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The Disappearance of the Public Bench

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Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#181

Post by thegjp210 »

jmyeet wrote: post #155
nradov wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're spreading a common misconception. No one really "owns" a home in China. What they're usually purchasing is a 70-year lease on the land. The hope is that the lease can be renewed on favorable terms but there's no guarantee.

This is misleading, arguably false. All land in China is state-owned. You own the building. You don't own the land the building is on. In this way, it's really no different to leasehold in the UK or land-lease in NYC. Do we say that all these UK leaseholders don't really "own" a house? Is there the same fearmongering? And in the UK, it's often the Royal Family or some aristocratic landholder who owns the land (eg the…

not in the US. We have the takings clause

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#182

Post by pocksuppet »

triceratops wrote: post #121
pocksuppet wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically the problem is that productive members of society and drug dealers are incapable of existing near to each other? Why is that? I pass by some drug dealers sometimes on the way to work. I don't see the problem. Occasionally I get asked if I want to buy some drugs. I don't want to buy drugs so nothing else happens.

> [why are] productive members of society and drug dealers incapable of existing near to each other? Drug dealers are criminals. Criminals commit other crimes and attract other criminals and crime. For example, rival drug dealers who want to take their spot and use violence.

So the problem is that someone who does one crime is a criminal and being a criminal means someone does every crime? For example, someone who removes DRM from a video game is a criminal, and therefore he also shoots people, so we have to put DRM removers in jail to decrease shooting deaths?

I have to admit, I'm not really following the logic there.

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#183

Post by 9x39 »

pocksuppet wrote: post #182
triceratops wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [why are] productive members of society and drug dealers incapable of existing near to each other? Drug dealers are criminals. Criminals commit other crimes and attract other criminals and crime. For example, rival drug dealers who want to take their spot and use violence.

So the problem is that someone who does one crime is a criminal and being a criminal means someone does every crime? For example, someone who removes DRM from a video game is a criminal, and therefore he also shoots people, so we have to put DRM removers in jail to decrease shooting deaths? I have to admit, I'm not really following the logic there.

Because you made a strawman out of their point. Reasonable people avoid drug markets for good reason.

Drug crimes and non-drug crimes (assault, robbery, x/y/z) commonly cluster[1], and citizens with working risk estimation skills move on and cede the space.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2719901/

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#184

Post by 9x39 »

chadgpt2 wrote: post #160
scoofy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do some people litter when they are steps away from a garbage can? Why do some people play their phones at high volume on public transit? Anti-social behavior comes in all shapes and sizes. There is a distinction between pro- and anti-social behaviors beyond capitalist and socialist systems. You can have anti-social behavior in both systems. You can have pro-social behaviors in both systems. This should be fairly…

The USSR did massively reduce homelessness by providing homes. They discovered the surprising fact they if someone has a home they are not homeless.

They also mostly criminalized, imprisoned, and ostracized them as primary strategies, particularly if they were antisocial.

Unclear with the language permissible whether 20th century homelessness on another continent is comparable to western homelessness in 2026.

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#185

Post by lobf »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #174
zdragnar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These programs exist, but they are underutilized to a significant degree. From a partner who used to work in one, people: - didn't trust the program and wouldn't sign up - didn't actually want to quit using so they avoided it - wanted to get the benefits from the program without changing anything (i.e. showed up to get free food etc) - tried but didn't like it and went back to using Very few people actually went all…

Frankly, I think we need to bring back corporal punishment for specific crimes. The process to arrest, prosecute, and then imprison people for "public space crimes" is basically flawed. Arresting and prosecuting is slow and expensive, prisons are full. A prison sentence destroys whatever remaining support system a person has and a conviction like that makes getting a job in the future nearly impossible. We should jus…

Too bad about that pesky “cruel and unusual” clause in the constitution for the bloodthirsty like you…

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#186

Post by AussieWog93 »

strictnein wrote: post #7
TheBlight wrote: post #3

I also like clean safe unobstructed sidewalks and parks but along with benches, we've made a decision. We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things. I don't personally ageee with this decision but it is apparently the consensus.

> it is apparently the consensus And what a strange consensus it is. The prevailing belief seems to be that preventing people from slowly/quickly killing themselves on the street (or, more accurately, dying from addiction) is somehow not "progressive" and the moral thing to do is to pretend like these people have made the choice of their own volition and that we cannot judge them for this choice. In reality, the peop…

I think a big part of this queasiness comes from the fact that a lot of the institutions we would put addicts and mentally ill people in really were nightmarish.

And ignoring the whole issue of the sanitariums being full of abuse, I don't think you can argue that sticking a drug addict in a regular prison full of criminals is good for them either.

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#187

Post by pocksuppet »

jvandreae wrote: post #122
pocksuppet wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a drug-addled vagrant?

> It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible. > https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918

Clarifying vague terms is a good thing. Otherwise, two people end up talking past each other because they have different meanings of a shared term.

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#188

Post by JuniperMesos »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #14
strictnein wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is apparently the consensus And what a strange consensus it is. The prevailing belief seems to be that preventing people from slowly/quickly killing themselves on the street (or, more accurately, dying from addiction) is somehow not "progressive" and the moral thing to do is to pretend like these people have made the choice of their own volition and that we cannot judge them for this choice. In reality, the peop…

What a strange false dichotomy. Either we do absolutely nothing to help people, or we involuntarily incarcerate them? The actually progressive option is to provide meaningful public support programs , and also make housing affordable (by building enough housing). The US mostly doesn't do either of those, but it should.

Any meaningful public support program that actually keeps severely-mentally-ill visibly-homeless people from acting crazy in public will necessarily involve involuntarily incarcerating at least some of them, some of the time. A lot of very dysfunctional people genuinely do not want to cooperate with meaningful public support programs or are simply too out of it to meaningfully consent or not consent to participation in such.

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#189

Post by JuniperMesos »

Loughla wrote: post #38
zdragnar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These programs exist, but they are underutilized to a significant degree. From a partner who used to work in one, people: - didn't trust the program and wouldn't sign up - didn't actually want to quit using so they avoided it - wanted to get the benefits from the program without changing anything (i.e. showed up to get free food etc) - tried but didn't like it and went back to using Very few people actually went all…

The answer to that question in a society that allows (mostly) autonomy of choice is that we let them die on the street. I'm not convinced that involuntary incarceration will actually fix the problem. I believe it will just take it off of the streets and out of the public consciousness.

Taking the problem of crazy severely-mentally-ill people off the streets and out of the public consciousness is strictly better than having that problem be on the streets and in the public consciousness because it's happening around the public all the time. If nothing else, it reduces the chances that a random commuter will get randomly stabbed on the subway by a severely crazy person.

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#190

Post by ohnei »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #188
JoshTriplett wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a strange false dichotomy. Either we do absolutely nothing to help people, or we involuntarily incarcerate them? The actually progressive option is to provide meaningful public support programs , and also make housing affordable (by building enough housing). The US mostly doesn't do either of those, but it should.

Any meaningful public support program that actually keeps severely-mentally-ill visibly-homeless people from acting crazy in public will necessarily involve involuntarily incarcerating at least some of them, some of the time. A lot of very dysfunctional people genuinely do not want to cooperate with meaningful public support programs or are simply too out of it to meaningfully consent or not consent to participation…

That is going right back to false dichotomy. Something can be meaningful and not clean up the streets of all things uncomfortable.
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