stabby_cicada

Musk's target audience are liberal, West Coast, technocratic, white or upper caste Hindu, brogressives and techbros - men (and the occasional token woman like Elizabeth Holmes) who give lip service to equality and talk a good game about social justice, and then go home to their gentrified neighborhoods and beat their wives. The kind of people who vocally celebrate the anti-capitalist ethic of Burning Man and then spend the burn in a luxurious private compound with dozens of servants and sex workers getting high off their ass while artists perform for them like Venetian nobles patronizing Renaissance painters.

His target audience are precisely the people who would name drop the Culture when promoting their latest startup but revert to moralizing about "traditional Western values" the instant someone actually behaves like a Culture member.

The nonprofit industrial complex is a leech. At least government agencies have some level of accountability, because if they fail to solve a problem, the voters blame the politicians, and the politicians shit downhill on the agencies. Nonprofits don't even have that minimal level of accountability. They just spend all the government money they get, write grants saying "we spent all the money you gave us doing stuff, please give us more", and get more money.

But this is what you get when both the left and right have bought into libertarian free market ideology and agree that privatizing government services is more efficient than letting the government do its goddamn job.

Preach. I rant about the same thing all the time.

Capitalism is decentralized tyranny. If a dictator said "if you refuse to work where I send you I will starve you to death on the streets" most Americans would recoil. But capitalism says "if you do not provide enough value for the upper class, they will not give you enough tokens to exchange for food and housing, and you will starve to death on the streets". And we just shrug and say it's the workers' fault for not working hard enough - because "no one is forcing you" - there's no specific individual we can blame for starving the unwanted population to death, it's the insensate grinding of the gears of a machine, and don't be silly, we can't turn off the machine, what are you, traitor?

And even with the open dictator model, many Americans would say "that just makes sense, if you don't work you don't eat" and cheer the dictator for putting lazy useless people to work. Just look how many people support slave labor in private, for profit prisons, and how many people want unhoused people to be enslaved in those exact same prisons. Hell, at the height of the Qanon craze something like 20% of Americans believed that Donald Trump would enact martial law and put millions of liberals in concentration camps and wanted it to happen. We're addicted to the taste of boot.

I agree, everyone who loves liberty should oppose this law.

Unfortunately, if you are conservative and you oppose this law, in my experience you are damn near a unicorn. I'm in California and these kind of brutal crackdowns are wildly popular among conservatives - and moderates, and even wealthy white liberals. Like the article says, blaming the victims of homelessness for the homeless crisis has been incredibly effective. And most people don't understand how corrupt the homeless industrial complex is, how little government funding actually gets to the homeless to help them, and how incompetent, abusive, and poorly run those aid programs actually are, so it's easy to look at all the money and programs that exist on paper and blame homeless people for "refusing help".

Unhoused people refuse help because past "help" failed them or people they know, or "help" comes with conditions that are unacceptable to them, or "help" will not solve the actual problems they have. The solution is not to force people into institutions that abuse them, neglect them, and then kick them out for failing to follow arbitrary rules.

I mean, if you have a dog, and the shelters don't allow dogs, what do you do? What sane person would risk their dog being put down at the pound in exchange for a few weeks of housing - housing, moreover, that is demonstratively less safe than living on the street?

The solution is to improve the services available without conditions so that unhoused people feel safe in asking for those services.

There are a small number of people who genuinely cannot make decisions because they cannot comprehend reality. And those people need help, possibly involuntary help. But even then, that doesn't mean taking them away from the people and places they know and locking them up. People blame Reagan's deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people in the '80s for the current homeless crisis - people forget Reagan's deinstitutionalization policy was popular because insane asylums were horrifically incompetent and abusive.

And if you see a homeless person experiencing a mental health crisis or acting irrational in public, please remember, they have no private place to go - how would you come off to the public if your worst moments had to be displayed in public? - and then ask yourself whether their actions are making you feel unsafe, or merely uncomfortable.

Perhaps we're talking past each other. Human rights are not defined by laws. Human rights come before laws. Laws, in decent nations, are written in such a way as to protect human rights.

The text of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, enacted by the UN in the hope that never again would the world see such widespread and horrific violations of human rights as it did during World War II, is an excellent starting point to understand how the modern world sees human rights. It is linked in the post I linked above.

And, just to circle back around to the topic, the laws of the United States are clearly failing to protect the fundamental human right to adequate housing for all persons resident in the United States.

Maybe your opinion is that housing is a human right but I’m not sure where you are drawing that definitive conclusion from. Are you saying it’s a legal right somewhere or that it’s your emotional stance?

The right to housing is a fundamental human right, according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many international treaties and agreements since. As the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights puts it:

Adequate housing was recognized as part of the right to an adequate standard of living in article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in article 11.1 of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Other international human rights treaties have since recognized or referred to the right to adequate housing or some elements of it, such as the protection of one’s home and privacy.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-housing/human-right-adequate-housing

Your personal experience has given you an incorrect belief regarding the human right to housing. I'm sorry to call you out so directly, but sometimes people need to hear hard truths. Facts don't care about your feelings.

And what's the problem? So what if a whole bunch of single people moved into tiny government houses? Housing is a human right. And it sure would bring rents down.

San Francisco infuriates me. There are activist groups that are made of actual literal unhoused people telling the city what they need and what they want. And the city could just give people the money they need for a fraction of the administrative costs it spins on its non-profits and its government agencies.

But the city says homeless people are drug addicts and criminals and can't be trusted to use money responsibly.

So they funnel millions of dollars to corrupt non-profits and government agencies who promise to use the money responsibly for the benefit of the homeless and they fucking don't. There was a $350K program run by the Salvation Army in partnership with the local public transit agency. One homeless person used their services.. One.

At least government agencies are, at some remove, responsible to the taxpayers and the voters. Non-profits dedicated to "helping" the homeless have a very strong incentive to make the problem worse. Because the worse the homelessness crisis becomes, the more money goes to the nonprofits. So they take government money, give it to their employees, make some sort of pathetic token effort to help unhoused people, and as the crisis worsens they go back to the government and say "the crisis is worse, we need more money".

And civilians look at the amount of money being poured into assistance to unhoused people, and look at the crisis getting worse, and say "more money and services won't help these people, we need to criminalize them". And fucking Newsom is all over that because he's angling for the Presidency and military style crackdowns impress the fascists in red states.

There's a homelessness crisis because of government corruption and incompetence. And the majority of Americans think the solution is to give the government more military power, more police power, and let those same corrupt agencies brutalize the homeless more. It's sickening.

I appreciate the link!

The article, I think, is very clear on how those dollar amounts were measured, and I don't think they're bullshit at all, but everybody here can read the article and decide for themselves.

Capitalists gonna capital, and developers gonna develop.

It's amazing how many self-described environmentalists keep chanting "build more solar!" and "build more wind!" and "build more nuclear!" as if the developers for those projects aren't the exact same people building subdivisions and coal power plants and bulldozing endangered species and historic sites to make a buck. As if we can develop our way out of the global environmental collapse we developed our way into. It's hilarious, except it's not funny at all.