The Supreme Court ruled Friday in favor of an Oregon city that ticketed homeless people for sleeping outside, rejecting arguments that such “anti-camping” ordinances violate the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment.
This is a great strategy. Let’s see how much blood they can squeeze from those stones. Can’t afford a place to live? Lets charge rent for that park bench!
But of course the real idea here is to give municipalities the ability to harass people. It’s certainly not about the fines. The less annoying homeless will be driven off by the harassment and then all that will be left is the annoying ones which might be a more manageable number to throw in jail.
Homeless people have money, just not enough for housing. People with houses also use drugs. All people get money from different places. Not sure what your point is but your generalizations aren’t useful.
You’re making a lot of spurious assumptions and generalizations. The overwhelming majority of the time the homeless are just minding their own business. Some are certainly more annoying than others, some smell worse than others but that doesn’t justify criminalizing all of them nor does it justify abdicating moral responsibility as a society to care for those that often for no fault of their own fail to integrate into the structures that have evolved. There are other solutions, none of them are going to be perfect. Maybe criminalizing sleeping on the street is fine as long as the city provides places to sleep that are reasonable.
Now the root of your objections are shown to be just callous indifference to human suffering. That’s fine, just come out and say you don’t care and can’t be bothered. You want to live in a world of machiavellian justice. Be careful what you ask for as maybe that knife will fall on your head or someone you care about if you are capable of that.
It’s hard to take you seriously when you try to conflate Marxism and religion, the guy that viewed religion as “the soul of soulless conditions” or the “opium of the people”. Or when you intimated that society was structurally fair. In what way is it fair that one person can be born to wealth and privlegde and another to poverty and lack of options? But even beyond the rules of society, there is no fundamental fairness in the universe. Some people get lucky others don’t. Some people are healthy others aren’t. It’s impossible to have any reasonable discussion when the starting point is so fundamentally divorced from reality.
We can certainly agree on the desire to improve society. We likely agree that there is a better solution to the homelessness situation than continuing as it is. Starting with a law that criminalizes homelessness is not the right place to start. We should be moving in the direction of cities or counties having to provide a minimum level of services for food, shelter and drug and mental health treatment. When that minimum level of support is available then it may be reasonable to consider laws that criminalize homelessness. You accuse the liberals of virtual signaling but any laws that criminalize homelessness are nothing but. They’ll do nothing to solve the actual problem and are really only intended to assuage people’s conscience and fool them into thinking that they’ve fixed a problem that they can simply no longer see. You profess to want an efficient productive society but then elect for options that are pure fantasy. If the end goal is to jail homeless people I can’t see how that is going to be cheaper than housing them. It makes a lot more sense to build a society that works for all the people, picks them up when they fall and helps them return as productive members. Will there be some people that just can’t be productive members of society? Yes, and we’ll certainly agree that laws and jails are appropriate. In fact we have those laws. It’s already illegal to steal and assault whether your homeless or not. Who is advocating removing those laws? The Marxists? The Christians? With all your arguing you certainly seem to want to live in a rational world but somehow continue to support irrational solutions.
This is a great strategy. Let’s see how much blood they can squeeze from those stones. Can’t afford a place to live? Lets charge rent for that park bench!
But of course the real idea here is to give municipalities the ability to harass people. It’s certainly not about the fines. The less annoying homeless will be driven off by the harassment and then all that will be left is the annoying ones which might be a more manageable number to throw in jail.
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Homeless people have money, just not enough for housing. People with houses also use drugs. All people get money from different places. Not sure what your point is but your generalizations aren’t useful.
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You’re making a lot of spurious assumptions and generalizations. The overwhelming majority of the time the homeless are just minding their own business. Some are certainly more annoying than others, some smell worse than others but that doesn’t justify criminalizing all of them nor does it justify abdicating moral responsibility as a society to care for those that often for no fault of their own fail to integrate into the structures that have evolved. There are other solutions, none of them are going to be perfect. Maybe criminalizing sleeping on the street is fine as long as the city provides places to sleep that are reasonable.
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Now the root of your objections are shown to be just callous indifference to human suffering. That’s fine, just come out and say you don’t care and can’t be bothered. You want to live in a world of machiavellian justice. Be careful what you ask for as maybe that knife will fall on your head or someone you care about if you are capable of that.
It’s hard to take you seriously when you try to conflate Marxism and religion, the guy that viewed religion as “the soul of soulless conditions” or the “opium of the people”. Or when you intimated that society was structurally fair. In what way is it fair that one person can be born to wealth and privlegde and another to poverty and lack of options? But even beyond the rules of society, there is no fundamental fairness in the universe. Some people get lucky others don’t. Some people are healthy others aren’t. It’s impossible to have any reasonable discussion when the starting point is so fundamentally divorced from reality.
Removed by mod
We can certainly agree on the desire to improve society. We likely agree that there is a better solution to the homelessness situation than continuing as it is. Starting with a law that criminalizes homelessness is not the right place to start. We should be moving in the direction of cities or counties having to provide a minimum level of services for food, shelter and drug and mental health treatment. When that minimum level of support is available then it may be reasonable to consider laws that criminalize homelessness. You accuse the liberals of virtual signaling but any laws that criminalize homelessness are nothing but. They’ll do nothing to solve the actual problem and are really only intended to assuage people’s conscience and fool them into thinking that they’ve fixed a problem that they can simply no longer see. You profess to want an efficient productive society but then elect for options that are pure fantasy. If the end goal is to jail homeless people I can’t see how that is going to be cheaper than housing them. It makes a lot more sense to build a society that works for all the people, picks them up when they fall and helps them return as productive members. Will there be some people that just can’t be productive members of society? Yes, and we’ll certainly agree that laws and jails are appropriate. In fact we have those laws. It’s already illegal to steal and assault whether your homeless or not. Who is advocating removing those laws? The Marxists? The Christians? With all your arguing you certainly seem to want to live in a rational world but somehow continue to support irrational solutions.