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California Governor Gavin Newsom demands cities force homeless people to move every 72 hours (www.wsws.org)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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On May 12, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, demanded that cities throughout the state adopt anti-camping ordinances that would effectively ban public homelessness by requiring unhoused individuals to relocate every 72 hours.

While presented as a humanitarian effort to reduce homelessness, the new policy victimizes California’s growing unhoused population—approximately 187,000 people—by tying funding in Proposition 1 to local laws banning sleeping or camping on public land.

In his announcement, Newsom pushed local governments to adopt the draconian ordinances “without delay.”

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Even if, just for the sake of argument, you assume that these people are living in tents on the streets just because they don't feel like finding housing, which is already an absolutely massive assumption that I don't for one instant actually describes reality, there's still this...

If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

You can't just make a problem go away by making it illegal, you've got to address the root causes.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

They’re not trying to make the problem go away. They’re planning to arrest the homeless to use for prison labor.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

America, Land of the Free, as long as you could pay for it. I fucking love it here don't you.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Yeeeeaaah, go thirteenth amendment!!!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

With this quote you're implying that it is immoral to be homeless, which would not be unusual. Plenty of people would agree with that line of thinking.

Anyway, most of what Heinlein is talking about here is up to human nature. The only way you get to the root of the problem with human nature is to eliminate the human with that particular nature. That or incarcerate them. Plenty of people seem to agree with that line of thinking, as well.

Personally, I like the idea of laws to curtail certain behaviors. For example, I'm very troubled by the fact that gambling has been embraced by baseball, and I get to see it advertised constantly in the ballparks and during games. It makes me distrust the outcomes of the games that are being played. I liked it a lot better when there were more laws separating gambling and the game. You can't stop people from gambling, but you might be able to limit gambling's influence on the game.

The issue, I think, is with inhumane enforcement of laws, and the current administration seems to be enabling that sort of approach and the people that want to take it.

I don't know if I entirely disagree with your sentiment here, but the quote seems to be a bit out of context. Also, I think Heinlein was a nut.