Those are reasonable points from @Sweeting and @Limiescouse, and surely assistance programs should be part of the solution. There definitely are people who are transitionally homeless through some life event or shift in circumstances. Such programs likely work well for them because there intent is to get back on the treadmill and do for themselves.
It’s the other cohort who are the issue. Ironically, this homeless problem seems worst in states (speaking of the U.S.) with the most generous social safety nets. My experience is primarily California. Here we have lots of people living in makeshift shelters along the interstate highways, perhaps because they have learned they will not be chased out of those locations. Not sure why that is. One day I was driving someone to the airport. We came upon one of these tent agglomerations that had just burst into flames. I called 911. On my way back from the airport the fire was out and police and fire trucks were there. No ambulances, thank goodness. The issue is how to get people to stop living that way who have no compulsion to live in any other way. There are many such people, sorry to say. The state of California has even tried renting hotel rooms (entire hotels actually) to house such people, but they end up destroying the rooms.
Not sure what the answer is, but in my opinion any solution which does not require something from them will fail. Its the old, give a person a fish, feed them for one day; make them fish to feed themselves for a lifetime. I’m paraphrasing.
Unfortunately, and sad as that clip was to watch… Unless some sort of one-to-one paid personal sponsor scheme can be implemented into the recovery journey… most will not have the mental strength to come through addiction like that alone
I think most people would agree with that sentiment. On the other hand when you talk about people who actually want to live as vagrants then I’m not sure there is a ‘solution’. If you want to sleep rough then you’re free to do so, although maybe saying ‘free’ is the wrong word given that law enforcement will move you on from a lot of places.
I think where we differ, and forgive me if I’m wrong, is it seems like you are saying that too much is being done for these people based on the amount of money spent. I’m on the other end of that scale where I think despite the money being spent we clearly aren’t doing enough if the problem of homelessness is increasing. I don’t agree that it’s a coastal or blue state problem either, I’ve been to Texas and they have large homeless camps too.
I do wonder where that money is being spent and who ends up with it. Is it really all going to the help of homeless people or is it ending up in the pockets of companies brought in to do things like evictions, run homeless shelters etc? It’s kind of the same way I feel about the military - the US military is the richest and best funded in the world… but then on our base we are flying 50 year old aircraft and the hanger roof has leaks we can’t afford to repair. We couldn’t even afford to send people to basic training for a time last year… so where is the money going? Same thing happening with homelessness I suspect. A lot of money spent but not a lot reaching the ground.
provincial government leased a pretty decent motel/hotel and turned it into transitional housing. took them less than two years to burn the hotel to the ground.
fuck them. I’ve lost all sympathy at this point for those who abuse the system. costing the taxpayers 10’s of millions of dollars and now we have this fucking burned out hotel in the middle of town in a legal stalemate because neither the government nor the hotel owner want to pay for the repairs.
Sherrod Brown gets to the bottom of the absurd turn in the GOP positioning themselves as a populist party in rhetoric while still being the party of the moneyed elite in policy
I’m not saying too much money is spent. I’m questioning how it is spent, but moreover, I’m questioning whether we should allow people to sleep in tents on the side of the highway. This may be more of a moral issue.
Maybe. Depends on where it is. Where it comprises a public health or safety hazard (as it often does in urban and suburban areas) should we as a society have a right to eradicate it? If so, then how? At what point do a person’s freedoms end and a society’s interests begin. Tricky subject I think, though my position would be we should not allow people to sleep along highways or overpasses in makeshift shelters.
case in point. homess camp under an older bridge here in 2009, lit a fire to stay warm and caught the old trestle timbers underneath the bridge on fire. closed the bridge for a month.
A power outage occurred in NC last night affecting over 40,000 people. The cause of it has been identified as vandalism to 2, possibly 3 substations, with pretty compelling evidence this was a purposeful act designed to prevent a drag show performance going ahead.
When you decide you no longer actually want to be president or believe you can be and are looking for a way out that allows you to remain within the comforting confines of an ever-narrowing echo chamber.
I think he is referring to the Biden camp trying to suppress stories about Hunter Biden, via Twitter.
Not sure of the details on that, but it is probably usual news management stuff that they all engage in, only the Republicans, and especially the Trumpists, will make as much of it as possible, in their own false equivalence stakes, and will blow it up to the level of the Capitol insurrection for their base. See. The Dems are just as bad!
It wasn’t even the Biden camp as such. It was a decision taken by most major news organisations not to touch the story because of it’s dubious provenance. Musk’s great reveal which he had been trailing all week turned out to be a real nothing burger. The only person giving it any import , surprise surprise , was Donald Trump. Just how a totally irrelevant smear story against his son somehow invalidates an election result and calls for a suspension of the constitution only makes sense to him. What it shows everybody else is just how desperate this fucker is becoming now.
Remember that Pilar A of the Trump reelection campaign was positioning Biden as the head of a crime family whose only reason for being in politics was to leverage that into personal wealth. The original impeachment was over conditioning aid to Ukraine over them admitting there was a corruption investigation into Biden’s actions in ukraine as VP (not doing the investigation, not even finding information, just saying there was one). They were so focused on this as their winning strategy that right before the election they hatched a plot about a laptop they were going to spin as containing evidence of the “crime”. By and large the mainstream press were wise to it, were aware of a lack of chain of custody over the material they were being asked to report on and so took a very hands off approach with it. The only source that covered it the way MAGA wanted was hte NY Post (a MAGA rag) and reporting on how they came to report on it quickly blew holes in the story. The result was a lot of meta-coverage…the coverage of the lack of coverage), but very very little of the details from the “laptop”. The socials all have policies on down weighting dubious stories in their algorithms and all applied those actions to this story.
Ever since, MAGA world have been convinced the failure to take their bait is evidence of a coordinated pro liberal agenda designed to get Trump out of office. On Friday, Musk and Matt Tiabbi coordinated on a report of what the “twitter files” said about how Twitter responded to the situation. What Tiabbi reported didnt support their argument even one bit, but in typical MAGA fashion the evidence doesnt need to support their argument. They don’t read, and they certainly dont think about what words they might have seen, so they just need to know there is a piece of paper, and then be told what the words on the piece of paper mean and off they run. So, MAGA world is now convinced Tiabbi uncovered (was given access to files by Musk, with “conditions” applied) proof that the government (they forget that Trump was actually President at the time, not Biden) squashed “the laptop story” when it shows no such thing.
In reality what evidence they do have of Biden’s team getting involved was his campaign reaching out to point out that what was being repeatedly shared on twitter was hacked, sexually explicitly photos of Hunter…dick pics and self made porn. the rest of the evidence (with 1 exception) all points to twitter having a process for dealing with hacked information and information of dubious legitimacy (note, it was since proven that files had been written onto the laptop after Hunter had last had access to it) following that process. The one exception? The Trump White House (not his campaign, but the actual executive branch of the federal government) asking twitter to do what they claim the government (i.e. Biden, the not yet actually president and so not government) unfairly did to the Trump campaign.
They tried something similar a couple of weeks ago, reporting bombshells that Homeland Security had been coordinating with twitter and facebook over ways to deal with fake news (in it’s legitimate definition…the purposeful planting of known false information). They are presenting this as uncovering evidence of government putting their finger on the scale to help Biden win, despite it being Trump’s DHS and the “secret” information they uncovered actually being public record reported by DHS themselves.
Same old shit with the ‘unmasking’ of Mike Flynn and Carter Page and the ‘spying’ on the Trump campaign. (‘Bigger than Watergate !’)
Like you say , they literally make shit up , safe in the knowledge that the audience at which it is aimed will have absolutely no inclination to check its veracity.
The upcoming House investigations will likely take it to a whole new level.
It will be a fascinating insight into the allure of MAGA. The House majority has been won largely on the back of their surprising results in NY. These seats by definition are in districts inclined to vote Dem and so the sort of GOP candidate who can win there are unlikely to be MAGA firebrands, and that seems to reflect who this new group of NY GOP house members are. The inside Washington analysis is that all the incentives then are for them to eschew MAGA craziness as going down that path is the quickest route to losing their seat in 24 in these districts. The implication being that this specific group will be incentivized to act like normal politicians in congress and so prevent the worst case scenario.
But I think people who think like that continue to treat politics as the game they think it is rather than the one we keep seeing it is. The biggest heel turn in all of the GOP during Trump’s time is Elsie Stefanik and her district is a textbook case of these other districts they’re talking about. Voted for Clinton, W, then Obama, and has a Dem represent them in congress for about the prior 30 years. If she can turn then any of the rest can, and once one of them does the center of mass changes in a way that it will harder for any of the rest to remain “normal”.
