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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37971 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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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.

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