Then you are looking at it from a totally wrong perspective anyways, just like most people do. The homeless encampments are full of people with mental illness challenges and/or in one or another way related to drugs. It is why I cannot stand drug use apologists and drug dealer/traffickers defenders that at the same time lament poverty and homelessness.
The poverty is not the cause, it is the symptom of the system’s rot. Especially when you compare other countries and societies that are poorer, but have far fewer of those problems and less crime. Drug addiction is not cheap.
The irony is that your very perspective is the very kind of mentality that has led to the circumstances where we can’t do anything about it even if we wanted to, while the powerful and rich simply do a cost benefit analysis of it because of that and conclude it is easier to, e.g., import replacements for the humans that have been destroyed by drugs and mental illness, which then also drives down the wages/salaries, and drives up the costs of living and drives up the profits of the rich you blame. It’s a kind of “the blind men and an elephant” problem. You keep scratching at the scabs of your self-inflicted cuts, but they don’t seem to be healing.
It really always astonished me that even here, in a community of people in a domain where logic is necessary there is still this stranglehold of irrational proto-religious, emotion based belief and dogma.
The ones I know personally ruined their lives with drugs, and ended up on the street. It's an intertwined issue, but the direction of causality is pretty clear when, eg, one brother is poor, but employed and in a shitty apartment, and the other is a human pit of misery and the primary fork was a proclivity for illicit drugs in his teens.
The weight of evidence is abundantly clear that the most effective way to reduce interpersonal crime is by reducing poverty, and providing housing & healthcare to everyone. Relatively modest sincere funding of these programs can have a huge impact, and if you had mentioned some of these "other countries and societies that are poorer, but have far fewer of those problems" I might even be able to point to some for you.
Wanting an increase in carceral solutions despite the weight of evidence against their effectiveness is exactly the "irrational proto-religious, emotion based belief and dogma" you're railing against. It doesn't feel fair to a certain worldview to allocate resources in this way. But you need to get over that, because it is what works.
Then you are looking at it from a totally wrong perspective anyways, just like most people do. The homeless encampments are full of people with mental illness challenges and/or in one or another way related to drugs. It is why I cannot stand drug use apologists and drug dealer/traffickers defenders that at the same time lament poverty and homelessness.
The poverty is not the cause, it is the symptom of the system’s rot. Especially when you compare other countries and societies that are poorer, but have far fewer of those problems and less crime. Drug addiction is not cheap.
The irony is that your very perspective is the very kind of mentality that has led to the circumstances where we can’t do anything about it even if we wanted to, while the powerful and rich simply do a cost benefit analysis of it because of that and conclude it is easier to, e.g., import replacements for the humans that have been destroyed by drugs and mental illness, which then also drives down the wages/salaries, and drives up the costs of living and drives up the profits of the rich you blame. It’s a kind of “the blind men and an elephant” problem. You keep scratching at the scabs of your self-inflicted cuts, but they don’t seem to be healing.
It really always astonished me that even here, in a community of people in a domain where logic is necessary there is still this stranglehold of irrational proto-religious, emotion based belief and dogma.
What makes you think the arrow of causality doesn't go homelessness->drugs?
The ones I know personally ruined their lives with drugs, and ended up on the street. It's an intertwined issue, but the direction of causality is pretty clear when, eg, one brother is poor, but employed and in a shitty apartment, and the other is a human pit of misery and the primary fork was a proclivity for illicit drugs in his teens.
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I'm totally with you! These are huge societal problems we have to solve, and nothing can get better until everyone is taken care of.
The weight of evidence is abundantly clear that the most effective way to reduce interpersonal crime is by reducing poverty, and providing housing & healthcare to everyone. Relatively modest sincere funding of these programs can have a huge impact, and if you had mentioned some of these "other countries and societies that are poorer, but have far fewer of those problems" I might even be able to point to some for you.
Wanting an increase in carceral solutions despite the weight of evidence against their effectiveness is exactly the "irrational proto-religious, emotion based belief and dogma" you're railing against. It doesn't feel fair to a certain worldview to allocate resources in this way. But you need to get over that, because it is what works.