Certainly no one asks to be mentally ill. Certainly some people are biologically far weaker in their tolerance to alcohol. Certainly some people made the mistake of trying hard drugs and got caught in a spiral they can’t escape from. But whether it’s their “fault” or not, they comprise a group of people who for one’s own protection you have to either shun them or else remove their freedom, because like a drowning person they will drag everyone around them down as well. Restrooms are made inaccessible to them because given the opportunity they will turn them into cesspits of drug use, drinking, solicitation and prostitution, physical filth (somehow they can’t even properly use sanitary facilities for the intended purpose) and squatting. And just somehow homeless encampments, rather than being the best makeshift people can arrange for themselves, quickly either become magnets for or actually generate the worst that human behavior can produce. Do you imagine that the homeless are just like you and me, only down on their luck? It doesn’t work that way.
What I imagine is that they are human beings that need more help, not less.
No, restrooms were made unavailable to them under the fantasy that if they were just denied basic amenities they’d simply go away, which failed to happen.
Actually, it largely does.
There is, absolutely, a subset of the homeless who are mentally or physically ill, and/or are addicted to drugs or alcohol. But, that’s a very broad brush you’re using.
From the cite below:
What aid would you provide them, @Lumpy?
No. Frontline medical personal and nursing home residents and staff were recommended to receive the vaccine in the first wave, in the US as in other countries. Then most countries recommended prioritising the elderly and those with preexisting conditions in the second wave, and key workers like police, teachers, nursery staff and basically anyone who was required to continue working in person in the third wave, while the US reversed this recommendation.
After these guidelines were publicised, there was enough fuss that they were revised before being implemented, and elderly Americans lives were not sacrificed to ‘equity’.
Say what?
You must mean some other amendment, or did you mean just the exemption for convicts sentenced to servitude?
…yep, the exemption. Legalised slavery is still on the books.
We are not talking about people going door to door in nursing homes here, but police, teachers, shop workers, construction workers etc. It’s a very large category. Here are some cites:
I just looked up NZ’s vaccine schedule and it was different to most other countries’, presumably because they were able to successfully quarantine the place and keep Covid out. Border staff and their families were first, followed by front line healthcare staff and care home residents and staff. After that it was done by age and relevant health conditions; key workers were not prioritised at all, again presumably because Covid was not being transmitted in the community at that time.
Those are indeed “some cites”, but they are not cites for your claim. I read both of them through, and nowhere in them is there evidence that the recommendation was “because the former group was more ethnically and socioeconomically diverse.”
Instead, we see a committee that was working in the middle of a pandemic, trying to balance a lot of factors, one of which was ensuring that the vaccine wasn’t focused overwhelmingly on members of one race, and another of which was reopening schools as quickly as possible. And they fucked up this one aspect of their complex recommendations.
From your cites, there were 9 days --December 11 through December 20–before they reversed their recommendation, based on criticism of how their recommendations would affect morbidity & mortality. Some of the criticism was reasonable, but other criticism was distorted through the right-wing propaganda machine to create a caricature of “woke gone wild.”
Your cites aren’t that latter sort of cite, which is why they don’t support your claim. They are clear, nuanced analyses of what happened, without “Woke gone wild!” nonsense. It appears that you vaguely remember the propaganda-ridden right-wing distortions and posted them without digging into it, and when challenged, offered cites that you didn’t read. Is this correct?
Your laundry list of “woke gone wild” is really useful, and I appreciate your offering it. Nearly everything on the list is the same sort of thing: a misrepresentation of what’s actually going on, filtered through that propaganda machine. Your list is a great summary of the sort of nonsense that the right says about the left. (Note that I’m not accusing you of lying–your posts come across as a sincere repetition of the lies that other, less principled, people are telling to you).
There is no way for the left to prevent the right from engaging in that sort of misbehavior. The right lies about the left because it wins elections, so they’re unlikely to stop doing so. The left absolutely needs to get better at fighting the lies, but the left can’t make the right stop lying.
It’s not something the average person thinks about, or that gets much reporting, so I’d say no.
Sure, that’s why it’s happening in the most left-wing cities in America. All those raging Republicans in San Francisco. 
Not as different as all that. Plenty of people struggle with mental illness and addiction but are able to avoid becoming homeless, whether by remaining functional enough to hold onto a job or having support from family.
But I think this is misleading too:
There’s a lot of confusion/equivocation in homelessness statistics. Most people who are homeless are not living on the streets but in RVs/cars, sleeping on friend’s sofas or in temporary accommodation like shelters. And most people who become homeless due to job loss or lack of affordable housing are only homeless for a short time. There’s a hardcore of long term homeless people who have more serious problems, and are basically not able to maintain a normal life, pay bills, or deal with government bureaucracy. Those are the ones no one knows what to do with, but making it everyone else’s problem by letting them take over blocks in some of the most expensive cities in the world is not really helping them, and it’s an extremely unpopular policy.
Yes, exactly. But as far as I know it’s not something Biden can really do anything to change - as I said, I’m not sure if seeing/hearing about this sort of thing makes a difference in Presidential elections or federal elections in general. What do the Americans here think?
How left wing San Fransisco and for that matter California in general are is seriously exaggerated. San Fransisco is well known in the state for its longstanding (and self-defeating) harsh attitude towards the homeless.
By the way, thank you, that’s a very helpful list.
No, as usual it’s far from correct. Back when this was in the news I read through the original report that these articles are based on, to verify that it really said what was claimed. I see the links no longer work, but you can find the presentation by googling “covid 04 dooling.pdf”. You have to read through the criteria and scoring system they are using, but if you do, it’s plain that the score in ‘Mitigate Heath Inequities’ is what led them to recommend prioritising Essential Workers (Non-Healthcare) over Adults Aged >= 65 years. The comments in this section are about the representation of Ethnic Minorities and low-income people in each group.
I’m on my phone right now, but I’ve attempted a screenshot here:
As you can see, it’s the low score in the ‘Ethics’ category that results in older people being placed behind essential workers in the recommendation, and it’s the low Inequities score that resulted in the low Ethics score.
I don’t understand why you’re all having a hard time believing this. If equity considerations are to be worth anything, they have to impact policy.
I could add more, but I wasn’t really sure what kind of examples you wanted.
But seriously, you can easily find this out for yourself. Read some right-wing news sites, or follow some conservatives or even centrists on Twitter. You can’t understand people if you don’t know what they’re thinking or how the policies you support appear to them, and boy does it show in these kinds of discussions.
ETA: I don’t mean Fox news, there are plenty of smart and nuanced thinkers out there.
…I’ve skimmed over them and I can’t see: where is the woke?
We obviously have different definitions of who was a “key worker” at the time.
…yes: marginalised folk are more likely to be working in the frontline, more likely to be exposed because they were dealing with new people every single day, and less likely to be working from home. And this was reflected in the death tolls.
This isn’t “woke.” Its evidence based. The elderly were more likely to be in a controlled environment with limited exposure to people. I’m not entirely sure I think the priority was correct here. But that’s an assessment best left up to experts in the field, and not the typical “keyboard warrior” who sees the words “Mitigate Heath Inequities” and reads into that more than it is.
First, that’s actually a cite that backs up your claim, and would have been a better cite to start with, rather than two cites that don’t back up the claim.
Second, note that this recommendation appears to have been in place for less than two weeks before being changed. It was a working group with a recommendation, and working groups make mistakes, and that’s hardly an issue.
Third, the reason why the recommendation was rejected was because their analysis was incorrect. Racial equity was promoted best by vaccinating the elderly, folks pointed out. It wasn’t a problem that they considered racial equity (it’s a crucial thing to consider in a nation whose medical system has systematically underserved people of color for centuries, and continues to do so today); the problem was that they had poor analysis.
The only way I can imagine “toning down the woke” in this case would be to stop considering racial equity in health care. Is that what you propose should happen? If instead you’re proposing that analysis should be better, I agree–but that would mean that “woke” is the same thing as “poor analysis,” which would obviously be a risible definition.
Here, from the pdf, the middle column ‘Essential Workers (non-Healthcare)’ is the group I’m referring to, it gives lots of examples:
Hope that clarifies things.
I think that’s debatable. It was rejected after adverse publicity, because it would have resulted in more deaths overall, and because it demonstrably differed from similar countries’ policies, as well as people pointing out that ‘more deaths overall’ included more minority deaths.
Yes, I think they should stop considering equity in healthcare because it is likely to lead to bad, discriminatory policies. What if they had found fewer POC would die in the first scenario, even though more people would die overall? (If the age disparity between groups is significant enough, this is a possibility.) Would you then agree with the recommendation?
My view is that if some group is being treated unequally, health services should aim to give them equal treatment, not deliberately privilege them or decide some lives are worth more than others. Equity as understood and practiced today is too often the latter.
I do think if a community or demographic is underserved or not taking advantage of public services, then civil servants should investigate why and try to ameliorate it if necessary. But the concept of equity is not required for this, just the idea that governments should serve all their citizens.