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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Jakhammer's preference reveals more about the negative state of the perpetually homeless people than it does about the migrants.

The migration issue has a clear and simple solution - increase border security and stop incentivizing people to come to the United States. Homelessness to me is not as clear what to be done with. I believe cities in the past that effectively dealt with homeless people simply moved those homeless people to another place. It solves the problem on the city scale, but it is still a nationwide problem. There are policies that enable homelessness in these cities so stopping them would certainly help, but I don't think doing just that will solve the homeless issue.

I believe cities in the past that effectively dealt with homeless people simply moved those homeless people to another place.

Casual observation reveals lots of drugs and insanity. The historical approach to junkies and crazy people is locking them up. Homeless people that aren't crazy junkies are typically not all that visible, as they largely consist of people in temporary situations where they're living in their cars or the modern equivalent of mountain men that want to live rough, but are sane enough to stay away from meth encampments.

It solves the problem on the city scale, but it is still a nationwide problem.

Solving it in the cities generally solves it everywhere because their lifestyle is not sustainable in a rural area.

I was thinking of individual cities rather than cities in general since if Chicago decides to push out all homeless for example, San Francisco would not have changed their policies. On the city level, you don't get to decide to policy of another city.

The unfortunate truth is that seemingly the only two ways to eliminate the problematic homeless are to forcibly institutionalize them or to make their lives so insufferably bad that they voluntarily choose to shape up. I suppose a third option would be to tacitly allow people to kill them with impunity, but that is obviously less realistic and more evil than the first two approaches. Most people are adamantly against involuntary institutionalization, and they’re too humane to allow cops or strangers to instill genuine fear in the hearts of the homeless. So they proliferate.

The problematic homeless are generally so dysfunctional that abusing them into compliance is not going to happen. If they could pull their life together they would already be doing that. Having the cops beat them up isn't too far off of standard practice and it hasn't made much of an impact. Your options more or less amount to prison or rehab.

I think some people just don't want to be helped and can't be helped, and thus shouldn't be helped at all since it's just draining resources and enabling their drug-induced behavior. Forcible institutionalization would probably be the cheapest and fastest solution but like you said people would be against that. But I can't help but think of what San Francisco did to clean up the streets when Xi Jinping was coming to visit, clearly if there is a will then there is a way. I would argue the policies of cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco enable a growing homeless population.

There is certainly an argument that it could be cheaper to provide a clean and safe place to let these people get their drug fix since that would lessen other crimes and means the city no longer needs to spend money on fixing the other issues (as they would no longer occur) but I haven't looked into those studies and my gut feeling is that even if the economics are true there are plenty of counter-arguments beyond just the economics.

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