[CFLAddLoader]

While "Empathy for the homeless" can situationally mean talking nicely about them, it also means stopping, blocking, and undoing directly terrible actions against the homeless.

Bulldozing peoples' stuff is in fact pretty bad. Having laws against giving money to people is in fact pretty bad. Putting hostile architecture everywhere is in fact pretty bad. People make decisions, over and over again, to not just hurt homeless people, but also hurt the people trying to help homeless people.

Stopping people from doing that is called "empathy for the homeless". It's called that because saying and feeling bad things about people is part of the process of hurting them. It's how people agree who is and isn't okay to hurt. By stopping group efforts to make things worse, you only have to worry about random individuals trying to make things worse for other random individuals. Which is unstoppable but untargeted.

[pdimitar]

Sounds nice and virtuous... until you remember there exist gangs of homeless people who mug law-abiding citizens, retreat into the structures that you want defended from demolishing, and cry victim when people want to stop their crimes. Not to mention they use the said structures as a hub to distribute drugs to the local community of teenagers.

You see, the problem with every such discussion is the lack of nuance and the willingness to demonize e.g. parents who want their kids to be safe in their neighborhoods.

What you call lack of empathy for the homeless is, in some instances, the concern and actions of the said parents.

So do these parents truly lack empathy, how do you think? Or they say "no matter what hand life dealt you, please just stay away from my kids"?

What's your opinion?

[xboxnolifes]

If people are mugging, they should be arrested. I see no need for the other laws.

[pdimitar]

And if they use abandoned / derelict buildings to group up and start their "operations"? Removing those is a nice first step.

[sagarm]

So, should we bulldoze homes in case they house thieves?

[pdimitar]

I specifically said abandoned / derelict. Shall I point you at the wiki page of a "straw man argument"?

[xboxnolifes]

I'm not interested in policing thought crimes,just real ones.

[pdimitar]

And I also mentioned those. Not sure what your goal is here.

[xboxnolifes]

I read your message as removing abandoned buildings because they might be used as some sort of gang HQ. Either they are doing illegal things and should be put into the legal system, or they aren't.

[rbits]

Your dislike of "gangs of homeless people" existing shouldn't be directed at the homeless people, but the gangs. In an area where black communities have high crime rates, the answer wouldn't be to go after black people, but address the crime directly. I don't see why this should any different.

[pdimitar]

I heard police officers say that lot of homeless people are doing some sort of crime.

It's not an oppression to read statistics. It's a good first step in trying to fix stuff.

[chaps]

God help us; the vagrants are doing some sorts of crime. And reading statistics on this stuff? Hah! The police don't even report crime statistics:

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/07/13/fbi-crime-rate...

[pdimitar]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was a guest in communities where people said they had problems with homeless people on a regular basis.

You are free to not believe it. I for the moment believe my eyes and ears.

[chaps]

Of course that shit happens on a constant basis and it's silly of you to think that my position isn't that shit happens.

Think about it like this: if you had no food, were starving, and the only way to eat for the night is to steal something, wouldn't you do it to? Or are you going to allow yourself to literally die because you're afraid to commit a crime? Nah. You will want to live.

I was once held up at gunpoint by three folk who stole my wallet, keys, phone, etc. Over the next 48 hours or so I watched the phone bill logs to see where they were calling. Hospital and HIV clinic were on the list. I asked the main dude why he was robbing me and he responded, "Man, we're just trying to live."

Grow some empathy for your fellow man.

[btreecat]

> Sounds nice and virtuous... until you remember there exist gangs of homeless people who mug law-abiding citizens, retreat into the structures that you want defended from demolishing, and cry victim when people want to stop their crimes. Not to mention they use the said structures as a hub to distribute drugs to the local community of teenagers.

There are folks who are not homeless who participate in criminal enterprise.

It's unlikely that a successful criminal is homeless, as doing crime successfully generally leaves you with money.

Like wage theft.

> So do these parents truly lack empathy, how do you think? Or they say "no matter what hand life dealt you, please just stay away from my kids"? > > What's your opinion?

Yes, some parents let the empathetic part of their brain that covers people not in their family die. "Fuck you, I got mine" is a popular mentality amongst those who believe in bootstrap and american excepptionalism.

[CFLAddLoader]

My view is that you cannot sacrifice other peoples' lives and belongings, and call it good, without also sacrificing some of your own. It does not actually have to be "an eye for an eye", the sacrifices do not have to be anywhere close to balanced. But willingly hurting other people and paying no price whatsoever cannot possibly be considered good.

> Sounds nice and virtuous Yeah it is. I care about people about as much as it is possible to care about people, because I can't truly separate myself from anyone. If I know someone is happy, I feel like I am happy. If I am aware of someone on death row, I feel like I am on death row. My brain doesn't actually mix up real and imagined sensations, but I lack the ability to hear of something happening to someone and go "that can't happen to me". In some sense, I "am" humanity: I want everyone to be happy and get what they want. I empathize towards trans people and transphobes simultaneously (though ultimately side with trans people). I feel near-completely unable of actually making a difference with anything, but my mind does give me rather strong yanks to "make this war go away" all the time. Though the one exception to all this is people who hurt other people and call it good, especially if they call it "for their own good". I feel quite a lot of rage when I hear about incidents like that.

If you share goals and desires with someone, you are "the same person" as them. You are a "law-abiding citizen". Their successes are your successes, their failures are your failures. You are not the same person as "homeless people". Their successes mean nothing to you. Same with your failures. They are capable of causing problems to you (as all people do), but your desire to retaliate is not limited by the desire to not "cut off your nose to spite your face" that you would have if the cause of the problem was a "law-abiding citizen".

In my understanding of the world, it is not possible to convince you to care about homeless people. The desires of different people are fundamentally not comparable. My desire to stay alive does not outweigh your desire to not stub your toe, and if those desires come into conflict, it does not matter which one wins. (Though as I also consider myself to be you to some extent, I desire both to stay alive and for you to not stub your toe. And you too are probably also "humanity" to some extent, though probably not as strongly as I am. Not that it actually matters beyond simply describing what happens)

I see groups of parents looking out for their kids and feel good. I see groups of homeless people being hurt and feel bad. You go, "I'm defending the lives and non-drugginess of the kids of my community. That makes me a good person". Does it? You are making a decision to help the people you feel closest to at the expense of the people you feel further away from. On one hand, no such decision is better than any other decision. On the other hand, people are being hurt at all.

[pdimitar]

> My view is that you cannot sacrifice other peoples' lives and belongings

..."Sacrifice" them? They are already marked for demolition but the local powers work with the speed of a glacier. You are starting on the entirely wrong premise, I am not surprised that you drew very wrong conclusions.

> Yeah it is. I care about people about as much as it is possible to care about people, because I can't truly separate myself from anyone.

You mistake me for somebody willing to discuss hugely unrealistically optimistic philosophy for 13-year olds. But I'll entertain you for a few minutes.

I have a lot of sympathy for people in difficult conditions. I was this close to being homeless 3 times in my life due to bad choices borne out of a toxic family and zero opportunities in life.

Yet I never mugged anyone. Never did one thing illegal. Had opportunities, mind you.

I am not special. I am not a unicorn, not a hero, fairly normal guy with maybe a little more brain that allowed him to do programming. Maybe. Or could be entirely average and be just deluding myself. Ego gets us all.

If I can avoid mugging people, everyone can.

I have sympathy for you until you draw a knife and command me to give you my wallet. There the sympathy stops. Unconditionally.

The rest is really your own philosophical diatribe. As said to another sibling comment -- sorry that you have no people to discuss this stuff with but I have moved past it maximum at 22 years old (and I am ashamed of myself because I believe I did it very late even; I'll again say this is stuff for teenagers to figure out).

So no, I am not everyone else and not everyone else is me. I wanted that. Wanted it with all my heart. I am so sick of all of us only looking after each other and -- in the very very best-case scenarios, looking out for a local community -- but it simply never happened. Got back-stabbed hundreds of times, still do to this day every time I "expose my belly", so to speak, without failure. Received true kindness maximum 5 times in my life, one of which was my wife treating me the way she did on our first date, another one was a true friend now passed away, the other 3 were actual work opportunities that I botched due to being bitter and physically exhausted (technically my fault).

That was it. And I am in my 40s. Five times receiving kindness in a lifetime.

Collectivism is a fantasy. And historically proven to not work (i.e. communism, the Japanese society, and others). And now I know you'll latch to those words in the parentheses and ignore everything else. Surprise me by not doing it. :)

So, one diatribe to counter yours. But IMO that topic(s) will lead us nowhere. I smell deep and incompatible clash of values. You live a life that allows you to be an idealist. I don't.

[CFLAddLoader]

I'm not actually an idealist. I think all humans are more trouble than they are worth, but that isn't actually a good reason to hurt them.

Doing physical violence does not make someone any more of a problem than they already were just by being alive. Is lying to get someone fired any better than beating them up and stealing their car? Of course not. Violence is substrate-independent. If something matters, humans will both use it to hurt others and hurt others to keep them from using it.

Yes, humans are collective. The tricky part is that they are only as collective as they need to be. Humans adaptively adjust how evil they are to take as much as they can without being retaliated against or burning everything down. Mostly. All the hardwired instincts are buggy and outdated, so they often vastly misjudge the situation.

People do in fact do good, mostly when their surroundings are too broken to survive being evil. But quite a lot of people mostly do good most of the time, because evil is so good at destruction that you need an awful lot of good to even come close to counteracting it.

I mostly think of myself as a good person, but I know that unless the local community is really good at keeping people from hurting others, doing good deeds mainly just supports other people doing bad stuff. It is theoretically possible to go an entire life without hurting others or having your works twisted to hurt others, but your descendents will have the same statistical chances of being evil as everyone elses'. (Plus, minds nudge people to cheat and do bad things whenever they can still think of themselves as good. I am not immune to that. I cannot rewrite my mind to remove the rootkits installed by evolution)

> ..."Sacrifice" them? They are already marked for demolition but the local powers work with the speed of a glacier. You are starting on the entirely wrong premise, I am not surprised that you drew very wrong conclusions.

If people have tents filled with whatever they can get their hands on to help them survive, having the police force everyone away so they can destroy everyone's stuff does in fact count as sacrificing their belongings. You are still only focusing on the ways homeless people slight you, and not on the way homeless people are hurt. "How dare they use buildings we aren't using and haven't cared enough to destroy! Something must be done immediately!". But you just ignore police destroying tents and sleeping bags right before winter, like that isn't going to be directly responsible for a lot of people's deaths.

I understand that in this terrible world everyone is drowning, but that isn't an excuse to pull down other people again and again.

Though the sacrifice part is more for things like civil asset forfeiture. If you let the police seize large amounts of cash from people, you shouldn't let the police keep it. In fact, seizing property should decrease the police budget by a small amount, so they only do it when they think it is actually important. If you claim that hurting another person is super important for society to do, you should willingly hurt yourself to show you are selfless in your intentions.

> I have sympathy for you until you draw a knife and command me to give you my wallet. There the sympathy stops. Unconditionally.

I have slightly more sympathy for people who use physical violence than people who hurt in other ways. Or at least I think people overreact to it because it's pretty much the easiest form of evil to detect. If a doctor systematically doesn't actually attempt to diagnose problems reported by women and just tells them to lose weight, they can easily do as much damage as a cannibal serial killer, and be as deserving of death, but it's way harder to tell they are doing it. (And if an organization were to be created to investigate doctors for this, it would either be irrelevant or twisted into a weapon at the expense of its purpose. Nothing that matters can be good)

So do I like everyone? Do I want everyone to die, including me? Am I an optimist? Am I a pessimist? It changes from moment to moment.

[pdimitar]

So, since you no longer come across as a brainless optimist, let's continue.

> I understand that in this terrible world everyone is drowning, but that isn't an excuse to pull down other people again and again.

Absolutely not what I was talking about. My point from which we started was this: if you use those seemingly-innocent structures as a base from which to mount assaults on hard-working people, the gloves must come off. (And I have witnessed this, a number of times.) You are owed no grace from that point and on.

That was it. Nothing else. Everything else you kind of inferred and started going on side quests. Which I found a little sad because again, maybe you have nobody to talk with about those things. But I am the wrong person for that discussion.

I am not here to discuss the most minute of nuances on how much kindness must we give to less privileged people.

My view is fairly straightforward: I pay taxes, I expect that the-powers-above-me must take care of the people less lucky than me and the actual criminals (two separate groups). I owe society nothing more than my time (my only true limited currency so I am already giving it way too damn much!), my health and part of my resources. I give quite enough already. Those who are paid to figure society out -- well, frakkin figure it out already, what are we paying you for?

That's all. I have nothing else to say on this topic and I'll ask you to not raise it further. I am seriously not interested in any other aspects of it.

> I think all humans are more trouble than they are worth, but that isn't actually a good reason to hurt them.

First part: GOOD! 99.99% of all humans deserve nothing more than indifference in the best case scenario. Second part: I am not hurting anyone. I only wish to be left alone. And even that was too much for way too many pieces of crap out there. Hope that clears it up.

> I have slightly more sympathy for people who use physical violence than people who hurt in other ways. Or at least I think people overreact to it because it's pretty much the easiest form of evil to detect.

Again, stuff for 13-year olds, dude. Of course physical violence is the easiest to react to. Of course our instincts are EXTREMELY outdated and inadequate and of course that is the reason for so much evil going on out there?

You want a medal for what I and a company of semi-drunk teenagers figured out one clear night gazing the stars 30 years ago, when most of us didn't even turn 15 y/o yet? :P

All of this is well-known and understood by many IMO.

Nowadays indeed the non-physical violence is more, by several orders of magnitude sadly, and that's partially my original point: normal hard-working people are pressed from all directions and some of us will not tolerate some homeless cretin thinking he'll get away with my phone. Nope. No chance, no but-s, no if-s, no kiddie philosophy about some imagined kindness. Nuh-uh. I'll die with my wallet in my pocket if I have to and I've proven it (I chased away guys who thought me and my wife were easy targets before).

But physical violence is indeed the easy mode, I'll agree on that.

We can't fight back against so much: inflation that is being shoved down our throats because it's the eternal band-aid and the rulers are too lazy and stupid to formulate something better, the new era of us needing new labor protections because as it is currently capitalism is so rampant and unregulated that we absolutely need another Henry Ford not yesterday but like 20 years now, and all the charming effects of globalism that I won't go deeper on (like the leeching migrants in the EU), that most people simply get severely depressed and just coast on life. And are leeched on.

You want a sad story? That is a sad story. Crush people's will so much that they completely disengage and become worker drones. That, my friend, is the actual tragedy, not the hobos whose biggest problem is where can they secure a few glasses of whiskey for the night.

So yeah, the non-physical violence is way too real in this age.

We live in an era of extreme parasitism.