signalling the higher ground one occupies. As is common enough, many people have actually internalised their misinformation and disinformation to the point they truly believe there is a medical basis to their belief systems. If they are at all introspective, they would see that morals and Calvinism have nothing to do with this purported health care policy. It’s a seemingly reasonable, logical place to arrive. No emotional element is necessary.

But allow me to step back for a moment. Am I saying that there are no possible harmful effect for consuming drugs and other chemicals? No. Am I claiming that no one has ever died as a result of chemical intoxication or overdose? No, again. Am I saying that drug abuse does not incapacitate some people? Nope. I am saying none of the above. I am claiming that hyperbole abounds, the causal connection is overattributed, and cofactors are ignored in favour of an orthodox etiology.

For the record, I am a teetotaler. I do not abuse or even use chemicals referred to as drugs—illicit or otherwise. I don’t drink alcohol, don’t smoke cigarettes. I don’t even drink coffee or covfefe. I do drink Coca Cola, so my big vice in this regard is caffeine. Even rarely do I take ibuprofen or acetaminophen.

As I note in my Defence of Capitalism post, it’s difficult to get good second-hand information of illicit drugs. The medical-industrial complex and the official police state peddle fear and disinformation. Whether they believe the information they dispense is true or not is irrelevant. What is important is the low truth content. It makes one wonder what to trust and what not to when these agencies routinely propagate falsehoods and misrepresent truth.

This misrepresentation isn’t limited to opiates. I found it interesting when Michael Phelps won gold at the Olympics, only to announce that he was the consummate pothead, and smoking weed was part of his daily routine. Here’s what the official Olympics website says about him, by the time he retired at Rio 2016 at the age of 31, Michael Phelps had collected a total of 23 golds, three silvers and two bronzes at the Olympics, a record-breaking haul that looks unlikely to be bettered for many years to come. So much for the lazy stoner stereotype. As marijuana becomes more accepted by mainstream culture, we come to notice that many of the so-called mental health issues were just fabricated. The purpose was to shroud a moral argument in medical legitimacy. Whether the healthcare industry was complicit or it was the law enforcement regime gone rogue is a separate question. Yet again, it undermines the legitimacy of any claims.

In 2020, the world encountered the Coronavirus, COVID-19. And medical expertise, particularly around immunology and the spread of pathogens, came into question. In the United States and United Kingdom, their misinformation was further exacerbated by administrations hostile to science. But given the history of misinformation for political purposes, it may be premature to blame the general public for being reluctant to trust the alarms. They’ve created the classic Boy Who Cried Wolf scenario. And so the question becomes what health information can one trust? And who is the authoritative source?

Listen to this as a podcast on Spotify

Defence of Capitalism

Posted in philosophy, prostitutionTagged , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Product markets don’t function the way we’re taught.

Wearing my economist’s hat, I have issues with arguments advanced attempting to defend Capitalism. Technically, Capitalism is a system of production and not one of distribution, but idiomatically, people conflate it with a market system. Ignoring that modern economic systems use markets, I am commenting in this idiomatic sense. 

I’m not sure why some of us economists are intrigued with how the market works for drugs and prostitution, I have this in common with Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics, still a decent book.

Rather than focus on prostitution‘s service market, I prefer to attend to drugs and the product market. I’ll showcase how unregulated markets don’t work per textbook and Libertarian lore. Heroin and fentanyl make for a perfect use case.

BACKGROUND 

Fentanyl (AKA fetty) is sold retail through independent distributors. As is typical, each link in the chain takes a cut, selling for a higher unit price to capture margin. All of this is textbook behaviour. 

On the city streets, dealers sell to caseworkers, who sell to block boys. There are also watchers, an overhead expense that we’ll ignore. They represent a typical SG&A function. I’ll return to the distribution chain in a moment. 

Product is sold to dealers as weight. This might be kilos or ounces. I’m not sure they are so concerned with whether they use the metric or imperial system of measure.

Weight is a wholesale activity. Retail units are bags and bundles. Maybe logs. Bags are the smallest unit. It’s around 10mcg to 30mcg.1 A person is likely to consider a bag or even a half a dose. Some people will purchase a bag or two at a time. Heroin and fentanyl bags are the same size. They are waxed paper bags about 30mm wide by 3cm tall. These are typically folded in thirds an inserted into little zipper locked bags—like tiny sandwich bags.

Tiny Sandwich Bags

If you are buying irregularly or up to maybe 4 or 5 bundles at a time, you are most likely buying from the block—block boys. This is a cash and carry business. First come, first serve. A block is a small city block—a territory on one street from one cross-street to the next. Cross the street, and you are in a new territory. Turn the corner, and you’re in a new territory. And territories serve particular brands. More on this later, but you don’t go to the Gucci block to buy Chanel.

As a buyer, you have some freedom to select a block where you are trusted (mostly just not to be a cop or a snitch), but there is some rivalry, so if a seller on block A sees you buying from block B, it may pose problems if you later try to buy from A. Although these block boys are competing for your business, by and large they know each other. It’s like if the Kellogg’s guy runs into the General Mills guy whilst stocking in the cereal aisle. As long as you aren’t using the other’s allocated shelf space, you’re fine. No knives. No gunfights. It’s all good.

Bag of Heroin Compared with a US Penny

The price of fentanyl varies wildly by location. As of now, a bag of powder retails at between $5 and $10. The closer one is to a distribution hub, the cheaper. In Philadelphia, $5 is the norm. In Wilmington, Delaware, $10 is typical. Further south in Dover, one might pay as high as $20. The supply chain takes its toll. Supply and demand are at work as advertised, so we’re still operating in textbook territory. 

Bags are aggregated into bundles, which may range between 14 and 16 bags.2 Ten bundles compromise a log. 

Whilst for some users a bag or a portion is sufficient, tolerance is an issue. In order to feel the same effects, users need to increase their doses. Some users need to dose 7 or more bags.

Bags of Fentanyl Representing Various Stamps

For entry-level users, fentanyl is a relatively cheap high. A dose lasts about 4 hours. Heroin lasts about 8. For addicts, there’s a notable downside: withdrawal. Withdrawal symptoms are flu-like. They get worse before they get better, addicts prefer to remain dosed prior to they become symptomatic.  For the typical addict, the struggle is real.

For a person using half a bag every hour a day, the cost would be a manageable $30 a day. For the 7 to 8 bag user, they are looking at about 3 bundles a day, which might cost between $70 to $120 apiece, so between $210 and $360 a day. Putting 2 + 2 together,  you might realise how addiction and prostitutes arrive hand in hand. This is not an activity for minimum wage workers, especially when the dose ratchets up.

A Couple Bundles and a Bag of Fentanyl with Hot Water Stamp

What happened to the economic angle? It turns out that there are several product issues. On the street, brand matters…sort of. Fentanyl brands are known as stamps. Bags are stamped to indicate the source. And this is the first deviation from textbook theory. 

Brand names became prominent in the 19th century with bulk goods. When purchasing oatmeal from the general store, the consumer would gain confidence in the product based on the brand. Brand marketing has become fundamental to modern commerce.

Quaker Oats Brand Label circa 1906

A problem with brand stamps is that they are not reliable product indicators. They are more indicative of the retail seller than the source. It would be like visiting Walmart and buying Walmart oatmeal, but it reveals nothing of the quality. As street fetty is cut with tranquilisers (tranq) or other cheaper ingredients and fetty actually relates to a class of drugs as opposed to a specific chemical formula, the quality varies from 0 per cent fetty to something less than 100 per cent, as 100 per cent would not be typically found on the streets, primarily owing to margin requirements. Most users I’ve encountered are fine with the tranq admixture. In practice, people have their preferred tranq and ratio. Of course, this quality is subject to variation, too. Because of the aforementioned withdrawal issues, if there is not an adequate dose of fetty, the batch will not stop or reverse the withdrawal symptoms.

Unlike a brand label that a box of Raisin Bran cereal you just purchased contains Raisin Bran, a common analogy might be that one day you buy a box of Raisin Bran but discover when you consume it that you’ve been served Captain Crunch instead. Alternatively, when you arrive to make your purchase, your boy tells you that no one has Raisin Bran, but Captain Crunch is the same thing (I swear). 

A Tale of Two Cereals

Apart from quality, there is no weights and measures oversight. I’ve read that a bag of fetty weighs around 100mg to 300mg, but I can’t substantiate this. However, I have it by a trusted account that the weight ranges wildly from 0mg to something more—let’s say 300mg to be generous.

If this occurred in the regulated world, a person might return the product for a refund or exchange. This is not an option on the block.

Unlike a brand label that the 400g  box of Raisin Bran cereal you just purchased contains 400g of Raisin Bran, a common analogy might be that on one day you buy a 400g box of Raisin Bran, but instead of getting this quantity of Raisin Bran, you discover you’ve only got 350g of Raisin Bran—or maybe 350g box of Captain Crunch. If this occurred in the regulated world, a person might return the product for a refund or exchange. This is not an option on the block. And with the various dilution schemes, you might end up with salted Raisin Bran. No returns. No refunds.

In the regulated world, if Walmart is unreliable, you can go to go to Safeway instead. But in this unregulated world, Safeway is just as unreliable. The street can only sell what it has access to, and if they receive a batch of something unexpected, they still need to unload it. The TV and movies make it seem like these guys are quality control freaks, but they are all bottom feeders.

Punchline

The Libertarian wet dream is that markets are self-regulating and bad actors will be forced out of business. The drug trade demonstrates this not to be true.

1 I am not sure of the actual weights, as I’ve never weighed any. The information available on the Internet conflicts.

2 I’ve read that in some places, a bundle is 10 and the next larger portion is a brick, but this is not the case in the greater Philadelphia area. Much I’ve read on law enforcement sites does not reflect my experience, not does the information on official medical sites, so I question the veracity of the information being fed to the public. It feels like there is more morality shaming than science. More on this in a separate post.

Racism is Null

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , 10 Comments

I recently engaged in a conversation about racism, and I won’t bore you with the larger debate. Instead, I’ll bore you with two threads.

  1. Taxonomically, modern humans have only one race
  2. Constructively, race is used as a proxy to otherwise justify otherness

Taxonomically, Homo sapiens is the species, and we so-called modern humans are Homo sapiens sapiens, which is an extended subspecies…and extended at that, perhaps a sub-subspecies.

    Definitionally, race is an alternative name for a sub-subspecies, so technically, our current instantiation of humanity, version X.whatever, can be considered a race. However, as there are no extant human subspecies, there is clearly no need for racial delineation. The best we can muster is to say we’ve reserved a placeholder in the taxonomy.

    To expand, in this taxonomy, Neanderthal and Australopithecus were competing species. Homo sapiens sapiens is meant to differentiate so-called modern humans from prior Homo sapins idaltu, from which we branched.

    The summary is that there is no other extant parallel species to Homo sapiens and (clearly) no parallel subspecies to Homo sapiens sapiens.

    Yet racists need races to operate on, and unless they are railing about races within other species, they’ve got no dog in this race. What to do?

    How does one not only construct races where none exist but also convince others that this delineation is de facto race, if not de jure?

    Colour and relatively recent geographical origin serve as good-enough proxies to differentiate classes under the guise of race. They create specious backstories et voilà.

    As most people are decidedly neither scientific nor inquisitive, this is an easy feat. And it provides a sort of gossamer other against which to rail. This structure is so permeable, people have tossed religious affiliation into the mix with barely anyone noticing because race is just a code word for otherness.

    The question becomes: how does one fight against something that doesn’t actually exist and whose definition morphs and adapts more readily than a virus?

    DISCLAIMER: This post was written on my mobile, so it may have more flaws than usual. I reserve the right to edit it substantially when I have access to a full-size keyboard and monitor.

    Disintegration Street

    Posted in language, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , 3 Comments

    Riffing on my recent post, I wanted to provide a tab more perspective on my claim that postmodernism serves a purely disintegrative function. Anyone can disintegrate a narrative into constituent parts, but postmodernism provides no grounds for privileged reintegration, as this too can be disintegrated. So, whilst one is free to disintegrate and even to reassemble the parts, one is never in a position to claim that this is how it should be put together because this privileges the subject and another subject can always come along and privilege another perspective. Also, there is no PoMo toolkit available to reassemble the parts that I am aware of.

    When I was a child, a neighbour owned and operating a demolition company. He disintegrated buildings. He kept some of the materials and sold some other for scrap. Whilst these materials could be repurposed and used in the construction of another building—or a picnic table—, this was not the function of the demolition company. It’s safe to say that no one was ringing him up under the premise that he had tools, so why won’t he build them a house. He knows houses, right?

    This is the same problem we face when deconstructing a narrative with postmodern tools. If we want to construct something, we can, but we should expect that no matter what we do, the next wave can readily knock it down. And though we can rebuild more castles made of sand, they are all subject to the same forces.


    * I admit that this title was lent from The Cure’s Fascination Street, which does happen to be on their album Disintegration.

    The Cure – Fascination Street video

    Conceptual Abstraction

    Posted in language, morality, perception, philosophyTagged , , , , , , 2 Comments
    Shared Concept Image

    I tend to go on about weasel words and the insufficiency of language, but I tend to get a lot of resistance by people who insist the chasm isn’t as expansive as I make it out to be. This makes me wonder how one might create a test to determine how much is similar and how much doesn’t.

    To summarise my position, abstract concepts of this type are specious archetypes that cannot exist in the real world: truth, justice, freedom, fairness, and so on. The common thread here is almost always that they exist in the realm of morality, another false concept.

    It seems to me that one could construct a sort of word cloud intersecting with a Venn diagramme. I’d assume that more articulate people would have more descriptors, thereby creating landscape with more details and nuance for any given concept.

    Additionally, I could see a third dimension which would capture diametric meanings. There is also the issue of diverse contexts, e.g. in the case of justice, we have distributive, retributive, restorative, and procedural flavours, so one would need to be taken into account.

    In everyday existence, I notice that these terms are good enough and have enough substance to trick people into believing not only that it’s real but that the are operating with a shared concept. My point is that it’s more apples and oranges. We could employ dimensions that make these appear to be similar.

    • Approximate spheroids
    • Fruits
    • Contain fruits
    • Have skin

    Additional scrutiny would illustrate the differences.

    • Colour
    • Taste
    • Consistency

    This difference between this concrete case is that we can observe the objects to compare and contrast, but with abstractions, we have a sort of survivorship bias in play. We remember what we agree on and forget or diminish the parts we don’t agree on. And we don’t necessarily even know the complete inventory of descriptors of our counterparts.

    The image at the top of the page is not to scale. I don’t know what the percent breakdowns are, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in a situation where there were 10 possible descriptors, that only 4 would be commonly shared—so 40 per cent—, leaving 6 not in common—60 per cent.

    In any case, I wonder if anyone has attempted this sort of inventory comparison. I haven’t even looked, do there could be tome upon tome published, but I don’t suppose so.

    Foucault Identity

    Posted in identity, morality, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

    ‘Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: Leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.’

    —Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language

    I am going to take liberal liberty with Foucault’s quote. This is another take on Heraclites’ ‘never the same man, never the same river’ quote. It can be taken as a commentary on identity and impermanence. Effectively, he is taking the position that the concept of identity is a silly question, so don’t bother asking about it. Then he defers to people who insist on it anyway.

    To be fair, creating a sort of contiguous identity does simplify things and creates categorical conveniences.

    Vendor: ‘Wasn’t it you who purchased that from me and promised to pay with future payments?‘

    Zen: ‘There is no future. There is only now. And I am not the same person who purchased your car.‘

    Perhaps this is where the saying, ‘Possession is 9/10 of the law‘, a nod to temporal presentism.

    In any case, some systems are predicated on their being identity, so a person benefiting from that system will insist on the notion of identity.

    Clearly, I’m rambling in a stream of consciousness, and it occurs to me that Blockchain offers a solution to identity, at least conceptually. In the case of Blockchain, one can always audit the contents of the past in the moment. And so it carries the past into the now.

    If one were able to capture into an archive every possible historical interaction down to the smallest unit of space-time—neutral incident recording, indexing and retrieval challenges notwithstanding—, one could necessarily attribute the record with the person, so long as they are otherwise inseparable. (We’re all well-aware of the science fiction narrative where a person’s history or memory is disassociated, so there is that.)

    Anyway, I’ve got other matters to tend to, but now this is a matter of historical record…

    Trolly Dilemma

    Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , 5 Comments

    Tom Guald wants us to imagine a different trolly dilemma but with a different pair of options. Or is that the telephone game?

    https://www.newscientist.com/article/2266041-tom-gaulds-runaway-lobster-telephone-problem/

    This image speaks for itself, so I won’t editorialise at the moment, save to mention that I find the scenario to be hilarious. If you like eating cooked lobster, I suppose that the elephant path makes the most sense—and of course, the elephant is already on fire.

    What would you do?

    All Claims Are Equal

    Posted in language, perception, philosophy, politicsTagged , , Leave a comment

    One of the most prominent strawman attacks of postmodernism and of relativism more generally is the statement countering the claim that all claims are equal.

    I know of no one outside those attacking the claim believe this. I’ll give a couple of examples to illustrate why the attack is preposterous — a culinary case and a socio-political case.

    The Proof is in the Pudding

    Visit a recipe site, and search for macaroni cheese recipes. You’ll get hundreds if not thousands of recipes. Are they all equal? No. It depends on your tastes and preferences…even your audience. There are variations in the type of pasta, the type or types of cheese, whether to add additional ingredients, whether to prepare on the range or baked in the oven, and so on.

    For your children, a prêt-à-manger out of the box preparation as opposed to the Gruyère and truffles verion you’re reserving for your next soirée.

    Is there a best recipe? No. There are only preferences.

    Is there an objectively best recipe? No. There are only preferences.

    Can I create any recipe? No. Read on.

    And they called it macaroni…

    To have a recipe qualify as mac & cheese, there are at least to requirements for inclusion into the domain: Macaroni (or any pasta product or substitute) and cheese (ditto but with cheese products). I’m only pretty sure that no one countering that relativists claim that everything is equal is also arguing that one can make mac & cheese with, say, tacks and bricks. So, one has to question either the intelligence or the integrity of someone assuming someone else would defend this argument. Context matters. And just the choice of a contextual boundary is subjective (and relative).

    Good Enough for the Government?

    This works for recipes, but what about for government? Obviously Democracy is the best possible form of government because reasons, duh. And people. And agency. And other words I can imagine and associate in my defence.

    As with mac & cheese, we need a defined purpose. The problem is that there are not only different purposes, there are different actors, each with their own needs and desires.

    At no time is anyone arguing that public policy created by a council of gerbils is the same as that of people or or some artificial intelligence, just as no one is proposing that we throw mac & cheese against a wall in the manner or reading entrails to arrive at a meaningful end. Though, to be fair, given some policy choices I’ve seen, I might have voted for the mac & cheese method.

    So, what are you trying to say?

    By now a reader should have disavowed the notion that relativists do not recognise domain boundaries. It could be very legitimate for a non-relativist (objectivist?) to call something out as having improper domain boundaries, whether over-specified, under-specified, or just mis-specified, but that’s not the same claim.

    A person may justifiably make the claim that such a such is not valid because it does not account for some other absent cohort. Perhaps it leaves out the dead or the unborn, or the animals, or the broader biosphere, if only by proxy. This is not to say that this would be easy or convenient, but it is certainly rational.

    Most implemented government systems not only privilege humans over everything else, it virtually excludes everything else. But this is not the main point, which is that if a place and people have a functioning form of government, whether it is better or worse is up to the participants to decide, and there is not likely to be a consensus view. It should always be expected that there will be detractors for any number of reasons. There may be large contingencies of detractors. It could easily be that a government is divided into two worldviews, as in the United States, Canada, and the UK — each side claiming that they’ve got the solution, each side denying relativism in order to defend their version of truth.

    Design and Purpose

    Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

    This viral TikTok by @viral_actor demonstrates with humour how designs and purposes don’t always coincide. The narrative of the clip is that the woman on the left designed a shape sorting toy. Metaphorically, we could assume that the design is the user interface for some software application or game.

    The tester, in the right frame, ‘tests’ the interface. One way of testing is to provide the tester with a purpose and little else, as this is how much people will approach a new product. It’s quite likely that the instruction was to put the shapes into the bin. The design, on the other hand, was supposed to pair a unique avenue for each block shape (in a particular orientation) with each opening through which to insert the shape.

    Let’s be clear, the user who inserts the blocks ‘incorrectly’ relative to the design is doing nothing wrong (morally or kinetically). The problem is that the designer had an intent in mind and didn’t consider full domain of possibilities. This interface design can be improved to solve for the unique 1:1 piece-hole relationship. In fact, the testing feedback provides input for an engineering—or interface design—solution.

    The tester, having been giving the task of putting blocks in a bin might be justified in entertaining the belief that the best design might have been a lidless bin—or that a single hole would have sufficed.

    In this case, the video producer is employing humour, so we can ignore that an adult is not likely to be the target audience would probably be infants or to test persons for visual-spatial perception. If this is the case, the tester group should necessarily be infants. Below, we can see a similar problem, again using humour.

    The parents are overjoyed to see their infant distracted by the hanging mobile. Little did they anticipate the enduring trauma it would commence.

    Most people with experience in the design space have seen many of these design faux pas. Here are some design-experience chestnuts. Notice the common thread. It’s also good to remember our maths lessons: The shortest distance between two points is a straight line—as evidenced axiomatically by the hypotenuse is the square root of the sum of the squares, and so will always be shorter for any right angle (and even this slightly obtuse rendition). Thanks for that, Pythagoras.

    Next, we have evidence that a designer created a barrier against bicycle traffic. To be fair, it did deter bicycle traffic from that path, but somehow I don’t think that was the sole intent. I’ll also imagine that the designed footpath route is as well travelled as the alternate path.

    Design versus Experience
    Please Use Sidewalk

    For the image above, it seems that the path traversers (users) should put up their own sign, but for now they protest performatively.

    Below, we see an intentional and mostly effective design meant to keep bicycle riders off of this footbridge.

    None Shall Pass

    One final note is to illustrate the difference between user interface design (UI) and user experience design. At teh top, we see two catsup (ketchup?) bottles. The traditional design on the left opens at the top and would not balance well upside down. On the right, the bottle opens down, and it sets well in this orientation. (To be fair, I’ve stored the top-right bottle upside down in my fridge, so perhaps a visual signal, say a narrower top, might obviate this habit.

    At the bottom, we see the experiential result of the interface design: The age-old challenge of getting the product out of the bottle on the left versus the instance on the right. It also appears that the narrow top of the left design was intentional to slow the flow, so perhaps widening the aperture may have countered that requirement. The righthand design does have an even smaller aperture, but the egress is broader until that point, and the orientation must compensate for it.

    We’ve also seen this design carry over to shampoo bottles.

    So there you have it…

    In the name of the law…

    Posted in identity, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

    A brief change of pace…

    We’re all familiar with the scenario: a representative from law enforcement appears at a door and flashes a badge or an ID. It’s in most of the police movies. A gaggle of people in official-looking uniforms. One of them pulls out a warrant, and they make their way into the residence. You still with me?

    Here’s the rub? How does one know with any degree of certainty higher than blind faith?

    Do you know what an ‘official’ badge or ID looks like? How do you know it’s not counterfeit? 

    Do you even know what a search warrant looks like? It’s signed, do you know the person it’s signed by? Perhaps it’s a judge. Is the warrant real or fake? What about the uniforms or official-looking vehicles? 

    Indoctrination and cognitive dissonance are key factors

    The answer is most people would have no idea. Indoctrination and cognitive dissonance are key factors. In movies, apart from the documentation, there’s the intimidation factor. And maybe guns for full effect.

    To be sure, people have performed variations of this script, and they’ve been punked. So, the question remains: How can one tell? And when does when get to call bullshit?

    And what are the down sides?  If these cats are legit, and after the bullying and indignity, you’ll probably be facing accusations of obstruction or resisting. Of course, you’ll be justified, but justification is asymmetrical and out of your favour. The house holds the advantage, and you aren’t the house.

    But let’s pretend that justice is symmetrical and does have meaning beyond its application as a power tool, how far would one need to go to be sure?

    Take the case of the warrant signed by a judge. S/he shows up in person and says, ‘Yup. I signed that warrant’. Has that gotten you anywhere? Probably not. You don’t know this person, and you have no way of evaluating the authenticity of the claim. Does it take the governor? The president? The head of the UN? 

    And even if you trust the entire process thus far, what say do you have in justifying the merit of issuance of the warrant? 

    Well, that was something…