Increasing the brutality handed out to unhoused people is performance art to satisfy our blood lust.

We're sad that the city is losing revenue because offices are still empty. But that truth is awkward.

So we scapegoat people suffering from addiction. Someone must be punished.

@mekkaokereke If we were to start taking care of people, "if you don't work, you starve" would stop being true, and then wage slavery stops working.

Fairly shortly after that, the rich aren't rich. (Certainly not in the "I don't pay taxes" sense; hopefully not at all.)

As you probably know, this is why the economic argument doesn't work; the point is not to maximize the return on public spending, the point is to guarantee obedience.

@mekkaokereke
In Oregon, we passed a law to decriminalize drugs. However, they didn't set up a system to take care of them. So now, people are screaming about how the mostly homeless addicted folk are roaming the streets and the police are not doing/cannot do anything about it.

I supported / still support the decriminalization,. I have also noticed many more homeless people, trash and graffiti. The race is on for setting up support for these individuals and the repeal of the law.

@jargoggles @mekkaokereke They are absolutely willing to think of drug addicts as victims of a system if those drug addicts are white people living in rural areas and hooked on pain killers.

That attitude has very little to do with drug addiction and much more to do with racism, xenophobia, etc.

@mekkaokereke there's a "joke" that used to go around fundamentalist Christians about two of them on a high ledge and each one keeps passing various social and doctrinal "checks," until at the point of "I'm thrice-reformed born again third-split Southern Baptist," the other screams "I'M POST-BAPTIST" and shoves him off the roof.

In a way, that was a deep insight into what Christofascism (and fascism in general, and by extension all the other bigotries) is, and *why* it's a constant roulette wheel of grievance and moral panic and hatred.

That people with privilege (white especially, but also cis male, also straight, also at least "middle management class," born here, etc etc) are trained to hate, to fear, to eliminate *everyone and everything but themselves* and immediately invent a reason for it.

And the uptick in classism is that and the next thing the professional hater class will pick once they're done with those of us who are trans

@deirdresm @griff @mekkaokereke yeah forget trying to get people off drugs, do what Portugal (I think?) pioneered and Switzerland adopted as one of the first, simply because it's cheaper

free prescriptions for addicts. then put competent social workers at the same place addicts get their daily shot, to help them fix their lives: housing, job, life stability in general. convert your addicts into tax payers!

treat the addiction like any other medical condition that requires life-long medication