Rather than just help them (which is cheaper btw) they take services away from everyone in an attempt to make their area shitty enough they’ll go somewhere else…
Completely ignoring that they’re making it shitty for the people they want to keep too, which makes people want to leave and depressed selling prices, which can easily lead to a panic and flight from an area destroying the community.
Even from a purely selfish capitalistic perspective, it’s best to just have a fucking safety net. Beyond all the ethical reasons we should, there’s not a single logical reason not to fucking help people.
But have you considered that maybe my good and just God has given me a mission to make everyone else suffer?
I’m sure it’s written somewhere in the bible. Idk I’ve never read it.
No? Have a safety net? The more that die, the more theoretical wealth becomes available to them. Even if it’s homeless.
It reaches the same goal for them. That’s why it’s selfish and capitalistic, it works. It just sacrifices everything that isn’t I. It’s that doomer mentality, of why bother helping. world’s dog shit, so be dog shit.
Live your life one of two ways, how the world wants or how you want the world to be.
I want this world to be better, so I do what I can to make it how I wish it was. Trying to quit a weed addiction, so I do small shit like not litter butts, or pick up garbage I think might be cool, help animals in danger, do something when you can.
Just talk. Capitalists however profit from any social benefits because they’re pathetic cowards that need daddy’s wallets until they’re decrepit middle age men.
Ps. This is just something that makes me feel special and I don’t have many friends. The other day on the train an old black guy and an old white guy were talking about how the world is ass. There hasn’t been a good president since George Washington, not the time to enlist cause what are we fighting for. I was tired, but eventually asked why is now the wrong time if tomorrow is worse. There’s never a good time, because you aren’t trying. Anyways, an EVEN older black man standing next to me says, something about back in his day even hoodrats tried to help. Everyone was quite.
The problem is that when you do help people, more people keep showing up who want help too. There’s a good reason why a couple hundred thousand migrants have come to NYC (where I live) and that isn’t because there’s no “fucking safety net”. Frankly, I want less of a safety net here so that these people leave and the rest of the country has to do its share. I feel absolutely no guilt saying that I want either those benches a person can’t lie down on or no benches at all in the public areas I go to.
There are help-the-homeless-even-more advocates in NYC so I’m not saying everyone is a hypocrite, but I expect that the overlap between “complains about measures to deter homeless people” and “lives in a neighborhood with a lot of homeless people” is small.
The problem is that when you do help people, more people keep showing up who want help too.
Which is why if it happens on a federal level, then people don’t congregate in the few places that aren’t as worse as possible.
If we handle it on a city or even state level, then people spit out by the worst states will always migrate, subsidizing the cost of the policies for those shitty states. And providing the incentive to be as cruel as possible.
That’s the thing with the logic against it, you end up arguing that it should be done on a federal level and agreeing with the person you’re arguing with.
Always worth the time for a reply tho. Hopefully it sticks.
I agree that it should happen on a federal level, although I don’t think it will as long as cities like New York and San Francisco are paying for it. I’m arguing against people who think that New York and San Francisco shouldn’t be creating any public areas that aren’t for homeless people.
There’s always some place that’s worse. What you’re arguing for here is a race to the bottom, where everyone tries to be worse than their neighbours in order to get the undesirables to go there instead.
In essentially “the tragedy of the commons” but in an opposite sense. If everyone gets worse in an attempt to get rid of “undesirables”, you just end up with everywhere being worse, and the “undesirables” still being around. What we need is for everyone to build safety nets together. That might actually improve the situation.
I recognize that this is a tragedy-of-the-commons scenario (although if everywhere is worse then at least people will stop coming from other countries to be homeless in the USA) but local action can’t prevent the race. It can only determine winners and losers.
You’re pathetic. I hope that if you ever need help, you never get it either. Absolutely pitiful.
“Pitiful” implies that people would have sympathy for me. I think the word “despicable” might better express what you intend.
Do you know how much your government spends on helping private companies, instead?
They keep dealing with the symptoms of the problem but never the root of the problem.
Namely the weak, cowardly, ignorant, parasitic minority of wealthy idiots that want to horde the wealth of the world for their own short insignificant lives.
The 90s in the USA were a simpler time, but some folks got it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs-O4k9jZzE
You should really read the politics section for John Popper’s Wikipedia page.
Oh… Oh no… Really?
Edit: I could have lived with it except for endorsing gwb. You don’t get to call yourself a libertarian and sign off on gitmo and patriot act. Those are like the difference between being problematic but principled ass and just an ass.
Bulldoze the community garden
And replace it with glass
Well duh. If people start gathering in public and talking to each other with a modicum of comfort, they might get thoughts in their heads
And thoughts lead to actions!
And you know what’s an action? Addressing the wage gap!
We must stop that!
To add another layer: allowing homelessness is one of the most widespread and visible acts of violence perpetrated by the state, supported by the market, and accepted-- or at least tolerated-- by most of the public. I wonder if institutions don’t address it because scares people into obedience.
Reflect on the focus of violence in stories about slavery. Hypothetically, without violence, slavery is still awful: robbing a human of their autonomy, spending their lives bettering the lot of those in power rather than their own. But we focus on the violence, not only because of the obvious, visible horror, but because you can’t rob someone of their autonomy without violence.
When it comes to homelessness, the violent act is not only inaction: failing to address risks and pitfalls, or add safety nets (focusing on growth, instead), but also what your original post is about: removing public facilities, forcing people to play the line-go-up game in order to have nice things, lest they have a string of bad luck and end up on the street, exposed to the elements.
The state and market didn’t cause the blizzard that may kill unhoused people, but they did nothing to try to get them out of its path. Isn’t that the purpose of these institutions? Yet homelessness is everywhere and it makes being unemployed all the more terrifying-- to be that much closer to the streets. “Better to take what you can get,” participate in an unjust market or it could be you.
It’s kind of crazy how swiftly Occupy was wiped off the zeitgeist. A key cultural event of the 2010s gone as if it never happened.
Far more often than not, even bloody revolutions do not achieve their goals, or lead to merely cosmetic and/ or short-lived changes. E.g. Kent Gang Deng investigated 269 major peasant rebellions over 2106 years of Chinese history. Guess how many of these actually rewrote history in any way, shape or form.
Recently, I’ve been reading several interesting pieces on the “Occupy” movement, the related G20 and other protests in the Western world, dating back as far as the 1960s. The bottom line being: asking nicely for some minimum demands that even conservative politicians can get behind, like capping CEOs’ wages, will not get the job done. In fact, some of the powers that be can use it for their internal power struggles and to show it off as a sort of legitimization folklore. “See how democratic we are? We even have protesters in little tents! Don’t worry, they aren’t hurting anyone.”
All hope is not lost, though, if new protest modalities can be found.
I’m currently on vacation in California at an outdoor mall. I’m squat/sitting on a tiny piece of concrete that’s like 8” off the ground and am so mad that I can relate to this picture. Why the fuck can’t we just have benches!?!
That would provide homeless people with 1 possible point of comfort, can’t have that.
Is that why we hate Soviet housing so much, because it gave the homeless dignity, shelter and comfort?
Pretty much it, yeah. Capitalism is fundamentally evil and they’ve spent so many decades now projecting all of its flaws on to any society that tries to work to a brighter future.
I thought we hated it because they were all ugly monotonous blocks with often pretty bad apartment layouts, often used to import a bunch of Russian workers to an existing city to slowly replace the local culture. But maybe that’s just me.
That’s not to say I don’t like the idea of everyone having housing, or even the idea of big apartment buildings. Just make them not look like prisons ffs. And put elevators in 5 story and lower buildings too. The soviet 5 story apartment buildings at least in my country never had elevators, so they were like a big F U for disabled people, as you couldn’t even get to the first floor without taking the stairs. Disabled people could only live in the bigger ones.
I’m visiting Naples at the moment with my Italian boyfriend, and I remarked to him that Naples has a lot of places that people can just hang out without spending money, something that the UK has lost. Part of this is due to the climate, but also corporatism hasn’t hit Italy as hard as other western countries. It really is a shame.
corporatism hasn’t hit Italy as hard as other western countries
