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I don't like the framing of this premise that you need to "contribute to society" in order to not be exposed to the elements and have a safe place to retreat. D

I don't like the framing of this premise that you need to "contribute to society" in order to not be exposed to the elements and have a safe place to retreat. Do people working on ads contribute to society? What about middle managers of middle managers? What about the people on golf courses that basically spend money to make other people do shit for them? Furthermore, we cannot dehumanize our fellow humans even if they use drugs. The result of such framing is vicious savagery as is seen in America, the Philippines, and other places around the world.

joenot443 7y ago
I think it's pretty obvious he didn't mean "contribute to society" in the metaphorical sense, but in the idiom which typically means "hold a job".
- jyrkesh 7y ago
  See my response above, I really didn't mean either of those things, it was just a lazy end to the sentence.
jyrkesh 7y ago
You know, I actually paused after those words because I was afraid of a response like this, but I didn't rephrase because I just figured "they'll get what I mean". In the context of my response, I really just meant it as shorthand for "not doing any of the negative stuff that Seattleites deal with on an everyday basis". Lots of homeless people are already doing that--namely, not putting the general public at risk with violence or needles sitting around--but many of the ones visible to us are making the city worse off. So again, my OP should really be reframed as: "if you take a dangerous drug addict and put them in a house, they're still a dangerous drug addict". And I do implicitly mean there that if you take a non-dangerous, knocked-off-their-feet homeless person and put them in a house, you now have a housed person, and that's a very positive thing :)
- vehementi 7y ago
  Yes, nobody says that just putting people into housing will magically fix them. That's why there's 30 other things on the list. Someone in housing is more likely to begin on their road to recovery than someone who has to live on the streets and have their stuff stolen all the time.

joenot443 7y ago

I think it's pretty obvious he didn't mean "contribute to society" in the metaphorical sense, but in the idiom which typically means "hold a job".

jyrkesh 7y ago
See my response above, I really didn't mean either of those things, it was just a lazy end to the sentence.

jyrkesh 7y ago

You know, I actually paused after those words because I was afraid of a response like this, but I didn't rephrase because I just figured "they'll get what I mean". In the context of my response, I really just meant it as shorthand for "not doing any of the negative stuff that Seattleites deal with on an everyday basis". Lots of homeless people are already doing that--namely, not putting the general public at risk with violence or needles sitting around--but many of the ones visible to us are making the city worse off. So again, my OP should really be reframed as: "if you take a dangerous drug addict and put them in a house, they're still a dangerous drug addict". And I do implicitly mean there that if you take a non-dangerous, knocked-off-their-feet homeless person and put them in a house, you now have a housed person, and that's a very positive thing :)

vehementi 7y ago
Yes, nobody says that just putting people into housing will magically fix them. That's why there's 30 other things on the list. Someone in housing is more likely to begin on their road to recovery than someone who has to live on the streets and have their stuff stolen all the time.