The mayor doesn't hate the homeless you dipshit.

Good Afternoon Charles,
While I enjoyed your excerpt from Plato's Republic, I'm dubious that the mayor hates the homeless. I, too having been hearing mad loud cawing of the crows of late. Maybe their just ornery. Or maybe the crows are racists?

:)

Just protecting their nests, Charles, it's that season. Don't overthink it.

Last week African homilies, this week anthropomorphic crows. I guess this is where you go when facts fail you.

Poor man's William Gibson.

Seventy years ago today, George Orwell’s “1984” was first published. Charles celebrates this monumental achievement with a pitch-perfect demonstration of “doublethink.” Facts which clearly show derilect RVs having housed drug users (and dealers) Charles cites as proof that derilect RVs house only our economically disadvantaged.

When all of the facts stubbornly and persistently run counter to your beliefs, doublethink is the doubleplusgood way to go!

Let me make sure I've got this right--you are PRO favela?

Maybe this
"Crows seeking a handout, for one thing, might tap a person with their feet, but don't typically initiate the more painful beak-on-flesh contact... a crow with an appetite is likely to pester somebody who's fed it in the past."

But also this
"...conditions for an actual assaultive strike are pretty specific, according to Pendergraft. "I would only expect crows to physically harm a person if they are defending their offspring or mate," he said. "However, if the victim has a strong negative association ... then the mob could get big and energetic enough that the crows might start dive-bombing."'

https://www.earthtouchnews.com/natural-world/animal-behaviour/when-crows-attack/

I hate the system that has normalized homelessness.

We have all the receipts on Durkan. Go to video tape, listen to her say it wasn't going to be like this.

Remember Durkan sitting there in the debates with Cary Moon, swearing with a straight face that her sweeps wouldn't really be sweeps at all, and they would totally be humane. She said she would definitely not just hound people from one neighborhood to another, leaving them no place to go, trashing all their stuff. Everyone who voted for her knew she was lying. They read her lies as a campaign promise to drop the hammer on everyone out there unhoused, to send in the bulldozers and cops with nightsticks. Everyone who voted against Durkan knew she was lying too.

It's the same as when conservatives wink at bigots and haters to win their votes. They know it's a lie, we know it's a lie, but the lie has to be said. Tell the truth and you don't get to take office and enact the bigoted hateful agenda your supporters are itching to see enacted.

Jenny Durkan definitely despises homeless people. If she doesn't hate them, she at least sees no humanity in them.

Disappointed in this quality of article, pure clickbait. If you want to talk about classism and the state of the city, then do so. You don't have to use crows to back you up. It's not like they can have a conversation with us literally. While crows can pick up on emotions from humans, and/or learn to adapt to humans in order to survive, to assume the crows' behavior is indicative of a larger human-based issue is simply inane.

I usually see better writing from Charles, and I'm sad about this, as a "bird person" who has done extensive research into crow behaviors. (Yeah, I'm biased.) While crows are intelligent and can pick up on faces, and remember areas, or groups of people, they simply do not possess the emotional qualities that you are projecting onto them. Anthropomorphizing them in this way gives a very desperate vibe. He is a terrific writer, and I hope he does something more useful with his talent.

@11: Just because Charles says something is bad doesn’t make it bad, you know. Just as his saying the root cause of homelessness is always poverty doesn’t mean drug addiction isn’t actually the root cause in most cases.

As for the statements by Durkan, provide the links or go home.

You must be getting really frustrated, comparing Seattle’s voters — a clear majority of whom had the unmitigated and unforgivable gall to disagree with your choice for mayor — to conservatives and even racist bigots. I guess if it consoles you, you’ll type it here, without regard to reality.

When tens of thousands of citizens rejected the EHT, you raved a paranoid conspiracy theory about how their signatures were all faked. When that got you nothing but snickering derision, you dropped that fantasy for another, claiming Seattle’s voters take their marching orders from Fox News (!). When your boastfully confident prediction of how CM O’Brien will “sail” to re-election got undone by the man himself, you first denied he had seen dismal polling results; when dismal poll results were indeed shown to be his reason, you then insisted the REAL reason were Ballard homeowners, who were, you claimed, conspiring on Nextdoor to murder him (!!). After enough time had passed, you insisted your failed prediction had been right anyway, because you simply declared anyone elected to succeed him would be exactly like him.

Unable to admit (or, apparently, even comprehend) you keep being wrong, you doggedly insist you’ve been right all along. Why you believe you’re fooling anyone other than yourself remains a mystery.

@13: @11 was true to form, and like so many noisy, self-described (but conveniently un-self-sacrificing) progressives in town, there's more than a little projection here.

I know Jenny. Jenny's a friend of mine. Jenny doesn't hate the homeless.

@4 "Fun Fact #1: By the City's own numbers, over half of Seattle's homeless are not from Seattle."

What percentage of Seattle's homed are from Seattle? Are you from Seattle? When you get massive migration, why wouldn't it be distributed across the income spectrum?

@17: Are you seriously claiming homeless persons moved here to work for Amazon?

The city’s 2016 survey had over two-thirds of the homeless respondents saying they were not from Seattle. Given the incentive to say the exact opposite, the actual number may well be far higher. Yet Charles continues to insist that persons who were homeless when they arrived here somehow magically got that way from our economic repression of them.

@17

In the referenced study (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3480319-City-of-Seattle-Homeless-Needs-Assessment-March.html) 15.4% of respondents stated they came to Seattle to access homeless services.

I assume the point @4 is making is that Charles' theory that RV dwellers are honest, hard working folks who just need a break is apocryphal bullshit. A significant portion of our homeless community came here from somewhere else to take advantage of the homeless services the city provides.

But to your point, yes, Seattle has always been a city of recent arrivals, from the gold rush through the tech boom.

Charles, I sincerely regret not masking my expletive in @1 with special characters.

Charles lies like Trump and Huckabee-Sanders.

@11: " to send in the bulldozers and cops with nightsticks"

In your fevered dreams. You obviously haven't watched a camp clearance. I have, two of them. There were no nightsticks, nor bulldozers, no jackboots, either. There were a lot of people who obviously wished they didn't have to do the job before them. They treated the 'campers' with respect and indeed compassion. There was no pressure placed on people to take the available shelter offered (IIRC--none did).

I thought Charles Mudede lives in a single-family house, no? I've seen photos of him sitting in his backyard. Maybe I'm wrong about that, though.

Charles: your comments about Mayor Durkan are vile. I have many issues with Jenny, but she does not hate or disrespect the homeless. She opened City Hall so hundreds of them could sleep indoors--is this hatred? And besides blame others and congratulate yourself what are you doing for the homeless? I mean, besides writing hateful hit pieces and spouting deluded sanctimony.

Some crazy woman pisses of a group of crows and it's worth a column?

What with the wide publicity local news outlets give to corvid research done at the UW, most locals are aware of the fact that crows can recognize individual human faces, and will continue to scold a person who has mistreated a crow, often for months afterward.

These crows recognized the woman they were scolding. They know her face. They know who she is, they know something of what she has done in this world.

But notice what happens to Charles. He begins to describe this specific woman, to enumerate her personal characteristics, but then he stops-- precisely at the point at which he applies the label "homeless" to her. From there on, there is no recognition that this is an individual; Charles instead shifts to generalities. It is as if watching her step into a tent has erased Charles' perception of this woman's individuality-- of her soul.

The crows, at least, will not forget.

@24: I see we must inform you that Charles just so happens to have an enormous natural sympathy for persons who get drunk (and/or high) all the time, never report to real jobs, and produce nothing of any value. ;-)

(As for his actually doing something, well, many professional writers tend toward the type of personalities who still believe in that most deluded of all undergraduate fallacies, that which equates saying something with doing something.)

@27 a) People at the margin of society do deserve sympathy (bus ticket out of town doesn't qualify) and b) talking heads make millions per year so someone with power clearly disagrees with you about the value of saying something. You sound like a reactionary asshole.

Oh God, something this stupid could only be a Mudede article. Those birds dive bomb anything. They dive bomb my fucking dog. That's what birds do because they are fucking birds.

He’s onto something, you fucking twerps. The crows’ capacity for facial recognition, and the apparent sharing this information with their brethren is widely documented and little understood.

Will the people who hate everything on Slog kindly fuck off to another corner of the web thx.

@30

If he were onto something, his argument would not erroneously leap from "crows hate this particular woman" to "crows hate the homeless."

Charles does this because he is uncomfortable thinking of homeless people as individuals. They are much easier to use as rhetorical pawns when they are one undifferentiated mass of noble, downtrodden wretches. They must not be allowed to have personalities, or even distinct faces; this would compromise their political utility.

It's every bit as dehumanizing as the vicious bile you'll find at NextDoor Seattle, but it wears a mask of righteousness.

One of the more interesting results from the UW crow studies is that crows can easily be fooled with masks.

If the crows really do hate the homeless, then the pigeons definitely despise the gang bangers.

Crow fledglings are helpless on the ground for two weeks. Parents and family protect them vociferously; homeless or not. Big leap for you to tie 19th Century arcades, Urban canyons, Plato and our homeless hating productive citizens to our mayor's all out relentless attack on the homeless for living in shit and rat infested RVs on public properties.

I kept waiting for a the human connection (like maybe how humans can protect their most vulnerable in a way that is different) but it never came. Just more cawing.

@34

I do have an RV with a person living in it parked in front of my house (well, three doors down, but close enough), going on around two years now. This person gets up early, goes to work, comes home early, interacts briefly and politely with me and my neighbors, and has the lights out by 9pm. No noise, no shady visitors, no trash, no poop. Once a week the old engine wheezes to life and off the RV goes to replace propane tanks and empty the septic or whatever other maintenance is needed. If there are drugs involved, there's no outward sign.

I'm not blind, I do see the RVs around town with trash piled up around them and tarps over the roof, different people loitering around them at all hours. But they're only part of the picture-- there are sober working people living in RVs, too. They're just a lot harder to notice, mainly because they're trying not to be noticed.

@28: “People at the margin of society do deserve sympathy...”

That wasn’t the question posed @24. This was the question @24 directed at Charles: “And besides blame others and congratulate yourself what are you doing for the homeless?” Because “sympathy” doesn’t pay the rent, or for drug treatment, or otherwise to do anything to get anyone off the street.

“...talking heads make millions per year...”

That doesn’t mean they do anything. (Looks like you’re still falling for a certain fallacy...)

@24 @36

There's, like, centuries of work that's been done on the theory of the power of political speech, and at least a dozen decades or so of measuring the phenomenon with the familiar tools of political science and behavioral psychology. The research is out there, if you care to look into it.

Our Bumbling Mudede still subscribes to the discredited theory of vanguardism, but he's at least got that old Leninist idea in his pocket to wave away the equally discredited assertion that a bit of scribbling can't possibly effect any change in a society.

@37: You really should study history more closely if you start to romanticize political repression and mass killings carried out by Bolsheviks. That's pretty sick stuff, wake up!

@39

WTF? Where the hell are you getting any of that? Or is this another entry in the "raindrop attempts sarcasm" series?

@37: Dude, there’s, like, I dunno, like, maybe thousands of years of human history to validate the concepts, “talk is cheap,” and “b— —t walks.”

If you need a refresher on either, just read any comment thread at Slog. ;-)

@41

Why do you think companies spend money on advertising?

Why do they pay other companies to produce their ads? What about political candidates? Are there any metrics on the effects of advertising? What do campaign managers mean when they use the words "internal polling?" What is an ad's "response rate" vs. its "conversion rate?"

Good grief. You STEM bigots may not realize that Communications majors have stats courses as requirements, but that doesn't mean the empirical evidence isn't real.

@42: There’s an old joke about advertising: half of the money spent on it is wasted, but nobody knows which half.

My original point was a jab at the “sympathy” expressed @28, since it’s both cheap to state and entirely worthless in practice.

Metrics and statistics are all very impressive, but always beware Garbage In, Garbage Out. No amount of great advertising is going to turn a poor or defective product into a winner.

(Also, given how much negative political advertising is done with the intent of reducing citizen participation in elections, it might not be such a great example for you to cite.)

@43

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you tensor, spinning on his heel to scold us about the real-world effects of negative messaging-- right in the middle of a discussion of the homeless.

You're a rare piece of work, buddy. Never change.

@44: Looks like SOMEone didn’t like losing the pointless fight he needlessly picked. (Kitchen, heat, and all that.)

@42: You did give me a chuckle with the phrase “STEM bigots,” though. @11, we ‘learned’ how electing a mayor who will enforce basic health and safety is the equivalent of having a raging right-wing hate-on to see cops beat and bulldoze the homeless. Likewise, noting an obvious qualitative difference between hard and soft sciences isn’t a valuable observation, but rather the hater’s refusal to see. Priceless!

This is especially humorous in light of the soft science repeatedly cited in this thread, the self-reported data given in Seattle’s 2016 survey of homeless persons. We who cited it attempted to adjust for the survey’s inherent biases by noting how some of the data should be counted as absolute minimum values.

(Also, of course future corporate propagandists learn statistics. Populating pretty Power-point slides with carefully-massaged data is how they’ll someday keep those cushy jobs.)

What you describe is clearly assault! When are we going to wake up and get serious about addressing black on black crime in this town?