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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37969 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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I think that Scott's latest article on how to defeat homelessness, was an okay steelman argument for the liberal policies with regards to the issue. At least, it's completely in line with the arguments I hear regarding my city's issues. There are a couple of things missing, though.

  1. People don't become psychotic out of nowhere. Years of unrestricted drug use does that to a person. And no, I don't want the continuation of the war on drugs, but I'm convinced that without somehow removing the drugs from the equation it's infinitely harder to approach a solution.
  2. Why do other countries don't have this problem? It's multifaceted, for sure - Finland and Japan use the "housing first" system Scott suggests and achieve great results, but I'll highlight one factor that I don't see anyone talking about in the first world: shame. In some societies like China or Turkey it's shameful to have a relative who is homeless. It's largely a cultural thing, but ultimately having relatives care about the homeless is a cheaper solution than building endless fields of Soviet blocks and intentionally creating ghettos that require policing. Is it possible to change a culture? How exactly is the western culture different? This is much harder to answer, but if we are talking about an ideal world with ideal outcomes, I'd prefer the community that experiences the issue to directly handle the issue.

Scott is being cute there. "Making homelessness a crime is a bad idea", "making having a mental illness a crime is a bad idea". Well, duh, we know that. It's being a public nuisance that has to be made a crime.

The solution is simple: as soon as someone complains about a visibly homeless person being disrupting, the police come and use whatever city ordinance they can cite to remove the hobo from the location. They can put him in a holding cell until he sobers up, inject whatever antipsychotic medication he stopped taking, give him a prophylactic percussion massage, like @BurdensomeCount suggested, or they can simply drag their feet when someone attacks the disruptive visibly homeless person: "oh no, what a shame Shit-Flinging Bill fell down the stairs and fractured his skull. What do you mean someone pushed him? No one has come forward as a witness. Even if someone did, they were probably one of his so-called friends, the DA thinks we shouldn't investigate crimes perpetrated by our most vulnerable subdemographic".

Scott is someone who is ideologically motivated and tries to influence his readers into the mental shackles of not strongly deviating from liberal consensus. Or when doing so, only after struggle, and guilt. It also related to the fact that he sells himself as an intellectual with solutions and it is in his interest to promote more verbally complex and promote things are complicated. Because if a lot of people have the solution, then his role is dismissed.

However, the fact that people treated as intellectuals of a liberal orientation prefer that there are no simple solutions to problems like homelessness doesn't mean that there aren't. Just like the fact that Bukele's solution would had been rejected as too simplistic. Scott is someone who even if he begrudingly accepts such suggestions he does it only after promoting enough mentally shackling propaganda that influences negatively in an anti intellectual direction everyone involved.

So I disagree with Scott's claim of people with "damn liberals" approach being unfair. It is possible for liberals to be extremists and wrong. Rejecting liberals views without taking blood from a stone without guilt, and without much struggle, and without being censored and punished is the way to go. Nobody respects equally all political tribes, or have problem rejecting what is sacred for all political tribes, and far, far fewer do so for those on the genuine right. Just because liberals as a tribe have a preference, does not mean people should respect it. Now, in practice, most people who genuinely reject the ideas of liberals aren't actually the kind who purity spiral in the opposite direction.

Another thing related to Scott's approach is not only his own ideology but him appealing and being part of liberal networks and the danger of offending them. Where there is a direct solution that is more simple and evidence suggests works, it should be recommended outright. It is not a virtue to be shackled in not offending too much the preferences of liberals, when offending their preferences can be what is correct and better for the common good.

The idea that the alternative can only be cruel and draconian is also false, as is the idea that Scott and people of his ideological preferences are kind. It is the fallacy of one sided examination of negative consequences. Obviously if you only focus on what is good for the group you favor and not for the negative consequences on other groups, you can claim falsely to be the kindest person on earth. Anarchotyranny and being at mercy of criminals or harassment by homeless, deserves negative description. Meanwhile, favoring too much criminals, or whatever ethnic group, ends up harming other groups. There are always tradeoffs, and a policy that is rainbows for everyone is impossible, but current decriminalization policies are on the cruel side and against the common good. Scott is exaggerating the harmfulness of rejecting liberal preferences. If you don't purity spiral in opposite direciton, you can have something better. See El Salvador as one example.

The reality is that homelessness is not that big of a problem in many countries. And despite the downplaying, the Soros and friends decriminalization policies are a massive problem as has been the pro libertine morality and drug policies and culture. What are called "Tough on crime" policies and reversing decriminalization policies and actually arresting people committing crimes or harassing strangers on public is a necessary element of solving such issues and it are neither cruel nor draconian.

I would reject as unnecessary the "kill" suggestion. Countries without much homelessness problem, don't kill the homeless. Plus, just because it is a liberal fallacy that it is kindness to put on the pedestal the groups liberals favor at expense of other groups whose rights and interests are dismissed and treated as even evil to consider them as legitimate and reduce the rights and favor on groups liberals favor too much (including those who share such preferences for tribes liberals favor, or some in isolation, or conform to it due to fear of being negatively labeled or otherwise harmed), it doesn't follow that it is correct to be maximally inconsiderate of their well being. Although of course their own tribalism, and willingness to disrespect others rights should both affect how they are treated a) from a universalist point of view b) when considering what is good for other groups on their own right from that group's perspective. And what is good for other groups matters also when considering things from a universalist point of view, as well considering who is aggressive towards who and who is minding their own business.

On the hierarchy of rights, you don't have a right for others to be pathologically altruist in your favor. Of course it follows, you don't have a right for other groups to be identity-less atomized and subservient who have no group rights and tribalism. You don't have a right for others not to have a right of self defense, if you threaten them. You do have a right to not be murdered however, including if you are homeless and more likely to statistically have problems and be mentally ill, an addict, criminal, etc.

Discussions about homelessness always remind me of this Onion headline. If almost every country in the world, including your own several decades ago, doesn't have the problem you have, then maybe you should stop doing whatever it is you're doing.

Scott clearly gets it:

And yet ordinary people should be able to say “I want to stop choking on yellow smoke every time I go outside” without having to learn the difference between hexamethyldecawhatever and tetraethylpentawhatever.

despite then insisting that all his readers learn the difference. And he even knows what solutions will work:

If your plan is “be cruel and draconian”, then that will work. It might even be justifiable, if it helps protect other vulnerable people - I talk more about this here. But please admit it. Don’t mumble something about “I just want these poor people to be able to get the treatment they deserve yet don’t know how to ask for” before going back to railing against the damn liberals.

The issue here isn't that people are being hypocritical by mumbling platitudes about treating homeless people better, it's that liberals will smear any plan that doesn't center the welfare of "unhoused individuals" as cruel and draconian and thereby force others to use their framework as a prerequisite for engagement rather than telling the truth, namely "we don't give a damn what happens to those people; just get them off our streets." I don't even see how restoring the old system of mental institutions would be any less cruel than letting these people kill themselves slowly and publicly, though I suppose people might oppose it on libertarian grounds.

Scott is carrying a bias from one on one patient treatment. He doesn't seem to understand the power law aspect at play. It's actually a fairly small number of people causing a whole lot of problems.

The top 100-200 craziest addicts consume vast amounts of resources being on the streets. Institutionallizing them would make the rest of the homeless situation much more manageable and free up a lot of resources.

The top 100-200 craziest addicts

Just wait until ESPN becomes desperate for content. The Tenderloin League PowerRankings are going to be wild.

More seriously - my assumption is that, much like major drug dealers, the top 100-200 most disruptive homeless people are super well known to local law enforcement and social workers. It would seem like that's the perfect place to start with targeted intervention to include assignment to asylum.

The big balancing act is threshold for non-voluntary commitment. I think it's too permissive now, but I get very concerned for it going too far the other way. Then, every Vet having a bad day gets shipped off.

The balancing act strikes me as similar to arguments about the death penalty. OK, I understand the concerns with killing an innocent man because we set the threshold too low, but can we at least execute the guy that literally live streamed himself murdering people in a grocery store because of their race? Likewise, I understand the concern with institutionalizing people that shouldn't be, but can we pick up the raving lunatic from the park that's raving in the park literally every day? Threshold concerns and slippery slopes are valid, but it's pretty clear which side of the line we're on at the moment, so let's think directionally for a bit.

I saw you mention that guy recently elsewhere, and I think no, we shouldn't execute him, we should give him a medal for bringing disparate statistics closer to proportionality.

  • -32

What a profoundly shameful and mindless thing to say.

Don't feed the trolls.

I agree. The conversation is so diluted at this point that the obvious raving-mad-man in the park cannot be dealt with. Hell, looking at the Daniel Penny case, even if the raving madman attacks you or others if the right culture war angle is invoked, defending yourself (and others) is equivalent to a lynching.

Castle Doctrine states for the win

<law geek mode> The Castle Doctrine is irrelevant here - the Castle Doctrine (which applies in every DTR state except Nebraska) says that even in duty-to-retreat jurisdictions you don't have a duty to retreat if a self-defence situation arrives in your own home. It isn't relevant in jurisdictions with strong stand-your-ground laws. I strongly suspect you mean SYG states for the win.

This is definitely a case where the SYG vs DTR scissor I wrote about previously applies, in that if you aren't familiar with the basic assumptions of SYG culture Penny is obviously a murderer and only a moron could acquit, and vice versa for someone unfamiliar with the basic assumptions behind DTR culture. But I don't think that SYG vs DTR (NY is DTR) as a legal issue will be relevant in this case - the trial is going to be about whether the length of time Penny maintained the chokehold after Neely passed out is so excessive that in constitutes either negligent or reckless homicide. </law geek mode>

Thank you for this!

What's say about DTR vs self-defense for a situation in which an obviously mentally unwell person is making unpredictable and violent gestures but not necessarily at a direct target.

"obviously mentally unwell" = Would pass the "reasonable person" standard. (i.e. mumbling to themselves, does not respond to verbal interaction in reasonable ways, seems to be addressing things that are not there etc.)

"unpredictable / violent gestures" = Gestures with any body part that resemble violent actions - strangling, clawing, punching, kicking etc. Presence of a weapon not necessary.

If both of those conditions are present in a public setting, what's the law geekery I need to be aware of?

What's say about DTR vs self-defense for a situation in which an obviously mentally unwell person is making unpredictable and violent gestures but not necessarily at a direct target.

I don't think it is actually a DTR vs SYG situation - what my effortpost was trying to say is that the fundamental difference between DTR and SYG is how you think about a situation where both sides contributed to a dispute escalating to violence but one side was clearly "in the right" on the merits of the original dispute that was being escalated.

Your question is closer to "When is the threat posed by a dangerous-looking crazy person sufficiently grave and imminent that you can take them out?", where as far as I am aware the answer is "Whatever the jury thinks is reasonable."

Given that Penny isn't being charged with murder or 1st degree manslaughter (in NY, any intentional, unlawful violence which ends in a death and doesn't qualify as murder is 1st degree manslaughter) it looks like in this particular case the prosecution are planning to concede that Penny could legally take down Neely if he did so competently, and instead are going to argue that Penny was criminally irresponsible in the way he did it.

it looks like in this particular case the prosecution are planning to concede that Penny could legally take down Neely if he did so competently, and instead are going to argue that Penny was criminally irresponsible in the way he did it.

"All good Samaritans must be licensed and up to date with their paperwork"

-- New York State, 2025.

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Even in Texas and Florida, that would not meet the legal threshold for self defense of any sort, let alone lethal violence.

I think it is becoming pretty obvious that homelessness is a national problem that can no longer be addressed at a local level.

If any one municipality gets the solution to homelessness "correct" their reward for doing so is to be flooded by homeless people from other areas. This doesn't require maliciousness on anyone's part. Imagine city A has the correct solution, and city B just lets them die in the streets. If you are a doctor in city B with a homeless patient, your best advice to them might be to tell them to get a bus ticket to city A. And that doctor would be right to continue sending patients from city B to city A until the conditions in both cities was equal. Or if you are just a semi-aware homeless person, you'd do the move yourself.

If you are just a random person in one of these cities, and all you care about is just not having homelessness. Then being closer to city B is the best option. Its cheaper and will cause the homeless to flee or be taken away by people in the system that care. Any additional amount of draconian rules or cruelty towards homelessness will move your city closer to B. If your job has you living in city A and taking care of homeless people, then you are probably correct to be a little pissed off at the people in city B advocating cruelty or draconian rules in their city. They are just foisting their problem off onto you.

Once you realize its a national problem the approaches that make sense change quite a bit.

There are lots of ways to address it. The government can build the ghettos. That has been done many times in the past. The federal government could offer subsidies to state and local entities that provide beds to homelessness. I think that would at least fit with our existing federal system of governance. The government can build prisons / mental institutions / etc.

Addressing the problem at the national level will not look pretty. It will almost certainly look ugly. Because homeless people have lives that are objectively shitty right now. Even if you are improve their lives significantly you aren't likely to get out of "objectively bad life to live" and into "objectively good life to live". So you'll have the government running a program where a bunch of people seemingly live terrible lives on the government dime, and it will definitely look like the government is causing them to live these terrible lives.

There are a few paths I can envision that lead to 'national government addresses homelessness':

  1. Some existing government org or agency decides to make it their responsibility. I don't see this as very likely. Maybe someone will get suckered into it, but no savvy politician would willingly choose for it to happen. Again, this will be an ugly program that wins you nothing but national condemnation.
  2. The treatment of homeless people gets much much worse. The number of homeless people continues to expand anyways. The calculus on helping these people will eventually shift. But I think it will get very bad before the calculus shifts. Think of every downtown city being worse than Kensington in Philly. And a few cities having violent riots where people hunt down and kill the homeless.
  3. The issue grows worse, but people and political organizations make a big push to have it addressed at the national level. Some well-meaning but ultimately stupid politicians spearhead the effort and put their names on it. Their names get dragged through the mud for the results, but it gets the ball rolling on a federal bureaucracy.

It depends what type of "correct" solution you're talking about.

A maximally "nice" solution, like free housing maintained by Government employees and unlimited free drugs, implemented in one city, would indeed probably draw all the homeless from the whole nearby area, thus exhausting the budget. Though honestly this would probably bust the budget of any city just dealing with the ones already there.

A maximally "mean" solution, like summary execution of all homeless, vagrants, beggars, etc, implemented in one city, would also solve the the problem of ordinary people not being able to walk the streets without being harassed, but would probably have the opposite effect, pushing all the homeless out of that city into other nearby cities with more average policies.

@anti_dan and @MotteInTheEye bring up a similar point.

I think my main point still stands, because there still is a selection effect as long as local policies differ, and as long as you can convince / trick / force the homeless to take a bus ride.

Lets say there are the two cities again. city A and city B. City A is maximally nice and "solves" the homelessness problem. City B is maximally mean and "solves" the homelessness problem. Both cities have to deal with side effects of their solution. Maybe city A has severe budgetary problems. Maybe city B is a totalitarian state where the presumption of innocence is gone and lots of people get thrown in prison or executed on flimsy grounds.

Now lets say there are two other cities. One city kinda likes the policies of city A, but doesn't have the budget resources to do it. One city kinda likes the policies of city B, but has too strong of a legal system and constitutional protections to carry it out. But they both have the budget / legal allowance to export the homeless. The solution for both of these new cities is straightforward, just send the homeless on to their preferred "solution" city.

Whether you think the solution is to be nice or mean to the homeless, the same problem exists with localities trying to implement it. The problem is certainly worse if places are trying to be nice, but its still there if you want meanness.

I had been thinking more about the opposite effects of the different solution types. One city doing the nice way draws in more homeless, and so places a substantially higher burden on itself while only having a minor positive effect on nearby cities that homeless move there from. So your point of it being unsustainable on a small scale applies. However, one city doing the mean way expels out homeless (anyone sufficiently with it to try to avoid near-certain death is going to leave), so having a minor negative effect on nearby cities. That means that way is sustainable and so is possible to start and grow without an all-at-once national initiative.

I hadn't thought of other cities aligned with the mean city but not going quite so far wanting to send their homeless to that city. I'm not sure that changes things though. The problem of getting more homeless that you plan to treat the nice way is that the cost of every extra one is high, but the cost of treating them the mean way can be quite low, presuming we're dispensing with legal protections. Especially when they've been conveniently gathered onto a bus for you.

I've never seen the cost of the mean solution as monetary. I think other people in the thread have pointed out the problems of being mean to homeless people. To sum up some of the points:

  1. People with the ability to carry out violence against others don't always just politely drop that ability when you want them to.
  2. Our court system is predicated on a basic belief in the dignity of human life and human rights. Losing those predications might easily end up badly for you in other situations.
  3. Distinguishing between the various types of homeless is still a difficult problem.

Some of the people on this forum seem a bit blase about executing homeless. I'm not sure if they'd all maintain that attitude if they were the specific ones delegated the task of carrying out the executions. For those that do maintain the blase attitude, I certainly wouldn't want to be neighbors with them. I'm not saying this entirely to admonish them. I had some homeless encampments near my neighborhood, and I have two young girls. I only found out about the encampments because one of my other neighbors had politely packed up their tents and left them a handwritten note of "dont camp here". He is an Afghanistan war veteran and has shot at people and been shot at. I had a lot of admiration for my neighbor in that moment, mainly for his restraint. I would have been tempted to at least trash the person's stuff.

I understand the tendency and desire to be tough and mean to the homeless. I feel it all the time. I just have a very premonition about acting on those feelings.

I'm having trouble phrasing my last point. To get at the heart of it though, violence is a slippery slope and a spreadable disease all in one. I see human society as a multi-generational project to try and use less violence and more trading to get what we want. Its a really difficult problem, because often the only way to stop violence is to use violence in response. If you have ever known some military or police families ... they can be a bit violent. The parents think corporal punishment is normal and fine. The kids think bullying is normal and correct as long as they have more physical power. Certainly not all of them ... but I can't be the only one with that observation?

Violence often looks like a small time monetary expense, but I think normalizing it creates a massive long term expense in the form of interpersonal misery.

I've described possible solutions at 2 extreme ends of the range of possibilities, but haven't actually advocated for any particular position. Part of why I enjoy discussing issues here is that I don't feel so compelled to take a specific position and defend it to the (metaphorical) death at all costs, but can consider a range of things before deciding on some specific position.

My description of the maximally violent solution and how it might spread might be taken as advocacy. I see it at least as much a warning as advocacy. Beware, those who actually make policy, if any particular place feels that the situation has gotten bad enough to go that far, the going-that-far might possibly spread farther and faster than anybody anticipated or wanted.

Perhaps most of that was more of a reply to others who have more directly advocated such things. Nevertheless, regarding violence, I tend to think that a little bit goes a long way, and people tend to feel a desire to use excessive amounts of it when a situation has been allowed to go on too long and get much worse than it needed to be. I think "violence" (defined as a scale starting at things like firm orders and harsh looks) is best applied in small amounts and highly limited scope, but right away when necessary. Probably ought to have a better word for that, but I can't come up with one right now.

I'm not 100% sure what we should actually do. I think there is clearly a cohort of homeless who are all of the above of hopelessly addicted to hard drugs, regularly aggressive and violent towards random people, have no fear of any sort of consequences, and completely uninterested in any sort of help. I'm not sure what the size of it is, but I expect the local police, jailers, and mental health professionals in any particular area know who they are. Those people should at the very least be locked away until such time as they can go multiple months without reverting to their previous lifestyle, using whatever force is necessary to achieve that without unduly risking the safety of whatever personnel are doing so, up to and including lethal force if absolutely necessary. It may not be so easy though to ensure that all jurisdictions strictly limit such treatment to those clearly in that cohort, but I fear we've already let this go far enough that there isn't much choice but to do something like that and hope for the best.

Some of the people on this forum seem a bit blase about executing homeless. I'm not sure if they'd all maintain that attitude if they were the specific ones delegated the task of carrying out the executions.

So, I am certainly one of the posters whom you would consider “blasé” about executing homeless. I consider the question “would I be able to pull the trigger myself” frequently. It’s very easy for me to ask, “Will no one rid me of these turbulent bums?” But would I capable of meting out that type of violence myself, if tasked to do so? Now to be clear, I do not believe that it’s illegitimate to advocate for a particular policy unless one is willing and eager to sign up to be a law enforcement officer, security guard, etc. It’s okay to have specialized positions which employ only individuals with the physical and psychological qualities appropriate for that job, and for others outside that position to still have a say in what policies will be carried out. But, it’s still worth asking whether my rather cavalier attitude about the topic is purely a consequence of my own distance from the ugly part of the process I’m advocating. I have personally never meted out any sort of interpersonal violence; I’ve never even been in a fistfight - I’ve been punched, but have not thrown a punch in return - and I’ve only fired a gun a handful of times. (My marksmanship leaves much to be desired.) So the question of whether I’m capable of carrying out executions, and the adjacent question of whether it would break me psychologically to do so, are appropriate questions to ask.

For those that do maintain the blase attitude, I certainly wouldn't want to be neighbors with them.

Now this, I don’t understand at all. What, specifically, are your concerns about having me for a neighbor? I’m an extremely respectful, quiet, and orderly neighbor. It is precisely my preference for orderly, clean, and peaceful environments which causes me such distress at being surrounded by homeless and the disorder they bring. What actual actions do you predict I would perform, as part of being your neighbor, as a result of my stated beliefs? Clearly I’m not saying that I personally am planning on going John Wick on random bums any time soon; I’m very much in the “be nice until you can coordinate meanness” camp, and am not a loose cannon.

Now, I did recently get in a very heated verbal confrontation with a bum who had decided to camp on the sidewalk outside my apartment complex, and whose long chain of tied-together shopping carts was blocking our exit path. That confrontation, in which I did not lay a hand on the man, resulted in him leaving almost immediately, taking all of his garbage with him, and he has not been seen since. Do you think this makes me a bad neighbor? Do you think I’m a coward or hypocrite for arguing with him instead of shooting him in the head, since the death penalty for chronic homelessness is what I advocate here? I would venture to say that the vast majority of those who advocate a similar position would act exactly the same way I did in that scenario.

To get at the heart of it though, violence is a slippery slope and a spreadable disease all in one.

I think this whole paragraph is asserting things which are not actually generalizably true. For example, Singapore is notorious for applying the death penalty for a far wider array of crimes than any European country does in this day and age. Furthermore, Singapore (like Japan) uses a method of execution - hanging - which has been out of use in European countries for over a century now due to its violent optics. However, Singapore (also like Japan) is one of the least violent societies on earth. It is perfectly able to contain the violence to one very small but important facet of society - the criminal justice system - in order to prevent its spread to the larger society as a whole. The men responsible for carrying out executions in Singapore do not, as far as I’m aware, also go out and blow off steam by murdering people for sport in their spare time. I’m not even sure if they have higher rates of corporal punishment of children than the average Singaporean or Japanese. (And, if they do, are you so sure that corporal punishment, within reason, of children for transgressions is ineffective at shaping those children into responsible and pro-social adults?)

A decade ago I absolutely would have agreed with you that civilizational progress is all about reducing the amount of interpersonal violence across the board, and I still share your basic visceral aversion to violence in terms of the way I live my own life. However, I’ve come to believe, through observation, that actually reducing violence requires the carefully targeted and process-based application of non-arbitrary violence against the most anti-social elements of society in order to maintain sustainable peace. Those anti-social elements are not going to stop being violent and unstable just because the rest of us forswear violence; rather, we need people who are not inherently prone to extreme violence to be willing to step up and do a little bit of it, in small doses, so that we can then go back to living our normal lives.

Except this is the lowest period of non-arbitrary violence against the most anti-social elements of society in probably human history and also the least violent part of human history. In the past, there was way harsher actions against anti-social elements of society, and far more general violence and chaos.

Also, the reason I wouldn't want is you're not a nice, respectful, orderly neighbor. You're an authoritarian with dreams of violent cleanses of people lesser than you, so in aggregate, crime and disorder goes down by 5%, if they're out of bounds of what you determine to be an orderly society.

This is that "nothing was ever good" thing you see all the time on Twitter, isn't it? The outright denial that there was ever a time when things were better in any way, that all the problems caused by recent policies always existed, and all evidence to the contrary is a Reactionary Fascist Myth.

Except this is the lowest period of non-arbitrary violence against the most anti-social elements of society in probably human history and also the least violent part of human history.

Actually no, violent crime rates in America are significantly higher today than they were in, say, 1950, when the U.S. had harsher vagrancy laws than today. In 1890s England, violent crime rates were lower than they are in England today, despite laws being stricter at that time. Yes, certainly the world of 2024 is less violent than the world of medieval times and before, but it’s also true that rates violence in, say, 1990 were significantly higher than they had been a couple of decades prior; since laws had grown more lax during that time, rather than less, whatever causal relationship you’re attempting to draw between laxity/non-punitivity and low rates of societal violence seems fairly questionable.

Also, the reason I wouldn't want is you're not a nice, respectful, orderly neighbor. You're an authoritarian with dreams of violent cleanses of people lesser than you, so in aggregate, crime and disorder goes down by 5%, if they're out of bounds of what you determine to be an orderly society.

What specific actions do you think I take, as a result of my beliefs about crime and punishment, that actually impact how good or bad a neighbor I am? Do you think I discuss my philosophy of policing with my neighbors? Do you think that any of the policies I advocate would have any significant impact on the day-to-day lives of the other residents of my apartment complex? If not, then in what sense am I “not a nice, respectful, orderly neighbor”?

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You get at the heart of why I ask about being willing to carry out violence. Someone is going to take on that psychological burden. Its easy to forget that when its not you. My level of experience with violence is pretty similar to yours, except I do have some decent marksmanship. I think I'd be able to pull the trigger and execute people, but I am also decently certain that it would eventually break me as a functioning member of society. Its a big mind-shift to see people as fleshy bodies that can easily be blown apart with a few rounds, and that is what I think I'd come to see other people as. And I have a cold temper that never manifests as screaming in people's faces, but certainly does manifest as logically thinking of ways I can maximally hurt someone. Having the 'murder' option readily available in my mental toolbox would be very bad for me.

Basically I wouldn't be happy to have myself as a neighbor that carries out executions. It is similar reasons that make me a libertarian. I'm pretty certain I would abuse power if I were in a powerful position, so I tend to not trust others in those positions.

Your interaction with a bum is something I'd like in a neighbor. I might have found your particular approach too risky for my taste. Unless I had a few other neighbors standing there with me.

Japan and Singapore mostly don't execute that many people. Maybe a dozen a year. I'm not worried about the spillover effects of that level of capital punishment. Certain cities of Texas might have a higher per capita execution rate.

There are currently about a half million homeless people in the US. I don't think you'd need to kill all of them. But conservatively maybe 10% of them are hopeless about getting out of their situation and would end up on the chopping block. Fifty Thousand executions. That is an unprecedented number in not just the Western world, but the entire world.

I went and looked it up and Iran apparently executed the most people in 2023, about 850 people. I think their society is already far more violent than I'd ever like to experience. Its not just the people carrying out the executions, its a support structure, and a society willing to say "yeah thats fine, go murder those people".

However, I’ve come to believe, through observation, that actually reducing violence requires the carefully targeted and process-based application of non-arbitrary violence against the most anti-social elements of society in order to maintain sustainable peace.

This is basically my belief as well. As I said above, getting rid of violence often requires violence. But executing about 50k people would not be trying to minimize violence. It would be a society wide escalation. There are only about 20k murders a year in the US. This just doesn't seem like "carefully targeted" violence at all.

A built in assumption of your "problem" is that solution B is not correct. An assertion not in evidence.

If any one municipality gets the solution to homelessness "correct" their reward for doing so is to be flooded by homeless people from other areas.

This is true only if homeless people have no agency to determine their place of residence, or if the solution is one that the homeless people themselves prefer to the default "unsolved" conditions.

If on the other hand there is a solution that the homeless people would prefer to avoid and they have some agency to avoid it by relocating, then the incentive would flow the opposite direction, with localities that do not adopt it getting flooded.

This is one reason "combining housing with aggressive anti-vagrant policing" might actually work.
The first places to start it get to keep all the fixable workers while pushing the dregs out, while holdout cities have to deal with an increasing burden of irredeemables.
In the end San Francisco would be overrun by every fentanyl zombie in the country. (Then we build the San Bruno Wall and blow up the bridges.)

For every fixable homeless person in a city with expensive housing, there is likely a responsible homeful person living within their means in a cheaper city who would jump at the chance to move, if only housing were affordable.

I don't think you get to (fairly) keep the fixable workers while pushing the dregs out. You either build more housing or you don't, but the current homeless in your city probably all have to go.

I think the implication was that the "solution" actually solved their homelessness (ie housing them, finding them jobs, treating their mental illnesses) rather than solving the issue of them being unpleasant for locals, like kicking them out or throwing them in jail. It's not a real solution if you simply push them off to be someone else's problem, then you're just in a prisoner's dilemma where everyone does that to each other.

The problem with homelessness is the problem it causes for others, not the problems the homeless are themselves suffering.

Solving homelessness means solving the problems they cause for others. It does not mean fixing their problems as people.

The problem with homelessness is the problem it causes for others, not the problems the homeless are themselves suffering.

The former is bad karma from ignoring the latter. If you solve the former without solving the latter, and continue ignoring the latter, it will somehow end badly for you; I don't know how, exactly, nor how long it will take, but it won't be an outcome you consider satisfactory.

The mills of G-d grind slow, but they grind exceeding small.

I suppose if you have some sort of selfish or elitist morality system where only you and people like you matter. But even then, "helping" homeless people doesn't just mean reducing their suffering but also converting them into productive members of society.

As a utilitarian, I think all humans matter. Failure to own a home (which is a state that literally all humans are born into and only manage to avoid by having kind/competent parents or producing enough to earn money for a place to stay on their own) does not discredit one from being a human and having inherent worth as a human being.

Now, if the cost to help a drug-addicted violent person fuel their addiction is the blood sweat and tears of five other people who have to pay for it out of their wages and suffer from crimes, then yeah, that's not worth it. But if you can help fix their addiction, and their behavioral issues, and turn them into a functioning and contributing member of society, then you've done all that AND saved an entire person's life, and then they can go and help other people as a productive member of society.

That's a big if. But it's a big gain if done. I'm sure that some homeless people are irredeemable scum who can't be changed. I'm equally sure that some people with homes and lots of money are also irredeemable scum who cause more harm than good but do it sneakily enough not to get caught. Houses are correlated with being a good person, but not even close to perfectly.

An actual solution to homelessness means solving the root cause of the issue, be that mental, behavioral, cultural, economic, social, or some combination. And then they're not homeless in the first place and that solves their issues and the problems they cause for other people at the same time. Anything less is a bandaid. Maybe useful as a temporary patch, but not ideal.

As a utilitarian, I think all humans matter. Failure to own a home (which is a state that literally all humans are born into and only manage to avoid by having kind/competent parents or producing enough to earn money for a place to stay on their own) does not discredit one from being a human and having inherent worth as a human being.

That doesn't sound like a very utilitarian position TBH. I agree with it, but I also don't claim to be utilitarian. It seems to me as though the utilitarian policy here is something like "the homeless people are causing everyone to suffer, so it's worth it to alleviate that suffering even if they suffer a lot individually". Basically the setup of the city in The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.

You misunderstand. I'm not saying it's never okay to do that. If Omelas were literally the only solution then yeah, I'd probably be okay with that. I'm saying it's less than ideal. Suppose we have 1 homeless person simultaneously suffering from homelessness and whatever mental illness or anti-social personality is causing it (1 point) and inflicting suffering on 3 people (1 point each). And the following options:

  1. Do literally nothing: Everyone suffers, (-4 points)

  2. Pay to house the homeless person. They no long suffer, but they still harass everyone else, and it costs money (though less than the suffering of being homeless or else ordinary people wouldn't buy homes. So maybe (-3.5 points)

  3. Exile the homeless person to another town. They suffer double, but the three people they were harassing are no longer harassed. BUT the new town has three new people for them to harass. (-5 points)

  4. Exile the homeless person from all society and/or incarcerate them and/or execute them. They suffer.... I dunno, a lot, call it X. But the three other people are fine. (-X points)

  5. Fix the homeless person's issues so they transform into a normal person. Let's suppose this is very difficult and expensive (-Y points). But everything else is resolved. They no longer suffer, the other people no longer suffer. (-Y points)

Your imagining of utilitarianism seems to be the claim that X < 3.5, that if we sacrifice homeless people via option 4 it's better than letting them inflict suffering on others. If option 5 did not exist, I might tentatively agree. 5 Does exist. I think Y < X < 3.5, and so Option 5 is ideal. Utilitarianism does not require sacrificing people to make other people happy, sometimes it just involves making everyone happy simultaneously. That's not always possible, but given that in this instance the very issue that is causing homeless people to inflict suffering on others (mental illnesses, addictions, and/or criminality) is the same thing inflicting suffering on themselves, solving that would get us both simultaneously.

An actual solution to homelessness means solving the root cause of the issue

No. Trying to solve root causes is how you get yourself intractable problems. Alleviate the symptoms; there's nothing wrong with a bandage.

Understand that for many the problem is in fact the suffering the homeless people themselves are experiencing. You might not care about them, but many do, and this is one of the core disconnects in these debates.

Of course I understand that. I can hardly help but understand that when surveying the topic in any depth at all. My understanding of the perspective is why I spoke against it. I don't think there's any policy that can achieve this, and therefore all homelessness policies advocated by you and yours are unlikely to achieve actual results. That's what I want to communicate, to you and to others.

If you'd like to do charity, you may do so in your own time with your own resources, but society needs governance, and that means dealing with the problems they are causing to others, and framing the debate in that manner.

Human suffering is not a solvable problem.

Especially and particularly the suffering of people caused by their own decision making. You can't solve people fucking their own life up without preventing them from having the freedom to control their own lives.

While I agree with you on the general idea here (that we shouldn’t try to solve their suffering) I disagree with this general idea.

You absolutely can do this, it is just incredibly expensive. With enough resources you can catch someone every time they fall, and piece their foot back together after every time they shoot it. Do I want to expend the immense resources this would take in literally insane people? No. But it is possible, especially when the insane people’s own standards for “not suffering” are far below that of a middle-class teenager.

Some people certainly want to expend the resources required, and I think a different argumentative tack is necessary to bring those people around.

No man, no problem.

Here's my modest proposal: have homelessness be punishable by the death penalty.

The liberals will be outraged, but anyone who can't get a stranger to house them, even under the impending threat of death, is obviously an individual who has completely and utterly exhausted the patience of society and is committing a slow form of suicide. If they don't care about their own lives, then why should we?

Housing is expensive, and giving it to the most useless members of our society is counterproductive. Bullets are cheap.

The policy you describe is obviously monstrous, but moreover, it seems likely to me that its worst consequence wouldn't be the people directly executed by the state; it would be the surge in crime brought on by well-meaning citizens frantically taking in homeless people to save them from the policy, no questions asked. The typical criminally insane homeless man wouldn't be killed under your regime; he would be given free access to the home of a WASP-y upper-middle-class overeducated Democrat family who conscientiously object to the policy. It would take many of their number being robbed, raped, and murdered for them to learn better, if they ever would; even relatively moderate sorts you wouldn't expect - Republican voters, even, hardcore Christian churchgoers - would be much more easily pressured into making serious personal sacrifices for the homeless under the conditions you describe creating.

I am cynical enough to wonder if something like this is your intent, although I am not so cynical to immediately assume it is.

"It sounds like you're just feeding naive liberal women to the homeless."

Quite astute. Yes, that was a foreseen secondary consequence. The burden of care falls about the socially conscientious directly, rather than abstractly through government policy. The reasoning isn't too far from requiring warhawks to register for the draft. And if they do so, without the public purse being involved, it is saving to the treasury: and the negative externalities are confined to those foolish enough to try, rather than the public at large.

So, overall, I see it as a win-win.

The reasoning isn't too far from requiring warhawks to register for the draft.

Okay, a rob-bank-hawk is someone who thinks we should arrest and jail bank robbers. Do you think that rob-bank-hawks should be required to become security guards (or maybe become bank robbers)?

The analogy would only make sense if in response to a legitimate problem (people robbing banks) people advocated for policies that would give out a percentage of the bank's deposits to anyone who would ask (for isn't the root cause of bank robbery the lack of money?) And if you questioned why you should give up your bank account to thieves (and why they suspiciously stuff all their income underneath the mattress) they called you racist or something. And that nonsense became the status quo.

Indeed, it would be the prudent thing for such concerned individuals to become security guards, rather than trusting the insurance to make up for rampant bankrobbery, somehow.

I can see where that analogy might work for homeless advocates, but how does it work for warhawks? Are warhawks advocating something that's equivalent to giving up your bank account to thieves?

I imagine he has in mind the myriad voices advocating for Ukraine, and giving it money.

The problem with ideas like this is that the people who are causing most of the problem are mentally ill, and part of that mental illness is often a lack of insight, impaired judgement and even things like a profound lack of awareness of the fact that they have a disease (anosognosia).

People who are more or less making a choice (ex: the mentally well, people with substance abuse absent mental illness)....it may be reasonable to treat these people harshly.

But figuring out who is in which population is HARD.

Can you tell me why their mental illness is a relevant factor in sentencing them to death without using the word ableism?

If someone was acutely delirious from say, sepsis, we'd forgive them for certain types of bad behaviors (like flailing and hitting their nurse). If they were high and did something they wouldn't usually we do we wouldn't forgive them. This is in part because the latter is a choice and the former isn't.

Mental illness is more complicated. Some people with schizophrenia don't take medication because they are lazy, or because they don't like the side effects. These people may be making a benefit risk calculation and failing. Some people don't because their illness tells them they are healthy and don't need medication. These people aren't making a "choice." Telling who belongs in which bucket can be very hard.

I think acute is doing a lot of the work here. We understand this person (1) doesn’t normal hit people and (2) won’t once the ailment passes.

That is entirely different from the druggie or the mentally ill.

Druggie's are one thing that is rather complicated, but for the mentally ill, especially at the level of severe mania and psychosis....they aren't making informed and considered choices, the disease gets in the way.

If someone lives a healthy, normal life, then gets frontal lobe damage and becomes an asshole....that's not their fault. We might lock them up to prevent them from threatening others, but the substrate is damaged and they can't make decisions required to stay out of trouble.

if your brain is telling you that you are NORMAL and HEALTHY and that medical people and government people are out to get you, then you can't make the right decisions. That's what a delusion is.

In very careful and controlled circumstances we can work around it, but it's depressingly rare. Many people feel great and are normal with meds (and want to continue), but then they get sick and metabolize a dose differently and then the whole thing starts again.

Do not underestimate the way severe mental illness impairs your ability to make the right choices, hell some of the medications have side effects like "compulsive gambling."

There comes a point where "is it their fault" doesn't matter. If someone is regularly violently criminal, it doesn't matter if it's because of a brain injury or they're just a sociopathic asshole, what matters is that they be stopped from victimizing other people. Whether or not they are morally culpable is a secondary concern over the need to incapacitate them for the benefit of their would-be victims.

This is overcomplicated and inhumane, and unprecedented. Instead we should use the cheap, simple, traditional solution- declare those who refuse efforts to help them outlaws, who can be beaten, threatened, and harassed with impunity. The police or ordinary respectable citizens can deal with the problem homeless them damn selves then, without the need for a baroque process involving NGOs and doctors. Likely it won’t apply to the non-problem homeless.

A modest proposal, then?

At the risk of taking the bait, and against my better judgment... This is a hideously lazy solution for a society that has moved beyond sustenance farming. You're making a cynical presumption of intentional apathy to justify unreasonable measures, when in reality, there but for the grace of God do you go. In a society where your friends and family reflect your attitude, you're one TBI away from being labeled an inconvenience and put to death. Without a hint of introspection or irony, you condemn the homeless because your tiny slice of the collective burden of housing them is too costly and inconvenient for you? Have we considered, perhaps, making the burden less burdensome? Maybe eliminating legislative barriers to affordable housing erected by the economically privileged would be a better place to start than getting out your guns and going postal on a tent city? As it stands, you want society to grant you a license to kill those who inconvenience you - and this is exactly the sort of small-minded, impulsive criminality that society is constructed to curtail.

While we're unseriously venting our spleens, here's a modest counter-proposal: you can have your license to kill the homeless, but you only get to kill as many people as for whom you voluntarily provide housing, and if you ever stop providing that housing for any reason, and anyone you housed is killed by this policy, you too are put to death. This is at least marginally less lazy than your proposal, because it forces you to exercise discriminating judgment as to who is worth helping and who is a lost cause, and it guarantees that you can't take someone in for a day just to execute them the following day. You get to slake your bloodthirst and prove that you aren't just a lazy sociopath who wants society to give you a free pass for murder; I get you to rehabilitate or hospice someone who doesn't deserve to die, because your skin is in the game; some people get a better life than they currently have; and we get to eliminate the truly hopeless cases. And if no one agrees to house someone for their license to kill, we're no worse-off than we started.

I'd personally prefer if we don't openly advocate for killing groups of people over inconveniences and unproductivity, but if we must, let's at least try to address the obvious, foreseeable objections to our modest proposals with our own well-reasoned conclusions, and not just show our whole ass to the world?

You're making a common, fundamental mistake: the problem isn't that they don't have housing. "Homeless" is a misnomer. The problem isn't where they sleep, the problem is how they act. They aren't homeless because rents are too high, they're homeless because they have failed to hold down a job, or pay their rent, or maintain relationships with friends and family, or stay out of jail, or prioritize their own well being.

https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2023/05/hes-just-been-a-wrecking-ball-accused-arsonist-in-sw-portland-apartment-fire-hit-with-stalking-order-day-before-blaze.html This is what happens when you give them free housing (though an admittedly extreme example). This is not a problem of allocating sufficient money, this is a problem of "what do you do with people who destroy everything around them when given freedom."

Uttermost nitpick: "subsistence farming", as in you can farm just enough to subsist on.

Though arguably with stuff like bioethanol we've also moved beyond sustenance farming...

Oops, thanks.

It's not laziness: it's restoring man to the state of nature where if he does not think of his morrows, of his shelter and sustenance, he will die. There is no ambushers lying in wait on the outside of corporate layoffs. Police forces around the world have a list of 'individuals known to authority', who commit the pareto majority of homeless nuisance. Let us kill them all: swallow your liberal indignation about the rights and dignity of man and other such nonsense, and I'll let you embark on whatever reformist scheme in the aftermath that you please.

That's my counterproposal!

it's restoring man to the state of nature

Would that be the same state of nature in which there was a 40-50% infant mortality rate?

Bailey Not-Castle: let's make homelessness punishable by death!

Motte Castle: let's kill everyone on the "individuals known to authority" list, as they commit the Pareto majority of homeless nuisances.

I won't poke too much more fun at this, since I did literally ask for it, and clearly connecting punishment to crimes instead of statuses is a promising step forward.

Padme: You confused the motte with the bailey... right?

...right...?

Maybe! I like to forget which is which. It makes for some funny threads.

I am not one of those advocating for executing homeless people, but I think there's an important point to be made here: if no solution is implemented, then this is what people will resort to. You cannot expect them to sit around for years waiting for enlightened technocrats to come up with the most humane remedies for societies' ills while they are harassed and threatened on a daily basis on the subway, going to a grocery store, or walking home. Any solution that goes into effect today is worth more to the folks on the ground than the perfect plan at some unspecified time in the future.

I can at least respect this position. Taxpayers and charities have handed lots of money and time to various entities to fix the problem, and they have a nasty habit of either making the problem worse, or running up a huge bill to sit around and pontificate on the problem. The police are neutered, incompetent, apathetic, or incapable of dealing with the problem, often by the demands and threats of a tiny slice of the activist class. And the homelessness problem has visibly gotten terrible! I live somewhere where I've seen firsthand how bad things have gotten. I can understand why people are eventually going to reach for vigilantism or mob rule when every function in society designed to protect against these problems has failed or turned traitor to wage class warfare.

And if we reach the point where our leaders, police, activists, and technocrats really can't fix the homelessness problem, and the only solution really feels like mass murder... indiscriminately taking out our collective anger on the mentally ill, addicted, and financially unlucky, is missing the forest for the trees, no?

You cannot expect them to sit around for years waiting for enlightened technocrats to come up with the most humane remedies for societies' ills while they are harassed and threatened on a daily basis on the subway, going to a grocery store, or walking home.

Yes, you can. And if they don't, you can have them imprisoned. And that will teach the other regular people that the homeless crazies are not to be interfered with; unlike the homeless crazies, most people respond quite well to incentives.

if no solution is implemented, then this is what people will resort to.

Not if you prohibit them from doing so, and consistently enforce this prohibition with serious punishments.

You cannot expect them to sit around for years waiting for enlightened technocrats to come up with the most humane remedies for societies' ills while they are harassed and threatened on a daily basis on the subway, going to a grocery store, or walking home.

Why not? What are they going to do about it? Particularly after anyone who decides not to just sit around gets prosecuted and sent to prison for decades pour encourager les autres.

Your response is just unbounded sympathy without a real solution. Indeed, the failure mode of every unsuccessful homeless "solution" appears to be the assumption that we are failing them, rather than that they are failing us.

I met a call for indiscriminate mass murder with a self-regulating incentive system that simultaneously brings out the best in people, offers a second chance to those truly down on their luck, and condones the death of the undeserving - I'd hardly call that "unbounded sympathy".

On a serious note, I totally agree that there has to be a limit to society's generosity for recalcitrant insanity and unrepentant antisocial behaviors. I also think that, as far as solutions, "kill them and everyone that roughly matches that description" is a lazy edgelord hot take; the ridiculous cost of food and shelter lately is probably responsible for a considerable fraction of the "roughly matches that description" class; and there's an important distinction between criminal and personal nuisances.

Here's my modest proposal: have homelessness be punishable by the death penalty.

If you dig into the lore of the Purge - it is literally how it started.

This is all just a uk sketch comedy bit from many years ago.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE?si=3wutHxO7qKcatKZa

I would prefer exile.

Also, as an addendum, might I propose deliberately loose enforcement? The whole problem I'm trying to solve for is belligerent vagrants ruining public spaces. If a given bum person temporarily experiencing unhousedness can avoid being a nuisance in public spaces, I really don't need to burn police resources tracking down remote encampments.

The problem with exile is that there's nowhere to exile them to anymore. Exile only works when there is unowned wilderness or other communities that are not significantly connected to your own nearby. We're definitely not going to be exiling them to Canada or Mexico, and there's no real way to exile someone from say San Francisco that doesn't affect San Jose, Oakland, and Palo Alto nearby. We're definitely not going to be exiling them to somewhere like Yosemite or Death Valley.

This makes even more economic sense: we'd save the price of a firing squad and the bullet too. All of the residents of the Tenderloin should be recollected to wherever those German tourists went in Death Valley a few years ago.

I obviously know that this is just a dopey hypothetical, but the Bureau of Land Management owns 247 million acres and plenty of it is remote.

I guess exile to Alaska is always good as a last resort. But at that point, we might as well start exiling them into the Pacific Ocean.

You might be underestimating how much federal land there is.

Yes, but if you exile them to the wilderness, they will die. It's a bit of fringe leftist cope that was slightly popular recently that "we" owe the homeless a living because there's no more wild lands where they could survive on their own. But that's nonsense; they'd nearly all die rather quickly in any halfway-wild place.

You don’t even need to use blm land. We have plenty of nearly abandoned towns in Nebraska. Fetterman in Pittsburgh was the mayor of an abandoned town.

Isn’t part of California’s homelessness problem the tendency for other cities to offer exile to California as an option for the homeless?

I always thought it had to do with the fact that Californian laws were simply more favorable to the homeless, creating a self selection process.

Probably part of the reason this offer gets taken, honestly.

remote encampments

Structures in encampments (not tents but e.g. wooden shacks) should be considered homes, allowing them to invest further in their structures etc. Adverse possession already exists on the law books. Private citizens may push them off. Then, on government land, why not let them homestead it?

Indeed, LA's "rivers" aren't used. Why not let people build structures in them, open insurance policies etc. If it does rain and flood, the government's already subsidizing housing in landslide and wildfire zones. At least peasant hovels are cheap to replace.

The subset of the homeless who are causing the problems are also the subset who, if given a home, will trash it. This includes encampments, so it won't work.

I will echo @erwgv3g34 and say that this is ultimately probably the only sustainable solution. Maybe rope instead of bullets, or lethal injection or whatever other painless and visually non-icky method of execution our society wants to come up with, but the general idea of executing the chronically homeless or profoundly mentally ill is entirely sound.

I'm not going to endorse OP's proposal, but just watching the opioid crisis and overdosing hit my city looks a lot like your suggestion already. I'm modestly surprised I haven't heard any self-declared progressives declare that euthanasia is a human right and trying to discourage Narcan in obvious heckin' valid overdoses suicide attempts -- there are already plenty of anecdotes of people saved by it becoming violent about its effects. It's an obvious opportunity to pat oneself on the back and save money at the same time.

But I do find the idea fairly repugnant.

But I do find the idea fairly repugnant.

Me, too, but I find the reality of tents under every bridge, and a panhandler at every stop sign, unacceptable.

I feel bad for feeling this way, but I have a weird feeling about Narcan for precisely this reason. It's pretty clear there's a large group of opioid users who hate their lives, hate their existence, find extreme painkillers and euphoriants necessary to carry on, and find absolutely no reason in living a life free from their drug addiction. They become a burden to themselves and their families, sometimes resorting to theft or even killing for pennies to buy fentanyl. After years -- years! -- of desensitization, they can take even large quantities of the hyper-potent fentanyl. And then you find them lying on the floor in a mall bathroom after years of this self-destruction, overdosed on their powder of joy and headed straight for escape from this quintessence of dust.

I think we need to do what we can to prevent people becoming opioid addicts and to help people who aren't too far gone. But more and more I see these stories of people who obviously don't want to live being brought back to the life they don't want with Narcan, and I feel bad for them. Their behavior has pretty clearly demonstrated what they want and yet we insist on holding them to the life they so profoundly despise.

I don't know why Americans love drugs so much. No other country deals with this like we do. But on this issue I'd say the moment Narcan becomes involved we've already failed many times. We've got to fix the reasons why people come to hate their lives so much they want to escape by any means necessary.

But once they've decided they hate existence so much they'll risk death to feel relief, maybe they're too far gone to save them and what we're saving is a shell of a person filled to the tippy-top with white powder.

I think we should allow 2-days a year for people to use heroin. Every other day during the year it is banned and punishable by death.

I’ve heard it’s an amazing feeling before your addicted. Everyone gets high once a year and enjoys it. The rest of the year access is impossible so no addiction.

Legal tolerance breaks. I like it.

"self-euthanasia" is a very niche position on the left, while having Medical Professionals prescribe MAID is now universally supported.

It seems strange to support one but not the other, until you consider it in terms of "rugged individuals making individual choices" vs "creeping bureaucratization of every aspect of human life from birth to death"

This, but unironically.

I think that Scott's latest article on how to defeat homelessness, was an okay steelman argument for the liberal policies with regards to the issue.

I quite literally thought the opposite. I think the whole thing was mealy-mouthed apologia and nitpicking, culminating in a "well, I guess you could just be mean, but you better tell me how you're going to be mean" as though that dissuades someone that was OK with being mean in the first place. Yes, I want the cops to pick up the deranged bum from the park, forcibly drug him, and if they keep having to do this, permanently incarcerate him. Ideally, this would all be done with more care and consideration than the inpatient mental facilities of yore, but honestly, I care a lot more about the ability of a mom to take her kid to the park without dealing with deranged bums than I do about what happens to the bum.

Scott really has a profound and obvious sensitivity to interpersonal "mean-ness." This comes across most egregiously in his writing about how public schools are, I guess, these awful no-fun dungeons of mental torment.

I couldn't exactly ever figure out why, from his writing alone, he had such a hard time.

Then I saw a picture of him and some sort of deeply buried physiogonomy module in me caused me to audibly yell, "NERD!" It made me think the Simpsons were on to something in that Nerd pheromones episode.

Scott had a hard adolescence. Cool. The point is to get over it. I've written before on the Motte about making a conscious decision to Chad-It-Up when I got to college. It worked. And, my life improved.

While everyone will always have personal biases derived from past personal experience, it's hard for me to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who is aware of that bias but then pretends it doesn't impact their "rational ability."

Eh, I think he's just extremely agreeable. I actually like that about him. I appreciate that he likes to advocate for people he thinks are being unfairly stamped on. He seems to honestly have the attitude that a lot of the wokesters pretend to have, where taking the side of the underdog is just important to him. He gets some stuff wrong, but I like his earnestness. I think you have to take the rationalists for what they are not for all the high-minded stuff about revolutionizing epistemology.

He's an earnest liberal making an earnest liberal argument about homelessness. We don't have to dig on his physiogonomy to understand what he's saying or make counterarguments.

The unaddressed elephant in the room still is that right-wingers mostly believe that the representative homeless is in it voluntarily because homelessness has become a comfy and appealing lifestyle of antisocial sloth, while left-wingers mostly believe that the representative homeless would gladly move into and maintain housing if only they could.

I don't understand why, instead of trying to persuade each other, these discussions are always based in seeming denial that the other premise exists (an endless loop of "You're wrong, providing the homeless with housing is not actually that hard!" - "You're wrong, punishing the homeless is not actually that hard!", apparently heard by the respective other side as "You're wrong, there is no realistic way to punish the homeless" and "you're wrong, we can't just magic up housing for them all").

The problem is that both are correct. A good majority of the people who are homeless during their lives are homeless for a reasonably short period of time before they get their shit together. Just giving those people more resources would plausibly help them reduce their time as homeless, reduce how much they suffer during that time by a lot, and be a reasonable use of resources.

However a majority of the homeless at any given time are the problem sort who won't accept the help you give them, will destroy any housing you provide them, and are responsible for basically all of the negative externalities.

As with most things, the ability to identify the groups is hard, and a mechanism to provide services to the first group and harsh discipline to the second is harder and probably illegal. So instead both sides pretend the whole homeless population is one that deserves their preferred solution and I think about All Debates Are Bravery Debates.

As with most things, the ability to identify the groups is hard

No, it isn't. It may be difficult to do at scale in a way that is legally/bureaucratically acceptable, but you can tell the difference between a "I'm in a bad situation and need a little help to get back on my feet" and a "meth just feels better with a machete in your hand" in about two minutes of conversation.

I think it might be a little more difficult than you think for some edge cases, but I broadly agree. I was also pretty obviously talking about policy though, which means doing it "at scale in a way that is legally/bureaucratically acceptable".

I will happily concede that the punisher walking around talking to homeless people and smoking the problematic ones would have a very high rate of success though if that's what you'd like to talk about instead.

Actually, thinking about it, I think there's a pretty easy way to differentiate on a policy level: criminal record. People down on their luck, the "have nots", won't have meaningful criminal records. The anti-social, criminal drug addicts, the "will nots" or "can nots", will. Where I live, pretty much everybody who ever gets arrested for criddler shit already has a significant record of violent crimes. You'll see a news story about "man arrested for charging after somebody with a machete", and when you google them they've got years of arrests for similar crimes. A massive amount of the west coast's homeless problems could be solved by simply keeping those people in jail, and it would be easy to deny those people access to resources like free housing if they have any arrests in the last five years (I'd be open to excluding victimless crimes like simple drug possession).

The unaddressed elephant in the room still is that right-wingers mostly believe that the representative homeless is in it voluntarily because homelessness has become a comfy and appealing lifestyle of antisocial sloth

Or the sloths cause outsized damage. In that case it wouldn't matter much if the representative homeless person was reasonable. The left-wing position wouldn't even be wrong, just a non-sequitur.

"You're wrong, providing the homeless with housing is not actually that hard!"

I don't know why you think right-wingers don't hear this response. I hear it and respond that they will absolutely destroy these homes. You can disagree, but it's not unaddressed.

"You're wrong, punishing the homeless is not actually that hard!"

I'm pretty sure they do hear this and respond, with something like, "how is punishing them supposed to help them?". I find the loop stupid and annoying, but they certainly do have a response and it's that they don't want to punish bums.

The unaddressed elephant in the room still is that right-wingers mostly believe that the representative homeless is in it voluntarily because homelessness has become a comfy and appealing lifestyle of antisocial sloth,

No, those are a different group. Not actually unhoused, mooching off friends, relatives, and collecting unemployment / welfare.

while left-wingers mostly believe that the representative homeless would gladly move into and maintain housing if only they could.

And this is why there's no point in trying to persuade them.

The solution, as always, is beatings. Operant conditioning works on dogs, it absolutely should work on the psychotic homeless too regardless of how poor their rational reasoning skills are (unless society is willing to admit these people are less capable of reasoning than Fido, which it will never do).

Create a rule where any homeless person publicly under the influence of drugs or caught doing them is subjected to half a dozen lashes delivered ASAP and you'll very quickly get these people associating drugs with pain no different to how they associate drugs with a high right now and a good portion of them will stop quickly.

And for the small proportion that doesn't? Well given that they've now demonstrated they can't conform to a basic principle followed by pretty much all mammals instinctively (avoid doing things that lead to punishment) you can use this as evidence of them being certifiably insane and use it to lock them up for a very long time.

I think corporal punishment is highly useful to deter certain crime. But in the US the optics of whipping black people would create a shitstorm.

But in the US the optics of whipping black people would create a shitstorm.

This is a hangup the the people of the US need, ahem, beat out of them.

I mean, it's mostly just cheaper housing or in Europe, a larger safety net. Sure, maybe family closeness helps in edge cases, but it's actually just housing is much cheaper in China, Turkey, or many other low-income countries with no homelessness. Even accounting for cost of living and wages, there are a lot of cheaper housing options in a second-tier city in Turkey, India, or Kenya than the US.

By the same token, the larger safety net helps left-leaning support of harsher treatment of problem homeless people in Europe. You can't have just the stick, and even if you disagree with how we handle the carrot here in the US, you still need some form of carrot.

Europe, a larger safety net

Many European cities are actually far more actively and heavily policed than the U.S.

The U.S. housing market is among the most affordable in the world and China among the least.

In Taipei, a small apartment costs $1 million but typical wages are $30,000 a year. Homelessness is vanishingly rare.

It's not so simple as housing prices.

China among the least

In Taipei

The Olympics aren't for another week, at least. I wasn't expecting to hear 'Chinese Taipei' before then.

The People's Republic of China is just a recent upstart who is temporarily controlling the mainland.

Taiwan is the older country and the legitimate holder of the mandate of heaven.

Picking random big-but-not-too-overhyped cities, in Chongqing a studio (up to expat standards?) apparently costs about $250/month, to a median salary of about $21k/year. Knowing China, there are plenty of options that are much cheaper but wouldn't be considered by a website called "expatistan". In comparison, in Chicago a studio is about $1500/month, to a median yearly income of $65k (and my impression from when I lived in the US is that even putting up with inhumane levels of slumlording won't lower your rent by much). I don't understand why you would expect homeless people to be able to buy, or any bank to give them the massive collateralised loan that is a mortgage.

(I briefly looked up the situation in Taipei and it seems that there the income/rent ratio is in between, at sth like $30k/year to $450 for a studio.)

Boner mistake on my part, because yes, the purchase/rent differential is massive.

We even talked about cheap Asian apartments on this very forum a year or so ago. IIRC, there was an apartment in Osaka that was renting for like $125/month.

That's obviously impossible in the U.S. For one, the unit wouldn't be up to code.

But more importantly, an extremely poor Japanese person can still be counted on to pay their rent and not destroy the unit. This is very not true of the American underclass. So there is a dollar amount, say $1000 a month in a place like Seattle, below which it never makes sense to rent your apartment. If you get a tweaker, they can do $100k worth of damage and take 3 years to evict.

Landlords can buy apartments in a city like Detroit or Toledo for like $50k and then turn around and rent them for $750/month each. What's more, this is NOT a profitable business. How do I know? I invested in a company that did just that. They were constantly dealing with delinquents and maintenance costs. It's true that you can make a profit renting to the poor, but only by employing slumlord tactics. It's a nasty business best left to immigrants.

If you get a tweaker, they can do $100k worth of damage and take 3 years to evict.

I knows these are probably SWAG numbers, but it reminded me of the fact that the rule-of-thumb for incarceration per year is between $80k-$100k (EDIT: looks like it's about $40-$50k, though there is some large state by state variance) depending on which state (or federal) the prisoner is locked up in.

It's interesting to consider that the cost of "not an active participant of society" ($60k-$100k, to cast a wide net) outpaces the median working-age wage ($35-$60k depending on location and age).

The other way to make money renting to the poor is by not having the poor pay the bill. Section 8 is big business, and there’s nice section eight with drug tests and a strict policy on tenants paying their share of the rent(and in my area often advertisements only in Spanish, which the virtuous poor disproportionately have as a first language compared to the underclass through fault of their own), in addition to crappy section 8 which asks no questions so long as the check keeps coming from the government.

(and in my area often advertisements only in Spanish)

This is smart. I had a brilliant idea to only list apartments for rent in Chinese. But then I found out that even East Asians can grift.

The Chinese play way to hardball for that, although I guess Tagalog or Vietnamese might be a smart niche to try.

Purchase price and rental price are often strongly disjointed:

https://www.newsweek.com/real-estate-map-where-cheaper-rent-versus-buy-1896130

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/countries-with-the-biggest-real-estate-gap-between-buying-and-renting-182644895.html

There are only two countries where buying is cheaper than renting. Average mortgage payments of $1,258 in Finland are 2.1 per cent cheaper than rent of $1,285. The other is Italy. Mortgage payments of $997 are slightly lower (0.9 per cent) compared to rent of $1,006.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/24/realestate/buying-vs-renting-home.html

Of course there are further considerations (like mortgage payments building equity.)

Don't forget that rent is a fixed amount that you pay each month which includes stuff like repairs and home taxes etc. (in some countries, but alas, not the UK) while mortgages though are a lower bound on your housing costs because you're responsible for all the repairs and taxes etc.

It's often no taken into account that with the American fixed rate mortgages people almost always use what a mortgage today would cost rather than a mortgage entered a decade ago. You lock in a flat payment that doesn't increased with inflation like rent does.

Taxes and insurance are often included in US mortgages, in the form of escrow.

Scott comes off as cowardly and needlessly pretentious. Doesn’t everyone know that bureaucracy and bad laws are part of the issue?

If your plan is to change the case law around involuntary commitment - to expand the definition of “dangerous to themselves or others” - it probably won’t matter, because most of these decisions are based on vibes that only loosely connect to the written law

Change the laws and departmental policy to make them overrule vibes, which is how most laws work. Do vibes overrule IRS laws?

doctors commit many more people, it still won’t matter, because those people will stay in the hospital for a few days

You can trivially solve this by increasing the time of commitment according to infractions over time.

If your plan is to “lock them up long-term”, keep in mind that (for now) there are almost no institutions equipped to do this

You build them. What kind of point even is this? You build buildings. They can be built. They are frequently built. Who does Scott think he is writing to that the reader would no longer support a cause because it requires a city to build buildings?

Do you expect San Francisco to be good at this?

Vote for any of the millions of Americans who can, and do, competently build buildings.

How long are you keeping people there

A reasonable amount of time. What is a reasonable amount of time? Low enough that a person whose condition is manageable can get out soon, and high enough that a person whose condition is consistently unmanageable stays in longer. So an intuitive and “normal person able to think” solution is to increase it by infraction, and for the institution to gradually allow the patient freedom so as to check his capacity.

and (if the drugs work) appear significantly saner within 2-4 weeks. Best-case scenario, they’re completely sane. Now what?

Most normal people thinking about this issue would be able to solve it. My personal take is that you go from full institutionalization to check-ups, and if you fail checkups you go back to the institution.

Etc. Nothing Scott wrote can justify his assertion that “it might be time to hit the books, learn about hexamethyldecawhatever, and make sure that what you’re demanding is possible, coherent, and doesn’t have so many tradeoffs that experts inevitably recoill”.

Most (?) homeless people are only homeless for a few weeks […] If someone was going to be homeless for a week, and instead you imprison them for a year, you’re not doing them or society any favors

This is a category error. Public displays of psychosis are not found in the median ”transitionally” homeless person staying at a friend’s or relative’s.

I feel like you've just proved the point of the blog. The argument is that mentally-homelessness is a very complicated, multi-faceted problem that can't be solved just by doing one or two things, you have to accomplish a number of difficult things. For example

Change the laws and departmental policy to make them overrule vibes

Come up with a new set of laws which can avoid human bias in a subjective setting

increasing the time of commitment according to infractions over time

Come up with a law to do this. Also you'll need a solution for all the extra capacity this will require

You build buildings...Vote for any of the millions of Americans who can, and do, competently build buildings.

Elect pro-construction politicians and solve nimbyism

A reasonable amount of time

Come up with a regulation determining time of stay that is "common sense", such that even a mediocre administrator is able to consistently apply it to all of the many patients that come through their halls.

Most normal people thinking about this issue would be able to solve it.

Use your "common sense" approach again to solve an intractable issue that is bedevilling the vast apparatus of the state.

Your proposed solutions are difficult, time-consuming, and there are a ton of details to solve. This seems exactly the situation in which you would need to hit the books and consider trade-offs.

If all of the steps are easy for a political party to solve then there is nothing difficult about it. In fact, the steps are trivial just for a normal human being to determine. The problem is not implementation but the incredibly inept and disinterested political class in the cities. The voter has a right to demand things without “educating himself” when the steps are easy.

Come up with a new set of laws which can avoid human bias in a subjective setting

It’s obvious when a person who is suffering from severe psychosis, so the target population can be solved (psychotic). The existence of rare failure modes has never prevented a law being written. When you go to a dentist or a doctor they are going to perform things on you and you trust that they aren’t going to amputate the wrong leg or take out all your teeth. You do not need to do anything outlandish to prevent too many errors here.

Come up with a law to do this

That’s what your politicians are suppose to do… etc.

How is that different from Scott’s proposal?

Not sure I understand your question?

The final point you touch on is something that really annoys me about the homeless argument. One side is complaining about the homeless (ie the person who has been living on the street for a long time, strung out, bad smelling, bad acting, drug addict). The side that simply wants to build more housing says “we can tackle housing by giving homeless shelter; don’t you know most homeless are only homeless for a few weeks.” The two are entirely different groups of people and the latter know it. They know it. But they choose to be dishonest because in reality they aren’t trying to solve the homeless problem. They are trying to solve a housing problem. And they will use homeless as a pawn.

What’s your evidence that they aren’t actually trying to solve the homeless problem?

For me, it's a classic example of the purpose of a system is what it does. California pours money into their homeless problem and the result is mostly that you have a bunch of well-funded NGOs that make it easier to be a homeless junkie. If they are genuinely trying to solve the problem, they're shockingly bad at it.

"the purpose of a system is what it does" is a bullshit argument, though (in any context). It only works if you assume that humans are perfect and achieve what they set out to do, but we know for a fact they aren't. Thus, imperfect humans will sometimes create a system that does something other than what they intended to begin with. It doesn't prove that their intent (i.e. the purpose of the system) was what they got.

I disagree. I think the phrase is pretty clearly meant to apply to iterative or analytic situations, rather than a one-shot. Imperfect humans create systems with unintended consequences all the time - this is common knowledge, which means that, as an imperfect human, we are all aware that our systems will have unintended consequences. As such, we are all aware that, if there are any consequences we want to avoid, then it's not good enough merely to check what we want; we have to actually empirically check the system and see what it does. We also all know that empiricism is difficult, especially when it involves systems that we are ideologically partial to, and as such, we should be especially harsh in judging such systems. Someone who ignores all that and just goes along with a system is someone whose intentions are to accomplish what the system does. Or, more precisely, their intentions are to convince themselves that they're doing good while not bothering to put in the substantial and often difficult effort required to actually check if they're doing good.

Assuming the description of "California pours money into their homeless problem and the result is mostly that you have a bunch of well-funded NGOs that make it easier to be a homeless junkie" is accurate, the fact that politicians have seemingly decided not to check what results from the systems they put in place or to ignore the results and double down with just more money tells us that the intent of these politicians is not to solve the homeless problem. It's to convince themselves that they're genuinely well-meaning politicians who genuinely want to find a solution to the homeless problem, the solution which just so happens to be in-line with their own personal biases and flatters themselves, while disregarding/ignoring/denying the suffering caused by and to homeless people due to the system they support.

That's exactly what I understand POSIWID to mean, though.

imperfect humans will sometimes create a system that does something other than what they intended to begin with.

You may have intended to build a system that does X but actually it does Y. It's now time to be clear-eyed about that fact, and working from the assumption that you have a system built to do Y, decide what to do next. But saying "no, it's meant to do X" is not an option if you're trying to actually achieve X.

The point of having the phrase "the purpose of a system is what it does" is to point out that intentions don't matter. Yes, someone intended X to be the outcome, but the system reliably does Y instead, and very quickly, other actors start relying on the Y-outcomes of the system because The Purpose of a System is What It Does, and rely on it to continue to do Y.

In this case, people intended for these NGOs to solve homelessness, but because of game theory and principal agent problems, it, uh, does other things. But those intentions are irrelevant because we now have a machine that redistributes funds for moral maze like reasons and a whole bunch of people who rely on this system to keep doing that.

That still fails as an argument, because it requires misusing the word "purpose" to mean the outcome instead of the intention. Also, WhiningCoil was explicitly drawing conclusions about the intentions of the people who made the system based on the outcome.

I reject the idea that purpose has connotations of intention, and suspect that a large part of contention around the obvious truism that "The Purpose of a System is What It Does" comes from this conflation. If I were to say "The purpose of the mitochondria is to generate ATP, which is then consumed by the rest of the cell to power it," this sentence is properly using 'purpose' by evaluating What The System Does, in a case where there could not be an intention.

More comments

Because of everything talked about above. That is, there are two problems of homelessness — the functional poor and the nonfunctional poor. The conversation is about the latter but the proponents of housing clearly are talking about the former.

Since these people are smart enough to understand the above, I conclude they don’t really want to solve the problem the people are talking about. Sure they want to help the functional poor (I’m sure) but…I think it is really about YIMBYism

And they will use homeless as a pawn.

Finally a productive socially net positive use for the lumpenproles!

You jest (maybe) but it really is gross. They take the mantle of caring without actually caring.

People don't become psychotic out of nowhere.

Yes and no.

Drugs can make people become psychotic (acutely/temporarily), we think they can also make you stay psychotic permanently less commonly. We think they can set off psychotic disorders in people would not otherwise be likely to get that disorder and also trigger people earlier. People with a psychotic disorder (such as schizophrenia) that appears absent substance often end ups with addiction problems of all different kinds. Because we don't full understand the pathophysiology of these things and these populations are um....not reliable historians that does make it difficult to be sure about some of this stuff.

But yes psychosis does come out of nowhere....and at the same time is almost always associated with substance abuse (even if we are just talking about smoking).

Not all drugs have this impact on psychosis. It's generally pretty obvious (PCP!) but not always (Marijuana).

If you were a homeless schizophrenic with a disease addled brain and zero social support you'd probably abuse drugs also.

All that being said a whole bunch of things probably come together to make the U.S. so uniquely troublesome with this stuff. I think an underrated cause of this is probably the support for freedom in the U.S. (which I support) this means less ability for police to just toss and/or arrest vagrants, but also things like more limited ability to involuntarily commit and force medications on the severely ill. Since many of these diseases have a stepwise decline it's pretty easy to burn through your resources and supports and end up in a spiral leading to extremely poor functioning. Same person forced to take medication by their family maybe dodges the whole thing.

Drugs can make people become psychotic (acutely/temporarily)

No kidding. I have a friend who I've known since undergrad. Very smart guy - graduated from high school early so he could play around with robotics, did an undergrad double major in math and philosophy, breezed through a T-5 law school and was doing really well for himself working BigLaw.

However, in addition to the smarts (or maybe as an adjunct to them) this guy was quite neurotic, and developed a quite serious fear of flying. Needless to say he wasn't happy about this, and so started self-medicating with THC whenever he needed to fly. This led to a discovery that he quite liked being high, and in short order he wound up escalating to quite heavy marijuana use.

I'm not sure how long he had this habit or how heavy his use had been, but one morning I got a call asking if I could come pick him up and maybe let him crash at my place for a couple nights...only to find out once I had got him that he was in the depths of full-blown (if well-mannered) psychotic incident, complete with auditory hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, erratic behavior, and mania. I spent about 18 hours convincing this alien inhabiting my friend's body that no, the cars parked out front of my apartment weren't there to surveil him, that the faint sounds audible through the apartment walls was just my neighbor watching a movie, and that no he really didn't need to go find a gun store.

He eventually calmed down and I let him loose when he seemed clearly in control of himself again. Three days later he called and let me know that his doctors had told him it was THC-induced psychosis, and that he really needed to lower his dose. Fortunately it hasn't happened again, but man was that a weird moment.

One thing that has happened is that modern weed is stronger than older weed (and therefore people are more likely to have severe shit happen). Synthetic marijuana is popular in some communities and can also cause extremely severe issues.

For a fun one: too much caffeine (and stimulants of any kind) can also cause psychosis.

I love college students who are super crazy because they are drinking too many monsters and not sleeping. One of my favorite presentations. Consistently hilarious to see when you walk into the ED.

For a fun one: too much caffeine (and stimulants of any kind) can also cause psychosis.

A guy I knew a long time ago with no history of drug abuse got prescribed new sleeping pills (might have been Ambien), ”sleep walked” on those to taking an entire package of his ADHD meds (dexamphetamine) at once and promptly ended up in a psych ward due to acute amphetamine psychosis.

Ambien side effects include: sleep talking, sleep walking, sleep driving, sleep eating, death.

All the good drugs have death listed as side effect.

Yup, America's inherent libertarian values is something that trips up both the paternalistic right-wingers here and my fellow paternalistic left-wingers here.

The reason why Europe is OK with being harsher to homeless people is partly, there's a larger social safety net, but also, there's more people OK with basically a harsh rules-based order, as opposed to a bunch of descendants of people who didn't like that rules-based order, and risked their lives getting on a boat and being on the ocean for weeks, if not months.

My idea for dealing with homelessness is to create a series of remote contained cities -- using BLM land -- that are essentially economies built around a hospital-prison-treatment-community college complex.

Let's say there are 4 categories of homeless:

  1. Economic
  2. Addiction
  3. Criminal
  4. Psychotic

The Cat-1 Homeless can live in apartments or housing and get jobs in the cities that serve the complex staff. There will be restaurants, groceries, everything a normal small city might have, as well as job in the complex. So there is plenty of opportunity for employment. They will also be enrolled in the college to develop other skills -- maybe with a focus on addiction treatment and social work. When they are on better financial and educational ground, they can "graduate" back to the real world.

The Cat-2 Homeless go to the addiction treatment center. They can "graduate" to Cat-1 or fail to Cat-2.

The Cat-3 Homeless are repeat offenders who have either failed Cat-2 or have been deemed mentally well enough to not belong to Cat-4. Through good behavior, they can graduate to Cat-1.

The Cat-4 Homeless are for the serially mentally unfit. these would need drastic oversight so as not to repeat the failure mode of the old state mental hospitals that turned into hellholes.

These cities would need to be far enough away from other cities to discourage foot traffic and have some kind of low-security system that checks people in and out. They are essentially halfway houses on a larger scale.

Maybe there can also be a wilderness area on the outskirts of these town for those homeless who aren't Cat 2-4 but who just wish to live in outdoor camps off the grid of normal society.

plenty of opportunities for employment

In an economy with no primary or secondary sector, a customer base selected for instability, and a constant brain drain of anyone who gets their lives together?

Judging by the BLS table, you’d have to throw out something like 75% of U.S. jobs. The resulting community would look much, much worse. Forget coercing the inmates—you’ll have a hell of a time hiring staff for this gulag.

There are lots of Cat-1 homeless, but there're two salient facts about them:

  1. Most manage to become housed in a matter of months within existing systems (governmental, social, and familial), unlike the others.

  2. Putting them in these communities would harm them a great deal, especially if they have kids. Those communities would be incinerators of human capital and well-being.

So you're left with categories 2-4. Some of those might graduate to category 1, but then it's the same issue: they'll get pulled back down into the swamp.

But without the cat-1s, you're essentially building a dystopian concentration camp for the insane, not a cute folksy healing village. Which I think would still be for everyone's benefit, but it's better to acknowledge this upfront instead instead of having an overly optimistic view of what it'd look like.

Putting them in these communities would harm them a great deal

Not if it's designed to let the Cat-1s live a facsimile of normal life but with the support system they lack on the outside. AIUI, the primary problem Cat-1s experience is a loop of helplessness: without a home, they can't find work; without work they can't find a home. You need a city-like environment in which they can operate freely with support long enough to get back on their feet and/or develop work skills if they lack them. They would not be incarcerated like or with the more dysfunctional levels. They would live amongst the professionals who operate the carcereal parts of the system.

Cat-1s aren't usually that badly off, mentally speaking. It's mostly folks who used to have jobs (and some still do), and could still hold down a job if they could find something appropriate. They can work, they can pay bills, they can pay rent, they can maintain a home, but they're low on social and economic capital and finally slipped through a crack. The current system works decently well for them, but it could always be made better, especially by increasing the availability of cheaper (crappier) housing.

Your categories use "psychotic", but there's a large range of potential mental problems that can cause (or result from) homelessness (or excessive drug use). And sometimes someone who looks like Cat-1 is actually suffering from some untreated mental problem that finally got too nasty for their coping mechanisms to deal with, causing them to lose their job and get kicked out of their home. Those are the ones that need special support like you suggest, but they're not really what you refer to as Cat-1, or are only superficially Cat-1.

Where I think a lot of other solutions fail is that they are only aimed at 1 type of homeless person and there is no coordination with the services that address the other types of homeless people. In my model, there is coordination so that misidentifications of type can be transferred to the appropriate wing within the all-encompassing system.

It also, importantly, removes all of the homeless individuals from mainstream society until they are fit to rejoin it. For the Cat-1s, it would be voluntary, but presumably if they are genuinely Cat-1 this is exactly the absent support that they are looking for.

Don’t these things already exists? These are basically just renamed prisons, but low-security and nice.

I don’t disagree with the idea. It’s just an intelligent person recreating prisons (I’ve had similar thoughts). Also sort of like Californias fire rescue prisoners. Take the ones who can be saved and focus them on doing something. You probably need to remove the criminals or the hole thing turns into our shitty prisons and pull the addicts down.

Prisons with stronger incentives for good behavior basically.

Think of it like one of those towns around a prison, but the prison itself has stronger drug treatment and mental health wings that are all part of the same system with the goal of rehabbing from one category to another.

To go full Draconian here, I’m tempted to think a full South East Asia-style zero tolerance policy for opiate drugs might work here. Anyone caught with anything other than tiny amounts of Fent or H or Tranq just gets fast-tracked for lethal injection. And the police would actively go looking for anyone slinging.

It would produce horrible optics and questionable outcomes for six months, but I think it would dramatically reduce the number of ruined lives, and even the net deaths (including those executed). The present situation is a classic worst-of-both-world scenario where we tolerate antisocial and dysfunctional behaviour and also have no serious social technologies in place (like family shame networks) to rescue people from its effects.

produce horrible optics

This might be an understatement. I foresee the left quickly labeling the policy as "narcophobic" and proclaiming that we are genociding the drug users. I would even venture as far as saying that it's impossible to implement this policy in the first-world countries.

The Dumb Left might not do that, but the Smart Left and Middle would just run ads in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and even other parts of Appalachia about how Republican's who take money from rich people who own the drug companies that got people hooked on Oxy now want to put your brother, daughters, and cousins to death for getting addicted.

Remember, drug addiction isn't a minority issue anymore, it's a poor people issue, including poor white people, whom the actual reactionary base may not like, but they are still the voting base, and while poor and working class white people may have issues with their relatives who have got addicted to fetanyl, they don't want them put to death.

Singapore is a first world country with a mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking, with drug trafficking so defined as it can be proven by possession.

One of many wonderful things about Singapore.

Not at all coincidentally, their rates of drug use are very low. Which is a pretty solid demonstration that drug prohibition can indeed work if you're serious about it.

Exactly. The homeless problem in Australia has expanded, but generally the times I feel any real intrusion from a homeless person is when they're clearly impaired by some sort of substance and thereby considerably more likely to perform random violence. The Summer of Love was lovely, but why in this Fentanyl-infused era do we need to continue tolerating it?

Geography matters.

Why invent something new when you just call it racist?

I saw a homeless beggar in China once. Two cops were standing over him asking him to go away. Their tone was kind and they didn't put a hand on him. But, when a beggar bothers people police show up and put a stop to it.

I suppose I live in a high trust part of the US then because aggressive panhandling generally got a stern talk as well.

I once saw a crazed homeless guy getting madder and madder. He was enraged in some sort of psychotic fit and was wildly gesturing and lunging at people but then pulling back. A woman ran over to a cop in his car and said that homeless guy was going to attack someone. The cop said he was going to circle around a bit and would check back later. He then drove away. I don't suppose he really intended to come back to check on the situation.

So let's say I live in a less high trust sort of region. It was a real novelty to go to China and see two cops block some guy's attempt to beg.

In some societies like China or Turkey it's shameful to have a relative who is homeless.

To compare, in western liberal cities, it's shameful to express discomfort about anything the homeless do. It's seen as a lack of compassion and understanding (the most important virtues for the WEIRD).

With the incentives being where they are, the difference in outcomes is unsurprising.

The implication is that you suck for not being able to hold your nose and step around the human feces left in the street and public transport for a couple of minutes of your day, while the homeless' life is so much worse, it sucks all day every day. This all slots in nicely with belief that affluent people with more pleasant lives probably don't deserve it, and vice-versa, the homeless doesn't deserve his shitty life.

This has not been my experience at all, living in precisely one of those western liberal cities.

San Diego has one of the worst homeless problems in the entire country; especially as someone who commutes primarily via public transit, I am in near-constant contact with the homeless, including the absolute worst and least functional of them; yesterday, while walking in a busy part of downtown, I walked by a homeless man who smelled so strongly of human shit that I detected his presence from across the street, several seconds before seeing him. A few months ago, I saw a homeless man literally drop his pants and shit on the floor of the trolley.

When I complain about these things to my extremely liberal/progressive friends, they nearly universally commiserate with me, and agree that these externalities of homelessness are disgusting and intolerable. Where they disagree with me is what ought to be done about it. Nearly nobody, outside of individuals who have built their identity around “homeless advocacy”, will look down on you for complaining about smelly insane bums. They just think that, as Jon Stewart memorably claimed, the continued existence of those smelly insane bums is “the price of our freedom.” They cannot countenance the kind of policies which would ultimately be necessary to do anything sustainable about it.

Thus, complaining about it is understood as simply blowing off steam, rather than the expression of serious politically-oriented opinion.

For a moment I thought you meant something like this epic display of civilizational decline: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DqfJYEKB8NQ

But trolley has multiple meanings.

Well. I won't disagree about the epic display of civilizational decline. But this particular showing is being put on by a pair of clowns. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/man-poop-in-nyc-mop-bucket/

Huh, I never knew that. I assumed that the homeless guy had been making a scene earlier and that's why cameras were filming but 'staged act' is a much more straightforward conclusion.

I'm not saying they don't complain but my experience with it is that when people complain about it, it's only with trusted friends and the way they say it is as if it is transgressive to admit that they don't think it's acceptable that mentally ill people scream at them on the bus. Then it's usually followed by multiple phrases saying how obviously it's not those people's fault and how it's because we're so terrible, etc...

People don't become psychotic out of nowhere.

Some people do just have schizophrenic breaks and become bad for society if not medicated out of nowhere.

My issue with housing first is that essentially the person is a drug addict in many cases and while they’re ostensibly getting help, they’re also very likely to do the kinds of things drug addicted people do— sell anything that isn’t nailed down physically and destroy property. So getting a large scale program like that to be self-sustaining is probably not possible. You can’t simply rent units with the government paying— no landlord of sane mind is going to participate because even if they pay above market (which they won’t, and they’d probably pay below market) it likely still won’t pay for the depreciation of the rest of the units (because the “unhoused” piss in the elevator, make lewd comments and possibly expose themselves to women and children, steal from their neighbors etc.) then afterwards, you basically have to rebuild the unit (likely with no help from the government) replacing all the fixtures and pipes and wiring sold for drugs, cleaning the floors that the unhoused never cleaned and probably used as a restroom, getting rid of the vermin who have taken up residence, repainting and repairing drywall, etc.

Building would probably again be a losers gamble because you have exactly the same problems. You aren’t going to rent the same unit without the rehab costs. Nobody in their right mind would allow those units built anywhere near them because of the crime and drug problems those units bring with them. Since the units would be built far from anywhere that has jobs — because again, no one wants them around because of the drug problems— you have the added difficulty of getting people without cars to jobs and rehab and training centers.

In an ideal world where the American homeless weren’t chronically addicted to drugs, housing first might work. It works on the Finns and Japanese because they are not chronically addicted to hard drugs and tend to have enough education that you could get them a decent job without too much worry. Americans much less so.

Apparently the Finns are much more willing to lock up the homeless.

Aren’t Finns notorious for meth use?

I mean in any case section 8 exists and landlords want to be on it, despite the people who live there almost always being bad tenants. Large section 8 expansion is a reasonable policy to pursue for reducing homelessness.

Aren’t Finns notorious for meth use?

Finnish drug addicts are notorious for meth and heroin (or subutex / other substitues). Whether they’re homeless or not doesn’t have much effect on their public behavior.

Finnish homeless are notorious for being drunks who largely don’t bother others (except occasionally in minor ways). These days it’s rare to see them much at all. A distinct difference to American ones is their massively lower incidence of antisocial behavior.

insert joke about Finnish social skills

I wonder how much of this is just that you'll die if you're sufficiently dysfunctional to try to sleep on the streets in Hellsinki. Of course Finnish social services might be better, Finnish social fabric might be better, etc. But I regularly beat the drum on Cali's homeless problem being particularly bad compared to other expensive cities with similar policies due to weather.

It's predicated on the idea that to solve the problems with the homeless, you must solve the problems the homeless have. And that is simply not true. You don't need to solve the problems the yellow smoke has, and you don't need to solve the problems the (aggressive, drug-addled, mentally ill) homeless have either.

Suppose we've built institutions for the mentally ill. And we put people in them, and they take their drugs, and they get better. Now we let them out. We don't need armies of social service workers... we just tell them that if they don't take their drugs and they start doing whatever got them locked up, we're going to treat them as criminals this time. If they can't understand that, they're not well enough to be let out. And so each time they don't take their drugs, we lock them up for some fixed and increasing term until either they're locked up forever or stop committing crimes.

That's the nice approach. The nastier approach just treats them as ordinary criminals from the get-go and ignores their mental health problems.

Smaller incentives with escalation would work better. Punishment should be relatively immediate and certain with increasingly severity - as in, start with losing privileges or perhaps, gaining them.

A demerit system can only be implemented in an institutional setting; you don't have fine enough control with people outside it.

An institutional setting isn’t required, exactly. Ordinary and frequent contact and authority are the actual requirements. We could get those out of public housing with daily/weekly welfare checks. Then, we just need to identify some privileges - could be better accommodations (without a room mate or with a private bathroom) or perhaps, less frequent and intrusive checks.

I’d expect some terrible abuse (like with the old institutions).

Long term incarceration is expensive. In California, it is about 350$ a day. And you would have to be prepared to lock up a lot of people, because the chronic homeless population is heavily slanted towards people who are unable to follow their long term incentives -- jail one to deter 100 will not work.

If we ignore the utility to the homeless themselves (as you seem to prefer), the question becomes whether the negative externalities of the median homeless person are above that sum. I don't doubt that there are some whose negative externalities can reach 1k$/day, but I don't think that is the typical case.

Long term incarceration is expensive.

Because of the same category of people who are telling us to be compassionate for the homeless! You cant cause a problem then use that problem as a reason to not solve another problem! Its disingenuous!

I agree that the minimum viable prison is just a fenced-off area with some guards watching the fence who optionally throw food in.

Unfortunately, such a prison would also be a human rights violation. If you imprison someone, you take away most of their agency which they could have used to look after their basic human interests, such as being housed, fed, adequately medicated and neither raped nor murdered. I think it is reasonable that the society who imprisoned a person should take care of these necessities.

And caring for a bunch of people who have already failed to be deterred by the grossest disincentive society has against bad behavior (prison) and preventing them from raping and murdering each other is going to be more expensive per capita than running a boarding school.

I would be surprised if the cost of imprisonment was that high because bleeding heart liberals had pushed for daily changed satin bed sheets and a wide selection of organic food for the prisoners. My money would be on general cost disease, possibly with a sprinkling of market failure (e.g. regulatory capture by the prison industrial complex).

Even in Texas, the costs per prisoner per day are 77$.

The rhetoric around human rights has just become silly. We clapped ourselves in the manacles of human rights and now we're confused why we are hamstrung. Everything ever described as a "human right" is a luxury designed for a rich, strong, and healthy society to indulge in in order to feel good. We don't live in that world anymore. We live in a sick, weak, and struggling country which desperately needs to strengthen itself or be torn apart. This homeless problem and our inability to handle it is a symptom of that.

I assume we are still talking about the US, here?

Since the universal declaration of human rights was signed in 1948, the per-capita inflation-adjusted GDP has quadrupled. Jim Crow laws were still going strong. The witch-hunt on suspected communists was just getting started.

The idea that that any previous age was the real Golden Age and today we are just witnessing the decline is false for the US. Sure, the rent is too damn high, and a significant fraction of the population are pursuing grievance studies instead of something productive, but rumors of the impending collapse of the US or civil war are highly exaggerated.

Now, I will grant you that there is a tendency to claim that more and more stuff are human rights. Someone using the wrong pronouns or some ethnicity having worse outcomes in some field (but equal outcomes when correcting for skill) is not a human rights violation. Still, the idea that human rights are only for whiny wokes is wrong.

Almost nobody will say: "This country was so much better when we had slavery. If we abolish due process and just have the police shoot any suspected criminals, that will be much better. And if the whiny liberals complain, we should be able to make a law against criticizing to government and shoot them as well."

I agree that the minimum viable prison is just a fenced-off area with some guards watching the fence who optionally throw food in.

Unfortunately, such a prison would also be a human rights violation. If you imprison someone, you take away most of their agency which they could have used to look after their basic human interests, such as being housed, fed, adequately medicated and neither raped nor murdered. I think it is reasonable that the society who imprisoned a person should take care of these necessities.

"Human rights" aren't real. They were literally made up from nothing by enlightenment thinkers. What about my right to walk the streets and use the library without being hassled by underclass vagrants? No one cares for it.

Of course, human rights aren't real. The only thing I can be certain about is that that something which runs my mind exists. All the other stuff, electrons, sun flowers, homeless people, other entities which experience qualia, laws of mathematics or societies and so on are at best useful models to make sense of my sensory inputs.

Of course, most of these concepts were not made up at random by people who were high. Instead, they were invented to solve problems -- from describing their sensory experiences ('reality') to trying to prevent the repeat of bad outcomes in society.

The US was one of the forerunners with regard to the idea of human rights, and I would argue that this played a significant role in their economic success.

Fortunately for you, there are all kinds of countries who share your disdain for human rights. Mainland China, the Taliban regime, Iran or Somalia all agree with you that the convenience of important people like yourself should trump the desire of some less important people not to be sent to some gulag or shot in the streets.

Even Texas is subject to lawfare.

We know how to prevent all that sort of stuff in prisons. All activity is conducted in public. Lights out at 8. And probably a good dose of racial segregation. The costs are high because prisons now have extravagant designs full of concrete and video monitors which are all less effective than chain link and guards being able to see around corners.

No moral framework can justify the dregs of our society incurring $350/day in costs. It's absolutely unmitigated cost disease through unions and regulatory capture.

Perhaps most importantly, the Californian prison system doesn't even give us anything for those costs. They have all the same problems with rape and overcrowding as any other US prison system, even if it's not at the same scale as the worst of them.

I agree that the minimum viable prison is just a fenced-off area with some guards watching the fence who optionally throw food in.

Sounds like the American built camps for former German soldiers.

Unfortunately, such a prison would also be a human rights violation.

Not according to any US administration since camps for "Disarmed Enemy Forces" were built, for no House of Representatives, Senate or President has at least offered condolences, let alone expressed regret or admitted wrongdoing.

By today's standards, these camps would be a human rights violation. Of course, the state of the imprisoned had set a really low bar for human rights.

I would still argue that there is a difference in degree between Nazi soldiers who plunged Europe into war and genocided millions and homeless who shit in the streets of San Francisco. Sometimes you have to commit actions of dubious human rights status to stop more severe human rights violations from going on, and the severity of what you try to stop should be considered.

There are some more differences to consider, though:

  • The Nazi soldiers were used to follow the orders of their officers. Military prisoners can self-organize in a way that ideally limits the amount of prisoner-on-prisoner violence.
  • The people in these camps were selected only by their willingness to surrender instead of dying the Heldentod for their Fuehrer, and as such represented a normal cross-section of men in society. Granted, they were indoctrinated with Nazi propaganda, but it is not like they had any Jews or commies to victimize. By contrast, the people populating civil prisons -- or even homeless camps -- are heavily selected for aggression or mental health problems, respectively.
  • Most of the prisoners were there for a single summer. This would explain the exceedingly low death toll (6k over 2M, per Wikipedia). However, the Endloesung to the homeless question proposed in this thread was basically life imprisonment. Bad weather and infectious diseases and the inability to control food distribution would likely cause significant attrition even if no explicit violence took place among the inmates.

Sounds like the American built camps for former German soldiers.

Jesus, TIL. Fascinating and horrible.

For a similar one further back in history, see the Andersonville POW camp in the American Civil War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andersonville_Prison

You do realize $350 and $77 are much different numbers.

We also have tech solutions today to prevent them from raping and murdering each other. Require them to wear Apple glasses or just watches. Put cheap cameras everywhere.

If you kill someone then we just need an immediate execution. If you rape someone then off to the hole for 10 years. This would negate the need for highly paid unionized gods.

Prison guards. Highly paid. These two descriptors do not belong in the same sentence.

I think labor costs are high because prisons take a lot of labor.

I think the obvious is unions. Outsource this stuff to the rust belt. The flight each way is like $1k with security.

The all-in costs should be something like 16k a year in rural areas. Notre Dame room and board is 17k. Lower the quality of the housing and the food. Add-in some expenses for security. Probably got more rural than there. Get rid of so it’s impossible to bring in substances. Make it one road in one road out type of compound.

Spending this amount of money on incarceration is a policy choice. It could very easily be brought down to $35 a day, if not lower.

We already spend a lot on the problem with very little to show for it. I wonder if the overall cost would be lower

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