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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   38392 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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I think that Scott's latest article on how to defeat homelessness, was an okay steelman argument for the liberal policies with regards to the issue. At least, it's completely in line with the arguments I hear regarding my city's issues. There are a couple of things missing, though.

  1. People don't become psychotic out of nowhere. Years of unrestricted drug use does that to a person. And no, I don't want the continuation of the war on drugs, but I'm convinced that without somehow removing the drugs from the equation it's infinitely harder to approach a solution.
  2. Why do other countries don't have this problem? It's multifaceted, for sure - Finland and Japan use the "housing first" system Scott suggests and achieve great results, but I'll highlight one factor that I don't see anyone talking about in the first world: shame. In some societies like China or Turkey it's shameful to have a relative who is homeless. It's largely a cultural thing, but ultimately having relatives care about the homeless is a cheaper solution than building endless fields of Soviet blocks and intentionally creating ghettos that require policing. Is it possible to change a culture? How exactly is the western culture different? This is much harder to answer, but if we are talking about an ideal world with ideal outcomes, I'd prefer the community that experiences the issue to directly handle the issue.

No man, no problem.

Here's my modest proposal: have homelessness be punishable by the death penalty.

The liberals will be outraged, but anyone who can't get a stranger to house them, even under the impending threat of death, is obviously an individual who has completely and utterly exhausted the patience of society and is committing a slow form of suicide. If they don't care about their own lives, then why should we?

Housing is expensive, and giving it to the most useless members of our society is counterproductive. Bullets are cheap.

I would prefer exile.

Also, as an addendum, might I propose deliberately loose enforcement? The whole problem I'm trying to solve for is belligerent vagrants ruining public spaces. If a given bum person temporarily experiencing unhousedness can avoid being a nuisance in public spaces, I really don't need to burn police resources tracking down remote encampments.

The problem with exile is that there's nowhere to exile them to anymore. Exile only works when there is unowned wilderness or other communities that are not significantly connected to your own nearby. We're definitely not going to be exiling them to Canada or Mexico, and there's no real way to exile someone from say San Francisco that doesn't affect San Jose, Oakland, and Palo Alto nearby. We're definitely not going to be exiling them to somewhere like Yosemite or Death Valley.

I obviously know that this is just a dopey hypothetical, but the Bureau of Land Management owns 247 million acres and plenty of it is remote.

You don’t even need to use blm land. We have plenty of nearly abandoned towns in Nebraska. Fetterman in Pittsburgh was the mayor of an abandoned town.

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