It doesn't seem the right-wing side of this Supreme Court gives much of a damn about personal freedoms, and they'd gladly help a profit-based imprisonment system nobody could ever escape from for simply existing. I hate this goddamned timeline.
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary 'working' men. They are a race apart--outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men 'work', beggars do not 'work'; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not 'earn' his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic 'earns' his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.
Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no ESSENTIAL difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course--but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout--in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.
Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.
-George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Fuck this is pathetic and sad. If you want a thriving (or at least a functioning) society, then provide the infrastructure and nonprofit services necessary to ensure at least a baseline of individual needs are met (food, access to clean running water, shelter, access to education).
It's obvious that these fascists don't want this. They wrongly believe they can provide this kind of society by doubling down on capitalism, which can only exist in a society where needs are solely provided in exchange for wage slavery. Poverty, homelessness, as well as the unregulated ultrawealthy are a necessary part of this dynamic.
Now they want to push even more people they don't like into prisons...here...in America... already with the largest for profit prison system in the world. Its obvious that if they had their way, they'd just bring the gas chambers back up and claim it's humane when in actuality it'd just be for profit (as well as for their own sick shits and giggles). Yet somehow, we all know that even with these obvious holocaust callbacks, they'd still claim they aren't fucking fascists.
WTFF.
Bold of you to assume they want a functioning society. They want a society that functions for them, and as far as they're concerned everyone else can be fed to a wood chipper.
But all they have to do is buy a house. Why don't the homeless ask their daddy to buy them one like Elon did?
What do you do with the homeless people who don't want help, due to mental illness or otherwise? There are violent, mentally ill homeless in my city and frankly my sympathy for them has run thin. They have shelters and programs that are well funded, but until we agree that some people need to be FORCIBLY put into programs, we're always gonna have issues, even if you're homelessness budget is good