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The A&W Halberd
The A&W Halberd is a makeshift weapon, an artifact most likely inspired by meth demons or related brain damage. It is a fine piece of methgineering. The weapon is composed of a crimson plastic broomstick, two chef knives (dull), and copious amounts of grey duct tape. One of the knives was attached to serve as the tip of the Halberd. To poke with. The other, perpendicular to the broomstick, is evidently for striking overhead.
One cold morning, armed with this masterpiece of a weapon, a knight possessed by evil methgic hastily stumbled into A&W. He was agitated, yelling, mumbling, shifting in unnatural ways. We'll never determine whether he arrived to vanquish the demons or to aid their evil cause; the knight was captured by the police of my beautiful, medieval city, Vancouver, BC. We'll never know the real cause. But there is a silver lining to this incident: nobody, not even a single Teen-type burger, was harmed.
Did you know that one homeless shelter in Vancouver, according to this commenter, has a weapon locker that has seen all sorts of medieval arms? Crossbows, maces, flails, swords, shurikens, you name it. If you can imagine it, methiculous methgineers can construct it. Guns are for modern times. Guns are boring. Halberds, spears, whips. Bows, nunchakus, quarterstaffs. These are the weapons I find infinitely more appealing. Infinitely more appropriate for a medieval city like Vancouver. The shelter staff agrees with me: they only reported guns to the police and not anything else of the endless selection of arms surrendered to the locker.
Shortly preceding the A&W Halberd incident, there was a hostage situation involving a dagger-wielding rogue (it might have been a knife in all actuality, but bear with me if you will). That wretched 7-Eleven is not two blocks away from the unfortunate A&W, to which the knight showed up with the halberd. The rogue was shot with the boring guns by the boring police. In the summer of the same year, a machete (let's imagine it as a shortsword) was employed by one raging barbarian to sever an arm of one stranger and a head of another.
These are the three incidents that were deemed worthy of reporting on by newspapers in our boring non-medieval world. But there are many more that go unreported, evident to me by the fact that I had a personal one in the time between the Halberd one and the 7-Eleven one, right by Vancouver Public Library, just across the road from the very same 7-Eleven. A tall 6'5" warlock, dressed in scraps, eyes devoid of any emotion but rabid madness, was trying to obstruct the path of a maiden, and I'm proud to say I fended him off. I waded into the dark medieval fairy tale of Methland for a quick second and became a hero of the day, saved the maiden. In all honesty, it was not really a great act of heroism; I put myself between the warlock and the maiden and with an awkward yet firm gesture kinda shooed him away, more like. His excuse for being creepy was yelled in our backs: "I was just trying to get directions!" If you say so, but I don't trust mad warlocks. If you commute to downtown Vancouver, I wouldn't be surprised if you had an encounter like this yourself.
I have many more incidents to spin my yarn about, much less scary ones, but for now, behold this map. I put all of the four incidents mentioned above on it. With the red cross, I marked my personal treasure: it's a Japanese cuisine place called Ebiten, serving a delicious plate of Kimchi Yaki Udon. I work 10 minutes away from it, and on the days I'm overcome by a bout of laziness sufficient enough for me to forego cooking for the next day, I fancy myself this succulent
ChineseJapanese meal. Also on the map, you can find that murky, dark place, the infamous East Hastings street and it's younger brother Granville street, where I was told all of the vagrants are localized and who never stray from those regions.I live in this fairytale city. I'm on Robson St every work day, commuting. I'm here to tell you that this predicament Vancouver and the whole of Canada found itself in is crazy. Having my office building do multiple lockdowns in one year is not in any way, shape, or form normal. I'm an immigrant here in Vancouver, and I readily admit I don't know the customs and traditions as well as the natively born Canadians, but when they tell me in the comments to the Halberd incident article on Reddit that I lead a sheltered existence, I have to respond: you've lost your mind. It's hard for me to express how thoroughly the Forces of Evil defeated everyday citizens of Canada.
I'm originally from Russia, that backward warmongering authoritarian country, and naturally, I made friends with Russians here in Vancouver. One of my friends
waded into that dark domain of East Hastingsdrove through East Hastings in order to record it, by the request of her father. He's a teacher and now uses the footage as a piece of propaganda about the decaying West - it's that jarring to us Russians. It's bizarre to our sheltered minds: the tents, the drug use, all of the fent zombies bending down, all of the trash piling up on the sidewalk. Not to say that homelessness doesn't exist in Russia; it naturally does. Just take the Three Station Square in Moscow (famously visited by Tucker Carlson) that serves as a shelter for the homeless during the winter frost and in all other months too but especially during the cold winter months. When the denizens get kicked out of one station, they migrate to another - a perpetual problem for the guards and the police, an eyesore for the commuters (more of a nosesore? is that a word? they smell is what I mean).(Sidetracking, calling a station on Three Station Square "a station" is a disgrace to it, to be honest. It's vokzal (вокзал). A big station. A grand station even. Each vokzal is a huge pavilion and for you North Americans to understand - it's big-mall-sized. More-than-a-big-Costco-sized. Imagine enormous Stalin-era-skyscraper style waiting halls and nooks and crannies and unused toilets where you can sleep, drink and shoot up at night)
Homeless people in Russia are neatly tucked away for the most part. It's harder to see them than in Canada, where they sit or lay everywhere cocooned into blankets. In Russia drug users mostly use drugs in condos and apartments. For the most part homeless people huddle in the aforementioned vokzals and stations, underground walkways or maybe along insulated pipes, anywhere warm, in fact. Train drivers traditionally turn up the heat in one or two cars on the last late-night intercity train for the homeless to warm up and sleep in peace during the winter (a small act of kindness, but not a sentiment broadly shared by the public. From 2023 onwards, persons in dirty clothes are forbidden from entering public transport, as if it wasn't already hard to be a homeless person). Sewers and entrance halls for apartment buildings can tide one over for a night. Public spaces like vokzals are the main ways to survive - various NGOs like Nochlezhka and government organizations like Doctor Liza are much more scarce and have much less funding than their Western counterparts.
I didn't live in Moscow, but I lived next to Moscow, commuted there every day. To me, trains, train stations, subways, and public transport are familiar environments, so naturally, I met a decent amount of homeless people. Maybe they were fragrant and unpleasant and often drunk, but I was never afraid of them (and I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm afraid of the Vancouver ones). The homeless in my motherland were rarely drug addicts, and even then, never were they really aggressive. I felt (and still feel) pity for most homeless when they were harassed by the police. I still perceive them as people down on their luck and for the most part they were. From what I know, it is not uncommon for Russian homeless people to be working towards reintegration. They weren't scary and that's the most important part. They lived a regrettable existence, but they were still humans who held on to some semblance of dignity that I almost never see in homeless people in the West.
As sheltered as my upbringing was (I like to think that it wasn't), I was never on guard when I was at Three Station Square; I could never imagine an "unhoused person" in Russia threatening me with a makeshift polearm, it just wasn't an issue for me or anyone else commuting downtown. Did I expect them to beg for change? Yes. Stab me? No. Expecting it and just accepting it as a status quo, from my oh so very sheltered perspective, is crazy. This commenter, and from my perspective, Western society at large just gave up, surrendered after a few policy misses, and just left this wound to fester and fester until cities like Vancouver ended up magically teleporting back in time, to medieval Europe with polearms and all. Don't westerners want to enjoy their burgers without being embroiled in a 100 year war?
My first idea is that everyone just fled downtown to quiet and comfortable suburbs and this is why Canadians don't care, but don't Vancouverites work downtown, commute there and have to deal with this shit and squalor every single work day of their lives? Downtown Vancouver is chock-full of offices, various government services, restaurants, sight-seeing attractions, doctor offices, etc. There are legit reasons to go there every day of the week. Well, I find one. I don't want this to become an urban vs suburban debate: it's just that as a person who grew up in a very urban environment of Moscow, I'm shocked to see the neglect of the shared parts of your city.
One big difference I see between how Russia treats homeless people and how Canada does is that it's just hard for them to live as vagabonds. Yes, you technically can tuck them away in vokzals and underground walkways, but it doesn't mean that the police aren't harassing them constantly. Yes, it's not illegal to live as a homeless person, but it's also really hard and shameful. You can't really sleep in a vokzal without getting woken up every hour by a cop who tells you to remove your feet from the bench. And cops will kick you and punch you too, a big taboo in the West (those damned "human rights or whatever). Having less funding, NGOs can't provide the same level of care as in the West. They don't receive as much in subsidies. Homeless are routinely getting kicked off public transport by the police or even commuters. They are refused entrance to grocery stores and medical facilities.
It's really, really cold during winter in Russia. The most common cause of death for a homeless person in my Motherland is freezing to death. That fear of death, less drugs on the street, constant harassment and shame are crucial motivators. These things sound bad, but the fear of getting beaten, the fear of hardship, the fear of freezing to death can be drivers for rehabilitation and, most importantly, prevention.
In 2024 Scott wrote about homelessness. I posted the article. When I hear about the Finnish model touted by Scott, it makes me laugh. If you see a medieval encampment like the Skidrow on your street and your thought is "let's make their life even simpler" you've given up on the homelessness problem. It's honestly self-evident to me: make their life harder for them! Not simpler! Scott admits himself that draconian ways work in the article, so let's do it, why not do it the draconian way? We are not even talking about people experiencing temporary homelessness, we are talking about hardcore drug users who are dangerous to themselves and to the society at large. They don't feel any sympathy for me or a for a guy getting stabbed when he buys a Monster Energy Gold at a 7-Eleven, so to me, a foreigner to this culture it's impossible to understand why Canadians still feel sympathy for them. It's so evident to me: no more safe-injection sites, no more funding to NGOs, no more investment into safe supply, no more free money and food to subsidize drug-addiction lifestyle with it.
When I see Ken Sim, the current mayor, do a "fire inspection" clean up of East Hastings it makes me... audibly sigh. You have this dangerous, armed medieval brigade and your best idea wasn't to make their life harder. Your idea was to evenly spread them across the city. With all of their weapons. Huh?
When I see a safe-injection site next to the most hipster movie theater in Vancouver (VIFF) and a playground for kids, it makes me laugh, again. The West truly may have fallen, I refused to believe it until I saw it with my own eyes: a guy smoking meth (presumably he got it from the safe-injection site) on that playground and not a single father to even try telling him to fuck off. People just stopped using that part of the playground, moved aside in fear. Not a police officer in sight too. Don't even get me started about a meth zombie erratically waving a knife near kids with a knife in a school. (While trying to find the exact article I saw, I found out that there were multiple incidents involving schools and men armed with knives).
My solutions for this problem are as radical as they come and I feel silly typing them out because they seem so self-evident to me:
There's one and only one takeaway from this whole ordeal for Canadians, the one that will prevent the worsening of already bad areas once and for all: you can't entrust your safety to someone who fundamentally cares about fent zombies more than they care about making your presence in the city safe and pleasant.
So when a commenter tells someone who is surprised by the plethora of weapons in the homeless shelter weapons locker that he lived a sheltered existence, maybe I did live a sheltered life, maybe I did, but I also know when I'm afraid and I see with my own eyes that you are afraid of the archers and infantrymen of Methland too. I've seen liberals go "I'm not actually uncomfortable about them, homelessness is just a part of life and you need to be okay with it. That's just what Downtown is like" and at the same time conveniently avert their eyes from a situation where your compatriots yield completely when a part of a playground for kids is occupied by an invader. Well, in any case, their compassion for drug addicts seems horribly misplaced, at the very least.
The question of "why and how did we allow all of this to go to shit?" is the hardest part. Does it all go back to the old Motte argument that the police in the West exist to protect homeless people from you, not vice versa? (I'd be grateful if someone could link). If so, why? Or is it just a temporary liberalism pendulum swing that happened perfectly in sync with drugs becoming more potent than ever before in history? I don't know. I'm just an observer whose opinion on homelessness was shifted to a diametrically opposite one by real-life experiences of living in a West Coast city.
I'll close with this: Canadians, you don't have to give up multiple streets of your beautiful city. This city doesn't really need to stay medieval. Neither you need to give up your emergency room — it can be safe, actually — for the staff and for the patients.
A&W can be safe, too! Take your A&W back! Be mad! No sane person should have more sympathy for Methland invaders than for little children! My message to proud Canadians: you don't deserve to live in fear of being stabbed by a polearm!
I have to disagree with the premise that too much liberalism created the problem. The solution is more liberalism: legalize gun ownership and deregulate housing. This approach has proven itself effective in the real world, it doesn't cost anything, and it doesn't require an authoritarian state.
Please explain to me how expanding civilian gun ownership is going to significantly improve the issues OP is talking about. Are you proposing that we simply let people fire a gun at homeless people who start acting erratic on the subway? Does this state of affairs strike you as more safe for bystanders than the status quo is?
Similarly, “deregulating housing” doesn’t begin to engage with the question of what happens when insane homeless junkies move into an apartment complex, tear through the walls to strip the metal piping and the electrical wiring, and sell those things on the black market to buy more drugs — something which has occurred time and time again when serious efforts to provide homeless with housing have been enacted.
An expansion of liberalism means an ever-growing list of “human rights” for homeless to exploit — ever more legal hoops for police and social services to jump through in order to be able to take any serious action against a class of individuals who are inherently exploitative of those “rights”.
Cheaper housing does reduce homelessness, but it probably disproportionately gets the individuals who are least problematic off the streets.
The mechanism here is one that tends not to occur to functioning upper-middle class people; poor households are incentivized to get the number of contributing adults into a household which fit in it. The more dear housing is, the stronger the incentive. When you already have a roommate sleeping on the couch your cousin who’s down on his luck cannot just sleep their instead. But in areas with cheaper housing, it’s not worth it to let someone sleep on your couch. So your down on his luck cousin gets it instead.
Right, I have no problem in theory with policies that would make housing more plentiful and affordable. I just don’t think it would have any tangible effect on the “chronic homeless”, whose problems go far beyond a simple lack of funds.
I am focused on empirical evidence rather than theory. Houston, with no zoning and few impediments to building housing, has a homelessness rate of around 30 people per 100k residents. Canada as a whole has an average homelessness rate of at least 90 per 100k residents. Vancouver appears to be something like 728 per 100k with 4,821 homeless and a population of 662k.
Why are you assuming that these things are causatively-related? It’s well-know that other states literally send their homeless people to more homeless-tolerant states like California, giving homeless individuals one-way Greyhound tickets to various destinations on the West Coast. I’m also betting that police in Houston are far less indulgent toward the homeless and the drug-addicted, and far more willing to use forceful means to deter and harass them, than Californian and Canadian police are. Houston also has far less effective public transit than large West Coast cities do, making them less favorable places for homeless people to live.
I want to be careful to make sure that you and I are both talking about the same thing when we use the word “homeless”. There are essentially two mostly-distinct populations both referred to by that term. There are individuals who are genuinely down on their luck, struggling financially and unable (for whatever reason) to rely on the assistance of others for long-term housing. These people often live in their cars or couch-surf, or they stay temporarily in homeless shelters. Obviously housing being cheaper will reduce the number of these individuals, and I’ve no doubt that the statistics you’re pointing to are related to that.
The homeless population I and the OP are talking about are an entirely distinct class of people. (Some of them started out in the first class and, through contact with the chronic homeless or as a way to self-medicate depression or trauma, got addicted to drugs, leading them to transition into the second class, but they’re nowhere near as common as the popular narrative makes them sound.) The “chronic homeless” — what I simply call “bums” — are not going to be able to access and maintain housing even if it’s substantially cheaper than it is currently. They suffer from some combination of severe mental illness, drug addiction, criminal background, and personality disorders. They end up on the streets even if homeless shelters are available, because they are unwilling or unable to comply with the rules shelters put in place. As I noted, if they are given a place to live of their own, they tend to irreparably damage said housing, due to intentional actions or simply profound neglect and disorder. I don’t know how different Houston’s number of bums is than California’s bums, but whatever difference there is is probably because of the policy differences I noted in my first paragraph, and not because of “zoning regulations”.
In DFW you have plenty of bums- generally less threatening bums but bums nonetheless- in Dallas county, but in tarrant county(Fort Worth) you have very few. The judges and prosecutors in tarrant county are all republicans; cops know this and make more arrests and are more willing to use force. In Dallas county judges are almost all democrats(and there are fewer bums in the areas under Republican circuits), and so bums are often ignored when they do minor crimes, because city of Dallas police know there’s no point.
The Republican Party runs campaigns on the difference in public safety between the two counties. They’re right next to each other.
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