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How does a prosperous society combat insidious "compassion"?
The article then notes acts of violence including eggs thrown, paintballs shot, and one homeless beaten dead (though the motive is not specified). None of this seems particularly remarkable to me, as the base rate for being subject to intra-homeless violence and general excess mortality seems substantial in any American city.
Yet the article's top reader comments predictably shout from the rooftops "cruelty", "what happened to compassion", "these so-called Christians", "it's a war against the homeless, not homelessness". Worse, I don't get the sense this chorus is particularly performative as compared to other virtue signaling hobby horses. Instead, my read, based on nothing more than a decade-long familiarity of NYT reader comments, is that a majority of the readership genuinely believes the people of Kalispell, Montana to be deplorables as a result of their anti-homeless actions.
I haven't egged, paintballed, or beaten any homeless and don't intend to start, but I firmly believe that any city will be worse off if a "compassionate" genie magically conjured up 100 homeless people to live its streets; no comment on whether I think a city should welcome a "cruel" genie who's able and willing to magically poof away the same. I also understand second order effects and believe people respond to incentives. It seems to me, then, that every compassionate Times reader equals something like 0.0001 compassionate genies, and every cruel Kalispell resident 0.01 cruel genies. Mechanics and process aside, the end result is a San Fran full of growing compassion and ever more unhoused, and a Kalispell with a cruel lid on the homeless, and maybe even a reduction down the line.
The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion? Even if the rational counterarguments are themselves obvious, it seems like a fundamentally losing messaging game. We raise our children to be compassionate and we look for spouses who are compassionate. Trying to shout from the rooftops that compassion is actually bad when it comes to the homeless feels akin to telling the world that generosity is bad when it comes to tipping. Which is why I'm resigned that no matter how many articles are written about the tipping culture being out of control, it will creep up to more industries and circumstances and higher preset amounts. Similarly, I'm resigned that more tax and charity dollars will go to the homeless and the homeless industrial complex ad infinitum, because you can't argue against compassion, at least not outside of the ratsphere and among the voting masses.
But perhaps an answer is to change the framing entirely. Ivy League campus DEI would have never died from straight white men (and adjacent Asians) arguing how anti-white and anti-man the apparatus is; it's just not persuasive enough for the public long accustomed to hearing about oppression, systemic racism, patriarchy, and the value of diversity. Falling the accepted wisdom requires something entirely different, recently having one oppressed in-group fight another until the contradiction is impossible to sustain.
So is there an entirely different approach to beating back compassion when it comes to the homeless problem? Is it possible to effectively campaign for the cruel genie?
With actual compassion.
It's not like homelessness is an unsolvable problem.
Sure, we'd need to spend money on it, but not that much; do you have any idea how much money we spend on beer and makeup? More to the point, do you realize that the labor force participation rate for adults is around 62%? We have plenty of excess capacity that could be turned towards solving this problem, if we wanted to.
Hell, the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices. We could make a big impact just by lifting the zoning restrictions that economists are already telling us to lift for non-compassionate reasons.
It may be true that some specific types of half-measures towards compassion are worse than nothing, but that doesn't mean we should accept doing nothing. It means we should use full measures.
When people make this argument it drives me nuts. I'm sorry, but I hope you don't actually believe this and honestly I think you are arguing this in bad faith and we should dismiss it because you aren't even arguing against what people are actually talking about. When people complain about the homeless, they aren't complaining about people who can't afford rent or have fallen on tough times. They are complaining about the insane people who scream at women and children and shit on the street or the drug addicts who have no intention of getting sober and leave used needles in parks children play at. Housing prices have no effect on these people because they either have no intention of getting a home, are too mentally ill for it to matter and need full time care, or would just use any housing you give them as a flop house to use and sell drugs at. The only way to help these people is to force them into institutions that will treat their mental illness and addiction against their will. Since you aren't allowed to do that, the only other thing you can do is to make it clear to them being homeless in your areas will suck and force them to go elsewhere.
Even three months in jail (for possession) would probably work miracles. Break their cycle of compulsive using and let them sober up and give them a chance to try being something other than a junkie living in a tent in a park.
(The public thinks of jail as a fate almost like death but they’re not that bad. The best jail is probably better than the worst public school)
Going to jail doesn't stop people from using drugs -- in fact it's even worse than rehab in that not only do you meet & spend all your time with a lot of people having a shared interest in doing drugs, but these people also enjoy doing crime in order to get more drugs.
Going to jail forces them to mostly stop being floridly actively addicted for a bit. Those few months where they can think some thoughts aside from how to get their next hit of meth/fentanyl 100% of the time is the valuable opportunity here. Jail has bad parts too: person's re-integration in society becomes harder because they have a record, and they meet a lot more criminals who can teach them to do more crime.
But, this forced sobering up might also be the only tool our society has that stops them from being a junkie destined to overdose in the near future committing crime the whole way.
That's just it -- it's pretty easy to get drugs in jail, drugs addicts that are sent there don't (generally) sober up.
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And zero interest in helping you get off drugs. Negative interest really, if they're cooking or supplying helping you get clean cuts into their bottom line.
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