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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   29623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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Good point, it's much better to have them out committing crimes on the streets instead. Or were you suggesting that we simply execute all of them?

  • -18

Perhaps something less extreme than mass executions. Such as institutionalization. Crazy homeless library masterbaters need help we are failing to provide.

As someone who lives in a city that's really gone to shit because of feral homeless, this kind of strawmanning is a pet peeve of mine. All that it would take to clean up the problems with the homeless is enforcing laws currently on the books. They harass somebody? Prosecute them. They jerk off in a library? Prosecute them. They dump out a garbage can on the sidewalk to look for reimbursable cans? Prosecute them. The problematic homeless are constantly committing crimes, JUST PROSECUTE THOSE CRIMES. That's all it would take!

I can't say that I would object too hard if my city adopted Judge Dredd rules and started executing vagrants, but there's no need for any tyranny at all besides the tyranny of basic law enforcement.

You say "just enforce laws" but what you mean is prison. All the homeless people will be sent to prison, because that's what happens when you enforce laws and prosecute people every time they break laws. This would of course cost 10x more money than the current library system, and lead to horrific human rights abuse in prison but... oh well, out of sight out of mind, right? You call it a strawman to to talk of executions, but your proposed solution is really not much better, and I'm tired of people like you who sneer that there's some quick easy solution that could be implemented overnight if only the local government could stop being pussies or whatever.

Prosecutorial discretion is a bad thing. If all laws were enforced to the hilt 100 percent of the time, then legislators would be very quickly incentivized by public outcry to make the definitions and the penalties for those crimes more reasonable.

You call it a strawman to to talk of executions, but your proposed solution is really not much better,

Well, if it's not much better, can we start executing criminals then? No skin off your nosenat this point, right?

man, what? I'm in favor of allowing them to stay and chill at the library. It seems like you're just venting and want to yell at someone on the internet at this point.

Ok, but I'm in favor of the death penalty for extremely violent criminals and sex offenders. This is unrelated to the homeless problem, bit since you said putting people in prison is not much better than executing them, you shouldn't be that much bothered by executing people who are serving life with no parole, for example, right?

Where I live there are cities with homeless problems and cities without them(housing is cheap enough than anyone who’s minimally functional can rent a room, so long term homeless are dysfunctional). The cities without them have the police beat the homeless until they move. The cities with them just let them concentrate in the ghetto.

Labor camps will probably suffice. Put them to useful work like filling in potholes, cleaning up trash from sidewalks and vacant lots, and removing graffiti 14 hours a day, under strict supervision, and they'll be too exhausted to get up to didoes.

There are not enough people in the US willing to be prison guards to make this happen. It’s a low status job.

IIRC there was a Scott article or Mottepost a few years ago about how forced labor is generally unproductive because the overhead costs exceed the value produced by unmotivated and unskilled workers? Not sure how much of that is motivated reasoning, but I'm willing to credit it.

Does anyone know which text I mean?

Another related datapoint is Project 100,000: generally people who are dysfunctional in society when given copious opportunities to be functional will not be net productive when press-ganged put into large work groups.

Obligatory link to Gwern's outstanding review of McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War:

It’s not well-known, but one of the most consistent long-term sponsors of research into intelligence has been the US military. This is because, contrary to lay wisdom that ‘IQ only measures how well you do on a test’ or book-learning, cognitive ability predicts performance in all occupations down to the simplest manual labor; this might seem surprising, but there are a lot of ways to screw up a simple job and cause losses outside one’s area. For example, aiming and pointing a rifle, or throwing a grenade, might seem like a simple task, but it’s also easy to screw up by pointing at the wrong point, requires fast reflexes (reflexes are one of the most consistent correlations with intelligence), memory for procedures like stripping, the ability to read ammo box labels or orders (as one Marine drill instructor noted), and ‘common sense’ like not indulging in ‘practical jokes’ by tossing grenades at one’s comrades and forgetting to remove the fuse - common sense is not so common, as the saying goes. Such men were not even useful cannon fodder, as they were as much a danger to the men around them as themselves (never mind the enemy), and jammed up the system. (A particularly striking non-Vietnam example is the case of one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever, the Port Chicago disaster which killed 320 people - any complex disaster like that has many causes, of course, but one of them was simply that the explosives were being handled by the dregs of the Navy - not even bottom decile, but bottom duo-decile (had to look that one up), and other stations kept raiding it for anyone competent.)

Gregory’s book collates stories about what happened when the US military was forced to ignore these facts it knew perfectly well in the service of Robert McNamara & Lyndon Johnson’s “Project 100,000” idea to kill two birds with one stone by drafting recruits who were developmentally disabled, unhealthy, evil, or just too dumb to be conscripted previously: it would provide the warm bodies needed for Vietnam, and use the military to educate the least fortunate and give them a leg up as part of the Great Society’s faith in education to eliminate individual differences and refute the idea that intelligence is real.

It did not go well.

Possibly Meditations on Moloch (Ctrl-F "slave" to get to the relevant part) or Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs (Ctrl-F "useful work" to get to the relevant part).

Note that neither of these makes the full claim that if you've got people sitting around whom you have to supervise and feed anyway, you can't extract useful labour from most/any of them. The first makes the much weaker claim that owning slaves-for-life is not the most cost-effective way of getting work done (vs. allowing the slaves to earn their freedom), and the second makes the weaker claim that there exist people from whom useful labour cannot be extracted (and even there, I will note that he did not consider the "job" of "low-class prostitute", probably because that's illegal in 49/50 states of the USA and also significantly dystopian).

In this case it's not intended to be directly productive, it's intended to tire out the criminals.

Why are "Status Quo", "Status Quo from the next town over" and "Hyperbole" the only viable options?

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