WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Homelessness, for example, remains a big problem, and it's typically worse in areas controlled by progressives doing so many things. Just this evening my wife did not want to use our nearby park to put the baby in a swing due to the homeless being all over the playground area (normally they're more broadly dispersed)
I can't help but notice that it sounds like your problem is "the homeless", more than "homelessness". Progressives, on the other hand, are trying to solve or alleviate "homelessness" - ie the problem experienced by the homeless where they, er, don't have homes. Keeping vagrants out of parks would solve the problem of "the homeless" from the perspective of more fortunate people who are inconvenienced by the presence of the homeless, but it wouldn't do shit to solve the problem of "homelessness" from the perspective of its actual victims, the homeless themselves. Indeed, it would make their lives fractionally worse than they already are, by further restricting their freedom of movement. Certainly if I was homeless it would make a big difference to my already-degraded quality-of-life and dignity whether I was allowed to hang out in pleasant green spaces or not.
Granted, seeing homeless people is by definition evidence that the problem of "homelessness" has not been successfully solved, so your anecdote isn't without value. But "the city (…) won't keep the drug-using vagrants away" is a non sequitur. Setting aside the continued existence of the vagrants, the city's willingness or lack thereof to keep them away from parks says nothing about how effective they are or aren't at solving the problem they're actually tackling, which is "there are human beings wasting away outdoors", not "well-fed well-housed people might sometimes have to set eyes upon the starving wretches, who are gross and scary", or even "sometimes well-fed well-housed people might be in legitimate physical danger if they get too close to concentrations of starving wretches". Improving the actual homeless people's lives is the outspoken priority of progressive authorities, and even if you disagree with that priority, you don't get to call them ineffective because they aren't very good at solving a completely different, if related problem that you think should be higher-priority.
(Another notable element is that the "drug-using" bit is the crux of the problem. For most of human history, it didn't use to go without saying that a bum is by definition a bug-eyed junkie who could at any time freak out and bite your nose off. The problem of "the homeless" is really an extreme case of the general societal problem of "drugs".)
It depends on specifics, but in a lot of casting-couch cases I think the actress who's been offered the deal has a credible fear of retaliation if she says no - not just that she won't get the job, but that the spited producer will pull strings to get her blacklisted and ruin her career, leaving her much worse off than one who was never offered the deal in the first place. While you can still view giving in as the morally worse option, I think even an actress who gives in to that kind of ultimatum deserves a lot more sympathy than one who tries to sleep her way to a job of her own volition, with no expectation of actively negative consequences if she doesn't.
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