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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34401 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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to the great benefit of the city's working poor

But if the city's working poor would benefit the most from this, why aren't they agitating for it? One would expect to see community groups spring up to deal with the issue, much like they did for the last 100 years of American history, but now there's nothing. Heck, I'd even expect it in the ballot box and candidates.

Now, I'm very willing to accept that the reason they aren't is propaganda and sabotage- and indeed, the entire reason why "muh oppression" continues is because it works- but I'm starting to suspect that even urban poor Americans are rich enough that their sense of apathy can take over (they're certainly much better off than any poor person anywhere else in terms of standard of living, and even some of the lower to middle class in other countries) and that the US crossed that point a generation ago.

So long as the poor don't feel themselves under threat and can afford the luxury belief of bike cucking accepting the occasional theft and confusing it for charity, I think it also releases citizens from the standard form of charitable obligations: the toleration of the underclass' behaviors is itself viewed as the charity.

The only place that really breaks this rule are West-aligned East Asian nations- but then again, they still have wireheaders all the same, and that's what hikikomori-dom is fundamentally caused by.

But if the city's working poor would benefit the most from this, why aren't they agitating for it?

How do you know they're not, but they get shouted down by the advocacy groups going on about "consensual substances"? Take the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is she representing her constituency's views on cracking down on subway crime? Or is this something the local working poor, if any of them are in her constituency, know would get them tagged as making fascism look benign so they don't even bother raising it with her?

You can go to her constituency office website and fill out something for FY24 community project funding around transportation, but that seems like a lot of paperwork and hoops to jump through for ordinary people in low-wage jobs to try and organise around.

Now, she has announced funding for these amongst other projects:

New York City Department of Transportation - Astoria Boulevard Safety Improvements

$1,000,000

55 Water Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10041

The New York City Department of Transportation is eligible to receive $1,000,000 to make Astoria Boulevard safer and more accessible for pedestrians by expanding sidewalk space, shortening crossing distances, adding crossings, and adding bus stop improvements, including bus bulbs. Specifically, this project will enhance pedestrian safety and improve pedestrian circulation by constructing curb extensions and median tip extensions along, as well as create left turn bays and crosswalks.

New York City Department of Transportation - Westchester Square Plaza

$1,000,000

55 Water Street, 9th Floor New York, NY 10041

The New York City Department of Transportation is eligible to receive $1,000,000 towards safety improvements in an area that is in the top 10% of dangerous crashes (severe injuries and fatalities) in The Bronx. The irregular street geometry at the intersection of Westchester Ave and East Tremont Ave significantly contributes to this area seeing a high number of pedestrian and motor-vehicle accidents, injuries, and fatalities. This project seeks to ameliorate these issues by removing a right turn slip lane and building out Westchester Square Plaza. This solution will create approximately 4,000 SF of quality public space in the area, providing public amenities and landscaping.

Those are great, but is there anything there about "and this is how we'll keep the junkies, criminals and violent homeless out of the new public amenities"?

Have you met the working poor? One of the biggest culture shocks for professional class Americans from the working poor is just how little sympathy they have for the underclass immediately below them. Letting people steal as charity is foreign to them; it’s an upper class luxury belief.

But if the city's working poor would benefit the most from this, why aren't they agitating for it?

Cognitive dissonance. But probably not in the way you are thinking.

My in-laws have a violently mentally ill son. They are upper middle class PMC types. Their experiences with him have warped their entire world view. They view everything through the lens of "protecting" their son, as opposed to protecting people from him. The world, and themselves, are better off every time he finally does something that lands him in jail. But they despair every time that happens. Because I guess that's just what family does to you.

The working poor often have far more familial proximity to deranged violent criminals. If this impact them anything like it impacts my in-laws, when these tough on crime measures get proposed, they don't react with joy or relief that they no longer have to worry about being stabbed taking the subway to work. They react with terror and fear that their violent, deranged cousins, siblings, uncles or fathers are going to get locked up.

They want the deranged violent people that terrify them locked up. Just not any that are related to them, because they love them.

From my limited experience, it's that when it gets to the point of being violent, etc. that the working poor do want their violent relatives taken into care, be that hospital wards or even jail, but they can't get it done until it's too late (e.g. the person has committed some crime bad enough to be locked away). There is the natural tendency towards "my family and I love them" but they do tend to be more realistic about how things can go bad, because they have to live beside the consequences of the violent, criminal, and mentally ill:

As part of the mitigation by defence, the teenager’s grandmother read out a letter to the court, which she said she had written to give a glimpse into the child he was.

“I am not a mother who sees no wrong in a child. I never had anything to do with crime and I don’t condone criminal behaviour,” she said.

She said her grandson used to be sports mad, excelling at hurling and boxing. She said he changed when his birth mother introduced herself to him in the street and when she did not get what she wanted from him, his mother said she would harm herself. The witness said that her grandson never returned to boxing or GAA after that and began to get into trouble at school.

“His new friends were all involved in stealing bikes and using the money to buy drugs. I got many agencies involved but nothing worked. He would be awake at night crying and made three suicide attempts,” she said.

This is an important insight, and I have observed this same phenomenon even among people whose loved ones have far more minor mental health issues. My very good friend has a brother who is autistic and extremely-online; he has no criminal record that I’m aware of, and seems completely harmless - just spergy and aimless. My friend is always talking about how important it is to “protect and advocate for the mentally ill” and seems terrified that some authoritarian crackdown on violent schizophrenics would inevitably expand to targeting her brother for eugenic cleansing. I see the same thing with the families of people with Down’s Syndrome: the specter of Nazi death camps looms over their minds and appears to lurk behind every corner, hiding behind efforts to enforce literally any negative consequences on any mentally-ill person. This seems to be yet another sensible public-policy front which has been irreparably tainted for a century by a certain mid-century Austrian painter.

I see the same thing with the families of people with Down’s Syndrome: the specter of Nazi death camps looms over their minds and appears to lurk behind every corner, hiding behind efforts to enforce literally any negative consequences on any mentally-ill person.

To be fair to the Down's Syndrome families, the push towards elective abortion for this cause does induce a kind of paranoia, because it is demonstrated that society thinks it's not alone acceptable, but moving towards compulsory, to abort such children. There's resentment dressed up as compassion around "who will take care of them when they're adults and their parents are too old or even dead? that's an expense on society".

There's public intellectuals willing to spout off on your moral duty around that. Or doctors going "Well we don't judge in such cases, but we think it's paternalism to make women wait three days to get an abortion" when speaking in the context of "how many pregnancies are terminated in such cases?" That was around the campaign for a Constitutional amendment to permit (limited) abortion in my country; before it became legal, the reassurance was all "No, it won't include disability as a reason"; afterwards, we get a newspaper article talking about how it's not covered under "fatal foetal abnormality" so women have to go abroad for a termination. What makes that relevant here is that part of the campaign for abortion in Ireland over the years included "women have to go abroad for a termination, it is much safer if they could receive such medical treatment here". I don't think it's unreasonable to see that as a call for including Down's Syndrome as another permissible grounds. The switch between "no no no we don't want to abort the Downies/actually yeah it should be legal to abort the Downies", you see?

So it's not the failed landscape painter at fault here, it's the entire system of "well of course you'll want an abortion, when do we schedule it?" around diagnosis, and even the whole practice of having routine amniocentesis to detect such conditions. That's helpful to let families prepare, but the end result is "95% termination" not "preparation to have a child with this condition". Or that it's been legally upheld that Down's Syndrome is one case where you can have an abortion up until birth:

In a summary of the decision, by Lord Justice Underhill, Lady Justice Thirlwall and Lord Justice Peter Jackson, the judges said the Act does not interfere with the rights of the "living disabled".

They said: "The court recognises that many people with Down's syndrome and other disabilities will be upset and offended by the fact that a diagnosis of serious disability during pregnancy is treated by the law as a justification for termination, and that they may regard it as implying that their own lives are of lesser value.

"But it holds that a perception that that is what the law implies is not by itself enough to give rise to an interference with Article 8 rights (to private and family life, enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights)."

…In England, Wales and Scotland, there is a 24-week time limit on having an abortion. Laws allow terminations up until birth if there is "a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped", which includes Down's syndrome.

I can certainly see grounds for paranoia, even if it's unreasonable (as yet).

I mean, look, I’m basically in total agreement with the people strongly encouraging women to abort all Down’s Syndrome fetuses. Abortion is a very difficult issue when it comes to public policy, and I’m not willing to say that mandating the termination of such pregnancies would be the optimal legal approach.

However, this is a wholly separate issue from the removal of obviously-ill adults from public spaces. The constituency calling for broad coercive efforts to remove the mentally ill from public transit has close to zero overlap with the consistency attempting to get women to abort babies with mental illnesses. Now, I personally would love it if these two consistencies to converge, as I would be an enthusiastic member of such a hypothetical coalition; the reality at this time, though, is that they are two separate and unrelated - in fact, usually two diametrically opposed - political phenomena in every first-world country worth discussing.

I get what you're saying, but I'm saying I can also understand why people in that situation would be twitchy about anything that looks like cracking down on the visibly mentally ill.

Because all the promises about "of course we don't mean your baby" have turned out to be lies.

There should be a way to get laws about adults who need to be institutionalised can be taken off the streets even against their will because they are not competent to make decisions and they are not acting in their own good, but the way things work it's plausible that there would be a lot of vague language inserted for both those who don't want to 'stigmatise' and those who do want to be draconian, and that this kind of language could be interpreted in unintended ways when it comes to provision of services and legal cases. As well as a shit-ton of scaremongering - look how Aduhelm got approved even over FDA resistance, because of the canny use of patient's groups and families of sufferers who were whipped up to protest about "this would cure my mom but the cruel bureaucrats are wrapping it in red tape!"

I don't trust public policy motives because the entire topic is way too politicised. You would have idiots screeching about how this is throwing the mentally ill and the homeless into cages and hellholes.

The constituency calling for broad coercive efforts to remove the mentally ill from public transit has close to zero overlap with the consistency attempting to get women to abort babies with mental illnesses. Now, I personally would love it if these two consistencies to converge, as I would be an enthusiastic member of such a hypothetical coalition

To make sure I understand you - are you saying you would support coercing women to have abortions against their will in such cases? Because if so, do you really not understand why people would have "the spectre of Nazi death camps looming" when you're saying in effect "pass this legislation and then we can get on to the whole Lebensunwertes Leben bit"? Because while I'd support "if we need coercive laws to solve this problem for the good of all including the homeless/mentally ill, okay", I'd definitely oppose you on that last. And if you make one conditional on the other, then sorry, one set of principles over-rides the other for me, thus blanket refusal.

But if the city's working poor would benefit the most from this, why aren't they agitating for it?

People don't necessarily advocate for what would benefit them. For one thing, if they are rational, working poor Los Angelians will take into account the dispersed benefits of a better city and the concentrated opportunity costs of using their precious time to advocate for something that might not be politically possible anyway.

Note: I am against draconian drug policies.

How often do the working poor ever organize politically, and when they try, is it ever effective? It wasn't effective at stopping the destruction of many poor neighborhoods to build roads through American cities back in the 60s (when the upper class, with more money and political capital, organized, they were able to stop it in their neighborhoods).

Political movements are almost always drawn largely from the middle class, often being more educated than average. As far as I'm aware, this is true of groups from Occupy Wall Street to Islamist terrorists to the Bolsheviks to the far more milquetoast political parties of modern developed countries. You could probably make a political organization called "more stuff for poor people now" and it would be 90% college-educated middle-class or richer (99% in leadership).

How often do the working poor ever organize politically, and when they try, is it ever effective?

Unions. Seriously, in their heyday they were the most effective grassroots political organisations ever.

Also the big-city political machines - although the leaders tended to be from respectable working class or lower middle class backgrounds (Boss Tweed was the son of a cabinet maker, and worked in various skilled trade jobs and as a bookkeeper before getting into politics via volunteer fire brigades), the middle-rank members of the machine who actually delivered the votes tended to be working poor. In western Europe where there wasn't the ethnic vote, the distinction between big-city political machines and unions was generally one without a difference.

Unions. Seriously, in their heyday they were the most effective grassroots political organisations ever.

Unions are the only way you'll get anything done on your behalf, if you're working class/working poor. But unions have become ossified as 'get plum jobs for our members/fat sinecures for our officials', which means cutting deals with city government (and that would be Democrats in LA, and the whole Democratic Party middle-class membership reacting with horror to the notions of cops on trains, crackdowns on drugs, etc.) and they have been weakened by the interests of employers who saw them as too powerful, and the taking for granted of the blue collar workers by the Democratic party:

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/labor-unions-hillary-clinton-mobilization-231223

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22307891/democrats-unions-pro-act-policy-feedback

https://www.lawcha.org/2016/11/23/bill-clinton-remade-democratic-party-abandoning-unions-working-class-whites/

Unions have always been quickly captured by moneyed interests in the US.

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