Well, this pit thread seems to have run its course, so we may as well begin the Starving Artist show.
Liberals are not concerned with the “freedoms” of homesless people. They are concerned with the actual freedom of people such as you. The ability to have people institutionalized against their will is a power that the government should be able to exercise in only the most extreme circumstances. There are many thousands of Americans who could conceivably be judged insane and requiring institutionalization if they were to be examined, and who would have difficulty proving that they were sane to a judge’s satisfaction.
The shit of a 50 lb dog is usually equivalent in size to human shit. Many, many dogs are 50 lbs or over. Unless you’re catching them in the act, I’m doubting it’s from people.
I once needed to pee while out and about, and went into the main branch of the New York City public library. I had to go through a metal detector and show the guard the inside of my purse not only on the way in, but the way back out. Did he think I had stolen a roll of toilet paper in the two minutes since he’d last seen me? But that’s better than my local public library which has no bathroom at all. I think for a lot of homeless people there really aren’t that many bathroom options, especially at night.
Here’s a Google street view of the corner of Belmont and Broadway, where I saw a homeless dude take a shit behind those two bus benches just right of center. I didn’t stick around long enough to observe whether he wiped, too, or with what.
I’ve discovered since changing neighborhoods and taking the el almost every day (red line - the busiest) now, that the el platforms are apparently perfectly acceptable places to take a leak. Where I might think one would at least saunter to the very end, where urine could be easily be expelled off the platform with one’s backside to any observers, this is not necessary. Simply find any upright object (this is why I never stand still up there), unzip and pee on it.
In the cold weather, I pretty much assume that every slushy puddle on the el platforms is pee.
You don’t RC (recall correctly). The trend of putting mentally ill patients out on the street was primarily driven not by liberal preferences for community-based treatment of mental illness, but rather by Reagan-era conservative spending cuts for social services. As far as the antitaxers were concerned, mentally ill poor people were just one more group of lazy losers who didn’t deserve any of their hard-earned money.
I happen to completely agree with you that many mentally ill homeless people need some form of residential care. But they’re not going to get it as long as conservatives remain so resistant to any form of tax increase to pay for it.
I’ve seen a chihuahua lay turds that I know were bigger than any I’d recently produced. He could have been an exceptional chihuahua, though, I haven’t finished my definitive study on the subject.
If the poop is appearing overnight, it could possibly be dog owners who don’t care enough to bring a flashlight along with their baggies.
Since the CTA has removed pay phones from its stations but (in most cases) left the frame, I say we convert the now-useless pay phone frames to urinals. The homeless and/or drunk folks can pee to their hearts’ content, the commuters with odd hours don’t get peed on (unless the pay phone urinal has a long line), it’s a win/win!
I don’t suppose you have any evidence that Reagan-era antitaxers believed the mentally ill to be lazy losers, or that they singled out the mentally ill to be put on the street?
My guess would be that social services were cut generally and that the administrators of those services made the decision to cut services to the mentally ill.
I haven’t been aware of any attempts to provide funding for care of the mentally ill. Have you? If not, then I don’t think it’s accurate to blame conservatives for refusing to fund it. I certainly would agree to it. I think what is more likely though is that huge social services programs have been floated with care for the mentally ill being merely a small part, and that those much bigger programs are the ones that have met resistance from conservatives. Of course you can prove me wrong, and I will readily acknowlege it if so.
Nice try, but it won’t hold up. Ronald Reagan’s budget proposals specifically targeted the provisions of the 1980 Mental Health Systems Act, among other things, for funding cuts. Likewise, Bush’s budget proposals as recently as 2008 specifically targeted the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for cuts.
Sure, care for the mentally ill is merely one of dozens of social service efforts that conservatives want to cut out of the government on the plea of saving taxpayers money. But it’s no use pretending that the conservatives are somehow just innocently trying to reduce over-spending in general and the mental health services are accidentally getting defunded without their being aware of it.
They’re deliberately specifying particular mental health services and organizations as targets for budget cuts. They know exactly what they’re doing.
Okay, but there are some areas where I still have questions. First of all, is the current lack of mental health care facilities for the majority of those who are homeless a federal problem or a state problem? On the one hand you blame Reagan for the cutbacks in 1980, and you blame Republican governors now. I would have thought that the cutbacks which suddenly saw the homeless population explode was caused by some federal government action, and I would think that an adequate solution to it now would have to come from the federal government as well. Everybody knows most states are struggling these days, and when I asked if any efforts were currently being made to provide residential care for the segment of the homeless population that is mentally ill, I was asking about efforts on the federal government level.
And then we have the question of just what is meant by the “health care for the mentally ill” that is being targeted by state governments. It’s one thing to provide residential or institutional care for people who are mentally ill in the way that many homeless people are, and it’s quite another to, let’s say, pick up the bill for antidepressant medications and psychiatric and clinical care for for everyone who has been deemed in need of it by their doctors. I’ve known all sorts of people over the course of my life who’ve taken antidepressants and/or seen psychiatrists. In every single case they can function perfectly well in terms of holding down their jobs and taking care of the duties and problems of everyday life. The problem has mostly been one of chronic unhappiness rather than an inability to provide adequately for themselves and their families. And while I would of course like to see everybody happy - or at least less unhappy - I don’t know that I’d favor spending already scarce state or federal resources on people with these less critical types of mental health needs.
And then, in the case of the governors you cited, I think it would be important to consider the overall financial health of the states involved and their ability to pay for mental health care. If states are struggling to pay for their welfare and food stamp and child care obligations, it may become necessary to cut back spending on mental health issues, because in the final analysis, people who are mentally ill generally can still survive, and perhaps their systems are set up where they either have to pay for any and all mental health services deemed necessary by whatever standards they use to make those determinations, or they have to cut spending across the board for all mental health care.
Still, once you mentioned the Reagan budget, it did ring a bell with me that government cutbacks at that time were largely responsible for the influx of homeless people onto the streets. I’d heard it mentioned here on more than one occasion that liberal concern over forced institutionalization and legislation resulting from that were the reason so many homeless people are around, and over time it seems I came to accept that version as what happened.
So, while I wouldn’t exactly call what you posted vis-a-vis the 1980 Mental Health Systems Act a cite (a cite would require pointing to the specific provisions rather than just naming the act itself), I still think what you are saying is correct. So I’ll withdraw my contention that liberal activism was responsible for creating this problem. Fair enough?
You are aware that there could well be, such a dog, in the neighbourhood, only let out at night to do it’s business? That you see homeless people, often, may mean nothing at all. Certainly, before I jumped to the conclusion you have, I’d pause.
And I say this as the previous owner of a large dog who frequently laid down what appeared to be perfectly human turds, all the damn time. Don’t be so sure about what you ‘think’ you ‘know’.
Except the third rail is at least 6 feet away, it would take a concerted effort to hit it, and electrocution via urine stream was debunked by those Mythbuster dudes. Anyway, if I was a dude, I would just go to the very end of the platform, where there are no tracks, plus a camera would only get a backside. Pull Willie out anywhere else on the platform, and he’s on camera!
Perfectly fair, thank you. In return, I’ll retract my broad-brush characterization of “antitaxers” in general explicitly denigrating mentally ill poor people as “lazy losers”, and clarify that I don’t believe that most conservative budget cutters try to defund mental health services out of any actual hostility towards the mentally ill. Rather, it’s simply that for whatever reason, they do not believe that mental health services are a sufficiently important/appropriate goal to warrant existing government funding.