Mamdani also not just totally reversed his position on homeless encampment sweeps but also got the NYC DSA co-chair to defend the sweeps on Brian Lehrer’s show lol
Both he and AOC rug-pulled some of their progressive backers. It's just good politics to send them to the veal pen if you have enough aura to cow them.
The answer about homelessness doesn’t quite seem to address the question. I’m sure the guy who asked it was aware that some of the “homeless” do have places to live. The homeless issue really hurts Democrats because not only are they not fixing the problem, but they seem committed to actually making it worse by doing absolutely nothing to prevent homeless people from completely taking over public infrastructure. Admittedly Democrats in office have made progress in this area over the past 3-4 years, but much of the rhetoric on the Left is still supportive of the theory of homelessness that held that clearing homeless encampments was unconstitutional and that is still probably the view from the left most often heard on the issue.
I think his point is that this is the reason most technocratic solutions to homelessness are unsatisfying--because the vast majority of people who can't afford a place to live are not the kind of highly visible vagrants that most people think of when they think of homelessness. The problem, then, is that a policy that helps the vast majority of actual homeless people afford homes is not going to fix the problem of nuisance vagrancy, and so you have to separately address that through enforcement. And so making the homeless/vagrancy distinction is important not for some PC reason, but because the optimal policy to solve the broader problem won't address most voters' direct concerns.
I was going to comment that we should perhaps use the word "vagrant" to describe disruptive antisocial people and "homeless" to describe the more sympathetic and larger group. You beat me to it though.
I still have a bunch of antipathy towards the concept of “harm reduction,” because advocates act like it only has upsides. They dismiss the possibility of downsides, incentives, or secondary policies that go along with the advocated policies.
Needle exchanges, safe use spaces, etc often also result in policies that are de facto legalization of narcotics. This makes the public presence of these activities more prevalent and reduces punitive pressures for people to remain sober.
It’s a wicked problem tied up with the worst parts of homelessness. People don’t want to be cruel but there is a perverse cruelty that permissiveness perpetuates.
I’ve recently heard an ad on the radio from the state department of health giving tips on how to use opioids safely; they give tips like starting with small doses and scheduling someone to check on you.
To be completely frank, the ads completely piss me off. All I can think is, “using tax dollars to tell people to be safe with their fentanyl usage is fucking absurd.”
If you’re gonna make an ad, I’d rather it be DARE style about how bad drugs are.
I would not totally mind this type of information being available on an as-requested basis on, e.g., a departmental website. *Broadcasting* it, in the most literal sense, would have me apoplectic.
The policy might work? But it might also normalize the unhealthy behavior and on the margins push a few more people into experimenting with the substance and thus going down the spiral of addiction.
Paragon told me I am ignorant for even questioning the efficacy or potential downsides of actions like this.
Didn’t needle exchanges start up in the early days of AIDS, back when contracting AIDS really was a death sentence? In that context you can make a strong case that keeping someone AIDS-free is way more important than enabling the addiction. But my understanding now is that needle exchanges are trying to stop stuff like Hepatitis- certainly not great to get, but not a death sentence. It seems that really does change the calculus.
Needle exchanges decrease HIV transmission but increase opiate deaths (if you believe the analysis using the rollout of these policies across geographies.)
It’s probably not the policy of needle exchanges causing deaths but correlated polices that tolerated narcotics use and trade.
Going back to my main point, proponents are adamant there aren’t downsides or tradeoffs. There are and this is why we need to at least weigh benefits vs costs.
Progressives pretending that people are crazy for acknowledging adverse impacts or downsides to their proposed policy solutions generates resentment and counterproductive public response.
What if the benefits are weighed and it's decided that the tradeoffs still point to needle exchange. Would you then concede the idea, or is it that you don't want the tradeoffs that entails?
“Progressives” are not the people driving harm reduction. People interested in harm reduction are. Some of them are quite conservative.
Drug potency has been rising considerably. Determining the efficacy of needle exchanges in reducing overdoses is really hard. We’ve also made Narcan much more available, so many variables are changing
The thing is, the current opioid epidemic is not mostly among prostitutes, but rather older whites, so STDs are much less of a problem that needs to be solved.
Errr, it’s both. And if you consider that the state pays for HIV treatment ($4k/month for life) or HCV treatment (~$40k for a course), it’s good fiscal policy to have the exchanges even if you don’t consider the human effects. Now, they should probably run on more of a DoorDash model, bc anywhere you put a physical needle exchange you’re going to get a concentration of local nuisance. Better to spread the love
One of my big complaints is that all the components of "Harm Reduction" get grouped under the "evidence based" umbrella even though only some components of harm reduction are empirically validated for specific outcomes. Needle exchanges do reduce the transmission of HIV, but we don't have much data on distributing foil and pipes, either for HIV transmission or whether they have an effect on the fatal overdose rate. They simply haven't been well studied so it's possible that distributing foil, straws and pipe raises the overdose death rate. And I'm not even going to go into the time someone from the harm reduction team at King County insisted that smoking drugs on the bus should be encouraged because someone could narcan them if they overdosed.
My very grumpy take is that harm reduction needs to decide if it's a science-based public health project or a political project and accept that the public will treat according to the decision it makes.
JPubE has a paper showing that needle exchanges increase opiate deaths. Then there is a JEP showing how the opioid epidemic was supply driven not demand driven.
Also WAT! - “And I'm not even going to go into the time someone from the harm reduction team at King County insisted that smoking drugs on the bus should be encouraged because someone could narcan them if they overdosed.”
My sister experienced similar statements from people in Portland and I have heard of public officials in addictions spaces quoted on podcasts saying similar shit. Never really in the wild though.
I am sure my wife has encountered some of this nonsense in addiction conferences.
Harm reduction, under their own goals and metrics, doesn't work. The main thing that was sold to the public was "we need these touch points so we can pull people into treatment programs, without them there is no where to start", if we implemented these programs we'd finally be able to pull people into treatment and reduce the scourge of drug addition on the streets. But this hasn't been successful at all, theres like a 1% or less rate of people going from a harm reduction program to treatment or other services. The problem is that the junkies really want to do drugs, and the service providers really don't want to stop them for ideological reasons.
The point of harm reduction is to reduce harm. If somebody who will use drugs regardless of your other actions uses a clean needle and avoids infection, they remain healthier and tax payers save the cost of treating their (and anyone they might infect’s) illness. If somebody wants to reduce use but isn’t ready to quit, helping them reduce can save their life and may eventually get them to long term sobriety.
I work in substance abuse treatment. The reason harm reduction is dominant now is because more rigid models are less successful, not because we have an ideological fixation on having people continue to use.
Side note: statistics on the rate of people going from harm reduction to “treatment” are almost impossible to generate reliably. The data collection barrier is huge and since you don’t include harm reduction in treatment, you’re excluding most of the most successful treatment programs, who all have harm reduction models.
As the literal boots on the fucking ground, no. I'm the one who has to deal with all the times your clients decide to inflict their problems on the world around them. I'm also the one who gets to show up when they overdose-including when they die.
As luck would have it, I ended up arresting a homeless drug addict while working out how to reply to this. He's 40; looks 55. Hes unlikely to make it to 41, and I'm fucking positive he won't make 42
Sounds like you want to ensure he doesn't. Don't know what more I can say to you other than the police I've worked with have actually been good at treating people as humans. I hope you're better able to do so than you sound in this post.
The easiest way to ensure he doesn't is to simply stop arresting him. That way, he runs into traffic when he gets high, instead of being forced to go to the hospital to address his infected dialysis catheter and possible pneumonia.
And I treat him as a human. A dumb human; someone who is very bad at being a human; but a human nonetheless. What I don't do is treat him like a character. I don't make up tragic stories about what caused him to become a heroin addict. I don't treat his insistence that he'll turn his life around if I let him go as the start of his redemption arc. I have access to the police records detailing the 20 years of bad decision making that led to this, and I was there for a few of them. I also know just how many times he could have been in prison, instead of on the street, slowly dying, if they had simply held him for a few years on any of the drug felonies he's been convicted of in the past few years.
Look, I want him to live. I want him to change. But I know how it eventually ends. Someone, possibly me, calls the medical examiner to report another overdose death.
"If somebody who will use drugs regardless of your other actions"
Is a terrible assumption to base your whole approach on.
Of course no one quits their addictions when you give them apartment to use drugs in, a 700 dollar monthly cash payment to spend on drugs, a bunch of junky friends and drug dealers inside the building, and all the drug paraphernalia one could want.
I strongly disagree on the merits with the rest of your post but I don't think arguing online is a productive activity and neither of us will change each others minds so feel free reply and have the last word and enjoy the rest of your friday!
I don’t work on that assumption, but people in the field also know many people need to go through treatment several times before they can quit. And there are people who simply don’t want to quit. sB commenters likely do not understand how often hard to treat substance abuse is about covering up terrible pain
My wife and mother in law both work in addiction medicine. One problem with safe use spaces and needle exchanges is that there are dealers preying on vulnerable people near these places.
There is indeed an adverse information component that does lower search costs to some of these policies.
There are three categories of people - those who will use whether you do program A or program B, those who will not use whether you do either program, and those whose use would happen under one rather than the other. No one can be sure what the sizes of these populations are, but if it’s plausible that the committed users are more numerous than the marginal users, then reducing harm to committed users can result in more good than stopping the marginal users. Of course the point holds the other way too if the numbers aren’t so different, and depending on the amount of harm reduced.
maybe, but what we have in the real world today is one giant dial for "tolerance of drug use" that goes from "singapore" to "vancouver BC" and has linear and predictable results at each notch on the dial that are exactly what you would naively predict.
That's not the argument I heard from harm reduction advocates in the 1990s when I first heard about the concept. It was "junkies are going to do drugs anyway, how do we make it less harmful for them to do so?"
the "how do you appeal to people who read the village voice" argument was "they're going to do drugs anyway, lets reduce HIV rates"
the "how do you appeal to the city council to get funding" argument was "this is what we need to do to reduce the number of people addicted to drugs in our city"
We absolutely needed to do harm reduction during the pandemic. People were going to get together socially, so we should have encouraged it in parks and outdoor dining rather than making people meet indoors.
If we look at the failures of cannabis legalization and how it’s contributed to public use, I don’t see how this libertarian stance holds up. What happens when the harms are very disproportionately concentrated, should we tolerate acute immiseration so that people on average have minuscule benefits?
I might be repeating a criticism of utilitarianism.
I mean, if you don't consider the full scope of harms prevented and harms created by any policy change then you aren't really doing "harm reduction". This is the central challenge of doing consequentialism correctly, but the tendency toward analytical laziness / incompleteness afflicts us all.
Just from personal family experience, it is very hard. My brother-in-law, now deceased, was a very successful businessman but he was a drinker and eventually became an alcoholic. He lost everything. Despite having a good support structure of family, he ended up on the streets. All of our interventions failed or were only successful temporarily. Alcohol eventually killed him.
That really changed my mind about this problem. It’s really extremely difficult to get addicts off the street without coercion.
When you spend a great deal of your time volunteering with people exactly like your BIL, the most frustrating thing is that every single thing that makes living outdoors less unpleasant prolongs them living outdoors, instead of holding their hand up and saying "I can't live like this any more", which is the point where intervention actually works. Addicts live outdoors because using is more important than living indoors. Nothing matters more than using. Nothing works until using is more painful than not using.
This is the same reason that 'housing first' is disastrous for addicts. 'Housing first' is a positively evil policy, IMO, and I don't even really believe in the concept of evil. If they even manage to survive the inevitable OD, they end up with serious prison time because of the other behavior that using indoors enables.
Yeah, that tracks with my BIL. He preferred the streets to living with a family member in a house with basic rules. His brother, sister, and wife all tried, but he was intolerable and only cared about where/how to get the next drink.
This is very interesting, because it’s the complete opposite of what “housing first” advocates say, which is that a lot of drug use is a way of coping with living on the streets, and likewise that mental illness symptoms are exacerbated by the stress of living rough. According to these advocates, if you give someone a roof over their head, you restore a bit of their dignity and give them a safe place to live, they’re more likely to find the strength to do the right thing, like seeking help to get off drugs.
Intuitively, this makes some sense. I’ve never been homeless, but I know that when I’m under a lot of stress, I make bad decisions and lapse into bad habits.
I'm aware. It is an easy position to hold until you have actual sustained contact with homeless addicts. It sure does make people who have minimal or un-choreographed contact feel good about themselves, though.
Dealing with a severe addiction in the family is one of the most frightening, frustrating and soul-crushing experiences one can have. I'm sorry you had to go through that.
And this is why I expressed antipathy earlier. We let people just die in public slowly from addiction and for some reason we are expected either to turn a blind eye or tolerate the adverse effects of all this?
True Housing First has never been tried...because regulatory burdens and zoning make it impossible to build enough housing. Also, no one seems to want such housing in their neighborhood? But we're all trying to find the guys who did this.
I resent "hostile architecture" because it's really unfriendly to non-homeless people too. A walkable urban environment is less useful when there are no benches, no trashcans, shops close early, tents obstruct the sidewalks, bus stops no longer have light or heat or real windbreaks...etc.
Housing first is not the answer -- or at least a bad slogan -- for the kind of homeless being discussed here. I think we need to give the drug/mentally addled homeless a private bunk and a locker but you have to expect they won't care for an apartment.
But yes the idea of giving them somewhere else to go is correct but no one wants those people to find living in their city better.
There are no answers or solutions: there is only managing. First you manage with something like housing first. Then you start managing issues around maintenance and people passing out while the faucets are running. You continue managing the tensions between fairness and tenant behavior. You plan on managing fluxuations in available funding. etc.
So if "housing first" yields some decent results, we need to be careful of saying "it doesn't work" and getting rid of it. (For example, it'll work for plenty of "mentally addled" people if they get the right support. I don't "have to expect" anything.)
Just to throw in an Arendt quote about managing expectations: "The reason why we are never able to foretell with certainty the outcome and end of any action is simply that action has no end. The process of a single deed can quite literally endure throughout time until mankind itself has come to an end. "
Housing first does nothing for the vagrancy problem. People with severe mental illnesses and/or fentanyl addicts don’t need a home, they need treatment and in many cases — restraint. And it is the vagrancy/destitution problem that I was asking about in the question.
As for housing addressing the other part of the problem (those who can’t afford anyplace to live), obviously it gets to the heart of the problem. What seems perverse though is when localities try to address this problem by building housing. This is like trying to address food affordability by getting government into the supermarket business.
California has spent tens of billions on the issue with little to show. Yet it can easily be addressed in good part through granny flats, converted garages, mobile homes, or even travel trailers. Just get out of the way!
I agree, hence leading with a double meme format to indicate incredulity and good-natured ridicule. Apologies if it didn't come across clearly.
Would note that from a YIMBY perspective, "get out of the way" is still "building housing", since it creates supply that counterfactually wouldn't exist. Matt alluded to this too, where he says that rising interest rates and a general recessionary economic environment leads to a general HODL mindset where people don't feel comfortable making their spare spaces available (if they could afford spare space to begin with). There's more than one way to spin the cat, it doesn't just have to be new builds. Which of course CA is notoriously bad at too, since we grossly inflate the cost of public and "affordable" housing, it usually still isn't affordable at the low end anyway (years-long lotteries just for a chance to move in!), and concentrating too many "consumers of low end housing" together leads to other unfortunate knock-on effects which drive away investment and good-neighborliness.
"affordable" housing drives me nuts. I mean, there should be housing for people who don't make a lot of money, but it is expensive as hell to build in California, and affordable housing ends up taking longer and costing more than just building regular housing. I always point out that our shitty old apartments aren't "affordable", so why should we expect a brand new building to be? I see affordable housing mandates as a stealth way to slow down construction of new housing by introducing endless loopholes. Feels like it would be cheaper to subsidize the rent for poor people so they can rent market-rate housing and have help paying the rent rather than try to build housing specifically for them.
Yes, there's not zero element of backdoor-NIMBY in the promotion of Affordable In Name Only (AINO) housing. Don't forget the impact of PLAs, "prevailing wage", and other left pork sops. Even when it's genuinely well-intentioned, which I think it mostly is.
What's extra confusing to me is that California already has a long-running nonrefundable "Renter's Credit", which serves the same purpose as a direct rent subsidy, without being tied to rent control or other non-market distortionary measures. Plus it's done through the tax system, so no scarlet letter of Section 8 vouchers. But it's been stuck at $60/$120 for years, and so effectively devalued bigly by inflation, and of course that's peanuts compared to rent itself. It could be made much larger, and also refundable...
I resent the actual low-utility architecture itself, while fully understanding the unsatisfying compromises that led to its implementation. Don't hate the player, hate the iterated game.
I wonder how many people here remember when this all started, and why? Fundamentally it was the decision to close state psychiatric hospitals because supposedly medical science had discovered drugs that made these institutions obsolete (and also because freedom-lovers were offended by the concept of locking up people who either were not criminals or incapable of knowing their behavior was wrong). The idea at the time (late 70s-early 80s I think) was that we could build residential group homes to care for those who needed supervision, which gave rise to the NIMBY movement because *nobody* wanted psych patients living next door. So we end up with people self-medicating and living on the street. Some of this is from psychopharmacology being way oversold as a solution and also society not wanting to spend tax money treating the mentally ill when there is already so much money going into our wildly inefficient system of healthcare.
In 1959 there were 37,000 psychiatric hospital beds occupied in California, when the total population was 15.5 million (one bed per 419 residents). In 2016 there were 6,800 beds, when the total population was 39.5 million (one bed per 5,808 residents). The recommended level is 50 beds per 100,000 in population (one bed per 2,000 residents), which we'd meet today if we had maintained half of the beds we had in 1959. There were legitimate scandals of neglect and abuse in these facilities exposed in the 1960s, which kicked off the dismantling of the system, but as with many movements in the 60s and 70s, it went too far.
It was an unholy alliance of leftists like Thomas Szasz and right-wing small government types like Reagan. Almost all the people who are homeless in a given year are due to economic distress, as Matt says, but they tend to be invisible: only homeless briefly and not wandering the streets ranting. Almost all such people are homeless for years. They are very small in number, but very high in visibility. There are sociological studies on this stuff. They tend not to be substance abusers or mentally ill, but both. It's a shame Matt really didn't engage with this.
I still think of the 2019 report on Bay Area Homelessness by the Bay Area Council as a reliable and practical guide to these issues well worth reading. It is focused on the San Francisco Bay Area counties, but includes comparisons with other large metros nationwide, including the critical distinction between housed and un-housed homeless populations. The report broadly supports the MY conclusion that (1) lack of housing supply and high rent are the most important drivers of homelessness -- including for the populations most likely to be unhoused for long periods of time or needing critical psychiatric services, and (2) that permanent solutions are going to be expensive -- especially for that same population. There are some more cost-effective ways to avoid the cascade of bad luck / bad timing that contributes to evictions that create the entry path into homelessness, but the interventions (limited duration rent assistance, etc.) are outside the normal policy discourse.
If you clear a homeless encampment, where do those people go? Underlying everything is the actual housing shortage.
And if you think the answer is put them in jail, wait until you see the price tag for that, it would swallow a whole lot of state/city capacity, and make successful governing even harder. It makes subsidized housing look like a bargain.
They should go to the clean safe shelters that we didn’t build with the $20 billion dollars (in just California) that we already spent (or is the word wasted) on the issue.
True, but the encampments are not safe and create a lot of safety and public health and environmental hazards. Being homeless doesn't mean you get to have a sprawling trash pile taking up half a city block. There are constant fires with the encampments in berkeley and oakland.
But you can't really address the problem compassionately because if you actually gave a good solution that made homeless lives better you'd get everyone's homeless.
Not really true IMO. The functional homeless folks living elsewhere have jobs and social ties and such. Making housing cheaper in your city won’t pull them your way in numbers greater than it will attract anyone else.
Helping the “bum” population will require coercive measures that won’t attract them from elsewhere.
The functional homeless ofc but I thought we were talking about the ones who are actually an issue. The functional homeless aren't a problem for democrats you don't know who they are.
See, there you go talking about "homeless" and "homeless" as two different categories, just like the post noted. I kind of like how some people in this thread have started calling the people shitting in the streets "vagrants". It's a good word.
We can start talking about what to do about vagrancy, and its clearer what the actual issue is.
The problem i see locally (i live near berkeley) is that there are sweeps, which are expensive, and then the people swept mostly refuse the housing offered, and camp out somewhere else, create another hazardous situation, then that area gets swept, and they go back to the first area and the cycle repeats. So it is expensive and doesn't really solve the problem. And there are vocal advocates locally that make it harder to conduct sweeps and another set of vocal advocates that make it harder to build new housing, so the cycle continues. I'm in general pro-sweeps because the encampments are dangerous and a health hazard and I think being homeless doesn't mean you need to build a sprawling dump, and if you annoy people enough maybe they'll find somewhere else to go or accept one of the offers of housing because a not-great housing situation beats getting hassled and moved along every few weeks.
But I think the vast majority of even progressive people agree that allowing someone to wallow in their own filth on public property is not great, and we should have a different solution....which depending on your political orientation is either supportive housing, forced rehab/institutionalization, or prison, all of which are expensive.
" I think most of the country has reached a kind of corrupt bargain where, instead of spending money on fixing things, politically moderate and conservative jurisdictions dump the troubled people onto progressive jurisdictions where the residents either tolerate it or leave."
Basically this. Conservatives want low taxes, and enough liberals believe in the right to die on the streets as an unproductive drug user (or themselves want low taxes) that nobody favors the civil commitment that would not only get these people off the street but also save a few of their lives.
The one thing I would add is it really is a form of "antisocial behavior". I get that drug addiction is real, but that doesn't mean there aren't choices involved. You can see the choices in what jurisdictions they move to, and you can also see it in their histories, which usually involve alienating their friends and family and refusing to hold down jobs or housing that would require them to obey rules and take responsibility for themselves.
My guess is if we actually shelled out the money and did the civil commitment and ensured that part of the commitment program was that they never be allowed to touch drugs again, with real monitoring, we would turn some lives around. Because, denied the option of refusing work, sleeping on the streets, and getting stoned, some of these folks would become productive citizens again. Others might just have to stay in civil commitment a long time, but we would at least save their lives.
Letting them get high on the streets, and refuse to be productive citizens, until they die young (the current policy) is cheap and cruel.
The conservatives are willing to apply the firmness but not spend the money whereas progressives are willing to spend the money but not apply the firmness. Ideally we'd spend the money and apply the firmness, but that won't happen if we're outsourcing state capacity to third parties who think it's wrong or for whatever other reason aren't able to do it.
Third parties benefit from social problems they nominally address remaining unresolved. Without a firm metric of success and timeline, they just perpetuate.
I'm not convinced it's that cynical, and indeed it might be easier if it was because it would suggest they can be bought. I think the organizations involved just legitimately believe really dumb things.
Absolutely, 100%. But it’s also easier to believe dumb things when they pay your salary. Orwell: "It is difficult to convince a man of something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it."
And your dismissiveness about the stewardship of public money undermines trust. Why are tax dollars going towards middlemen with well compensated leadership when the state should be providing public services?
I don’t know if you watch The Pitt, but I feel like it really illustrates the knots that bien-pensant progressives (who definitely run that writers’ room) tie themselves into on drug addiction. When a poor person is addicted to drugs, a young doctor who says “I don’t understand why someone would do that to themselves” is chided for his lack of empathy. But in a later episode, when a rich white guy assaults a nurse in a state of crazed disorientation, the revelation that he did it while under the influence of alcohol and cocaine is treated as a sign of his moral badness (he angrily rejects rehab to drive home the point). Yes, the guy chose to use drugs and reject rehab…but all of the poor drug and alcohol abusers the ER deals with made exactly those choices at some point earlier! That’s how they became addicts!
When a poor person is addicted to drugs (and does not violently assault a member of the hospital staff) he is treated with more understanding and tolerance than the upper middle class man who, under the influence of alcohol and cocaine (tries to strangle a young nurse, and then tries to lie about it in order to avoid responsibility). And even then, there is beef between the head nurse who protected the young nurse by sedating the attacker, and the head of the ER, who is worried about her use of the sedative, which might expose the hospital to liability. The story line is very clearly about the appropriate response to violence, not about drug use "choices", and our sympathy as viewers is clearly directed toward the protective head nurse. There are no progressive "knots" being tied anywhere in this storyline.
When Dana (the head nurse) gets the toxicology report showing the attacker was under the influence, this doesn’t cause her to view the guy’s actions less harshly. Instead, she furiously strides over to the room where the guy is and slams the report on the window for the physician to see. The impression is that the guy’s drug use exacerbates the badness of his actions. This impression is strengthened when the guy protests that being charged will ruin his life, and the doctor scoffs, “Anyone who can play golf and buy cocaine can afford a lawyer”: the coke lessens our sympathy for him, it doesn’t increase it.
(Whether the guy is lying about attacking the nurse, or simply was blacked out, is unclear. It’s obvious he was legitimately tweaking out—he has no sober motive to attack her—but I guess we’ll never know whether he actually remembers.)
Of course you’re right that there’s a big difference between attacking someone, and not attacking someone. I just think the show is inconsistent about when empathy is called for and when it should be withheld (the doctor who has no sympathy for the golfer asshole was herself convicted of a violent crime and had to wear an ankle monitor, something we’re supposed to sympathize with her for). It’s reminiscent of, for instance, people saying that people with mental illness and disabilities shouldn’t be stigmatized or dehumanized, BUT when Kanye West engages in anti-Semitic rants or a guy with Tourette’s uses the N-word at an awards show, their conditions don’t enter into it; they’re just bad people.
The significance of the toxicology report she brandishes is that it constitutes evidence that he was under the influence of a psychoactive during his attack on the junior nurse, which is both illegal (cocaine) and undercuts his claim that he does not remember and does not think he attacked the nurse. The tox report goes to his credibility in the upcoming police interrogation (which is happening because he is being charged with the assault, not the drug use), and it helps to justify the senior nurse's (unauthorized and irregular) use of a pre-filled syringe of Versed to sedate him during the attack. So the gist is "you are not going to be able to weasel out of responsibility for this attack by claiming the senior nurse used unnecessary means to stop the attack", not "drug use is morally reprehensible".
In fact, the season-long subplot about the senior attending (Langdon) who re-enters the ER after drug rehab is a good example of the show's attitude and treatment of drug use. Langdon has taken the necessary steps (rehab, etc.) to regain his position, but some members of the staff do not believe he can ever be trusted after he lied and stole meds from patients while in the throes of his addiction, while other members of staff welcome him back and appreciate his talent, friendship and recovery. It's unclear how much of the negative reaction is to the addiction itself (can a once-addicted physician ever be trusted again?) and how much is to the specific violations of professional responsibility and patient trust. And pointedly, they include a scene in which Langdon confesses and apologizes to the chronic alcoholic / addict patient from whom he stole medication, and the patient forgives him, saying something along the lines of "I know what it's like to be addicted." The apology and forgiving happen shortly before that patient dies of the complications from decades of alcohol and drug use. I don't think this subplot is built into the show to make a didactic point about the morality or immorality of drug use, but it does illuminate the short and long-term dangers of addiction.
That said, I’m not sure why it would be true that him being on a potent combo of booze and coke would mean that he must remember the attack. Isn’t it the opposite? Drink by itself can make someone black out; I don’t see why adding cocaine would reverse that.
I think Langdon is a great example of how the show treats drug addicts with empathy. How people should feel about him, whether he should work in the ER, these are difficult questions that different characters answer differently, for reasons that themselves invite empathy. But we’re never encouraged to harden our hearts to him. We’re also supposed to empathize with Dr. McKay, who—I want to reiterate—is not only a recovering addict but also was convicted of a violent crime. (Javani gets rebuked for gawking at McKay’s ankle monitor.) We’re obviously supposed to empathize with Louis, and with the addict in the park, both of whom Ogilvie is callous about in a way that illustrates his awkward, much-to-learn quality. I’m talking about empathy a lot because the show talks about it constantly, invoking it not just for drug addicts for other characters whom society ostracizes for their supposed bad choices: the malnourished prisoner, the obese man (another Ogilvie gaffe), etc.
And yet there are a few characters with whom we clearly are not supposed to empathize. And this golfer guy is one of them. He bears a strong resemblance to Doug Driscoll, the asshole who slugged Dana in Season 1, but whereas Doug’s malice had no explanation, golfer guy’s does: he took coke and alcohol together, not knowing what the effect would be. But now there’s no suggestion that this guy made bad choices for which we should have any understanding. Instead, the coke cuts against him: it shows he’s rich and privileged, it impacts his credibility as you said. Dr. McKay is the perfect person to say, “Look, you did something bad and you have to face the music. But in a funny way, I’ve been where you are. Your life isn’t ruined; this could be what you need to turn things around.” Instead, when he angrily rejects help (anyone know if that’s something addicts are known for?), she isn’t saddened; she’s grimly amused. It’s all very understandable, it just seems inconsistent with the show’s values around drugs.
I agree with your observations about empathy - I think that is the deep bass line of the show. I also agree that we are encouraged not to empathize with certain characters, but I think that is because they are violent, destructive, disruptive ... or themselves display a lack of empathy. The golfer is an easy case: he's violent, then he displays a lack of character by trying to deny his violence, then he low-key threatens legal action the nurse who had to sedate him. He has none of the redeeming qualities we see in Langdon, Louis or McKay (all of whom are non-violent addicts or recovering and remorseful addicts), nor even in Ogilvie, who I think is cast in an ambiguous light because he is shown to be the least empathetic (though highly competent) member of the medical staff (at least in the current season). I think if you re-write the golfer scenario with his violence but without the subsequent revelation of his additional character flaws, you would get a pretty standard Pitt scenario, in which even his drug-induced violence could have been excused (if not exactly forgiven) by the more empathetic cast members (McKay seems to be tending that way until he reveals his additional character flaws).
I don’t watch it, but, yeah, if you’re working with people with addiction, you need to be compassionate towards them regardless of demographics. Nobody chooses addiction, and wealth does not equate to good experiences. Trump is a great example of a man who would be completely miserable if he were merely rich and couldn’t have paid for all the lawyers who enabled him and his reckless choices
They’re differently situated. A poor person who has nothing else good going on in his life chooses to use drugs is more understandable than a rich person who could get massive amounts of pleasure in so many other ways choosing to use drugs.
I wonder if the status quo has ended up in a place where we're spending/losing more money than just building (in my state) a 300 bed security hospital. You read articles about the transit agency spending $50 million on security, the amount per person being spent year after year on "connecting them to services," the huge loss of property tax revenue, etc and I don't know, does this get close to the cost of building and running the hospital?
It's $125k/year/person here in California to keep someone locked up in prison. It's hard to imagine with all the money we're collecting for homeless services but the current status quo of shunting them to the margins and only responding if they act out is on the cheaper end.
I don't know if you realize both how truly expensive and horrible commitment is. For people where there is no other option ok fine but that's not true for 90% of even the problem homeless.
They'd happily keep their problems private if you gave them somewhere with privacy to sleep and a locker to keep their shit in. It will be way cheaper and less cruel than commitment. It doesn't happen because of that corrupt bargain. No one wants to attract all those people without the money to pay for it and conservatives will use the fact that privacy will let them use drugs as an excuse not to allow federal funds to follow for such uses.
In fairness we have absolutely tried to give free housing and it's often just destroyed. I have a family member who was a super of a building like this in Seattle. In one year I think there were something like a 6-7 opioid deaths, a dozen more completely destroyed apts that were essentially uninhabitable after, and a parking lot where everyone's cars were eventually beaten up by drug abusing drivers returning in a stupor and just hitting other parked cars over and over. My family member left halfway through as she couldn't stomach walking into apts with dead bodies any longer. Eventually the building owner turned it into section 8 and dropped the grant money/non profit approach entirely. The level of care at the bottom end is essentially hospice level treatment not simply a room to crash.
There are levels to this. 2/3rds of homeless are not chronically homeless and do just need a place to stay for a temporary time, and we have that solution already. Of the chronically homeless, I would guess another 2/3rds need only some room and regular checks. But that final 1/3 needs no joke 24/7 monitoring to not completely destroy themselves and others imo
The Seattle times did some reporting on water setoffs in supportive housing. Basically if you use more than a certain amount of water in a period of time, your water shuts off, which lowers the building's water bill and also reduces the damage from someone flooding their apartment. A lot of people were having their water shut off. And the advocates were going on about how it was unfair because many of the residents were too mentally disorganized to shut off the faucet when they were done getting water, or were running the faucet in the tub for hours on end to drown out the voices. It was clear that many of the people in supportive housing really did need to be in some sort of facility because they could not safely live o their own.
They wouldn't happily keep their problems private! They often reject housing that comes with basic rules like "don't use drugs here where families are located".
And there's also an obligation to contribute to society. I am all for anyone who can hold down a job and supporting themselves being left alone with respect to their drug use. But these people don't work- they can't because fhat would require them to not be stoned all the time the way they enjoy.
Yes we should pay to solve the problem. But civil commitment IS the solution. And by the way, it's a deterrent too. If it is well known that society expects every young man to work and contribute to society and will not accept any long term residency on the streets getting stoned, young men will realize this isn't an option and some of them will end up in rehab rather than dead on the streets.
A million times this. As an urban lib I feel like the policy are choices I am presented with isn't some major investment in building new humane social systems designed by Keith Humphreys and run by compassionate professions but rather the status quo (which isn't great!) or, well, forms of "social cleansing" (see South Korea under the military government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_Home for how this actually tends to work) advocated by various very online types who are furious they have to see a poor person the two times a year they come downtown. As a lib if I'm forced to chose between the options, I pick the former rather than the later.
My thing is that, almost a decade into this, the "they just hate poor people" thing has gotten incredibly grating. I'm still out there, going outside, not working from home, not getting my groceries delivered, not taking Ubers everywhere, etc. It's a lot worse than it was in 2015. It is legitimately hard to understand the perspective of the people who are not seeing this. And I'm friends with a lot of them, they just tend to not spend much time in or around the downtown Target but do manage to have a lot of takes about what it's like.
I agree we are stuck in a bad equilibrium! I have sympathy for your plight! But forced to choose between the options, I choose the grating option over what some people are proposing instead (which as far as I can tell will probably end up being like that Soderbergh lost gem Unsane)
The current policy isn't compassionate to the long term homeless. It kills them on the streets. It only seems compassionate to those who have a baseline view that there should be a basic freedom to refuse to work and support oneself and to get stoned all day until one dies young.
You're not responding to my points at all counselor. A hypothetical fully funded humane system designed by Keith Humphreys and run by compassionate professionals would be great, but that's not really on the policy menu in my experience. (To be sure I'm with Matt that we should enforce rules about public order, especially on public transit, and encampments are bad and should be humanely cleared, but you aren't calling for stepped up foot patrols and more "defensive architecture" on bus stops, right? As far as I can tell you want something quite different.)
This kind of narrative is just pretty different from what I see with the homeless people who camp in the park near me. They are unsightly but have never bothered me when I go by them and I go by them all the time including with small children. My family members who complain most about them are the healthcare workers complaining that they treat the hospital as a hotel and take up a lot of expensive care that our taxes pay for. I do not know if they would be better off or not in civil commitment but their lives as do not seem obviously hellish, some of them have bicycles and I even saw one with a kayak once. Maybe my local homeless are exceptionally nice for some reason and I am not seeing a representative sample. But If I had to choose I think I would also prefer camping in the park over being in prison.
They steal the bikes; I live in a city where fancy bikes are popular and it's amazing how many $2,000 bikes the obviously homeless seem to ride around on.
One of my coworkers lives in an exurban area and there is an encampment along a bike trail near his house. They apparently try to entice kids to come into the encampment.
I'm not pretending that at all, I'm saying it's for the good of the park and the citizens who enjoy the park. That's why no one, no matter how desperate their circumstances are alleged to be, gets to sleep in the park, period. ("Where are they going to go?" That's absolutely their problem. This idea that because a person exists, that's a problem for everyone else -- it's sick, and among other things it means everyone has a strong interest in having far fewer people around, which isn't a great incentive structure!)
I visited a state run facility that housed seriously mentally ill adults who were subject to what we call LPS conservatorships in California which means that the state rather than an individual initiated the conservatorship. The facility looked not unlike a public school from the 1950s with 3 to 4 people per room and television as the primary form of activity. As a person who is pretty introverted I left understanding why family members would want their loved ones there rather than on the street but I honestly would prefer living on the street to living in that facility. The lack of freedom or privacy and forced togetherness seemed unbearable.
I once visited an actual low-security prison and it reminded me a lot of the public school I went to! Just the aesthetics of it. A lot of it probably built by the same contractors lol.
There is a man here in Chicago who places himself outside the doors of my local Jewel-Osco and harangues every customer going in and coming out to give him money. The number of times I have wanted to shout "Would that you permit me to transit without repeatedly importuning me for alms!"
Another time, after telling a woman I do not carry cash or change (because I don't), she then proceeded to loudly shout she didn't want my loser money, and then called me fat.
So what? They should be working, following the rules, holding down an apartment, and if taking drugs is what prevents them from doing that, not using drugs. This is a community and they owe obligations to it as citizens. They should be out of that park and acting as responsible citizens. Or institutionalized and forced off drugs forever if they can't make that happen.
Modern society is pretty complicated and technologically advanced and it’s not clear that everyone has the capability to be productive. AI will drive this point home to more people I think.
And your initial comment was claiming you’re doing this for their own good. If you want to force them to comply with some notion of duties that’s fine but then don’t pretend you’re doing it for their own good. I don’t think institutionalizing them makes them better off. I wouldn’t want to be institutionalized if I were in their shoes, and other commenters have said the same thing.
I don’t know about turning lives around….mostly it would just be keeping them in the institution and providing (prescription) drugs. That’s what civil commitment is—you keep them off street drugs by literally keeping them off the street, out of society, in a place where they don’t have choices.
I think people don't realize there's plenty of intentional behavior here. If you are the sort of person who alienates all your family, feels no obligation to society, hates following rules, hates work, and enjoys being stoned, a homeless camp in a warm weather west coast city is very attractive.
A society that denies that type of person that option may result in some people realizing that a sober life working and following rules on the outside is more attractive than a sober life in a mental institution. So it may save lives. The key is denying them the option they would like to exercise.
All of those adjectives could describe plenty of professionals making $500k lol. I’d say those things are very normal actually—isn’t the dream to have “duck you” money so that you don’t have to follow rules or work and can alienate whoever you want? The difference between the upwardly mobile rich guy seeking duck you money and the homeless guy may be IQ or education or family background and connections but it isn’t prosocial attitudes…
The difference is a professional making $500k a year is a productive member of society following rules and meeting their basic obligations to their fellow human being. If they can do that and manage a drug habit we shouldn't intervene.
But the deal is if a person decides to alienate everyone in their life, not follow basic rules, and refuse to contribute the work he owes to his fellow community members because he would prefer to be a creep on the streets who gets stoned all day, THAT'S an anti-social choice whereas the professional is not making an anti-social choice. Which means we need to stop him and deny him that option so he gets to decide how he will fulfill his citizenship obligations. And, if we do that we will save some lives because the "freedom to kill yourself on the street" is cruelty, not compassion.
My brother and I have a half-serious joke that the federal government should step in on the nuisance vagrancy problem by converting the Oklahoma Panhandle into some kind of semi-wilderness preserve. House nuisance vagrants from the entire country there in something like CCC camps.
I'm not sure the optics of "move all the people we don't like to Oklahoma" are great lol, though maybe history education is lacking enough that people aren't aware of the Trail of Tears
If we take protectionist logic at face value, that cheap imports destroy domestic industry, then the most devastating economic weapon imaginable wouldn't be a blockade. It would be an imposition of free trade. Economic sanctions on Cuba/Iran/Russia should take the form of forced free trade.
Time to brush up on some pre-20th century history- this is exactly how colonial powers used to behave. Britain was the 'workshop of the world', and they forced their colonies to open up to 'free trade' with them whether they liked it or not. The whole pre-1980s model of world trade was 'rich countries physically manufacture the goods and then ship them to poorer countries', and it's why first the UK and later the US were so strongly pro-free trade.
Selective free trade was literally an imperial weapon, turning weaker countries and colonies into captive markets for metropolitan manufactures. This is what the West did in China, this is why the US forcibly opened up Japan to outside trade- coercive treaties literally prevented the Japanese from enacting tariffs on Western goods until 1911. This is part of what the American colonists were so angry about it- Britain forcibly favoring their own industries- and the newly formed US immediately tariffed British goods. Historians have been documenting 'imperial free trade' like..... forever
I think it's wrong to put this in a colonial frame. This is also what the European powers did to each other. They were not free traders, they viewed trade as another weapon to wield in their wars and were mercantilist to the core.
For instance when Napoleon was trying to bring down the UK he instituted the Continental System, which was basically trade with me and close your ports to British vessels. One of the main reasons his alliance with Russia didn't prosper is that this made a lot more sense for France than Russia, and he demanded his allies be part of the Continental System.
European powers tried to do this to each other (culminating in Nazism) but they were largely powerful enough to resist it. Non-European countries were not.
1. This is a good refresher! Aligns with what we studied in history texts in middle & high school (what the British did in India in particular) though even then it was presented as one "school of thought".
2. In general, historians' grasp of history is good, and their grasp of economics or trade less so. Or at least they frame things as zero sum because wars and conflicts are zero or negative sum.
3. The problem with colonialism was the coercion, state-backed monopolies, and lack of property rights. Not the trade! Adam Smith had it right. Smith argued that maintaining a global empire was a massive drain on the British taxpayer, existing primarily to enrich politically connected monopolies like the East India Company through rent-seeking, rather than genuine market competition.
This is not dissimilar to what's happened as a result of exchange rate manipulation and insanely high subsidies to industry by neo-mercantilist powers since 2000 or so, just that the recipient nations' neoliberals are stupid enough to believe they're getting a good deal.
I generally agree but to steelman the other side many rich countries did force free trade on poor countries through gunboat diplomacy in the 1800s and it was devastating in most cases; China remembers it as the “Century of Humiliation” and Chinese people actually got shorter, and it was so devastating to the Ottoman Empire that the term “capitulation” which just meant a “chapter” of a treaty now means complete surrender even in English.
Free trade is good generally but poor countries also need a developmentalist state with enough bargaining power to extract concessions like tech transfer from multinational corporations so they don’t get all the value.
Yes, If you don't have rule of law, inclusive rather than extractive institutions, allow for creative destruction, free trade is not going to save you. But then neither is protectionism.
I think the (non-stupid) protectionist argument is slightly more nuanced than this, or at least more sensitive to initial conditions in the relative allocation of labor and capital.
AIUI the initial protectionist argument is fundamentally about capital: Country's First Domestic Auto Factory is extremely unlikely to be competitive on efficiency and product quality with longer-established peers in industrialized nations in competitive markets, and the more that outputs are capital-dependent rather than substitutable with labor[1] the less the labor-cost advantage of your current labor-heavy, capital-light economy actually matters. So you use protectionism to assure above-market returns to inferior products in order to bootstrap domestic investment in capital. Then (if you do it right) you try for gradual import-substitution over time by loosening tariffs to spur competitiveness from a nonzero industrial base[2]. So if you have a lot of extremely high-capital low-labor-input industries, free trade might be a decent way to beggar thy neighbor on the assumption that Cuba is unlikely to, say, develop a homegrown space launch company rather than just buying capacity from SpaceX.
If, alternatively, you find yourself in the position of the United States where the Koreans work brutally long hours to produce capital-intensive goods at lower prevailing wages than your own industries (and for some reason your factories haven't all moved to China, which of course in practice they have), high tariffs to protect domestic industry seem like they're basically an indirect form of domestic wage subsidy and/or industrial policy to make sure you don't totally lose knowhow in the way that happened to the US shipbuilding industry notwithstanding the Jones Act. This, uh, doesn't seem like it should work long-term without some kind of domestic output sustaining those high wages, but that's sort of getting into this territory -- https://youtu.be/axHoy0hnQy8?t=41 .
[1]. Though I'm not an economic historian, I would imagine that the traditional "infant industries" during the Industrial Revolution probably often fit this mold pretty well--there's not really any amount of poor farmers you can substitute for a blast furnace. Not that that stopped Mao from trying a century later....
[2] AIUI This is basically the Korea Story, although unfortunately they appear to have hit a competitive equilibrium that's stalled out at substantially lower prevailing wages than the US with an immiserating, totalizing work and study culture, an unbelievably steep bifurcation in outcomes based on whether you work for a chaebol or not, and a cratering birth rate. So, uh, proceed with caution.
1. A state that finds itself in the first situation is unlikely to have the state capacity to enforce and collect tariffs fairly. Or the institutions to distribute gains fairly. There is large scale smuggling, corruption in setting different rates for different products, permanent pleas for protection, etc.
2. A lot of good the Jones Act has done! Fewer, more expensive ships, and ~0% of the world's commercial ship building output.
Yes. Jones Act delenda est. As I've observed elsewhere, if the US actually had a marine shipbuilding industry worth a damn you could at least make the *argument* that it's doing what it's supposed to, but we don't even have that!
I'm less sure about (1) though, not because tariffs don't invite all sorts of political-economy mischiefs (they obviously do) but because at least a few countries have genuinely succeeded in import-substitution even if various others have fucked it up (also apparently there's some story whereby at least certain sectors of Russian industry may actually have increased in capacity post-2014 due to sanctions creating a more autarkic regime, although it seems like it's a mixed bag at best).
The entire chronic long term homelessness issues comes down to this one concept:
The NYTimes did an article a few weeks back about the biggest cause of preventable death in America - high blood pressure. It helpfully noted that 90% of people can get their blood pressure under control with treatment. And then an article a few weeks later about the 10% of people who don't respond to GLP1s. But when it does an article about the chronically homeless mentally ill and drug addicted they somehow are under the impression that it's all 100% treatable with drugs and therapy.
I've never been able to get an answer to the question of what to do with the 10% who are treatment non-responsive. Because if someone did respond well to treatment when they had their first mental health episode they wouldn't be homeless to begin with. These people are where they are because, in many cases, they just can't be fixed.
Many of those homeless people aren't crazy crazy ... they have demons that push them to look for escape and then end up with serious drug addiction. In a way that is treatment resistant because our medical system is unwilling to recognize that some people are unhappy to a point that only extreme hard drugs are able to relieve (until we invent something better).
Honestly the solution other countries came up with is just to give them places to do that in private that don't bother the rest of us. We can't bring ourselves to do that plus the state system means you risk pulling more people in that situation.
No I think they forcibly institutionalize them. Example:
“Finnish mental health legislation takes a medical approach to compulsory measures, emphasising the need for treatment of psychiatric patients over civil liberties concerns... Finland has the highest rates of detention per 100 000 inhabitants, about 214 compared with 93 in the UK and 11 in Italy”
"Honestly the solution other countries came up with is just to give them places to do that in private that don't bother the rest of us."
Right, places in state mental hospitals that they never closed*. They key is the people can't leave.
* In Germany, for example, there was a move to community based care where appropriate and state hospitals became less crowded, but they were never closed. Bed capacity fell by half not 90% like in the US.
I am very well aware and I've spent time with these people. What you are missing is there are many forms of mental illness with full on psychosis being relatively rare. There is a very large fraction of people who have serious mental health issues and take drugs to self-medicate but are perfectly aware of reality and don't want to cause anyone harm.
Thing is we haven't solved homelessness except for this 10%. We have a lot of regular homeless people, or people that only become addicts once they fall into that environment.
This is a hard problem to solve but there's lower hanging fruit that is going unaddressed.
"Tibita Kaneene: How should a rational dem allocate $100 give today"
<rant>
a rational dem shouldn't give any candidate $0.01 unless they promise to never sell your phone number, or text you. emails are as bad, but you can keep unsubscribing/ reporting as spam. but the texts just dont stop.
as someone who gave in 2020, I am not giving a single $0.01 via actbloo or whatever till they figure this bullshit out.
Also - if you are claiming to be the party of integrity, you should not resort to blatant lies to try to raise money. WE HAVE A 500% MATCH ON EVERY DOLLAR RAISED TIL MIDNIGHT AND ITS GOING STRAIGHT TO FUNDING RELEASE OF EVERY TRUMP MENTION IN THE EPSTEIN FILES.
IF YOU DONT DONATE RIGHT NOW WE WILL LOSE THIS ELECTION.
I’m sorry, I guess it’s effective, but we should maintain some degree of integrity.
I continue to be somewhat confused by Matt's analysis of the "anti-Israel" issue. This mailbag's analysis sounds reasonable, but the one about cozying up to Hasan Piker didn't. I think the main problem is that vague polling questions, e.g., "Do you approve of Israel?", make it very hard to distinguish between:
1. A view that our policy should be less favorable to Israel, e.g., cutting off aid or not looking the other way on settlement expansion.
My guess is that this is the view that's prevalent among the general public, and, in particular, the base of the Democratic party. When you ask a suburban wine mom "Do you like Israel?" she has a vague idea that Bibi is bad.
I don't think most American Jews would care too much about a Democratic party that moves away from Israel in this sense. There may be some over-enthusiastic people who call these mild policy changes antisemitism (and the left gets a lot of mileage out of trolling Jews about this), but even Bibi and the Kahanists agree with some of these policies.
2. A view that the people of Israel are something close to ontological evil while its enemies are something close to ontological good. This issue should be at the center of one's moral compass. While political violence is never acceptable, one can't help but understand why one would commit violence against those who don't hold this view.
I think this is the anti-Israel view held by people in the media, academia, etc. E.g., the Pod Bros frequently citing Drop Site, all of those obviously-false statistics alleging to show that Israel is uniquely evil (they killed more journalists than the Nazis!), people being somewhat sympathetic towards the Michigan synagogue terrorist, etc. Crucially, this latter view is what you would need to take if, as Matt suggested, you want to go on Hasan Piker's show and agree with him on Israel.
Again, the left gets a lot of mileage out of (correctly) pointing out that this derangement is not classical antisemitism. What really grinds my gears is when they further suggest that since it's antisemitic to link Jews with Israel, actually Jews should stand *against* antisemitism by adopting this view. (I.e., that the war on half the Jews is righteous.)
I think it would be utterly shameful for American Jewish institutions to take this view. When I hear American Jews say that this would be the best way to defuse antisemitism, I think it's pathetic. Barbarians are shooting rockets at half your people, and you're worried about people calling you names?
The view Matt took about Hasan is that people should go on his show and say that the government of Israel is bad and we should stop giving them money. The view that you can't go on anyone's show and express your points of agreement with them while not endorsing all the outer crazy stuff they say is part of the problem here. Joe Rogan also believes lots of crazy stuff.
I don't know about this. If you want to argue against affirmative action, e.g., I think it's very different to (a) announce it on Fox News, or (b) announce it on David Duke's radio show. Doing this sends all sorts of signals that people will draw inferences from whether the candidate likes it or not.
You’re not doing the “divided loyalties” trope any favors by calling the citizens of a foreign nation that’s been increasingly acting in a manner hostile to American interests “your people” from the perspective of American Jews.
I don’t see how this is expressing any sort of dual loyalty? Like, if the US were at war with Israel, I’d support the US. I don’t think the Jewish tradition of being a people (going beyond individual adherence to a religious doctrine) conflicts with this.
No one finds it strange that some random Bangladeshi-American has an affinity for Palestinians, or that Irish-Americans have an affinity for the Irish (even when they were terrorizing a US ally). Nor, for that matter, would anyone find it so odd if Persian-Americans were concerned for their coethnics in Iran, a country we’re at war with.
It's an alien idea; as an obviously white American I have no ethnicity. The idea that I should give a fig what some Europeans that may be distantly related to me are up to makes no sense. Assimilate already!
Arguably there are few things more American than having strong opinions relating to ancestral countries that you objectively have no ties to (unless you're British or German). You may not like this, but this is what assimilation looks like.
To be fair, most of the not having substantial views about the homeland has to do with nothing of great import currently happening in those countries. Prior to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, many, possibly most, Irish-Americans would have had a view about what was going on in Northern Ireland. The most obvious evidence for that is how much energy the US invested in brokering the agreement.
Too much of my misspent youth was hanging out in Irish bars in and around Philly. Virtually all of them included some reference to this, from the fairly benign "Give It Back, Thief" poster to actual fundraising for the not so benign Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID).
Similarly, the Solidarity movement and moment in Poland was a really big deal in the 1980s if you were Polish-American.
White just refers to my skin color; it's not part of my identity any more than me fitting the fascists "heritage American" definition. It's utterly meaningless.
This would be a hugely more compelling argument if the median Jewish American’s ancestors hadn’t arrived around when mine did.
I assure you, I could not possibly give less of a shit if Germany and France started lobbing cruise missiles at one another, except for the economic consequences here in the US.
Historically our Jewish folks have, thankfully, followed the Bundist model… but if Israel undermines that then I have deep concerns about our relationship with it.
This cuts both ways. A large number of the prominent anti-Israel people on the left (and sometimes right) are motivated by ethnic or religious ties that are quite transparent. Rashida Talib and Zohran Mamdani didn't spontaneously decide to be anti-Israel because of a rigorous, rational approach to the conflict.
There's another interesting aspect of this. Zohran Mamdani is the most prominent Shiite in America. No one seems to be asking him to comment as a Twelver Shia on the actions of the self-described revolutionary Twelver Shiite government of Iran, which often claims to speak for all Shia and be a protector of them. I suspect it's because only 0.5% of Americans know what a Twelver Shiite is. But dual loyalty is a live issue in the Middle East for Twelver Shia, and it might come to get Mamdani soon. I hope, for his sake, he is ready for it. Jewish politicians aren't always ready for that.
Mamdani has, from the perspective of someone who pays only the vaguest attention to NY politics, seemed to run from most of these issues whenever he can. Most of his campaign handling of Israel/Palestine boiled down to, "Not my concern, here's what I'm going to do for NYC."
I find it difficult to envision him giving up that discipline anytime soon, and it won't matter for many years, if he ever runs for federal office at all.
Honest question: what would it look like to demonstrate non-divided loyalties? I basically agree with Matt's take on foreign policy, but I don't support persecution of American Jews based on their political opinions, and it sounds like that's JA's position as well.
>>Barbarians are shooting rockets at half your people, and you're worried about people calling you names?
This is pretty daft. Every time Israel acts this way anti-Semitism spikes in the US. That can mean name calling, sure, but it also means your personal safety is more likely to be at risk.
I live in a very Jewish area and since 10/07 my neighborhood has seen vandalism, a stabbing and a shooting. My Jewish friends have felt unsafe and at times did not want to patronize Jewish businesses. Those things didn't happen in the 6 years we lived here before.
Israel acts according to its own interests, which are not the interests of the diaspora. Separating the concepts of Jewish from Israeli is good for the diaspora and bad for Israel, which is why Israel spends so much effort mixing the two together. You're doing it yourself by calling Israel "half the Jews" in your post, rather than treating it as a foreign nation. Those interests sometimes align, but they sometimes don't.
When your personal safety is compromised because of a warmonger halfway across the world I can perfectly understand why you'd want some distance between you.
Yes, I agree that anti-Armenian hatred in the US is primarily the result of the actions of Armenia. Most Armenians in the US aren’t even from Armenia. Pashinyan clearly doesn’t govern with the residents of Glendale in mind when setting policy! When anti-Armenian flyers were posted at St Mary’s Apostolic Church in 2023, it was primarily because of Armenia’s aggressive policies in Nagorno-Karabakh. It certainly wasn’t because of anti-Armenian bias of those who posted the flyers. Armenians have nothing to do with Armenia!
You're straw-manning against something I didn't argue. Obviously anti-Semitism has existed for longer than the state of Israel. It's still the case that when the I/P conflict goes hot anti-Semitism incidents spike in the US.
That doesn't imply that all anti-Semitism is because of Israel, a statement I would not agree with.
It's still the case that when Israel does bad things it reflects on the diaspora to many people. Or do you think Netanyahu's actions have no explanatory power for why antisemitism is on the way up?
I think this is generally right and illustrates why it's just not a good 'popularist' issue. Our politics on this subject would be a lot healthier if it was easier to say Israel is a foreign country whose interests align less and less with the United States, and even better if we could concede that the relationship has become anything but normal. It's hard to imagine what's going on now happening with any of our other allies.
However it's also hard to get more than ankle deep into realism about Israel/our relationship with them without encountering the bizarre parallel universe you describe in part 2.
The thing that continues to be very annoying to me about even normal lib takes on this conflict, reflected somewhat in MYs post, is the idea that the war is Israels "fault" or that Israel "started" the war with Iran.
Irans whole foreign policy revolver around creating a "ring of fire" around Israel and provided the means for most of the SEVEN groups attacking Israel since 10/7. As they have built up weapons supply they have been openly chanting "death to Israel" (and America) and promised to used the weapons to slaughter as many Israelis as possible.
At what point does this constant escalation warrant a response? I continue to be amazed that people can look at the current conflict and say Israel "attacked" Iran and "caused" or "started" the war. It requires a complete and total ignorance of Irans actions and their effects.
Israel and Iran are enemies and it's not surprising if they take military actions against each other.
I'm not sure why the US and Iran are enemies. Yep, they facilitated the death of American soldiers when we were fighting a war next door to them (as part of the Axis of Evil, which we designated them part of) but that war has been over and backward-looking foreign policy is a fool's errand.
So if Bibi finagled Trump into joining in his war on Iran, that's 90% on Trump, but it's still 10% on Bibi.
More to the point, Israel clearly prefers a failed state in Iran to the current odious regime. Of course Israel isn't even bordering any countries that border Iran! So for them reducing the ability of Iran to project power is more important than the regional chaos that would emanate from a failed Iranian state or Iranian civil war. But a bitter factional war within Iran is going to cause MAJOR problems for U.S. allies in the Gulf in addition to Pakistan and Turkey, who would probably see major refugee flows and also increased problems (from Turkey's perspective) from Kurdish separatists. I wouldn't even hazard to guess what would happen in Iraq.
It does seem Saudi Arabia, which is larger, hates Iran a lot, and probably more insulated from happenings on that side of the Gulf is with Israel in pulling for obliterating the Iranian government. But to me it seems clear that Israel's desire for the endgame of this war would NOT be in the US interests.
The US needs a stable, reliable regime in Iran -- even if it's hostile! -- that has an interest in the free flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf. You can strike a deal with a hostile regime if you have shared interests. A failed regime is very bad for the US because the Strait becomes vulnerable to any particular group that has the ability to threaten it.
Israel imports all its oil (while exporting a lot of natural gas) so it has reasons not to want chaos in the oil market. But its security concerns may outweigh that and make it happy to have pure chaos in Iran (and thus in the Gulf).
Neither of those are considered causus belli when you are talking about a superpower and a third rate power. Not every problem, or affront, or provocation, even violent provocation, is a justifiable reason for going to war., More than one American has tried to assassinate Trump and every other President. We don't overreact and do things like suspend civil liberties in response.
Being a super power doesn't guarantee us safety from all the bad things people might do to us, and when they're done they don't automatically justify pulverizing the offending party.
You can disagree about our casus belli for attacking Iran - to prevent them from getting nukes, to assist a diplomatic partner being attacked, to reduce their international proxy ring that stretches to mexican cartels, to reduce chinas ability to get past sanctioned oil assets, to reduce arms flows to Russians to slaughter ukrainians - and so on, but I don't think you can do that and say that we should help ukraine or taiwan when they face similar threats. Isolationism is definitely a political philosophy many asribe to.
That doesn't follow at all, and there is a near infinite distance between isolationism and going to war.
We are helping Ukraine because they were invaded, their sovereign territory encroached upon and occupied, by Russia. Still, we are not going to war on their behalf.
If China invaded Taiwan, I would absolutely support assisting them with arms, materiel, intelligence etc. in their effort to fight them off. Whether to go to war for them is a much harder question, and there are very good reasons that we have never pledged to do so, nor entered into a mutual defense treaty with them in the same way we have with NATO and various other closer allies.
None of that is isolationist.
None of the things you listed are near to the casus belli that Ukraine has and for which we are assisting them. If in fact Ukraine was listing those types of actions as their reason for attacking Russia I would be much more skeptical of how much aid we should provide.
Ukraine was actually invaded by Russia. If Iranian troops had invaded Israel and were occupying and attempting to annex parts of the country then I would support defending Israel. That’s not what’s happening of course. The only country doing invasion and annexation is Israel. This distinction should be obvious.
The Nazis killed a few hundred people to retaliate for a successful assassination of Heydrich and this is rightly considered very evil. Killing thousands in response to an alleged assassination plot that didn’t even make it into an attempt would make us a good deal worse than the Nazis.
Yes, this is true. We also declared Iran as part of the Axis of Evil after 9/11 (which they had nothing to do with) and occupied and ruled Iraq (which also had nothing to do with 9/11), a nation of vital interest to Iran and not to the US.
You can call them evil for facilitating the death of American troops occupying the nation on their border or attribute it to rational foreign policy, but you still have to justify why we're launching military actions against them *today.*
Is that a better comparison? Was Iran going to take Israel? When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, we gave Britain some missiles; we didn’t carpet bomb Buenos Aires.
What rocket incident are you referring to that precipitated the war? My understanding is that, when Iran has launched rockets at Israel, Israel has retaliated proportionately. Much like how, when we killed General Soleimani, Iran retaliated proportionately. Multilateral widespread bombing of Iran’s cities, along with killing its head of government and many other leaders, is a major escalation, no? You’re really mystified as to why people would call that “Israel attacking Iran”?
Iran has been launching rockets at Israel for over 2 years now. You can call the response an escalation, but I would call Israel fighting on seven fronts against Iranian arms more than an escalation. I truly dont understand in what world people live in where Iran and their funded proxies can launch Iranian arms at Israel from all sides and not eventually expect a response. They wanted this war, started it, and now are getting it in return.
We fought the Soviet Union across many fronts—definitely more than seven!—for many years. But I don’t believe that if one side assassinated the head of government of the other, that you would see that as less of an escalation than the proxy wars previously happening.
I mean look, see it however you want; you said you’re mystified how people can see this as “Israel attacking Iran” and I’m trying to explain it. I know there’s always the temptation to say “well, if they would just see it my way…” If Americans would view affirmative action as fairness rather than discrimination, they’d be on board! But it seems they don’t, and as people say, when you’re explaining, you’re losing.
When Iran actually attacks. It’s funny how the bill of particulars against Iran is always based on what people there are chanting. Almost as if they haven’t actually done anything violent that would be considered an act of war by any historical standard.
That's an absurd statement that shows incredible ignorance of the facts of what Iran has done for decades. They've been doing acts of war for years we've simply been ignoring it because we didn't want to get into a long drawn out conflict.
It boggles my mind that MY cannot differentiate criticism of Israeli leadership and policy with calls for Israel’s elimination. It’s truly something that’s nearly impossible to conflate in basically any other circumstance.
The idea that there’s no connection between Jews and Israel is a bit like saying there’s no connection between Armenia and Armenians. But there are Arabs who also live in Israel (but there are Azeris who live in Armenia). But there are many Jews who don’t live in Israel. (A larger percentage of world Jewry lives in Israel than ethnic Armenians live in Armenia by several fold). But many Jews had families who never lived in Israel. (Yeah, and many Armenians come from Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and even Israel-Palestine, and not from Armenia).
I agree with you that Jewish institutions who try to disassociate Jews and Israel are pathetic.
I think I'm safe in asserting that no one, especially no American, who is not Armenian or maybe Turkish, or of their descent gives a shit about anything having to do with their conflict. Any analogy to it sunders on this fact.
Funny, an argument I've made here several times is "how does [X pro-Israel nonsense] sound if you swap 'Israel' with 'Azerbaijan', and 'Israelis' with 'Azeris'?
"they further suggest that since it's antisemitic to link Jews with Israel, actually Jews should stand *against* antisemitism by adopting this view. (I.e., that the war on half the Jews is righteous.)"
Though of course different, the relationship of American Jews to Israel, the relationship of Americans of German ancestry to Germany in WW1 and 2, and the relationship of Americans of Japanese ancestry to Japan in WW2 are related phenomenon.
Personally, I think it help clarify some thinking on this issue if people would go through the exercise of making careful and thoughtful comparisons of these three examples.
I'm confused by this comparison. Not only are we not at war with Israel, we are currently fighting a war *alongside* Israel. Moreover, Israel has historically fought enemies that, broadly speaking, are aligned against American interests (even if they don't pose a big threat).
I can't think of a great example, because America's allies are usually not capable of kicking the shit out of their enemies the way Israel is. So something like British-Americans' opinions of the UK bombings in German cities during WWII is not really apt here. But that would nevertheless be closer!
Japan and Germany also fought against the US enemy the USSR.
In WWII, Japan and Germany were the expansionist powers starting the war and taking territory, while the Allies were defending. That makes Israel more similar to the Axis, as they are taking territory in Palestine and Lebanon and started the war with Iran.
No, Israel takes territory because its enemies use the territory to attack Israel.
The idea that Israel started the war with Iran would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. A founding principle of the Islamic Republic was the need to destroy Israel, and Iran has waged war on Israel through its proxies for over 40 years.
If anything, what Israel is doing is more similar to what the UK and France should've done in the mid-late 1930s in response to the Axis. For example, I've read that the Germans crossing into Rhineland in 1936 were under orders to turn back if fired upon...but the French commander failed to even fire warning shots.
The USSR was not our "enemy" when the US entered WW2. Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941.
I think German-Americans did tend to be more isolationist which you can see in election results in the Midwest which was more heavily German. But even then they were not pro-affirmatively supporting Germany.
There was, however, anti-German xenophobia in WW1 and anti-Japanese actions in WW2, based on beliefs that Americans with ethnic ties to those countries were tainted by association.
I think Matt is basically right about 10/7, Israel's role in Iran, and aid, but what I would actually say is that actual anti-Zionism in 2026 IS anti-semitic. The theory is to start a civil war that drives the Jews out, just as the theory of the far Right in Israel is to try and drive the Palestinians out.
Our policy should be to call out anyone who is calling for any sort of population transfer as a bigot. No more "technically anti-zionism is not anti-semitism". It is. The Jews are there and if you want crap that will get them killed you are a bigot.
But Netanyahu's rejection of 2 states and coddling of settlers should draw a real response.
I just think that calling it antisemitism is increasingly not convincing to people (even if, according to some definitions, it would be accurate). It gives people who adopt this view an easy out to say "I want Israel to be overrun by the Arabs, but look, I'm at a seder! How could I be antisemitic?" ("Antisemitism" originated in the same way, actually. "I don't hate Jews, just Middle Eastern race-mongrels!")
Perhaps it would be more convincing to point out that antizionism is typically a violent derangement on its own terms.
I guess it just depends on the audience for me. Some audiences aren't really receptive to this framing, which makes further communication difficult.
It can also sometimes perversely turn into a debate where you get really into the weeds and "lose" if you can't conclusively prove something is antisemitism rather than antizionism. (I remember many on the left thinking it was really important to insist that the Bondi and Michigan attacks were best characterized as antizionism.)
You’re kind of eliding the distinction between “population transfer” (intentional action) and “crap that will get them killed” (passive voice, speculation about the results of policies you don’t like). I don’t think most people supporting equal rights between Jews and Palestinians would agree that this would lead to civil war or result in Jews being killed.
Dayton was only possible because the parties first agreed to negotiate a permanent end to fighting. The Palestinian people must first agree to stop trying to destroy Israel and kill all its Jewish inhabitants. Otherwise Israel has a strong disincentive - based on consistent Palestinian behavior - to allow a Palestinian state on its borders.
Every time Palestinian representatives have had an agreement at hand, Palestinians responded with an intifada (the first after Oslo, the second after Madrid). Palestinians, in the only free fair and open election ever held among them, elected Hamas - not in spite of its genocidal charter, but at least in part because of it (doubtless other factors also came into play, as the PA had little appeal either).
Of course they want that. As Matt pointed out long ago, none of those 1 state solutions ever have realistic plans to stop it.
The base belief of the 1 stater is "the Jews should have never 'colonized' Palestine and therefore shouldn't have a state", with full knowledge of what will happen when the state is eliminated and no plan to stop it.
Israel should prosecute settlers who attack Palestinians and their homes. More importantly, Israel should take action to prevent such attacks. Burning Palestinian homes displaces Palestinians and thus creates facts on the ground which criminal prosecutions don't necessarily undo. I don't think it's cynical to suggest that some on the Israeli right see the prosecutions as a fig leaf for an expulsion strategy, and any prosecuted settlers as necessary sacrifices.
But Netanyahu came to power as a result of Israeli abandonment of the two-state solution, not as a cause of that abandonment. The Israeli people saw that there was no significant Palestinian support for a two-state solution, especially after the second intifada. They saw the Palestinian people repeatedly refusing to take yes for an answer after both Oslo and Madrid.
Arguably, Arafat saw Rabin's murder after Oslo as a warning about his own extremists, and in effect abandoned the two-state solution in response.
MY frequently and irresponsibly used the term “anti-Israel” but doesn’t define what he means.
There is a global project, backed by many sizable countries and organizations, to dismantle and eliminate the state of Israel. This project has been around since Israel’s founding in 1948. There are many countries that do not allow Israelis to enter and do not recognize the country. Several countries have “This passport is valid for all countries of the world except Israel” written on their passports. The whole situation of not settling refugees from a mid 20th century war is wholly unprecedented and is intended to keep alive a war over Israel’s very existence. If you listen to anti-Zionist protestors (with anti-Zionist explicitly meaning against the existence of a Jewish state) shout “from the river to the sea”, they are signaling support for this project. The opposition to Israel’s existence for people within this project is ideological based on core principles, not contingent on Israeli behavior or policy.
Some leftist progressives placate themselves by saying they just want a single binational state, which is fine. Until you realize that literally zero major Palestinian factions support this and this is the least popular solution in Palestinian politics. And you realize that the path to get there either involves Israel annexing the territories (which these advocates are clear they are against) or dismantling Israel and have another entity take power (like the PA or Hamas).
This is highly unusual for a country. There is no organized global movement for the dismantling of Croatia, or opposition to Croats expressing their national self determination in a country, no matter how violent the 20th century was there. There’s no organized global project to dismantle Armenia despite lots of displacement of ethnic Azeris and Turks throughout constant conflict. (There is a project to dismantle Ukraine as it turns out, and we see that playing out).
So “anti-Israel” could mean having some objections to particular policies of Israel in the West Bank and the fact the Israeli government has not expressed a serious vision for a political solution to the conflict in decades. But these are things that I, as a pro-Israel guy who moved to Israel and made Aliya agree with. It could mean wanting to distance ourselves from Israel, but still supporting its existence and believing it should defend itself. It could mean disagreeing with this or that military action.
Or “anti-Israel” could mean you are active in the robust global project to delegitimize and dismantle the state of Israel.
MY frequently conflates these things in a way that is highly irresponsible. It’s like confusing being against Armenian policy in Nagorno-Karabakh with wanting to dissolve, eliminate and dismantle Armenia, and harassing Armenians who support the existence of an Armenian state! Basically no one would confuse these things in pretty much any other context.
MY conflates these things in nearly every article he writes about the subject. I think it’s grossly irresponsible.
This is very... what's the word I'm searching for... morally frustrating.
I've been yelled at for making a similar point on Substack: Netanyahu is a vile scumbag, and Israel has been doing horrible things, not only in Gaza but in the West Bank too. (Remember that Palestinian man Israelis stripped naked and sexually assaulted?) At the same time, look at a map. Israel is a teeny-tiny little sliver of land surrounded by majority Muslim/Arab countries. It is the one and only majority Jewish nation on earth. It's wrong to say "Israel is bad, it should cease to exist" when nobody has a problem with majority Muslim or majority Arab nations existing. As for people who lost their homes (or, more realistically, whose grandparents lost their homes) in 1948, that is very sad, but guess what, my family lost our home during WWII in what was then Poland but is now Ukraine, and you don't hear me continuing to bitch about it in 2026.
Polish people aren't demanding a right to return to Lwow; Germans aren't demanding a right to return to Breslau or Stettin. You gotta let some things go!
I think one of the saddest things about the Trump era is that entire concepts like tolerance and reconciliation just feel passé.
In 2012 during the peak of Arab Spring hope-and-change fever, I toured a bilingual school in Israel where Muslim and Jewish kids grew up alongside each other. Everyone knew the effort was doomed to fail but decided it was worth trying anyway. I can't imagine anyone believing in that kind of thing these days.
Agreed. And quite often if you look behind the curtain it always boils down to they don't support the right for the state of Israel to exist and many of them don't want any Jews to exist.
Post-Cold War Marxists like the Code Pink morons are the Disney Adults of American politics: they seek refuge from adulthood in childish fantasies. They should be mocked mercilessly and ignored politically.
Median-ish people also want to be billionaires themselves. Why do you think gambling and lotteries are so popular? The many median-ish people who want to be billionaires are not going to support guillotining billioniares.
Guillotine fetishists tend to be on the upper end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Normal people generally are uncomfortable for those who openly state that are looking for the pretext to engage in wanton murder and violence.
This gets close to the reasoning behind those who fetishize the violence of the French Revolution. Downwardly mobile college graduates want to make room for their upward mobility.
If they’re downwardly mobile anyway why would they need room for upward mobility?
It’s probably more of a concern for upwardly mobile people starting out without much finding that even if they are very successful they simply cannot catch up to other people born into wealth making a couple percent returns every year meaning they cannot afford a nice house or upward mobility, without something akin to winning the lottery.
Of course we should not have violence. But we should have more progressive and wealth rather than income based taxes.
Interestingly historically the French king believed what you’re saying that it was only the downwardly mobile college kids against him which is why he tried the Flight to Varnes but the poor rural people sold him out and it got him guillotined.
If you look at the degrees some of these people who post this crap on social media have and how those fields are zero sum (non profit, culture industries, academia) what they are expressing is a purging sentiment.
Add to it geographic concentration in desirable cities, then you see how these resentments result in some people fetishizing guillotines.
Then there is probably a bunch of hedonic expectations playing into these sentiments.
We already have a progressive tax system. The top 1% of income earners pay about 30% of Federal income tax revenue. The top 50% of income earners pay 97-99% of Federal income tax revenue. Arithmetic says the bottom 50% of income earners pay 1-3% of Federal income tax revenue.
Taxpayers with AGI under $75K pay zero Federal capital gains tax.
A wealth tax violates the Takings Clause, fortunately. Crafting such a tax would lead to many perverse consequences.
I don't see how anyone could claim a "discrediting" when a simple perusal of stock prices shows a big obvious dip right around Liberace Day, followed by a recovery after the flip-flop was walked back (probably mostly because of the market going into freefall). Why, you'd need some sort of elaborate conspiracy theory that the dastardly duo, Standard and Poor, intentionally coordinated a stock sell-off just to snub the President. You can see the same occurring in real time, right now, with all the unfortunate implications of the Straight of Hormel being crooked. Except it's a lot harder to undo a (never formally declared!) war than to change some numbers around at the Bureau Whose Name I'm Too Lazy To Look Up That's Responsible For Implementing Tariffs. "They predicted 10 of the last 5 recessions!", tweeted from my iPhone while standing in line at the unemployment office.
Disappointed at the "do you think it's time to punch the hippies again and harder?" bait question. Audience capture isn't not a thing, although the answer was a good enough redirection rather than boring old plant-based red meat, at least.
I lived in SF for a long time and what I found tough to deal with regarding the vagrancy/drug use/homeless situation there was the aggressive and shameless lying the service provider/non profit folks would constantly deploy. "These folks grew up here, they're part of our community and they're victims of hard times" -> the mayor in 2020 changed policing orders to arrest people for public drug use, in something crazy like 97 of the 100 first arrests the people's last recorded address was more than 100 miles away, and they had currently active arrest warrants in other states and other counties. "We need safe injection sites and housing as an initial contact point to offer people treatment, otherwise we have no way to get people into treatment" -> of the thousands of people who used the safe injection centers in SF, less than 1% sought treatment. "its cheaper to house homeless people than it is to have them on the street, if they're on the street they call the police/fire/ambulance and its very expensive" -> when you put these people in housing they don't magically get better. They still call the police/ambulance/whatever all the time, on top of that many of them completely destroy the buildings they're in. SF had to pay ~200M + dollars to a few hotels that were used to house homeless people in project homekey because they were completely destroyed by the inhabitants. I don't know what the solution here is but I am 100% certain that a key part on the critical path to a better world here is a complete regime change in the non profit/service provider universe that are funded by our taxes and operate completely against and also somehow immune to popular sentiment in the cities themself. The current crop of non profit execs and workers is completely discredited and should have their contracts cancelled and be disregarded politically.
At least for this issue I feel pretty strongly that there is a very limited role for the non-profit industrial complex. That industry attracts the kind of terminally earnest do gooders that are uniquely ill suited to actually solving the problem.
that might be the east coast industry vibe, the west coast industry seems to attract radical anarchists who have adopted the political project that all drug addicts are tortured poets who are the vanguard against capitalism and must be supported by society in their noble pursuit of nothingness.
I've even heard that the homeless people camping in the parks and doing drugs all day are morally superior to the average American because they have chosen to opt out of the violent system of capitalism. I don't know how you can get a steady supply of meth or fentanyl without capitalism, but I'm sure the people making those claims know what they're talking about.
Regarding the homeless people destroying housing, the solution is probably concrete buildings with little furnishings and with dorm style monitored living.
So, some kind of state instutition where the residents are kept from destroying the place or harming themselves or others, something like that? Maybe at the same time we could give them psychiatric treatment?
I too lived in NYC, and what we’re experiencing in Seattle is not that. I DO know that the people I see openly using, dealing, and decompensating in my neighborhood are homeless because they live in tents and RV encampments. I’m pretty sure Matt’s rather patronizing, “I’m a sophisticated NYC boy so I’m not scared by a few eccentrics the way suburbanites and flyover folk are,” means he’s not living in that same reality.
I’m a city girl. I’m not scared, I’m angry. I - along with a lot of liberals, many of whom are too afraid to speak their frustration - am done being told by homeless advocates and YIMBY’s that I don’t get it, that stats belie my daily experience, that it’s really an affordable housing problem. Sorry, but we have thousands of people living on our streets who can’t take care of themselves, simply put.
I appreciate Matt trying to differentiate between two groups, the financially insecure and the severely damaged, but there’s an insouciance and a tinge of condescension (and ignorance?) in his treatment of the latter. Encampment communities of the chronically homeless are a true urban crisis. For ten years it’s been so designated in our city. Yet, in the name of compassion, wokeness, and some future in which the 80, topographically-challenging, square miles of one of the most expensive cities in the country has built enough affordable/free housing for our over 17,000 unhoused; these folks have been left to feed their hellish addictions, permanently fry their brains, prostitute themselves and others, and die among dealers and fellow addicts.
This is not only unacceptable from a moral and basic city-management perspective, it’s politically disastrous. Progressives and some Democrats position themselves as defenders of the right of addicts and mentally ill folks to illegally camp in our parks and on our sidewalks, to refuse offers of shelter, to form longterm communities which instead of discouraging, progressives and do-gooders enable with sanitation, donations, needles. meals, and opposition to so-called “sweeps.” This is akin to the way we positioned ourselves as the defenders of the right of people to live in our country illegally; as consistently and self-righteously caring about the struggles of illegal immigrants and non-normative identity groups over everybody else - creating hierarchies of deservingness that exclude most Americans, including the middle-class, working-class, and poor of all races and ethnicities.
On Israel, I am currently sitting on some polling which finds that a majority of Americans under 30 agree with the statement "Israel is an apartheid state, engaged in racist oppression against Palestinians." (The statement is based on something Rashida Tlaib said; we also asked people if they agreed with some statements from Chuck Schumer, Ted Cruz, Nick Fuentes, etc.) Should be out in a week or so.
You’re conflating two different things: opinion on issue X and importance of issue X. X can be very popular but also unimportant to people. A good example is trans women in women’s sports. Another example is this.
Anyways, the poll does include an issue ranking question. And Israel-Palestine does rank low overall. However, it’s ranked as much more important by young voters, which are the same group that is most likely to believe Israel is an apartheid state. So that tells you something.
Or rather, before you have responsibilities in life, things that don’t matter to other people can be equally important to you as things that do matter to other people.
I’m finding a surprising convergence between this discussion and my sense of the difficulty of getting students to understand how AI can be actually useful, and not just a tool for cheating. If you don’t have any big responsibilities other than schoolwork (and exercise), then it’s hard for AI to do much to help you accomplish things other than your schoolwork (and exercise).
I think you might want to consider that not everything is a conspiracy against Israel or Jewish people and it might just be that voters don’t like the stuff Israel does
I don't know, maybe the $300 billion that America has given Israel? And the fact that we have a much closer relationship with Israel than with other nations that do similarly bad things?
Do you have any poll questions that try to tease out anti-Israel from antisemitism? Like, Is it ok to boycott a Jewish business to voice your displeasure with Israel?
I mean, a lot of it was on TV and everything. You can argue about whether Israel should have bombed the crap out of Gaza (as far as I can tell they had zero good options), but not really about whether or not they did.
I’ve been getting frustrated that so much of the discussion around attitudes of the young is tied up in one single graph that doesn’t come with an obvious report allowing us to know what the numbers mean. We need multiple different methodologies investigating related questions to get a real understanding!
"" I think most of the country has reached a kind of corrupt bargain where, instead of spending money on fixing things, politically moderate and conservative jurisdictions dump the troubled people onto progressive jurisdictions where the residents either tolerate it or leave.""
i live in a tier 3 city that is literally what MY says here, and the whole thing sucks. residents of the city are constantly big mad at the dem mayor and council who has literally no control over this, and the state doesnt gaf.
of course being a college town, thing are made worse because the only housing built at scale is $1400/ month apartments for rich students. all other initiatives are stuck in NIMBY hell.
Mamdani also not just totally reversed his position on homeless encampment sweeps but also got the NYC DSA co-chair to defend the sweeps on Brian Lehrer’s show lol
Charismatic leaders roll their base!
Both he and AOC rug-pulled some of their progressive backers. It's just good politics to send them to the veal pen if you have enough aura to cow them.
The answer about homelessness doesn’t quite seem to address the question. I’m sure the guy who asked it was aware that some of the “homeless” do have places to live. The homeless issue really hurts Democrats because not only are they not fixing the problem, but they seem committed to actually making it worse by doing absolutely nothing to prevent homeless people from completely taking over public infrastructure. Admittedly Democrats in office have made progress in this area over the past 3-4 years, but much of the rhetoric on the Left is still supportive of the theory of homelessness that held that clearing homeless encampments was unconstitutional and that is still probably the view from the left most often heard on the issue.
I think his point is that this is the reason most technocratic solutions to homelessness are unsatisfying--because the vast majority of people who can't afford a place to live are not the kind of highly visible vagrants that most people think of when they think of homelessness. The problem, then, is that a policy that helps the vast majority of actual homeless people afford homes is not going to fix the problem of nuisance vagrancy, and so you have to separately address that through enforcement. And so making the homeless/vagrancy distinction is important not for some PC reason, but because the optimal policy to solve the broader problem won't address most voters' direct concerns.
Vagrant is a good word to describe then second kind of homeless—Matt was searching for a good word and I think that fits great.
Unless you're trying to communicate with progressives on this issue. "Vagrant" sounds too disparaging.
And no I don't have a better suggestion 😬
OMG, you just gave us a perfect term for what Matt described: nuisance vagrancy
I was going to comment that we should perhaps use the word "vagrant" to describe disruptive antisocial people and "homeless" to describe the more sympathetic and larger group. You beat me to it though.
I still have a bunch of antipathy towards the concept of “harm reduction,” because advocates act like it only has upsides. They dismiss the possibility of downsides, incentives, or secondary policies that go along with the advocated policies.
Needle exchanges, safe use spaces, etc often also result in policies that are de facto legalization of narcotics. This makes the public presence of these activities more prevalent and reduces punitive pressures for people to remain sober.
It’s a wicked problem tied up with the worst parts of homelessness. People don’t want to be cruel but there is a perverse cruelty that permissiveness perpetuates.
I’ve recently heard an ad on the radio from the state department of health giving tips on how to use opioids safely; they give tips like starting with small doses and scheduling someone to check on you.
To be completely frank, the ads completely piss me off. All I can think is, “using tax dollars to tell people to be safe with their fentanyl usage is fucking absurd.”
If you’re gonna make an ad, I’d rather it be DARE style about how bad drugs are.
I would not totally mind this type of information being available on an as-requested basis on, e.g., a departmental website. *Broadcasting* it, in the most literal sense, would have me apoplectic.
The policy might work? But it might also normalize the unhealthy behavior and on the margins push a few more people into experimenting with the substance and thus going down the spiral of addiction.
Paragon told me I am ignorant for even questioning the efficacy or potential downsides of actions like this.
I understand the sentiment. I wonder what evidence that that specific messaging campaign is a net social benefit?
DC has/had vending machines for drug paraphernalia. Is this a good use of public money? Is it really lessening the burdens of drug addiction?
If we lower the cost of engaging in a bad activity, then we should see more of it. There is a reason we tax cigarettes…
I really hate how the choices our relative political options have settled on are maximum cruelty and maximum permissiveness.
Didn’t needle exchanges start up in the early days of AIDS, back when contracting AIDS really was a death sentence? In that context you can make a strong case that keeping someone AIDS-free is way more important than enabling the addiction. But my understanding now is that needle exchanges are trying to stop stuff like Hepatitis- certainly not great to get, but not a death sentence. It seems that really does change the calculus.
Needle exchanges decrease HIV transmission but increase opiate deaths (if you believe the analysis using the rollout of these policies across geographies.)
It’s probably not the policy of needle exchanges causing deaths but correlated polices that tolerated narcotics use and trade.
I mean overdoses are not contagious so that is still a very good trade.
Going back to my main point, proponents are adamant there aren’t downsides or tradeoffs. There are and this is why we need to at least weigh benefits vs costs.
Progressives pretending that people are crazy for acknowledging adverse impacts or downsides to their proposed policy solutions generates resentment and counterproductive public response.
What if the benefits are weighed and it's decided that the tradeoffs still point to needle exchange. Would you then concede the idea, or is it that you don't want the tradeoffs that entails?
“Progressives” are not the people driving harm reduction. People interested in harm reduction are. Some of them are quite conservative.
Drug potency has been rising considerably. Determining the efficacy of needle exchanges in reducing overdoses is really hard. We’ve also made Narcan much more available, so many variables are changing
Overdose itself is not contagious but the kind of problem drug use that makes it likely is. Kind of like AIDS vs HIV.
chronic drug use is contagious though and permissive use laws expand and enable chronic drug use and addiction
The thing is, the current opioid epidemic is not mostly among prostitutes, but rather older whites, so STDs are much less of a problem that needs to be solved.
Look into the recent resurgence of syphilis then and how it is hitting new populations originally not thought at risk.
HIV and blood borne illness transmission is still a major problem with these populations.
Errr, it’s both. And if you consider that the state pays for HIV treatment ($4k/month for life) or HCV treatment (~$40k for a course), it’s good fiscal policy to have the exchanges even if you don’t consider the human effects. Now, they should probably run on more of a DoorDash model, bc anywhere you put a physical needle exchange you’re going to get a concentration of local nuisance. Better to spread the love
One of my big complaints is that all the components of "Harm Reduction" get grouped under the "evidence based" umbrella even though only some components of harm reduction are empirically validated for specific outcomes. Needle exchanges do reduce the transmission of HIV, but we don't have much data on distributing foil and pipes, either for HIV transmission or whether they have an effect on the fatal overdose rate. They simply haven't been well studied so it's possible that distributing foil, straws and pipe raises the overdose death rate. And I'm not even going to go into the time someone from the harm reduction team at King County insisted that smoking drugs on the bus should be encouraged because someone could narcan them if they overdosed.
My very grumpy take is that harm reduction needs to decide if it's a science-based public health project or a political project and accept that the public will treat according to the decision it makes.
JPubE has a paper showing that needle exchanges increase opiate deaths. Then there is a JEP showing how the opioid epidemic was supply driven not demand driven.
Also WAT! - “And I'm not even going to go into the time someone from the harm reduction team at King County insisted that smoking drugs on the bus should be encouraged because someone could narcan them if they overdosed.”
That is a trust destroying message.
Did that happen? Good God
My sister experienced similar statements from people in Portland and I have heard of public officials in addictions spaces quoted on podcasts saying similar shit. Never really in the wild though.
I am sure my wife has encountered some of this nonsense in addiction conferences.
Harm reduction, under their own goals and metrics, doesn't work. The main thing that was sold to the public was "we need these touch points so we can pull people into treatment programs, without them there is no where to start", if we implemented these programs we'd finally be able to pull people into treatment and reduce the scourge of drug addition on the streets. But this hasn't been successful at all, theres like a 1% or less rate of people going from a harm reduction program to treatment or other services. The problem is that the junkies really want to do drugs, and the service providers really don't want to stop them for ideological reasons.
The point of harm reduction is to reduce harm. If somebody who will use drugs regardless of your other actions uses a clean needle and avoids infection, they remain healthier and tax payers save the cost of treating their (and anyone they might infect’s) illness. If somebody wants to reduce use but isn’t ready to quit, helping them reduce can save their life and may eventually get them to long term sobriety.
I work in substance abuse treatment. The reason harm reduction is dominant now is because more rigid models are less successful, not because we have an ideological fixation on having people continue to use.
Side note: statistics on the rate of people going from harm reduction to “treatment” are almost impossible to generate reliably. The data collection barrier is huge and since you don’t include harm reduction in treatment, you’re excluding most of the most successful treatment programs, who all have harm reduction models.
As the literal boots on the fucking ground, no. I'm the one who has to deal with all the times your clients decide to inflict their problems on the world around them. I'm also the one who gets to show up when they overdose-including when they die.
As luck would have it, I ended up arresting a homeless drug addict while working out how to reply to this. He's 40; looks 55. Hes unlikely to make it to 41, and I'm fucking positive he won't make 42
Sounds like you want to ensure he doesn't. Don't know what more I can say to you other than the police I've worked with have actually been good at treating people as humans. I hope you're better able to do so than you sound in this post.
The easiest way to ensure he doesn't is to simply stop arresting him. That way, he runs into traffic when he gets high, instead of being forced to go to the hospital to address his infected dialysis catheter and possible pneumonia.
And I treat him as a human. A dumb human; someone who is very bad at being a human; but a human nonetheless. What I don't do is treat him like a character. I don't make up tragic stories about what caused him to become a heroin addict. I don't treat his insistence that he'll turn his life around if I let him go as the start of his redemption arc. I have access to the police records detailing the 20 years of bad decision making that led to this, and I was there for a few of them. I also know just how many times he could have been in prison, instead of on the street, slowly dying, if they had simply held him for a few years on any of the drug felonies he's been convicted of in the past few years.
Look, I want him to live. I want him to change. But I know how it eventually ends. Someone, possibly me, calls the medical examiner to report another overdose death.
"If somebody who will use drugs regardless of your other actions"
Is a terrible assumption to base your whole approach on.
Of course no one quits their addictions when you give them apartment to use drugs in, a 700 dollar monthly cash payment to spend on drugs, a bunch of junky friends and drug dealers inside the building, and all the drug paraphernalia one could want.
I strongly disagree on the merits with the rest of your post but I don't think arguing online is a productive activity and neither of us will change each others minds so feel free reply and have the last word and enjoy the rest of your friday!
I don’t work on that assumption, but people in the field also know many people need to go through treatment several times before they can quit. And there are people who simply don’t want to quit. sB commenters likely do not understand how often hard to treat substance abuse is about covering up terrible pain
My wife and mother in law both work in addiction medicine. One problem with safe use spaces and needle exchanges is that there are dealers preying on vulnerable people near these places.
There is indeed an adverse information component that does lower search costs to some of these policies.
Hence why there isn’t a panacea to the problem.
There are three categories of people - those who will use whether you do program A or program B, those who will not use whether you do either program, and those whose use would happen under one rather than the other. No one can be sure what the sizes of these populations are, but if it’s plausible that the committed users are more numerous than the marginal users, then reducing harm to committed users can result in more good than stopping the marginal users. Of course the point holds the other way too if the numbers aren’t so different, and depending on the amount of harm reduced.
maybe, but what we have in the real world today is one giant dial for "tolerance of drug use" that goes from "singapore" to "vancouver BC" and has linear and predictable results at each notch on the dial that are exactly what you would naively predict.
That's not the argument I heard from harm reduction advocates in the 1990s when I first heard about the concept. It was "junkies are going to do drugs anyway, how do we make it less harmful for them to do so?"
the "how do you appeal to people who read the village voice" argument was "they're going to do drugs anyway, lets reduce HIV rates"
the "how do you appeal to the city council to get funding" argument was "this is what we need to do to reduce the number of people addicted to drugs in our city"
We absolutely needed to do harm reduction during the pandemic. People were going to get together socially, so we should have encouraged it in parks and outdoor dining rather than making people meet indoors.
Which is the same nonsensical argument gun proliferationists make about making guns more difficult for criminals to acquire.
I'm ok with the legalization of narcotics in the privacy of your own home. I'm also ok with laws that ban public intoxication or consumption.
Drug legalization doesn't have to mean we give up our public spaces.
If we look at the failures of cannabis legalization and how it’s contributed to public use, I don’t see how this libertarian stance holds up. What happens when the harms are very disproportionately concentrated, should we tolerate acute immiseration so that people on average have minuscule benefits?
I might be repeating a criticism of utilitarianism.
how has cannabis legalization been a failure, besides taxes being so high they incentivize the black market?
I don't think cannabis legalization has been a failure. It's important to note that I also like the smell of weed even if I don't partake.
Also, I consider freedom to be a very important good, even if I disagree with how people use it.
I mean, if you don't consider the full scope of harms prevented and harms created by any policy change then you aren't really doing "harm reduction". This is the central challenge of doing consequentialism correctly, but the tendency toward analytical laziness / incompleteness afflicts us all.
You can't just SAY that! Someone will feel bad!
Just from personal family experience, it is very hard. My brother-in-law, now deceased, was a very successful businessman but he was a drinker and eventually became an alcoholic. He lost everything. Despite having a good support structure of family, he ended up on the streets. All of our interventions failed or were only successful temporarily. Alcohol eventually killed him.
That really changed my mind about this problem. It’s really extremely difficult to get addicts off the street without coercion.
When you spend a great deal of your time volunteering with people exactly like your BIL, the most frustrating thing is that every single thing that makes living outdoors less unpleasant prolongs them living outdoors, instead of holding their hand up and saying "I can't live like this any more", which is the point where intervention actually works. Addicts live outdoors because using is more important than living indoors. Nothing matters more than using. Nothing works until using is more painful than not using.
This is the same reason that 'housing first' is disastrous for addicts. 'Housing first' is a positively evil policy, IMO, and I don't even really believe in the concept of evil. If they even manage to survive the inevitable OD, they end up with serious prison time because of the other behavior that using indoors enables.
Yeah, that tracks with my BIL. He preferred the streets to living with a family member in a house with basic rules. His brother, sister, and wife all tried, but he was intolerable and only cared about where/how to get the next drink.
This is very interesting, because it’s the complete opposite of what “housing first” advocates say, which is that a lot of drug use is a way of coping with living on the streets, and likewise that mental illness symptoms are exacerbated by the stress of living rough. According to these advocates, if you give someone a roof over their head, you restore a bit of their dignity and give them a safe place to live, they’re more likely to find the strength to do the right thing, like seeking help to get off drugs.
Intuitively, this makes some sense. I’ve never been homeless, but I know that when I’m under a lot of stress, I make bad decisions and lapse into bad habits.
I'm aware. It is an easy position to hold until you have actual sustained contact with homeless addicts. It sure does make people who have minimal or un-choreographed contact feel good about themselves, though.
That should have been 'choreographed'.
Dealing with a severe addiction in the family is one of the most frightening, frustrating and soul-crushing experiences one can have. I'm sorry you had to go through that.
And this is why I expressed antipathy earlier. We let people just die in public slowly from addiction and for some reason we are expected either to turn a blind eye or tolerate the adverse effects of all this?
It feels cruel.
True Housing First has never been tried...because regulatory burdens and zoning make it impossible to build enough housing. Also, no one seems to want such housing in their neighborhood? But we're all trying to find the guys who did this.
I resent "hostile architecture" because it's really unfriendly to non-homeless people too. A walkable urban environment is less useful when there are no benches, no trashcans, shops close early, tents obstruct the sidewalks, bus stops no longer have light or heat or real windbreaks...etc.
Hostile architecture sucks but if we don't do anything about vagrant drug users it becomes inevitable.
Housing first is not the answer -- or at least a bad slogan -- for the kind of homeless being discussed here. I think we need to give the drug/mentally addled homeless a private bunk and a locker but you have to expect they won't care for an apartment.
But yes the idea of giving them somewhere else to go is correct but no one wants those people to find living in their city better.
There are no answers or solutions: there is only managing. First you manage with something like housing first. Then you start managing issues around maintenance and people passing out while the faucets are running. You continue managing the tensions between fairness and tenant behavior. You plan on managing fluxuations in available funding. etc.
So if "housing first" yields some decent results, we need to be careful of saying "it doesn't work" and getting rid of it. (For example, it'll work for plenty of "mentally addled" people if they get the right support. I don't "have to expect" anything.)
Just to throw in an Arendt quote about managing expectations: "The reason why we are never able to foretell with certainty the outcome and end of any action is simply that action has no end. The process of a single deed can quite literally endure throughout time until mankind itself has come to an end. "
Arendt quotes are almost always the right call.
Can you do housing first if the clients can’t take care of it? In this Ezra Klein column he describes visiting a successful housing complex that was nonetheless severely damaged by a client who went to sleep/passed out with the faucets running: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/02/opinion/democrats-liberalism.html?unlocked_article_code=1.YFA.1FVF.J1DPekWbyxfu&smid=nytcore-ios-share
Housing first does nothing for the vagrancy problem. People with severe mental illnesses and/or fentanyl addicts don’t need a home, they need treatment and in many cases — restraint. And it is the vagrancy/destitution problem that I was asking about in the question.
As for housing addressing the other part of the problem (those who can’t afford anyplace to live), obviously it gets to the heart of the problem. What seems perverse though is when localities try to address this problem by building housing. This is like trying to address food affordability by getting government into the supermarket business.
California has spent tens of billions on the issue with little to show. Yet it can easily be addressed in good part through granny flats, converted garages, mobile homes, or even travel trailers. Just get out of the way!
I agree, hence leading with a double meme format to indicate incredulity and good-natured ridicule. Apologies if it didn't come across clearly.
Would note that from a YIMBY perspective, "get out of the way" is still "building housing", since it creates supply that counterfactually wouldn't exist. Matt alluded to this too, where he says that rising interest rates and a general recessionary economic environment leads to a general HODL mindset where people don't feel comfortable making their spare spaces available (if they could afford spare space to begin with). There's more than one way to spin the cat, it doesn't just have to be new builds. Which of course CA is notoriously bad at too, since we grossly inflate the cost of public and "affordable" housing, it usually still isn't affordable at the low end anyway (years-long lotteries just for a chance to move in!), and concentrating too many "consumers of low end housing" together leads to other unfortunate knock-on effects which drive away investment and good-neighborliness.
"affordable" housing drives me nuts. I mean, there should be housing for people who don't make a lot of money, but it is expensive as hell to build in California, and affordable housing ends up taking longer and costing more than just building regular housing. I always point out that our shitty old apartments aren't "affordable", so why should we expect a brand new building to be? I see affordable housing mandates as a stealth way to slow down construction of new housing by introducing endless loopholes. Feels like it would be cheaper to subsidize the rent for poor people so they can rent market-rate housing and have help paying the rent rather than try to build housing specifically for them.
Yes, there's not zero element of backdoor-NIMBY in the promotion of Affordable In Name Only (AINO) housing. Don't forget the impact of PLAs, "prevailing wage", and other left pork sops. Even when it's genuinely well-intentioned, which I think it mostly is.
What's extra confusing to me is that California already has a long-running nonrefundable "Renter's Credit", which serves the same purpose as a direct rent subsidy, without being tied to rent control or other non-market distortionary measures. Plus it's done through the tax system, so no scarlet letter of Section 8 vouchers. But it's been stuck at $60/$120 for years, and so effectively devalued bigly by inflation, and of course that's peanuts compared to rent itself. It could be made much larger, and also refundable...
You resent the people who built it? Or the people whose behavior necessitated it?
I resent the actual low-utility architecture itself, while fully understanding the unsatisfying compromises that led to its implementation. Don't hate the player, hate the iterated game.
I wonder how many people here remember when this all started, and why? Fundamentally it was the decision to close state psychiatric hospitals because supposedly medical science had discovered drugs that made these institutions obsolete (and also because freedom-lovers were offended by the concept of locking up people who either were not criminals or incapable of knowing their behavior was wrong). The idea at the time (late 70s-early 80s I think) was that we could build residential group homes to care for those who needed supervision, which gave rise to the NIMBY movement because *nobody* wanted psych patients living next door. So we end up with people self-medicating and living on the street. Some of this is from psychopharmacology being way oversold as a solution and also society not wanting to spend tax money treating the mentally ill when there is already so much money going into our wildly inefficient system of healthcare.
In 1959 there were 37,000 psychiatric hospital beds occupied in California, when the total population was 15.5 million (one bed per 419 residents). In 2016 there were 6,800 beds, when the total population was 39.5 million (one bed per 5,808 residents). The recommended level is 50 beds per 100,000 in population (one bed per 2,000 residents), which we'd meet today if we had maintained half of the beds we had in 1959. There were legitimate scandals of neglect and abuse in these facilities exposed in the 1960s, which kicked off the dismantling of the system, but as with many movements in the 60s and 70s, it went too far.
It was an unholy alliance of leftists like Thomas Szasz and right-wing small government types like Reagan. Almost all the people who are homeless in a given year are due to economic distress, as Matt says, but they tend to be invisible: only homeless briefly and not wandering the streets ranting. Almost all such people are homeless for years. They are very small in number, but very high in visibility. There are sociological studies on this stuff. They tend not to be substance abusers or mentally ill, but both. It's a shame Matt really didn't engage with this.
I still think of the 2019 report on Bay Area Homelessness by the Bay Area Council as a reliable and practical guide to these issues well worth reading. It is focused on the San Francisco Bay Area counties, but includes comparisons with other large metros nationwide, including the critical distinction between housed and un-housed homeless populations. The report broadly supports the MY conclusion that (1) lack of housing supply and high rent are the most important drivers of homelessness -- including for the populations most likely to be unhoused for long periods of time or needing critical psychiatric services, and (2) that permanent solutions are going to be expensive -- especially for that same population. There are some more cost-effective ways to avoid the cascade of bad luck / bad timing that contributes to evictions that create the entry path into homelessness, but the interventions (limited duration rent assistance, etc.) are outside the normal policy discourse.
If you clear a homeless encampment, where do those people go? Underlying everything is the actual housing shortage.
And if you think the answer is put them in jail, wait until you see the price tag for that, it would swallow a whole lot of state/city capacity, and make successful governing even harder. It makes subsidized housing look like a bargain.
This really is where the low-end dormitory style housing that got made illegal last century would be helpful.
They should go to the clean safe shelters that we didn’t build with the $20 billion dollars (in just California) that we already spent (or is the word wasted) on the issue.
True, but the encampments are not safe and create a lot of safety and public health and environmental hazards. Being homeless doesn't mean you get to have a sprawling trash pile taking up half a city block. There are constant fires with the encampments in berkeley and oakland.
Bring back the bughouse.
But hopefully without the bugs! Nobody likes to live in a cockroach or bedbug-infested building! Ew.
Usually they move to poorer neighborhoods.
Like to say that if you allow homeless to occupy a subway station then you neither have a homeless shelter nor a subway station...
So yea, 'stricter and more generous' rings true for me
But you can't really address the problem compassionately because if you actually gave a good solution that made homeless lives better you'd get everyone's homeless.
Not really true IMO. The functional homeless folks living elsewhere have jobs and social ties and such. Making housing cheaper in your city won’t pull them your way in numbers greater than it will attract anyone else.
Helping the “bum” population will require coercive measures that won’t attract them from elsewhere.
The functional homeless ofc but I thought we were talking about the ones who are actually an issue. The functional homeless aren't a problem for democrats you don't know who they are.
Yea but the precise measures to deal with the nonfunctional ones are exactly what won’t attract them: coercive treatment for drugs or mental health.
See, there you go talking about "homeless" and "homeless" as two different categories, just like the post noted. I kind of like how some people in this thread have started calling the people shitting in the streets "vagrants". It's a good word.
We can start talking about what to do about vagrancy, and its clearer what the actual issue is.
The problem i see locally (i live near berkeley) is that there are sweeps, which are expensive, and then the people swept mostly refuse the housing offered, and camp out somewhere else, create another hazardous situation, then that area gets swept, and they go back to the first area and the cycle repeats. So it is expensive and doesn't really solve the problem. And there are vocal advocates locally that make it harder to conduct sweeps and another set of vocal advocates that make it harder to build new housing, so the cycle continues. I'm in general pro-sweeps because the encampments are dangerous and a health hazard and I think being homeless doesn't mean you need to build a sprawling dump, and if you annoy people enough maybe they'll find somewhere else to go or accept one of the offers of housing because a not-great housing situation beats getting hassled and moved along every few weeks.
But I think the vast majority of even progressive people agree that allowing someone to wallow in their own filth on public property is not great, and we should have a different solution....which depending on your political orientation is either supportive housing, forced rehab/institutionalization, or prison, all of which are expensive.
" I think most of the country has reached a kind of corrupt bargain where, instead of spending money on fixing things, politically moderate and conservative jurisdictions dump the troubled people onto progressive jurisdictions where the residents either tolerate it or leave."
Basically this. Conservatives want low taxes, and enough liberals believe in the right to die on the streets as an unproductive drug user (or themselves want low taxes) that nobody favors the civil commitment that would not only get these people off the street but also save a few of their lives.
The one thing I would add is it really is a form of "antisocial behavior". I get that drug addiction is real, but that doesn't mean there aren't choices involved. You can see the choices in what jurisdictions they move to, and you can also see it in their histories, which usually involve alienating their friends and family and refusing to hold down jobs or housing that would require them to obey rules and take responsibility for themselves.
My guess is if we actually shelled out the money and did the civil commitment and ensured that part of the commitment program was that they never be allowed to touch drugs again, with real monitoring, we would turn some lives around. Because, denied the option of refusing work, sleeping on the streets, and getting stoned, some of these folks would become productive citizens again. Others might just have to stay in civil commitment a long time, but we would at least save their lives.
Letting them get high on the streets, and refuse to be productive citizens, until they die young (the current policy) is cheap and cruel.
The conservatives are willing to apply the firmness but not spend the money whereas progressives are willing to spend the money but not apply the firmness. Ideally we'd spend the money and apply the firmness, but that won't happen if we're outsourcing state capacity to third parties who think it's wrong or for whatever other reason aren't able to do it.
Third parties benefit from social problems they nominally address remaining unresolved. Without a firm metric of success and timeline, they just perpetuate.
I'm not convinced it's that cynical, and indeed it might be easier if it was because it would suggest they can be bought. I think the organizations involved just legitimately believe really dumb things.
Absolutely, 100%. But it’s also easier to believe dumb things when they pay your salary. Orwell: "It is difficult to convince a man of something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it."
That's actually Upton Sinclair, btw.
Thx!
And it's always much cheaper to hire crazy true believers for a job.
That cynicism is ignorant of the people doing the work and the problem being addressed
And your dismissiveness about the stewardship of public money undermines trust. Why are tax dollars going towards middlemen with well compensated leadership when the state should be providing public services?
I don’t know if you watch The Pitt, but I feel like it really illustrates the knots that bien-pensant progressives (who definitely run that writers’ room) tie themselves into on drug addiction. When a poor person is addicted to drugs, a young doctor who says “I don’t understand why someone would do that to themselves” is chided for his lack of empathy. But in a later episode, when a rich white guy assaults a nurse in a state of crazed disorientation, the revelation that he did it while under the influence of alcohol and cocaine is treated as a sign of his moral badness (he angrily rejects rehab to drive home the point). Yes, the guy chose to use drugs and reject rehab…but all of the poor drug and alcohol abusers the ER deals with made exactly those choices at some point earlier! That’s how they became addicts!
And they also made him a golfer, which is the real sin in progressives' eyes.
I really enjoy The Pitt but it is painfully woke at times. The writers really do their best to make the characters caricatures of progressives.
When a poor person is addicted to drugs (and does not violently assault a member of the hospital staff) he is treated with more understanding and tolerance than the upper middle class man who, under the influence of alcohol and cocaine (tries to strangle a young nurse, and then tries to lie about it in order to avoid responsibility). And even then, there is beef between the head nurse who protected the young nurse by sedating the attacker, and the head of the ER, who is worried about her use of the sedative, which might expose the hospital to liability. The story line is very clearly about the appropriate response to violence, not about drug use "choices", and our sympathy as viewers is clearly directed toward the protective head nurse. There are no progressive "knots" being tied anywhere in this storyline.
When Dana (the head nurse) gets the toxicology report showing the attacker was under the influence, this doesn’t cause her to view the guy’s actions less harshly. Instead, she furiously strides over to the room where the guy is and slams the report on the window for the physician to see. The impression is that the guy’s drug use exacerbates the badness of his actions. This impression is strengthened when the guy protests that being charged will ruin his life, and the doctor scoffs, “Anyone who can play golf and buy cocaine can afford a lawyer”: the coke lessens our sympathy for him, it doesn’t increase it.
(Whether the guy is lying about attacking the nurse, or simply was blacked out, is unclear. It’s obvious he was legitimately tweaking out—he has no sober motive to attack her—but I guess we’ll never know whether he actually remembers.)
Of course you’re right that there’s a big difference between attacking someone, and not attacking someone. I just think the show is inconsistent about when empathy is called for and when it should be withheld (the doctor who has no sympathy for the golfer asshole was herself convicted of a violent crime and had to wear an ankle monitor, something we’re supposed to sympathize with her for). It’s reminiscent of, for instance, people saying that people with mental illness and disabilities shouldn’t be stigmatized or dehumanized, BUT when Kanye West engages in anti-Semitic rants or a guy with Tourette’s uses the N-word at an awards show, their conditions don’t enter into it; they’re just bad people.
The significance of the toxicology report she brandishes is that it constitutes evidence that he was under the influence of a psychoactive during his attack on the junior nurse, which is both illegal (cocaine) and undercuts his claim that he does not remember and does not think he attacked the nurse. The tox report goes to his credibility in the upcoming police interrogation (which is happening because he is being charged with the assault, not the drug use), and it helps to justify the senior nurse's (unauthorized and irregular) use of a pre-filled syringe of Versed to sedate him during the attack. So the gist is "you are not going to be able to weasel out of responsibility for this attack by claiming the senior nurse used unnecessary means to stop the attack", not "drug use is morally reprehensible".
In fact, the season-long subplot about the senior attending (Langdon) who re-enters the ER after drug rehab is a good example of the show's attitude and treatment of drug use. Langdon has taken the necessary steps (rehab, etc.) to regain his position, but some members of the staff do not believe he can ever be trusted after he lied and stole meds from patients while in the throes of his addiction, while other members of staff welcome him back and appreciate his talent, friendship and recovery. It's unclear how much of the negative reaction is to the addiction itself (can a once-addicted physician ever be trusted again?) and how much is to the specific violations of professional responsibility and patient trust. And pointedly, they include a scene in which Langdon confesses and apologizes to the chronic alcoholic / addict patient from whom he stole medication, and the patient forgives him, saying something along the lines of "I know what it's like to be addicted." The apology and forgiving happen shortly before that patient dies of the complications from decades of alcohol and drug use. I don't think this subplot is built into the show to make a didactic point about the morality or immorality of drug use, but it does illuminate the short and long-term dangers of addiction.
First, I’m really enjoying this conversation!
That said, I’m not sure why it would be true that him being on a potent combo of booze and coke would mean that he must remember the attack. Isn’t it the opposite? Drink by itself can make someone black out; I don’t see why adding cocaine would reverse that.
I think Langdon is a great example of how the show treats drug addicts with empathy. How people should feel about him, whether he should work in the ER, these are difficult questions that different characters answer differently, for reasons that themselves invite empathy. But we’re never encouraged to harden our hearts to him. We’re also supposed to empathize with Dr. McKay, who—I want to reiterate—is not only a recovering addict but also was convicted of a violent crime. (Javani gets rebuked for gawking at McKay’s ankle monitor.) We’re obviously supposed to empathize with Louis, and with the addict in the park, both of whom Ogilvie is callous about in a way that illustrates his awkward, much-to-learn quality. I’m talking about empathy a lot because the show talks about it constantly, invoking it not just for drug addicts for other characters whom society ostracizes for their supposed bad choices: the malnourished prisoner, the obese man (another Ogilvie gaffe), etc.
And yet there are a few characters with whom we clearly are not supposed to empathize. And this golfer guy is one of them. He bears a strong resemblance to Doug Driscoll, the asshole who slugged Dana in Season 1, but whereas Doug’s malice had no explanation, golfer guy’s does: he took coke and alcohol together, not knowing what the effect would be. But now there’s no suggestion that this guy made bad choices for which we should have any understanding. Instead, the coke cuts against him: it shows he’s rich and privileged, it impacts his credibility as you said. Dr. McKay is the perfect person to say, “Look, you did something bad and you have to face the music. But in a funny way, I’ve been where you are. Your life isn’t ruined; this could be what you need to turn things around.” Instead, when he angrily rejects help (anyone know if that’s something addicts are known for?), she isn’t saddened; she’s grimly amused. It’s all very understandable, it just seems inconsistent with the show’s values around drugs.
I agree with your observations about empathy - I think that is the deep bass line of the show. I also agree that we are encouraged not to empathize with certain characters, but I think that is because they are violent, destructive, disruptive ... or themselves display a lack of empathy. The golfer is an easy case: he's violent, then he displays a lack of character by trying to deny his violence, then he low-key threatens legal action the nurse who had to sedate him. He has none of the redeeming qualities we see in Langdon, Louis or McKay (all of whom are non-violent addicts or recovering and remorseful addicts), nor even in Ogilvie, who I think is cast in an ambiguous light because he is shown to be the least empathetic (though highly competent) member of the medical staff (at least in the current season). I think if you re-write the golfer scenario with his violence but without the subsequent revelation of his additional character flaws, you would get a pretty standard Pitt scenario, in which even his drug-induced violence could have been excused (if not exactly forgiven) by the more empathetic cast members (McKay seems to be tending that way until he reveals his additional character flaws).
I don’t watch it, but, yeah, if you’re working with people with addiction, you need to be compassionate towards them regardless of demographics. Nobody chooses addiction, and wealth does not equate to good experiences. Trump is a great example of a man who would be completely miserable if he were merely rich and couldn’t have paid for all the lawyers who enabled him and his reckless choices
They’re differently situated. A poor person who has nothing else good going on in his life chooses to use drugs is more understandable than a rich person who could get massive amounts of pleasure in so many other ways choosing to use drugs.
I wonder if the status quo has ended up in a place where we're spending/losing more money than just building (in my state) a 300 bed security hospital. You read articles about the transit agency spending $50 million on security, the amount per person being spent year after year on "connecting them to services," the huge loss of property tax revenue, etc and I don't know, does this get close to the cost of building and running the hospital?
It's $125k/year/person here in California to keep someone locked up in prison. It's hard to imagine with all the money we're collecting for homeless services but the current status quo of shunting them to the margins and only responding if they act out is on the cheaper end.
I don't know if you realize both how truly expensive and horrible commitment is. For people where there is no other option ok fine but that's not true for 90% of even the problem homeless.
They'd happily keep their problems private if you gave them somewhere with privacy to sleep and a locker to keep their shit in. It will be way cheaper and less cruel than commitment. It doesn't happen because of that corrupt bargain. No one wants to attract all those people without the money to pay for it and conservatives will use the fact that privacy will let them use drugs as an excuse not to allow federal funds to follow for such uses.
In fairness we have absolutely tried to give free housing and it's often just destroyed. I have a family member who was a super of a building like this in Seattle. In one year I think there were something like a 6-7 opioid deaths, a dozen more completely destroyed apts that were essentially uninhabitable after, and a parking lot where everyone's cars were eventually beaten up by drug abusing drivers returning in a stupor and just hitting other parked cars over and over. My family member left halfway through as she couldn't stomach walking into apts with dead bodies any longer. Eventually the building owner turned it into section 8 and dropped the grant money/non profit approach entirely. The level of care at the bottom end is essentially hospice level treatment not simply a room to crash.
There are levels to this. 2/3rds of homeless are not chronically homeless and do just need a place to stay for a temporary time, and we have that solution already. Of the chronically homeless, I would guess another 2/3rds need only some room and regular checks. But that final 1/3 needs no joke 24/7 monitoring to not completely destroy themselves and others imo
The Seattle times did some reporting on water setoffs in supportive housing. Basically if you use more than a certain amount of water in a period of time, your water shuts off, which lowers the building's water bill and also reduces the damage from someone flooding their apartment. A lot of people were having their water shut off. And the advocates were going on about how it was unfair because many of the residents were too mentally disorganized to shut off the faucet when they were done getting water, or were running the faucet in the tub for hours on end to drown out the voices. It was clear that many of the people in supportive housing really did need to be in some sort of facility because they could not safely live o their own.
They wouldn't happily keep their problems private! They often reject housing that comes with basic rules like "don't use drugs here where families are located".
And there's also an obligation to contribute to society. I am all for anyone who can hold down a job and supporting themselves being left alone with respect to their drug use. But these people don't work- they can't because fhat would require them to not be stoned all the time the way they enjoy.
Yes we should pay to solve the problem. But civil commitment IS the solution. And by the way, it's a deterrent too. If it is well known that society expects every young man to work and contribute to society and will not accept any long term residency on the streets getting stoned, young men will realize this isn't an option and some of them will end up in rehab rather than dead on the streets.
A million times this. As an urban lib I feel like the policy are choices I am presented with isn't some major investment in building new humane social systems designed by Keith Humphreys and run by compassionate professions but rather the status quo (which isn't great!) or, well, forms of "social cleansing" (see South Korea under the military government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_Home for how this actually tends to work) advocated by various very online types who are furious they have to see a poor person the two times a year they come downtown. As a lib if I'm forced to chose between the options, I pick the former rather than the later.
I took the 18 after dark last night and had a pretty bad time. Is that something you have to do at all?
Like I said, it would be nice if another choice was presented to me but I really don't see that as part of the policy menu.
It's like how if my choices are a dysfunctional police department or no police department I'll be a bad liberal and pick the former.
My thing is that, almost a decade into this, the "they just hate poor people" thing has gotten incredibly grating. I'm still out there, going outside, not working from home, not getting my groceries delivered, not taking Ubers everywhere, etc. It's a lot worse than it was in 2015. It is legitimately hard to understand the perspective of the people who are not seeing this. And I'm friends with a lot of them, they just tend to not spend much time in or around the downtown Target but do manage to have a lot of takes about what it's like.
I agree we are stuck in a bad equilibrium! I have sympathy for your plight! But forced to choose between the options, I choose the grating option over what some people are proposing instead (which as far as I can tell will probably end up being like that Soderbergh lost gem Unsane)
The current policy isn't compassionate to the long term homeless. It kills them on the streets. It only seems compassionate to those who have a baseline view that there should be a basic freedom to refuse to work and support oneself and to get stoned all day until one dies young.
You're not responding to my points at all counselor. A hypothetical fully funded humane system designed by Keith Humphreys and run by compassionate professionals would be great, but that's not really on the policy menu in my experience. (To be sure I'm with Matt that we should enforce rules about public order, especially on public transit, and encampments are bad and should be humanely cleared, but you aren't calling for stepped up foot patrols and more "defensive architecture" on bus stops, right? As far as I can tell you want something quite different.)
This kind of narrative is just pretty different from what I see with the homeless people who camp in the park near me. They are unsightly but have never bothered me when I go by them and I go by them all the time including with small children. My family members who complain most about them are the healthcare workers complaining that they treat the hospital as a hotel and take up a lot of expensive care that our taxes pay for. I do not know if they would be better off or not in civil commitment but their lives as do not seem obviously hellish, some of them have bicycles and I even saw one with a kayak once. Maybe my local homeless are exceptionally nice for some reason and I am not seeing a representative sample. But If I had to choose I think I would also prefer camping in the park over being in prison.
They steal the bikes; I live in a city where fancy bikes are popular and it's amazing how many $2,000 bikes the obviously homeless seem to ride around on.
One of my coworkers lives in an exurban area and there is an encampment along a bike trail near his house. They apparently try to entice kids to come into the encampment.
that choice shouldn't be available.
Fine but then don’t pretend you’re taking away the choice for the homeless people’s own good.
I'm not pretending that at all, I'm saying it's for the good of the park and the citizens who enjoy the park. That's why no one, no matter how desperate their circumstances are alleged to be, gets to sleep in the park, period. ("Where are they going to go?" That's absolutely their problem. This idea that because a person exists, that's a problem for everyone else -- it's sick, and among other things it means everyone has a strong interest in having far fewer people around, which isn't a great incentive structure!)
I visited a state run facility that housed seriously mentally ill adults who were subject to what we call LPS conservatorships in California which means that the state rather than an individual initiated the conservatorship. The facility looked not unlike a public school from the 1950s with 3 to 4 people per room and television as the primary form of activity. As a person who is pretty introverted I left understanding why family members would want their loved ones there rather than on the street but I honestly would prefer living on the street to living in that facility. The lack of freedom or privacy and forced togetherness seemed unbearable.
I once visited an actual low-security prison and it reminded me a lot of the public school I went to! Just the aesthetics of it. A lot of it probably built by the same contractors lol.
There is a man here in Chicago who places himself outside the doors of my local Jewel-Osco and harangues every customer going in and coming out to give him money. The number of times I have wanted to shout "Would that you permit me to transit without repeatedly importuning me for alms!"
Another time, after telling a woman I do not carry cash or change (because I don't), she then proceeded to loudly shout she didn't want my loser money, and then called me fat.
So what? They should be working, following the rules, holding down an apartment, and if taking drugs is what prevents them from doing that, not using drugs. This is a community and they owe obligations to it as citizens. They should be out of that park and acting as responsible citizens. Or institutionalized and forced off drugs forever if they can't make that happen.
Modern society is pretty complicated and technologically advanced and it’s not clear that everyone has the capability to be productive. AI will drive this point home to more people I think.
And your initial comment was claiming you’re doing this for their own good. If you want to force them to comply with some notion of duties that’s fine but then don’t pretend you’re doing it for their own good. I don’t think institutionalizing them makes them better off. I wouldn’t want to be institutionalized if I were in their shoes, and other commenters have said the same thing.
It is absolutely for people's own good to disallow them the life of getting stoned and dying on the street.
And until AI actually causes the job apocalypse it is not excuse to allow this anti-social behavior.
I don’t know about turning lives around….mostly it would just be keeping them in the institution and providing (prescription) drugs. That’s what civil commitment is—you keep them off street drugs by literally keeping them off the street, out of society, in a place where they don’t have choices.
I think people don't realize there's plenty of intentional behavior here. If you are the sort of person who alienates all your family, feels no obligation to society, hates following rules, hates work, and enjoys being stoned, a homeless camp in a warm weather west coast city is very attractive.
A society that denies that type of person that option may result in some people realizing that a sober life working and following rules on the outside is more attractive than a sober life in a mental institution. So it may save lives. The key is denying them the option they would like to exercise.
All of those adjectives could describe plenty of professionals making $500k lol. I’d say those things are very normal actually—isn’t the dream to have “duck you” money so that you don’t have to follow rules or work and can alienate whoever you want? The difference between the upwardly mobile rich guy seeking duck you money and the homeless guy may be IQ or education or family background and connections but it isn’t prosocial attitudes…
The difference is a professional making $500k a year is a productive member of society following rules and meeting their basic obligations to their fellow human being. If they can do that and manage a drug habit we shouldn't intervene.
But the deal is if a person decides to alienate everyone in their life, not follow basic rules, and refuse to contribute the work he owes to his fellow community members because he would prefer to be a creep on the streets who gets stoned all day, THAT'S an anti-social choice whereas the professional is not making an anti-social choice. Which means we need to stop him and deny him that option so he gets to decide how he will fulfill his citizenship obligations. And, if we do that we will save some lives because the "freedom to kill yourself on the street" is cruelty, not compassion.
My brother and I have a half-serious joke that the federal government should step in on the nuisance vagrancy problem by converting the Oklahoma Panhandle into some kind of semi-wilderness preserve. House nuisance vagrants from the entire country there in something like CCC camps.
I'm not sure the optics of "move all the people we don't like to Oklahoma" are great lol, though maybe history education is lacking enough that people aren't aware of the Trail of Tears
The real reason Trump wants Greenland....
If we take protectionist logic at face value, that cheap imports destroy domestic industry, then the most devastating economic weapon imaginable wouldn't be a blockade. It would be an imposition of free trade. Economic sanctions on Cuba/Iran/Russia should take the form of forced free trade.
Time to brush up on some pre-20th century history- this is exactly how colonial powers used to behave. Britain was the 'workshop of the world', and they forced their colonies to open up to 'free trade' with them whether they liked it or not. The whole pre-1980s model of world trade was 'rich countries physically manufacture the goods and then ship them to poorer countries', and it's why first the UK and later the US were so strongly pro-free trade.
Selective free trade was literally an imperial weapon, turning weaker countries and colonies into captive markets for metropolitan manufactures. This is what the West did in China, this is why the US forcibly opened up Japan to outside trade- coercive treaties literally prevented the Japanese from enacting tariffs on Western goods until 1911. This is part of what the American colonists were so angry about it- Britain forcibly favoring their own industries- and the newly formed US immediately tariffed British goods. Historians have been documenting 'imperial free trade' like..... forever
I think it's wrong to put this in a colonial frame. This is also what the European powers did to each other. They were not free traders, they viewed trade as another weapon to wield in their wars and were mercantilist to the core.
For instance when Napoleon was trying to bring down the UK he instituted the Continental System, which was basically trade with me and close your ports to British vessels. One of the main reasons his alliance with Russia didn't prosper is that this made a lot more sense for France than Russia, and he demanded his allies be part of the Continental System.
European powers tried to do this to each other (culminating in Nazism) but they were largely powerful enough to resist it. Non-European countries were not.
1. This is a good refresher! Aligns with what we studied in history texts in middle & high school (what the British did in India in particular) though even then it was presented as one "school of thought".
2. In general, historians' grasp of history is good, and their grasp of economics or trade less so. Or at least they frame things as zero sum because wars and conflicts are zero or negative sum.
3. The problem with colonialism was the coercion, state-backed monopolies, and lack of property rights. Not the trade! Adam Smith had it right. Smith argued that maintaining a global empire was a massive drain on the British taxpayer, existing primarily to enrich politically connected monopolies like the East India Company through rent-seeking, rather than genuine market competition.
This is not dissimilar to what's happened as a result of exchange rate manipulation and insanely high subsidies to industry by neo-mercantilist powers since 2000 or so, just that the recipient nations' neoliberals are stupid enough to believe they're getting a good deal.
I generally agree but to steelman the other side many rich countries did force free trade on poor countries through gunboat diplomacy in the 1800s and it was devastating in most cases; China remembers it as the “Century of Humiliation” and Chinese people actually got shorter, and it was so devastating to the Ottoman Empire that the term “capitulation” which just meant a “chapter” of a treaty now means complete surrender even in English.
Free trade is good generally but poor countries also need a developmentalist state with enough bargaining power to extract concessions like tech transfer from multinational corporations so they don’t get all the value.
Yes, If you don't have rule of law, inclusive rather than extractive institutions, allow for creative destruction, free trade is not going to save you. But then neither is protectionism.
Sadly, Substack will only let me like this one time!
I think the (non-stupid) protectionist argument is slightly more nuanced than this, or at least more sensitive to initial conditions in the relative allocation of labor and capital.
AIUI the initial protectionist argument is fundamentally about capital: Country's First Domestic Auto Factory is extremely unlikely to be competitive on efficiency and product quality with longer-established peers in industrialized nations in competitive markets, and the more that outputs are capital-dependent rather than substitutable with labor[1] the less the labor-cost advantage of your current labor-heavy, capital-light economy actually matters. So you use protectionism to assure above-market returns to inferior products in order to bootstrap domestic investment in capital. Then (if you do it right) you try for gradual import-substitution over time by loosening tariffs to spur competitiveness from a nonzero industrial base[2]. So if you have a lot of extremely high-capital low-labor-input industries, free trade might be a decent way to beggar thy neighbor on the assumption that Cuba is unlikely to, say, develop a homegrown space launch company rather than just buying capacity from SpaceX.
If, alternatively, you find yourself in the position of the United States where the Koreans work brutally long hours to produce capital-intensive goods at lower prevailing wages than your own industries (and for some reason your factories haven't all moved to China, which of course in practice they have), high tariffs to protect domestic industry seem like they're basically an indirect form of domestic wage subsidy and/or industrial policy to make sure you don't totally lose knowhow in the way that happened to the US shipbuilding industry notwithstanding the Jones Act. This, uh, doesn't seem like it should work long-term without some kind of domestic output sustaining those high wages, but that's sort of getting into this territory -- https://youtu.be/axHoy0hnQy8?t=41 .
[1]. Though I'm not an economic historian, I would imagine that the traditional "infant industries" during the Industrial Revolution probably often fit this mold pretty well--there's not really any amount of poor farmers you can substitute for a blast furnace. Not that that stopped Mao from trying a century later....
[2] AIUI This is basically the Korea Story, although unfortunately they appear to have hit a competitive equilibrium that's stalled out at substantially lower prevailing wages than the US with an immiserating, totalizing work and study culture, an unbelievably steep bifurcation in outcomes based on whether you work for a chaebol or not, and a cratering birth rate. So, uh, proceed with caution.
A couple of thoughts, one for each case.
1. A state that finds itself in the first situation is unlikely to have the state capacity to enforce and collect tariffs fairly. Or the institutions to distribute gains fairly. There is large scale smuggling, corruption in setting different rates for different products, permanent pleas for protection, etc.
2. A lot of good the Jones Act has done! Fewer, more expensive ships, and ~0% of the world's commercial ship building output.
Yes. Jones Act delenda est. As I've observed elsewhere, if the US actually had a marine shipbuilding industry worth a damn you could at least make the *argument* that it's doing what it's supposed to, but we don't even have that!
I'm less sure about (1) though, not because tariffs don't invite all sorts of political-economy mischiefs (they obviously do) but because at least a few countries have genuinely succeeded in import-substitution even if various others have fucked it up (also apparently there's some story whereby at least certain sectors of Russian industry may actually have increased in capacity post-2014 due to sanctions creating a more autarkic regime, although it seems like it's a mixed bag at best).
Protectionist logic?
Tariffs are what we do to people we don't like
The entire chronic long term homelessness issues comes down to this one concept:
The NYTimes did an article a few weeks back about the biggest cause of preventable death in America - high blood pressure. It helpfully noted that 90% of people can get their blood pressure under control with treatment. And then an article a few weeks later about the 10% of people who don't respond to GLP1s. But when it does an article about the chronically homeless mentally ill and drug addicted they somehow are under the impression that it's all 100% treatable with drugs and therapy.
I've never been able to get an answer to the question of what to do with the 10% who are treatment non-responsive. Because if someone did respond well to treatment when they had their first mental health episode they wouldn't be homeless to begin with. These people are where they are because, in many cases, they just can't be fixed.
Many of those homeless people aren't crazy crazy ... they have demons that push them to look for escape and then end up with serious drug addiction. In a way that is treatment resistant because our medical system is unwilling to recognize that some people are unhappy to a point that only extreme hard drugs are able to relieve (until we invent something better).
Honestly the solution other countries came up with is just to give them places to do that in private that don't bother the rest of us. We can't bring ourselves to do that plus the state system means you risk pulling more people in that situation.
No I think they forcibly institutionalize them. Example:
“Finnish mental health legislation takes a medical approach to compulsory measures, emphasising the need for treatment of psychiatric patients over civil liberties concerns... Finland has the highest rates of detention per 100 000 inhabitants, about 214 compared with 93 in the UK and 11 in Italy”
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychiatric-bulletin/article/compulsory-psychiatric-detention-and-treatment-in-finland/4757FEDD5BB56849744DDE76A7FEBBE1
"Honestly the solution other countries came up with is just to give them places to do that in private that don't bother the rest of us."
Right, places in state mental hospitals that they never closed*. They key is the people can't leave.
* In Germany, for example, there was a move to community based care where appropriate and state hospitals became less crowded, but they were never closed. Bed capacity fell by half not 90% like in the US.
No I mean the street drug users who those countries mostly do not institutionalize but move them out of public view.
I think you're not recognizing the venn diagram of serious mental illness self medicating with drugs and alcohol.
I am very well aware and I've spent time with these people. What you are missing is there are many forms of mental illness with full on psychosis being relatively rare. There is a very large fraction of people who have serious mental health issues and take drugs to self-medicate but are perfectly aware of reality and don't want to cause anyone harm.
Thing is we haven't solved homelessness except for this 10%. We have a lot of regular homeless people, or people that only become addicts once they fall into that environment.
This is a hard problem to solve but there's lower hanging fruit that is going unaddressed.
I don't know how common it is to become homeless and then start drinking vs. losing everything because you're a chronic alcoholic.
"Tibita Kaneene: How should a rational dem allocate $100 give today"
<rant>
a rational dem shouldn't give any candidate $0.01 unless they promise to never sell your phone number, or text you. emails are as bad, but you can keep unsubscribing/ reporting as spam. but the texts just dont stop.
as someone who gave in 2020, I am not giving a single $0.01 via actbloo or whatever till they figure this bullshit out.
</rant>
Agreed, I mark everything as SPAM and it just never stops.
Also - if you are claiming to be the party of integrity, you should not resort to blatant lies to try to raise money. WE HAVE A 500% MATCH ON EVERY DOLLAR RAISED TIL MIDNIGHT AND ITS GOING STRAIGHT TO FUNDING RELEASE OF EVERY TRUMP MENTION IN THE EPSTEIN FILES.
IF YOU DONT DONATE RIGHT NOW WE WILL LOSE THIS ELECTION.
I’m sorry, I guess it’s effective, but we should maintain some degree of integrity.
My wife keeps wondering who keeps on texting me and when I reply that it's all fundraising, it just seems so ridiculous.
At least the very obviously fraudulent (??) 9000% match crap has petered out, for now.
If I have to give a phone number, I just won't donate. Email is fine since I can just use spoof emails.
I continue to be somewhat confused by Matt's analysis of the "anti-Israel" issue. This mailbag's analysis sounds reasonable, but the one about cozying up to Hasan Piker didn't. I think the main problem is that vague polling questions, e.g., "Do you approve of Israel?", make it very hard to distinguish between:
1. A view that our policy should be less favorable to Israel, e.g., cutting off aid or not looking the other way on settlement expansion.
My guess is that this is the view that's prevalent among the general public, and, in particular, the base of the Democratic party. When you ask a suburban wine mom "Do you like Israel?" she has a vague idea that Bibi is bad.
I don't think most American Jews would care too much about a Democratic party that moves away from Israel in this sense. There may be some over-enthusiastic people who call these mild policy changes antisemitism (and the left gets a lot of mileage out of trolling Jews about this), but even Bibi and the Kahanists agree with some of these policies.
2. A view that the people of Israel are something close to ontological evil while its enemies are something close to ontological good. This issue should be at the center of one's moral compass. While political violence is never acceptable, one can't help but understand why one would commit violence against those who don't hold this view.
I think this is the anti-Israel view held by people in the media, academia, etc. E.g., the Pod Bros frequently citing Drop Site, all of those obviously-false statistics alleging to show that Israel is uniquely evil (they killed more journalists than the Nazis!), people being somewhat sympathetic towards the Michigan synagogue terrorist, etc. Crucially, this latter view is what you would need to take if, as Matt suggested, you want to go on Hasan Piker's show and agree with him on Israel.
Again, the left gets a lot of mileage out of (correctly) pointing out that this derangement is not classical antisemitism. What really grinds my gears is when they further suggest that since it's antisemitic to link Jews with Israel, actually Jews should stand *against* antisemitism by adopting this view. (I.e., that the war on half the Jews is righteous.)
I think it would be utterly shameful for American Jewish institutions to take this view. When I hear American Jews say that this would be the best way to defuse antisemitism, I think it's pathetic. Barbarians are shooting rockets at half your people, and you're worried about people calling you names?
The view Matt took about Hasan is that people should go on his show and say that the government of Israel is bad and we should stop giving them money. The view that you can't go on anyone's show and express your points of agreement with them while not endorsing all the outer crazy stuff they say is part of the problem here. Joe Rogan also believes lots of crazy stuff.
I don't know about this. If you want to argue against affirmative action, e.g., I think it's very different to (a) announce it on Fox News, or (b) announce it on David Duke's radio show. Doing this sends all sorts of signals that people will draw inferences from whether the candidate likes it or not.
Great analogy
You’re not doing the “divided loyalties” trope any favors by calling the citizens of a foreign nation that’s been increasingly acting in a manner hostile to American interests “your people” from the perspective of American Jews.
I don’t see how this is expressing any sort of dual loyalty? Like, if the US were at war with Israel, I’d support the US. I don’t think the Jewish tradition of being a people (going beyond individual adherence to a religious doctrine) conflicts with this.
No one finds it strange that some random Bangladeshi-American has an affinity for Palestinians, or that Irish-Americans have an affinity for the Irish (even when they were terrorizing a US ally). Nor, for that matter, would anyone find it so odd if Persian-Americans were concerned for their coethnics in Iran, a country we’re at war with.
It's an alien idea; as an obviously white American I have no ethnicity. The idea that I should give a fig what some Europeans that may be distantly related to me are up to makes no sense. Assimilate already!
Arguably there are few things more American than having strong opinions relating to ancestral countries that you objectively have no ties to (unless you're British or German). You may not like this, but this is what assimilation looks like.
I don't think many Irish, Italian, or Polish Americans have substantial views about the homeland either anymore. Greeks also headed in that direction.
Some ex-Yugoslavian emigrants do but that's because they're first-generation.
To be fair, most of the not having substantial views about the homeland has to do with nothing of great import currently happening in those countries. Prior to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, many, possibly most, Irish-Americans would have had a view about what was going on in Northern Ireland. The most obvious evidence for that is how much energy the US invested in brokering the agreement.
Too much of my misspent youth was hanging out in Irish bars in and around Philly. Virtually all of them included some reference to this, from the fairly benign "Give It Back, Thief" poster to actual fundraising for the not so benign Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID).
Similarly, the Solidarity movement and moment in Poland was a really big deal in the 1980s if you were Polish-American.
Depends, there are a lot of Irish-Americans who have strong feelings about Northern Ireland to this day.
My brother, “white American” *is* your ethnicity!
If you said “My ethnicity doesn’t cause me to have divided loyalties between the United States and another country,” then I would agree with you.
It’s not an ethnicity though. I’m white but am not the same ethnicity as a guy who grew up in Romania and just got his citizenship, for example.
Being a white American is an ethnicity. People can assimilate to a new ethnic identity or be forced to over time.
This just further paints ethnicity as incoherent. Which, is largely fair. I don't see how it helps the discourse, though.
Is being "white German" an ethnicity? It's the same thing.
White just refers to my skin color; it's not part of my identity any more than me fitting the fascists "heritage American" definition. It's utterly meaningless.
This would be a hugely more compelling argument if the median Jewish American’s ancestors hadn’t arrived around when mine did.
I assure you, I could not possibly give less of a shit if Germany and France started lobbing cruise missiles at one another, except for the economic consequences here in the US.
Historically our Jewish folks have, thankfully, followed the Bundist model… but if Israel undermines that then I have deep concerns about our relationship with it.
This cuts both ways. A large number of the prominent anti-Israel people on the left (and sometimes right) are motivated by ethnic or religious ties that are quite transparent. Rashida Talib and Zohran Mamdani didn't spontaneously decide to be anti-Israel because of a rigorous, rational approach to the conflict.
Yes. You've upvoted comments of mine where I layed into that brand of idiocy as well.
There's another interesting aspect of this. Zohran Mamdani is the most prominent Shiite in America. No one seems to be asking him to comment as a Twelver Shia on the actions of the self-described revolutionary Twelver Shiite government of Iran, which often claims to speak for all Shia and be a protector of them. I suspect it's because only 0.5% of Americans know what a Twelver Shiite is. But dual loyalty is a live issue in the Middle East for Twelver Shia, and it might come to get Mamdani soon. I hope, for his sake, he is ready for it. Jewish politicians aren't always ready for that.
Mamdani has, from the perspective of someone who pays only the vaguest attention to NY politics, seemed to run from most of these issues whenever he can. Most of his campaign handling of Israel/Palestine boiled down to, "Not my concern, here's what I'm going to do for NYC."
I find it difficult to envision him giving up that discipline anytime soon, and it won't matter for many years, if he ever runs for federal office at all.
Honest question: what would it look like to demonstrate non-divided loyalties? I basically agree with Matt's take on foreign policy, but I don't support persecution of American Jews based on their political opinions, and it sounds like that's JA's position as well.
>>Barbarians are shooting rockets at half your people, and you're worried about people calling you names?
This is pretty daft. Every time Israel acts this way anti-Semitism spikes in the US. That can mean name calling, sure, but it also means your personal safety is more likely to be at risk.
I live in a very Jewish area and since 10/07 my neighborhood has seen vandalism, a stabbing and a shooting. My Jewish friends have felt unsafe and at times did not want to patronize Jewish businesses. Those things didn't happen in the 6 years we lived here before.
Israel acts according to its own interests, which are not the interests of the diaspora. Separating the concepts of Jewish from Israeli is good for the diaspora and bad for Israel, which is why Israel spends so much effort mixing the two together. You're doing it yourself by calling Israel "half the Jews" in your post, rather than treating it as a foreign nation. Those interests sometimes align, but they sometimes don't.
When your personal safety is compromised because of a warmonger halfway across the world I can perfectly understand why you'd want some distance between you.
Yes, I agree that anti-Armenian hatred in the US is primarily the result of the actions of Armenia. Most Armenians in the US aren’t even from Armenia. Pashinyan clearly doesn’t govern with the residents of Glendale in mind when setting policy! When anti-Armenian flyers were posted at St Mary’s Apostolic Church in 2023, it was primarily because of Armenia’s aggressive policies in Nagorno-Karabakh. It certainly wasn’t because of anti-Armenian bias of those who posted the flyers. Armenians have nothing to do with Armenia!
You're straw-manning against something I didn't argue. Obviously anti-Semitism has existed for longer than the state of Israel. It's still the case that when the I/P conflict goes hot anti-Semitism incidents spike in the US.
No you said, “your personal safety is compromised because of a warmonger halfway across the world”
That doesn't imply that all anti-Semitism is because of Israel, a statement I would not agree with.
It's still the case that when Israel does bad things it reflects on the diaspora to many people. Or do you think Netanyahu's actions have no explanatory power for why antisemitism is on the way up?
I think this is generally right and illustrates why it's just not a good 'popularist' issue. Our politics on this subject would be a lot healthier if it was easier to say Israel is a foreign country whose interests align less and less with the United States, and even better if we could concede that the relationship has become anything but normal. It's hard to imagine what's going on now happening with any of our other allies.
However it's also hard to get more than ankle deep into realism about Israel/our relationship with them without encountering the bizarre parallel universe you describe in part 2.
The thing that continues to be very annoying to me about even normal lib takes on this conflict, reflected somewhat in MYs post, is the idea that the war is Israels "fault" or that Israel "started" the war with Iran.
Irans whole foreign policy revolver around creating a "ring of fire" around Israel and provided the means for most of the SEVEN groups attacking Israel since 10/7. As they have built up weapons supply they have been openly chanting "death to Israel" (and America) and promised to used the weapons to slaughter as many Israelis as possible.
At what point does this constant escalation warrant a response? I continue to be amazed that people can look at the current conflict and say Israel "attacked" Iran and "caused" or "started" the war. It requires a complete and total ignorance of Irans actions and their effects.
"At what point does this constant escalation warrant a response?"
From whom?
From the people being actively attacked on 7 fronts
So not the US, got it
Correct we attacked Iran. You can claim that. Israel did not start the attack on Iran, Iran attacked Israel and started the conflict.
"Iran attacked Israel and started the conflict."
Are you referring to 10/7, or 1979?
Israel and Iran are enemies and it's not surprising if they take military actions against each other.
I'm not sure why the US and Iran are enemies. Yep, they facilitated the death of American soldiers when we were fighting a war next door to them (as part of the Axis of Evil, which we designated them part of) but that war has been over and backward-looking foreign policy is a fool's errand.
So if Bibi finagled Trump into joining in his war on Iran, that's 90% on Trump, but it's still 10% on Bibi.
More to the point, Israel clearly prefers a failed state in Iran to the current odious regime. Of course Israel isn't even bordering any countries that border Iran! So for them reducing the ability of Iran to project power is more important than the regional chaos that would emanate from a failed Iranian state or Iranian civil war. But a bitter factional war within Iran is going to cause MAJOR problems for U.S. allies in the Gulf in addition to Pakistan and Turkey, who would probably see major refugee flows and also increased problems (from Turkey's perspective) from Kurdish separatists. I wouldn't even hazard to guess what would happen in Iraq.
It does seem Saudi Arabia, which is larger, hates Iran a lot, and probably more insulated from happenings on that side of the Gulf is with Israel in pulling for obliterating the Iranian government. But to me it seems clear that Israel's desire for the endgame of this war would NOT be in the US interests.
The US needs a stable, reliable regime in Iran -- even if it's hostile! -- that has an interest in the free flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf. You can strike a deal with a hostile regime if you have shared interests. A failed regime is very bad for the US because the Strait becomes vulnerable to any particular group that has the ability to threaten it.
Israel imports all its oil (while exporting a lot of natural gas) so it has reasons not to want chaos in the oil market. But its security concerns may outweigh that and make it happy to have pure chaos in Iran (and thus in the Gulf).
Iran tried to assassinate Trump and Hayley last year for their support of Israel
Neither of those are considered causus belli when you are talking about a superpower and a third rate power. Not every problem, or affront, or provocation, even violent provocation, is a justifiable reason for going to war., More than one American has tried to assassinate Trump and every other President. We don't overreact and do things like suspend civil liberties in response.
Being a super power doesn't guarantee us safety from all the bad things people might do to us, and when they're done they don't automatically justify pulverizing the offending party.
You can disagree about our casus belli for attacking Iran - to prevent them from getting nukes, to assist a diplomatic partner being attacked, to reduce their international proxy ring that stretches to mexican cartels, to reduce chinas ability to get past sanctioned oil assets, to reduce arms flows to Russians to slaughter ukrainians - and so on, but I don't think you can do that and say that we should help ukraine or taiwan when they face similar threats. Isolationism is definitely a political philosophy many asribe to.
That doesn't follow at all, and there is a near infinite distance between isolationism and going to war.
We are helping Ukraine because they were invaded, their sovereign territory encroached upon and occupied, by Russia. Still, we are not going to war on their behalf.
If China invaded Taiwan, I would absolutely support assisting them with arms, materiel, intelligence etc. in their effort to fight them off. Whether to go to war for them is a much harder question, and there are very good reasons that we have never pledged to do so, nor entered into a mutual defense treaty with them in the same way we have with NATO and various other closer allies.
None of that is isolationist.
None of the things you listed are near to the casus belli that Ukraine has and for which we are assisting them. If in fact Ukraine was listing those types of actions as their reason for attacking Russia I would be much more skeptical of how much aid we should provide.
Ukraine was actually invaded by Russia. If Iranian troops had invaded Israel and were occupying and attempting to annex parts of the country then I would support defending Israel. That’s not what’s happening of course. The only country doing invasion and annexation is Israel. This distinction should be obvious.
The Nazis killed a few hundred people to retaliate for a successful assassination of Heydrich and this is rightly considered very evil. Killing thousands in response to an alleged assassination plot that didn’t even make it into an attempt would make us a good deal worse than the Nazis.
The war is not about the assassination attempts I'm just showing that none of you have actual standards you stick to
Maybe Trump shouldn't have blown away one of Iran's most important leaders during his first term.
Soleimani was directly responsible for killing over 600 American servicemen by equipping shiite militias in Iraq. 17% of our total deaths over there.
So we get to take revenge after the fact and after the war?
Would we have been justified in also continuing to kill all the intermediaries from Soleimani on down?
No! That would effectively mean no war ends and no cessation of hostilities ever occurs.
Yes, this is true. We also declared Iran as part of the Axis of Evil after 9/11 (which they had nothing to do with) and occupied and ruled Iraq (which also had nothing to do with 9/11), a nation of vital interest to Iran and not to the US.
You can call them evil for facilitating the death of American troops occupying the nation on their border or attribute it to rational foreign policy, but you still have to justify why we're launching military actions against them *today.*
Would you say we attacked Iraq in 2003? Yet there were precipitating events in that conflict too, including an attempted assassination.
The better comparison is helping Kuwait when Iraq invaded. Should we have let Saddam take Kuwait and said fuck you to our allies getting slaughtered?
Is that a better comparison? Was Iran going to take Israel? When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, we gave Britain some missiles; we didn’t carpet bomb Buenos Aires.
Who did Iran invade? The only country in the Middle East that has invaded and is currently occupying foreign territory is Israel.
Saudi Arabia had important connections to Al Qaeda. Nevertheless, if we bombed Saudi Arabia, I would say that we attacked Saudi Arabia. Wouldn’t you?
Not if Saudi Arabia itself were actively launching rockets at us as well
What rocket incident are you referring to that precipitated the war? My understanding is that, when Iran has launched rockets at Israel, Israel has retaliated proportionately. Much like how, when we killed General Soleimani, Iran retaliated proportionately. Multilateral widespread bombing of Iran’s cities, along with killing its head of government and many other leaders, is a major escalation, no? You’re really mystified as to why people would call that “Israel attacking Iran”?
Iran has been launching rockets at Israel for over 2 years now. You can call the response an escalation, but I would call Israel fighting on seven fronts against Iranian arms more than an escalation. I truly dont understand in what world people live in where Iran and their funded proxies can launch Iranian arms at Israel from all sides and not eventually expect a response. They wanted this war, started it, and now are getting it in return.
Who cares if Israel is responding to Iranian actions or acting preemptively? I care that the US is joining them in this war.
We fought the Soviet Union across many fronts—definitely more than seven!—for many years. But I don’t believe that if one side assassinated the head of government of the other, that you would see that as less of an escalation than the proxy wars previously happening.
I mean look, see it however you want; you said you’re mystified how people can see this as “Israel attacking Iran” and I’m trying to explain it. I know there’s always the temptation to say “well, if they would just see it my way…” If Americans would view affirmative action as fairness rather than discrimination, they’d be on board! But it seems they don’t, and as people say, when you’re explaining, you’re losing.
When Iran actually attacks. It’s funny how the bill of particulars against Iran is always based on what people there are chanting. Almost as if they haven’t actually done anything violent that would be considered an act of war by any historical standard.
That's an absurd statement that shows incredible ignorance of the facts of what Iran has done for decades. They've been doing acts of war for years we've simply been ignoring it because we didn't want to get into a long drawn out conflict.
It boggles my mind that MY cannot differentiate criticism of Israeli leadership and policy with calls for Israel’s elimination. It’s truly something that’s nearly impossible to conflate in basically any other circumstance.
The idea that there’s no connection between Jews and Israel is a bit like saying there’s no connection between Armenia and Armenians. But there are Arabs who also live in Israel (but there are Azeris who live in Armenia). But there are many Jews who don’t live in Israel. (A larger percentage of world Jewry lives in Israel than ethnic Armenians live in Armenia by several fold). But many Jews had families who never lived in Israel. (Yeah, and many Armenians come from Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and even Israel-Palestine, and not from Armenia).
I agree with you that Jewish institutions who try to disassociate Jews and Israel are pathetic.
I think I'm safe in asserting that no one, especially no American, who is not Armenian or maybe Turkish, or of their descent gives a shit about anything having to do with their conflict. Any analogy to it sunders on this fact.
Because a reader is less emotionally invested in that conflict allows you to see the logic better.
And the logic just crumbles if you apply it to basically anything.
Funny, an argument I've made here several times is "how does [X pro-Israel nonsense] sound if you swap 'Israel' with 'Azerbaijan', and 'Israelis' with 'Azeris'?
No, "Israelis" would be equivalent to "Azerbaijanis", and "Jews" would be equivalent to "Azeris".
Does that then make the US into Iran, as pertains to 'Azeris'?
"they further suggest that since it's antisemitic to link Jews with Israel, actually Jews should stand *against* antisemitism by adopting this view. (I.e., that the war on half the Jews is righteous.)"
Though of course different, the relationship of American Jews to Israel, the relationship of Americans of German ancestry to Germany in WW1 and 2, and the relationship of Americans of Japanese ancestry to Japan in WW2 are related phenomenon.
Personally, I think it help clarify some thinking on this issue if people would go through the exercise of making careful and thoughtful comparisons of these three examples.
I'm confused by this comparison. Not only are we not at war with Israel, we are currently fighting a war *alongside* Israel. Moreover, Israel has historically fought enemies that, broadly speaking, are aligned against American interests (even if they don't pose a big threat).
I can't think of a great example, because America's allies are usually not capable of kicking the shit out of their enemies the way Israel is. So something like British-Americans' opinions of the UK bombings in German cities during WWII is not really apt here. But that would nevertheless be closer!
Japan and Germany also fought against the US enemy the USSR.
In WWII, Japan and Germany were the expansionist powers starting the war and taking territory, while the Allies were defending. That makes Israel more similar to the Axis, as they are taking territory in Palestine and Lebanon and started the war with Iran.
No, Israel takes territory because its enemies use the territory to attack Israel.
The idea that Israel started the war with Iran would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. A founding principle of the Islamic Republic was the need to destroy Israel, and Iran has waged war on Israel through its proxies for over 40 years.
If anything, what Israel is doing is more similar to what the UK and France should've done in the mid-late 1930s in response to the Axis. For example, I've read that the Germans crossing into Rhineland in 1936 were under orders to turn back if fired upon...but the French commander failed to even fire warning shots.
The USSR was not our "enemy" when the US entered WW2. Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941.
Fun fact: the US and USSR were allies during the Second World War!
I think German-Americans did tend to be more isolationist which you can see in election results in the Midwest which was more heavily German. But even then they were not pro-affirmatively supporting Germany.
There was, however, anti-German xenophobia in WW1 and anti-Japanese actions in WW2, based on beliefs that Americans with ethnic ties to those countries were tainted by association.
I think Matt is basically right about 10/7, Israel's role in Iran, and aid, but what I would actually say is that actual anti-Zionism in 2026 IS anti-semitic. The theory is to start a civil war that drives the Jews out, just as the theory of the far Right in Israel is to try and drive the Palestinians out.
Our policy should be to call out anyone who is calling for any sort of population transfer as a bigot. No more "technically anti-zionism is not anti-semitism". It is. The Jews are there and if you want crap that will get them killed you are a bigot.
But Netanyahu's rejection of 2 states and coddling of settlers should draw a real response.
I just think that calling it antisemitism is increasingly not convincing to people (even if, according to some definitions, it would be accurate). It gives people who adopt this view an easy out to say "I want Israel to be overrun by the Arabs, but look, I'm at a seder! How could I be antisemitic?" ("Antisemitism" originated in the same way, actually. "I don't hate Jews, just Middle Eastern race-mongrels!")
Perhaps it would be more convincing to point out that antizionism is typically a violent derangement on its own terms.
I think bigots denying their bigotry isn't some massive reason not to say what is happening.
I guess it just depends on the audience for me. Some audiences aren't really receptive to this framing, which makes further communication difficult.
It can also sometimes perversely turn into a debate where you get really into the weeds and "lose" if you can't conclusively prove something is antisemitism rather than antizionism. (I remember many on the left thinking it was really important to insist that the Bondi and Michigan attacks were best characterized as antizionism.)
You’re kind of eliding the distinction between “population transfer” (intentional action) and “crap that will get them killed” (passive voice, speculation about the results of policies you don’t like). I don’t think most people supporting equal rights between Jews and Palestinians would agree that this would lead to civil war or result in Jews being killed.
That’s mainly because they’re delusional imbeciles.
The non-delusional 1.5-state solution is using overwhelming American military might to guarantee a Dayton Agreement version of Israel-Palestine.
Dayton was only possible because the parties first agreed to negotiate a permanent end to fighting. The Palestinian people must first agree to stop trying to destroy Israel and kill all its Jewish inhabitants. Otherwise Israel has a strong disincentive - based on consistent Palestinian behavior - to allow a Palestinian state on its borders.
Every time Palestinian representatives have had an agreement at hand, Palestinians responded with an intifada (the first after Oslo, the second after Madrid). Palestinians, in the only free fair and open election ever held among them, elected Hamas - not in spite of its genocidal charter, but at least in part because of it (doubtless other factors also came into play, as the PA had little appeal either).
Ignoring your hilariously one-sided account, re-read what I actually wrote.
Oh Christ no.
I want to spend less time sending American kids to get blown up in the Middle East, not more.
Of course they want that. As Matt pointed out long ago, none of those 1 state solutions ever have realistic plans to stop it.
The base belief of the 1 stater is "the Jews should have never 'colonized' Palestine and therefore shouldn't have a state", with full knowledge of what will happen when the state is eliminated and no plan to stop it.
Israel should prosecute settlers who attack Palestinians and their homes. More importantly, Israel should take action to prevent such attacks. Burning Palestinian homes displaces Palestinians and thus creates facts on the ground which criminal prosecutions don't necessarily undo. I don't think it's cynical to suggest that some on the Israeli right see the prosecutions as a fig leaf for an expulsion strategy, and any prosecuted settlers as necessary sacrifices.
But Netanyahu came to power as a result of Israeli abandonment of the two-state solution, not as a cause of that abandonment. The Israeli people saw that there was no significant Palestinian support for a two-state solution, especially after the second intifada. They saw the Palestinian people repeatedly refusing to take yes for an answer after both Oslo and Madrid.
Arguably, Arafat saw Rabin's murder after Oslo as a warning about his own extremists, and in effect abandoned the two-state solution in response.
In NY there is now a bribery scandal being prosecuted over funding nonprofits to service asylum seekers. I was like “this overlaps so many issues!”
The blue NGO industrial complex is the new Dem patronage politics for the 21st century.
MY frequently and irresponsibly used the term “anti-Israel” but doesn’t define what he means.
There is a global project, backed by many sizable countries and organizations, to dismantle and eliminate the state of Israel. This project has been around since Israel’s founding in 1948. There are many countries that do not allow Israelis to enter and do not recognize the country. Several countries have “This passport is valid for all countries of the world except Israel” written on their passports. The whole situation of not settling refugees from a mid 20th century war is wholly unprecedented and is intended to keep alive a war over Israel’s very existence. If you listen to anti-Zionist protestors (with anti-Zionist explicitly meaning against the existence of a Jewish state) shout “from the river to the sea”, they are signaling support for this project. The opposition to Israel’s existence for people within this project is ideological based on core principles, not contingent on Israeli behavior or policy.
Some leftist progressives placate themselves by saying they just want a single binational state, which is fine. Until you realize that literally zero major Palestinian factions support this and this is the least popular solution in Palestinian politics. And you realize that the path to get there either involves Israel annexing the territories (which these advocates are clear they are against) or dismantling Israel and have another entity take power (like the PA or Hamas).
This is highly unusual for a country. There is no organized global movement for the dismantling of Croatia, or opposition to Croats expressing their national self determination in a country, no matter how violent the 20th century was there. There’s no organized global project to dismantle Armenia despite lots of displacement of ethnic Azeris and Turks throughout constant conflict. (There is a project to dismantle Ukraine as it turns out, and we see that playing out).
So “anti-Israel” could mean having some objections to particular policies of Israel in the West Bank and the fact the Israeli government has not expressed a serious vision for a political solution to the conflict in decades. But these are things that I, as a pro-Israel guy who moved to Israel and made Aliya agree with. It could mean wanting to distance ourselves from Israel, but still supporting its existence and believing it should defend itself. It could mean disagreeing with this or that military action.
Or “anti-Israel” could mean you are active in the robust global project to delegitimize and dismantle the state of Israel.
MY frequently conflates these things in a way that is highly irresponsible. It’s like confusing being against Armenian policy in Nagorno-Karabakh with wanting to dissolve, eliminate and dismantle Armenia, and harassing Armenians who support the existence of an Armenian state! Basically no one would confuse these things in pretty much any other context.
MY conflates these things in nearly every article he writes about the subject. I think it’s grossly irresponsible.
Agreed.
This is very... what's the word I'm searching for... morally frustrating.
I've been yelled at for making a similar point on Substack: Netanyahu is a vile scumbag, and Israel has been doing horrible things, not only in Gaza but in the West Bank too. (Remember that Palestinian man Israelis stripped naked and sexually assaulted?) At the same time, look at a map. Israel is a teeny-tiny little sliver of land surrounded by majority Muslim/Arab countries. It is the one and only majority Jewish nation on earth. It's wrong to say "Israel is bad, it should cease to exist" when nobody has a problem with majority Muslim or majority Arab nations existing. As for people who lost their homes (or, more realistically, whose grandparents lost their homes) in 1948, that is very sad, but guess what, my family lost our home during WWII in what was then Poland but is now Ukraine, and you don't hear me continuing to bitch about it in 2026.
Polish people aren't demanding a right to return to Lwow; Germans aren't demanding a right to return to Breslau or Stettin. You gotta let some things go!
I think one of the saddest things about the Trump era is that entire concepts like tolerance and reconciliation just feel passé.
In 2012 during the peak of Arab Spring hope-and-change fever, I toured a bilingual school in Israel where Muslim and Jewish kids grew up alongside each other. Everyone knew the effort was doomed to fail but decided it was worth trying anyway. I can't imagine anyone believing in that kind of thing these days.
Poland is a relatively unique case, it's the only country to have been 'scooched'.
They absorbed Prussia and now voila they’re suddenly the shield of Europe protecting them from Muscovy.
Agreed. And quite often if you look behind the curtain it always boils down to they don't support the right for the state of Israel to exist and many of them don't want any Jews to exist.
Post-Cold War Marxists like the Code Pink morons are the Disney Adults of American politics: they seek refuge from adulthood in childish fantasies. They should be mocked mercilessly and ignored politically.
Median-ish people also want to be billionaires themselves. Why do you think gambling and lotteries are so popular? The many median-ish people who want to be billionaires are not going to support guillotining billioniares.
Guillotine fetishists tend to be on the upper end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Normal people generally are uncomfortable for those who openly state that are looking for the pretext to engage in wanton murder and violence.
That logic doesn’t seem to follow, a lot of people have killed kings because they wanted to be a king.
This gets close to the reasoning behind those who fetishize the violence of the French Revolution. Downwardly mobile college graduates want to make room for their upward mobility.
If they’re downwardly mobile anyway why would they need room for upward mobility?
It’s probably more of a concern for upwardly mobile people starting out without much finding that even if they are very successful they simply cannot catch up to other people born into wealth making a couple percent returns every year meaning they cannot afford a nice house or upward mobility, without something akin to winning the lottery.
Of course we should not have violence. But we should have more progressive and wealth rather than income based taxes.
Interestingly historically the French king believed what you’re saying that it was only the downwardly mobile college kids against him which is why he tried the Flight to Varnes but the poor rural people sold him out and it got him guillotined.
If you look at the degrees some of these people who post this crap on social media have and how those fields are zero sum (non profit, culture industries, academia) what they are expressing is a purging sentiment.
Add to it geographic concentration in desirable cities, then you see how these resentments result in some people fetishizing guillotines.
Then there is probably a bunch of hedonic expectations playing into these sentiments.
The point is that they are moving down, but want to move up. No?
We already have a progressive tax system. The top 1% of income earners pay about 30% of Federal income tax revenue. The top 50% of income earners pay 97-99% of Federal income tax revenue. Arithmetic says the bottom 50% of income earners pay 1-3% of Federal income tax revenue.
Taxpayers with AGI under $75K pay zero Federal capital gains tax.
A wealth tax violates the Takings Clause, fortunately. Crafting such a tax would lead to many perverse consequences.
I don't see how anyone could claim a "discrediting" when a simple perusal of stock prices shows a big obvious dip right around Liberace Day, followed by a recovery after the flip-flop was walked back (probably mostly because of the market going into freefall). Why, you'd need some sort of elaborate conspiracy theory that the dastardly duo, Standard and Poor, intentionally coordinated a stock sell-off just to snub the President. You can see the same occurring in real time, right now, with all the unfortunate implications of the Straight of Hormel being crooked. Except it's a lot harder to undo a (never formally declared!) war than to change some numbers around at the Bureau Whose Name I'm Too Lazy To Look Up That's Responsible For Implementing Tariffs. "They predicted 10 of the last 5 recessions!", tweeted from my iPhone while standing in line at the unemployment office.
Disappointed at the "do you think it's time to punch the hippies again and harder?" bait question. Audience capture isn't not a thing, although the answer was a good enough redirection rather than boring old plant-based red meat, at least.
“Liberace Day”
Fabulous.
I lived in SF for a long time and what I found tough to deal with regarding the vagrancy/drug use/homeless situation there was the aggressive and shameless lying the service provider/non profit folks would constantly deploy. "These folks grew up here, they're part of our community and they're victims of hard times" -> the mayor in 2020 changed policing orders to arrest people for public drug use, in something crazy like 97 of the 100 first arrests the people's last recorded address was more than 100 miles away, and they had currently active arrest warrants in other states and other counties. "We need safe injection sites and housing as an initial contact point to offer people treatment, otherwise we have no way to get people into treatment" -> of the thousands of people who used the safe injection centers in SF, less than 1% sought treatment. "its cheaper to house homeless people than it is to have them on the street, if they're on the street they call the police/fire/ambulance and its very expensive" -> when you put these people in housing they don't magically get better. They still call the police/ambulance/whatever all the time, on top of that many of them completely destroy the buildings they're in. SF had to pay ~200M + dollars to a few hotels that were used to house homeless people in project homekey because they were completely destroyed by the inhabitants. I don't know what the solution here is but I am 100% certain that a key part on the critical path to a better world here is a complete regime change in the non profit/service provider universe that are funded by our taxes and operate completely against and also somehow immune to popular sentiment in the cities themself. The current crop of non profit execs and workers is completely discredited and should have their contracts cancelled and be disregarded politically.
At least for this issue I feel pretty strongly that there is a very limited role for the non-profit industrial complex. That industry attracts the kind of terminally earnest do gooders that are uniquely ill suited to actually solving the problem.
that might be the east coast industry vibe, the west coast industry seems to attract radical anarchists who have adopted the political project that all drug addicts are tortured poets who are the vanguard against capitalism and must be supported by society in their noble pursuit of nothingness.
I've even heard that the homeless people camping in the parks and doing drugs all day are morally superior to the average American because they have chosen to opt out of the violent system of capitalism. I don't know how you can get a steady supply of meth or fentanyl without capitalism, but I'm sure the people making those claims know what they're talking about.
Regarding the homeless people destroying housing, the solution is probably concrete buildings with little furnishings and with dorm style monitored living.
So, some kind of state instutition where the residents are kept from destroying the place or harming themselves or others, something like that? Maybe at the same time we could give them psychiatric treatment?
Sounds good to me.
thats a lot more expensive than leasing decrepit hotels which is the current strategy
Maybe in the short term, but long term is probably makes sense.
I too lived in NYC, and what we’re experiencing in Seattle is not that. I DO know that the people I see openly using, dealing, and decompensating in my neighborhood are homeless because they live in tents and RV encampments. I’m pretty sure Matt’s rather patronizing, “I’m a sophisticated NYC boy so I’m not scared by a few eccentrics the way suburbanites and flyover folk are,” means he’s not living in that same reality.
I’m a city girl. I’m not scared, I’m angry. I - along with a lot of liberals, many of whom are too afraid to speak their frustration - am done being told by homeless advocates and YIMBY’s that I don’t get it, that stats belie my daily experience, that it’s really an affordable housing problem. Sorry, but we have thousands of people living on our streets who can’t take care of themselves, simply put.
I appreciate Matt trying to differentiate between two groups, the financially insecure and the severely damaged, but there’s an insouciance and a tinge of condescension (and ignorance?) in his treatment of the latter. Encampment communities of the chronically homeless are a true urban crisis. For ten years it’s been so designated in our city. Yet, in the name of compassion, wokeness, and some future in which the 80, topographically-challenging, square miles of one of the most expensive cities in the country has built enough affordable/free housing for our over 17,000 unhoused; these folks have been left to feed their hellish addictions, permanently fry their brains, prostitute themselves and others, and die among dealers and fellow addicts.
This is not only unacceptable from a moral and basic city-management perspective, it’s politically disastrous. Progressives and some Democrats position themselves as defenders of the right of addicts and mentally ill folks to illegally camp in our parks and on our sidewalks, to refuse offers of shelter, to form longterm communities which instead of discouraging, progressives and do-gooders enable with sanitation, donations, needles. meals, and opposition to so-called “sweeps.” This is akin to the way we positioned ourselves as the defenders of the right of people to live in our country illegally; as consistently and self-righteously caring about the struggles of illegal immigrants and non-normative identity groups over everybody else - creating hierarchies of deservingness that exclude most Americans, including the middle-class, working-class, and poor of all races and ethnicities.
I’m done.
Thanks for one of the best distillations of the issue that I've read in a long time.
On Israel, I am currently sitting on some polling which finds that a majority of Americans under 30 agree with the statement "Israel is an apartheid state, engaged in racist oppression against Palestinians." (The statement is based on something Rashida Tlaib said; we also asked people if they agreed with some statements from Chuck Schumer, Ted Cruz, Nick Fuentes, etc.) Should be out in a week or so.
"Israel is an apartheid state, engaged in racist oppression against Palestinians."
Given that the average person's response to, "What do you think about Gaza?" Is, "What's a Gaza?" I'm not buying it.
You're almost certainly underestimating the salience of Gaza. This is a topic that's received a lot of coverage over the last 3 years.
No one cares about the Palestinians. Try a ranked poll of actual average people:
Rank the Following
1. AI
2. Iran
3. Gas prices
4. Housing
5. Gaza
6. Global Warming
...
And see where Gaza ends up.
You’re conflating two different things: opinion on issue X and importance of issue X. X can be very popular but also unimportant to people. A good example is trans women in women’s sports. Another example is this.
Anyways, the poll does include an issue ranking question. And Israel-Palestine does rank low overall. However, it’s ranked as much more important by young voters, which are the same group that is most likely to believe Israel is an apartheid state. So that tells you something.
It tells me that before you have actual responsibilities in life you can feign outrage over morally ambiguous things which don't concern you.
Or rather, before you have responsibilities in life, things that don’t matter to other people can be equally important to you as things that do matter to other people.
I’m finding a surprising convergence between this discussion and my sense of the difficulty of getting students to understand how AI can be actually useful, and not just a tool for cheating. If you don’t have any big responsibilities other than schoolwork (and exercise), then it’s hard for AI to do much to help you accomplish things other than your schoolwork (and exercise).
Even if that's true, the Democrats depend on people who have less responsibilities to turn out and vote much more than Republicans do.
Cope harder
I agree that's probably the case because that has been pushed by a certain segment of the elites and MSM for quite a while now.
Uniformed people believing the slop they were fed.
I think you might want to consider that not everything is a conspiracy against Israel or Jewish people and it might just be that voters don’t like the stuff Israel does
I agree that there is a small segment of people that are actually just critical of Israel.
But the vast majority of them are just using that as a fig leaf to hide their anti-Semitism.
Evidence?
How about the double standard they apply to Israel but not to any other nation.
Or the odd fixation over Israel vs other nations.
There's always just something about Israel and the Jews that gets these people riled up. What could it be...
I don't know, maybe the $300 billion that America has given Israel? And the fact that we have a much closer relationship with Israel than with other nations that do similarly bad things?
Do you have any poll questions that try to tease out anti-Israel from antisemitism? Like, Is it ok to boycott a Jewish business to voice your displeasure with Israel?
Yes that Q specifically is asked
“…voters don’t like the stuff Israel does”
Or, more properly since 10/7, the stuff Israel was accused of doing.
I mean, a lot of it was on TV and everything. You can argue about whether Israel should have bombed the crap out of Gaza (as far as I can tell they had zero good options), but not really about whether or not they did.
There was a lot of this kind of thing:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/24/media/gaza-hospital-coverage-walk-back/index.html
Not to mention the ever present, gratuitous accusations of genocide.
I’ve been getting frustrated that so much of the discussion around attitudes of the young is tied up in one single graph that doesn’t come with an obvious report allowing us to know what the numbers mean. We need multiple different methodologies investigating related questions to get a real understanding!
"" I think most of the country has reached a kind of corrupt bargain where, instead of spending money on fixing things, politically moderate and conservative jurisdictions dump the troubled people onto progressive jurisdictions where the residents either tolerate it or leave.""
i live in a tier 3 city that is literally what MY says here, and the whole thing sucks. residents of the city are constantly big mad at the dem mayor and council who has literally no control over this, and the state doesnt gaf.
of course being a college town, thing are made worse because the only housing built at scale is $1400/ month apartments for rich students. all other initiatives are stuck in NIMBY hell.