10 ms·

I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. It’s a shame we in the west surrender

• moduspol 2mo ago
  Yet another consequence of no longer living in a high-trust society.
  • Avicebron 2mo ago
    What I want to know is if anyone can identify when exactly the homeless issue became so bad. It was already a problem when I lived in the Bay, and when I moved back to the East Coast it had been 10 years in the making (conveniently when I was away). Clearly there a some sharp lines that can be drawn somewhere. But it's hard to get some actual answers. Edit: rough clauding indicates it was when fentanyl took off, but idk, that doesn't seem wholly accurate.
    • liveoneggs 2mo ago
      California is a garden of eden, a paradise to live in or see.. but believe it or not you won't find it so hot if you ain't got that do(ough)-re-mi. https://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Do_Re_Mi.htm https://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Do_Re_Mi.htm
    • throwawayffffas 2mo ago
      When it became unfashionable to put mentally ill people in asylums. The additional fashion of "giving local people a voice" in construction projects planning did not help either.
      • slg 2mo ago
        The problem regarding putting mentally ill people in asylums is who gets to decide who is mentally ill? I mean that's literally incarcerating people for thoughtcrime. If people have committed no crime, how can we justify taking away their freedom?
        • kurthr 2mo ago
          Yet strangely, we imprison people based on their intent all the time. For years a woman ran around in traffic and was killed by a car to protect her from the state. Nothing could be done? She had to die? https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Castro-homeless-woman-known-for-wandering-into-15783160.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Ca...
        • thayne 2mo ago
          Ideally we would have a way for people who can't take care of themselves, or hold a job to be taken care of that isn't effectively putting them in prison. Mental "asylums" that were almost as bad (and sometimes worse) than prisons is clearly bad. But just leaving people to live on the streets or end up in actual prisons isn't strictly better. I'm not saying we should bring back the asylums, at least the way they were, but there should be a better way to take care of people who aren't able to care for themselves.
          • fragmede 2mo ago
            Bring them back! Yes they were bad and got abused, but not doing them is worse. Bring them back, spend so much money on them that the abuses of the system are monitored tracked reported and fixed and then fire the people who abuse the system. That takes political capital and will that doesn't exist, but the Overton window isn't going to move in its own.
        • mohamedkoubaa 2mo ago
          Exactly and once you're in the asylum the doctors can lobotomize and drug you to the point of insanity. People used to abuse the system to get rid of family members they had an inheritance dispute with.
    • zmgsabst 2mo ago
      Circa 2015 when the reformulation of meth made it more likely to induce psychosis — as the new flow chemistry version altered which isomers were made. At least, in Seattle.
      • nradov 2mo ago
        What is the new formulation? How does it differ at a chemical level?
        • mister_mort 2mo ago
          It's a theory that labs in Mexico switched back over to P2P 'biker' meth (instead of the old stuff based on cough/flu meds) and that the new meth is causing progressive brain damage to users. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
    • arctic-true 2mo ago
      It began in 1953 when thorazine was introduced on the premise that it would allow previously institutionalized people to live normal lives with only outpatient care. This turbocharged the movement to shutter mental institutions, and their populations began to crater around 1956. [0] For a lot of people, thorazine and its descendants have been nothing short of miraculous and have lived up to the promise. But not for everyone, and in the name of charity and respect for individual autonomy, we have chosen to allow these people to either live in awful conditions and fend for themselves or do something prison-worthy. So, while there isn’t great data on homelessness from before the 21st century, the root cause of much of it - a societal refusal to recognize certain people as requiring lifelong care for mental illness - begins in 1953. [0] https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=2470&context=journal_articles https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...
      • throw-the-towel 2mo ago
        The advert in the Wikipedia page for chlorpromazine (aka thorazine) has some... vivid imagery.
    • jezzamon 2mo ago
      FWIW you should clarify: do you mean mentally unstable people on streets, or do you mean any form of homelessness (living in cars, surfing on friends couch, etc). Because that second category is much larger and includes a lot of sincere people who are basically just priced out of the area that grew up in
    • mock-possum 2mo ago
      Feels like it’s been a last ten years thing in Portland too - covid locked in the whole “it’s okay for people to pitch a tent on the sidewalk and set warming fires” thing
  • yorwba 2mo ago
    In China, it has more to do with putting drug users into labor camps: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure-forced-detox-camps-reeducation-through-labour-and-the-contradictions-of-chinas-war-on-drugs/ https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure-fo...
• mmooss 2mo ago
  > massive population of antisocial people 'Social' isn't 'nobody annoys me'; it's empathy for, caring about, and helping others, especially those you don't like - otherwise it means nothing. I'm in the West, and I support liberty - the defining feature of the West - uber alles; it's their right. I'm not threatening others' freedom so you can feel more at ease. (You are more of a problem for them - they can't have you locked up.)
  • kraken_cult 2mo ago
    There has to be a line draw somewhere. Generally people who say this don't actually have regular interactions with aggressive, hostile, homeless. Or are you just really cool with going to a coffee shop and have someone screaming in a pile of their own feces 20 or so feet away?
    • 0xcde4c3db 2mo ago
      The problem is that once you draw "the line", then what? Warehouse a bunch of helpless people in overcrowded prisons? Bus them to some other less-draconian municipality? Forcibly drug them into quasi-submission and then turn them loose again until the depot injection wears off? Or perhaps we should "just kill 'em", as Fox & Friends cohost Brian Kilmeade once suggested?
      • kraken_cult 2mo ago
        Forced rehab if needed and then somewhere they can work to pay their way, learn the skills to help themselves. There's a ton of manual labor that needs doing, potholes to be fixed.
        • csullivannet 2mo ago
          Oh, so forced labour then?
          • qwerpy 2mo ago
• yodelleehoo 2mo ago
  I was picking up some lumber today (USA) and they were blaring some country song about "Try that in a small town" which was basically a gun owner's fantasy about shooting people. One of the lines was something like "we look out for our own". And that right there describes half the USA: outsiders not welcomed. ingroup/outgroup is nothing new, and its not like any country has really fixed it, and the countries that have seemed to "figure it out" are wildly racist (Nordic countries, Japan, etc.) or authoritarian (China), but that's that underlying attitude: it an outsider's fault. And even IF you are "one of their own" and you fall off the wagon, you find yourself with a bus ticket to a Blue State sanctuary city courtesy of your local Red Leaders. I live in a city that is a dumping ground where Red States have bussed the homeless populations -- out of sight out of mind -- and even before this, homelessness was a growing due to skyrocketing rents, medical costs, and simply falling behind the treadmill. And now gave crazy new drugs, crazy new inflation, and even more unchecked greed, there's really no stopping this so called "antisocial" behavior. Why care about a society when it doesn't give a fuck about you>? Then again, when I was in college in the mid-80s, Freshman year a bunch of young white engineering boys in my dorm were laughing about how they smeared shit all over the bathroom walls of a McDonalds. So, it's been going on forever, but now the scale is massive. I include "white" because a lot of people think this is a non-white, non-rich, non-christian problem.
  • pkulak 2mo ago
    Portland?
    • yodelleehoo 2mo ago
      Someday! Two more choices. ;)
  • mycall 2mo ago
    It takes a brave person to be selfless. The golden rule is how.
  • scheme271 2mo ago
    That thing about cities bussing their homeless elsewhere seems to be a pretty common urban myth. I don't think anyone has really shown that it's definitively happening on any large scale manner. And it should be relatively easy to show given that governments publish their budgets.
• LoganDark 2mo ago
  Antisocial people who destroy the public facility don't just come out of nowhere. People get driven to this. Not to say that you can simply ignore them when they're already everywhere, though.
  • nradov 2mo ago
    People aren't driven to this, they escalate to this when there are no consequences attached to lesser antisocial behavior.
    • Frieren 2mo ago
      > no consequences Usually if you are extremely poor or extremely rich there are no consequences for you. The extremely poor are desperate and have nothing to lose, society already took everything from them. The extremely rich are above the law. As inequality increases crime increases with it, from vandalism to financial crimes. This is why equality is so important. When the average Joe has a good job, good salary, and a home then can lose things that society has helped him to get and can take away.
      • prawn 2mo ago
        I agree. A simple and unremarkable person could once upon a time have their basic factory job (or similar), make enough to own their home, and have a decent unremarkable life with their family. I think the pressures of housing costs or rent and other costs of living squeezed those people, often to distress. It's obviously not the entirety of a solution, but it's surely part of it.
    • LoganDark 2mo ago
      "People" are not some evil force that fundamentally grows antisocial when not kept in check. There's overwhelming evidence that people want to be good. There are entire countries of good people that treat their people well, where even criminals don't become antisocial like this. (Example: Norway) People act bad like this not because they're any more particularly free to, but because they're given incentives to. People get slighted by their county, state or the federal government, and everybody else shuns them. It's normal and practically expected to ignore homeless people, for example, and even blame them for their condition. The rich and the lucky are hostile and entitled, while the poor and mentally ill are harassed and taken advantage of. People get radicalized, even trained to commit worse crimes by what's expected of them. Nothing else gets attention or achieves anything. It's never been about consequences, people do this whether it'll get them 25 years or not. People do this whether they'll get caught or not. They do it because they think it needs to be done, they think it's deserved and they want to get back for everything that's been taken from them and caused to them. And for that, everybody hates them and treats them like everything that's wrong with the country. When in reality, what's wrong with the country is what's creating people like this. Seeing violent criminals makes me sad for what they suffered, not angry at them for being the problem.
• ytoawwhra92 2mo ago
  I assume you're talking about software engineers, because in every office I've worked in the toilets have been absolutely filthy by mid-morning. At my current place there are boot marks on top of the toilet seat that have been there for weeks, put there by one of the 10 people in the company. I think we can just apply the broken windows theory here. If whoever's responsible for the toilet doesn't demonstrate that they care about its state of cleanliness and repair, the people using the toilet won't care about that either.
  • garbagewoman 2mo ago
    What worries you about the boot marks specifically?
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    • mvdtnz 2mo ago
      Is this a serious question? Maybe people don't want to put their bare ass down on filthy bootprints.
      • kurthr 2mo ago
        He didn't didn't want to be the SECOND person squatting with boots!
      • wincy 2mo ago
        Well that first guy didn’t want to put his butt where other guy’s butts have been, that’d be pretty gross.
    • LeBit 2mo ago
      Exactly. People are asses. Don’t assume you know everybody’s history. Maybe the guy is one legged and has to jump on the toilet seat to keep his balance.
      • 2mo ago
• justin66 2mo ago
  > I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that. What a weird way of stating the problem. There is too large a population of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts wandering the streets. We didn't surrender anything, at least not during the last half century in the United States. We did as little as possible to deal with homelessness and mental illness and discovered there's good money to be made incarcerating drug addicts.
  • ElProlactin 2mo ago
    [dead]
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  • b0rtb0rt 2mo ago
    in japan the homeless people clean up after themselves and don’t destroy everything what’s the difference here?
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    • justin66 2mo ago
      My first thought is, I'm not certain their homeless are different in their behavior, but based on what little I know, I'm rather certain their non-homeless are. I'd expect disruption or damage to a public space of the kind that sparked this discussion to be dealt with swiftly as a high priority.
      • TonyStr 2mo ago
        I don't know much about this, but when I visited Japan, I walked aimlessly in the outskirts of Tokyo (Sumida city) until I ended up in a homeless area. They had used old palettes and tarps to build square houses with functioning doors, and it was surprisingly clean. Their shoes were neatly lined up against the walls, they used trash bags and the ground was clean. It was quite a culture shock, because it was cleaner than non-homeless streets at home.
• pessimizer 2mo ago
  > I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. Or a consistent race-based or immigrant underclass caste. A lot of countries have the blessing of not having a large population whom they can dismiss the condition of based on visual cues. They just moved from feudalism to universal humanism in one generation. Whatever bad things you can say about China or Taiwan, they both think slavery is wrong and kings are childish. Somehow the west never caught up. Still having that debate, still trying to justify why their great-grandpas killed those people. China left Mao behind; and the US is still praying to slaveholders and mocking slaves' children, while eating their inheritance. > It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that. The west were slavers. They literally auctioned off women to have sex with (the "fancy trade") and put children (sometimes their own) into the fields for life. When some got the morality to be disgusted by that, it resulted in bloody wars (I would even include the wars Germany really started because it lost the colony race.) Their civil society was rife with sundown towns, and in Europe actual death factories were designed to murder civilians. The west is run by degenerates and venerates degenerates. Until it faces that properly, it will never be safe. China did that. > the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populations It's "altar," and the cliché usually refers to wasted efforts to preserve something (generally an abstract ideal.) Nobody is trying to preserve "antisocial populations." They're usually trying to dispose of the old ones after using them up, and to get new ones in who still can't vote. Ironically, the "antisocial populations" are also the ones who clean the toilets.
  • 47635274172635 2mo ago
    >Whatever bad things you can say about China or Taiwan, they both think slavery is wrong and kings are childish. I remember China being pretty racist. A lot of people visiting got a clear message. Not aggressively but quite clear. >The west were slavers. Who sold them the slaves? Did Europeans go hunt for slaves or did they buy them? Who did they buy them from? Also answer this, if Americans wouldn't have bought the African slaves, all those African-Americans that are now enjoying life in the land of the free, where would they have been born today? Think if they could push a button today to wipe slavery from the past, but that meant they get to spawn back in Africa, they would push it or not? Legitimate question. Because it's not like nothing good came out of it.
• dyauspitr 2mo ago
  I don’t think we should put the homeless in forcible shelters like they do in east Asia.