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On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause.
Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault).
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On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:40 Acrofales wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. Sounds to me like San Franciscan exceptionalism. If your city is one of the richest in the world, but has homelessness problems worse than Mumbai, that isn't because you have a larger-than-normal number of deranged people... When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place.
My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time.
One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit".
On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault).
It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping".
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On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:40 Acrofales wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. Sounds to me like San Franciscan exceptionalism. If your city is one of the richest in the world, but has homelessness problems worse than Mumbai, that isn't because you have a larger-than-normal number of deranged people... When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping".
On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly.
Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take?
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On July 16 2019 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:40 Acrofales wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. Sounds to me like San Franciscan exceptionalism. If your city is one of the richest in the world, but has homelessness problems worse than Mumbai, that isn't because you have a larger-than-normal number of deranged people... When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping". Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take?
Choosing not to go into a topic is different from having no feelings on a topic.
If it were up to me and I had a wand:
1. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 5k sqft of home total
2. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 2 acres of residential land total
3. No human can have wealth exceeding $10M USD
4. All humans are regularly screened for mental illness at least annually. People who have insufficient mental functionality for long term employment are forcibly rehabilitated in facilities that provide everything from medication to job training to temporary housing
But we were talking about whether or not a specific SF community should build a shelter. I gave my reason why it is misguided to make that shelter.
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On July 16 2019 01:31 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:40 Acrofales wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. Sounds to me like San Franciscan exceptionalism. If your city is one of the richest in the world, but has homelessness problems worse than Mumbai, that isn't because you have a larger-than-normal number of deranged people... When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping". On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take? Choosing not to go into a topic is different from having no feelings on a topic. If it were up to me and I had a wand: 1. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 5k sqft of home total 2. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 2 acres of residential land total 3. No human can have wealth exceeding $10M USD 4. All humans are regularly screened for mental illness at least annually. People who have insufficient mental functionality for long term employment are forcibly rehabilitated in facilities that provide everything from medication to job training to temporary housingBut we were talking about whether or not a specific SF community should build a shelter. I gave my reason why it is misguided to make that shelter. The rest of it seemed fine, but point 4 strikes me as super dystopian. First off, it's putting "able to hold long term employment" as the primary measure of a human's functionality.
But anyway, what about people for whom no amount of rehabilitation can see them able to hold down a job?
What about people who can function normally in society except for being unable to hold a job? You're essentially locking them up.
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On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. What is your proposed or preferential solution?
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Honestly teaching kids mental health maintenance techniques in school would dramatically reduce mental health issues without having to forcibly check people every year.
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On July 16 2019 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:40 Acrofales wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. Sounds to me like San Franciscan exceptionalism. If your city is one of the richest in the world, but has homelessness problems worse than Mumbai, that isn't because you have a larger-than-normal number of deranged people... When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping". Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take?
The response he gave to this is interesting in its own right. I'd call it a sort of utopian quasi-socialist therapeutic culture with a high focus on pop renewable-sustainable environmentalism. I think you're on board with the last part, from your dialogue on 2nd-amendment outlets for revolutionary responses to climate change. I'm also only half-hating on utopian, because any principles someone wants the whole world or country to run on tend towards utopian outlooks, since they have to solve several problems at once for everyone without creating problems larger than the ones they tried to fix.
The primary intellectual underpinnings is the perfection of man by psychological intervention. If only we had a priestly caste of psychologists giving mandatory screenings every year! Funded by not-rich people in not-quite-mansions sitting on 2 acres. It parallels religious utopias: if everyone worshiped the same God teaching nonviolence, love, and generosity, then it would solve strife compassion and scarcity in one go. The second state has more communal farming and dancing and wardrobe matching.
But you said right-wing, and I only offered a generic critique, so I'll add that the people imagining general perfect-society plans are one of the reason that these plans are never brought to earth.
+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:31 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:40 Acrofales wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. Sounds to me like San Franciscan exceptionalism. If your city is one of the richest in the world, but has homelessness problems worse than Mumbai, that isn't because you have a larger-than-normal number of deranged people... When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping". On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take? Choosing not to go into a topic is different from having no feelings on a topic. If it were up to me and I had a wand: 1. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 5k sqft of home total 2. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 2 acres of residential land total 3. No human can have wealth exceeding $10M USD 4. All humans are regularly screened for mental illness at least annually. People who have insufficient mental functionality for long term employment are forcibly rehabilitated in facilities that provide everything from medication to job training to temporary housing But we were talking about whether or not a specific SF community should build a shelter. I gave my reason why it is misguided to make that shelter.
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On July 16 2019 01:31 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:40 Acrofales wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. Sounds to me like San Franciscan exceptionalism. If your city is one of the richest in the world, but has homelessness problems worse than Mumbai, that isn't because you have a larger-than-normal number of deranged people... When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping". On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take? Choosing not to go into a topic is different from having no feelings on a topic. If it were up to me and I had a wand: 1. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 5k sqft of home total 2. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 2 acres of residential land total 3. No human can have wealth exceeding $10M USD 4. All humans are regularly screened for mental illness at least annually. People who have insufficient mental functionality for long term employment are forcibly rehabilitated in facilities that provide everything from medication to job training to temporary housing But we were talking about whether or not a specific SF community should build a shelter. I gave my reason why it is misguided to make that shelter.
I know, that's why I put the part about you corrupting an argument of empathy to rationalize what's an inhumane response.
Ky (and even Danglars) mentions some of the problematic parts about your 4. which is also at least part of what I was getting at. Generally speaking, our healthcare system (even if people had reliable and affordable access, which millions don't) can't really "fix" anyone as it is.
Studies show anti-depressants outside of very specific neurological chemical imbalances aren't any better than placebos for example.
Antidepressants are supposed to work by fixing a chemical imbalance, specifically, a lack of serotonin in the brain. Indeed, their supposed effectiveness is the primary evidence for the chemical imbalance theory. But analyses of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits are due to the placebo effect. Some antidepressants increase serotonin levels, some decrease it, and some have no effect at all on serotonin. Nevertheless, they all show the same therapeutic benefit. Even the small statistical difference between antidepressants and placebos may be an enhanced placebo effect, due to the fact that most patients and doctors in clinical trials successfully break blind. The serotonin theory is as close as any theory in the history of science to having been proved wrong. Instead of curing depression, popular antidepressants may induce a biological vulnerability making people more likely to become depressed in the future.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
EDIT: Yet because of capitalist interests Antidepressant use in U.S. soars by 65 percent in 15 years
Worth noting that people become chemically dependent on these prescriptions and often can't quit, in part because the withdrawal symptoms are exactly what the drugs claim to be treating (giving the mistaken sensation of effectiveness).
Homelessness tends to interrupt people's access to these medications (and others) as well, triggering further degradation of their mental conditions.
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On July 16 2019 01:52 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:40 Acrofales wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. Sounds to me like San Franciscan exceptionalism. If your city is one of the richest in the world, but has homelessness problems worse than Mumbai, that isn't because you have a larger-than-normal number of deranged people... When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping". On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take? The response he gave to this is interesting in its own right. I'd call it a sort of utopian quasi-socialist therapeutic culture with a high focus on pop renewable-sustainable environmentalism. I think you're on board with the last part, from your dialogue on 2nd-amendment outlets for revolutionary responses to climate change. I'm also only half-hating on utopian, because any principles someone wants the whole world or country to run on tend towards utopian outlooks, since they have to solve several problems at once for everyone without creating problems larger than the ones they tried to fix. The primary intellectual underpinnings is the perfection of man by psychological intervention. If only we had a priestly caste of psychologists giving mandatory screenings every year! Funded by not-rich people in not-quite-mansions sitting on 2 acres. It parallels religious utopias: if everyone worshiped the same God teaching nonviolence, love, and generosity, then it would solve strife compassion and scarcity in one go. The second state has more communal farming and dancing and wardrobe matching. But you said right-wing, and I only offered a generic critique, so I'll add that the people imagining general perfect-society plans are one of the reason that these plans are never brought to earth. + Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:31 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:40 Acrofales wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. Sounds to me like San Franciscan exceptionalism. If your city is one of the richest in the world, but has homelessness problems worse than Mumbai, that isn't because you have a larger-than-normal number of deranged people... When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping". On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take? Choosing not to go into a topic is different from having no feelings on a topic. If it were up to me and I had a wand: 1. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 5k sqft of home total 2. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 2 acres of residential land total 3. No human can have wealth exceeding $10M USD 4. All humans are regularly screened for mental illness at least annually. People who have insufficient mental functionality for long term employment are forcibly rehabilitated in facilities that provide everything from medication to job training to temporary housing But we were talking about whether or not a specific SF community should build a shelter. I gave my reason why it is misguided to make that shelter.
This post is delirious. Yearly medical checkups are very much real and not on par with unicorns as you are suggesting.
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On July 16 2019 01:52 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:40 Acrofales wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. Sounds to me like San Franciscan exceptionalism. If your city is one of the richest in the world, but has homelessness problems worse than Mumbai, that isn't because you have a larger-than-normal number of deranged people... When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping". On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take? The response he gave to this is interesting in its own right. I'd call it a sort of utopian quasi-socialist therapeutic culture with a high focus on pop renewable-sustainable environmentalism. I think you're on board with the last part, from your dialogue on 2nd-amendment outlets for revolutionary responses to climate change. I'm also only half-hating on utopian, because any principles someone wants the whole world or country to run on tend towards utopian outlooks, since they have to solve several problems at once for everyone without creating problems larger than the ones they tried to fix. The primary intellectual underpinnings is the perfection of man by psychological intervention. If only we had a priestly caste of psychologists giving mandatory screenings every year! Funded by not-rich people in not-quite-mansions sitting on 2 acres. It parallels religious utopias: if everyone worshiped the same God teaching nonviolence, love, and generosity, then it would solve strife compassion and scarcity in one go. The second state has more communal farming and dancing and wardrobe matching. But you said right-wing, and I only offered a generic critique, so I'll add that the people imagining general perfect-society plans are one of the reason that these plans are never brought to earth. + Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:31 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:40 Acrofales wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. Sounds to me like San Franciscan exceptionalism. If your city is one of the richest in the world, but has homelessness problems worse than Mumbai, that isn't because you have a larger-than-normal number of deranged people... When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping". On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take? Choosing not to go into a topic is different from having no feelings on a topic. If it were up to me and I had a wand: 1. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 5k sqft of home total 2. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 2 acres of residential land total 3. No human can have wealth exceeding $10M USD 4. All humans are regularly screened for mental illness at least annually. People who have insufficient mental functionality for long term employment are forcibly rehabilitated in facilities that provide everything from medication to job training to temporary housing But we were talking about whether or not a specific SF community should build a shelter. I gave my reason why it is misguided to make that shelter. We have priestly caste of psychologists giving screenings every year in the UK. We call them doctors.
General practitioners (GPs). They are funded publically. They are not mandatory. They do good work and save a lot of money by prevention. There's no need to demean them by comparing them with religious figureheads.
But I'll ask again. What is your proposed or preferred solution? What I can see is that you seem to be ok with homelessness, as long as it isn't on your doorstep.
|
On July 16 2019 01:37 Kyadytim wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:31 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:40 Acrofales wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. Sounds to me like San Franciscan exceptionalism. If your city is one of the richest in the world, but has homelessness problems worse than Mumbai, that isn't because you have a larger-than-normal number of deranged people... When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping". On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take? Choosing not to go into a topic is different from having no feelings on a topic. If it were up to me and I had a wand: 1. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 5k sqft of home total 2. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 2 acres of residential land total 3. No human can have wealth exceeding $10M USD 4. All humans are regularly screened for mental illness at least annually. People who have insufficient mental functionality for long term employment are forcibly rehabilitated in facilities that provide everything from medication to job training to temporary housingBut we were talking about whether or not a specific SF community should build a shelter. I gave my reason why it is misguided to make that shelter. The rest of it seemed fine, but point 4 strikes me as super dystopian. First off, it's putting "able to hold long term employment" as the primary measure of a human's functionality. But anyway, what about people for whom no amount of rehabilitation can see them able to hold down a job? What about people who can function normally in society except for being unable to hold a job? You're essentially locking them up.
I am not going to pretend I am a psychological expert. I am not. I don't know what the specific criteria would be. I just know that people need to be able to live normal lives and we owe it to our fellow man to do what we can to help. If it isn't possible, treat it like disability and provide housing/stipend. Treat it like someone being paraplegic. If someone isn't capable of work and can never be made capable of work, give them as much humanity as they can be given. If they are violent, don't expose them to the public. If they are just really weird, let them go in public. We have vastly inadequate solutions to people with mental retardation. We should use an adequate version of that for "beyond repair" people with mental illness.
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On July 16 2019 01:33 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:10 Simberto wrote:
A good first step would be a healthcare system which actually covers everyone. If people can get treatment for mental illness before it gets out of control, that is better for everyone. But in the US system, a lot of people who would need that treatment simply cannot afford it.
But homeless shelters do not hurt, either. Even if you had none to start with, the longer you stay homeless, the higher the chance that you develop mental illnesses or drug addiction. Because living on the street is not good for your mental health. Very true, we spend so much time and effort of the symptoms and not the cause. It is similar with prisons, if they actually focus on correction (life skills, therapy so on) instead of punishment, re-offending goes way down. Sadly in the states with for profit prisons and healthcare prevention is bad for business. In germany is therapy covered? Here you can get prescriptions from your family doctor for things like depression and if it is bad you can get to a psychiatrist with our system. But a psychologist is usually not covered, sometimes through work benefits. There are also some social programs for those who cant afford it but it is not like going to the doctors. There are also still some social stigmas but they are starting to go away little by little.
Therapy is covered if you have a doctors diagnosis to prove that you actually need it, which you usually get if you actually need it. Social stigma to therapy do exist here, too.
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On July 16 2019 02:12 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:37 Kyadytim wrote:On July 16 2019 01:31 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:40 Acrofales wrote:
[quote]
Sounds to me like San Franciscan exceptionalism. If your city is one of the richest in the world, but has homelessness problems worse than Mumbai, that isn't because you have a larger-than-normal number of deranged people...
When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping". On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take? Choosing not to go into a topic is different from having no feelings on a topic. If it were up to me and I had a wand: 1. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 5k sqft of home total 2. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 2 acres of residential land total 3. No human can have wealth exceeding $10M USD 4. All humans are regularly screened for mental illness at least annually. People who have insufficient mental functionality for long term employment are forcibly rehabilitated in facilities that provide everything from medication to job training to temporary housingBut we were talking about whether or not a specific SF community should build a shelter. I gave my reason why it is misguided to make that shelter. The rest of it seemed fine, but point 4 strikes me as super dystopian. First off, it's putting "able to hold long term employment" as the primary measure of a human's functionality. But anyway, what about people for whom no amount of rehabilitation can see them able to hold down a job? What about people who can function normally in society except for being unable to hold a job? You're essentially locking them up. I am not going to pretend I am a psychological expert. I am not. I don't know what the specific criteria would be. I just know that people need to be able to live normal lives and we owe it to our fellow man to do what we can to help. If it isn't possible, treat it like disability and provide housing/stipend. Treat it like someone being paraplegic. If someone isn't capable of work and can never be made capable of work, give them as much humanity as they can be given. If they are violent, don't expose them to the public. If they are just really weird, let them go in public. We have vastly inadequate solutions to people with mental retardation. We should use an adequate version of that for "beyond repair" people with mental illness.
I don't want to be a dick or condescend. You seem like you intuitively support socialism but don't have the ideological underpinnings needed to see a path from here to there.
That results in the sort of political erraticity that bounces between left and right wing framing/solutions.
How could I interest you in looking deeper into the thinking and theory of how we get from where we are now to
If someone doesn't work and can never be made to work, we will not deprive them of their humanity.
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On July 16 2019 02:20 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 02:12 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:37 Kyadytim wrote:On July 16 2019 01:31 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:
[quote]
When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping". On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take? Choosing not to go into a topic is different from having no feelings on a topic. If it were up to me and I had a wand: 1. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 5k sqft of home total 2. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 2 acres of residential land total 3. No human can have wealth exceeding $10M USD 4. All humans are regularly screened for mental illness at least annually. People who have insufficient mental functionality for long term employment are forcibly rehabilitated in facilities that provide everything from medication to job training to temporary housingBut we were talking about whether or not a specific SF community should build a shelter. I gave my reason why it is misguided to make that shelter. The rest of it seemed fine, but point 4 strikes me as super dystopian. First off, it's putting "able to hold long term employment" as the primary measure of a human's functionality. But anyway, what about people for whom no amount of rehabilitation can see them able to hold down a job? What about people who can function normally in society except for being unable to hold a job? You're essentially locking them up. I am not going to pretend I am a psychological expert. I am not. I don't know what the specific criteria would be. I just know that people need to be able to live normal lives and we owe it to our fellow man to do what we can to help. If it isn't possible, treat it like disability and provide housing/stipend. Treat it like someone being paraplegic. If someone isn't capable of work and can never be made capable of work, give them as much humanity as they can be given. If they are violent, don't expose them to the public. If they are just really weird, let them go in public. We have vastly inadequate solutions to people with mental retardation. We should use an adequate version of that for "beyond repair" people with mental illness. I don't want to be a dick or condescend. You seem like you intuitively support socialism but don't have the ideological underpinnings needed to see a path from here to there. That results in the sort of political erraticity that bounces between left and right wing framing/solutions. How could I interest you in looking deeper into the thinking and theory of how we get from where we are now to Show nested quote +If someone doesn't work and can never be made to work, we will not deprive them of their humanity. ?
Their situation deprived them of fundamental pieces of the human experience. We should help them hold on to as much as they can get. But a lot is already gone and can't be restored
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On July 16 2019 02:18 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:49 Jockmcplop wrote:
Honestly teaching kids mental health maintenance techniques in school would dramatically reduce mental health issues without having to forcibly check people every year. My wife is a grade 1 teacher and she has made a mindfulness program. There is also a lot more professional development workshops. Nothing mandatory at this point or anything directly in the curriculum here. But many teachers agree with you and are adding things themselves. There are many future benefits as you mentioned but also direct benifits in the classroom.
I would imagine there are definitely benefits in the classroom lol.
I'll explain from my POV why this would help (I have posted this sentence often in here and it usually gets ignored so thanks for replying).
I've spent alot of time around people with mental health issues, both as a support worker and later on on the 'other side' of the issue.
One thing that you can be absolutely sure of is that once someone has their first anxiety attack, they are massively more likely to suffer from mental health conditions after this. Anxiety is like the gateway to further mental health issues.
You can literally teach people to not have their first anxiety attack. What we experience as anxiety is about 60% physical (adrenaline, breathing rate, heart rate in a feedback loop) and 40% mental. That's why people should be taught breathing exercises in school. You can interrupt that feedback loop literally by controlling your breathing rate, your heart rate then drops, you produce less adrenaline and you avoid reaching a tipping point.
People who have had an anxiety attack often get straight on medication which can make their anxiety turn into depression and its only downhill from there.
Obviously its much more complicated than that, but this is the gist.
There is no downside to teaching this kinda stuff in school, except for less time to spend on useless information regurgitation.
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On July 16 2019 02:27 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 02:20 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 02:12 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:37 Kyadytim wrote:On July 16 2019 01:31 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:
[quote]
The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time.
Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping". On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take? Choosing not to go into a topic is different from having no feelings on a topic. If it were up to me and I had a wand: 1. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 5k sqft of home total 2. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 2 acres of residential land total 3. No human can have wealth exceeding $10M USD 4. All humans are regularly screened for mental illness at least annually. People who have insufficient mental functionality for long term employment are forcibly rehabilitated in facilities that provide everything from medication to job training to temporary housingBut we were talking about whether or not a specific SF community should build a shelter. I gave my reason why it is misguided to make that shelter. The rest of it seemed fine, but point 4 strikes me as super dystopian. First off, it's putting "able to hold long term employment" as the primary measure of a human's functionality. But anyway, what about people for whom no amount of rehabilitation can see them able to hold down a job? What about people who can function normally in society except for being unable to hold a job? You're essentially locking them up. I am not going to pretend I am a psychological expert. I am not. I don't know what the specific criteria would be. I just know that people need to be able to live normal lives and we owe it to our fellow man to do what we can to help. If it isn't possible, treat it like disability and provide housing/stipend. Treat it like someone being paraplegic. If someone isn't capable of work and can never be made capable of work, give them as much humanity as they can be given. If they are violent, don't expose them to the public. If they are just really weird, let them go in public. We have vastly inadequate solutions to people with mental retardation. We should use an adequate version of that for "beyond repair" people with mental illness. I don't want to be a dick or condescend. You seem like you intuitively support socialism but don't have the ideological underpinnings needed to see a path from here to there. That results in the sort of political erraticity that bounces between left and right wing framing/solutions. How could I interest you in looking deeper into the thinking and theory of how we get from where we are now to If someone doesn't work and can never be made to work, we will not deprive them of their humanity. ? Their situation deprived them of fundamental pieces of the human experience. We should help them hold on to as much as they can get. But a lot is already gone and can't be restored
"Their situation" didn't manifest from a child's dream the night before, it has a traceable genesis. I think we established that your familiarity with modern psychology/psychiatry is fairly limited (I don't exclude myself from that criticism btw). Rather than anecdotal proclamations about the irretrievable nature of people's humanity (which inadvertently by some, intentionally by others, is used to justify treating people as less human), I think we should stick to what we can support with related academic/professional research.
On July 16 2019 02:27 Jockmcplop wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 02:18 JimmiC wrote:On July 16 2019 01:49 Jockmcplop wrote:
Honestly teaching kids mental health maintenance techniques in school would dramatically reduce mental health issues without having to forcibly check people every year. My wife is a grade 1 teacher and she has made a mindfulness program. There is also a lot more professional development workshops. Nothing mandatory at this point or anything directly in the curriculum here. But many teachers agree with you and are adding things themselves. There are many future benefits as you mentioned but also direct benifits in the classroom. I would imagine there are definitely benefits in the classroom lol. I'll explain from my POV why this would help (I have posted this sentence often in here and it usually gets ignored so thanks for replying). I've spent alot of time around people with mental health issues, both as a support worker and later on on the 'other side' of the issue. One thing that you can be absolutely sure of is that once someone has their first anxiety attack, they are massively more likely to suffer from mental health conditions after this. Anxiety is like the gateway to further mental health issues. You can literally teach people to not have their first anxiety attack. What we experience as anxiety is about 60% physical (adrenaline, breathing rate, heart rate in a feedback loop) and 40% mental. That's why people should be taught breathing exercises in school. You can interrupt that feedback loop literally by controlling your breathing rate, your heart rate then drops, you produce less adrenaline and you avoid reaching a tipping point. People who have had an anxiety attack often get straight on medication which can make their anxiety turn into depression and its only downhill from there. Obviously its much more complicated than that, but this is the gist. There is no downside to teaching this kinda stuff in school, except for less time to spend on useless information regurgitation.
I think you know I support stuff like that and were talking about other ignoring it but I'll say this is all good stuff.
Just one part I take issue with (and this probably isn't a surprise).
There is no downside to teaching this kinda stuff in school, except for less time to spend on useless information regurgitation.
Of course there's a downside for giving people a free way to reduce the likelihood of a lifetime dependency on medication (that may only make things worse) provided by a for-profit medical system.
I'd argue it's that downside specifically that holds a great deal of influence on making implementation of such things nearly impossible in the US.
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On July 16 2019 02:03 Dan HH wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:52 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:40 Acrofales wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. Sounds to me like San Franciscan exceptionalism. If your city is one of the richest in the world, but has homelessness problems worse than Mumbai, that isn't because you have a larger-than-normal number of deranged people... When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping". On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take? The response he gave to this is interesting in its own right. I'd call it a sort of utopian quasi-socialist therapeutic culture with a high focus on pop renewable-sustainable environmentalism. I think you're on board with the last part, from your dialogue on 2nd-amendment outlets for revolutionary responses to climate change. I'm also only half-hating on utopian, because any principles someone wants the whole world or country to run on tend towards utopian outlooks, since they have to solve several problems at once for everyone without creating problems larger than the ones they tried to fix. The primary intellectual underpinnings is the perfection of man by psychological intervention. If only we had a priestly caste of psychologists giving mandatory screenings every year! Funded by not-rich people in not-quite-mansions sitting on 2 acres. It parallels religious utopias: if everyone worshiped the same God teaching nonviolence, love, and generosity, then it would solve strife compassion and scarcity in one go. The second state has more communal farming and dancing and wardrobe matching. But you said right-wing, and I only offered a generic critique, so I'll add that the people imagining general perfect-society plans are one of the reason that these plans are never brought to earth. + Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:31 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 01:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:23 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 01:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:54 Jockmcplop wrote:On July 16 2019 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:40 Acrofales wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. Sounds to me like San Franciscan exceptionalism. If your city is one of the richest in the world, but has homelessness problems worse than Mumbai, that isn't because you have a larger-than-normal number of deranged people... When we let people camp wherever they want, but don't help people work towards overcoming whatever makes them scratch off every piece of skin on their legs, we don't fix anything. If you give someone a meal, then they throw their shit at some people (yes, they do), then bloody themselves up in a big fight, then get their blood all over the street or within a business, all you did is feed someone. You didn't make the situation better. My entire point is that feeding these people isn't sufficient. They need to be cured of their mental illnesses. Making a homeless shelter is a useless pat on the back and doesn't help anyone. The issue I have with this is that people are becoming homeless all the time. Homeless shelters don't only help the homeless who have been homeless for 25 years and have awful mental and physical health problems as a result - they help people who have just become homeless and have no idea what to do about the situation. They can help those people find the resources they need to get out of their situation before they end up on drugs or with massive PTSD issues. Right, there basically 2 different groups: 1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction 2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". People with mental illness and drug addiction living on the street tend to still need food and socks too. Not providing that as well as not providing mental healthcare isn't better. Are you making an accelerationist argument that were we to do less to keep up with the need for socks and food, that the pervasive mental health crisis that undergirds homelessness would reach a crisis point demanding action? On July 16 2019 01:07 Mohdoo wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2019 01:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:34 Mohdoo wrote:On July 16 2019 00:24 GreenHorizons wrote:yikes...on that whole take but Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop I'm a communist because downtown, without money, there's nowhere to shit but the street. You don't think just replying with a condescending "yikes" is a bit shitty? Why not just explain why you think its such a bad take rather than this silly drive by condescension? Mostly because I thought you would probably take it personally and worse than "yikes", but if you wanna know... Show nested quote +On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by. That part was mostly fine. It has a slight aura of blaming the people for their mental states but it's largely fine. This is where it goes off the rails. Show nested quote +Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. This reads as a more overt indictment of the character of people living on the streets of SF and reads as implying they don't deserve basic human dignity because of some character flaw. Then you switch back to mentally ill people that need medical attention (and aren't getting it) and the discomfort it must cause the affluent people who pass it on their commute. Show nested quote + One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Show nested quote + Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop. I thought I could sum up my opposition to your take by pointing out the poop you're complaining about is a direct result of neoliberal/Democrat policies that try to push homeless people into more rural communities rather than address their suffering. Show nested quote +I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were. More right wing rhetoric about how "these people" are not the decent humans but the defective ones and a "LARGE" portion of these people are beyond repair (so what are you implying happens with them?). Show nested quote +You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many. You continue to talk about homeless people (particularly of SF) like they are practically another species making clear you believe homeless people in SF are some especially different than not just the people commuting around the city but homeless people elsewhere. Show nested quote +In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless. They need universal healthcare (that includes real mental health services). If they had it, many of them would have never been living on the street in the first place. Finally you manage to corrupt an argument of concern into an excuse for why nothing will be done and why it's your empathy that will cause you to oppose assistance for the people Show nested quote +If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. So after this rant against homeless people we're left with no critique of the systemic progenitors, a scathing indictment of people exploited by capitalism, and a solution that says they need to fix it, but anything productive is unrealistic and anything realistic is unproductive. It sounds like most of your critique is misunderstanding my conclusion. I am not saying they aren't worth helping or that they can't be helped. I am saying that they need significantly more and that giving these people a meal is just that, a meal. I am saying building another typical shelter in a SF neighborhood will not help the actual problem. The problem is that we need to give these people years of mandatory support while we fix them. In many areas I have been, homeless people are not nearly as out of control as SF. People who have never been to SF likely wonder why a homeless shelter wouldn't help. The answer is that they need significantly more because they have debilitating mental illness. In addition, when we let politicians impose bandage solutions, we let them off the hook, It allows them to say they did something. But they didn't accomplish anything. So they still get to say "I advocated for $10M of homeless stuff! I am hella progressive! xD!", and yet nothing happened. So people get complacent. If we stopped letting people impose policies that do nothing except pat ourselves on the back, and only accepted (actual) solutions, I think we would be in a better place 10 years from now. When we let ourselves try things that we know won't work, we only set ourselves back. Indeed this sounds like an even more explicit endorsement of accelerationism? Your "we need to lock them up and fix them" also sounds pretty much like the facilities that were shut down putting them into the streets in the first place. My family goes around town handing out little bags of supplies for homeless people ever year. We include toiletries, socks and some money. A huge portion of people in Portland had no interest. They didn't want socks. They were dragons. Plenty of totally reasonable people were like "shit dude thanks", but I am sure you know that a great deal of homeless people in Portland (IIRC you are in Seattle so I'm sure you've been to Portland plenty of times) have no interest in handouts or rehabilitation or any of that stuff. When you are fundamentally broken, you need to be forcibly rehabilitated for a really long time. One of the reasons there are so many outreach groups for various types of homeless people is the fact that it is more efficient to deal with the populations distinctly. Portland has a ton of programs for homeless children and women. Extremely few for older men. Why? There is nothing a volunteer can do to cure a man of schizophrenia. You can help a a homeless family get a place to sleep while the mom gets resume training and finds a job, but you can't deal with someone who is trying to kill dragons in a street by throwing poop at children. Those people need extreme intervention. We have a lot of ways to deal with lots of types of homelessness in the pacific northwest. We have almost nothing for the "real shit". On July 16 2019 01:22 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 16 2019 01:12 Jockmcplop wrote:
Unfortunately GH, I have seen this kind of problem first hand. Manchester in the UK has had a pretty massive homeless population for the size of the city for about 5 years now.
Reading the local papers and what the local authorities say about the situation, the biggest priority is getting them out of the way of 'ordinary' folk because they are such a nuisance. Anti-social behaviour is often the accusation, which is ironic because I would say its pretty fucking anti-social to design your society around the idea that one person can have 2000 empty houses and 2000 people can be homeless as a result.
In the UK we have people employed by the police (they usually work for G4S or some other similar private firm) whose main job is to move homeless people out of city center areas by force. We are currently battling local authorities over here who are now pushing for the ability to fine the homeless £100 for 'aggressive begging' or 'anti-social behaviour' (which includes sleeping rough outside a shop/refusing to move when asked by the police).
Also, I totally get what mohdoo is saying here. Unfortunately part of my solution would be to confiscate long-term unused housing for a start and using that as a way of stopping the problem getting worse before we work on fixing those with huge long term issues, and most people I know hate that idea (because they are living under the misguided notion that one day they will be able to buy 10 houses).
Yeah, I get where Mohdoo is coming from and know both homeless people and 6 figure folks that complain about having to see the human suffering their exploitative industries cause. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about how disgusted I am by the inhumanity of it but I try to be as gracious with capitalists as I am with their victims (maybe to a fault). It's not about having to see them. It is watching someone treat cancer by putting a bandage on someone's forehead and then saying "nice, I'm helping". On July 16 2019 01:18 Danglars wrote:On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote:
SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency. On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote:
Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness". I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas. You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly. Do you see how without a critique of capitalism your take is nearly indistinguishable from danglars right wing take? Choosing not to go into a topic is different from having no feelings on a topic. If it were up to me and I had a wand: 1. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 5k sqft of home total 2. No human on earth can have ownership of more than 2 acres of residential land total 3. No human can have wealth exceeding $10M USD 4. All humans are regularly screened for mental illness at least annually. People who have insufficient mental functionality for long term employment are forcibly rehabilitated in facilities that provide everything from medication to job training to temporary housing But we were talking about whether or not a specific SF community should build a shelter. I gave my reason why it is misguided to make that shelter. This post is delirious. Yearly medical checkups are very much real and not on par with unicorns as you are suggesting.
This post doesn't delve into mandatory, society-wide psychological health screenings, and thus is not "on par" with dialogue that leads anywhere. I'll admit that if Mohdoo had instead suggested mandatory vision checkups for driving licenses at 60 and every 1-5 years afterwards, I wouldn't have made the comparisons I did.
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