Obsolete Architecture

The ACLU of old is, alas, no more.  Gone is the organization so passionately devoted to civil liberties that it paid for a team of Jewish lawyers to defend literal Nazis’ right to free speech; in its place is an organ of the Democratic party whose main concern is keeping its cash flow as high as possible by parroting its primary donors’ beliefs (often in childish tweets repeating some a priori statement in all caps, over and over, without a word of justification), and never ever ever challenging those beliefs, no matter how anti-civil-rights and factually wrong they may be.  So it was unsurprising when they recently tweeted the silly rhetorical question, “Prisons and jails aren’t drug rehab centers, so why does our country use them as such?”  The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t; it uses them as cages to lock people up for the “sin” of drug use, so as to “correct” them.  The newer model of drug use as “disease” has been overlaid on the old “vice” model, but has not replaced it, just as newer brain architecture has overlaid but not replaced the old architecture of emotions, instincts, etc.  The same process is visible in cops vomiting out the new “whore as victim” rhetoric while still actually enacting the old “whore as criminal” model.  It’s what happens when a system is bad at phasing out obsolete processes, such as the ACLU being unwilling to change its name despite the fact that it no longer has very much concern for civil liberties.