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A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

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Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#311

Post by awillen »

Retric wrote: post #213
leephillips wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“People have different values.” That’s for sure. The values of the poster you’re replying to are better than the values of a professional parasite.

A parasite he may be, but people can do a lot more harm as part of the economy than that. It’s simply a question of leverage, even something as seemingly pleasant as Disney World causes significant direct and indirect ecological harm in ways a homeless person doesn’t. And frankly you can find plenty of far worse examples than Disney World.

So? There will always be someone worse or more harmful - that doesn't excuse the bad actions of anyone else.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#312

Post by markzzerella »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #282
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Supporting the odd philosopher poet is the exact function of society, in my opinion. Have you considered that society should also be the natural predator of the odd philosopher poet so that their numbers do not become problematic for their environment?

Why would society need to even be a predator though? The whole point of society is that we organized into large enough groups that what the "natural order" was no longer applies: societies literally rise above the natural order by replacing that order with something we as society control. That means things like corporations, and working hard for your money, but also means things like "meaningless art", and allowing p…

>the whole point of society is that we don't need this ridiculous "natural" nonsense. We beat it. It can stay outside. We replaced it with society.

When the silent part is said out loud. "We" didn't beat anything, and "we" certainly aren't gods that managed to counter natural law, despite the current zeitgeist that likes to pretend it is so.

Humans are predators, and to pretend otherwise will be the folly of our species. One need not look any further than the political, corporate, or social elite to see what predators look like in so-called civilized society.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#313

Post by stevejb »

elliekelly wrote: post #151
s1artibartfast wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that we are living in a all time high of human generosity, on a scale previously unimaginable. It just isn't carried out on a personal and emotional level.

Does human generosity scale though? I’m not so sure. Because we’re also living in a time of human hunger, human thirst, and human displacement previously unimaginable. The generosity doesn’t seem able to keep pace.

Uh yeah this is totally wrong. Life has never been better for the vast majority of the world's population.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#315

Post by noduerme »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #289
noduerme wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking to someone who lived on the road for 10+ years and spent plenty of time in music circles on beaches discussing the nature of the universe. All of which came to very little. I don't work and earn to chase a new car. I do it to give my life meaning and to afford a good future for myself and my family. And yeah, I have every right to look down at the people who think they're being so smart by "not getting…

I have know a lot of homelessness. In 99.99% of the cases, they weren't homeless by choice, or ideology. But yes--most of them thought they were there by choice. It must be some ego defense mechanism? For some reason a disproportionate amount were former Programmers? I knew Jim Fox. He was a cocreator of Wordstar, but got zero credit. I watched him slip from employment to wearing a Penguin outfit playing a ukleee beg…

This is a thoughtful answer. I should be clear that I draw a bright distinction between young traveling punks sleeping rough (often by choice) and people who are long-term homeless not by choice. I knew a lot of the former, but only encountered some of the latter as the graybeards in mostly young communities. And I'd say most of them still had some choice, they just didn't see a reason to go back to normal society.

I'm just objecting to the glorification of homelessness as an ethos, and the diminution of people who work as a consequence. I'm not saying the ethos is responsible for all or even most homelessness. It can, and does, draw some intelligent people into making really bad decisions, though.

I'd also add that I've known many people living rough who were happy to have work, and worked hard when they could. And I don't include them in any of what I'm saying about the ethics of surviving on other people's charity, because they indeed did not wish to.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#316

Post by stevejb »

thomasfl wrote: post #302

People living their life completely without money, can teach us all a few good lessons. If some people can live completely without money, then the rest of us probably spendt too much time hoatding money. Happiness is possible without money.

The good lesson it can teach is that there are hypocrites in the world, and that at the present time there is enough excess productivity in the system that people who contribute nothing can basically ride for free, and the value they contribute is that they serve as props for a fantasy discussion that is delusional at best.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#317

Post by boomlinde »

stevejb wrote: post #307
bserge wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of a small community, it can be left to volunteers (optionally offer them a meal/beer) or simply rotation so everyone does the unwanted jobs. It's a fair system and people will do it.

> simply rotation so everyone does the unwanted jobs. It's a fair system and people will do it. I think that what would end up happening is that in even in a small group of people, it would naturally emerge that there are variations in quality, efficient, economies of scale, etc. Even in my immediate family, there are some menial jobs that my wife does 90-100% of and some menial jobs that I do 90-100% of. If we tried…

> If we tried to make if 50-50 or have some type of rotation, we would both lose.

Because you recognize this and aren't completely inflexible, you don't. Some degree of self-organization for mutual convenience can be relied on in much larger groups of people than two. For example, I often hear of shift workers trading shifts.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#318

Post by boomlinde »

vorpalhex wrote: post #97
bserge wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of a small community, it can be left to volunteers (optionally offer them a meal/beer) or simply rotation so everyone does the unwanted jobs. It's a fair system and people will do it.

Every office, multi-tenant household and often times families themselves fight over this. People will not do tasks merely because it's "fair". Otherwise crime would have evaporated, life would be harmonious, and judges would be bored.

On the other hand I think being bunced up with people I don't know, don't really care about or outright dislike is, at least to some extent, a side effect of the extreme centralization of work opportunities since the industrial revolution. Functionally, in terms of production, apartment complexes and offices are to people what coops are to chickens.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#319

Post by AussieWog93 »

Jochim wrote: post #246
AussieWog93 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If that happened, who would wash the dishes? I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them. Everyone wants to hand out toys to sick kids and pose for photos, nobody wants to clean up their chemo-smelling shit and puke. It's been a real issue in every single volunteer-run organisation I've been a par…

> I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them. Motivating them is the key word. Right now we depend on people being forced into stressful, precarious or life threatening situations in order to coerce them into doing jobs those of us in more stable circumstances would never do voluntarily. As a resu…

You can read my past comments - I agree with you completely.

Toilet cleaners, garbage men and fruit pickers should not just be paid well for the important work they do; they should be given respect for it as well.

Taking advantage of their desperation is absolutely unjust.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#320

Post by gimmeThaBeet »

mikem170 wrote: post #299
gimmeThaBeet wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, if your grand answer to the torments of society is to just rely on that exact society to sustain you, it's not a sustainable answer. Even just something as simple as the cigarettes he scavenges, where does he think those are coming from? Like I'm sure you could grow some sort of nicotiana in BC, but it's not exactly North Carolina, and he's not exactly Thoreau. It's kind of stunning how close this guy is to…

> Tangential, but I tend to feel this way about a segment of van life philosophy Ah, I know what you mean. I've thought about this myself. One of those "it wouldn't work if everyone did it" kind of things. You could do van life while working for an oil company, there's people with all kinds of van life jobs, it's a way to cut expenses and have more time outside of work. But things would need to be quite different if…

I understand, I was careful to say a segment, I know how easy it is to come off resentful or bitter. I largely don't have much a problem with van life or any such lifestyles, like you say, there's plenty of people where the extent of van life is they just happen to live in a van. The issue I take is admittedly more pedantic, sort of intellectual honesty. I know it's paradoxical, but a thought I have a lot is "I don't care if you lie to yourself, I just ask you don't lie to me."

Rejecting money as some moralistic endeavor while living in a city is to me, bluntly, pretty dishonest. I feel like that is what is arguably wrong with what he does, especially in the context of his own framework. It really is like Diogenes, if he hates society so much, why is he still here? I'm not a fan of half measures, especially when one wants to be a modern day philosopher.

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