Mayor Adler heads west... but why? (Austin: appointed, taxes, live)

[ATX Wahine]

Originally Posted by Snowpacked

The most recent mayor and council are hardly liberal.

Well, you’re right about that. They’re hardly liberal because they’ve steered the clown car toward hard left progressive insanity.

[Westerner92]

Originally Posted by austinaggie

Even if we did “chase them out of town” we’d have a never ending supply to replace them courtesy of one way bus tickets to Austin provided by other Texas cities to THEIR homeless.

It almost sounds like other places are really good at producing mentally invalid people. I wonder if there's a way to tackle it at the source so that we aren't producing the next generation of homelessness.

[austinaggie]

Originally Posted by 10scoachrick

Conservative liberals?

Not even close!

[10scoachrick]

Originally Posted by austinaggie

Not even close!

That descriptive is a good as any being used in most discussions

[Snowpacked]

Originally Posted by austinaggie

So what are they, conservative?

Liberal was when maintaining our quality of life was the goal. I guess you don’t notice all of money being made by everyone determined to put as many people in an area designed for half of the current population. I would enjoy seeing a huge market crash to stop this non sense and get back to reality.

[xz2y]

Originally Posted by Westerner92

It almost sounds like other places are really good at producing mentally invalid people. I wonder if there's a way to tackle it at the source so that we aren't producing the next generation of homelessness.

I think the issue with mentally ill is different from the homeless problem. A lot of mentally ill individuals end up homeless due to the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill starting in the 1980s, institutions were closed and the mentally ill were dumped into "communities" without any resources to provide services for them.

A lot of the mentally ill have been abandoned by their families who don't have the resources to help them, so they end up homeless. There are lots of stories about families who do take care of a mentally ill family member and it costs thousands and thousands each year. Health insurance doesn't cover a lot of the costs. Some families can't afford to help.

I do think that the mentally ill are a very small portion of the homeless population.

[Westerner92]

Originally Posted by austinaggie

So what are they, conservative?

Champagne Liberals or Limousine Liberals are the most common terms I've heard for it. Privileged people who honestly want to create equal opportunity, but they don't want to touch the economic status quo that they've benefited under. So they make a lot of superficial gestures, hoping that forcing everyone to recycle will save the planet, that using affirmative action to hand pick the upper crust to reflect the ethnic demographics of an area will end racism, that legalizing camping anywhere will give homeless people just the boost they need to pull themselves out of the vicious cycle.

They don't actually want to look at any systemic changes that created the problems. They think outlawing being mean will solve everything. This has been the DNC's platform since Carter lost.

[Aquitaine]

Sowell calls it the "unconstrained vision" -- Rousseau's Utopian notion that anything, even human nature, can be changed if taken in hand early and with sufficient willpower. Even hardened conservatives can see the appeal.

He contrasts it with the "constrained vision" whose starting point is the acceptance of the limitations of human intelligence and behavior -- a baseline assumption that reality is always going to have a level of badness, and even if you can ameliorate it, you can't behave as though you can remove it.

Whether you're saying "let's decriminalize homelessness" or "let's decriminalize border crossings," there's an obvious unconstrained vision-argument to make in favor of those things that identifies the suffering of the people committing these "crimes" and complains of the injustice of penalizing someone who is essentially already a victim.

But that's the easy part of the argument. "So now what?" is the hard part. I don't visit San Francisco or Los Angeles and think that they've "solved homelessness." It may be a compelling argument that the traditional solutions aren't sufficient, but if so, I haven't seen a persuasive alternative that ends up being anything other than virtue-signaling and tent cities.

[Snowpacked]

Originally Posted by xz2y

I think the issue with mentally ill is different from the homeless problem. A lot of mentally ill individuals end up homeless due to the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill starting in the 1980s, institutions were closed and the mentally ill were dumped into "communities" without any resources to provide services for them.

A lot of the mentally ill have been abandoned by their families who don't have the resources to help them, so they end up homeless. There are lots of stories about families who do take care of a mentally ill family member and it costs thousands and thousands each year. Health insurance doesn't cover a lot of the costs. Some families can't afford to help.

I do think that the mentally ill are a very small portion of the homeless population.

The metal facilities were demonized by payed congressional testimonials conducted in the 50's. That lead to the stop funding efforts, which leads us to where we are generations later. We now have a criminal system that makes millions from jailing the mentally ill.

[Westerner92]

Originally Posted by Aquitaine

Sowell calls it the "unconstrained vision" -- Rousseau's Utopian notion that anything, even human nature, can be changed if taken in hand early and with sufficient willpower. Even hardened conservatives can see the appeal.

He contrasts it with the "constrained vision" whose starting point is the acceptance of the limitations of human intelligence and behavior -- a baseline assumption that reality is always going to have a level of badness, and even if you can ameliorate it, you can't behave as though you can remove it.

Whether you're saying "let's decriminalize homelessness" or "let's decriminalize border crossings," there's an obvious unconstrained vision-argument to make in favor of those things that identifies the suffering of the people committing these "crimes" and complains of the injustice of penalizing someone who is essentially already a victim.

But that's the easy part of the argument. "So now what?" is the hard part. I don't visit San Francisco or Los Angeles and think that they've "solved homelessness." It may be a compelling argument that the traditional solutions aren't sufficient, but if so, I haven't seen a persuasive alternative that ends up being anything other than virtue-signaling and tent cities.

I don't think the notion of constrained/unconstrained vision falls along conservative/liberal lines, and every single person has a different reference point for what the limitations of human intelligence and behavior are. Conservatives, in their current form in America, have unconstrained visions for addressing socioeconomic inequality, family planning, and gun violence, for instance.

Constrained/unconstrained visions are just an intellectually dense way to describe practical/idealistic views.