If I'm in SF, it's for conferences and it's always strange that literally one block away from our expensive hotel, there are zombies shambling about -- and this is totally normal!
For those who know Toronto: it's like you're in Yorkdale, you walk one block and you're in the worst part of Parkdale.
The other odd thing is that I seem to pay about the same in taxes, given the author's figures.
If you want a name, say "drug-addicted homeless person". We're talking about the most badly abused people in our society and you and the author are simply abusing them more with these words. Surprise, they aren't there to say anything back, not that they care at this point. Although I hope at least you'd get a couple fuck you's if you tried it in person.
1/3 of homeless people in the US have a serious mental illness like schizophrenia. Do you think that if they aren't able to distinguish between reality and fantasy and are constantly being told to take pills by a health professional that they will miraculously decide not to take other drugs on the advice of a drug dealer?
If I called you a zombie for just blindly going along with the crackhead term that the author used, you would be offended, right? Are the thank-god-for-the-lowest-caste-so-that-I-can-not-belong-to-it opiates treating you well?
Do you think that anybody living on the street addicted to drugs is feeling happy and fulfilled about it? I mean, it just doesn't go down like this: "I've decided that despite the fact that drugs are bad for you, I'm going to totally allow them to fuck up and control my life and be homeless." It's more like: "I'm in a lot of pain, and hey for a couple hours if I do this I feel better. Fuck my life is getting bad now and nothing I do is working, I need some more of those things that make me feel good."
Fuck you and your expensive hotel.
edit: I was mean here, so I apologize. It probably didn't do any good, I think I just felt like getting angry at someone.
But you're also right that I need to lighten up. Attacking people out of the blue like I just did is not good for one's health, and it has little positive effect on the world. I have pretty poor social skills.
It makes me angry when privileged people don't demonstrate compassion.
For example, consider:
(1) "Just outside of my expensive hotel, there were all these drug-addicted homeless people that couldn't even walk properly. Life must be pretty difficult for them."
vs.
(2) "Just outside of my expensive hotel, there were all these crackhead zombies shambling around. Life must be pretty difficult for them."
The second sentence in the second form is so improbable that I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.
(3) I find it strange that there is such poverty next to such wealth and that people consider it acceptable. I feel as though I've woken up in a zombie movie, but everyone else is just carrying on with their day, like no big deal.
Whether they scream at/spit on/push around my sister or female employees because they are on crack, mentally ill, or just in a bad mood, I could care less. They need to be removed from the area because they are a real and present threat to public safety.
I would happily donate money to move them all to a camp outside the city where they can scream at trees and smoke tea leaves all day but for whatever reason the powers that be seem content to leave them where they are, which directly places the rest of us in harm's way.
It just seems to me that replacing the pejorative terms with neutral language makes the whole post more compassionate. And then the question you end up asking is, "This is bad, what should we do about it?" - because obviously zombies outside your four star hotel is a sign of badness - as opposed to, "Fucking crackheads, how do they work?"
I think that people even have to live on the street at all in the richest nation in the world is a travesty. It's almost like they're there to motivate people to work harder.
"Doublespeak is language that deliberately disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g., "downsizing" for layoffs, "servicing the target" for bombing [1]), making the truth less unpleasant, without denying its nature. It may also be deployed as intentional ambiguity, or reversal of meaning (for example, naming a state of war "peace"). In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth, producing a communication bypass.[2][3]
However, euphemism is not the same as doublespeak. It will not be considered as doublespeak if it is used appropriately and without the intention to deceive. For example, using "passed away" to suggest somebody is dead is an appropriate use of euphemism."
I am confused as to how my attempt to assert the use of neutral language is coercive or being used for social engineering or how it is strong arming anyone here. I certainly don't want to be doing these things, so if I am I would appreciate being told how I am.
I would say that "economically disadvantaged sporadically sheltered substance abuser" is a lot more... Orwellian.
Make no mistake, some of the people here actually want to live in a post-apocalyptic zombie film. :)
People sniffing glue, blazing crack pipes, and defecating on the street is 'character'?
It's a recipe for large-scale, institutionalized abuse. All I have to do is label you crazy etc., and then I can do whatever I want with you, while no one has to see it.
Any case where we argue that we should compel someone to do something for social order needs to be handled with the utmost in transparency and restraint. I.e. not putting them in camps.
Fair enough.
> If I called you a zombie for just blindly going along with the crackhead term that the author used, you would be offended, right?
Nope, I really wouldn't. But, that's probably because I'm a privileged Half-Blackfrican-Canadian with a 150 IQ.
If you said I didn't act black enough, or said I was a bad programmer, then I'd be insulted.
> Are the thank-god-for-the-lowest-caste-so-that-I-can-not-belong-to-it opiates treating you well?
You're assuming far too much. I apologize for hitting what is obviously a hot-button issue for you. Re-read my comment as a criticism of US social policy.
When I was in Toronto, I found Jane & Finch to be a bit of a shock because suddenly there were all these pejorative pejoratives pejorativing.
Just as you petitioned SF to get rid of the homeless people from your precious neighborhood, you can downvote my post, flag it, and petition PG to ban my account if you don't want me to post comments like this. If it fails, just as your real life petition failed, you can always find another web forum.
What's becoming clear is that I don't belong on HN. There's just no real sense of belonging that I have. Despite understanding all of the technical stuff, I just don't seem to fit in with you guys, and I don't really share a lot of your views, including PG's. It's almost like I come here just to differentiate myself from what I am not, and to show off technical knowledge once in a while.
For me, this isn't a forum where degrading a whole class of society is okay. Except, from what you guys are saying, maybe it is okay because it's a visible and personally annoying class? That is where the anger comes from.
What's ironic about all this is that if you read his later comments, the original guy I responded to apparently shares my opinions more than yours.
Finally, did you get so hung up on the F-bomb that you missed my edit to the original post?
Perhaps you've missed the changes in the last 40 years of American funding for welfare and social services.
That said, you're also completely out to lunch.
> "Especially when these people have all the resources in the world to get out of their situation.
They can? Have you been homeless, or worked with the homeless? What do you think is a sufficient upside to convince someone to be hated by everyone around them, be addicted to all kinds of dangerous chemicals, shit on the streets, and sleep in their own filth?
Do you also realize that the majority of the homeless population suffers from severe mental illnesses - severe enough to make them effectively non-functioning? Do you know the proportion of the homeless population who are veterans suffering from PTSD?
So you have a group of people who are, predominantly, suffering from a wide variety of mental illnesses that prevent them from functioning in life, and they have "all the resources in the world" to get out of it. Right. That's like chaining someone up, giving them a nail file, and asserting that they have all the tools to get out of it.
Hell, even if we institutionalized most of these people the bulk of them won't ever "get out of it". There are two distinct classes of the homeless - the situationally homeless, and the chronically homeless. Most liberal-minded people like to believe that all homeless are capable of being returned to "normal", where in fact a large portion of them will never escape their mental illnesses enough to be functional members of mainstream society, even with the best of help.
> "Often they have better apartments than the people they are begging money from."
Citation needed on this. There are, of course, some people out there scamming a quick buck by taking advantage of the homelessness situation. Did you watch that one NBC expose on that one woman in Queens, NY, and extrapolate this to all homeless?
I don't agree that challenging negative language and asserting neutral language is "whitewashing". I believe that it helps matters relative to the negative language. If you wouldn't use language to somebody's face, it's still abusive to use it behind their back, because it doesn't encourage kindness towards them. Would you call a homeless person with a crack addiction that you knew by name a crackhead to his face? If I take a moment to imagine going outside and doing this, it makes me want to cry. Whitewashing is what I associate with taking something bad and making it look good by changing the language. I don't want to do that.
But then there's even the more generic argument for not talking badly about people behind their backs: if person A says something mean to person B about person C behind their back, it actually hurts A because person B will start operating on the basis that when their back is turned, person A will talk about them in a similarly bad way to persons D, E, and F.
By the way, this page says 1/3 of the homeless population has severe mental illness (not just schizophrenia):
http://www.schizophrenia.com/szfacts.htm
I don't think that page includes simple alcoholism and drug addiction, which are legitimately disabling physical and mental illnesses on their own. After that, I'm not sure there are any homeless that are unaccounted for. None of them are there because they are "lazy bums".
Heroin. Crack. Severe mental illness. I didn't say even all the resources in the world could help them, just that they were available. Except for the one resource we refuse to offer--involuntary institutionalization. But we don't and we won't. Maybe because of old movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Maybe because we think they are exercising their civil rights by sleeping in their own filth and shouting at passerby.
> Citation needed on this.
I lived in a building downtown where many of these panhandlers lived. During the day they would hang out on the sidewalk and beg for money. In the evening they would go back to their $3000/mo market-rate apartment and do drugs and prostitution.
There is a revolving door between mental institutions, prisons, and the street. Talk to some schizophrenic people if you doubt me.
Nevertheless, I do believe mandatory but free drug rehab and work placement programs could help people, since I believe drug addiction is a mental and physical illness. Then addicts might be able to work for a living instead of beg for a living.
> In the evening they would go back to their $3000/mo market-rate apartment and do drugs and prostitution.
I suspect a pimp might be involved in paying for a $3K apartment if the people in it are "doing drugs and prostitution".
Your question is an attempt to destroy my argument by character assassination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
Except, even if we assume that one must not be a hypocrite to advocate a given position - I am accepting your fallacy here as truth - you are also changing the position. I did not argue that one should help homeless people. Rather, I argued for not using degrading terms to describe them. I have not been a hypocrite in that respect, and I have admitted to using degrading terms to describe them in the past.
Now, "a strong association in your mind" is a manipulative way of saying, "if and only if". So, if and only if I am a hypocrite, then my rhetoric is empty. Since you have exposed me as a hypocrite, or attempted to, my rhetoric must also be empty.
If you claim, no, it's only in the other direction, then since my rhetoric is empty, I must be a hypocrite, so then you decided to expose that side of it to see if you were right.
So now it falls back to the question of whether or not my argument is empty. Without an explanation as to what you mean by "empty rhetoric" - because the term is sufficiently vague on its own as to only constitute more character assassination - you may as well say, "Your argument is bad."
Your argument is bad too. I believe I have explained why.
Crackheads/street people don't like to freeze, so they move to the warmth is. I'd imagine this is as true in the US as it is in Canada.
But as someone from Vancouver who has visited SF quite a bit, SF always seemed to have more homelessness (it does have a warmer climate than Van) and more parts that smelled really bad. I might be desensitised to it already, though. Also, throughout my time living in Vancouver, I've never witnessed a robbery/theft/crime, whereas visiting SF last month I witnessed a random theft from a homeless at a Walgreens and they were really abusive towards him.
What I'm saying is, it still feels like a different country with a different culture, instead of it only being a west coast thing.
Everything in the US is basically X 10, so you have to allow for that in the similarities.
I only know a few people with cars in Vancouver, and none ever had their cars broken into except one who lived on the Drive.
Now, I know a bunch of people who own bicycles. Vancouver is notorious for their bicycle thieves!
So my dream of becoming a homeless programmer in Hawaii is still alive!
That said, Chicago's true poor are cached away far south of the places where people who read Hacker News would likely live.
Being in SF was really sad for me - sitting in a niceish cafe/restaurant and looking out the window to see a homeless person sifting through a bin. It's not at all what I'm used to.
Chicago, on the other hand, is a beautiful city. I was only in the Loop/Greektown area, but it was super clean, full of really friendly people, and lovely art installations and park areas. It was a pity that I could only stomach the food for a few days.
Unlike West Queen West (Ossington & Dundas hood), SF has not tried to pretty up their shelters etc.