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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28477 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Any of the reasonably wealthy countries/cities that are also highly authoritarian, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Singapore, etc. I would assume China too but I have no first or second-hand experience of this.

A college friend from Luxembourg and I were in Montreal once and a homeless man asked us for money. He was shocked and said that would be unthinkable in Luxembourg.

I’ve also spent a lot of time in Istanbul and while there are a lot of Gypsy beggars and post-Syrian civil war a LOT of refugees, I do not recall ever really seeing a “homeless” person. I think there are a couple of reasons for this:

  1. Turkish police do not give a fuck about civil rights. Obviously this varies by class but I mean to say that if you looked like the classic American zombie psycho homeless person, they would happily beat your ass and chase you away or throw you in jail and be lauded for it.
  2. Much stronger familial ties, way less likely that you will end up as one of these zombies in the first place. Related to this there’s still a strong element of social shame in the culture.
  3. I may be reaching here but there is a near-total absence of Christian slave morality and its woke ideology offspring. No risk that you will end up on TikTok for beating or chasing a homeless person away and getting cancelled. In fact probably the opposite will happen.

A college friend from Luxembourg and I were in Montreal once and a homeless man asked us for money. He was shocked and said that would be unthinkable in Luxembourg.

It's probably that I've become desensitised but Montreal is not even really bad with this, we might have the proper balance of how to treat them. The police, barring extreme circumstances, do not let the homeless cluster until they become a problem. The real trouble tends to start when they interact with one another, if they're spread out they might panhandle and annoy the public a bit, but they don't often get violent.

Also, housing's pretty much got to be cheaper there. I don't know if Istanbul is the kind of city where the medieval neighborhoods have been gentrified and the poor people live in outlying postwar tower-block developments, or the kind where the lowest classes live in the oldest housing, but either way the rents have to be cheaper than most US cities.

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