Yes, I have been around hundreds of them. I volunteer, and I have lived in areas with large homeless populations. Some of them smell horrible - those are typically the mentally ill. Some of them smell poorly, more like a construction worker after a long day. Some of them don’t smell at all - they get showers at the shelter.
I have also been around women who put on way too much disgusting perfume, to such an extent that I had to leave the area. Even better, there is a nice little pit thread on the topic right now:
Now, you want to ban smelly bums from society. I am still asking you to tell me how to determine if someone is a smelly bum, and why the *bum * modifier is so important if the *smelly * bit is the real problem.
I agree that 15 smelly people makes a library a less than inviting place. However, that’s a long way from agreeing that they should be “locked up” for no other reason than being scary, sick, lazy or annoying. When they cross the line and become dangerous, then I’ll be right there with you.
So, it’s OK to lock em up, as long as you don’t call them bums.
And it’s OK to walk down the street speaking obscenities to folks that are not there as long as you have a BlueTooth in your ear.
And locking them up is for their own good, which you define without their consent.
If I find you a little frightening, and a bit mentally ill, if not downright nuts, can I have you locked up? (In a low security mental hospital, of course.)
And I am still saying, with all respect, that you are willfully adopting a silly argument. 99 out of 100 reasonable people would consistently know what a smelly bum was. The 100th would want to pose cute hypothetical arguments about how we can’t ever reach agreement on what smells bad, like the judge who said that some people might affirmatively enjoy the smell of feces – it could be “ambrosia” to them.
The “bum” part does matter to me because, if you’ll recall, I jumped in on the OP’s social contract point. I believe in the social contract. I also believe that someone who doesn’t work, pays no taxes, and imposes on his fellow citizens with his smell, nutty behavior, etc., has (mis)-used his free will in such a way and to such a degree that his desire to, say, occupy the library or the sidewalk is entitled to somewhat less consideration than that of someone who is contributing to society.
But N.B. that my moral judgment in this regard, while I stand by it, is not necessary in order to conclude that we can and should have quasi-objective standards for what constitutes a public nuisance. If a professor craps himself in the library, or Britney Spears starts shouting at invisible pink elephants, I’ve got no problem saying everyone (offender included) is better off if they are sequestered somewhere other than the public sphere.
“Punish the lazy”? If we’re going to lock up people for being lazy and not contributing to society, I’d rather start with people who have inherited wealth, don’t work a day in their lives, and do nothing to help anybody else. Put Alice Walton in a workhouse and then we can start dealing with “lazy” people who have no money.
I’ve been homeless twice, for brief periods in my twenties. It’s definitely a bigger pain in the ass than working. The additional burden of mental illness would have been really tough.
What if the professor was sick? What if Spears was drunk? What if someone throws up on a foreign dignatory? That’s pretty nasty, and smells awful, as well. Lock them up?
Then you have a very limited basis on which to form opinions.
Before I deal with the rest of your post, I just want to mention I knew a lady who was homeless for several years, slept mostly in Chicago’s Union station. She later earned an MD is now an emergency medicine specialist in Wisconsin. If you don’t want to associate with the evil nasty scary-looking homeless people don’t ever get into an accident or have a heart attack in her area, because if you do you’ll stand a good chance of being treated by one of those evil, nasty, scary-looking (formerly) homeless people. Just sayin’
Either that, or he hopes he less likely to be mugged or assaulted if it looks like he’s talking to someone or has a means to call for help.
Why?
What crime have they committed?
I wasn’t aware that being scary looking was a crime. In which case the fully employed Harley enthusiast living upstairs in my apartment building should be arrested, but really, she’s a very nice person even if she IS a walking art gallery. Ditto for her boyfriends.
What about the people who just need jobs?
Really? Can you tell me where? Because I’ve been unemployed myself for 2 months now and despite submitting applications on a daily basis I’ve only managed 4 interviews - in each case I was one of dozens of applicants for a single position - and I’ve yet to get a job offer. Given that everyone wants an address and phone number, I would think having no permanent address would be a further handicap for the homeless in getting employment, not to mention difficulty in hygiene when you have no access to a shower and difficulty in dressing nice when you have no iron for your clothes and no closet to keep them in.
We’ll just ignore the exploited, the deported, the ones killed laboring in unsafe jobs, and the homeless immigrants, m’kay?
If you are mentally ill you will not be accepted by the military.
I’m sure the homeless lady I used to see at the intersection of Lake and Michigan in the Chicago Loop who is missing one foot would also not be accepted by the military.
Someone with diabetes will not be accepted by the military.
You DO realize that there are a lot of people who look OK but have some hidden problem that makes them unacceptable to simply dump into the military, yes?
Thank Og my doctor friend never had to go to the likes of you for help. Apparently you are clueless that it only takes something like a house fire to render a nice, middle class person homeless, and that it frequently takes a couple years to come back from something like that. What about all those people who lost homes during Katrina, should we lock all them up for the crime of having lost just about everything?
Hang a sign around your neck saying more or less that.
That’s because they do not have a shower. You’d reek pretty bad, too, if the only place you could wash up was the sink at the Greyhound bus station or in some McDonald’s or, yes, a city library - and that’s assuming some self-righteous jerk who DOES have a home and bathroom doesn’t chase you out, first.
Cite, please
Why don’t you pay for an apartment for them, then? As a bonus, they’d have a bathroom where they could shower daily so as not to offend your nostrils. Or perhaps you could build a homeless shelter next door to your home so you could potentially house, feed, and bathe dozens of people.
I think you should get a dose of compassion. Why don’t you volunteer at a shelter or soup kitchen for awhile so you can get a better perspective and have some actual knowledge on which to base your opinion?
You do realize that jailing people, making it a crime to be homeless, will virtually make them unemployable? How does that solve the problem? Looks to me like it only perpetuates it.
Then he should go somewhere appropriate to be treated for his sickness, preferably at his own expense, but I’m a visionary. He definitely shouldn’t stay in, or keep coming back to, the library if he has some “condition” that makes him perenially stink.
She might well be taken to jail under the laws that decree public drunk and disorderly conduct to be an excessive imposition on the commonweal. If her overall mental state, including voluntary intoxication (which the law tells us is not a defense to anything) were deemed such that she was a threat to herself or society, then Van Halen informs me she could be (hey, just was!) involuntarily committed under Section 5150 of the California Welfare and Institutions Code.
Then we would revert to John Stuart Mill and evaluate the totality of the circumstances, understanding that non-idiots can distinguish between a decorated war veteran who is President of the United States but has food poisoning, and a bum drunk off of rotgut puking in the library. The President is not a bum (free rimshot, people).
How about rather then sending out the paddy wagons to round up everyone that scares or disgusts Two and a Half Inches of Fun, we actually provide help? Maybe part of
Yep, we have a society, and WE need to live up to our responsibilities. Not lock them up to get them out of our sight. Help them get food, jobs, someplace to live and mental health treatment.
It’s not the homeless that aren’t meeting their obligations, it’s the rest of us.
That being said, there are people who don’t want help. They are where they want to be. Who am I do say that they don’t have the same rights I do. To go to the library, to be on the side walk, to talk on a cellphone.
Institutionalizing the homeless is expensive, and for the ones who are homeless because of chronic low-grade mental illness, it requires a commitment to keep them institutionalized for life since the chance of cure is neglibible.
A more practical solution would be to put them to sleep. The likelihood of society accepting this solution seems low.
Again, what if your bum is also a decorated war veteran with food poisoning who happens to be in the library?
Yes, most people are capable of telling the completely mentally fried, drunken bums. However, this is a sliding scale. There are many types of homeless out there:
Mentally ill in need of medication
Mentally ill in need of therapy
Addicts
Unfortunates (layoffs, bankruptcy, runaways, abuse victims)
Bums
You appear to put everyone you don’t like in the final category. You also appear to claim that you can ID them all on sight, and that you are willing to give power to others to ID them on sight and to get them out of your sight - regardless of any civil rights.
I do not support the notion that it’s OK to lock up the batshit insane, at least not simply for being batshit insane. Homeless or otherwise.
a) If you can establish that beforementioned batshit-insane person is legally incompetent to make decisions — a process that should put the burden of proof on the person making the allegation, and one where the standards, in order to protect all of us from being carted away by our younger relatives if we fail to croak and leave them our fortune soon enough to suit them — then it’s OK to deal with the beforementioned batshit-insane in order to secure their safety and happiness, under the assumption that they can’t make appropriate decisions. But if we’re going that route, your happiness (including sense of smell being offended, etc) isn’t relevant. In my opinion, beforementioned legally incompetent batshit-insane person isn’t at risk to self there in the library, so as court-appointed guardian I’m OK with person being in library.
b) For everything else, you lock up beforementioned batshit-insane person on the same basis that you lock up anyone else. Has to be something they did in violation of law or statute. Now it’s not relevant to bring up “for their own good” arguments. Strictly “that’s illegal” or “that’s against the policy of the library”. ETA: actually we don’t usually lock up people for violating library policy but I guess we could have them escorted out of the building.
c) Being homeless, being lazy, shiftless, or unemployed or whatever, is all irrelevant to either situation.
Could be put in a controlled environment where the medication will be supplied to them and where, if they show evidence that they won’t comply with the medical regime, can be constrained to do so by being committed. I.e., institutionalization.
Same.
Same.
Section 8, shelters, job banks, private charity. It’s odd for me to be saying this as I’ve posted elsewhere about my dislike of taxes, but dammit, we’re already paying for a lot of safety net. Some non-trivial portion of the visibly-problematic homeless population are those who refuse available resources or “don’t like the shelter.” Again anomalous for me, but I’d support spending more for accommodations for the truly “can’t work” (as opposed to “won’t work”) remainder of the population if someone convinced me that there was a deficit. There’s just no way that “the library” or “the sidewalk” is the answer to “where is the best place to have these guys supported by society, assuming they really need to be supported by society?”
Not so. I’d probably not like a lot of bankrupts and runaways either.
I can ID them pretty reliably, so can you. They will generally be those doing something that is inappropriate in view of the intended purpose of the public or private property they’re taking up. There’s no specific civil right to occupy any particular area of space, for any particular purpose, unless you own that area of space. Other civil rights that do exist are qualified by reasonable restrictions and must be assessed in view of the countervailing rights of others. The right to speak doesn’t include the right to scream inside a library. The right to peacably assemble doesn’t include the right to block the sidewalk while doing so (as abortion protestors found out).
I don’t discount individual autonomy, but nor is it unlimited (and I pay less heed to it when it’s being exercised by a less rational person). A bum “wants to” sit in the library and stink it up? I’m sure that is a deeply-held desire. I just don’t think it trumps the rest of our desires.
heh One of the “bums” at the local shelter (where I lived for eight years) actually has no sense of smell (medically confirmed). In addition, he’s also on the low end of the intelligence scale, and it seemed that no amount of explanation could make him understand that, even though he can’t smell himself, other people can, and that regular showering would make people stop complaining about him. You’d think he’d eventually understand the problem when other homeless people didn’t want to be around him because he smelled so bad, but we had limited success with him. He’d occasionally make a token effort, but judging by his aroma it seemed what he was doing, instead of actually showering, was just rubbing a dry bar of soap all over himself to mask (unsuccessfully) the smell.
Fortunately for everybody at the shelter he lived in a separate outbuilding, not in the dorm (it was a proper living space, not a shed).
On the other hand, I was told about another old man who lived at the shelter before I did who simply refused to shower. He lived in the dorm, and generated all manner of complaints from the other residents. That guy had no excuse; the showers were private stalls, so he couldn’t even make the excuse that he didn’t want anybody to see him naked. After several direct orders from the staff to shower went unheeded, the house manager came to him and handed him soap and a towel and ordered him into the shower. The manager stood outside the shower room and waited to make sure he actually did it. He told me that the guy went into the shower room and closed the door, and the manager heard the water running for ten minutes. The water shut off, and a couple minutes later the guy emerged … with completely dry hair and dry towel. He’d simply stood beside the shower with the water running for ten minutes :dubious:
The next step involved the staff packing all of the guy’s stuff into boxes and carrying it all outside. In January. In 10 degree weather, with snow on the ground. “What are you doing?” the guy hollered. He was told he would either shower, or he was out. He showered.
What makes your preferences so important that they can over rule others. Do you really feel that anyone who causes you distress by their mere proximaty should be either forced to take medication or should be warehoused where you can’t see them? If these people present no danger to themselves or to others, what gives you or I that right?
Maybe I don’t like the cologne you insist on wearing, or the music you always listen to grates on my nerves. Should I have the right to have you sent someplace else until you comply with my sense of what should be allowed?
People who don’t need a job should work and take a job from someone really needs one? Every time I see a story about a multi-million dollar lottery winner continuing to work for a salary, I think about the people who are begging for a chance to work for an honest wage.
The proposition is that if someone is causing significant unease, discomfort, displeasure for a significant number of people, by conduct that has little or no social utility (as perceived by a significant part of society), their behavior can be subjected to sanction or modification.
This general principle stands behind: all law (putting aside ‘natural law’ theories for the moment); all zoning ordinances; and just about any of the many laws and regulations to which you and I are subjected every day (don’t litter; don’t blast your radio too loud; don’t walk around with your junk hanging out of your pants).
Note that for the most part, these “public order” regulations apply only when you’re in “public.” That’s because that’s when you’re most likely to interfere with others rights by exercising your own contended-for and annoying “rights.” If you want to crap your pants/litter/walk around naked on your own property, out of public view, I doubt I or anyone will care. Is securing a space of your own a high price for exercising your eccentricites without fear of complaint/coercion/sanctions? I don’t think so, YMMV, but as long as we have any public order laws, that’s how it is.