Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

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There is also right now an epidemic of homeless people harassing, assaulting, and even murdering people and generally making major cities nearly unlivable. So when you create a false dichotomy between "treat mentally ill people who might murder you" or "lock up gay people", YOU are in fact giving tools to the people who want to lock up gay people. However much your average, non-gay person supports rights for gay people, I guarantee you they support not getting murdered more. So when you force a choice between "maybe, hypothetically, gay people get locked up" and "you might get murdered", people are going to choose the "don't get murdered" side. People, really, really don't like being murdered.

Instead, how about we don't force that choice on people? How about we offer the option "don't lock up gay people" and also, "don't let mentally ill people murder anyone"? Call me a crazy idealist if you must, but I really think we just might be able to do both things.

I live in a major city that is constantly described as having an epidemic of homeless people. I am far more annoyed by delinquent, housed teenagers than I am of the homeless population here. And more people die from reckless drivers than are murdered by insane homeless people-- in fact, a little girl was killed in a hit and run this year a few streets from me, and 0 murders by insane homeless people have happened in the meantime.

I'm pointing out that you must absolutely contend with the fact that marginalized people have historically been labeled mentally ill when they fight for equality, and that asylums have historically been used as a tool for this purpose. If your concern is to address homeless insane people, one of the major causes of insanity is being homeless for more than a few months, and yet our homeless shelters are still under-resourced and we are still creating more homeless people by seeing housing as an investment that must always grow, pricing out more and more people.

If anything, I am pointing out we must address the "false positive" issue, where the population of people who are under threat of being institutionalized as insane even though they are just a marginalized person reasonably reacting to their own oppression might be greater than the insane homeless we want to address. And that "we just won't do that because regulation" is a straight up delusional belief, with zero basis in actual reality, and is more or less saying you hate homeless people more than you care about marginalized people losing their rights.

> I'm pointing out that you must absolutely contend with the fact that marginalized people have historically been labeled mentally ill when they fight for equality

And I am pointing out that all people, marginalized or not, are currently subject to violence and harassment by the untreated mentally ill, right now. Not historically, currently.

If one party starts telling voters that they care more about hypothetical inconveniences for marginalized people than they do about people getting murdered right now, that party is not going to be in any kind of power for long and they will have no opportunity to protect anyone's rights.

Why are you calling the actual, historically factual sexual assaults of women in asylums to be "hypothetical inconveniences for marginalized people"? I guess that's what it means to be marginalized, that the harm done to you and how your life has been ruined is an inconvenience.

The only reason why the rape of women in asylums is historical is because we no longer have asylums. If you want to bring back asylums, justify how you're not going to also be bringing back raping women in them.

> we just might be able to do both things

Yes. But there is no easy solution. History shows that anything that involves locking up people because they might commit a crime will result in innocent people being locked up and abused.

Better not do anything then, certainly not try to figure out a better way.

The only safe choice is to oppose every proposal and offer nothing as an alternative.

Fix the root causes of the homeless crisis. Home affordability, employment, mental health treatment (with consent).

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