- cross-posted to:
- latestagecapitalism@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- latestagecapitalism@lemmygrad.ml
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28140949
Why does “violent drug addicts with severe mental illness” mean somehow they shouldn’t be helped anyways?
Wild claim, considering Musk is one of the most violent drug addicts who has ever lived.
I wonder what we should call a violent drug addict, convicted of inciting insurrection, living in housing paid for by the public ?
He is so fucking incoherent from all the ketamine it isn’t funny.
Let’s say, for sake of argument, that Elon is correct. Should we not be helping people with severe mental illness?
I can’t speak for Elon (and will not defend him) but Kyle (from Secular Talk) is dramatically underestimating the problem by tossing out the $20 billion figure. You can’t just throw a bunch of money at a person with severe mental illnesses and addictions and just expect them to be okay.
The state of California has spent over $24 billion on homelessness since 2019 yet the number of homeless people in the state has grown by 20%. Obviously they aren’t spending the money wisely in a manner that would maximize reduction of homelessness, but Kyle didn’t specify how the money should be spent either. Perhaps that’s actually the hard problem: how do you spend the money in the way that would be most effective?
He is a literal NAZI! So he wants mentaly ill to suffer for losing the gene lottery!
Wait weren’t they doing that already?
If not, where was all that money going?
Gonna need you to define “that” in "that money.” If you mean government programs, much of those were defunded back in the Reagan admin. While institutions back then did need broad changes, their removal without a suitable replacement vastly increased the homelessness issue.
Homeless: without a home.
Weird how he’s lying again. I’ve been there, and I can promise this fuckwit that not having a roof or food in the middle of winter in a city where the stoplights literally freeze is not some kind of illusion. That being prodded away from a public bench in sub-zero temperatures so you can shamble a few blocks whilst the sleep in your eyes freezes, over and over for weeks, so you can’t get more than an hour sleep at a time for months, isn’t the holiday he thinks it is.
Jesus christ, I bob my head to the surface for this? It’s like he’s not even trying to be relatable now.
TIL Elon Musk is homeless.
Not allowing billionaires to exist would end homelessness
tax the rich!
having been homeless…
the fuck is he talking about and who the fuck does he think he’s fooling
Himself and his other techbro friends that couch surfed for a while, aka violent drug addicts with severe mental health issues.
Just more of the same from his class. Wants everyone to believe in a meritocracy, because that means he’s rely great, and the people whose lifeblood he drained to get where he is aren’t victims - they’re just inferior. They wouldn’t be where they are if they were superior like him.
Probably a guillotine wouldn’t even work on him, he’s so superior. Hypothetically.
the US in total is a right-wing place that thinks that “hard work” is the way of life, and anybody who doesn’t adhere to that is a “drug-addict” or a psychopath.
Which is wildly ironic because billionaires don’t actually work.
*working and grifting
where grifting essentially means forcing your subordinates to work harder
Remember, they are saying what would need to be true to justify what they plan to do. This should be read as Elon declaring intent to put homeless people in camps.
It’s amazing that a man who does enough ket to bring down a racehorse even dares to use the phrase “drug addict” as an insult.
Not unusual for addicts to displace blame onto the people around them in order to justify their addictions.
The difference between Musk, Thiel, et al and your average American junkie is simply their line of credit. They can keep taking experimental intoxicants, safe in the knowledge their friends will loan them another $2M the next time they wrap their McLauren around a stop sign.
Also half of all homeless people are foster kids who aged out of the system. They don’t have a family to fall back on.
You know, even if what he’s saying is half true. We HAD systems to help those mentally ill drug addicts and they got gutted. Making them, wait for it, Homeless! you prick.
A billionaire is the equivalent of a person sitting in a cafeteria who bought every piece of food in the restaurant kitchen and doesn’t want to share any of it with the thousand people sitting around him even though he’ll never be able to eat all the food they bought.
Owning and controlling so much wealth that you’ll never be able to enjoy everything you have in a lifetime isn’t a success or a sign of intelligence … it’s a mental illness. Especially when all that wealth and control could mean the life or death of thousands or millions of people everywhere.
There are exceptions. Warren Buffet (as an example) has given away a large fraction of his wealth, and pledged/planned to give 99% of it over his lifetime (he is 94). It’s a sane strategy to let his shares appreciate and “maximize” his charity.
For a billionaire, he lives modestly and speaks reasonably. He has a sanely sized house. His kids are getting an inheritance, but not a stupidly large one.
Look, I want to tax the shit out of billionaires too, I just object to blanket labeling any group as mentally ill. You know, like Musk did in OP’s post.
Yeah fuck that. Even if warren buffet lives up to the leftist wet dream of what billionaires should do, we need legislation, and if we don’t get it, heads should fucking roll. Billionaires should not exist, full stop. You cannot work that hard, they have not and will not work that hard. Stop thinking like these parasites have any empathy. They will cash you out for 50 cents. Cash them out for far more.
You’re like the guy in the cafeteria who stands at the far end of the billionaire’s table and tell everyone in the cafeteria that the billionaire will donate and give away his sandwiches when he leaves and that he isn’t that bad because he only eats a bit of the food and saves the rest because he will give it away soon.
^Not being contrarian but wanna place a bet how damn poorly this is gonna do - no nuance for billionaires (understandable but ears can still be better open than closed)
If he just keeps donating what he’s been donating, it will be fine.
Again, he is quite an exception.
So when’s he gonna hit that 99% pledge? He’s 94 fucking years old, he better give the rest of it away tomorrow.
Ostensibly a halfway decent exception!
Initially, I believed my prediction mistaken, but now I see as expected:
+ 9 / - 11
Depressing fact: Most of the homeless people you see acting all crazy and talking to themselves all the time behaved normally when they started being homeless. It’s spending years in complete isolation, being constantly ignored by everyone around you and having no one to talk to that makes you act like this.
I wouldn’t jump to that though. Most working homeless live out of a car or couch surf, while not doing that.
Having both been homeless for a year (as in, on the streets, migrating from shelter to shelter) and also having worked for a homeless shelter system…
Yeah, most homeless either live in their cars, or couch surf, or jump from motel to motel… until their car gets repo’d, or their hosts kick them out, or they run out of money for motels.
Then, they’re on the streets, like I was.
A couple years of that, even if you totally stay away from hard drugs as I did, is more traumatizing than what most soldiers go through, with the exception of an actual, repeated, stop loss style front line combat deployment where they’re regularly in actual combat.
You see your friends die in your hands or right in front of you from an OD or a drive by or a mugging, you never know who you can trust, you know you may always, at any time, be assaulted or dispossesed, lose all your ids and bank cards, know that now you’re sleeping outside in a blizzard tonight because you can’t limp back to th shelter in time to make curfew, can’t call for help because your phone was broken or stolen.
All the while, every ‘normal’ person just thinks you are disgusting, literally will not even look at you, much less speak to you.
I am astoundingly lucky I lasted a year. I have PTSD now, recurring night terrors, and I am still doing PT to recover from getting regularly assaulted and walking about 2000 miles in one year… its a miracle I wasn’t stabbed, and I was maybe 100 feet away from eating lead in a drive by.
Took me a solid year of not being homeless to … just be able to have an in person conversation with anyone, without having an anxiety attack, deescalation strategy and escape route pre planned.
Women on the street have it even worse.
I remember going into a trap house at one point to get one out. I will not explain to you what they had done to her.
To add into that, most homeless are just normal people that fell on hard times, you won’t see them cause they don’t want to be a bother. You see the crazies because… Well they’re crazy. Gigantic assholes like musk assume that since you see crazy homeless people wandering outside, then obviously ALL homeless people are crazy violent lunatics. He is the smartest person in the world after all.
It’s spending years in complete isolation, being constantly ignored by everyone around you and having no one to talk to that makes you act like this.
I mean, yeah - it’s that AND the meth.
And heroin, and severe mental illness.
People forget that not every homeless person is just someone temporarily down on their luck. Iirc that $20b figure is just housing the homeless, which doesn’t fix things for people who are mentally ill, drug addicts, or both, and that’s like 60-80% of the chronically homeless.
It’s a massively complex issue with no simple fix.
You’re right, a 100% fix of the problem is not simple or easy. But there’s a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that we can tackle to make huge strides.
While drugs and/or mental illness may be involved in a high percentage of the chronically homeless, the chronically homeless only account for somewhere between 1/5 and 1/3 of all homeless. So housing the other homeless would still take care of the needs of ~80% of all homeless, give or take. Get single-payer healthcare up and running to prevent more people from ending up in those situations, and change from a retributive justice system to one that cares about rehabilitation, and suddenly we’ve got a society that actually cares about people, and would cost less to run while we’re at it.
But, with a functioning safety net, people won’t feel like they have no other choice but to work a shit job for shit wages, and the oligarchs can’t have that.
i would add that housing-first approaches increase the likelihood that mental health and substance use treatment even work long term.
hard to wanna get sober when you’re being harassed by police or other people. hard to stay sane when you’re barely surviving and putting drugs on top to cope.
right now, many people experiencing homelessness and severe mental illness/addiction are hospitalized for a few days or a week and then they go back to the street. which doesn’t do much except get an individual out of immediate crisis. many will repeat this pattern over and over until incarceration or death.
where does he even get that idea? i never heard people refer to Elon as homeless.
Not sure what you mean.
Edit: I’m dumb. The joke is that Elon is a drug addict. Hit me a few minutes later.
It’s a joke. He’s implying that Elon is a violent drug addict with severe mental illness. Which is, of course, true.
Thanks. Got it just in time to edit my comment and then see your reply. I’m a dummy.
Not sure about now, but there was a time period where he owned no properties and lived in the houses of friends. Staying in someone’s fourth home is not a hardship, but technically he didn’t have a home.
I don’t believe it, and even if it’s true it wasn’t out of necessity. he probably found it convenient to mooch off people like he always does one way or another as a lifelong parasite. he was born into immense wealth. literally the only thing he’s ever done is buy companies. that’s his entire career.