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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34406 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Indeed local government is currently involved in a fight with the metro because the metro makes homeless people get off its trains at the end of the line, annoying residents of Long Beach and Santa Monica who want to force them to let the homeless stay on the trains overnight(!) so they don't enter the wider city. That the homeless problem could be solved rather than forced upon someone else is seemingly uninteresting.

I have never been to Addis-Abeba, but I have a suspicion that if a homeless person tries to camp in metro there, the police would come, take him out immediately, and if he persists, would apply some kinetic persuasion to convince him it's not a good idea. What they wouldn't do is to have a wokefest about "safe spaces" and "holistic solutions" and have 25 NGOs with billion-sized budgets write white papers about the problem, while prohibiting the police from addressing it on the ground. I am not advocating that AA approach is better - and it's certainly less humane towards the homeless - but it is certainly different. It's not that the solution is a total mystery - it's that LA (and others) decided, as a society, that they don't like that solution, and so far they were unable to find any other one. Obviously, the money is not the barrier here - if you don't know what to do, no amount of money would help you.

Lock the addicts up, slaughter the dealers, forget about the problem

I have an idea. We should have some catchy name to this approach. I propose "War on Drugs". If we could pull off something like that, I imagine in a couple of years we'd be done. If only somebody would have such an idea sometime earlier, let's say about 1971... We'd never even know such a problem existed at all. Too bad we only got to this now.

The Philippines have had a rather successful war on drugs for the last few years.

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