Does giving to a panhandler help them or are you just enabling their lifestyle and making them dependent on that form of income which may prevent them from getting a real job?
Criminalizing homelessness and making it a sign of essentially being a pariah in society does far more to ensure homeless people become dependent on begging for money than giving money to homeless people does.
Most societies in history have had codified ways of beggars receiving food or basic needs from vendors, the current situation in at least the US is horrendously cruel.
If panhandling was 100% illegal with a felony charge for those panhandling and for those giving do you think more people would pull themselves out of being homeless or would they just suffer more?
Homelessness is not caused by laziness as the state of being homeless is exhausting both mentally and physically, thus codifying the act of being homeless and needing money as even more criminal doesn’t do anything to stop people from falling into homelessness and getting stuck there. What causes people to fall into homelessness and extreme poverty and get stuck there is how obscenely cruel our society is structured and how if you fall down everybody around you starts kicking you because that is just what we do when people fall down.
It doesn’t really matter what a homeless person uses the money for that you give them or that the homeless person might think “oh this is a good spot to panhandle” if you give them money in that spot, these are trivial little details of the day, they have nothing to do with what is crushing that human being down (especially when you live in the richest country on earth like I do, and we have plenty enough resources to go around if we cared to tackle wealth inequality).
Git off discord tho for game development, it ends up causing only the types of people who are really active on discord to interact and give feedback and I have seen that really send some games off the rails as the rest of the playerbase begins to get the vibe the game is being developed for a small sliver of the game’s fans (the ones on discord and really active).
Any dev worth their salt knows to balance and weigh the feedback across all channels. Discord is easy for quick troubleshooting and frequently asked questions.
I am sure most devs who primarily interact with their game’s community through discord believe they are listening to feedback from a variety of sources, but it is clear to me in every case I know of where a game has “join our discord!” plastered all over the store page that functionally the only place where your feedback will actually be taken seriously and get to the devs is discord.
To be fair, war is actually a lot like gambling, most of the time it is boring sameness run through with a constant low level anxiety and then when something changes it happens abruptly with no warning. The difference is that when the unusual punctuates the boredom and you win in gambling you get money but when the jackpot sounds on the slot machine of war and something unexpected happens it usually means you are about to die.
It isn’t gambling for the rich though, more like the big loud distraction (that happens to kill lots of people) put on to distract everybody else from them robbing us all blind (on both sides of whatever war you can imagine).
Yes, WW1 was taught to me in school as coming out of a tense political situation that spiraled out of control before anyone knew what was happening, almost sort of like a freak natural disaster.
Everything made so much more sense when I read Gravity’s Rainbow with the way it portrayed the world wars as inevitable horrendous colonial violence turned inwards (which was bound to happen eventually). At first I was really confused why Pynchon included so much about the Herero peoples of Southern Africa, what did they have to do with WW2? Then I started to learn more history, I read the great article in the guardian on the 100th anniversary of WW1 about how the violence and genocide of colonialism was a direct path to the mass killing and violence of WW1
I strongly recommend getting a house where you can walk out your door and walk somewhere without feeling unsafe because the road immediately outside your house is dangerous if you aren’t in a car and have the destination you are walking be a pleasant environment to be a pedestrian (i.e. not endless stroads).
The impact on your health, especially if you can win the lottery and get a job within walking distance, cannot be measured easily and most people vastly underestimate the savings and quality of life impact from not having to drive everywhere for everything.
Then I would definitely recommend moving somewhere where going out and meeting people is easy, whether it be hobbies, nightlife or other reasons to get together with new people and make friends. Definitely don’t buy a house somewhere where it takes a conscious input of energy from yourself to see others as when we become depressed that is the HARDEST time to get ourselves to push through inertia. If you are anything like me you are going to end up on your couch feeling sad and a lot of times you won’t push through that to drive the 30+ mins to whatever thing you were considering doing. You also can’t be anywhere near as spontaneous about interacting with people and participating in different community events when every time you do it requires specific planning. If you live in town all it might take for you to get involved in something happening you were unaware of or thought you weren’t interested in is to pass by it happening. When you live far away from things, you have to sit there on your couch and specifically make the decision while blobbing on your phone that you want to participate in whatever thing you are interested in, and that can be a lottttt harder when you are depressed, trust me lol.
If you want the feeling of being out in the sticks, pay attention to being close to mass transit or easy drives out into nature.
Honestly, that sounds like a great lifestyle fit for you, but for many people there is a huge risk in that lifestyle in becoming extremely isolated from other people and not feeling like there is an easy way to escape that isolation.
A couple of mile walk into town is not the kind of thing someone who is feeling down but wants to maybe meet people is going to do unless the bicycling infrastructure is pleasant and easy to use. It also leaves you heavily dependent on having a healthy body to socialize which again I think is generally a bad idea as it is the times we are in poor health that we need friends the most.
I think a better question to ask is whether the groups and ideologies involved in the BLM protests (which were MASSIVE) were ever allowed to have power?
If BLM failed to enact significant policy change than I don’t think it is because BLM wasn’t focused enough, had unrealistic goals or was handled badly, I think it is because in terms of law enforcement policy it really doesn’t matter what voters do or don’t want. Any kind of noise made by voters and the public about police violence and the inherent problems with police (and their vital role in maintaining economic injustice and inequality through state violence) will be aggressively pushed back in the opposite direction by the political forces of law enforcement, and because the average person has no power and their vote is useless this will result in a broad push in policy in the opposite direction of BLM’s goals.
However, the function of BLM must be seen for what it was then, to lay bare the true nature of the power relationship between voters and cops and in the minds of countless, countless people living in the US it delegitimized the authority of law enforcement to commit violence wherever and howsoever it chooses. It sent a massive crack through the entire structure of policing, jails and systematic divestment from minorities and the poor. Just because BLM didn’t create significant policy changes doesn’t mean that the battle hasn’t already been lost for the legitimacy of law enforcement in the long term in the US, and I call that a victory.
Just to add a tiny bit of clarification, I think what BLM did was change the subterranean psyche of America, you can’t measure it in policy or material changes because those were resisted absolutely by the ruling class, but they could not stop the change in perspective and thinking that occurred.
Exactly and as time goes on I have shifted from a perspective that Occupy Wall Street was an unfocused failure to a perspective that the control of the finance industry and money on politics is absolute and those in power will not tolerate it being questioned, so Occupy Wall Street could never have resulted in immediate policy changes, Wall Street would have prevented it any cost even if it meant physically walking into the street and shooting protestors until they went back to work. Of course “financial instruments” would probably be used instead of guns, but murder is murder and the weapons the finance industry uses to make their living make mass shooters with assault rifles look like amateurs playing around with toys, see the 2008 financial crash as example A.
The role of Occupy Wall Street was thus to lay bare this power relationship and the associated threat of violence towards those who seek to modify it. The impact of Occupy must be understood in terms of how the internal psyche of the US was irrevocably radicalized from a collective witnessing of this truth.
In the same way that a crowd of fans will remember a ref on the soccer field making horrible calls that screw their team over (…and even though the crowd has no actual codified power to stop the ref from making bad calls and swinging the game), the crowd will remember:
the injustice itself
the collective shared awareness of the injustice among fellow strangers in the crowd
the disempowerment forced upon the crowd in that moment to preserve the status quo of the injustice
These are not things that crowds forget easily, in sports or in broader political contexts. Movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have to be understood as acts of reality crafting that first and foremost validate individual’s feeling that the majority of the public understands the power structure of the status quo as an existential threat to the common good.
Once people have seen the validation from essentially 1 out of every 10 people in the country showing up to Black Lives Matter with them it flips a switch in their head and talking heads on tv permanently lose a degree of power to manipulate people into believing their feelings are fringe in regards to rejecting police violence and systematic racism.
I think there is a big piece missing if we want to make lasting change. Protests should be the first part and we have missed many opportunities by skipping the second part.
Certainly so, but also I think an important difference between the civil rights movement with MLK and current day is the public is actually much closer to siding with the civil rights protestors now, MLK and others were not necessarily anywhere near as accepted during their time as a political activist figures though their ideas may have won out in the long term. We forget this when we see people like MLK as “popular figures” now.
I think the current problem is not that the majority believes in defending the racist structures of society, we don’t need an MLK to convince us that systematic and direct racism are abhorrent. The majority of us know, but the other difference between the civil rights movements of the MLK era and now is that we are far more powerless as a public body of normal people to actually wield power politically and enact the changes Black Lives Matter advocated for. We can’t change the laws, the rich and powerful WILL NOT let it happen, and we live in a time period where their power is near absolute.
We can’t judge the BLM or Occupy movement for failing to create policy changes when both movements were specifically born out of a desire to directly express the unsustainable nature of disempowerment in the US of the average person. We have reached a maximum point of powerlessness against an entrenched, corrupt political system and at this point policy just isn’t going to happen unless we all collectively keeping threatening to shut it all down.
NYC and other cities briefly dropped some cop funding and all that did in the end was for crime to go up. NYC subway now needs metal detectors and the national guard was called in recently due to the uptick in violent crime.
I am sorry, but you viewpoints are clearly based on your desire to engage with a narrative rather than the facts
The only spike in violence New York City saw was from the pandemic making desperate people even more desperate. There was a spike and then it subsided because people got less desperate.
At best some shallow, meaningless changes like a mural or a rainbow or BLM flag painted on a street, hell, maybe even a street name change or something akin to that, and in some cases, it just increased crime and looting statistics in the aggregate in numerous cities. Sorry bro, this is reality.
The reality is that the people with the power in the US political system are like you and will categorically not accept less police violence, it is a feature not a bug. Meanwhile, crime has been decreasing and will keep decreasing no matter how much rightwing figures make a bunch of noise about crime and scary immigrants to try to distract people from noticing they aren’t actually doing their jobs and passing legislation to meaningfully improve people’s lives (that addresses REAL problems like unaffordable healthcare or lack of access to affordable housing, not whether hypothetically a transgender person might have a slighttttt advantage in sports??)
It also increase social tension and some distrust between races, which ain’t good, either. I dare say that racism, from all races went up since 2016. Won’t fully blame BLM for this but the movement sure did not help.
Cite your sources bro. If anything has changed it is that rightwing extremists have become less capable of hiding their racism under a veneer of acceptability politics and have become more openly violent as they realize the general public is beginning to see rightwing extremists (which is effectively the whole damn party, since it is a party of cowards that just follows the loudest, angriest person) for the losers they are. In this sense, yes maybe tensions have increased, but if they have the overwhelming evidence points to conservative rightwing extremists specifically escalating tensions in the vast majority of cases.
Perhaps more existentially for the conservative movement in the US, the general public is also beginning to realize how irresponsibly rightwing extremists behave in policy making (again which is essentially every Republican in office because they all just fall in line no matter how hateful their leader is) because their basic sense of empathy was utterly lobotomized by spending too many hours in front of the tv watching the likes of New Gingrich and Bill O’Reilly. Republicans are the dog chasing the car and the car is hate, and we can only hope that they have finally caught the car in banning abortions and overturning roe vs wade (which the numbers are looking promising, my fingers are crossed :) ).
If we stop treating driving as functionally a right we have to stop treating owning a car as functionally mandatory to having a job and being able to feed and house yourself.
What do you do in the US if you need a job but don’t have a license? You drive anyways and just deal with the risk. The problem is that people HAVE to drive so we can’t really in good faith take the ability to drive away from most people as most when pushed to their limit couldn’t stop driving if they wanted to.
It is disgusting because people want trucks with super high hoods because they look like cowboy belt buckles and it’s masculine… but the reason cars haven’t been built to look like that in the past is because it is a pathologically murderous way to design a vehicle that will inevitably get in accidents with other cars and pedestrians at some point. I can’t walk around wielding a giant machete in broad daylight and have people treat me like that is acceptable behavior, why do we treat driving around a vehicle optimized to hurt other people in accidents as acceptable behavior? Especially when the reason is “idk, it looks cool, especially once I lift it”.
I think the design of pickups really pretty precisely tracks the retreat of conservatism from pretending to honor basic social contracts in favor of outright embracing violence against The Other whoever that might be defined as. Giant pickups are just a physical manifestation of marketing department’s best guess at what the interior psyche of conservative masculinity desires, and that desire has clearly gravitated more and more towards embracing violence and lack of caring for the consequences of ones actions on others and that is a scary thought.
Yeah, honestly I hope it is referencing the tanukis then, though I suppose it is fitting in a weird way to dress up as an invasive species and then proceed to murder everything…
…but also… seeing my mom lose all her patience and yell at my dad for having aggressive late stage dementia and not being able to function properly.
Seeing that and being broke and unable to materially change the situation was by far and away the most cynical, insufferable thing I have ever experienced in my entire life and hopefully I will never experience something as awful again or I fear I would shatter into a million pieces.
What really hurt me to see (obviously it hurts the actual victims more) was how during Covid there was this what felt like once in a generation opportunity for progressive policies that were necessary during Covid such as rent eviction moratoriums, child support payments and stimulus checks to prove themselves to society and be embraced outside the context of Covid.
Then the rich violently slammed the door shut, and seeing the rent eviction moratorium be let to unceremoniously expire made my heart sink, it felt like the final nail in the coffin of the possibility of a brighter future because of how obviously wrong it was as a choice and how much the narrative of mainstream media was ready to move on as if we always had to move on, we always had to get back to this incredibly unsustainable grind that is quite visibly slowly (and not so slowly) destroying everyone around me including myself (which isn’t casual hyperbole, I say that very seriously).
The system cannot be fixed at this point I don’t think unless the people in power see agreeing to fixes in system (“concessions” from their standpoint) as the less scary alternative to other things. Otherwise Covid proved exhaustively that populist changes that improve everyone’s lives will be forced by any means necessary to be repealed by the ruling class.
99% of the people here are dumb as a box of rocks
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Git gud (lemmy.world)
99% of Gamblers stop before they Rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Sorry for the low quality post but nonetheless need some advice (lemmy.world)
Were the BLM protests of 2020 a success?
Bustacean (lemmy.world)
Going 100km/h in a 30km/h zone (lemmy.world)
"Raccoon energy" is definitely something to aspire to (sopuli.xyz)
What are some of the most insuffereable moments in your life?
Evictions skyrocket nationwide as housing costs rise (www.nbcnews.com)