You're assuming others share your perspective and understanding.
> The transition to using the word "homeless" has resulted in transforming something we can't easily measure -- "drug addicted or mentally ill people being a public menace" -- into something that we can measure -- "people without a good living arrangement".
> the former is the actual problem that we care about
The word homeless is pretty old, not something people have 'tranistioned' to any time recently.
I haven't seen anyone trying use 'homeless' as a euphemism; they are actually concerned about people without housing. That is the big problem.
You apparently believe "drug addicted or mentally ill people being a public menace" is a comparable problem, but your comment is the first time I've heard that. Nobody is conspiring to hide it; they just don't think about it like you do.
I spend a lot of time in cities and know others who do too. None feel menaced by people who are unhoused - why would that be menacing? - or high. High people generally don't know you are there, and are easily avoided. I've had zero problems; I don't know of anyone else who has.
Also, the subtext is about eroding human rights. You have no more rights than a homeless or high person. Feeling 'menaced' is not sufficient to compromise someone's freedom. That's what freedom means - of course people can always do things that others don't mind; freedom means doing things other people don't like. I find your comment menacing; who decides who gets locked up?
> I spend a lot of time in cities and know others who do too. None feel menaced by people who are unhoused - why would that be menacing? - or high. High people generally don't know you are there, and are easily avoided. I've had zero problems; I don't know of anyone else who has
This is completely detached from reality. I find it hard to believe you are being truthful unless you're doing some sort of gotcha where you carry a gun or are some sort of jiu-jitsu master. Here's an example of people being afraid of the homeless and another of drug addicts, just from last year in NYC but there's thousands of examples.
- Business owners and residents along Midtown Manhattan’s “Strip of Despair” are so frequently robbed and harassed by drug-addled “psychopaths” that they’ve stopped trying to resist — or even bother calling the cops for help. https://nypost.com/2024/06/17/us-news/horror-stories-from-ny...
I don't mean to say with this that ALL of them are dangerous, but you trying to portray that you never even heard of someone being afraid of homeless or drug addicts and the trouble they sometimes create is like saying you don't know which color the sky is. Like you honestly never seen an aggressive person who is high?
Anyway if not, I can tell you I've had a drunk homeless guy throw a bottle at me for no reason other than walking home. The next day I talked to him and now I know Cyril, my local homeless drunk and high Russian guy, and sometimes give him socks, but even he admits that when he drinks and huffs nitrous he gets a bit crazy.
> This is completely detached from reality. I find it hard to believe you are being truthful unless you're doing some sort of gotcha where you carry a gun or are some sort of jiu-jitsu master.
As someone who has lived in San Francisco, CA for the past long-ass while, I agree with the paragraph that you're objecting to. I own no firearms, and can hardly throw a pillow, let alone a person.
Maybe try, like, talking to more homeless folks? Or at least observing them from a distance? They're folks like anyone else, and most of them (like most folks) simply don't want police attention, so doing anything more to regular folks than asking for spare change isn't in their repertoire. Honestly, I'm a LOT safer in the parts of the city where there are folks out on the street than I am places where there's noone. [0]
[0] The only times I've gotten mugged or robbed were when I was in the fancy parts of town where there's noone on the street to provide assistance... and my assailants were groups of folks who looked to be doing well for themselves, rather than rough-looking folks looking for cash for a score.
In Finland, "homeless" actually means "homeless". We don't mean "people suffering mental illness and substance abuse issues". So that's the background for the article.
I recently visited NYC and understand your specific angle, but "homeless" actually can just mean "person without a home" without connotations of mental issues or substance abuse.
There are extreme cases where people willfully live under bridges or something but that's super rare.
what's completely detached from reality is that the problem is so bad in (US) cities like NYC that it seems inconceivable that it isn't a universal truth that cities just have an indigent population that regularly threatens and sometimes follows through on threats of violence to passersby.
You don't know how ridiculous that is. Stop watching propaganda and just visit NYC. I'm tempted to buy you a ticket. Or just ask someone who lives there.
Fear is a feeling, and I'm not sure what "very real" means, as if your feelings are matter of national importance. If someone commits a crime, then the people are justified in acting - in a proportionate, necessary way - through government. Otherwise, your fear is your problem. Maybe the homeless person is scared of you - after all, you can call the police and subject them to serious abuse.
I agree that it's an often implied issue, but I think the sub-subtext, the point of it all, is far more serious: whether you can do things to other people - via the state or personally - for arbitrary reasons. That is, whether people have universal human rights. That is the elephant they are hunting.
They have found their best test cases, their best steps toward destroying universal human rights, with homeless people, people without legal immigration status, and those engaging in progressive protests.
They won't stop there, of course. It's either human rights for all or for none.
I'm saying the fear people feel is real, and "valid" in the sense that the rest of us must recognize it, not dismiss it.
Only when we meet people in the fearful place they're at, and they feel heard, can we start to try to make them see that the fear is not justified or rational compared with the actual risk posed by the homeless or mentally ill or what have you.
I do agree, it's human rights for everyone or no-one.
I generally agree, but that's perhaps more appropriate for the vulnerable. For powerful, fearful people, they need to stop actualizing it or making it important before they hurt someone.
The post pushes right-wing propaganda; it's a Rupert Murdoch publication, the same as Fox News. Ignore it.
Manhatten is so safe it's dull. It's lost its edge, its variety, its lifeblood which is the dynamic people. Really, I'm not kidding you. Look up the crime stats. Or just go visit - if more people would stop believing the right-wing nonsense and just see things for themselves, they'd be much happier (and how about holding the the NY Post, etc. accountable?).
> Like you honestly never seen an aggressive person who is high?
No, or if they are aggressive, they are aggressive to the empty air around them - I don't engage in conversation. But people high on opiods, which is most common by far, are quiescent. Some are basically asleep standing up, drooling in place. Very scary!
Lived in cities all my life, 3 capitals, 2 non capitals, 3 countries. And gave you a personal example of my current local homeless guy, thanks for discounting my lived experience as one says.
For your argument to be valid, homeless people and drug addicts would need to be some special breed of human that is much more peaceful than everyone else. I don't demonize them but I also don't think they are angels. And they certainly are more desperate. Only a lack of understanding of human nature could tell you that people aren't afraid. Remember your argument isn't even that they are more dangerous. Your argument is that people don't ever even feel afraid of them, that is ridiculous.
Regular people have a stigma against the homeless and that perceptions of crime from the homeless are higher than they should be and that's detrimental to help them. That is clear as water. I genuinely think you're trying to just push some perceived overton window and are ending up in a nonsensical argument about nobody being afraid of a whole group of people. And then you say I'm too fearful, which was the opposing argument you made, that nobody ever felt fear. It's like inflammatory rhetoric for it's own sake.
Stop lying. I live in a big city and everyone agrees with him and knows exactly what he’s talking about. I’m not worried about the guys who want to sit around drinking on the sidewalk but almost every time I go outside there’s at least one of them screaming at pedestrians, yelling at nothing, blowing meth or crack fumes, etc.
If you don’t think it’s a problem then give me your address so I can yell at you through the window and poop on the sidewalk. Part and parcel of living in a big city, right?
> I spend a lot of time in cities and know others who do too. None feel menaced by people who are unhoused - why would that be menacing? - or high. High people generally don't know you are there, and are easily avoided. I've had zero problems; I don't know of anyone else who has.
"Nothing ever happens" says person nothing happened to. Meanwhile, these are just some examples that made the news:
* https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-67386865 "A suspect has been arrested two days after former US Senator Martha McSally reported being sexually assaulted while on a run in Iowa [...] The suspect, who is thought to be homeless,"
* https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41484206 "A "manipulative" homeless man who turned on a family who befriended him has admitted the "frenzied" murder of the mother and her 13-year-old son."
* https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/life-sentence-for-... "A severely mentally ill man was sentenced to life in prison on Friday for beheading a Hollywood screenwriter [...] a homeless former Marine described by his lawyer as "very, very mentally ill", pleaded guilty [...] in a crime without motive."
Fortunately I haven't witnessed any murders or rapes, but the most shocking for me was that I've visited Vancouver twice in my life, and on both visits, lone women walking down the street in broad daylight were chased after and opportunisticly molested by drunk vagrants hanging around on Robson Street. Broad daylight. They had absolutely no shame. And other than the molested women fighting them off and running away, nobody did or said anything.
Everyone has a right to walk about in public unmolested, and I would want the police to arrest those men and prosecute them for sexual assault.
You're delusional or misinformed if you think this doesn't happen. Of course it happens.
On the other hand, you can be molested or assaulted by drunk and beligerent homed people. And, more importantly, homeless people are much more at risk of assault or rape by the homed, than the homed are of being assaulted and raped by the homeless. For all the articles I linked above, they are dwarfed by news reports of homeless people being shot, beaten, stabbed, set on fire or raped.
So, overall, homeless people as a whole are neither saints nor devils. They are who they are, and each individual has a different situation. We should feel a lot of empathy for them, and want to help them into a less precarious position... but we also want to do it because we're mindful of the danger to the public that untreated mental illness poses.
I think you are taking 'nothing' (if I used that word) too literally. Of course crimes happen. People win the lottery too. That doesn't make it a trend or a crisis. All those news stories add up to five individual crimes spread onto two continents.
> you can be molested or assaulted by drunk and beligerent homed people. And, more importantly, homeless people are much more at risk
I don't know enough to say "much" more, but I think those are good points. There's nothing special about being homeless, in terms of crime, except you are much more exposed to it.
> on both visits, lone women walking down the street in broad daylight were chased after and opportunisticly molested by drunk vagrants hanging around on Robson Street. Broad daylight.
How do I spend so much time in cities and never see anything like that? I'm sure some of these stories people tell are true, but wow.
Linking to incidents in cities in the US, and the 51st and 52nd state, aren't representative of cities across the world.
Maybe """ "Nothing ever happens" says person nothing happened to.""" is honestly telling the truth that they don't concieve of anything happening to them because they live outside of this insane bubble we're in that it's just accepted for cities to just have a violent homeless population that "we can't do anything about". Maybe we're the idiots in this situation.
But you complain about fictive homeless people attacking you, with or without moral compunction.
What will you do with this person after you've committed them? It turns out that forcing people to detox isn't effective. Addiction is a disease with no reliable cure; you can't just give someone a round of antibiotics.
But if you think it's possible, demonstrate it to the world: Get yourself addicted, then detox, and you should be fine!
I've not complained about anyone, fictional or otherwise.
If your assertion is that getting someone off of drugs in the short term plays absolutely no role in getting someone off drugs in the long term, then I'm not really sure what to say to you. It's my understanding that people primarily get and stay sober out of fear of losing absolutely everything and dying. The trouble with rehabilitating the homeless is that they've effectively lost everything but their lives, and yet remain addicted. In this sort of situation, involuntary commitment would necessarily have to involve serious attempts at community building to show them they can have things in their life again - if they stay clean.
Respectfully, your glibness and the borderline denial of reality makes it difficult to have this conversation because I don't feel as if I'm typing with someone who legitimately wants to improve the situation. Most seriously, your suggestion that I get myself addicted to drugs (which demonstrates that you've completely neglected to consider that you could be typing with a person who has had substance abuse issues - it hasn't even occured to you) indicates that you're not taking this seriously, but rather attempting to appear virtuous by banging on about freedom and being totally unafraid while preventing any possible consideration of solutions to a major humanitarian crisis.
How disappointing that you are resorting to the ad hominem attacks; we could have learned from each other; we could have connected.
That is the wages of fear. It results in attacks on the things that alarm us, including other commenters, unhoused people, and addicted people. Unhoused and addicted people are nothing to fear.
And on top of that, fear doesn't justify hurting other people. It's a very different thing being afraid and vulnerable, and being afraid and in a position of power. You have a position of power relative to unhoused and addicted people. Power corrupts; powerful people don't have a check on them; they think their hunger or fear or lust or whatever are important, are the natural priority. Your fear isn't a priority over the freedom, rights, and welfare of addicted people.
The only thing to fear is fear itself, according to someone who was smart, courageous, and who had led people through danger we can't imagine, and held positions of great power.
Your theory of how addiction and homelessness work conflicts with what I've heard from many experts I've spoken to and that I've read. That doesn't make you wrong, but look up the research.
> Your theory of how addiction and homelessness work conflicts with what I've heard from many experts I've spoken to and that I've read. That doesn't make you wrong, but look up the research.
It is telling that your opinion isn't based on talking with addicted and/or homeless people.
> How disappointing that you are resorting to the ad hominem attacks; we could have learned from each other; we could have connected.
I think you should still consider learning from what Boogie_Man said.
> The transition to using the word "homeless" has resulted in transforming something we can't easily measure -- "drug addicted or mentally ill people being a public menace" -- into something that we can measure -- "people without a good living arrangement".
> the former is the actual problem that we care about
The word homeless is pretty old, not something people have 'tranistioned' to any time recently.
I haven't seen anyone trying use 'homeless' as a euphemism; they are actually concerned about people without housing. That is the big problem.
You apparently believe "drug addicted or mentally ill people being a public menace" is a comparable problem, but your comment is the first time I've heard that. Nobody is conspiring to hide it; they just don't think about it like you do.
I spend a lot of time in cities and know others who do too. None feel menaced by people who are unhoused - why would that be menacing? - or high. High people generally don't know you are there, and are easily avoided. I've had zero problems; I don't know of anyone else who has.
Also, the subtext is about eroding human rights. You have no more rights than a homeless or high person. Feeling 'menaced' is not sufficient to compromise someone's freedom. That's what freedom means - of course people can always do things that others don't mind; freedom means doing things other people don't like. I find your comment menacing; who decides who gets locked up?