They keep dealing with the symptoms of the problem but never the root of the problem.
Namely the weak, cowardly, ignorant, parasitic minority of wealthy idiots that want to horde the wealth of the world for their own short insignificant lives.
The 90s in the USA were a simpler time, but some folks got it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs-O4k9jZzE
You should really read the politics section for John Popper’s Wikipedia page.
Oh… Oh no… Really?
Edit: I could have lived with it except for endorsing gwb. You don’t get to call yourself a libertarian and sign off on gitmo and patriot act. Those are like the difference between being problematic but principled ass and just an ass.
It doesn’t really say too much damming. You can be socially libertarian and economically left and still be a good person.
You have to remember that the democrats shot themselves in the foot with the entire rock industry when Tipper Gore waged christian housewife war on them.
Closing Down The Park
Blues Traveler
12:55
Bulldoze the community garden
And replace it with glass
Well duh. If people start gathering in public and talking to each other with a modicum of comfort, they might get thoughts in their heads
And thoughts lead to actions!
And you know what’s an action? Addressing the wage gap!
We must stop that!
Which is why we need a world where people are constantly being forced to move and never allowed to ever stop moving, for fear that they may some day stop and think.
To add another layer: allowing homelessness is one of the most widespread and visible acts of violence perpetrated by the state, supported by the market, and accepted-- or at least tolerated-- by most of the public. I wonder if institutions don’t address it because scares people into obedience.
Reflect on the focus of violence in stories about slavery. Hypothetically, without violence, slavery is still awful: robbing a human of their autonomy, spending their lives bettering the lot of those in power rather than their own. But we focus on the violence, not only because of the obvious, visible horror, but because you can’t rob someone of their autonomy without violence.
When it comes to homelessness, the violent act is not only inaction: failing to address risks and pitfalls, or add safety nets (focusing on growth, instead), but also what your original post is about: removing public facilities, forcing people to play the line-go-up game in order to have nice things, lest they have a string of bad luck and end up on the street, exposed to the elements.
The state and market didn’t cause the blizzard that may kill unhoused people, but they did nothing to try to get them out of its path. Isn’t that the purpose of these institutions? Yet homelessness is everywhere and it makes being unemployed all the more terrifying-- to be that much closer to the streets. “Better to take what you can get,” participate in an unjust market or it could be you.
It’s kind of crazy how swiftly Occupy was wiped off the zeitgeist. A key cultural event of the 2010s gone as if it never happened.
Far more often than not, even bloody revolutions do not achieve their goals, or lead to merely cosmetic and/ or short-lived changes. E.g. Kent Gang Deng investigated 269 major peasant rebellions over 2106 years of Chinese history. Guess how many of these actually rewrote history in any way, shape or form.
Recently, I’ve been reading several interesting pieces on the “Occupy” movement, the related G20 and other protests in the Western world, dating back as far as the 1960s. The bottom line being: asking nicely for some minimum demands that even conservative politicians can get behind, like capping CEOs’ wages, will not get the job done. In fact, some of the powers that be can use it for their internal power struggles and to show it off as a sort of legitimization folklore. “See how democratic we are? We even have protesters in little tents! Don’t worry, they aren’t hurting anyone.”
All hope is not lost, though, if new protest modalities can be found.At this point the only valid forms of protesting are basically doxxing the billionaires and gathering outside their homes. Only problem is you’ll be at the gate of an estate thats empty half the time.
That’s why Putin made public gatherings illegal
I’m currently on vacation in California at an outdoor mall. I’m squat/sitting on a tiny piece of concrete that’s like 8” off the ground and am so mad that I can relate to this picture. Why the fuck can’t we just have benches!?!
Because poor people might use them, so fuck you pleb.
That would provide homeless people with 1 possible point of comfort, can’t have that.
Is that why we hate Soviet housing so much, because it gave the homeless dignity, shelter and comfort?
I think that’s what’s so pervasive about capitalism: The superiority it gives people. It has a perpetual struggling class that the comfortable can always point to and say, “At least I’m better than that.”
Well that and a million other reasons.
Homeless people are just losers who lost the game of Capitalism, their punishment is just and necessary for them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and start a Fortune 500 company
/sPretty much it, yeah. Capitalism is fundamentally evil and they’ve spent so many decades now projecting all of its flaws on to any society that tries to work to a brighter future.
At this point capitalism is just feudalism with a stock market.
Always has been.
I thought we hated it because they were all ugly monotonous blocks with often pretty bad apartment layouts, often used to import a bunch of Russian workers to an existing city to slowly replace the local culture. But maybe that’s just me.
That’s not to say I don’t like the idea of everyone having housing, or even the idea of big apartment buildings. Just make them not look like prisons ffs. And put elevators in 5 story and lower buildings too. The soviet 5 story apartment buildings at least in my country never had elevators, so they were like a big F U for disabled people, as you couldn’t even get to the first floor without taking the stairs. Disabled people could only live in the bigger ones.
I thought we hated it because they were all ugly monotonous blocks with often pretty bad apartment layouts, often used to import a bunch of Russian workers to an existing city to slowly replace the local culture. But maybe that’s just me.
Certainly not anywhere else, with replacing local workers and their culture with bland carbon copy lookalikes…
At least it was a effient use of space, building up than sideways.
How long did it take for a mall cop to tell you to stand up?
Well, it’s mall. Its goal is maximizing profits.
I’m visiting Naples at the moment with my Italian boyfriend, and I remarked to him that Naples has a lot of places that people can just hang out without spending money, something that the UK has lost. Part of this is due to the climate, but also corporatism hasn’t hit Italy as hard as other western countries. It really is a shame.
I wish society would put more into making the world work better for rule followers instead of focusing so much on punishing rule breaking (which often punishes everyone).
I don’t think being poor should be cause of being seen to be a rule breaker.
You target poor/homeless with laws aimed to “prevent loitering”. The “rule breakers” are the people who simply are affected the most by the laws. Being poor shouldn’t cause you to break rules but think about it, overdraft fees, late fees, etc all targeted at the poor. Like someone else said earlier the punishment is aimed at a symptom not the problem. It’s why we’re all here lamenting about how ridiculous it is.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” ― Anatole France
The word humanity or even the derivative humane, are complete falsehoods. This is humanity, cruel and selfish,dumb and easily motivated towards violence and hatred. We suck as a species.
Agreed, imagine if instead of tearing down benches so people couldn’t sleep in the park, they instead added bike lifts to help people get up a steep hill in the park or maybe a sprinkler system for the kids to play in… actually adding value and stuff
Removing public amenities is just the first step. The next step is to erect fencing around public parks and other spots where people like to enjoy themselves. Source: living in Dublin “the city centre is for working and shopping only” Ireland.
Fuckin trashbag the more you read about him.
Motherfucker purposely built the bridges for local streets going over the highways much lower than avg to prevent buses (and thus poorer folks) from being able to get to Jones beach: https://www.nycurbanism.com/blog/2020/7/28/robert-moses-low-parkway-bridges
Freedom before capitalism happens.
Free dumb after capitalism happens.
You know how in the south, they closed public pools instead of desegregating because they would rather have no pools than let black people swim?
That impulse didn’t go away. And it wasn’t limited to the south and their hatred of black people.
Reminds me of that story about a sports field that got weird „opening hours“ because some old fuck nearby didn’t like the children being noisy near his house. After some months it got turned into a parking lot because „no one was using the sports field“.
Bro, I hate children too. But you have to draw the line at lung cancer.
That’s kind of my head canon of why the park near my parent’s house no longer has benches. It’s three blocks away from a school, and kids/teens would hang out there.
Guessing some Karen whose house faced the park flipped their shit.
So he hates the noise the youth made, but is ok with people revving to the extremes.
Hopefully it’s because they’re putting in new benches made from the bones of real estate tycoons ❤️💖
They got rid of them at the bus stop near me. There used to be an indoor space for people to wait in, but they closed that down. And this is in Alaska. Having to wait a half an hour for the bus to arrive after taken a shower is a shitty way to wake up.
The boring-dystopia solution: a company that rents out chairs, and records everything that happens around those chairs for training AIs.
Their excuse, ‘for the safety of children’.
Shhh. Don’t give them ideas
I’ve bought a camping stool recently. It folds up and small enough to put in a backpack.
I have twisted discs and find it difficult sometimes to find a seat. Sucks. But man, I can’t recommend camping stools enough! I love this thing.
Brand and model recommendation(s), please
I just saw one in a local’ish shop of mine, for £4. It doesn’t have any branding on it, sorry!
My aunt got me a “Helinox sunset chair” recently and I love it. Pricey, wouldn’t have bought it for myself, but it weighs nothing and it’s comfy.
I’d love a hard case backpack that has a seat and chair legs that can fold down.
It’s as if they don’t want you to be able to get out of your house and socialise except for some paid time at private properties (cafes, restaurants etc). And no this isn’t just a US problem, it’s a Europe problem as well.
There’s a few zombies in there. It’s like playing wheres waldo
Just people living their best radioactive lives and you’re mocking them?
“They Live” by John Carpenter for those thinking this is some AI generated image
to be fair, it’s the NIMBY people complaining to the state about those people, and then the ordinances being passed
Then there’s the whole corporate aspect. How can you expect corporate businesses to drive people to be in their stores if you let them loiter around outside on government provided benches? If the only place to sit is in a Starbucks and they require you to buy something to stay in the store, well…
incidentally, the people who frequent starbucks overlap with the NIMBY people in the venn diagram of people responsible for hostile architecture
Nothing is going to change until “landlord culture” is suppressed, and we re-adopt a “homeowner” mentality.
We need to massively raise taxes on residential property, but institute an “owner occupant” credit so actual homeowners don’t pay the increase. Only landlords - people who own the property but don’t live in it - will pay the increase. Residential property taxes should be the highest of all property taxes without the credit, but effective tax rate should be the lowest due to that credit. Landlords should be fighting for any way they can to convert “tenants” into “buyers”, even if that means issuing private mortgages to their (former) tenants to make it happen.
What about people with short-term housing needs? People who prefer to rent rather than owning? Not a problem: “Land Contracts” work very much like rentals, but without the annual increase that always outpaces inflation. The monthly payment is fixed for the life of the agreement.
The main difference is that after three years, a land contract automatically converts to a purchase agreement, and the previous 3 years of “rent” are retroactively converted to payments on a private mortgage. You’re 3 years into a 30-year mortgage.
