Conservative
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This is a great strategy. Let's see how much blood they can squeeze from those stones. Can't afford a place to live? Lets charge rent for that park bench!
But of course the real idea here is to give municipalities the ability to harass people. It's certainly not about the fines. The less annoying homeless will be driven off by the harassment and then all that will be left is the annoying ones which might be a more manageable number to throw in jail.
Homeless people have no money and they need drugs. Where do you think they get their money and other various items?
Homeless people have money, just not enough for housing. People with houses also use drugs. All people get money from different places. Not sure what your point is but your generalizations aren't useful.
Rich people use drugs as well, but they do not decrease the economic quality of the area and generate a lot of crimes and nuisance. For tourism, it is necessary to clean up the encampments, and sleeping homeless to market attractions. Since they are poor and addicted to drugs, probably feel screwed by society, they are more likely to steal. They have not showered in ages, do you enjoy being next to stinky people?
You're making a lot of spurious assumptions and generalizations. The overwhelming majority of the time the homeless are just minding their own business. Some are certainly more annoying than others, some smell worse than others but that doesn't justify criminalizing all of them nor does it justify abdicating moral responsibility as a society to care for those that often for no fault of their own fail to integrate into the structures that have evolved. There are other solutions, none of them are going to be perfect. Maybe criminalizing sleeping on the street is fine as long as the city provides places to sleep that are reasonable.
Being homeless is not a criminal offense, and how do you know it is not their own fault? How do you know they are just minding their own business? Talk about spurious assumptions and generalizations. Get out of town... Let me guess, you believe the poor, the hobos, and minorities who are the subpar classes deserve your compassion because they are underlings of other classes, that society is structurally unfair, and the underlings need a free pass, while the superior classes need to acknowledge their sin of being better up in class. That is your fallacious assumptions and beliefs. That's your opinion. You have a fundamentally Marxist brain that stems from religion. Ask the insurance companies, local businesses, and neighborhoods if hobos "just mind their own business". Portland had your beliefs until they realized they're making their own quality of life lower. Showing your tolerance and compassion for bad behavior, bad lifestyles, and even bad people do not work. They are much better examples of managed cities in the world than the liberal let-live, mind your own business, crap holes of Western society. You are excrementally wrong.
Now the root of your objections are shown to be just callous indifference to human suffering. That's fine, just come out and say you don't care and can't be bothered. You want to live in a world of machiavellian justice. Be careful what you ask for as maybe that knife will fall on your head or someone you care about if you are capable of that.
It's hard to take you seriously when you try to conflate Marxism and religion, the guy that viewed religion as "the soul of soulless conditions" or the "opium of the people". Or when you intimated that society was structurally fair. In what way is it fair that one person can be born to wealth and privlegde and another to poverty and lack of options? But even beyond the rules of society, there is no fundamental fairness in the universe. Some people get lucky others don't. Some people are healthy others aren't. It's impossible to have any reasonable discussion when the starting point is so fundamentally divorced from reality.
To the contrary, I want the problems of society fixed. I want the quality of life of people to be improved, not out of compassion, but out of duty, and by the concept of improvement, in the most efficient way. Liberals always virtue signaling they care about the poor, and so on, yet look at the environment they created. Singapore has one of the most expensive properties in the world and high inequality, yet they have no homeless people.
Karl Marx was born into a Christian culture, and he was culturally Christian. Did Karl Marx disagree with the Bible in regard to poor versus rich? Christianity is subversive; the poor will prevail over the rich, the downtrodden people will prevail over their oppressors, the fool will win over the wise man. Socialism and communism are as scientific as witchcraft and astrology. They are not economic systems. Life isn't fair; that is the real world. It is through work, applied knowledge, that you make your state better than before.
We can certainly agree on the desire to improve society. We likely agree that there is a better solution to the homelessness situation than continuing as it is. Starting with a law that criminalizes homelessness is not the right place to start. We should be moving in the direction of cities or counties having to provide a minimum level of services for food, shelter and drug and mental health treatment. When that minimum level of support is available then it may be reasonable to consider laws that criminalize homelessness. You accuse the liberals of virtual signaling but any laws that criminalize homelessness are nothing but. They'll do nothing to solve the actual problem and are really only intended to assuage people's conscience and fool them into thinking that they've fixed a problem that they can simply no longer see. You profess to want an efficient productive society but then elect for options that are pure fantasy. If the end goal is to jail homeless people I can't see how that is going to be cheaper than housing them. It makes a lot more sense to build a society that works for all the people, picks them up when they fall and helps them return as productive members. Will there be some people that just can't be productive members of society? Yes, and we'll certainly agree that laws and jails are appropriate. In fact we have those laws. It's already illegal to steal and assault whether your homeless or not. Who is advocating removing those laws? The Marxists? The Christians? With all your arguing you certainly seem to want to live in a rational world but somehow continue to support irrational solutions.
@hapablap @Amoxtli I agree with you partially here. The causes of homelessness should be addressed before it is criminalized.
However, harshly cutting off drug supplies and making it easier for people who, for example, have criminal records, to get jobs, would be a better way to start than building in incentives for people to stay homeless.
You'd be surprised by how many people are literally homeless just because they got hooked on drugs.
What do you mean incentives to stay homeless? Does this include anything that reduces the discomfort of homelessness like food and medical care? I don't have statistics about the number of homeless that actually choose to be homeless, which sounds like an impossible question to answer because. It seems likely that any homeless person would want an improvement to their lifestyle of some kind. Given the option of becoming a homeless drug addict versus not, what right-minded person would make that choice? It just isn't a choice. Certainly, once you're a homeless drug addict it really isn't a choice anymore. A homeless drug addict can't just decide not be a homeless drug addict. In fact I'd wager that once you're a homeless drug addict, if you become housed it's a lot harder to remain so. If a homeless drug addict becomes clean, it's a lot harder for them to remain so. Virtually no one would choose that lifestyle. If it is such a great choice then choose it yourself!