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August 30 - November 16, 2024
great social workers are both loving and tough.
had a job in prison. I was doing all these classes. I was a leader in my treatment community. I was helping other women, so much more robust of a life than I had then. That never would have happened if I kept using.”
Heroism is not the absence of victimization but the overcoming of
he aimed to blur the moral divide between innocence and guilt.
It’s impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can’t have capitalism without racism.”
For Foucault and others on the radical left, the ends justified the means.
after the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, the anarchists rebranded themselves as anti-fascists,
District Attorney Boudin was offering weaker sentences than even defense attorneys were requesting,
The New York success is supported by research that finds that greater police visibility decreases crime. It does so by convincing would-be criminals that they are more likely to get caught, known as deterrence.63 The same research into deterrence also finds that longer sentences do not deter crime and may in fact increase it. Probation is also shown to prevent crime and decrease recidivism, while imprisonment is not.64 This suggests that an effective way to reduce crime and mass incarceration would be shorter, swifter, and more certain prison sentences, with the money saved redirected to more
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One researcher estimated that swift, certain, and fair could halve the United States’ prison population.
always giving me a hard time. I hate going to see her. She pops up out of nowhere. But, Vicki, I do better when I’m on probation.’
Today there are fewer police officers per capita than at any time since 1992.74
“The homeowners would get mad because you didn’t move the homeless who were sleeping in front of their house. Then, when you tried to help the homeless, someone would start yelling about police brutality. And everyone had a cell phone camera on you.”
the evidence suggests that fewer cops may mean more police misconduct, because the remaining officers must work longer and more stressful hours.
percent) than white support (27 percent) for increasing the number of police.
say, ‘Go home. You don’t represent us. When we protest, we march in a peaceful way with thousands, no violence.’”
for more than thirty years, a large and financially motivated lobby of homeless service providers, homeless housing developers, labor unions, for-profit consultants, and advocacy groups have lobbied at the federal, state, and local level to increase funding for themselves. During that time, homelessness only grew worse.
we are putting special porta-potties near the homeless camps, which cost $320,000 each! For porta-potties! That’s some good shit!”
Haidt and others note that while progressives (“liberal” and “very liberal” people) hold the values of Caring, Fairness, and Liberty, they tend to reject Sanctity, Authority, and Loyalty as wrong.
Once you decide, in advance, to let victims determine their fates, then much else can be justified.
Where traditional morality views recreational injection drug use as a violation of the Sanctity of the body, Tula, like many libertarians, believes that the state coercing sobriety is.
The germ of the idea that society should be organized around the downtrodden was developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the mid-nineteenth century.
The dark side of victimology is how it moralizes power. Victimology takes the truth that it is wrong for people to be victimized and distorts it by going a step further. Victimology asserts that victims are inherently good because they have been victimized. It robs victims of their moral agency and creates double standards that frustrate any attempt to criticize their behavior, even if they’re behaving in self-destructive, antisocial ways like smoking fentanyl and living in a tent on the sidewalk.
we are to understand why progressives ruin cities, we need to understand how and why compassion, altruism, and love have created a blind spot,
compassionate people who were also psychologically and spiritually lost, angst-ridden, and concerned about their social status.
cults are much more common in progressive, secular places like the West Coast than in more traditional and conservative religious places.
secularization “stimulates the growth of cults where the conventional churches are weakest,”
Victimology appears to be rising as traditional religions are declining.
secular religion like victimology is powerful because it meets the contemporary psychological, social, and spiritual needs of its believers, but also because it appears obvious, not ideological, to them.
As soon as you use the word “homeless” you find yourself trapped within a powerful discourse, one that manipulates our thinking and feelings.
One word, “homeless,” entails an entire, insidious discourse that acts unconsciously and subliminally on our hearts and minds, rendering us unable to understand the reality before us.
it is also clear that untreated mental illness and addiction in progressive West Coast cities has gone well beyond being degrading to the people suffering from it, and dehumanizing to everyone who witnesses it, to also being a threat to public safety and order.
“The function of pain is to prevent us from damaging our own tissue,” says one psychologist. “The function of shame is to prevent us from damaging our social relationships, or to motivate us to repair them.”
“The people who bear the consequences aren’t the same ones who set the policy,”
A big part of the reason for the failure of the homeless industrial complex has had to do with perverse incentives, progressive resistance to mandatory treatment, and the insistence on permanent supportive housing over shelters.
Instead of governments providing such services directly, they give grants to nonprofit service providers who are unaccountable for their performance.
“It’s mainly the domain of a bunch of charities who are unlicensed, unfunded, relatively speaking, run by unqualified people who do a shitty job.
How and why do progressives ruin cities? So far we have explored six reasons.
takes a certain kind of leader to raise his middle finger. And I don’t know if Gavin is the kind of leader to do the right thing when it’s unpopular. He’s more reactive and transactional.
sought to replace the principle of gratitude for charity with an attitude of entitlement.
‘Do your own thing’ is not so different than ‘every man for himself.’”4
Some people have told me that they thought San Francisco’s Safe Sleeping Sites looked like a natural disaster. But with city-funded social workers providing services to the people in tents, it looked to me more like a medical experiment, albeit one that no board of ethics would ever permit.
People suffering addiction and living on the street are ill. To mix them up in speech and policy with people who are merely poor is deceptive.
What kind of a civilization leaves its most vulnerable people to use deadly substances and die on the streets? What kind of city regulates ice cream stores more strictly than drug dealers who kill 713 of its citizens in a single year?
People must not be exempted from this because we feel sorry for them and label them Victims.
The American people are capable of distinguishing between stigmatizing fentanyl use without stigmatizing the sick person who is using fentanyl. The person requires our compassion, but the behavior requires our condemnation.
One of the most important discoveries of sociologists in the late twentieth century, as they sought to understand rising crime rates, was that most people obey the law not because they are afraid of being caught violating it but because they believe in the law, and that it’s being administered fairly.
f homelessness was just a question of money, this issue would already be solved.”
she never realized how much of an industry poverty was.”
“The chief of psychiatry in a public hospital system in one of the largest California cities told me, ‘I know for a fact, and all of my colleagues know, that what we actually need to deal with the problem in the biggest cities in California is long-term residential secure psychiatric care. But I can’t say that publicly because I would be disemboweled by the activist left.
