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“Shocking” — hardly, given the aforementioned extensive media coverage of the situation. “Unpleasant to be around” — I personally find lots of folks unpleasant
by voltaireodactyl 4y ago
“Shocking” — hardly, given the aforementioned extensive media coverage of the situation.
“Unpleasant to be around” — I personally find lots of folks unpleasant to be around; the homeless fall somewhere in the middle of the scale. I’m far less concerned with their drug use than with the intoxication of people owning and operating cars, for example. I know far more people negatively and physically impacted by DUI than by random assault by the homeless.
I’m also less bothered by the existence of folks without homes than I am by folks who — upon registering their own discomfort with the situation — seek to move the problem out of view rather than addressing the root cause.
The process you’re seeking to describe as a “desensitization” is instead a growing comfort with a larger swath of communities than folks who don’t live in such cities are fortunate enough to encounter. In reality, it would seem that desensitization actually occurs when folks are exposed to endlessly “othering” media, with very little personal experience to speak of.
Policing has taken a similar path from “community engagement based decision making” to “birds eye statistical algorithmic policing”. It’s going about as well as addressing the actual causes of homelessness.
- WeylandYutani 4y agoThis is just bullshit. Homeless camps are a fucking disgrace for a rich Western country and every citizen should feel bad about it.
- whateveracct 4y agowhat's your solution? if they're a disgrace we must have been able to get to where we are with a simple change, right? what was then blindspot?
- mantas 4y agoWhy with a specifically simple change?
- pfannkuchen 4y agoI’m a bit confused how you’ve taken the “shocking” part so extremely out of its immediately adjacent context. “This is assuming that a person *without any media exposure* at all would still find the homeless situation shocking” How could a hypothetical person without any media exposure at all be informed by the extensive media coverage?
- voltaireodactyl 4y agoTo split hairs: I would have to assume any person capable of visiting an American city, but somehow without any media exposure at all would have to be homeless themselves, and people are generally not shocked by others living their same experience. I’m trying to think of another scenario where such a hypothetical person might exist, but my imagination fails me.
- pfannkuchen 4y agoYes, you are totally correct that such a person would probably not visit Seattle. That part of my reply was an abstract clarifying question aimed at "It gives you an actual sense of what is dangerous rather than one built upon fear of the unknown and media spin". I.e. the negative feeling one gets when one is in a city with people living in tents as they do in Seattle today is not necessarily strictly or even primarily due to media consumption, because (I assert) a theoretical human unexposed to media would still have a qualitatively-same instinctive negative reaction. Do you disagree? If so I am interested in why you disagree. For example, if you somehow talked an orthodox Amish person into visiting Seattle with you (and perhaps had them read a few books about what cities are like in general first), they would still be shocked by the tent areas and find them unpleasant, despite never being exposed to whatever news outlets you consider inflammatory, immoral, incorrect, etc (and I do agree that all news outlets are all of these things, I personally avoid the stuff). Relatedly, if you then asked the Amish person if they would prefer to stay in Seattle and help try to fix the problem, or to just return to their Amish village and ignore the problem, I think they would 100% of the time go with the latter? Are they wrong?
- 4y ago