cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28140949
having been homeless…
the fuck is he talking about and who the fuck does he think he’s fooling
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Elon’s very familiar with the condition of homeless drug addicts.
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.
So the mentally ill deserve to be left to rot in the streets? Why else have a social safety net, if not for them?
He’s a violent drug addict, way more dangerous and destructive than any homeless person could be.
Alright I’ll bite, even if Hairplug Himmler is right (and let’s be perfectly clear, he’s not).
Why wouldn’t we as Americans want to help our fellow citizens overcome drug use, treat mental illness, and help rehabilitation efforts on their behalf?
ESPECIALLY IF THEY ARE “VIOLENT” and “on the street”. Wouldn’t we want to help them get off the streets?
Wouldn’t that make us safer, happier, healthier, and dare I say… Great Again? Wouldn’t that protect citizens and police officers alike at a lower cost than incarceration? (Spoiler alert it would, but there’s no private for profit companies offering this service).
Wouldn’t these people become tax payers? Employees contributing to society? Become future homebuyers and start a family?
These empathy lacking neo-fascist clowns can’t stop punching down to those less fortunate (while claiming the lords name in vain) and I can’t wait for the day we get the opportunity to match their empathy as they head to prison (preferably one in El Salvador).
Why wouldn’t we as Americans want to help our fellow citizens overcome drug use, treat mental illness, and help rehabilitation efforts on their behalf?
It’s kind of a two-part question, that.
- Do we want to spend the money to get fellow citizens off drugs and treat their mental illnesses?
That’s a pretty easy question if you have a soul: Yes.
- If those fellow citizens refuse any and all help because they have a fundamental mistrust of the system. What do we do?
That’s the more difficult question. Forcing them to get treatment breaches their human rights and only stokes further mistrust in the system. Leaving them just leaves them open to exploitation and doesn’t make their lives better.
Homes are easy, it’s all the support that comes with it that’s difficult, especially if the person you’re trying to help either refuses to engage or actively fights you every step of the way.
Absolutely, and thank you for your reply. Learning and expansion of ideas and thoughts only comes from good conversation and discourse. That’s what makes this such a complex and difficult issue.
There is an inevitability of homelessness in a country is unavoidable, yes. Just like the inevitable need for criminal justice programs to detain, deter, and rehabilitate those who break the law.
No argument from me on the facts, there WILL be homelessness and crime in any society. (This is for my sunshine and rainbows friend up top also).
So let’s figure out how much that SHOULD be:
https://www.greaterchange.co.uk/post/which-country-handles-homelessness-the-best
Finland currently has a homelessness rate of .06% (2023) of their population. So let’s say that’s the baseline when you give people a fair shot, benefits, and treat them with care, and the remaining of those people that won’t take help when offered.
The United States has a rate THREE times that at .19% homelessness. Despite having a GDP output, 83 times as large as the US.
Since I went to public school, percentages make me woozy so let’s put it in whole numbers.
636,500 fellow citizens are homeless in the US (.19%).
If we adopted Finland’s (already proved 35+ year plan) we could get that down to 201,000 over time. Heck if it takes 35 years as well, at least we’re helping them.
That’s 435,500 fellow citizens (Or a city the size of Cincinnati) that are sleeping on the street tonight, so that ONE MAN Elon Musk can pay less taxes.
Fellow Americans, until we vote these billionaires out of office and tax them (oh I don’t know, at least as much as you and I pay) we are either ignoring the issue or complicit and I for one don’t want to be either.
TL;DR: This is just one example why we should lift up those below us, and not be pessimistic about our fellow man.
Most of our homeless want a fair shot, mental health counseling, and rehabilitation.
We need to advocate for them and help them just like if we were reading this sleeping on the street.
No arguments from me about giving them somewhere to live and the healthcare they need. If you have any kind of soul, that’s the least you can do. In an ideal world, there should be enough service to cover 100% of the homeless population (plus some buffer to cover any sudden increase) whether they take it or not. The question I have is do you have the right to force them to take it?
That’s a good and thoughtful question, with no easy answer.
My opinion is I don’t believe you can force someone to receive help, but you can incentivise them through rehabilitation, job training, counseling and housing.
At the end of the day, we need to respect their rights and not infringe on them. If they don’t want help, then they are part of the .06% that chooses homelessness.
Let’s say, for sake of argument, that Elon is correct. Should we not be helping people with severe mental illness?
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.
Whether someone is a drug addict with severe mental illness is irrelevant to whether they’re homeless or not.
Do they have somewhere to live that has a permanent address? No? Then they’re homeless and need help.
Obviously there’s a bit of nuance with things like ProxyAddress where homeless people can have permanent addresses but still be homeless, but the gist of my point is the same! Do they have a home or not?
The word Elon is a propaganda word it is a lie. It is actually Felon, which is a violent drug addict with mental illness.
So those people you’re talking about, Elon… They have homes? No? Then homelessness isn’t a lie, you gigantic sack of human waste.
Not allowing billionaires to exist would end homelessness
tax the rich!
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.
@Confidant6198
“secular talk” is wrong here.Musk is an absolute psychopath without any empathy. He doesn’t need any excuse to sleep at night knowing all the harm he did to the world.
By destroying USAID, this devil just threw millions of people into starvation.
I’d say destroying USAID is the one good thing they did. Long term mind you. I won’t deny the short term effects of such an instant cutoff to these programs.
But USAID is primarily used to disrupt the economic systems of nations that the US exploits for cheap labor.
I’d quote the revolutionary Thomas Sankara
Those who come with wheat, millet, corn or milk, they are not helping us. Those who really want to help us can give us ploughs, tractors, fertilizers, insecticides, watering cans, drills and dams. That is how we would define food aid.
The US primarily uses its food aid to disrupt these nations from being self sustainable and force their industry into a single crop that is most beneficial for US capitalist to export.
So, while the shorterm is bad. The disconnection of these exploitative relationships are good.
Obviously it would be better if these programs were slowly removed. But continuing them for the next 4 years would be worse then ending them drastically.
Also, mind you, I don’t think Trump even realizes why these programs exist to benefit the US exploitation of the third world. I think he sees them simply as “foreign aid”. So his own ignorance of them actually ends up destroying an important part of US Imperialism by mistake.
Removing the exploitative relationships that the US has with third world countries in the form of “foreign aid” is good. It’s just that (1) Trump actually thinks these benefit these nations. Which they do not. And (2) the well intentioned liberals thinks the same as Trump does. So we end up with this weird state where both are wrong but the policy is actually good long term.
Again, there will absolutely be problems as these dependencies are cut of so quickly. But no more than the continued exploitation in the long term would result in.
At Thomas Sankara said. These direct food injections are not helpful. They are a way that capitalist use to direct the economy of third world nations towards dependency on America Imperialism. Ending them is good for these nations. Even if there are struggles when they end.
Self determination and self sustainability have been robbed from these nations by USAID for decades.
@LeninOnAPrayer
No. Its a genocide.
Ending so much funds so abruptly is criminal.
Millions are starving right now.
Thousands of people will die of Malaria and aids. Thousands of children will get polio and will be crippled for life.
That’s a disasterI think you missed the entire point of my comment if you don’t think I acknowledge that. Two things can be true at once.
There are also other nations like the EU and China that are assisting these countries. As well as private charities working to compensate for this lack of immediate aid.
USAID is not meant to help these nations. It is meant to control their crops by injecting massive amounts of cheep foods, grown in the US, to destroy their local markets for growing crops that country would need to be self sustainable.
It forces the farmers in these countries to only grow sugarcane, bananas, or other crops that cannot be grown in the US. Forcing a reliance on USAID and ensuring the most profitable crops are grown for Capitalist.
