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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   39497 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.

The problem with ideas like this is that the people who are causing most of the problem are mentally ill, and part of that mental illness is often a lack of insight, impaired judgement and even things like a profound lack of awareness of the fact that they have a disease (anosognosia).

People who are more or less making a choice (ex: the mentally well, people with substance abuse absent mental illness)....it may be reasonable to treat these people harshly.

But figuring out who is in which population is HARD.

Can you tell me why their mental illness is a relevant factor in sentencing them to death without using the word ableism?

If someone was acutely delirious from say, sepsis, we'd forgive them for certain types of bad behaviors (like flailing and hitting their nurse). If they were high and did something they wouldn't usually we do we wouldn't forgive them. This is in part because the latter is a choice and the former isn't.

Mental illness is more complicated. Some people with schizophrenia don't take medication because they are lazy, or because they don't like the side effects. These people may be making a benefit risk calculation and failing. Some people don't because their illness tells them they are healthy and don't need medication. These people aren't making a "choice." Telling who belongs in which bucket can be very hard.

I think acute is doing a lot of the work here. We understand this person (1) doesn’t normal hit people and (2) won’t once the ailment passes.

That is entirely different from the druggie or the mentally ill.

Druggie's are one thing that is rather complicated, but for the mentally ill, especially at the level of severe mania and psychosis....they aren't making informed and considered choices, the disease gets in the way.

If someone lives a healthy, normal life, then gets frontal lobe damage and becomes an asshole....that's not their fault. We might lock them up to prevent them from threatening others, but the substrate is damaged and they can't make decisions required to stay out of trouble.

if your brain is telling you that you are NORMAL and HEALTHY and that medical people and government people are out to get you, then you can't make the right decisions. That's what a delusion is.

In very careful and controlled circumstances we can work around it, but it's depressingly rare. Many people feel great and are normal with meds (and want to continue), but then they get sick and metabolize a dose differently and then the whole thing starts again.

Do not underestimate the way severe mental illness impairs your ability to make the right choices, hell some of the medications have side effects like "compulsive gambling."

There comes a point where "is it their fault" doesn't matter. If someone is regularly violently criminal, it doesn't matter if it's because of a brain injury or they're just a sociopathic asshole, what matters is that they be stopped from victimizing other people. Whether or not they are morally culpable is a secondary concern over the need to incapacitate them for the benefit of their would-be victims.

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