“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.”
Second of all those fat loser fucks would be beating the person in the second panel.
One popular move employed by city cops is to steal all a homeless person’s belongings and trash them right before a big freeze or rainstorm or heat wave. This deprives the homeless population of protection from the elements and increases the rate of homeless death by exposure.
Yeah, the goal isn’t to ‘end’ homelessness. There are always going to be dirtbags that think they are too good to get a job but stand on the same corner at the same time every day. They take advantage of the kindness of strangers and give nothing back to society. Worse they hinder the recovery of people who actually want to be a member of society.
But go on, pretend the violence and street shitting isn’t a problem. I know you will defend the failed policies 100% no matter what the consequences. Because admitting they are bad policies would require introspection and rationality - both of which are clearly lacking.
There are always going to be dirtbags that think they are too good to get a job but stand on the same corner at the same time every day.
You can’t seriously believe this right? You’re talking about fellow human beings who are down on their luck, not objects, could easily be you in a street corner some day.
There are always going to be dirtbags that think they are too good to get a job but stand on the same corner at the same time every day.
There are always going to be far more dirtbags who let the rich convince them to betray their inherent solidarity with other struggling humans because of morality stories about who deserves empathy and who doesn’t that have ZERO percent to do with reality, actual effective policy or even common sense.
These dirtbags have used the incredible capacity of the human mind to mutilate their empathy and committed a colossal waste of time by using such a powerful organ of consciousness…… to rationalize not extending a basic mercy to those in need, which even children who know nothing of the world can easily identify as evil because ignorance is wiser than years of rotting the core of one’s soul out with hateful conservative rhetoric.
I have sympathy for homeless people but I also realise they aren’t all good, harmless innocents (just like those who are lucky enough to have a home aren’t all good).
Some encampment activities were difficult to talk about — a disturbed camper throwing feces over the 97 Street bridge on unsuspecting passersby and cars.
Gangs are preying on vulnerable campers, setting up “taxation” tents like trolls under bridges, demanding payment for the use of safe consumption sites, or a chance to visit an agency to get free needles, or pick up a cheque
A 16-year-old girl was being sex-trafficked around the encampments. She was found in hospital with 75 per cent burns — under an alias.
They were sex trafficking a child, setting up wires to behead cyclists… those aren’t good people.
But yeah the solution isn’t to shuffle them into prison. They need homes.
“It’s worth every dollar. These are human lives. By making this new investment, we are going to put individuals on a new trajectory in life,” he [the mayor] said, adding that city staff are hearing from other municipalities across Ontario and the rest of Canada, as many grapple with how to deal with homelessness.
There is a security hub, washrooms and showers separate from the units, and a service room. One of the 50 units has a toaster, toaster oven and microwave. Laundry is done off site. An indoor community space, which will include a kitchenette and laundry facilities, is not open yet.
Each unit, which costs $21,150 to build, comes with a bed, bedding, mini fridge, smoke alarm, personal heater, air conditioning unit, and storage space. The units are side by side, with a door at the front and a window at the back.
I too would rather stand in the median of a busy highway interchange for 12 hours a day, in the rain or snow, with a bag of my stuff getting ruined, holding a sign and watching everyone turn their head away from me to not make eye contact, day in and day out, than get a job. I’m so glad you understand
Had coworkers who would insist the guys panhandling on the street were making more than we were. In fairness, we were being paid shit. But there were so many back-of-the-envelop assumptions and urban legends flying around - “Well, if he gets $1 on every light and there’s 20 light changes every hour…” / “I hear they all drive nice cars and just pretend to be poor…” / “I heard on the AM Radio that there’s a trick homeless people use to get rich quickly…” - that you couldn’t have any kind of serious response to the right-wing rumor mill.
Housing First’s early goal was to create 2,500 new homes. It has created 3,500. Since its launch in 2008, the number of long-term homeless people in Finland has fallen by more than 35%. Rough sleeping has been all but eradicated in Helsinki, where only one 50-bed night shelter remains, and where winter temperatures can plunge to -20C.
But Housing First is not just about housing. “Services have been crucial,” says Helsinki’s mayor, Jan Vapaavuori, who was housing minister when the original scheme was launched. “Many long-term homeless people have addictions, mental health issues, medical conditions that need ongoing care. The support has to be there.”
“We had to get rid of the night shelters and short-term hostels we still had back then. They had a very long history in Finland, and everyone could see they were not getting people out of homelessness. We decided to reverse the assumptions.”
They want free prison labor instead of helping people. All programs that gave people shelter and UBI had high success rates of getting people off the streets. If you give people resources and real help. They can be housed, it isn’t unsolvable at all.
They want free prison labor instead of helping people.
They don’t even really want that, at this point. Prisoners are increasingly geriatric, malnourished, and prone to mental illness, making them unreliable employees at their best and completely unprofitable more often than not.
All programs that gave people shelter and UBI had high success rates of getting people off the streets.
Ah, but you’re forgetting the mystery third option. Pack undesirable people into cages during a plague or a heat wave and kill them from behind bars. This is significantly less expensive than either enslaving them at a loss or funding housing/UBI.
And then in a few years, after making no efforts to create a space where homeless people can live the way they want or a path for them to get a job and a home, the enforcement of these laws will loosen up and you’ll be back to stepping over people on the sidewalk.
You’ll never get rid of the homeless by building shelters. Some of them don’t want to go to one. They can’t shoot up or drink in there, and there are other rules to follow too. There are also some other issues of living in a shelter.
Like they aren’t assured long term spots and can’t bring their pets, often the pets who helped them survive, physically and emotionally. Maybe fuck off with your exterminationist bullshit?
What exterminationist bullshit? Where in my comment did I say anything like that? Where did I say “all homeless do this”? I said you won’t get rid of homelessness by building shelters, since there are many homeless people who don’t want to go to a shelter. I also gave some reasons they don’t want to go. Not letting in pets is one such reason
If only Reagan didn’t defund asylums in order to “prove” they didn’t work so that they could move the homeless to jail or on the street where they can be a scary story to keep us wage slaves in line.
Yeah, a shelter is not of much use to someone who has the shakes so bad that he would still feel better if he had his fix while on the street while its freezing.
This is exactly it: The best treatment for opioid addiction is tapering them over time (though with the likes of fentanyl you want to downgrade to heroin) flanked by socio-psychological treatment. Crime suddenly plummets, when not having to fear for their dose and life addicts become functional, some of them might be too far gone to get the curve but it’s still going to be cheaper overall to society because pharmaceutical-grade heroin is cheap as fuck and, as said, you’re slashing crime. Heroin is not a drug that, in itself, makes you non-functioning, or would be particularly dangerous to health – gotta monitor respiration while under but that’s it, it doesn’t kill your organs or something.
Meth and crack are quite a bit harder in the sense that tapering doesn’t really work, but it’s still not a good idea having addicts running around looking for copper to sell and dicks to suck. Similar issue as with alcohol, actually: Tapering doesn’t work there, either, but if you can get people stabilised and away from binge drinking things suddenly look way better and possibilities open. That is, instead of getting up, noticing that there’s no alcohol, then hustling for a bottle or two of liqueur to binge come evening, you get them on a regular glass of wine every few hours, enough to stave off withdrawal and suddenly they can actually develop clarity instead of being either restless or completely plastered.
Too bad most people won’t listen to that argument and will stop listening 3-5 sentences in to shout “REEEEEEE FREE DRUGS FOR LAZY PEOPLE REEEEEEE” because they don’t understand the underlying causes of crime and only care about punishing the effects, not preventing them.
I hate how much this country is infected with the protestant work ethic, because it’s destroying us.
It’s not a Protestant thing but individualism and competitiveness taken to American degrees. Ask an OG European Lutheran theologist and they’d say something along the lines of “As you hand a construction worker a shovel, so you hand an addict the necessary tools to do their work”, and to the addict “as you work on yourself, god will see and smile on you”. A work ethics can exist without getting societal atomisation, “fuck you got mine”, and “the result of work is money, if it doesn’t earn money it’s not work” into play.
To give an armchair diagnosis of the American condition from the psychological/theological POV, it’s Calvinist focus on predetermination combined with not understanding the “lazy argument” as the Stoics call it: The universe is deterministic thus things are predetermined, so the Stoics say, and then detractors say “if it is predetermined whether I live or die, it doesn’t matter whether I go to the doctor”. “Bullshit”, say the Stoics, “the proper argument goes like this: If it’s ordained by the fates that you live, you will go to the doctor, if it is ordained that you die, you won’t”. If that argument now convinces you that you can “change” your fate by going to the doctor, then the fates always intended you to be swayed by it. But in any case: Actions matter. The fates won’t bend physics to accommodate you not wanting to go to the doctor, their machinations are weaved into, indeed are, the very laws of the universe.
That is, as far as this kind of doctrine is concerned seeing an addict and saying “this is one who does no work, he’s not one who will reach the heavens, he can be discarded” only means that you, yourself, are not doing the work demanded of a Christian, as you do not know whether even a simple kind word might not change their life for the better, and you were there, and you said nothing, and you will be judged by god for judging without qualification, and the addict will be judged by god, and god will see that the addict has done their part of the work, and they will go to heaven.
(Not Christian btw I just like to preach the real stuff to people who pretend they are)
Wait y’all have cops that don’t just start wailing on that guy for not moving? Cops in my city absolutely call backup and go squad deep when homeless people stand their ground.
Or when they dont. In my twenties I worked with unhoused populations, and someone who I was kind of point of contact for came inafter being missing for a couple weeks. She had really weird injuries. I recognized a few of them, not all, and I’m pretty familiar with broken bodies so that was surprising. Apparently she’d been kidnapped and tortured by cops for at least a week. I found out basically everyone has a few of those. The cops just do that. Theres no reason, There’s no jusrification; they just take who they can.
And why should someone who’s been thrown away like that give a shit about your comfort? I know when I was thrown away and ended up homeless, I lost a lot of respect for my environment and ‘normal’ people. I didn’t get as bad as a lot of people.
Do you have a good reason for them to care? To care about something other than the next fix? Maybe a future, or a chat with a friend? No? Then maybe shut the hell up about how icky the actual living human beings you let get thrown away like trash make you feel when you have to walk through their fucking homes.
Who will pay their bribes to secure a healthy pipeline of human suffering because that’s good for their investors donations to encourage more great policies and responsible governance.
Yes but then we’re punishing them and letting some corporation buy their labor(not from them, and not in such a way that covers the costs) and pay them in top ramen. Which is morally better, Jesus says so.
The answer to what question though? If it is what’s presented here in the comic, I.e. “what to do instead of sleeping on the street”, then that’s a remarkably American answer, and requires significant stupidity and/or malice.
Around where I live, there’s plenty of shelters, with plenty of open spots where the only requirement is that if you’re on drugs you need to go to rehab.
Yes, that’s part of the problem. Pay for rehab with what money? Homeless shelters also aren’t a solution to homelessness, because shelters are not housing.
Drug addiction doesn’t work that way. Imagine if the only way to get housing was to quit smoking cold turkey. Very, very few people will succeed. Some of the homeless have tried to kick their habit and failed, so very few people would want to fail abstinence and go back on the streets.
Rehab is rarely successful, especially religious institutions, but that is no excuse for not trying to fix a very clear problem with ones self. Drug addictions work exactly like that. Either you want to change and you’re trying, or you don’t and you’re not.
I was curious what the difference was so I went searching for a study like this one and saw on Table 2 that voluntarily admitted treated individuals at the 6 month follow-up survey were only 50% abstinent for the prior 30 days compared to 24% of compulsorily admitted. However, it is true that the overdose rate for VA was much lower than CA’s 22%.
I’m not sure courts anywhere in the USA can force rehab for more than a year, some states do about 30-50 days. Even then, usually only for repeat offenders. With that in mind the number of people who complete treatment for compulsory admission is probably much much lower than for VA, but I didn’t bring stats to back that claim up.
I do also know for a fact, though, that the 2 year rate is even worse than those numbers, so rehab is more often unsuccessful regardless.
I’ve never done drugs before, but I’ve heard that once people experience being high, being sober is pretty damn depressing & unbearable, And they would rather live this miserable existence high than sober. At any cost, no matter the stakes.
I’ve literally never drank alcohol either. I mean people have asked me to try it so I’ve taken a sip and IMO it tastes disgusting like poison and I had no desire to go beyond a taste, so no I’ve never drank alcohol.
And you’re right, alcohol is not only a drug but it’s the worst drug. And it’s socially acceptable and it will never be illegal because everyone’s addicted to it.
Have you ever been given drugs at the doctor’s or dentist, like anesthesia or pain meds? It’s pretty rare that someone has never experienced an altered state of mind at some point.
The majority of people have been high before, and the majority of people are not drug addicts who find being sober horribly depressing. It’s the depression that causes the drug addiction, not the other way around - though it certainly does make it harder to recover.
Doing street drugs or abusing prescription drugs is completely different from being put under anesthesia or having a dentist numb your mouth. They’re two different animals.
Didn’t intend to suggest they were the same, only that people don’t find being sober depressing and unbearable after experiencing an altered state of consciousness once. People get “high” at the doctor’s or dentist all the time and the risk of addiction from that is all but non-existent, but if someone seeks out the same drug outside a hospital setting the risk of addiction is much higher. Why? Because drugs don’t make people addicted, they keep people addicted. People become addicted when they begin to use drugs as a maladaptive coping mechanism (typically for mental illness or environmental factors, i.e. poverty), and only then does the chemical component of addiction come into play.
I’m sorry I didn’t mean to sound argumentative. You are making a lot of good points. If I’m understanding you’re saying that people who have a higher risk for drug addiction could suffer from addiction after being exposed to it in a completely legal and legitimate setting (example dentist pulled your teeth and you got prescribed codeine, you liked how it numbed your emotional state, and now you want to use it to cope with your other non-related mental issues)?
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