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> A few years ago I co-founded a non-profit working mostly with inner-city youth I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your reply and give major credit to you for

> A few years ago I co-founded a non-profit working mostly with inner-city youth I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your reply and give major credit to you for being personally and directly involved. Much respect. People wanting to be able to live in a safe environment free from violence and coercion is the essence of the social contract. We create institutional structures like a judicial system and penal system in an attempt to create fair systems that create the desired incentives for all. There are certainly a small number of people who suffer from mental illness and substance abuse challenges that render them incapable of participating in the social contract in the same way as other people. Society has replaced private charity with state welfare which also includes care for the elderly, for orphans, etc. I think the defining characteristic of a properly functioning social contract is that it provides an incentive for everyone to cooperate and to preserve the status quo. SF is at a disadvantage because of how badly other cities treat the underserved. I've heard stories even about private hospitals in SF putting very ill homeless patients in a taxi and sending them to the public hospital (in violation of a multitude of laws and ethical standards), and a similar scenario exists with other cities that are less hospitable to the have nots. Thus SF has become a sanctuary city. Much like a bird sanctuary that offers habitat to beings that would otherwise starve or die off, SF provides habitat for humans who simply would not have anywhere to go. In the past we've had laws that criminalize drugs and prevent many modes of treatment, creating a drug epidemic in the US far worse than exists in places that provide care without moral judgment. But in the US moral judgment is insatiable and sells politically. That's why I am trying to help identify what I call the "right-wing impulse", the idea of the downtrodden as the political "other" that must be feared and stopped. While any kind of dehumanization rhetoric is harmful and cuts of empathy and critical thought, dehumanization targeting the weakest in society has been strongly on the rise in the US in recent years. In my view, the post-911 response of "see something, say something" and widespread, state sponsored suspicion of brown people fueled what would eventually become Trump's anti-immigrant (fundamentally anti-brown) movement. The US Government spent billions on advertising telling us to fear or neighbors. The right wing impulse is what the public is trained to have by that kind of advertising. The idea that we should be suspicious, fearful, and that policing and surveillance is the solution. Much like an abundant apple orchard will attract all kinds of species with the smell of blossoms and fruit, an abundant society will attract people from all walks of life. It will give hope to those who are too damaged to be contributors to society and whose role it is to receive charity. I think we need to change our impulse response from the right-wing one to the realization that it is our good fortune that makes our cities places where those with no hope go to find hope.

_bin_ 1y ago
This is pretty-well considered; you're right that the SF's policies and climate go a long way to contributing to the problem. And yes, if other cities treated them better, SF's problem would be smaller. Sometimes this is due to a lack of services, to be sure, but SF's services are so unsustainably expensive that even were we to radically increase taxation and scale this federally, it wouldn't work. The "NGO-industrial complex" through which this is washed is the big culprit here, I think. But so is the fact that we do a bad job of caring for those who cannot participate. They cannot really live on their own, cannot keep their housing clean or well-maintained. At some level, the only thing to be done here is to move them to in-patient care, at least until they are psychologically stabilized. This is really hard to do nowadays, legally speaking. The changes that made it so are entirely understandable: after reports of the incredible institutional abuse of the mentally ill, after the age of lobotomies being the craze, it's no wonder everyone agreed we were due for a change. But the pendulum swung too far, and this is helpful neither for the homeless nor for those who live near them. Psych hospitals are objectively not great and we should improve them. But living out on the street, hopelessly addicted or mentally ill with no treatment, isn't really better. I'm afraid we've let the perfect become the enemy of the good, let the valid conclusion that state psych wards are not nice places blind us to the streets being worse for at least some people. This doesn't apply to those who are legitimately just down on their luck, obviously; for them, housing-first policies can work much better. No arguments with you that state-sponsored suspicion is bad. That said, Trump just won all four counties in the Rio Grande Valley, an extremely Latino-dominant area that was a democratic stronghold. He's consistently performing better than any other republican in my lifetime amongst many minority groups (though with a heavy bias towards men), so he must be tapping into something more than anti-brown. I see what you're saying about this being at some level a right-wing impulse, and distrust of the other is much more right-wing versus the classical left-wing openness. I just don't know that you will ever get people to be substantially open to those whom they see as victimizing them: this moves past the right-leaning "I don't like this other" to the fairly neutral "I don't like this person who is harming me." If I am mugged, my empathy for that person is zero. Maybe it should be different, and that may soften with time, but it's extremely hard to give people sermons on why they should really feel for the guy who just took their wallets at knifepoint. All that said I agree with most of the issues you've identified. I'm a big fan of localism, moving things to smaller governance areas, because that does seem to resolve many of the scaling issues of democracy. My hope is that helps us apply empathy more consistently where it's deserved: it's much easier for me to look at folks in my city whom I know and figure out how to help them out than it is to do this for folks up in Washington, or over in South Carolina, or wherever. The other side of this is crime committed by people besides the homeless. I think for that, you'll seldom get much sympathy, and that's incredibly unlikely to change. This is because most of us who are still sympathetic to the homeless are creating an exception to our dislike of people who wrong us, not defaulting to empathy as our first response. I'm not sure how realistically this is fixable. As much as government rhetoric doesn't help, most people get pissed when someone cuts them off in traffic. They don't think, "Wow, I bet that person is having a bad day, or has somewhere to be." And there's no government rhetoric telling them to flip that guy the bird.

_bin_ 1y ago

This is pretty-well considered; you're right that the SF's policies and climate go a long way to contributing to the problem. And yes, if other cities treated them better, SF's problem would be smaller. Sometimes this is due to a lack of services, to be sure, but SF's services are so unsustainably expensive that even were we to radically increase taxation and scale this federally, it wouldn't work. The "NGO-industrial complex" through which this is washed is the big culprit here, I think. But so is the fact that we do a bad job of caring for those who cannot participate. They cannot really live on their own, cannot keep their housing clean or well-maintained. At some level, the only thing to be done here is to move them to in-patient care, at least until they are psychologically stabilized. This is really hard to do nowadays, legally speaking. The changes that made it so are entirely understandable: after reports of the incredible institutional abuse of the mentally ill, after the age of lobotomies being the craze, it's no wonder everyone agreed we were due for a change. But the pendulum swung too far, and this is helpful neither for the homeless nor for those who live near them. Psych hospitals are objectively not great and we should improve them. But living out on the street, hopelessly addicted or mentally ill with no treatment, isn't really better. I'm afraid we've let the perfect become the enemy of the good, let the valid conclusion that state psych wards are not nice places blind us to the streets being worse for at least some people. This doesn't apply to those who are legitimately just down on their luck, obviously; for them, housing-first policies can work much better. No arguments with you that state-sponsored suspicion is bad. That said, Trump just won all four counties in the Rio Grande Valley, an extremely Latino-dominant area that was a democratic stronghold. He's consistently performing better than any other republican in my lifetime amongst many minority groups (though with a heavy bias towards men), so he must be tapping into something more than anti-brown. I see what you're saying about this being at some level a right-wing impulse, and distrust of the other is much more right-wing versus the classical left-wing openness. I just don't know that you will ever get people to be substantially open to those whom they see as victimizing them: this moves past the right-leaning "I don't like this other" to the fairly neutral "I don't like this person who is harming me." If I am mugged, my empathy for that person is zero. Maybe it should be different, and that may soften with time, but it's extremely hard to give people sermons on why they should really feel for the guy who just took their wallets at knifepoint. All that said I agree with most of the issues you've identified. I'm a big fan of localism, moving things to smaller governance areas, because that does seem to resolve many of the scaling issues of democracy. My hope is that helps us apply empathy more consistently where it's deserved: it's much easier for me to look at folks in my city whom I know and figure out how to help them out than it is to do this for folks up in Washington, or over in South Carolina, or wherever. The other side of this is crime committed by people besides the homeless. I think for that, you'll seldom get much sympathy, and that's incredibly unlikely to change. This is because most of us who are still sympathetic to the homeless are creating an exception to our dislike of people who wrong us, not defaulting to empathy as our first response. I'm not sure how realistically this is fixable. As much as government rhetoric doesn't help, most people get pissed when someone cuts them off in traffic. They don't think, "Wow, I bet that person is having a bad day, or has somewhere to be." And there's no government rhetoric telling them to flip that guy the bird.