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Yesterday, I was out for a late morning run, coming up my city's main commercial and restaurant street towards the capitol square. As I approached a stoplight and took a little break in the sweltering heat, a man across the street was blaring music on Bluetooth speakers; mildly annoying, but common enough in the public square. What startled me was another man on the other side of the road who began rapping (for lack of a better description, since it was basically just yelling with a slight match to the cadence) a stream of invective - he was going to kick people's asses, motherfucker this, n-bomb that, people better not fuck with him, and so on.
Reflecting a bit, this made me think of the recent discourse on asylums and what to do, and it occurs to me that I think many people are still missing the actual point. The man I described above didn't show outward signs of any particular mental illness, I have no idea if he uses drugs, and while he did look like a vagrant, I don't know whether he sleeps rough or not. Do any of those things actually matter to me? In some sense, it would matter if there was a serious and treatable mental illness (e.g. schizophrenia), but I don't actually care whether he has diagnosable narcissistic personality disorder or is merely what we would colloquially describe as an asshole. What's to be done if there is no such diagnosis and no drug-induced psychosis, but merely an asshole yelling at people about how he's going to kick their ass? My answer is basically that I want police officers to exercise their discretion to inform him that his options are that he can knock it off, do it elsewhere, or they'll arrest him for disorderly conduct. We don't need to escalate to immediate criminalization, starting with "move along sir" is fine, but no, you don't get to keep yelling at people all day.
So much of the discourse about
bumspersons experiencing houselessness seems like we're just talking past each other. At the end of the day, I genuinely don't care what the state does with these people, I just want them removed from my neighborhood. This attitude is derided as not solving the problem, but that claim merely highlights that we don't agree on what the problem is. For the people that insist on handling root causes, that part will be up to them, I'm perfectly satisfied with literally any solution that removes the people that throw chicken bones and vodka bottles on the ground in the park. I'm not actually very interested in whether they're addicts, mentally ill, or simply terrible people. The answer from the BeKind crowd seems to be that everyone has the right to behave the way they want to and that I'm a very bad person for wanting these guys removed; this seems like an unsolvable impasse in preferences for how to live.This doesn't make you a bad person, but
certainly doesn't make you a good one.
I also live in an area rife with these problems and I sympathize, and think that the state needs to do better at dealing with it. At the same time I wouldn't be fine with "literally any solution", there's got to be red lines about their treatment somewhere. I'm curious where exactly you'd draw the line, and how much you'd want the state to spend on it.
I meant what I said. I have trouble imagining any plausible solution that any modern state has taken to this problem that I would object to as long as it resulted in people not camping in the park, throwing trash on the ground, and yelling obscenities at passersby in the public square. I might have preferences about solutions, but it's hard to imagine proposals that I would consider worse than the status quo on this front. Singaporean harshness would be fine by me. Softhearted liberal utopian visions would also be fine by me. Huge public spending would be fine by me if it actually removes the problem. As long as the problem is solved, I am not that concerned with the exact solution.
There should be no surprise about why people would think you're a "bad person" then. Explicit lack of caring about others is kind of what makes one a "bad person".
I am also not okay with the status quo either, but I think there is some minimum level of support that must be provided (or possible to achieve) before you violate people's autonomy willy-nilly.
(my preferred solution is low-quality, cheap housing, that doesn't have to be right in the most expensive locations for some freaking reason. If you make that available that justifies a lot more force when removing people from public, as they actually have somewhere to go.)
But it’s not ‘ others ‘ - it’s pieces of shit.
He doesn’t hate his gay or black or Jewish or Polish or Haitian neighbor, nor presumably any of these, or other, peoples.
He doesn’t care about the pieces of shit.
That doesn’t make him a bad person, it actually makes you a bad person for judging him based on him disliking criminality.
You think another person should feel like you do because of culture, or god, or morals, or something else.
But you’re actually trying to scold him for caring about living a peaceful and crime free existence.
That’s my take from your posts anyway.
"Love thine enemy."
I know not everyone is a christian. But aside from the fact that everyone should be, it's just good game theory. A society that has made a pact to be utilitarian still has all the justification it needs to prevent bad individual behavior, but at the same time doesn't risk arbitrarily turning its instruments of judgement against someone without regard for their preferences just because they're doing something someone else doesn't like. But to defect against that is to ask people to in turn defect against you. And as proof for the danger of that, I'd point out that that's what the OP was literally doing against these "pieces of shit"-- presumably, reacting to some prior defection. I know, in turn, that no society can survive unilateral total disarmament... but disarmament need not be total, merely proportional. Spending less of your effort caring about bad people is still better than spending none of your effort.
Plus, it's just good virtue signaling. If a man will give his son a fish, that says little about what he'll give a beggar. But if a man will give a beggar a fish, he must be generous indeed to his sons! I would rather be friends with a generous man than a stingy one, and will therefore work harder to make it into the good graces of the latter man. That's the (nonreligious) essence of being a good person: the ability to gain long-term benefits from your reputation!
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