The same cell (presumably) hit the
Southland Mall in Hayward last night. While I do not accept the dystopian Singapore-style "solutions" proposed by the right, I've got to admit that this anarchic crime activity has me feeling pretty anxious. I suspect we are dealing less with an organized crime unit like a mafia, and more a diffuse internet-fueled avenue for crimes of opportunity in which disenfranchised people with access to the right circles of communication can dip in or out of participation as they feel, thus making them very difficult to collectively hunt down. Their willingness to commit casual acts of violence en route to their goal calls "Fight Club" to mind, not in a good way. We can point fingers to the Left or Right all we like, but I think it is a fact that civil order
is fracturing in this country to some degree. Riots every summer, hate crimes every winter, anarchic voices compromising the partisan structure of the goverment at both extremes. Not just in San Francisco by any means, but we will always be high on the list of targets, as long as this is where a siginificant pool of the national wealth is concentrating. And displacing the wealth would just displace the problems. Texas is getting happily high on the new business teat these days, but they're doing as badly as the South Bay did in the 90s when it comes to preparing for the long term consequences of a tech boom; they too will start to see incidents like this happening with greater and greater frequency as their population and profits boom, and they are if anything even less prepared than we were.
Interesting enough, there are a few major effects that are coming down on us, as a species, like teeth of a massive and disgusting jaw. This is absolutely one of them: that evil can now organize
I like to live in a world in my imagination
I've noticed that about you.
Tom
FYIAD.
If I cared I'd Google the meaning of FYIAD.
Oh well.
Tom
It's a humorous statement that goes, "Fuck you, I'm a dragon." It's just fun to say.
I guess in the world of your imagination I asked a question.
I didn't.
Tom
I liked their answer, though I figured it out from context. They don't have to actually need to be answering you to explain it for others.
@TomC *sticks out her tongue*
The point was prisons and the other costs of failing to address homelessness is probably substantially more of a fiscal drain than it would be to address those problems. I realize that American prisons are not up to the standards of Norway's "comfy prison" model, but even with that, the cost of keeping those people incarcerated and of paying for their healthcare costs is ludicrous. Furthermore, the cost of paying for their emergency room visits whenever they get sick or injured due to the hazards that are related to homelessness is ludicrous.
The UCLA study that I provided a few posts back was actually very interesting. I think there is a very strong economic case for simply providing shelter for the homeless. Several models for it already exist.
As a person that has been through intermittent homelessness around the time of the recession, I can tell you that being homeless does not make you want to work. It makes you want to be dead. It makes you want to lie down and give up. It puts you into vicious cycles of self-defeating behavior. The idea that making people sleep outside is going to make them more moral is outright unhinged. It just doesn't work that way.
It is a well documented effect that animals will die, just give up, when their agency passes beneath a given lower bound.
Humans are animals.
It strikes me more as a philosophy of "just kill them in a way so as to be able to minimize the feeling of responsibility for such a dereliction of basic personal decency, but so also to stealth away from any act that so brings social censures."
I admit, it may be a geometry of the mind that holds it such that it masks the truth off, defends the ignorance of the thinking mind of it's evil. But it is there, the knowledge of what we know the effect of such positions.