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The New York Times certainly isn’t a conservative newspaper. If even they are saying Portland has become horrible, it must be worse than anybody can imagine.
The New York Times certainly isn’t a conservative newspaper. If even they are saying Portland has become horrible, it must be worse than anybody can imagine.
That’s some serious conspiracy theory territory.
So, a non-exhaustive list of things that seem very odd to me in this comment:
“The Left” is an incredibly vague term that groups together a lot of different groups that have hugely different ideologies and perspectives
Decriminalization has proven to work extremely well in some contexts. Not all decriminalization is created equal. Portugal’s system has proven amazingly successful at dropping rates of illegal drug use. Mandatory rehab and access to psychological help instead of prison time has proven to work very well. Not got a great idea about the specific attempt in Oregon, but it’s not some deep conspiracy: it’s attempts (some better, some worse) at finding ways to address drug abuse problems in society.
If homelessness is at 50%, that basically means the entire housing market has completely failed. That’s not “a homelessness problem”, that’s a housing market that has failed in such fundamental ways that I don’t see how that could even happen in a country that isn’t trying intentionally to increase the homeless population. California, the state with the highest homeless population (and it is a real problem!) has a homeless population of 0.44% of the total population. 50% feels like such an arbitrary ass-pull number. Even 5% would be considered a complete collapse of the housing market.
Automatically assuming that those trying to restart their lives are brainless alcoholics is so reductive I don’t even know where to start. The most effective and proven way to reduce the number of homeless people is to focus on a housing first approach. You house them, you provide them professionals to help sort out their issues, get them into a job and have them start paying off the house. This is an internationally proven approach.
The rest just goes into full dystopian future fan fiction, so I’ll stop there.
Absolutely true, just like the Right. They’re both coalitions, and many of us are guilty of treating them both as a hive mind, especially when we’re on the opposing side.
Still, there’s some truth to the generalization. Of course it’s not true of every single person on the Left, but it’s generally true of the Left’s collective efforts.
You can’t rightfully compare the US to any other country. As soon as you try to, you fundamentally misunderstand what makes us the greatest country on Earth. There are so many differences that make any attempt at comparison doomed to failure from the outset. To name just a few, our several States differ from other countries because:
So whatever works well in Portugal is 100% irrelevant to Portland, although they do have similar names.
The solution is clear if we actually wanted to solve the problem:
Few people actually want to take these steps, but they’d solve the problem fully and quickly.
Agreed, but that’s the goal as I contend. Communists don’t trust markets.
No way that’s accurate. You look at any recent video of California and every street is lined with tents. It looks like 99% of the population, and I’m sure it’s not as bad as it looks, but there’s no way it’s 0.44% either. I’m sure it’s hard to survey the homeless, but that figure is unbelievable. Especially because almost any Californian who could afford to moved out of California in the last five to ten years.
“Internationally proven” means offensively un-American. As far as Americans are concerned, the only proven means to kick a drug habit is to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. That has a 100% success rate, far above any other approach. Anyone who’d rather not do that is unfit to live in the US anyway. As long as druggies have a genuine chance to repent and be reborn, anyone who prefers to side with Satan can get deported.
Is it the number of children shot in schools? Or is it the wealth inequality? Or maybe our disregard for the environment? Or were you referring to our incarceration rate? Or obesity? Our homicide rate? Or is it the amount we spend on healthcare?
Nobody wants to take those steps because studies have already shown that they are not the solution.
That simply isn’t true.
Completely agreed.
Isn’t this very elitist? I find it very reasonable to make comparisons about stuff that works, stuff that doesn’t, and discussions as to why. While I agree with your list of points as to what makes the US different with the exception of being predominantly Christian (you are, but so are many European countries, and the US does more than many European countries to equalize different religions under the law), that doesn’t mean it’s worthless to look at different solutions from different places and discuss why they might/might not work.
I’m not from the US, but from what I understand, that does seem profoundly un-American, especially with your previous point about heterogeneity. Isn’t that very big government authoritarian as well? Doesn’t sound very conservative.
The rest of the points here seem to share similar problems: complete disregard for the wishes of other countries and a desire to isolate the US demographically, economically and culturally. Why is it only US states that get the rights to try and figure out their own problems without federal over-reach? What’s wrong with applying the logic of reasonable self-rule to other countries and avoiding being the world police?
Here’s where that “The Left” point from earlier comes in. Vanishingly few people left of center from earlier are actually communists. It’s not exactly a very popular position these days. In the US, the main-stream left-wing ideology seems to be liberalism, and in Europe it’s democratic socialism. Neither of these things share much in common with communism, and liberalism isn’t even in the same umbrella as socialism.
I prefer facts to subjective opinions based on videos. Here’s a decent survey on the matter. 171,000 people out of 39,240,000 is 0.43% (sorry, I might have been slightly off). Now, those people aren’t evenly distributed throughout: they tend to cluster around cities, not generally setting up tents in the woods. Still, as some conservatives like to say, facts don’t care about your feelings.
What is your opinion on the US separation of church and state, out of interest?