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And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

shkspr.mobi

251–260 of 447 posts

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#251
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the ideal number of jails is not zero, but why wouldn't the ideal number of homeless people be zero?

I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything. And ideally we have good safety nets that find these people and give them resources and treatment, but some people will refuse everything and end up in bad situations of homelessness due to their drug and/or mental health crises. And even in…

Has anyone studied why homeless people refuse help? It's usually because the "help" isn't help. E.g. "you can sleep here but only if you haven't used drugs in the last week, so we'll test your blood before we let you in"

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#252
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything So? Why can't a 21st century country provide them with some at-least pod-like homes, so they are not fucking homeless?

Because having homeless people is a deliberate choice, a feature of said country. Same with "illegal immigrants".

Homeless people are necessary so that poor workers can see what will happen to them if they stop working.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment. Do you know why there aren't more granular controls? On my phone in the US the toggleable alert options are: Extreme Threats Severe Threats AMBER alerts (child abduction alerts) Public Safety Messages State and Local Tests

I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem! Millions of Texans were woken up at 4AM to an "EXTREME" level alert because one police officer was shot when he went to serve an arrest warrant to a suspected burglar at his apartment at 11pm earlier the same night. The officer recovered and was back on duty 5 weeks later. This shooting happened in one of the most remote…

I live in DFW Texas, use to be when you heard the tornado sirens you hit the deck. Now they go off, not kidding, for pingpong ball hail and “high winds”. That’s basically 1 out of every 4-5 spring/summer thunderstorms.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#254
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the ideal number of jails is not zero, but why wouldn't the ideal number of homeless people be zero?

Because there are places, where it's safe and reasonable to remain without a permanent home for an extended period of time. Warmer areas of Australia come to mind, or Dominic van Allen ( https://www.theguardian.com/society/audio/2023/sep/20/from-t... ) from the UK. It's a very fine line, between authoritarianism and the freedom of someone (whatever their mental state/ability is) to chose to not have a permanent place…

We know most of them aren't choosing it though. They're "choosing" it by a creative definition of the word.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#255
post #62
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing is a privilege, not a right, and not a requirement. Except, being a free country, in jail.

I said it is - I'm not saying it should be.

Then you should have said "housing is treated as a privilege" instead of "housing is a privilege".

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a video about a fatal oil drilling accident where the resulting investigation found that an operator had ignored the alarm which indicated the underlying issue because there were other alarms sounding for things he'd been told to ignore because they were benign. This is apparently common enough cause of problems that there is a term for it (other than "crying wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue…

In France, we have a bed story for children related to exactly that: "Pierre et le loup" (aka your "crying wolf"). It may be a EU wide tale.

It’s a common tale in English speaking world as well, but we don’t use it as a bedtime story because of the ending.

Edit. Didn’t realize it might just be an English version where the boy is killed and eaten. Aesop’s original didn’t have that. Just the sheep killed.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a video about a fatal oil drilling accident where the resulting investigation found that an operator had ignored the alarm which indicated the underlying issue because there were other alarms sounding for things he'd been told to ignore because they were benign. This is apparently common enough cause of problems that there is a term for it (other than "crying wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue…

In the US spewing all the alarms at the line level employees and fatiguing the shit out of them is a direct (and predictable, but of course everyone who complained in advance got sneered at by the usual demographics) result of OSHA policy. Same bunch of moronic incentives that result in there being a policy against everything and employees technically violating the rules to work normally. Whenever you see an alarm fa…

> a policy against everything and employees technically violating the rules to work normally.

This is called "normalization of deviance" and generally should be avoided, because it often precedes a serious accident.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes good point and in theory that's how it should work and mostly does. The interesting thing we're seeing is how it's playing out at a societal level with regards to the manipulation, gaslighting, cheating and bullying. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in individual interpersonal relationships, it sometimes takes a while for the victim to fully understand what's being done to them because the abuser is not onl…

It is kind of funny and sad that in the U.S. we've gone from corporations virtue-signalling to vice signalling in just a few years.

Having experienced vice signalling, I'm never going to complain about virtue signalling again.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If tech can cause social problems (there are multiple books on this) then it can solve them too - the only modern tech industry we've ever known has been dominated by players attempting forms of lockin to capture rents and amass enormous fortunes, of course the technology of this society isnt generally helpful to the society at large.

> If tech can cause social problems (there are multiple books on this) then it can solve them too You haven't actually argued why it can solve them too. When you're about to make a general argument about tech, try to exchange "tech" with "cocaine" to see if the argument still holds ( If cocaine can cause social problems, then it can solve them too )

Cocaine does solve a societal problem: the cult of performance pushing people to their limits. Without cocaine, there would be more burnouts and depressions (right now; I am not talking about long-term).

See also the role of "soma" in the novel Brave New World.

People take cocaine voluntarily. It solves a problem for them, at one point at last (addiction is as much a psychological problem as a physiological one). It is the same as doping in sports. Maybe you think of junkies in the streets when you think of cocaine and see only the problems it causes, but there is as much if not more cocaine users who are right now successful executives and colleagues right by your side, who can still hide well their use, and have enough money to buy good grades of drug, and a stay in a rehabilitation clinic when things get out of hand.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#260
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing The phrase "the right thing" is load-bearing, to steal a Claudeism. The Muslim Brotherhood that ran the country before El-Sisi thought they were doing "the right thing." El-Sisi also thought he was doing "the right thing." Egyptians mostly thought El-Sisi was doing “the right thing” during this time…

> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." To have a functioning civil society, you actually need the opposite of what you're saying. You need a collective general trust that people will follow the rules regardless of what they think is "the right thing." […] The only way we can cooperate is if we agree to neutral rules and procedures, and have a collective general trust that we'll all…

> This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure...

Yes, it does. And we live in a society. So by extension we do already accept that neutral procedures are possible and that we have achieved them.

The English Common Law systems and their derivatives are an astonishing success in achieving general fairness. People arguing against it have, with remarkable consistency, failed to come up with anything that reaches it's level of neutrality. In fact, normally people struggled to come up with general criticism beyond accusations that specific individuals didn't follow the procedures properly or relatively minor tweaks to the administrative details.

Neutral procedures are a solved problem, the tricky part is convincing the law enforcement system to do things by the book.

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