4 ms·

There is a huge difference between being homeless and choosing to camp on a public street in metropolitan areas. Its not only illegal, its immoral. If they are

There is a huge difference between being homeless and choosing to camp on a public street in metropolitan areas. Its not only illegal, its immoral. If they aren't mentally ill, you forcefully remove them to the outskirts of the city. If they still keep coming back then you imprison them. If you think this is fascist, then you are dangerously loosening the definition of fascism. You must see how playing with these words like this is extremely dangerous? Does "the boy you cried wolf" ring a bell?

ModernMech 3y ago
If you think forcibly concentrating groups of undesirables into camps isn’t a hallmark of fascism, I have to introduce you to the 20th century. > If they aren't mentally ill And what happens when the people making the decisions on whether or not someone is mentally ill are religious conservatives who believe homosexuality and transgenderism is a mental illness? Are you aware that religious conservatives often call leftism a mental disorder? They call wokeism a “mind virus”. Maybe you think you have a good idea here with your homeless concentration camps, but all I see is a back door to prosecution and persecution for people you just don’t like to see. Today that’s the homeless, and when they’re gone you’ll move on to the next group. First they came for the socialists…
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Aren’t you just describing the modern prison system? I believe the fascism comes from doing it to non-criminals, or communism if you count china’s re-education camps. Also, the British invented concentration camps during the Boer war. Work camps were a thing in the USA during the Great Depression. Supposedly a good thing, but I guess it depends on perspective.
  - ModernMech 3y ago
    I mean, the prison system in the US is its own humanitarian crisis.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      Sure, but other prison systems that are more humane also concentrate people in locations. Imagine America with a humane prison system that actually rehabilitated people rather than just grind them out at the end of their sentence. Then, we could send people with drug problems, or shop lifting or arson problems, to prison, and it would be a good thing for them rather than a bad thing. That might work. And right now, there is a lot of crime going on in the drug addicted side of the homeless problem, we know prison is pointless so don’t even bother prosecuting these days unless it’s severe. However, it means that if we had the above, no other pretense would really be needed (crime -> enforced rehab). This is all fantasy of course, because we have nothing like that in place. But it would be a good place to start (fix the correctional system).
      - ModernMech 3y ago
        > crime -> enforced rehab Right, exactly. We concentrate people on what they do, not who they are. It’s harder to abuse the system that way (although it is abused still). Right now the system is such that we try to be as specific as possible as to what is punishable by imprisonment and for how long, and the system results in imprisonment only if a jury is convinced beyond a reasonable doubt about the guilt of a defendant. We can’t apply this same system to mental illness, for the reasons I stated in my other post. You see how it’s working in Florida; you tell everyone that you want to protect the children, write some vague laws to “protect” them, and then you use them to wage an ideological war against your political enemies, leveraging the vagueness of the laws you’ve passed. That’s the legal mechanism by which fascism works to corrupt democracy. You see a lot of people eager to leverage the criminal system to get rid of homeless people by criminalizing homelessness on streets. This doesn’t work for them though, because it just drives homeless people into parks. That’s when you see the “well, let’s just ship them to the desert anyway” kind of ideas pop up. But there’s no legal mechanism to do so, I which is where the fascism comes in. “We will just label them as ‘undesireable’… I mean ‘mentally ill’ and that should be enough justification.” I’m wondering how many of the people proposing such concentration camps are themselves diagnosed with a mental illness, and whether or not the absence of such a diagnosis may make them more likely to suggest such an idea.

ModernMech 3y ago

If you think forcibly concentrating groups of undesirables into camps isn’t a hallmark of fascism, I have to introduce you to the 20th century. > If they aren't mentally ill And what happens when the people making the decisions on whether or not someone is mentally ill are religious conservatives who believe homosexuality and transgenderism is a mental illness? Are you aware that religious conservatives often call leftism a mental disorder? They call wokeism a “mind virus”. Maybe you think you have a good idea here with your homeless concentration camps, but all I see is a back door to prosecution and persecution for people you just don’t like to see. Today that’s the homeless, and when they’re gone you’ll move on to the next group. First they came for the socialists…

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Aren’t you just describing the modern prison system? I believe the fascism comes from doing it to non-criminals, or communism if you count china’s re-education camps. Also, the British invented concentration camps during the Boer war. Work camps were a thing in the USA during the Great Depression. Supposedly a good thing, but I guess it depends on perspective.
- ModernMech 3y ago
  I mean, the prison system in the US is its own humanitarian crisis.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Sure, but other prison systems that are more humane also concentrate people in locations. Imagine America with a humane prison system that actually rehabilitated people rather than just grind them out at the end of their sentence. Then, we could send people with drug problems, or shop lifting or arson problems, to prison, and it would be a good thing for them rather than a bad thing. That might work. And right now, there is a lot of crime going on in the drug addicted side of the homeless problem, we know prison is pointless so don’t even bother prosecuting these days unless it’s severe. However, it means that if we had the above, no other pretense would really be needed (crime -> enforced rehab). This is all fantasy of course, because we have nothing like that in place. But it would be a good place to start (fix the correctional system).
    - ModernMech 3y ago
      > crime -> enforced rehab Right, exactly. We concentrate people on what they do, not who they are. It’s harder to abuse the system that way (although it is abused still). Right now the system is such that we try to be as specific as possible as to what is punishable by imprisonment and for how long, and the system results in imprisonment only if a jury is convinced beyond a reasonable doubt about the guilt of a defendant. We can’t apply this same system to mental illness, for the reasons I stated in my other post. You see how it’s working in Florida; you tell everyone that you want to protect the children, write some vague laws to “protect” them, and then you use them to wage an ideological war against your political enemies, leveraging the vagueness of the laws you’ve passed. That’s the legal mechanism by which fascism works to corrupt democracy. You see a lot of people eager to leverage the criminal system to get rid of homeless people by criminalizing homelessness on streets. This doesn’t work for them though, because it just drives homeless people into parks. That’s when you see the “well, let’s just ship them to the desert anyway” kind of ideas pop up. But there’s no legal mechanism to do so, I which is where the fascism comes in. “We will just label them as ‘undesireable’… I mean ‘mentally ill’ and that should be enough justification.” I’m wondering how many of the people proposing such concentration camps are themselves diagnosed with a mental illness, and whether or not the absence of such a diagnosis may make them more likely to suggest such an idea.