I don't know a name for this emotion

[mellowtigger]

*sigh* Sometimes, I just don't understand government or the people who vote to make it the way it is.

This morning, I looked out my kitchen window and saw a City Of Minneapolis Regulatory Service car sitting motionless in my alley. Was it here to complain about my back yard? I'm not sure what would be the problem. This looks okay from this weekend, right? Or was it here about my neighbor, which had 9 vehicles parked in the back yard recently? It's been bad for weeks/months, but 9 vehicles was a new record, so I took this photo yesterday.

If this is "broken windows policing", then I'm not a fan. These vehicles are not directly harming anything, so why waste taxpayer money on monitoring? I'd much rather have somebody driving around listening for obnoxious noises to track down, so they don't rattle my home windows.  The local noise pollution wears down the mind.  Why doesn't government spend this money instead on monitoring the powerful for stolen wages, missed taxes, or abused authority?

After my experience as a 54-year-old man being arrested at a homeless encampment facing eviction, I can sympathize with this 78-year-old woman arrested for feeding the homeless. There is also video of her arrest and her speaking about it.  Why is this happening? Is it really just religion? What breeds this contempt for humanity?  Seriously, why is this happening?

Why are people voting into office the representatives who make these laws and regulations? Why is anyone using their power in this world to enable such awful things like criminalizing poverty?  Our lives could be better.

Comments

[bitterlawngnome]

Desperate people do desperate things. Living next to one of these camps is always tense, one doesn't go out alone after dusk, one has to add razor wire and more locks and more security or people WILL break in, gangs and dealers move in on camps almost immediately so there are weapons and fencing and chop shops and etc. There is noise 24/7, generators and music and screaming and fights and whatnot. ODs, sirens, cops, more screaming, more fights, weapons used. People start fires and they quickly get out of hand. Cleaning up piss, shit, needles, garbage, and blood so you can use your front door - daily. Garbage accumulates inside the camps; rats rats rats and more rats and eventually disease. Angry fucked up people destroy stuff for no reason beyond expressing their anger. I've lived next door to one and a couple blocks away from another, and even with all the empathy in the world you still have to deal with the negative side effects and they are not trivial. And that's not to mention that the camp is probably located on a park or other public amenity, so the public use of that area is lost.

There's bugger all I can do in the short term as an individual to convince the government to build more social housing, which is the actual solution, but I CAN call the cops and politicians and "demand that something be done", and the cops and politicians are ever-ready for an excuse to look indispensable. Vancouver has a new mayor elected on exactly this premise - he's going to "clean up" the camps, without ever talking about socialized housing. He's going to do this by hiring 100 more cops. And people will throw money at him to do it. The candidates who DID talk about public housing got less than 20% of the already pathetic voter turnout (nowhere in the Vancouver area was it over 39% of eligible voters) and people will tell you upfront it's because they don't see why they should pay for someone else's housing when their own is already so expensive - and that's as far as they're willing to think through the issue. The low voter turnout in itself is a message - most of the electorate do not feel their vote is meaningful.

Or was your question entirely rhetorical :)

[mellowtigger]

I understand and appreciate the points: drugs, noise, fights, theft. But government seems to think that these things are created by encampments, rather than merely concentrated where the needy gather. I think (?) it's the same poverty problem everywhere, so why not finally try to solve the problems where they're easiest to reach? Why insist on "looking busy" and distributing people elsewhere? It's like being angry at birds, so you implement a system for destroying nests. That policy doesn't end birds; it just moves them elsewhere. (Ignoring the conservation egg/reproduction issue for the moment.)

Cost is a different matter. It seems like the same neoliberal capitalism issue that crops up everywhere. With automation, we're on the verge of sci-fi levels of abundance. Or we could be, if we'd stop implementing policies that try so hard to concentrate the wealth upward into the fewest hands possible. Why is housing so expensive? Here in the Twin Cities, most housing is owned by corporations of some variety. Profit. That's why it's expensive. The perpetual effort of the rentier class to extract wealth for having something rather than doing something. I understand that the demand/supply equation can theoretically be complicated, but we've allowed the want of something (housing, medicine, etc.) determine cost rather than the actual measurable cost of production. Target that. Crash the markets of greed. Constrain them forever with law.

There are only a few things that are not renewable in timeframes relevant to human lifestyle. Potable water is one of them, with sanitation issues being "the other half" of that equation. Cities/communities without systemic solutions are terrible. Greenhouse gases are another problem. We are constrained by some limits, sure, but greed is something that we do to ourselves. Our systems treat it as if it can be supported through indefinite growth. I desperately want a grand Reset Button to recalibrate the measurement of our needs and the actual resources needed to provide them.

[bitterlawngnome]

People don't seem to be able to get past the idea that they would be paying for someone else's housing. That's it. Your ideas are faaaaar more complicated than that. The logical response to that concern is to demonstrate that it's actually cheaper to just house ppl or give GBI, and it's been demonstrated several places in several ways, but you can't argue with angry or hungry, people are not coming from a place of rational decision making. The more riled up they get (FB, Fox, etc) and the more wealth is taken away from them (wealth concentration) the less rational and more emotional their decisions become, and that suits the people at the top of food chain very well.

Also I don't think it makes sense at all to talk about "the government". There isn't a government, there's only a whole mass of factions more or less battling each other for primacy, and of necessity that is their number one priority at all times (whatever your agenda might be, gaining or holding onto a position of power is a necessary first step in making it happen). Anything that gets accomplished is only ever in the service of that goal. If you can recast your arguments to help one faction or another feel they will get and hold more power then you have a chance of implementing your agenda, otherwise, you are irrelevant to them.

But again, perhaps you just wanted to vent?

[mellowtigger]

Sorry, I didn't answer your last question. Yes, I'm looking for creative answers. No, it's not rhetorical venting. I seriously want to understand the impediment. I'm tired of repeating the same philosophical arguments and getting nowhere. Your first sentence here may be the ultimate issue. It's the emotional part of perceived loss versus perceived gain. I think that's the psychological crux of the problem, where perceived loss is felt more keenly than an equivalent gain. Systemic solutions are always more complicated than just relocating a problem so we can temporarily stop perceiving it. Stupid evolution. ;)

But I have a thought experiment percolating in my brain. I'll write a new post when I have it better ironed out.

[mellowtigger]

Oh, quick distraction. Back to religion. I've read theories that religion is an invention meant to provide humans with easy-to-identify solutions to complex problems where knowledge is limited. But it's obviously failed CONSIDERABLY here. As a tweet I linked above points out, it's the religious types who seem most AGAINST doing the things that would help! Such a failure! Unless... we need a new religion? Since nobody listens to that longhair hippie freak any more, preferring the gospel of wealth instead.

[bitterlawngnome]

I would argue that religion is doing exactly that here - it's a whole lot simpler to just say campers are bad and should be punished. It's rather a complicated argument to get to public housing or GBI, and for most people completely counterintuitive.

[shimmerwine]

I'm so tired of the world and the hatred. I'd like to find a cave, a warm cave, somewhere and become a hermit.

[mellowtigger]

When we finally have realistic VR and automated production of basic needs, that's actually one of the civilization failure modes that concerns me. Tech could allow us to splinter our population as often as we desire. What if the only reasonable company we can tolerate is ourselves? :) I can sure imagine myself just editing out humans from my perception. Somehow, an individual brain maintains an illusion of singular thought, despite all of its neurons doing their own (often counter-signaling) dance. We need to figure out this process at a larger scale. In my most hopeful moments, I figure this problem is the barrier that galactic civilization is waiting for us to solve before they say hello.

[shimmerwine]

Now that's an interesting take on it!

[geowench]

Because it's your fault. If you are homeless or poor or in ill-health, it's YOUR fault. Legacy or our puritan heritage, or something. I really think this idea that bad luck is a sign of your own poor management/decisions is a big reason why our gvt doesn't try to solve problems like hunger and homelessness. Because those people deserve it. And those in power or who have more $ are there because they also deserve it and/or are in god's favor.
(Just to be clear, this is NOT how I think, but I do genuinely think it is part of the whole criminalizing poverty mentality.)

[mellowtigger]

Yes. I should've thought of this influence. A decade ago, it was already obvious that an entire political party wanted everyone to think we are just "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". I think this mindset pairs quite well with neoliberal prosperity theology.

"Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by maximum market freedom and minimum intervention by the state. The role of government should be confined to creating and defending markets, protecting private property and defending the realm. All other functions are better discharged by private enterprise, which will be prompted by the profit motive to supply essential services."
- "How the neoliberals stitched up the wealth of nations for themselves", The Guardian, 2007 Aug 27

Essential. Profit. That's how we got where we are. Now we have to find a way to change the human psychology of why we got here.

[mrdreamjeans]

It appears one of your neighbors called about the nine cars. The backyard looks like a junkyard. I don't understand why you would be upset over the monitoring. Traffic control routinely monitors the improper street parking around my building. I've already had one of my neighbors t-boned coming out of our driveway because of improperly parked cars. I am grateful they are ticketing.

[mellowtigger]

It's the direction of random surveillance that's troublesome. If that govt car was here because someone called, then that's absolutely appropriate. Govt should investigate and document complaints. Is there a govt agency that randomly audits corporations (video, databases, etc.) to see if they are behaving appropriately (employee pay, employee hours, waste management, etc.)? I think there isn't. It seems like the only time those issues ever face govt scrutiny is when there's a whistleblower or public complaint.

I'm not opposed to surveillance. (I welcome technological telepathy, which is a kind of sousveillance or universal surveillance.) It's the imbalanced, unidirectional use of observation-with-consequence that has far reaching implications. And that's what freaks me out, because it's the pattern that I see pretty much everywhere. That pattern needs to change.