Comments

2

Thank you MrB. You nailed it. You know, people like Mudede, City Council and the rest of the virtuous folks really dont make any effort to understand the gestalt and level of animus they've created with most city residents, many of whom used to be very sympathetic to the plight of the homeless. It's far easier to dismiss us all as NIMBYs, even though Herbold wants the lawa enforced when a rodent and bedbug-spreading RV is parked in front of her house. Same with Sally Bagshaw when her bike is stolen.

I sure hope Mudede and Shaun Scott never have a break in because who are they gpnna call?

3

Charles, I hate to say it, but you've printed a page of utter gobbledegook that makes little sense and few will read.

The problem isn't homeless people, the problem is the Reptilians.

The Reptilian infestation of our cities is out of control. They walk among us without fear, protected by the natural camouflage that makes them appear human to the uninitiated. Only those with mental discipline and a strong will can learn to see through the mirage, to glimpse their dull scales, to catch the occasional scent of their narco-poisonous blood.

The Reptilians do not understand or respect our human ways. They have no concept of property, they build nests of mud and garbage, they can barely distinguish food from waste.

The Reptilians must be exterminated. But first, they must be recognized. Stand up, my fellow strong-willed, clear-eyed citizens. When you see them, point them out to others, and name them. Stand up and call a lizard-man a lizard-man! The time for politely walking past the slithering hordes, hoping they would eventually move on, is long past.

4

Matt Spek Watson is the rapper who "retired" in order to give black men in Seattle a better chance in Seattle's music scene. Now, while his poor wife is off working all day, this pathetic nub of a man sits around all day on Twitter, spawning bullshit like this. He's the left's equivalent of a lululemon-clad housewife in Laurelhurst, hunched over her computer, blogging about how the homeless dude in the park is going to rape her kids.

5

Arguments re the individual vs collective fault aside, how will pay to house 12,000 people and where? With housing units costing at bare minimum $300,000 each, that’s $3.6 billion. What services are we willing to slash to house 12,000 people? Hands are tied by the state to have an income tax, and another head tax is DOA. This lil bit of math is why homesslessness is an “issue,” much to the disbelief of the author.

7

@1 Nailed it.

8

Jeff Bezos' PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY doesn't include paying business taxes. That's someone else's RESPONSIBILITY, i guess.

9

MrB, whoa, where did that racial resentment come from? Not enough that we’re divided by the homeless issue?

11

Everyone is responsible for their choices. Good situation, bad situation everyone has personal accountability. Reading bullshit like this makes me want to wash them with bleach.

13

MrB, try and stay on topic! Bringing up some school takeover in 1985 might be a personal grievance of yours but isn’t related to homelessness.

15

@MrB... “I can’t be a racist. I voted for the black guy...”

17

19 minutes into the video is a great case for ground rents/land rents that return the value of land — which we all invest in through our daily work — to the people who created it, that is to say, all of us. Land rents are something that's hard to see until you see it…and then you see it everywhere. Landlords and rentiers make money in their sleep and that money belongs to those of who created it. Why is Seattle such an attractive place to live and work? Because of the work we are already doing. Why is it possible to raise the minimum wage and still see job growth, new businesses? Because Seattle works. But the profits aren't staying in Seattle.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*9W7oubrw39AZHsNtsHNdLw.png

That sign could be put up anywhere in Seattle…the surface parking lots in Belltown, the vacant lots in Lake City, the space under the old Viaduct. I wonder how many millions of dollars flow out of Seattle the first week of each month as out of town rentiers deposit locally-earned wages. In a city that is half rentals, where one in five single family assets is a rental, this issue should be front and center.

18

Who knows toxicity better than Charles? Well, Kshama. That’s it though.

22

@6 Ah yes...Singapore...the place where they cane you for accidentally dropping a candy wrapper. That's exactly what Seattle needs...a punitive, authoritarian system in which the right-wing governing party is never voted out of power and dissent is, for all practical purposes, impossible.

Ah yes...order, or fascism, which are the same things...

Also, MrB, who are you to say that people on the left, OR the poor, DON'T have mores? Who are you to assume you are morally superior to others?

I congratulate you for your luck and good fortune in life, for the fact that, unlike many others who worked just as hard as you, your hard work was actually rewarded. But no, that does not mean you are entitled to sit in high and mighty judgment over those not as lucky as you.

23

@21: You don't have to be capitalist or egotist and devote your life to trying to get rich to create your own identity, MrB.

The people I've met on the left have some of the strongest and most positive identities of any I've observed among my species.

And btw, saying "I voted for Obama" is basically the 2019 update of "some of my best friends are..."

24

You should move to Singapore ASAP Mr.B. Sounds like your kind of place.

Your use of oppressed in scare quotes @6 days it all.

26

So let me get this straight ~ Lisa Herbold's campaign hysterically calls their media connections to say that Dori Monson parked a RV in front of her home; causing the RV to be broken into and vandalized. Then, when it turns out the RV was legitimately and legally parked, and had nothing to do with Dori Monson, then Herbold turns around and tries to play hero for the family? LOL! It was her scheming campaign that caused the RV to be damaged! Well played Lisa Herbold.

27

@26: And that assumes the parking of the RV was, indeed, a complete coincidence. It just so happens to allow an embattled CM to publicly “live the values” as ballots go out. Lucky her!

28

@25: You don't really know anything about addiction and how people get into drugs, do you? It's usually not somebody waking up one morning and saying "y'know...screw it. I'm gonna trash my life for the sake of trashing my life here". Many other things are involved. Drug use is usually a combination of experiencing trauma and despair and being unlucky enough to have been born with an addictive personality-something nobody can know they have until they end up with a substance abuse problem, including alcoholism, an addiction which is exactly the same as abusing meth or cocaine-btw, there's no difference between being a cokehead and being a crackhead, so there was never any justification for the penalties for crack possession being harsher than coke possession-or being on heroin. It's a combo plate of pain and anesthetic, not a willful decision to trash yourself for the hell of it.

The flaw in Nancy The Speedfreak's comic yet tragic "Just Say No" campaign-a campaign that didn't even keep HER off drugs-was the campaign's utter inability to recognize that it's never as easy or as simple as saying "no"-especially if you are in a life where you whatever hopes you may have had were stripped away by forces outside of your control. Nancy didn't get it that substance abuse chooses those its effects, that it's not childish rebellion and that it's not something people fall into when they're in a healthy frame of mind and are able to process the consequences. Of course, everybody in a healthy, positive relationship with life knows that drugs do bad things to you, but those who've been served the addictive personality/overwhelming despair combo plate-with unlimited seconds, whether anyone wants them or not-are not in the frame of mind where that matters. They may not be in a frame of mind where that makes a difference.

In some cases, substance abuse is a response to unbearable chronic physical pain and the lack of actual cures for such pain. One dirty little secret of the medical-industrial-complex is that its against the interests of that complex for actual cures for chronic pain to be developed; if ways are found to actually cure people of chronic pain, who are going to keep buying expensive corporate pain medications that corporate power can now keep in brand-name status for years, thus denying people the chance to buy such products in "generic" form, by making cosmetic changes to the products; the brand-name copyright on Imitrex(sumatriptan), one of the only products that do anything at all to ease chronic intractable migraines, has been extended through such massive changes as-altering the shape of the pill. for those who don't know, chronic migraines can make it impossible for a person to function on the level of a responsible human being-make it impossible to get out of bed and go to work, or to search for a job, or even get out of bed in some cases while they rage through the migraine sufferer's head. The same situation holds with many other forms of chronic pain and the medications needed to get through life with chronic pain in a world where medical science probably could find cures for chronic pain but chooses not to even try out a reluctance to reduce its revenue streams from prescription palliative medicines,

With corporate medicine refusing to make any real efforts to actually cure chronic pain, and with the cost of prescripition pain medicines kept artificially high by manipulation of the

Incarcerating people for large-scale dealing is something even most of us on the left are okay with-nobody's against putting the kingpins and their major foot soldiers in check-but incarcerating people for possession for use does nothing to get people off of drugs-every jail and prison is full of drugs and, in most cases, all incarceration does is cause people like those with substance abuse problems to come out of the incarceration peiod with a criminal skill set they didn't previously possess, and, since criminal records for even minor offenses like possession block the formerly incarcerated from finding employment-something that is essential for anybody to rehabilitate themselves, all incarceration for minor, trivial offenses like possession for personal use does is to turn people who could have been saved into lifelong and potentially violent, lifelong offenders.

And the incarceration approach does nothing to address the other main non-economic cause of homelessness; mental health issues and neurodiversity.

If the neighborhood treatment centers that were supposed to be built when deinstitutionalization happened-and deinstitutionalization of people with mental health issues had to happen, because all institutionalization was succeeding at was warehousing those the "normal" simply wished never to see-had been built, people with mental health issues would be much less likely to be homeless. They would be much more likely to have been able to find a functional existence outside the institutions which were doing nothing to help them, which were only concealing them from those who thought themselves "perfect". It was the refusal to build those centers which caused chronic homelessness among that community. Today, reinstitutionalization is NOT an option- the money isn't there in the public sector and we can assume that for-profit centers would be built and run as cheaply as possible and run solely to make a profit for those who own them. The only things that can work are A)actually building the neighborhood centers and building them wherever they are needed-no effect they could have on any neighborhood could possibly be worse than either the status quo-and, again, reinistutionalization is not and has never been an option-and the NIMBYs who blocked the neighborhood treatment centers(and the walk-in drug treatment clinics which provided nonjudgmental and effective paths for people out of substance abuse and would do so again if rebuilt) should have accepted, from the start, that there was never any chance that their resistance to neighborhood centers was never going to force reinstitutionalization.

Your whole approach to the problems of Seattle is based on what seems to be an obsession with wreaking vengeance on everyone you disagree with or look down on- and on bigotry and delusion, as is shown by your bizarre belief that people of color are treated more leniently by the police than white people, something I wouldn't advise you to say to the relatives of Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and Philando Castile, btw-and the things you propose can do nothing but damage.

Singapore may be a clean city-for whatever value a sterile municipal appearance may have-but Singapore is also a city where freedom as we know it doesn't exist. There is freedom for people, usually people who were born rich, since self-made millionaires and billionaires don't exist in Singapore, to make more money than they already have. But there is not freedom to be spontaneous or creative or joyous or, in any real sense alive. SIngapore is about obedience for obedience sake, and that's all it's about. A city that puts "order" before all else is a city without life.

Final note: I'd suggest a change in avatar: that figure you use may be your self-image, but you're much more of a Thurston Howell the Third type in the actual impression you create in people.


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