Hundreds of unsheltered people living in tent encampments in the blocks surrounding the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco have been forced to leave by city outreach workers and police as part of an attempted “clean up the house” ahead of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s annual free trade conference.
The action, which housing advocates allege violated a court injunction, was celebrated by right-wing figures and the tech crowd, who have long been convinced that the city is in terminal decline because of an increase in encampments in the downtown area.
The X account End Wokness wrote that the displacement was proof the “government can easily fix our cities overnight. It just doesn’t want to” (the post received 77,000 likes). “Queer Eye but it’s just Xi visiting troubled US cities then they get a makeover,” joked Packy McCormick, the founder of Not Boring Capital and advisor to Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto VC team. The New York Post celebrated the action, saying that residents had “miraculously disappeared.”
We shouldn’t decide the morality of things based on it being legal or illegal. The law is at best an after thought around morality.
I’ll take “it was legal at the time” for a thousand, Alex.
What are you referring to? Are you aware the sweep that was performed was illegal?
You don’t even need to read the article; it’s in the headline.
How does this statement about “legal at the time” correspond to anything in this story?
First of all, I was playing off of the parent comment that legality is wholly divorced from morality, a notion that I agree with, rather than commenting on the article.
Second, even though it’s illegal, well, read the article. It seems to me that even the social aid organizations involved were giving a bunch of coy, shitty non-answers to the journalists involved in this story. This is kind of one of those unsettling moments where the institution has lost faith in itself, like when the SCOTUS found the removal of native Americans to be illegal and President Jackson said “Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let him come enforce it” and caused the trail of tears anyway. I doubt we’re going to see any accountability come of this. So, even though it’s illegal on paper, it’s functionally legal; the state is just going to five finger salute the law on this one.
The law is a essentially the enforceable moral code of the state that enforces it. Most criminal laws were created to penalise acts that are considered morally reprehensible. I wouldn’t say the law is an afterthought around morality but a reflection of the morality of the state. The laws are largely written by the capitalistic class and are a reflection of what they consider right and wrong.
Yeah but the problem with this sentiment is that it eschews responsibility for the state its self, a responsibility for which a people always ultimately are. A state legislature makes laws. City councils create rules. Dog catchers have policies. At any point you can work to take responsibility for those positions. Its not an abstract theoretical thing. These are real material positions.
We are responsible for the society we live in.
Yes. Laws can be changed but in reality but don’t really have that much say nor do they even pay that much attention. Let me ask how much people really vote with the homeless on their mind? How much people voted for Biden because they were genuinely excited for him or because he just was the only way to prevent Trump from coming back? The laws of the state are a reflection of what it deems to be moral and just there’s no way around that.
I totally agree. Point is that a people are ultimately responsible for the state.
Yes. So what is the disagreement about then? Laws are essentially the enforceable moral code of the state. I do believe that people are ultimately responsible for their own laws but because of propaganda and misinformation by the capitalistic class they are rarely fully informed of the laws they vote for. The capitalistic class ensures to public are constantly misled so their candidates and lawmakers get picked. This ultimately sees the ruling 1% in control of the law and deciding what the state or country considers right or wrong. How much people do you think Biden really represents?
of the State
Right there is where the disagreement is. My argument is that laws are ultimately a moral code of a people, because a people are ultimately responsible for their state. It’s a false dichotomy that misrepresents where states and laws ultimately come from. It ‘others’ the state as some kind of inaccessible agent that our actions don’t contribute to. It removes the moral responsibility of state actions from a people, which is not ok. My argument is that individuals are and need to take responsibility for the state and the codification of its moral because they are us. The state is not a separate entity from its people, when it is a state of the people. This thinking of the state as separate from the people is deeply problematic.
So, what’s that say about the law since slavery was completely legal at one point in time?
That once upon a time people considered slavery to be just or morally ok.
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A philosophical argument that goes all the way back to Socrates.
So-craytes!
Truth.
Why do the right cheer as if it’s a permanent solution? They’ll be back as soon as the important people are gone. To say the problem is “fixed overnight” is like saying “Look Mom, I cleaned my room!” after you just finished sweeping everything underneath the bed and hiding it with the covers.
I do hope they fix the problem, but I don’t know what else they can try other than just building houses and giving them the keys. That would probably be less expensive in the long run, but taxpayers evidently feel better paying for homelessness programs in perpetuity rather than giving people free shit one time.
Conservatives don’t have solutions, just stop gaps. They just stall and pass the ball, and lower taxes, its their only trick.
Conservatives didn’t do this. The article mentions cheering but not who actually did this. All it says is the operation was a “black box”.
This isn’t journalism. They made zero effort to get to the facts. Facts such as:
- Who ordered this sweep to occur?
- Who will be held responsible for the illegal actions performed?
Why is this story entirely focused on the New York Post being in favor of it? There is zero effort to hold the people responsible for this to account.
Moderate democrats, liberals, are still conservatives, notice I didnt say Republicans
republicans love the idea of a brutal authoritarian police state society
Were they moved into sanctuary districts? https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District
DS9 just seems to get more and more relevant with age. Sad we haven’t done any better than projected by the show.
No, it seems like they just had their tents and possessions taken and then we’re forced to find a different street to sleep on. The sad thing is something like Trek’s Sanctuary Districts would take a government that is way less cruel to the homeless than we currently are.
10 months to go until the Bell Riots.
!remindme 10 months 🫠
Either they were meticulously kept out of frame, or Star Trek didn’t have nearly as much heroin addicts
Wow that sure is a shitty thing to do to humans…
Right-wing: “yay” on all shitty things.
Right wingers might have cheered this on (I believe one individual and one news publication were mentioned cheering in the article), but who actually ordered and carried out the sweep?
All the article says is that the operation is a “black box”.
Who ordered this?
But I’m sure YOUR door is open to house the homeless right?
False equivalence
It’s not but ok.
It is, because I don’t have the resources to house strangers in my home to any meaningful extent. I can barely keep myself fed.
A city’s municipality has the resources of a literal City, and is therefore in a position where they can actually do something about homelessness.
yes, in fact it is. But it’s part of my religion.
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Housing needs to be a right. Every citizen should be able to go to a housing authority and have a roof over their head if they are unable to afford it.
Illegal eviction and illegal failure to preserve tenant possessions. California let them move in and remain, now they must follow their own rules protecting squatters.
They will absolutely be sued for this.
It’s getting there but we’re still pretty far from critical mass. Need 10x more people to truly show the world how far US has slipped in favor of the 0.01%.
Of course conservatives would cheer the continued marginalization and traumatization of society’s most vulnerable. They touch themselves to the cruelty.
An extrapolation to say the government could clean up the city over night of homelessness because they were able to relocate a portion a few neighborhoods for an event.
I just do not understand why we are not addressing homelessness in more productive ways. We know it can be better managed as some countries have figured it out. Really crazy that we are not all on board with just doing the right thing and having a win win for all. We choose to suffer and we choose to sweep our suffering under the rug when guests come over.
Just World is heavily baked into the American ethos, I think. That, along with a healthy dose of contagious protestant every-moment-must-be-productive.
Homelessness is the-on earth hell they need and invoke.
I just wish Jesus had an opinion on the poor that he’d shared with his followers.
Because solving homelessness is counter-productive to running a capitalist society.
That is one of the common excuses but countless studies show it is cheaper to just deal with it.
Yeah, the best solution I’ve seen is lots of small, private housing. Basically, give people a bed and a locking door, and they have a way better chance of turning their life around. Let people stay as long as they’re not violating the rules, and don’t violate their privacy.
… that and providing mental health care.
We have a large homeless community in our downtown area and it is rampant with people that have mental health issues and no support system from family or friends. Nowhere to go but out on the streets if you can’t manage your finances when you live in a capitalist society.
But all of that costs money, and… ya know… capitalism means that money is the most important resource…
There are no easy solutions to mental health issues, but helping the quiet majority who just need a locking door and a bed in order to reset their life is inexpensive, relatively easy, and effective. It can even potentially prevent many mental health issues from developing or worsening in the first place, especially if counseling services are provided to residents of these communities.
This is a large part of it. Not all homeless have mental health issues, but the most conspicuous ones often do.
And months of homelessness likely means some support is warranted, in a compassionate society. Better to prevent homelessness, but that doesn’t change on a dime.
also no one on the left went live on any national tv broadcast to denounce it either
At this point the homeless ought to try staging a camp in at the city hall. Get the headlines all over them being dragged out of there.
I remember homeless people doing exactly that in Santa Cruz back in the eighties to great success.
However, public sentiment over the past thirty years really seems to have swung aggressively toward the fuck you I got mine so die end of the pendulum.
Food Not Bombs did it there ten years ago too. They camped outside of city hall every week, getting arrested over and over. They were finally given a vacant lot next to the freeway to freely camp in after that. It started after SC passed anti-camping laws, making it illegal for any unhoused person to fall asleep.
I seriously doubt that’s the case compared to the 80s, the 80s is how we got Reagan, and whatever qualms you have with Mr. Tangelini, Reagan was demonstrably worse.
No fucking shot was Reagan worse than Trump. Reagan was a piece of shit, but he didn’t attempt a coup and (insert list of the thousands of insanely stupid and illegal things Donald Trump has done since being elected).
He didn’t attempt a coup here.
Latin America has a very different opinion of that point though.
Also, Trump let COVID happen because of sheer idiocy, Reagan let AIDs happen as an act of genocide against queer folks.
Are you accounting for candidate Reagan negotiating with Iranians in Tehran in 1980 holding American hostages in order to weaken Carter’s re-election efforts as part of the October surprise, by prolonging the situation until after Reagan won and was sworn in? (Obviously this has some undercurrent that it may have been even more of a VP GHW Bush fingerprint in terms of execution of the plan as he was a recent DCI of the CIA).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_October_Surprise_theory
https://theintercept.com/2023/03/24/october-surprise-ben-barnes/
https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/george-h-w-bush-the-11th-director-of-central-intelligence/
Yes. I am aware of, and accounting for, that. Pales in comparison to Trump.
I’d make the argument that Trump was never competent enough to pull off anything so sinister and evil. Trump is more of a calamitous evil buffon spewing bullshit than some 5d chess player of evil. Some people around him may be crafty evil sons of bitches, but Trump is a petulant man child dipshit that actually thinks money makes him powerful, all while having to play pretend that he’s one of the ‘ultra rich’ and not just a scumbag criminal scammer moving debt around trying to hide his business incompetence.
I don’t usually lean in so hard on this stuff, but it’s Sunday morn and I’ve had 3 cups of coffee. /fidgets
While I agree we should be solving the root problem of homelessness equitably, the headline is misleading as I know many people on the left were also happy to have clean streets for a while.
Live in Bay Area, vote progressive/left, so ready for encampment to be less of a thing - in favor of some better solution like what they have near Oracle Stadium.
If the streets were cleaned by putting people in housing, it would be worth celebrating, but there’s nothing left wing about people being displaced from where you personally live. Even if those “people on the left” have certain left wing values, it’s right wing selfishness that made them happy. Those homeless people just got pushed elsewhere and those areas have to deal with a rise in the unhoused. The streets can only be, “cleaned,” by housing people, otherwise you’re just sweeping the, “filthy poors,” into another person’s area.
From an amoral economic perspective, we should either get people shelter and make them productive members of society, or just hasten their inevitable deaths on the streets by executing them ourselves. Give them a helping hand, or accept that we don’t think that they deserve life if they can’t play the capitalist game. The current approach costs us more money, prolongs their suffering, but gives us plausible deniability through ignorance. Fuck ignorance. Just embrace that the system is evil.
Lol what? I don’t think they would appreciate being executed, and would gladly take the status quo over being “out of their misery” 🙄
It’s a “Modest Proposal.” A satirical joke. It points out the absurdity of the current system and attitudes about unhoused people being filth that need to be cleaned away. You usually clean dirty things by washing away the grime and taking the waste to the dump. It’s no way to describe actual people.
We put these people’s lives at risk by not giving them basic necessities. We give them serious, life-changing trauma while insisting they pull themselves up with little help. We treat them like they don’t deserve to live, as dangerous pests that we can uproot at will. If we’re not going to do enough to help them out of their situation and we don’t want them around, what else can we do but kill them? We could put them in some town in the middle of nowhere, but that’s just housing them with extra steps. We give them housing and social services, or don’t complain when they’re on the streets.
Hmm I wouldn’t say left vs right wing is equivalent to some videogame good vs evil slider. Everyone can be selfish, it’s not a ‘right wing’ trait. To enjoy a respite from feeling unsafe, having human defecation on the street, and being yelled at for no particular reason doesn’t make you a sinner.
It is true that left vs right isn’t the same as good or evil. However, the left wing tends to look for non market based solutions, using the government to address issues rather than relying on private interests. Left wingers can be selfish, but right wingers have selfishness explicitly embedded into their ideology of free markets and social Darwinism. Besides, prudent behavior isn’t the same as being selfish. Enjoying negative reinforcement isn’t bad so long as you recognize who applies it and what they want to accomplish.
And there is no mention in the article about who ordered and carried out the sweep.
Who cheers about something is secondary to who actually does it. This article doesn’t address who actually did it.
To solve homelessness would mean to completely upend the entire world’s economy and change to a global socialist structure. Homelessness is baked into our economic system. Capitalism is a zero sum game and if we’re going to celebrate having billionaires, we have to celebrate having people live and die on the street.
Capitalism is wired in such a way that productivity literally produces poverty.
Lowest form of humanity, has to be near when you criminalize homelessness.
No I heard yous solved the problem by calling them uNhOuSEd
That kind of language shift is stupid. Changing words because you don’t like the connotation is just denying reality. The connotation comes from what the word means. It’s not the word itself. Homeless has horrible connotation because of what it is describing. If you change the word, eventually it will gain the same baggage.
Homeless is the perfect example of this because that was the new soft word. It replaced vagrant or bum.
Dear conservatives,
Why are you purposefully awful?
With love, Everyone
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I think they’re just awful people and use things like religion to somehow justify their awfulness. It’s easier to go “God says gay people are bad” than “gay people make me feel icky and I don’t want to deal with why I feel icky so fuck them!”
Especially since the original passage was actually about pedastry not homosexuality.
Blame King James for a terrible translation
easy reply:
Can you prove god existed?
Why is it when progressives carry out an illegal sweep of homeless people, and conservatives cheer it, we get a story about conservatives?
Because Democrats are aware of the problems in their party and many disagree with how things are done and try to vote to stop it. While Republicans cheer at homeless people getting kicked while they’re down.
Why is it … conservatives cheer it … ?
