Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
I currently reside in a city that has a homelessness rate similar to SF. While there are some really unhinged characters, the vast majority are merely visibly homeless (which, I will grant, still puts people off - most people don't like being accosted by scruffy strangers asking for money). Cheap housing won't transform them into model citizens, but it will get them off the street and facilitate enforcement against the more genuinely anti-social. I don't know, maybe the SF vagrants are built different.
Perhaps more importantly, it alters the homelessness-generating function. As mentioned, WV is dirt poor and full of addicts, but they are able to die of a fentanyl overdose in the comfort of their own living room, because housing in WV is cheap enough that even a marginally employed fent addict can afford a place to live. If the current crop of homeless contains a large share of people who are unfixable to the degree the only real choice for them is whether or not their cell has padding, preventing more people from ending up in that circumstance is a major part of actually fixing the problem.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
SF is more or less the poster child for "I will do anything to end homelessness but build more housing". It's not surprising that their spending on homelessness has failed to resolve the issue when they've made only the most tepid efforts to actually house the homeless rather than just ameliorate their conditions.
Housing isn't the problem. Drugs are the problem.
Drugs aren't the problem. They're a problem, but West Virginia has one of the highest drug overdose rates and lowest homelessness rates (this pattern is true in weaker forms across the rest of Appalachia and parts of the Midwest).
Skibboleth
10mo ago
Probably not. The vast majority of homeless people became homeless in their current locale, which suggests the relationship is people move to attractive location => housing costs go up => some segment of the population that wasn't at risk of becoming homeless now is => individual episodes of misfortune amongst the now-larger at-risk population lead to more homeless people.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
quoth someone from elsewhere:
The tribesman doesn't experience autonomy in ANY of their relationships. The tribesman don't choose the group, he belongs to it. To that person, freedom is not the autonomy of the individual, it's the autonomy of THEIR group from outside forces. "Freedom from Washington DC" is a concept that makes perfect sense to them, "Freedom from church" is a non-concept. When they say "Freedom to live my life" or "freedom to live without government interference," they're not talking about letting their neighbor be gay. They're talking about "leave me and my tribe alone."
Many (though certainly not all) conservatives are operating in this mindset. Your freedom to watch porn/do drugs/be gay/generally not conform to societal expectations is not only of no interest to them, it is an active threat to their freedom to live in a society ordered to their preferences. Some will even make the case that these things are not Real Freedom ("I must tell you, That their Liberty and Freedom, consists in having of Government; those Laws, by which their Life and their Gods may be most their own.")
The fundamental problem with "liberty orientation" as a framework is that liberty means different, contradictory things to different people. Most everybody agrees that your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, but once we move from metaphor to application things almost immediately lose clarity.
Think of all the other subpopulations for which progressives write highly specific codes of etiquette. 10 Things Not to Say to Pregnant Women. 15 Common Microaggressions Against AAPI. Now imagine that these codes are replaced by Grandma's simpler, more scalable etiquette that recognizes where respectful behavior truly originates: not in feelings, but in habit and training.
If I were to be a touch ungenerous, I would say that these things emerge because many of their writers and audience are incredibly socially awkward and lack the sensitivity or experience to intuit appropriate behavior. And not just for what they might do/say, but for what other might do/say to them. If I were to be less generous, I would say that these things emerge because some people are looking for an excuse to get offended. If I were to be more generous, I would say that these things emerge because many people were not socialized into a culture of dignity and courtesy. Or the socialization didn't take, or carried with it an unspoken assumption that these standards of behavior only applied to the right sort of people. It is certainly not difficult to find people who openly delight in meanness (especially online, where a lot of our instinctive filters aren't functioning).
(If I were to be honest, I think all three of these things are true simultaneously).
None of the ideas you describe as "Miss Manners" etiquette are alien to my or most of my midwestern middle-class millennial peers (though I would hazard to guess we all picked it up from our parents rather than writing). However, I think you are right in saying that there is an effort to promote sentiments rather than behaviors. The goal is to get past polite toleration (which very much has its limits, as you note) and into actual acceptance. We might not call someone a fat fuck to their face, but as you also note there are a thousand little social indicators that being fat Not OK. And now apply the same concerns to, e.g. LBGT acceptance. (Though ironically, that may be more attainable, given that even notional allies of Fat Acceptance tend to not-so-secretly think that being fat is bad).
Skibboleth
10mo ago
I think it's important to draw the distinction between paternalism (by which I primarily mean laws that curtail individual autonomy for the subject's own good and/or pro-social causes) and authoritarianism. While one shades into the other in places and there tends to be strong correlation (authoritarian governments are not known for their laissez faire attitudes except when it comes to accountability), you can, e.g. have a politically free country that bans drugs or gun or sodomy. Likewise, you could have a politically unfree country that permits all of the above.
Even the open socialists or populists.
Political radicals are the most prone to authoritarianism because they tend to assume ordinary politically processes are hopelessly corrupted/subverted and thus extreme measures are justified.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
I suspect the main point of divergence is who you think the authleft is and how influential they are. Do you the representative authoritarian leftist is some tankie academic or Joe Biden and the Regime? (And, just as relevantly, what priority to do you assign to them?)
I think that's a blind spot for The Motte.
Tbf it is a blindspot for everyone; the Motte simply isn't as special in its intellectual virtue as its members might like to think.
We all have behaviors that we instinctively regard as amoral, which is go say we don't think about them at all in a moral sense. To have someone come up and tell us (or even just suggest by their own conduct) that these behaviors are morally bad is highly uncomfortable. Since most people like to think well of themselves, the easiest thing to do is plug your ears and shoot the messenger.
also a generally terrible ability to discuss these things reasonably.
Per the above, I'm not sure that is really true so much as they're starting in a massive hole when it comes to bringing their arguments. They're often criticizing core behaviors. It doesn't matter how dispassionate you are about discussing the costs of cars and the benefits of transit when your audience treats the very idea as a personal attack. (Yes, there are annoying advocates, but that is hardly distinctive).
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(Anecdcote: contra everyone else here, apparently, every vegan I've ever met has been an absolute paragon of health and fitness. Doubtless there are confounding factors, but there are only so many times you can see an obese man warn an ultramarathon runner about the risks of his diet before it loses credibility)
Skibboleth
10mo ago
Skibboleth
10mo ago
OP's post is similar in quality to other top level posts here, save for whose sacred cows it brings to the slaughter.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
Breaking the power of Southern elites and the subsequent century of white supremacist rule in the South.
Killing seems excessive. Redistribution of the planter class' assets to their former slaves would have sufficed alongside actually maintaining legal and physical protection of freedmen (which, as we saw, was very much necessary).
Skibboleth
10mo ago
Why are so many Americans committed to sneering at and impugning the traditions of their warrior class?
White Southerners are not the American warrior class. Enlisting at a somewhat higher rate doesn't overcome the weight of demographics.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
The scorn for ordinary southerners is largely retrospective and based more on the social history of the post-war South.
The Southern elites were of the same race and class as the Northern elites
They weren't. Southern elites were agrarian landowners, Northern elites were businessmen and industrialists.
The gentle treatment of Southern elites owes more to war exhaustion, a general indifference to the fate and fortunes of freedmen, and specific obstruction by southern sympathizers than to class affinity between Northern and Southern elites.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
The conspirators also planned to assassinate a number of other senior Lincoln administration officials, including Johnson, but the assassins either failed or lost their nerve.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
Conservative politics in the US is extremely Southernized - the South is cultural heart of American conservatism (especially the paleo varieties). Loving the South and Southern myths Southern iconography is very common, even if you're not from the South yourself. Attacking them is off limits.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
Except states set their own curricula and Southern states aren't exactly known for their wholehearted embrace of Anti-Racist memes.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
Are you really saying FDR, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Revolution and the rise of the US managerialism is mostly due to.. the confederacy having been imperfectly dealt with?
I mean, at least one of them clearly is, but I rather suspect they're saying that no, they're simply not the problem. Or at least, they are not the problem with conservative politics. Rather, that the political and ideological culture of the south is a corruption in the heart of American conservatism.
However, this is @DBDr 's post, so I suppose they can speak for themself.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy, or second order effect from it
If I'm in a bad mood, I'll say the key failing was insufficiently humiliating the South, but the real failing was giving Southern elites a pass for trying to destroy the country. Within a few decades, the Southern aristocracy was back with its power and status only slightly attenuated.
It's easy to dump on the hillbillies and rednecks, but every corner of the earth has people like them. Somehow, it hasn't been a problem for the Midwest.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
I think it’s a general progressive aversion to the idea of bad behavior having bad outcomes and good behavior having good outcomes
I think this is a bad model. You can find people who think like this, but it's a specific case of a broader disagreement over the actual mutability of outcomes.
(American) Conservatives adhere to a kind of socio-economic Calvinism and think outcomes are fixed, so we should be preoccupied with punishing bad behavior so they can't ruin it for everyone else. This is important for the conservative world view because without it they're just the latest round of elites explaining why it's god's will that they're rich and you're poor.
Progressives believe outcomes are changeable (as do most people left of center, though their specific analysis varies) and often think focusing on punishment for bad behavior is a distraction or outright impediment to improving outcomes. This is important to the progressive world view because without it they're just pissing straight up.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
So maybe we'd stop following ruinous policies sooner.
Surely if progressive policies were so ruinous we'd expect to see anti-progressive strongholds like the Deep South substantially outperforming progressive strongholds like New England.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
Presumably pro-crime poor communities outcompete anti-crime ones
Poor communities often have poor access to law enforcement (i.e. the police are often absent, abusive, or unhelpful) for social/political reasons, which allows criminal behavior to flourish, which increases antagonism from law enforcement, which increases distrust of law enforcement, which allows criminal behaviors to flourish...
This is often compounded by weak law enforcement also encouraging anti-social behaviors which may be adaptive in that environment but not in others. E.g. in a community with weak law enforcement, being willing to fight may be important to not being victimized (even if that norm also leads to stupid fights over petty disagreements). In a community with robust law enforcement, being willing to fight gets you arrested for assault.
Except that they're more than willing to defend the supposed bailey. This is more like referring to refugees and asylum seekers as 'illegals'.
I think you're severely overestimating the popularity of the Coatesian 'white supremacy' anti-racist paradigm versus normie lib 'don't be a dick' anti-racist paradigm.
(I suspect you also underestimate the prevalence of racism, which leads to further confusion)
I kept thinking to myself who are these white supremacists that they think run the country? If this country was run by white supremacists, they would be doing a terrible job.
Your confusion arises from semantic differences. When someone like Coates or Kendi talks about "white supremacy", they don't (just) mean mask-off segregationists or white nationalists. They don't even mean closeted white racists. They mean the whole accumulation of things which collectively acts to keep white people at the top of the socio-economic heap*. You can probably find a direct quote from one of the above that articulates this without my paraphrasing, but it's late and I'm on my phone, so I'm leaving that as an exercise for the reader.
Crucially, in this paradigm, it is entirely possible for society to be white supremacist despite the fact that everyone including racist white people profess to oppose racism and look at efforts to form explicitly white organizations with intense suspicion. Disparate impact and outcomes are the key indicators.
*though they'll also be quick to note that the US also has a pretty long history of explicitly giving preferential treatment to whites.
Contra this, there is a certain fetishization of cruelty - often disgust papered over with affected ruthlessness ("sometimes hard choices are necessary; this is a hard choice, therefore it is necessary) - when it comes to discussions of how to handle the homeless/drug addicts/[insert undesirable here]. There is a great deal of room in between the idea that kindness requires us to tolerate anti-social behavior from homeless people and endorsing extra-legal violence against them.
In particular, I tend to find a tendency to underestimate how harshly the homeless are currently treated. For example, I often see the question asked "why don't they break up homeless encampments?" or similar sentiments. And the answer to that is that in most cities they do (to the extent that it's legal to do so). But this doesn't actually accomplish very much - they might temporarily move to a different street, but it can't meaningfully fix the problem because the homeless don't have anywhere to go. Selfish local remedies (e.g. bussing out the homeless) tend to be zero sum, since other localities implement the same measure and you waste a bunch of money pushing the homeless back and forth grandstanding about how tough you are on vagrants.
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