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  1. #21
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by tehdang View Post
    I would lay the fault more with permissive attitudes towards drug use in law and enforcement than the lingering effects of defund the police. The police already made homeless issues and drug issues low-priority, and who can really blame them much when dismantled encampments and drug use/sales sites reappear in weeks if not days.
    Hot tip; if police action utterly fails to solve the problem and the homeless/drug dealers are back in days or weeks, then the issue is that the police action is utterly ineffective to such a degree that it becomes clear that either those police are completely incompetent nincompoops who shouldn't be serving as unarmed security for the Teen Choice Awards let alone as a police officer, or their intent was never to put an end to this in the first place, likely because constantly fighting a neverending "disease" is way more remunerative in terms of budget and power than actually curing the problem the first time out. Same reason pharmacorps prefer to sell treatment for symptoms rather than cures, wherever possible.

    I don't particularly care if you prefer that they're incompetent or malicious, but that's basically your two choices. Especially with regards to the homeless, because breaking up the camps doesn't magically make them not-homeless. It's just a way for cops to get off on hurting innocents with the least capacity to fight back.

    The ill effects on public transit are just the side effect of an actually popularly-held position. "Drug users and homeless people hang around the edges of the plaza and have breached locked areas in the station, creating a danger for riders and staff" meets "Well, where do you want them to go?"--compassionate instincts. And the people most empathetic towards train drug use and public area homeless encampments simultaneously stop low-income housing and fail to notice how anti-homelessness spending is spent.
    There you go, blaming compassion and empathy as if those are ills to be ignored rather than the baseline of human ethical conduct.

    Also, citation frickin' needed that it's people pushing to support social action to help the homeless get off the streets that oppose things like low-income housing rather than NIMBY middle-class and higher conservatives who think they're better than others.


  2. #22
    If the intent of this post was to gather all the right wing nut-jobs in one place, so they could share lies and ignore reality, then congratulations. Job done.

    If you wanted an actual discussion on something, you may well be out of luck.
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  3. #23
    Quote Originally Posted by Draco-Onis View Post
    But the reason you are seeing more junkies is directly result of more people being on drugs. The reason you are seeing less ridership in all cities not just LA is because the pandemic has changed cities forever since work from home is now a permanent factor so a lot of businesses no longer reside in the city or only operate there half the time. The cities are no longer what they are so a lot of empty real estate is going around attracting the homeless.
    I'm not completely convinced about that.

    I have looked at ridership statistics for major known public transportation systems in places like Europe and NYC.

    https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/riders-return/
    https://www.cityam.com/london-underg...-pre-pandemic/


    Systems that service a city as a whole, rather than commuting people back and forth between their office and homes have all mostly recovered to pre-pandemic levels with healthiest recovery being actually on weekends. NYC for example still hasn't fully recovered but the lines service the "outer" boroughs rather than the business district of Manhattan have seen stronger recovery numbers than the lines servicing Manhattan.

    Essentially, if you have a comprehensive city wide system that people use daily because it's convenient and lets you go out, go shopping, just get around town, ridership recovered. If you have a system designed to shuttle people between work and home (like LA), then the ridership numbers stayed lower as working from home remains a thing.
    Last edited by Elder Millennial; 2023-03-22 at 07:01 PM.

  4. #24
    Merely a Setback Kaleredar's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by NED funded View Post
    Nah. Its not a matter of drug use but where ppl do drugs. Seeing junkies and smelling fentanyl is kinda bad o_0

    Throw them in jail or the street rather than let them shoot up in public transportation. The bigger issue of drug addiction is kinda separate
    Hi, you seemed to have missed my previous comment, so I’ll politely reiterate it because it basically strikes directly at the heart of the entire premise you shoddily constructed this thread on:

    But the police have a larger budget now than they did before, talks of “defunding” resulted in no actual changes for them.

    Why aren’t the police, who have more funding than ever, able to stop these crimes now? Why did an increase in police budget not lead to a lowering in crime?
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  5. #25
    Quote Originally Posted by Elder Millennial View Post
    The argument from Ned, Dang and the other nitwit is literally "If you don't give ALL THE MONEY to the police and send everyone to jail for having mental health and substance abuse problems then people will quit their jobs, leave their families and become homeless junkies. Because being a homeless junkie is so much fun."

    It is that fucking retarded.

    It's the same basic argument as "If a Big Sky Daddy doesn't tell people not to rape and murder, everyone would just start raping and murdering".
    Ooh what great hyperbole you have! Readers should note that I think attitudes are too permissive and disagree with the problem lying mostly with defunding the police, but look how quickly this gets made into "send everyone to jail."

    I'm a southern California resident so I'm pretty familiar with the tactics of the allies for this problem. Speaking up in defense of safe metro stops and rail transport for the working poor will get you accused of wanting to give all the money to the police and send everyone to jail.

    Back in the glory days of OFF TOPIC, supertony, vixyn, and hubcap would start a "Portland/Seatle-are-crumbling" threads twice a month.
    Thankfully for some here, the "crumbling" is somewhat confined to sidewalk commuting and public transit. If you own your own car and commute daily in and out of high-crime, drug, and homelessness-riddled areas, then you can cheerfully declare that the problems are moderate or light, and the people saying not enough is planned or done are bad people. Liberals that write sunnily about rebuilding coastal cities aren't riding the metro next to an overdosing fellow passenger. They're musing about maybe a ballot measure next year for $1.2 billion that will claim to address 10,000 needy, and succeed with several hundred or a thousand and change.
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  6. #26
    The Undying Cthulhu 2020's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by NED funded View Post
    Its wild to see people pretend that the movement didnt change how cities treat crime particularly drug use and theft

    I dont think its a coincidence that the junkies started doing drugs more shamelessly after the whole movement picked up steam, people are realizing they can do whatever they want and not suffer any serious consequence. Voters get the policies they want
    Hilariously uninformed. Saw a twitter thread just last night of someone posting pictures of a bunch of syringes on a New York sidewalk, feigning shock and horror that NYC would let drug use get out of hand. Only for the entire thread to get fact checked that they were extra large syringes without needles, the kind used to feed soft food to baby animals or elderly people.

    But I guess you guys would be the type to fall for click bait outrage over reality, so it's not really any surprise you think there's some kind of rampant rise in drug abuse in LA specifically. In fact, we know that fentanyl and opiate abuse is by far and away the most out of control in the most conservative parts of the nation, largely by conservatives.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by tehdang View Post
    I would lay the fault more with permissive attitudes towards drug use in law and enforcement than the lingering effects of defund the police. The police already made homeless issues and drug issues low-priority, and who can really blame them much when dismantled encampments and drug use/sales sites reappear in weeks if not days. The ill effects on public transit are just the side effect of an actually popularly-held position. "Drug users and homeless people hang around the edges of the plaza and have breached locked areas in the station, creating a danger for riders and staff" meets "Well, where do you want them to go?"--compassionate instincts. And the people most empathetic towards train drug use and public area homeless encampments simultaneously stop low-income housing and fail to notice how anti-homelessness spending is spent.

    All this isn't to say that the problem will indefinitely grow worse and popular opinion won't change. Last year's LA Mayor race was more closely contested from concerns about street homelessness and public safety.
    It's almost as if destroying homeless encampments and confiscating on-hand needles does jack shit about the actual problem. But conservative policing was never about "fixing" the problem, it's about bringing pain and misery to the poor and disabled.
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  7. #27
    Quote Originally Posted by tehdang View Post
    look how quickly this gets made into "send everyone to jail"
    It gets made into that because criminalizing poverty has been a favorite pastime of conservatives since time immemorial. Maybe the misanthropic garbage who wring their hands over the homelessness problem would get more benefit of the doubt that they actually care if they stopped spending money installing fucking spike strips on benches and underpasses and spent that cash actually trying to help people instead.

  8. #28
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cthulhu 2020 View Post
    It's almost as if destroying homeless encampments and confiscating on-hand needles does jack shit about the actual problem. But conservative policing was never about "fixing" the problem, it's about bringing pain and misery to the poor and disabled.
    All taking needles away from addicts does is increase the likelihood that they'll share needles. It doesn't stop them shooting up. These kinds of policies aren't about fixing the problem by helping homeless people and addicts. It's about "fixing the problem" by putting these people at maximum risk in the hope that more of them straight-up fuckin' die.


  9. #29
    Void Lord Elegiac's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by tehdang View Post
    Readers should note that I think attitudes are too permissive and disagree with the problem lying mostly with defunding the police, but look how quickly this gets made into "send everyone to jail."
    Wondering if this is entirely a function of the fact your "analysis" of any given issue revolves entirely around criticizing liberals without ever actually offering an alternative statement of what you believe the problem is or any working solutions for that problem. Like in this case, the only thing you've actually stated in regards to your own beliefs is a vague insinuation that the War on Drugs wasn't prosecuted hard enough.

    All this really says is that you're entirely aware your positions can't survive scrutiny outside of conservative echo chambers where outright lies are accepted as fact.
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    The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk and understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.

  10. #30
    Man that jump to conclusions though.

    "Defund the police must have caused this" I lol'd pretty good @Op

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Endus View Post
    All taking needles away from addicts does is increase the likelihood that they'll share needles. It doesn't stop them shooting up. These kinds of policies aren't about fixing the problem by helping homeless people and addicts. It's about "fixing the problem" by putting these people at maximum risk in the hope that more of them straight-up fuckin' die.
    This is going to be kind of a heartless question, and it's based off kind of an idle thought here. I will preface is by saying; I agree with you.


    That said;

    What value do they add to the world? If the homeless / drug addict situation was gone due to dying off from overdosing or w/e.... would that not (in a purely mathematical / logical sense) be a net positive for the city? Especially with regards to social spending

    edit; why tf can I not stop spelling phonetically.

  11. #31
    Void Lord Elegiac's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by prwraith View Post
    This is going to be kind of a heartless question, and it's based off kind of an idle thought here. I will preface is by saying; I agree with you.

    That said;

    What value do they add to the world? If the homeless / drug addict situation was gone due to dying off from overdosing or w/e.... would that not in a purely mathematical / logical since be a net positive for the city? Especially with regards to social spending
    You're failing to see how this attitude in combination with policies that make drug abuse more likely in certain demographics provide an avenue for the elimination of those demographics.
    Quote Originally Posted by Marjane Satrapi
    The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk and understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.

  12. #32
    Quote Originally Posted by Cthulhu 2020 View Post
    Hilariously uninformed. Saw a twitter thread just last night of someone posting pictures of a bunch of syringes on a New York sidewalk, feigning shock and horror that NYC would let drug use get out of hand.
    Read the original article. I can promise you it's more about LA than pictures taken on a New York sidewalk.

    It's almost as if destroying homeless encampments and confiscating on-hand needles does jack shit about the actual problem. But conservative policing was never about "fixing" the problem, it's about bringing pain and misery to the poor and disabled.
    The problem is safety on the metro rail system. The solution appears to be identifying the political affiliation of people discussing the problem.

    Quote Originally Posted by s_bushido View Post
    It gets made into that because criminalizing poverty has been a favorite pastime of conservatives since time immemorial.
    I'm sure you could make a great thread on criminalizing poverty and why that's a conservative pastime, in your opinion. Here, it just looks like responses to posts can be made independent of anything in the post, and get defended by others!

    It sounds like the real problems plaguing LA reduce to dastardly conservatives not proposing good enough solutions for Democratic politicians in decades-long-control of the city & county, so I'll have to raise my eyebrows at that and see if NED replies on the subject of abolish the police involvement.
    "I wish it need not have happened in my time." "So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

  13. #33
    Quote Originally Posted by Elegiac View Post
    You're failing to see how this attitude in combination with policies that make drug abuse more likely in certain demographics provide an avenue for the elimination of those demographics.
    By all means teach me or link me to some stuff, I'm always open to learning

  14. #34
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by prwraith View Post
    This is going to be kind of a heartless question, and it's based off kind of an idle thought here. I will preface is by saying; I agree with you.


    That said;

    What value do they add to the world?
    I'm cutting the question off here because I want to make a very specific point;

    I don't assess humans based on some subjective sense of "value", in the first place, to determine if they "deserve" to live.

    Even if I were to entertain it, there's whole reams of people whose "value" I would peg as being far lower than a typical homeless person. Like, take a hypothetical banker living in the upper middle class, who beats his kids with a belt, sexually abuses his daughter, beats his wife as well, I would say that man's "value" is far less than the homeless guy living in a cardboard box and begging for spare change. The homeless person's contribution to society may be minimal; the hypothetical banker's is highly negative.

    This all usually gets framed based on financial contribution to society, and I flat-out reject such concepts of "value" as deeply dystopic and itself indicative of serious misanthropy by those making use of such a model. If I were to develop a means of determining "value" of a given human, it wouldn't have any measure of fiscal success rolled into it whatsoever. Especially since successful capitalism essentially requires unethical, exploitative conduct.

    If the homeless / drug addict situation was gone due to dying off from overdosing or w/e.... would that not (in a purely mathematical / logical sense) be a net positive for the city? Especially with regards to social spending
    The problem there is the untreated illnesses and lack of support those groups are experiencing. Yes, it would be a net "good" to get homeless people housed, and to decriminalize drug use and make safe injection sites available and work to provide support to anyone who wants to break the cycle of addiction.

    Those issues are problems because society is intentionally allowing them to suffer. And that suffering is what needs to be alleviated. Valuing those suffering so little ensures they'll never get that help, because the implicit argument is that helping them "isn't worth it", because they aren't "worth it". Which is why I'm gonna take this strong a stance against it.

    Empathy and compassion don't come with price tags attached, dude. That's the fundamental truth, here.


  15. #35
    Quote Originally Posted by prwraith View Post
    What value do they add to the world? If the homeless / drug addict situation was gone due to dying off from overdosing or w/e.... would that not (in a purely mathematical / logical sense) be a net positive for the city? Especially with regards to social spending
    You don't want to live in a society where the response to these situations is "fuck it, let them die." Because there's nothing magically stopping it from being you (or the people you care about) on the receiving end of that treatment. Seems painfully obvious to me...

  16. #36
    Void Lord Elegiac's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by prwraith View Post
    By all means teach me or link me to some stuff, I'm always open to learning
    It's fairly self-explanatory; taking a "just let them die" attitude towards drug abuse while simultaneously pushing for policies that perpetuate poverty in marginalized demographics and thus make drug abuse more likely is effectively a policy of further marginalizing that demographic by fostering an unsafe environment where they are more likely to die - especially in a country where healthcare access has a massive financial burden.

    The War on Drugs as it exists in the US has always been geared towards providing a pretext for state violence against undesirable groups. To quote Richard Nixon's domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman:

    "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
    It is not a coincidence that the tone of discussion about drug policy has shifted significantly since opioid abuse started skyrocketing in older and primarily white communities, as another poster previously mentioned. The snag comes from the fact that while conservatives have now started acknowledging that the War on Drugs as it existed in the Nixon and Reagan eras isn't a workable solution, they don't actually know how to solve any social or economic problem beyond throwing police or tax cuts at it.
    Last edited by Elegiac; 2023-03-22 at 08:04 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Marjane Satrapi
    The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk and understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.

  17. #37
    Quote Originally Posted by Endus View Post
    The problem there is the untreated illnesses and lack of support those groups are experiencing. Yes, it would be a net "good" to get homeless people housed, and to decriminalize drug use and make safe injection sites available and work to provide support to anyone who wants to break the cycle of addiction.

    Those issues are problems because society is intentionally allowing them to suffer. And that suffering is what needs to be alleviated. Valuing those suffering so little ensures they'll never get that help, because the implicit argument is that helping them "isn't worth it", because they aren't "worth it". Which is why I'm gonna take this strong a stance against it.

    Empathy and compassion don't come with price tags attached, dude. That's the fundamental truth, here.
    On some level though you're really just supporting bad decisions. A help center should be accessible and available. But going overboard and allowing safe injection sites is just encouraging it. I don't think we should shame them for their disease, but actively refusing to admit they have a disease does not make it societies responsibility to say yes you do.

  18. #38
    Quote Originally Posted by Elder Millennial View Post
    I'm not completely convinced about that.

    I have looked at ridership statistics for major known public transportation systems in places like Europe and NYC.

    https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/riders-return/
    https://www.cityam.com/london-underg...-pre-pandemic/


    Systems that service a city as a whole, rather than commuting people back and forth between their office and homes have all mostly recovered to pre-pandemic levels with healthiest recovery being actually on weekends. NYC for example still hasn't fully recovered but the lines service the "outer" boroughs rather than the business district of Manhattan have seen stronger recovery numbers than the lines servicing Manhattan.

    Essentially, if you have a comprehensive city wide system that people use daily because it's convenient and lets you go out, go shopping, just get around town, ridership recovered. If you have a system designed to shuttle people between work and home (like LA), then the ridership numbers stayed lower as working from home remains a thing.

    I clicked on the two links you provided it says they are still lower about 10-20% lower with ridership going up on the weekend when people have off. I am not sure about the EU but everything in the big cities in the US have changed, real estate is changing from commercial to residential. There's also a lot of people that have moved out of the big centers for the suburbs or to less populated states altogether. I am not sure how this will play out perhaps when those commercial buildings are converted to residential ridership will go up.

    It will probably take years for us to get to a new normal, too many factors are still unknown especially the real estate market and interest rates.

  19. #39
    Quote Originally Posted by s_bushido View Post
    You don't want to live in a society where the response to these situations is "fuck it, let them die." Because there's nothing magically stopping it from being you (or the people you care about) on the receiving end of that treatment. Seems painfully obvious to me...
    I agree, like I prefaced this with it was an idle thought that I'm kind of letting the discussion here expand upon. That said, where do you draw the line. How much help can you give as a society before it honestly becomes fiscally irresponsible to do so?

  20. #40
    Quote Originally Posted by prwraith View Post
    On some level though you're really just supporting bad decisions. A help center should be accessible and available. But going overboard and allowing safe injection sites is just encouraging it. I don't think we should shame them for their disease, but actively refusing to admit they have a disease does not make it societies responsibility to say yes you do.
    The data shows otherwise injection sites overall result in less deaths and lower addicts because those sites have resources to help people get out of addiction and inject safely. As long as the program is properly staffed with professionals it's a huge success, if you have data that shows otherwise feel free.

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