I recently said a thing I say a lot in various places: That we need more housing as a primary solution to the homeless problem.
And someone replied to that and included a bunch of criticisms of "leftist" politics and their assumptions that because I think we need more housing, I am all for letting homeless people sit on their ass and do nothing while a nanny state provides for their every need because presumably, homeless people are all total fucking losers and big babies -- junkies and crazies and the like with no capacity to care for themselves.
Yeah, no.
One again, I looked up the terms left wing politics and right wing politics on the internet. Yes, I can read, duh. And I'm well aware these are terms that date to the French Revolution and began because people who sat on the left side generally shared certain views and people who sat on the right side shared certain views.
And beyond that it is gibberish to me, though I have looked it up repeatedly.
Apparently, (according to Wikipedia) the left is supposed to be for civil rights, women's rights, LBGTQ rights and pro-environment. GUILTY AS CHARGED. And get off my back.
Right wing is supposed to be pro free enterprise and private ownership and traditional family values. Also guilty of all that.
I'm a former military wife and full-time mom. I did the "traditional family" thing for two decades.
I am all for family taking care of family. But I am not for that being some prison or "fuck you" policy for women or people who fail to be cis het white males.
I got divorced and my life has seriously sucked ever since. I would like my life to work in spite of me no longer being married and having a man to pay my bills, thanks.
The reality is I think we could do better by ALL people, including cis het white men who also get shafted by the system in some important ways. There are downsides to the role they get assigned as well. It's not all peachy keen for them just because they tend to have more money and power than most other demographic categories in this country.
This right-wing and left-wing bullshit sounds to me like the nature VERSUS nurture argument. It's BOTH. BOTH nature AND nurture shape human beings into what they ultimately become.
It's useful to try to determine what things are more influenced by nature and what things are more influenced by nurture and just how much you can vary the outcome depending on what you do about the things you have some control over.
But it's a bullshit argument to argue whether people are just born that way or raised that way. The answer is: YES. BOTH.
Trying to give me a political label when I have managed to vote twice in my life because of health issues and other overwhelmed by events stuff is a case of you trying to simplify me to fit into some little box in your tiny mind so you don't have to work at understanding me.
If you don't want to work at understanding me, go away. Stop wasting my time -- and yours.
There are some things that are best provided as a public good -- i.e. by the government. This includes things like police and fire and should include some baseline medical access. In the US, we kind of do basic medical and kind of don't.
The reason such things SHOULD be a public good is not some bleeding heart bullshit where you think some people are losers who cannot provide for themselves. It's because shafting some portion of the population with your policies screws everyone.
Fire is a good example to use. There are places in the US where you have to pay a fee to get fire service and if you don't pay the fee and your house catches on fire, they send a fire truck and firemen to your property to stand there and watch it burn to the ground because they need to be ready to fight the fire if it spreads beyond your property.
So if you don't pay, they still send a truck. They still pay their staff for their time. They still pay for the gas in the truck and maintenance needs incurred by driving it there (which invisibly add up over time). They only really save on water.
It's kind of a stupid model, if you ask me. It's better to find some means to fund it and just provide fire coverage to the community as a whole. Done.
Public health is sort of the same: If you say "Oh, your health problems are NOT MY PROBLEM" it soon will be your problem. Either they will spread their disease or die a pauper and you need to dispose of the body or both.
I've never been involved in politics. I'm a former homemaker. I never cared about politics.
But as I get older it is gradually becoming more clear to me that politics matters because of the impact it has on our private lives and on how business works and yadda. So I may someday get interested in politics.
But "politics" was never my motivation for anything I did previously. I was only analyzing a certain problem space because I care about people and also because those problems impacted MY LIFE.
I have NO political background. I do not care about your bullshit pre-existing categories for what I am supposed to believe as a package deal because I think we need more housing in the US of a certain kind as a means to resolve some of our problems.
Please don't infer OTHER things about what I supposedly believe because I think we need more housing of a certain kind. That's stupid on the face of it.
Einstein once said that you cannot solve a problem from the same mindset that created it. So if you want to put me in a little box of pre-existing categories, you are trying to keep alive the problems we have that grew out of those mental models AND you aren't hearing what I am saying in any kind of meaningful way.
I don't really want to play that game. I would like to propose new mental models that don't make the same assumptions.
The reality is that the federal government played a significant role in creating what currently exists. The federal government not only provided housing benefits to returning soldiers in World War II they also created Fannie Mae in 1938.
This is part of what gave birth to modern suburbs of large swaths of single family detached homes. What you can readily and easily find a means to fund is what tends to get built in spades. DUH.
I would personally prefer to see the lack of affordable housing of a certain kind be provided by private for-profit companies rather than as "public" housing owned by the government. I would rather see the federal government foster that by injecting funds into certain kinds of development via loan programs, mortgage guarantees, grants, technical assistance and similar such traditional federal processes.
We have overbuilt suburban single family detached homes in part because that is what the federal government was willing to help make it easy for us to fund. If they would make it similarly easy to fund other forms of development, then we wouldn't have a de facto stanglehold on SROs, duplexes, etc.
But I don't think it needs to be public housing and I don't think it is especially helpful to see all homeless people as total fucking losers who can do NOTHING for themselves. It's more helpful to see homeless people as individuals whose lives have come unraveled and who cannot readily weave it back together and to wonder what things exist out in the world that are a general barrier for a great many people and try to ease those burdens while not getting all up into the personal business of specific individuals just because they happen to currently be very poor.
This country began as the land of opportunity. I believe in that, which means I believe we need to remove barriers to opportunity and let people make of themselves and their lives what they CHOOSE to make and are willing to work for.
I would personally like to be a business woman. I would ideally like to do community development work in a for-profit capacity -- which may never happen due to small town politics and yadda.
I would also like to start a clothing company, write some apps of various sorts and yadda and hopefully make a pretty penny at such things. I currently have personal barriers to making those things happen but those are things I would like to make happen, if possible.
I absolutely do not wish to be assigned to the wastebin of life and treated like a total fucking loser forever and ever because I currently lack sufficient funds for classist assholes to see me as a human being. That actively throws away human capital and it not only harms individuals, it harms society.
We need a social safety net so that when things go wrong, people have some hope of recovering and returning to a productive life. But we need that safety net to be more about designing a world that works well for people generally and less about asking some people to prove they are total fucking losers and "deserve" means-tested aid.
I would like to see less need for means-tested answers of that sort and the way you get there is you create a world where someone who is currently impaired or putting their time into, say, raising kids can make their life work anyway. We currently have a world where that simply isn't feasible for far too many people.
The right kind of housing (where, among other things, a car is genuinely optional) plus health care for all are two pieces of the puzzle for letting people sort their stuff on their own terms as they see fit rather than having to jump through hoops to prove "I suck so much, even YOU would approve of letting me eat for free."
And someone replied to that and included a bunch of criticisms of "leftist" politics and their assumptions that because I think we need more housing, I am all for letting homeless people sit on their ass and do nothing while a nanny state provides for their every need because presumably, homeless people are all total fucking losers and big babies -- junkies and crazies and the like with no capacity to care for themselves.
Yeah, no.
One again, I looked up the terms left wing politics and right wing politics on the internet. Yes, I can read, duh. And I'm well aware these are terms that date to the French Revolution and began because people who sat on the left side generally shared certain views and people who sat on the right side shared certain views.
And beyond that it is gibberish to me, though I have looked it up repeatedly.
Apparently, (according to Wikipedia) the left is supposed to be for civil rights, women's rights, LBGTQ rights and pro-environment. GUILTY AS CHARGED. And get off my back.
Right wing is supposed to be pro free enterprise and private ownership and traditional family values. Also guilty of all that.
I'm a former military wife and full-time mom. I did the "traditional family" thing for two decades.
I am all for family taking care of family. But I am not for that being some prison or "fuck you" policy for women or people who fail to be cis het white males.
I got divorced and my life has seriously sucked ever since. I would like my life to work in spite of me no longer being married and having a man to pay my bills, thanks.
The reality is I think we could do better by ALL people, including cis het white men who also get shafted by the system in some important ways. There are downsides to the role they get assigned as well. It's not all peachy keen for them just because they tend to have more money and power than most other demographic categories in this country.
This right-wing and left-wing bullshit sounds to me like the nature VERSUS nurture argument. It's BOTH. BOTH nature AND nurture shape human beings into what they ultimately become.
It's useful to try to determine what things are more influenced by nature and what things are more influenced by nurture and just how much you can vary the outcome depending on what you do about the things you have some control over.
But it's a bullshit argument to argue whether people are just born that way or raised that way. The answer is: YES. BOTH.
Trying to give me a political label when I have managed to vote twice in my life because of health issues and other overwhelmed by events stuff is a case of you trying to simplify me to fit into some little box in your tiny mind so you don't have to work at understanding me.
If you don't want to work at understanding me, go away. Stop wasting my time -- and yours.
There are some things that are best provided as a public good -- i.e. by the government. This includes things like police and fire and should include some baseline medical access. In the US, we kind of do basic medical and kind of don't.
The reason such things SHOULD be a public good is not some bleeding heart bullshit where you think some people are losers who cannot provide for themselves. It's because shafting some portion of the population with your policies screws everyone.
Fire is a good example to use. There are places in the US where you have to pay a fee to get fire service and if you don't pay the fee and your house catches on fire, they send a fire truck and firemen to your property to stand there and watch it burn to the ground because they need to be ready to fight the fire if it spreads beyond your property.
So if you don't pay, they still send a truck. They still pay their staff for their time. They still pay for the gas in the truck and maintenance needs incurred by driving it there (which invisibly add up over time). They only really save on water.
It's kind of a stupid model, if you ask me. It's better to find some means to fund it and just provide fire coverage to the community as a whole. Done.
Public health is sort of the same: If you say "Oh, your health problems are NOT MY PROBLEM" it soon will be your problem. Either they will spread their disease or die a pauper and you need to dispose of the body or both.
I've never been involved in politics. I'm a former homemaker. I never cared about politics.
But as I get older it is gradually becoming more clear to me that politics matters because of the impact it has on our private lives and on how business works and yadda. So I may someday get interested in politics.
But "politics" was never my motivation for anything I did previously. I was only analyzing a certain problem space because I care about people and also because those problems impacted MY LIFE.
I have NO political background. I do not care about your bullshit pre-existing categories for what I am supposed to believe as a package deal because I think we need more housing in the US of a certain kind as a means to resolve some of our problems.
Please don't infer OTHER things about what I supposedly believe because I think we need more housing of a certain kind. That's stupid on the face of it.
Einstein once said that you cannot solve a problem from the same mindset that created it. So if you want to put me in a little box of pre-existing categories, you are trying to keep alive the problems we have that grew out of those mental models AND you aren't hearing what I am saying in any kind of meaningful way.
I don't really want to play that game. I would like to propose new mental models that don't make the same assumptions.
The reality is that the federal government played a significant role in creating what currently exists. The federal government not only provided housing benefits to returning soldiers in World War II they also created Fannie Mae in 1938.
This is part of what gave birth to modern suburbs of large swaths of single family detached homes. What you can readily and easily find a means to fund is what tends to get built in spades. DUH.
I would personally prefer to see the lack of affordable housing of a certain kind be provided by private for-profit companies rather than as "public" housing owned by the government. I would rather see the federal government foster that by injecting funds into certain kinds of development via loan programs, mortgage guarantees, grants, technical assistance and similar such traditional federal processes.
We have overbuilt suburban single family detached homes in part because that is what the federal government was willing to help make it easy for us to fund. If they would make it similarly easy to fund other forms of development, then we wouldn't have a de facto stanglehold on SROs, duplexes, etc.
But I don't think it needs to be public housing and I don't think it is especially helpful to see all homeless people as total fucking losers who can do NOTHING for themselves. It's more helpful to see homeless people as individuals whose lives have come unraveled and who cannot readily weave it back together and to wonder what things exist out in the world that are a general barrier for a great many people and try to ease those burdens while not getting all up into the personal business of specific individuals just because they happen to currently be very poor.
This country began as the land of opportunity. I believe in that, which means I believe we need to remove barriers to opportunity and let people make of themselves and their lives what they CHOOSE to make and are willing to work for.
I would personally like to be a business woman. I would ideally like to do community development work in a for-profit capacity -- which may never happen due to small town politics and yadda.
I would also like to start a clothing company, write some apps of various sorts and yadda and hopefully make a pretty penny at such things. I currently have personal barriers to making those things happen but those are things I would like to make happen, if possible.
I absolutely do not wish to be assigned to the wastebin of life and treated like a total fucking loser forever and ever because I currently lack sufficient funds for classist assholes to see me as a human being. That actively throws away human capital and it not only harms individuals, it harms society.
We need a social safety net so that when things go wrong, people have some hope of recovering and returning to a productive life. But we need that safety net to be more about designing a world that works well for people generally and less about asking some people to prove they are total fucking losers and "deserve" means-tested aid.
I would like to see less need for means-tested answers of that sort and the way you get there is you create a world where someone who is currently impaired or putting their time into, say, raising kids can make their life work anyway. We currently have a world where that simply isn't feasible for far too many people.
The right kind of housing (where, among other things, a car is genuinely optional) plus health care for all are two pieces of the puzzle for letting people sort their stuff on their own terms as they see fit rather than having to jump through hoops to prove "I suck so much, even YOU would approve of letting me eat for free."