If you are a scofflaw homeless, the rational thing to do is shoplift and maybe pickpocket. Putting the fear of God in innocent people, including kids, is sociopathic. End of story.
OK, so?
Iâm not sure peopleâs behavior changes that much in a world with no cops. Iâm pessimistic about human nature. I think a better social safety net leads to better behavior, but I donât think getting rid of cops makes people care more about others.
Understood. I submit that you live in a society where youâve been told your whole life to stay out of other peopleâs problems and call the proper authorities if thereâs any trouble. I think thatâs a symptom of and reinforcing the unnatural alienation in our society.
You could live a thousand years and still probably be a favorite to not experience some random person breaking into your home with a gun. But i would never just allow someone armed to take whatever they wanted or risk my familyâs safety assuming the opportunity to stop or kill the person didnât increase the risk of harm to my family.
I think thatâs a key assumption. I think there are a lot of interventions that would increase the risk of harm to your family.
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For sure, I would say the majority would. But I think there is a too much of a difference between choking someone out for 15 mins to their death becuase they might get uo again and yell at you to someone literally forcing into a someoneâs home with a gun to use a blanket statement that itâs best to just let them do their thing and deal with it later - not that you were saying that.
Youâre going to be special kind of stupid to be the person whos willing to do the latter and it isnât going to be the type of person who is looking for a âcrime of opportunityâ or just needs food to eat.
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TIL another day in paradise by Phil Collins was about him having an awkward encounter with a homeless person where he says he neither helped her nor ignored her.
Youâre an asshole or more kindly I might say youâve been acting like an asshole, so I wasnât going to respond to this other than to call you an asshole, but the other posts in this thread have led me to talking about stuff like how not-governments do things which brought something else to mind. Not all homeless people are in the same situation and even the definition of what constitutes being homeless is not clear. Anyway, because this is something I was able and available to do, I did this last fall. Starting at 39:24 they go to the van that I worked on. I put in the solar equipment (panel, battery, inverter, charge controller). Iâm not present in the video.
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Of course theyâre more likely to be victimized than to perpetrate; theyâre extremely vulnerable.
Strawman, sadly, as I never said/implied otherwise.
Of course, untreated mental illness is more dangerous than a ârandom driverâ.
I think this is debatable, maybe you donât drive on roads like the ones near Toronto where chaos reigns. In any event you missed the point that because there are vastly more drivers and vastly more dangerous interactions with drivers, the effective risk is higher.
Edit: Just to put a little color on this to avoid all doubt of what the point is. The number of automobile deaths in Ontario last year exceeded the total number of homicides across the board. The number of homicides actually committed by mentally ill homeless people can probably be counted on one hand (maybe two, I donât know). The perceived risk is wildly out of proportion to the actual risk because people donât understand mentally ill people so they get panicky. This is understandable human nature but itâs not rational.
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In the US there are about 30k deaths from driving a year. There are about 2k homicides per year where the victim didnât know the killer and many of those could still be gang related. A random person minding their own business getting murdered is pretty rare and mass shootings are a significant percentage of those.
Thatâs obvious. I acknowledged as much (see âper capitaâ above).
The larger point, that always seems to need to be raised when bad arguments are made about the perils of driving (usually by gun nuts excusing the relative lack of shooting deaths), is that driving has significant and obvious and necessary utility in a way that âinteracting with hostile mentally ill people randomlyâ does not.
Therefore the benefit part of the risk/bene calculus is skewed, and to discuss âdrivingâ and âinteractions with mentally illâ as if theyâre on a parity is dim.
Ok.
The other side of the calculus in âinteracting with hostile mentally ill people randomlyâ is that people are talking about homeless people who are mostly not hostile and youâre mostly talking about people being annoyed by the mere presence of the homeless. These are people with as much right to exist as you and if a particular individual has not demonstrated that they are a threat, you have no right to demand that they do anything or hire people with guns to round them up and force them anywhere. Do something constructive to help, live with the fact that you donât get everything the way you want it, or fuck off to rural Montana and mind your own business.
Eta: the utility of living in a free society.
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Strong libertarian streak in this one
It would certainly sound like that to a fascist.
Live and let live (including allowing people to randomly assault strangers)
What the hell are you talking about?