tl:dr Democrats have sold out to the same forces that bought out the Republican Party, either the same ones, or similarly intentioned ones.
I would conjecture that even a dog playing piano can have the intent of making certain sounds, simply because it likes them, not just in imitation of hoo-man moo-sic.
California Democrats, however, have found a new level of ignorance and stupidity, in which they sell out their constituents and the cornerstones of civilization, to line their own short term pockets.
Instead of fighting the Biden era policies to eviscerate our society at the labor level, such as 'red' states, who bussed their migrants to Martha's Vineyard, from where they were promptly evicted by our polite, sanctuary-providing overlords, they have doubled down on his faux vision.
Namely, some misguided ideas about the virtues of being poor and 'unhoused'. Isn't it sort of reminiscent of Mother Theresa, who glorified the misery and poverty of the poor Indian people, people she abused in the name of Catholic suffering, while flying herself flying back to the west for her own medical treatment?
The good lady siphoned off huge sums, which were donated to her foundation to fund the treatment of the people to whom she ministered, while reusing dirty needles for the 'dying'. Is it unlikely that even a few could have recovered, if not for her 'care'?
To where did that saintly money flow? I assure you that it was not lost. It went, very decidedly, someplace, in a highly organized manner. The name of that place may or may not start with a V, like vendetta or vultures.
Likewise, as with the $5 trillion in unmarked federal government dollars found by DOGE to be, ostensibly, going nowhere, this 'lost' California money has not just been misappropriated in a swelter of do-gooding nonsense.
It has ended up in very specific pockets of the charity/NGO system, which like the Catholic Church, has been constructed for laundering money intended for the poor, while helping the poor remain poor, by forever funding their poverty.
If you were to actually teach a man to fish, instead of giving him a fish for a day, every day, well then, what need would there be for you as a proxy to accept and distribute funds, to buy him those fish?
Isn't it much like the American Cancer Society, which would have to shut its doors forever, if a reasonable cure for cancer could be found?
Meanwhile, the rest of us peons are expected to deal with the limited remaining resources and jobs, while dodging poop on the streets and trash fires that belong in the alternate timeline of Back to the Future.
That has to be intentional as well, as previously explained by Democrats, back in the day, who explained that bringing in migrants, en masse, dilutes the labor pool, thus putting downward pressure on wages. This removes the power of the working class to resist their own disenfranchisement.
Is it a great irony or a tragic stupidity that blue staters have often derided red staters, for not voting in their own best interests, while themselves giving the Masterclass on it?
The American Cancer Society “in business” since 1910, hasn’t been able to come up for a “cure for cancer” in 115 years! What’s up with that? The ACS, one of the original “not for profit grifter” organizations.
Sorry, I usually agree with your takes, but not seeing it here. These are all leftist, big gov't, nanny state policies and framings, authoritarian in nature (enacted with a smiley face), and given credence by "the science" (which - if you compare the "findings" to real world outcomes - is nothing more than propaganda). Consider the language they use: affirm, provide, support, follow the science, more programs, more budget, more regulations. They're openly trying to regulate what people can *say* about homelessness. Limiting speech is an attempt to delimit thought. No libertarian would use those terms/framings or argue for those things. This is all just unbridled leftism, and we are seeing the outcome of that ideology's full, uncontested implementation.
But the point is that leftists are using libertarian language about restraint and rights as a cover for the endless growth of government. It's a performance -- a language about rejecting coercion that results in more coercion.
Its a trap so they can ratify the illegal invasion the lawless previous administration allowed to happen for the purpose of weighting congressional districts towards the Left.
Bernie and Lexie are traveling the country to do just that. None of this is coincidental. It’s orchestrated and finely tuned. Who is funding it all? I think one is wearing a Medal of Honor. Just a hunch. The oligarch has even named the play.
I think you should have been far more clear about that. The left has a habit of adopting the language and names of freedom as cover for authoritarian tendencies. The right has a habit of taking them at their word and then deciding "Freedom is bad! See what happened when these guys wanted freedom!?" Then we are left in our usual condition of both sides wanting to do basically the same thing, dictate and control, just with different aspects they want to focus on. Or as Russ Roberts put it "Both parties want to take my money and give it to their friends, they just have different friends."
It´s more like India, where all kinds of street level sacred oddity and weirdness is tolerated in the name of preserving a caste system for Brahmins ....
The trouble is that this is an entirely fraudulent government, which styles itself as a "democracy", where there is a ever-expanding welfare state, which is dependent on expansion of client numbers - and which feeds off of the productive part of society. That part has come to resent the persistent armed robbery, and so the welfare state finds it necessary to import new voters and disperse them around the country to swing the "democratic" elections - in places where the would be ruling party cannot outright cheat to get the result it desires. The answer is to alter - or more probably, to utterly abolish - that government and its crooked schemes.
They don't even need to be "voters" to impact our politics. House reappointment is driven by the US Census and the census counts live bodies present, not citizens.
> an entirely fraudulent government, which styles itself as a "democracy", where there is a ever-expanding welfare state, which is dependent on expansion of client numbers - and which feeds off of the productive part of society.
Precisely what we observe in WA state. The number of state, county, and municipal sinecures, and 501(c)(3) jobs, funded by this dolt-wrangling is massive. Don't threaten their rice bowl, or their handlers will import more dolts!
This constantly reminds me that anarchists (libertarians) were allies of bolsheviks (communists) in the Russian Communist Revolution and influenced the communist ideology. It promised a utopian society with no government populated by "new humans" with high moral values. The departure from libertarianism is that you blame the population for the failure of the ideology, they're not moral enough. They must be terrorized under tough control, taught the ideology at schools, with enemies of the state killed or sent to gulags, until they become better. Then the government will somehow dissolve on its own.
To answer your question, I think this ends with a government unlimited in its power to enforce squalor on all of its captive populations at gunpoint. No doubt it will continue to mouth egalitarian principles.
I see some readers have managed to confuse themselves about your core theme of scoundrels using the language of liberty to legitimize the impoverishment and destruction of the society liberty built. It wasn't you; you wrote with sharpness and clarity, thanks.
Garcia already has a deportation order, he already got his due process. The Trump admin made a fairly minor error sending him to El Salvador instead of somewhere else, because he had a court order providing relief from being deported to El Salvador.
In other words, the problem was the destination, not the deportation.
Watching Van Hollen fly down there and have margaritas with the guy is unbelievable, though. How out of touch is the entire left right now?
He is elected by the same voters that keep electing Democrats to run Baltimore. His political career will end prematurely only if he ventures off the plantation.
You really think the cover group's conception of "voting" is anything but a technicality, assuming it is their fingers which really check off those boxes?
He’s playing to his constituency, both at the national level and in the state of Maryland which was my home for almost 60 years. Three jurisdictions determine state level elections. Montgomery and Prince George’s counties and Baltimore City. All looney left wing strongholds. The current governor, Wes Moore, is whispered as a leading national contender for 2028. George Clooney just came out and praised him. He is the next Obama. Took a $5 billion budget surplus to a multi billion deficit in a couple of years. He has his own migration happening whereas lots of tax paying citizens are fleeing the state. Looks and acting like any other blue dominated state.
That photo will make someone (a Republican) a great campaign argument for getting Van Hollen out of office. But maybe he can counter with a photo from that day when he comforted the family of Rachel Morrin. Oh wait……
He's a citizen of El Salvador while not being a citizen of the US. Ironically, if you're a dual citizen, the US government can't help you in a country of your other citizenship, they have no jurisdiction. But if you were in the US illegally, you're privileged forever.
We should bring him back to the US, arrest him as soon as he lands, and deport him to a suitable place. If we can’t put him back in his home control given his gang ties maybe Venezuela or Gaza will take him.
He had a deportation order, not a lifetime imprisonment offshore beyond the reach of US law order.
Or does the fifth amendment no longer apply? And if not, where are you going to draw that line? If Garcia can be shipped off to an offshore hellhole without being convicted of a carceral crime, who else can a future government do that to?
I believe the Trump administration is claiming that, upon their January declaration of MS-13 as an international terrorist organization, Garcia's withholding from removal was automatically revoked because terrorists are not eligible for withholding orders and prior immigration proceedings identified him as MS-13.
I've also heard the Trump admin disavows that Garcia was improperly sent to El Salvador. Supposedly the court filing that acknowledged it as an administrative error was the work of a loyal Democrat DOJ attorney to muddy the waters and undermine the administration, and that the individual has since been fired.
Bukele is El Salvador's (wildly popular) president. Garcia is a legal citizen of El Salvador. What's Trump supposed to do, let judges start dictating international policy?
Not sure I follow. Say oops about what? (I think they have said oops about the court filing) and fix the problem how? Not trying to be contrary, just unclear what you mean.
Oops about violating the Withholding of Removal order. If they think it shouldn't be valid, they should have dissolved it BEFORE sending him down there.
The best fix would be to deport Garcia somewhere else, as should have been done originally. (Again, barring the dissolution of the WoR) Practically, that may be impossible, but it shouldn't stop the administration from playing by the rules - not justifying why they did after the fact.
I hope all the great meme-makers out there are trying to imagine what Senator Chris Van Hollen would be saying to Kilmar, El Salvadoran illegal alien, in any other scenario:
"Uh, Kilmar, I'm gonna need those hedges clipped first thing in the morning..."
"Uh, Kilmar, it's $8 an hour or I drive you back to the Home Depot parking lot..."
"Uh, Kilmar, I'm gonna need you to work all weekend to clean up after our daughter's Sweet Sixteen. Gracias!"
I'm not sure the sentiment here is Libertarian as much as it's sentimental humanitarianism. Liberalism has devolved into a weird victim fetish, where migrants, trannies, petty criminals, Palestinians, and even Mother Earth herself take their turns on the cross to be worshipped.
California may devolve into an open-air asylum but at least we'll have never said NO to a victim of structural oppression, which is the greatest crime of all, and while our shoes may step in shit, our hearts will be in the right place.
Bingo. I bet he brought packages of hot sauce down there like HRC did when courting Latino districts.
What are we going to do, have individual jury trials for 20 mil illegals?
This is a ploy to take advantage of those who believe in the rule of law, people who value freedom, and those who believe in individual agency in a rights based society.
Just so fake. Wanna be slave masters who are slaves to virtue signaling.
This has nothing to do with "due process".
They want them here, in perpetuity, to change congressional districts so that we have a low trust society.
This is all a ploy to ratify the illegal invasion of our country allowed by the lawless previous administration.
Holly MathNerd has calculated it would take the nation’s 700 immigration judges close to ten years to hold hearings for the 20 million illegals in the country, spending only an hour on each and working a punishing schedule.
It's virtue signaling turned up to 11 where they forget they are citizens of the country they are destroying, mixed with cultural Marxism self-hatred and pity paradigm. Go back and watch Dancing With Wolves, 1990. This has been going on for a long time.
Taking people's money to give to the homeless so they can destroy other people's property is about the opposite of libertarian. Libertarians get accused of wanting to let the homeless die in the streets, not give them piles of tax dollars and exemptions from laws. This is just the left stealing the good name of libertarians, and Chris, alas, falling prey.
I mean to say that the left is wearing libertarian rhetoric as a mask, and that their use of an argument about limited government always results in larger government.
I hear you, and I think that is the correct interpretation of what the left is doing, but it was not clearly the take away from your article. It read a bit more like one of Rikard's rants.
In our local ND (California) the sentiment is "love for government regulations". Government makes the air clean and workplace conditions safe, look at all this smog and traffic in red states.
Not a suicide pact. The rich politicians of California are embracing murder of their fellow citizens. They eat at the French Laundry and live in their gated, privately patrolled communities where they write the rules to prevent us from using whatever private property we can manage to scavenge. They take poor people's land to pretend to build a "bullet train". They force everyone into electric cars and prevent anyone from building a refinery or a nuclear energy plant. They are the very reincarnation of the French aristocracy before the revolution. "Let them eat cake," is the new California state motto.
It’s an abiding mystery why all the rest of California that lies more than 30 miles east of the pacific coast just doesn’t defect and become part of Nevada. Just the zero income tax distinction would seem compelling enough. There has been a great deal of discussion about redrawing various state boundaries, but it never materializes. Is there some unshakable legal reason for this?
Eastern Washington and Oregon have been trying to join Idaho for years with no success, so I don't think it's realistic. Maybe Trump's new voter rules will help, but it seems there's no saving the Bay Area Losers from their own insanity.
….And ruin everything they touch . Los Angeles was beautiful, now hunkered deep in the leaves of eucalyptus trees and flowering hibiscus and jasmine are areas full of garbage beyond belief and mentally deranged , drug addicted people. These dems like them lying around , it makes them feel better about themselves, empowered and in control . There is no empathy there , otherwise put these people in shelters . Where did all the people go when China came to visit San Francisco. They know exactly what they are doing .
I grew up in the north San Fernando Valley in the 50s and 60s, and lived in LA until I left CA for good in 1990. Several years ago I visited the modest, but clean and safe middle class suburban neighborhood where I had grown up and it literally looked like a third world slum. It was appalling. I could not believe I was in the US, much less southern California.
Same. Left in 1999. Best thing I ever did. Have to visit my daughter every couple years. She lives in downtown LA . It never ceases to amaze me how far north Tijuana has encroached . The only difference is the human turds are solid, not rivers of shit running down the dirt road. But give em a few more years.
Allowing the mentally ill and drug addicted to live in absolute squalor under the guise of protecting their freedom is in no way a compassionate or humanitarian act.
Yes, they do know exactly what they are doing. The best way to keep a man in prison is to not let him see the bars. They people on the street are in prison and the government welfare programs are the bars. This is all by design.
Yes...but "sentimental" is...not quite accurate. That's the masque in play. But there is nothing "sentimental" about seeing first-hand the damage these tramps do to both themselves and others, and then saying, "Let's protect, extend, normalize, and reward this!"
Where I live in WA state the permastate girl who used to be in charge of a nearby county's "COVID dashboard"/data project was moved from that job, when the Big Crisis was backed away from, and into a new job where she harasses homeowners with septic systems. Such a big worry about septic systems! Your septic system might be leaking! Imagine what it MAY do IF that leaky meets Le Precious Water. (Water is precious, but that's not what they're on about, in reality).
Meanwhile tramp camps of hundreds of people are parked right next to lakes, streams, and other bodies of water, emitting not just body waste but the entire retinue of chemicals, drugs, and toxins directly into the soil. And that's just dandy. Chris's photo of the butane bottles doesn't even begin to cover it.
There is no "sentimentalism" here. The people enabling this--often for a paycheck--are using The Least Of These My Brethren to virtue signal over...but in fact they are deploying and supporting them as bioweapons against people they loathe: taxpaying home- and landowners with roots in this place and primary allegiances to our families, rather than whatever Virtue ShamWow is imported this week.
Am aware of that; and you didnt mention the deliberate creation of chaos, to make our lives more difficult and ugly . Nevertheless, the people suffering this befoulment of our home places don’t stand up to fight it because there is a persistent trope that somehow we owe them, they are sick with addictions, mentally ill, cant help themselves, and protesting identifies you as cruel. People are so craven, so afraid of that, theybdon’t stand up. Or if they do, they are alone.
> there is a persistent trope that somehow we owe [tramps], they are sick with addictions, mentally ill, cant help themselves
Agree, E.…but I wouldn't call that a trope (a term from classical rhetoric that has accreted myriad other meanings) but rather a performative, compulsive, self-destructive impulse that resembles addictive or other trauma bonding.
I'm thinking of the dramatic acts and tales of self-sacrifice/heroic effort in the face of volatility, danger, and violence on the part of the tramps, acts done and tales told by Professional Tramp Helpers and their organizational/institutional deployers.
This is coupled with the persistent message: “BUT I CAN SAVE HER/HIM/THEM.” More money. More programs. More services. More Tramp Helpers.
One of the features of dysfunctional/trauma bonding, such as bonding with or between addicts, is the dipole of "I know they are hurting themselves, and others, and the community, and me, BUT I CAN SAVE HER/HIM/THEM." and "oh no, they are hurting themselves, others, and the community, and me—again…I must have done something wrong, or didn’t have enough money/programs/services/staff.”
And then, “BUT I CAN SAVE HER/HIM/THEM.” Round and round it goes.
If the Professional Helpers and their allies were speaking in these same terms of a date, a relationship, a partner, a spouse, your average “therapist” would have no hesitation pronouncing it “limerence” or “trauma-induced bonding” or “addictive relating” or whatever.
Listening to the Dantean-infernal-epic tales of one of these Professional Helpers one day in late 2023, I watched the seamless move between mention of childhood trauma at the hands of addict parents…and stories of being a Professional Tramp Helper.
I ruminated after that on the neurobiology of trauma, trauma-based mind control, and the use of these in certain schemes of political power.
How is it that Professional Helpers and their allies will give, and feel they owe, intensive approval, attention, affection, and resources to people who offer nothing in return (at best) or more often violence, cruelty, and abusive/destructive behavior?
How is it that they demand others accept their view of these relationships (“BUT I CAN SAVE HER/HIM/THEM”), and also supply these inputs and resources…when others are cautioning them about the costs of their obsession, meanwhile being negatively impacted by it, but having nowhere to turn to fight back, since every avenue of pushback has been blocked?
How is it the Professional Helpers turn on, and punish, those who question their structure of pathological loyalty, and its devastating costs to others?
Well, trauma bonding is like that. PROTECT THE QUEEN.
And who plays on all this to get and keep power?
I find it unsurprising that the most communistic members of society take on/manifest these behaviors, given the Communist expertise and grounding in this form of manipulation. Abandon yourself; serve your captors; sting to death anything that threatens the hive. The politics based on the hacking of infant wetware/reactions to physical and emotional abuse. The politics of destroying anyone who recognizes the pattern and questions it, or pushes back. Today the Revolution, tomorrow, the Gulag.
In closing, "people don't stand up to fight it" isn't accurate in the least in my local experience these past 25 years, but I’ve written enough. Thanks, Elizabeth, for the opening to do so.
The degree of denial from the "Left" regarding Kilmar is remarkable. Solid data points like his wife seeking a restraining order are glossed over or hand-waved away. TDS has metastasized into a Godzilla of denial. I knew it was bad but... dayum.
It’s almost like one of our frenemies is paying politicians and bureaucrats to advance policies that will destroy our country “without firing a single shot”.
Let me see if I have this right…San Francisco voters just decided that letting folks steal up to $950 wasn’t such a good idea after all, so they modified the law to allow someone to steal up to $950 as often as they can manage without getting caught twice. After they’ve been caught twice, then…well, maybe something bad might happen.
Not to be outdone, LA has taken a page from SF’s playbook and will now allow any theft provided it can be blamed on homelessness or basic survival needs?
“Hold it right there buddy, just where do you think you’re going with that new $2000 TV?”
Not libertarian, nor socialist, is the idea's platform underpinning how California is acting.
The libertarian approach would be do nothing from the state's side, trusting to the community to solve this in the immediate while also easing up on or removing rules for buildings, zoning, et c to make it profitable to build lots and lots of cheap housing units.
Any student of history and economics knows this results in huge and densely packed slums.
The Marxist approach would be for the state to build a few huge areas about an hour's commute away from everything, with Social Services-owned and run high rises filled with cheapest possible apartments, packing as many people in per square yard of floor area as possible, and with bare-bones essentials located in the centre of the area of blocks.
Again, any student of history knows how that solution plays out. Same as the libertarian solution, basically.
What California is doing is combining the worst elements of Libertarian and Socialist schools of thought: profit incentive for community organisers and their teams, groups, whatever to act - for pay - on the State's or the City's behalf, and the funding coming from confiscated means (taxes):
Neoliberalism. The Dogma and paradigm of political economy we all have been living under since the end of the Cold War. Aka socialised losses/privatised profits.
Step one, would be to stop thinking about this in terms of rights, and instead look at cost & consequences. Given the climate, Winter doesn't remove a significant number of homeless the way it does in the North. Calluous? Maybe, but also true. The climate you can't really do much about.
Behaviour of the individual? Violentce, drug abuse, mental illness? Then they go to the supervised concetration camp far out in the desert where three meals, showers*, a change of clothes and no access to drugs awaits, for the rest of their natural life or until they have "detoxed" and can be helped back on track - if so they are moved to training camp where they are (re)trained so they can rejoin the workforce (assuming a market for simple manual labour can exist in a modern high-tech state).
*I mean real showers, by the way.
I could go on for some 40 000 words on this, because the issue can be solved (we did it in under five years here, a century ago or so - then neoliberalist politics brought homelessness back in under three) but the first step (Hello, Captain Obvious!) is wanting to solve the immediate issue.
And neither Libertarians nor Socialists wants to do that: the Libertarians, being capitalistically inclined, wants a perpetual and guaranteed captured customer-base without options so there's no competetion, and the Socialists, being Marxist, wants to exert ever-growing control over anything they can imagine and thus needs a large Lumpenproletariat with which to threaten, guilt-trip and scare the workers and bourgeoisie into supporting the Socialists and handing over more power.
Anyone objecting to seeing their pet ideology besmirched thusly - go look at history and compare what has worked well when and where, to figure out why. Why do I say that?
Because wherever the ideology you favour failed, your excuse will be that it wasn't done right, or was the real thing. And that is a lesson in itself about the dangers of ideological thinking.
Your last two sentences are master level insight that everyone should seriously ponder regardless of political party or ideology. We all believe there is only one correct way to solve a "problem." When that solution doesn't work, we double down because we didn't do enough of it and we therefore need to do it bigger and better. Perfect explanation of the current state of the Loud and Proud members of the Democratic party. While I revel in their current "PhD level" lack of self-awareness, I recognize that Republicans can sadly fall into this trap.
Thank you - I really want to stress that I wish it wasn't like this, and that the trap as you aptly call it was exclusivley to specific schools of thought (one might argue succesfully that some are more susceptible than others, but we the humans do not differ in this susceptability), but alas, it is not so.
A parallel that might be of interest to you is that the Swedish counterpart to the US Democrat party, the Swedish Socialist-Democrat Workers' Party, is on an opposite course, PhD-wise. The less educated and experienced outside of politics, the better, has been the norm for about 15 years now for them. Perfect example: Annika Strandhäll, nicknamed "the bag-in-box twitterati" by some. Credentials, apart from joining the party in her youth: hairdresser. She was for years in charge of the dep. overseeing healthcare and social services...
Their counterparts are not much better, and they are also all inexperienced from any kind of career outside of politics.
Are you familiar with the game "King of the Hill"?
Everyone climbing favours competition, and everyone on top fights against it.
When enough climbers reach the top and realise they can better defend if they join forces, it ceases to matter if they started out as Marxists or Libertarians, since all their action will be based in preventing challenges and competition from without.
Therefore, anyone in the group at the top not showing willingness to act in that way, will be cast down, and it becomes a rational choice to act as the group consensus dictates: elimination of competition becomes the only logical course of action.
Being a Libertarian by no means mean you won't do this too - because if you do?
So what is your point? That humans always will attempt to keep others out once they get to the top of the power hierarchy, regardless of what ideology they started with? If that's the case, the whole point is moot, because nothing you claim as superior is not going to fall prey to that same weakness.
Your initial response indicated that you think that a libertarian or libertarianism is somehow immune or not affected by this human behaviour.
And I can point to historical - empirical - examples that were superior to what is happening in the USA and elsewhere when people try to abolish homelessness.
Which proves that it can be done, and that it is not an issue of resources, but of the moral and ethical character and the voluntary choices of the people involved, that is the problem/solution.
And that is never a very pleasant realisation for an ideologue, but to a realist pragmatic it is his bread and butter: what worked, when, where, how.
If your solution must adhere to an ideology, you are not trying to solve a problem; you are trying to prove your ideology objectively correct.
Since an ideology is an abstract collection of ideas about reality, no matter which one is applied, it will always fail - either immediately, or gradually, since applying it changes the situation it was supposed to control, thereby making the conditions the ideology was applied different from it was applicable to.
Mull it over, and look at historical - empirical - situations where the problem was solved, rather than thinking in terms of abstract principles.
"Which proves that it can be done, and that it is not an issue of resources, but of the moral and ethical character and the voluntary choices of the people involved, that is the problem/solution."
So you are saying if you only have the right people in charge, everything will work out? Or are there specific ideas you have in mind? So far you have been long on assertions that we need to look at what worked and when, and very short on examples, specific reasons why it worked, or really anything.
I suspect that the reason is that drawing insight from the examples of reality requires creating an abstract collection of ideas about reality, and if you hope to change reality later applying the same. Indeed, that is the weakness of all so called "pragmatists": they claim to just do whatever works, but their beliefs about what will work in a given situation are based on unacknowledged and unsystematically tested or even thought through ideas. So their actions are short sighted and highly contingent on moment to moment concerns, leading to constant surprises as new problems crop up.
I wouldn't call that a minor quibble. Great points, Rikard, esp the slum/ghetto aspect which could be their way of incorporating immigrants into their Smart Cities for easier control and elimination when it comes to it.
Also your point, 'socialised losses/privatised profits' is spot-on. Funny how we lose sight of that.
Have you read the work of ICE-9 ? Highly recommended.
ICE-9 goes into the socialised losses/privatised profits in depth. His work is astonishing. And the cute moniker is from Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle.
"Ice-nine is a fictional material that appears in Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle. Ice-nine is described as a polymorph of ice which instead of melting at 0 °C, melts at 45.8 °C."
> profit incentive for community organisers and their teams, groups, whatever to act - for pay - on the State's or the City's behalf, and the funding coming from confiscated means (taxes):
It is precisely, accurately, absolutely this. There are entire cadres of these Dolt Wranglers drawing snug paychecks inflicting these tramps on everyone else, and they also get to virtue signal over their work, among themselves and externally.
The evangelical churches in my area worship "the homeless" more than they worship Christ. Who Himself, just prior to His execution on the Cross, pointedly told his disciples that keeping an eye on the most high, and honoring it with humility, was superior to making performative gestures for The Poor. See John 12:3.
Only the left could try to justify inviting poor people from other countries into this country illegally and then giving them welfare benefits. It's obviously suicidal and very unfair to struggling Americans. But obviously, they're on the moral high ground (and able to steal untold billions in taxpayer funding along the way), so there's that.
And only idiots will complain their social security and disability checks are small and running out while fighting against people uncovering all the fraudulent spending of said money
Whenever the government allocates money to solve a problem, it creates an incentive for the problem to grow. For if the problem were actually solved, the cash would stop flowing, the government bureaucracy that was erected to the address the problem would be dismantled, all of those cushy jobs that pay well above the private sector would disappear along with the pensions, expense accounts, weekend junkets to Napa to “whiteboard” solutions, etc.
It’s a scenario that is repeated over and over again. The war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on homelessness, programs to solve “why Johnny can’t read.” None of those efforts ever came close to solving the problem they were spawned to address. On the contrary, the problems got worse and thus, the program expanded. By design.
I have called governmental homeless programs “people farming”. Expand the crop of homeless and you will need more farmers, tractors, silos, barns. It’s corruption on an industrial scale.
A simple calculation shows that LA's budget comes to #21,230 per homeless person or $1,770 per month. That's about 2/3 of my income from my pension plus Soc Sec. Now, those homeless are still homeless, with all that money. So it provides what? My bet is about 8000 bureaucrats at $120,000 each in salary. For doing what? Certainly for accounting. Maybe for martinis.
The head of the county homeless services agency made a base salary of $430,000 a year, before being invited to resign for disappearing tens of millions of dollars.
Chris, may I ask, how many times a day do you throw up, knowing as much as you do about the despotic evil that is inexorably turning the blue areas of California into a toilet and the remainder of California into paupers?
A study of Denver’s homeless programs found that the amount of money spent would be sufficient to rent two apartments for each of the “unhoused”. Not to be outdone, a journalist found that Dallas provides two apartments to some of its homeless, because no ID is required so the more enterprising bums sign up for two. Then they still live on the streets much of the time because when your brain is severely drug addled that seems like a nice hobby.
The HomeLess need what they need and should not be denied. The HomeLess can barbecue our children… because… they are HomeLess. We must therefore be… comPassionate… because they are…HomeLess. We must provide them…lighter fluid. It’s only the right and comPassionate thing… to do. Because we are… comPassionate [fucking insane idiots].
Nature is selecting California for extinction. Those non-idiots in California can either flee, or they can fucking fight.
See also, on the same themes:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-libertarian-conundrum
I'd quibble these are far from libertarian policies, although they certainly resemble bastardized versions of them.
Stipulated. They bullshit a language about constitutional order and limited government, in the service of massive government.
It's like they broke our legs, and are now offering crutches.......
I was just about to come back to say that watching Democrats use the language of limited government is like watching a dog play the piano.
tl:dr Democrats have sold out to the same forces that bought out the Republican Party, either the same ones, or similarly intentioned ones.
I would conjecture that even a dog playing piano can have the intent of making certain sounds, simply because it likes them, not just in imitation of hoo-man moo-sic.
California Democrats, however, have found a new level of ignorance and stupidity, in which they sell out their constituents and the cornerstones of civilization, to line their own short term pockets.
Instead of fighting the Biden era policies to eviscerate our society at the labor level, such as 'red' states, who bussed their migrants to Martha's Vineyard, from where they were promptly evicted by our polite, sanctuary-providing overlords, they have doubled down on his faux vision.
Namely, some misguided ideas about the virtues of being poor and 'unhoused'. Isn't it sort of reminiscent of Mother Theresa, who glorified the misery and poverty of the poor Indian people, people she abused in the name of Catholic suffering, while flying herself flying back to the west for her own medical treatment?
The good lady siphoned off huge sums, which were donated to her foundation to fund the treatment of the people to whom she ministered, while reusing dirty needles for the 'dying'. Is it unlikely that even a few could have recovered, if not for her 'care'?
To where did that saintly money flow? I assure you that it was not lost. It went, very decidedly, someplace, in a highly organized manner. The name of that place may or may not start with a V, like vendetta or vultures.
Likewise, as with the $5 trillion in unmarked federal government dollars found by DOGE to be, ostensibly, going nowhere, this 'lost' California money has not just been misappropriated in a swelter of do-gooding nonsense.
It has ended up in very specific pockets of the charity/NGO system, which like the Catholic Church, has been constructed for laundering money intended for the poor, while helping the poor remain poor, by forever funding their poverty.
If you were to actually teach a man to fish, instead of giving him a fish for a day, every day, well then, what need would there be for you as a proxy to accept and distribute funds, to buy him those fish?
Isn't it much like the American Cancer Society, which would have to shut its doors forever, if a reasonable cure for cancer could be found?
Meanwhile, the rest of us peons are expected to deal with the limited remaining resources and jobs, while dodging poop on the streets and trash fires that belong in the alternate timeline of Back to the Future.
That has to be intentional as well, as previously explained by Democrats, back in the day, who explained that bringing in migrants, en masse, dilutes the labor pool, thus putting downward pressure on wages. This removes the power of the working class to resist their own disenfranchisement.
Is it a great irony or a tragic stupidity that blue staters have often derided red staters, for not voting in their own best interests, while themselves giving the Masterclass on it?
The American Cancer Society “in business” since 1910, hasn’t been able to come up for a “cure for cancer” in 115 years! What’s up with that? The ACS, one of the original “not for profit grifter” organizations.
I would use Taibbi’s phrase, the it’s like ABBA singing in English. Their mouths are making sounds but they have no idea what the sounds mean.
Oh c'mon Abba understand English!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj_FCM7THDI
Celine Dione´s Titanic song!
Sorry, I usually agree with your takes, but not seeing it here. These are all leftist, big gov't, nanny state policies and framings, authoritarian in nature (enacted with a smiley face), and given credence by "the science" (which - if you compare the "findings" to real world outcomes - is nothing more than propaganda). Consider the language they use: affirm, provide, support, follow the science, more programs, more budget, more regulations. They're openly trying to regulate what people can *say* about homelessness. Limiting speech is an attempt to delimit thought. No libertarian would use those terms/framings or argue for those things. This is all just unbridled leftism, and we are seeing the outcome of that ideology's full, uncontested implementation.
But the point is that leftists are using libertarian language about restraint and rights as a cover for the endless growth of government. It's a performance -- a language about rejecting coercion that results in more coercion.
Its a trap so they can ratify the illegal invasion the lawless previous administration allowed to happen for the purpose of weighting congressional districts towards the Left.
And strangle Trump's effort to deliver on promises hoping his base will revolt.
Bernie and Lexie are traveling the country to do just that. None of this is coincidental. It’s orchestrated and finely tuned. Who is funding it all? I think one is wearing a Medal of Honor. Just a hunch. The oligarch has even named the play.
And they are flying around from ”rally to rally” on “oligarchical private jets” funded by a Bernie!
Yes. Exactly. Good point
^^This!^^
I think you should have been far more clear about that. The left has a habit of adopting the language and names of freedom as cover for authoritarian tendencies. The right has a habit of taking them at their word and then deciding "Freedom is bad! See what happened when these guys wanted freedom!?" Then we are left in our usual condition of both sides wanting to do basically the same thing, dictate and control, just with different aspects they want to focus on. Or as Russ Roberts put it "Both parties want to take my money and give it to their friends, they just have different friends."
It´s more like India, where all kinds of street level sacred oddity and weirdness is tolerated in the name of preserving a caste system for Brahmins ....
Holy cows!
The trouble is that this is an entirely fraudulent government, which styles itself as a "democracy", where there is a ever-expanding welfare state, which is dependent on expansion of client numbers - and which feeds off of the productive part of society. That part has come to resent the persistent armed robbery, and so the welfare state finds it necessary to import new voters and disperse them around the country to swing the "democratic" elections - in places where the would be ruling party cannot outright cheat to get the result it desires. The answer is to alter - or more probably, to utterly abolish - that government and its crooked schemes.
They don't even need to be "voters" to impact our politics. House reappointment is driven by the US Census and the census counts live bodies present, not citizens.
> an entirely fraudulent government, which styles itself as a "democracy", where there is a ever-expanding welfare state, which is dependent on expansion of client numbers - and which feeds off of the productive part of society.
Precisely what we observe in WA state. The number of state, county, and municipal sinecures, and 501(c)(3) jobs, funded by this dolt-wrangling is massive. Don't threaten their rice bowl, or their handlers will import more dolts!
This constantly reminds me that anarchists (libertarians) were allies of bolsheviks (communists) in the Russian Communist Revolution and influenced the communist ideology. It promised a utopian society with no government populated by "new humans" with high moral values. The departure from libertarianism is that you blame the population for the failure of the ideology, they're not moral enough. They must be terrorized under tough control, taught the ideology at schools, with enemies of the state killed or sent to gulags, until they become better. Then the government will somehow dissolve on its own.
To answer your question, I think this ends with a government unlimited in its power to enforce squalor on all of its captive populations at gunpoint. No doubt it will continue to mouth egalitarian principles.
I see some readers have managed to confuse themselves about your core theme of scoundrels using the language of liberty to legitimize the impoverishment and destruction of the society liberty built. It wasn't you; you wrote with sharpness and clarity, thanks.
Garcia already has a deportation order, he already got his due process. The Trump admin made a fairly minor error sending him to El Salvador instead of somewhere else, because he had a court order providing relief from being deported to El Salvador.
In other words, the problem was the destination, not the deportation.
Watching Van Hollen fly down there and have margaritas with the guy is unbelievable, though. How out of touch is the entire left right now?
The problem will be solved, and the "crisis" will whimper to an end. But Van Hollen, wow.
Those pictures will haunt him for the rest of his (hopefully short) political career.
I can't believe there wasn't a single sane person in his orbit that could convince him this was a very, very, very stupid idea.
He is elected by the same voters that keep electing Democrats to run Baltimore. His political career will end prematurely only if he ventures off the plantation.
If in fact he was ever elected at all - machines are black boxes which can be programmed to produce a desired result.
There are real people that vote in ways you cannot fathom, that is reality. Don't ignore reality - leave that mistake to progressives.
You really think the cover group's conception of "voting" is anything but a technicality, assuming it is their fingers which really check off those boxes?
Tru dat.
I wonder how much attention a citizen of Maryland receives when they call his office? I hope the voters take note.
He’s playing to his constituency, both at the national level and in the state of Maryland which was my home for almost 60 years. Three jurisdictions determine state level elections. Montgomery and Prince George’s counties and Baltimore City. All looney left wing strongholds. The current governor, Wes Moore, is whispered as a leading national contender for 2028. George Clooney just came out and praised him. He is the next Obama. Took a $5 billion budget surplus to a multi billion deficit in a couple of years. He has his own migration happening whereas lots of tax paying citizens are fleeing the state. Looks and acting like any other blue dominated state.
The Curley Effect.
I always forget Baltimore is in Maryland.
Really? Ewww.
I grew up in Howard county, and we need that creep to be defeated.
That photo will make someone (a Republican) a great campaign argument for getting Van Hollen out of office. But maybe he can counter with a photo from that day when he comforted the family of Rachel Morrin. Oh wait……
He's a citizen of El Salvador while not being a citizen of the US. Ironically, if you're a dual citizen, the US government can't help you in a country of your other citizenship, they have no jurisdiction. But if you were in the US illegally, you're privileged forever.
Don’t they say that it’s not the destination that counts, it’s the journey? For a man like Garcia, I’d call it Mission Accomplished.
We should bring him back to the US, arrest him as soon as he lands, and deport him to a suitable place. If we can’t put him back in his home control given his gang ties maybe Venezuela or Gaza will take him.
I don't even think we have to bring him back to the US. Fly him straight from El Salvador to Costa Rica or wherever.
He had a deportation order, not a lifetime imprisonment offshore beyond the reach of US law order.
Or does the fifth amendment no longer apply? And if not, where are you going to draw that line? If Garcia can be shipped off to an offshore hellhole without being convicted of a carceral crime, who else can a future government do that to?
Hopefully more, given the person being deported is an illegal alien & not entitled to the constitution protections of a citizen.
Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador. Go complain to Bukele.
I believe the Trump administration is claiming that, upon their January declaration of MS-13 as an international terrorist organization, Garcia's withholding from removal was automatically revoked because terrorists are not eligible for withholding orders and prior immigration proceedings identified him as MS-13.
I've also heard the Trump admin disavows that Garcia was improperly sent to El Salvador. Supposedly the court filing that acknowledged it as an administrative error was the work of a loyal Democrat DOJ attorney to muddy the waters and undermine the administration, and that the individual has since been fired.
Yes, the entire problem is Trump's inability to say "Oops" and fix the problem. So the court orders continue.
Bukele is El Salvador's (wildly popular) president. Garcia is a legal citizen of El Salvador. What's Trump supposed to do, let judges start dictating international policy?
Not sure I follow. Say oops about what? (I think they have said oops about the court filing) and fix the problem how? Not trying to be contrary, just unclear what you mean.
Oops about violating the Withholding of Removal order. If they think it shouldn't be valid, they should have dissolved it BEFORE sending him down there.
The best fix would be to deport Garcia somewhere else, as should have been done originally. (Again, barring the dissolution of the WoR) Practically, that may be impossible, but it shouldn't stop the administration from playing by the rules - not justifying why they did after the fact.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69777799/1/1/abrego-garcia-v-noem/
Regardless of the politics, it seems that too many politicians can’t admit fault.
Zero argument about that one.
I hope all the great meme-makers out there are trying to imagine what Senator Chris Van Hollen would be saying to Kilmar, El Salvadoran illegal alien, in any other scenario:
"Uh, Kilmar, I'm gonna need those hedges clipped first thing in the morning..."
"Uh, Kilmar, it's $8 an hour or I drive you back to the Home Depot parking lot..."
"Uh, Kilmar, I'm gonna need you to work all weekend to clean up after our daughter's Sweet Sixteen. Gracias!"
I'm not sure the sentiment here is Libertarian as much as it's sentimental humanitarianism. Liberalism has devolved into a weird victim fetish, where migrants, trannies, petty criminals, Palestinians, and even Mother Earth herself take their turns on the cross to be worshipped.
California may devolve into an open-air asylum but at least we'll have never said NO to a victim of structural oppression, which is the greatest crime of all, and while our shoes may step in shit, our hearts will be in the right place.
Bingo. I bet he brought packages of hot sauce down there like HRC did when courting Latino districts.
What are we going to do, have individual jury trials for 20 mil illegals?
This is a ploy to take advantage of those who believe in the rule of law, people who value freedom, and those who believe in individual agency in a rights based society.
Just so fake. Wanna be slave masters who are slaves to virtue signaling.
This has nothing to do with "due process".
They want them here, in perpetuity, to change congressional districts so that we have a low trust society.
This is all a ploy to ratify the illegal invasion of our country allowed by the lawless previous administration.
Holly MathNerd has calculated it would take the nation’s 700 immigration judges close to ten years to hold hearings for the 20 million illegals in the country, spending only an hour on each and working a punishing schedule.
Not to mention the untold trillions of tax payer dollars
Thats the point. These people are despicable. And SCOTUS is complicit.
"I'm not sure the sentiment here is Libertarian as much as it's sentimental humanitarianism."
In the article I'm working on, I posit this is a consequence of the "oppressed/oppressor" lens they view everything through lately.
It's virtue signaling turned up to 11 where they forget they are citizens of the country they are destroying, mixed with cultural Marxism self-hatred and pity paradigm. Go back and watch Dancing With Wolves, 1990. This has been going on for a long time.
"This has been going on for a long time."
To be more exact, it's been going on since Sacco and Vanzetti and the Scottsboro Boys.
Taking people's money to give to the homeless so they can destroy other people's property is about the opposite of libertarian. Libertarians get accused of wanting to let the homeless die in the streets, not give them piles of tax dollars and exemptions from laws. This is just the left stealing the good name of libertarians, and Chris, alas, falling prey.
I mean to say that the left is wearing libertarian rhetoric as a mask, and that their use of an argument about limited government always results in larger government.
I hear you, and I think that is the correct interpretation of what the left is doing, but it was not clearly the take away from your article. It read a bit more like one of Rikard's rants.
In our local ND (California) the sentiment is "love for government regulations". Government makes the air clean and workplace conditions safe, look at all this smog and traffic in red states.
Late stage ruling class liberalism is an evolutionary adaptation to camouflage predators from surveillance by the lower orders.
It instrumentalizes recognition of identity (sexual or ethnic) to anaesthetize victims. It legitimizes inequality. It fuels ego inflation.
Best of all, it misdirects the hatreds it incites to the disadvantage of designated targets (pale proles).
It is the libertinism of trust fund sociopaths. Gilles De Rais, Sade and the worthies who ran the workhouses in OLIVER TWIST hardly compare.
Not a suicide pact. The rich politicians of California are embracing murder of their fellow citizens. They eat at the French Laundry and live in their gated, privately patrolled communities where they write the rules to prevent us from using whatever private property we can manage to scavenge. They take poor people's land to pretend to build a "bullet train". They force everyone into electric cars and prevent anyone from building a refinery or a nuclear energy plant. They are the very reincarnation of the French aristocracy before the revolution. "Let them eat cake," is the new California state motto.
Cake is for the elite. You vil eat ze bugs! You vil take ze shots! You vil own nazing und be hoppy.
It’s an abiding mystery why all the rest of California that lies more than 30 miles east of the pacific coast just doesn’t defect and become part of Nevada. Just the zero income tax distinction would seem compelling enough. There has been a great deal of discussion about redrawing various state boundaries, but it never materializes. Is there some unshakable legal reason for this?
Eastern Washington and Oregon have been trying to join Idaho for years with no success, so I don't think it's realistic. Maybe Trump's new voter rules will help, but it seems there's no saving the Bay Area Losers from their own insanity.
Yes. The coastals keep voting Dem and the Dems have a super majority choke hold . And they need your money
Exactly.
The democrats will fight for illegal immigrants and sexual deviants, but not for taxpaying citizens. They are communists through and through.
….And ruin everything they touch . Los Angeles was beautiful, now hunkered deep in the leaves of eucalyptus trees and flowering hibiscus and jasmine are areas full of garbage beyond belief and mentally deranged , drug addicted people. These dems like them lying around , it makes them feel better about themselves, empowered and in control . There is no empathy there , otherwise put these people in shelters . Where did all the people go when China came to visit San Francisco. They know exactly what they are doing .
I grew up in the north San Fernando Valley in the 50s and 60s, and lived in LA until I left CA for good in 1990. Several years ago I visited the modest, but clean and safe middle class suburban neighborhood where I had grown up and it literally looked like a third world slum. It was appalling. I could not believe I was in the US, much less southern California.
Same. Left in 1999. Best thing I ever did. Have to visit my daughter every couple years. She lives in downtown LA . It never ceases to amaze me how far north Tijuana has encroached . The only difference is the human turds are solid, not rivers of shit running down the dirt road. But give em a few more years.
The water is still to drink. But not for long.
My cousin, who departed California for paradise, (Montana), would probably opine that the human turds are in Sacramento.
Allowing the mentally ill and drug addicted to live in absolute squalor under the guise of protecting their freedom is in no way a compassionate or humanitarian act.
It's an attempt to destroy society from the inside so they can Build Back Better. Which is just better for them, not anyone else.
Can't Build Back Better if everything's Still Standing.
Just wait...
lol
Yes, they do know exactly what they are doing. The best way to keep a man in prison is to not let him see the bars. They people on the street are in prison and the government welfare programs are the bars. This is all by design.
Exactly. So obvious
It’s disgusting 🤮 and shameful. These people are shameless.
Yours is a novel framing to me, how “less” government becomes much more government. Thank you for this.
On the subject of spending a lot more money to avoid the obvious solution, my favorite example is how city of L.A. is going to replace all the street lights with solar ones… to prevent copper wire theft. https://www.dailynews.com/2025/04/02/mayor-bass-says-streetlights-using-solar-power-will-reduce-copper-wire-theft/
Amazing! How very Los Angeles.
Because you can't just jack the solar panels, I guess?
You cannot fix stupid. And the sentimental are stupid.
Yes...but "sentimental" is...not quite accurate. That's the masque in play. But there is nothing "sentimental" about seeing first-hand the damage these tramps do to both themselves and others, and then saying, "Let's protect, extend, normalize, and reward this!"
Where I live in WA state the permastate girl who used to be in charge of a nearby county's "COVID dashboard"/data project was moved from that job, when the Big Crisis was backed away from, and into a new job where she harasses homeowners with septic systems. Such a big worry about septic systems! Your septic system might be leaking! Imagine what it MAY do IF that leaky meets Le Precious Water. (Water is precious, but that's not what they're on about, in reality).
Meanwhile tramp camps of hundreds of people are parked right next to lakes, streams, and other bodies of water, emitting not just body waste but the entire retinue of chemicals, drugs, and toxins directly into the soil. And that's just dandy. Chris's photo of the butane bottles doesn't even begin to cover it.
There is no "sentimentalism" here. The people enabling this--often for a paycheck--are using The Least Of These My Brethren to virtue signal over...but in fact they are deploying and supporting them as bioweapons against people they loathe: taxpaying home- and landowners with roots in this place and primary allegiances to our families, rather than whatever Virtue ShamWow is imported this week.
Am aware of that; and you didnt mention the deliberate creation of chaos, to make our lives more difficult and ugly . Nevertheless, the people suffering this befoulment of our home places don’t stand up to fight it because there is a persistent trope that somehow we owe them, they are sick with addictions, mentally ill, cant help themselves, and protesting identifies you as cruel. People are so craven, so afraid of that, theybdon’t stand up. Or if they do, they are alone.
> there is a persistent trope that somehow we owe [tramps], they are sick with addictions, mentally ill, cant help themselves
Agree, E.…but I wouldn't call that a trope (a term from classical rhetoric that has accreted myriad other meanings) but rather a performative, compulsive, self-destructive impulse that resembles addictive or other trauma bonding.
I'm thinking of the dramatic acts and tales of self-sacrifice/heroic effort in the face of volatility, danger, and violence on the part of the tramps, acts done and tales told by Professional Tramp Helpers and their organizational/institutional deployers.
This is coupled with the persistent message: “BUT I CAN SAVE HER/HIM/THEM.” More money. More programs. More services. More Tramp Helpers.
One of the features of dysfunctional/trauma bonding, such as bonding with or between addicts, is the dipole of "I know they are hurting themselves, and others, and the community, and me, BUT I CAN SAVE HER/HIM/THEM." and "oh no, they are hurting themselves, others, and the community, and me—again…I must have done something wrong, or didn’t have enough money/programs/services/staff.”
And then, “BUT I CAN SAVE HER/HIM/THEM.” Round and round it goes.
If the Professional Helpers and their allies were speaking in these same terms of a date, a relationship, a partner, a spouse, your average “therapist” would have no hesitation pronouncing it “limerence” or “trauma-induced bonding” or “addictive relating” or whatever.
Listening to the Dantean-infernal-epic tales of one of these Professional Helpers one day in late 2023, I watched the seamless move between mention of childhood trauma at the hands of addict parents…and stories of being a Professional Tramp Helper.
I ruminated after that on the neurobiology of trauma, trauma-based mind control, and the use of these in certain schemes of political power.
How is it that Professional Helpers and their allies will give, and feel they owe, intensive approval, attention, affection, and resources to people who offer nothing in return (at best) or more often violence, cruelty, and abusive/destructive behavior?
How is it that they demand others accept their view of these relationships (“BUT I CAN SAVE HER/HIM/THEM”), and also supply these inputs and resources…when others are cautioning them about the costs of their obsession, meanwhile being negatively impacted by it, but having nowhere to turn to fight back, since every avenue of pushback has been blocked?
How is it the Professional Helpers turn on, and punish, those who question their structure of pathological loyalty, and its devastating costs to others?
Well, trauma bonding is like that. PROTECT THE QUEEN.
And who plays on all this to get and keep power?
I find it unsurprising that the most communistic members of society take on/manifest these behaviors, given the Communist expertise and grounding in this form of manipulation. Abandon yourself; serve your captors; sting to death anything that threatens the hive. The politics based on the hacking of infant wetware/reactions to physical and emotional abuse. The politics of destroying anyone who recognizes the pattern and questions it, or pushes back. Today the Revolution, tomorrow, the Gulag.
In closing, "people don't stand up to fight it" isn't accurate in the least in my local experience these past 25 years, but I’ve written enough. Thanks, Elizabeth, for the opening to do so.
100% yes
The degree of denial from the "Left" regarding Kilmar is remarkable. Solid data points like his wife seeking a restraining order are glossed over or hand-waved away. TDS has metastasized into a Godzilla of denial. I knew it was bad but... dayum.
Godzilla of Denial. This is the movie currently playing.
It’s almost like one of our frenemies is paying politicians and bureaucrats to advance policies that will destroy our country “without firing a single shot”.
This!!!!!
Let me see if I have this right…San Francisco voters just decided that letting folks steal up to $950 wasn’t such a good idea after all, so they modified the law to allow someone to steal up to $950 as often as they can manage without getting caught twice. After they’ve been caught twice, then…well, maybe something bad might happen.
Not to be outdone, LA has taken a page from SF’s playbook and will now allow any theft provided it can be blamed on homelessness or basic survival needs?
“Hold it right there buddy, just where do you think you’re going with that new $2000 TV?”
“I’m gonna sell it so I can buy food, officer.”
“Very well then, have a nice day.”
Oh California, wither hast thou gone?
Minor quibble:
Not libertarian, nor socialist, is the idea's platform underpinning how California is acting.
The libertarian approach would be do nothing from the state's side, trusting to the community to solve this in the immediate while also easing up on or removing rules for buildings, zoning, et c to make it profitable to build lots and lots of cheap housing units.
Any student of history and economics knows this results in huge and densely packed slums.
The Marxist approach would be for the state to build a few huge areas about an hour's commute away from everything, with Social Services-owned and run high rises filled with cheapest possible apartments, packing as many people in per square yard of floor area as possible, and with bare-bones essentials located in the centre of the area of blocks.
Again, any student of history knows how that solution plays out. Same as the libertarian solution, basically.
What California is doing is combining the worst elements of Libertarian and Socialist schools of thought: profit incentive for community organisers and their teams, groups, whatever to act - for pay - on the State's or the City's behalf, and the funding coming from confiscated means (taxes):
Neoliberalism. The Dogma and paradigm of political economy we all have been living under since the end of the Cold War. Aka socialised losses/privatised profits.
Step one, would be to stop thinking about this in terms of rights, and instead look at cost & consequences. Given the climate, Winter doesn't remove a significant number of homeless the way it does in the North. Calluous? Maybe, but also true. The climate you can't really do much about.
Behaviour of the individual? Violentce, drug abuse, mental illness? Then they go to the supervised concetration camp far out in the desert where three meals, showers*, a change of clothes and no access to drugs awaits, for the rest of their natural life or until they have "detoxed" and can be helped back on track - if so they are moved to training camp where they are (re)trained so they can rejoin the workforce (assuming a market for simple manual labour can exist in a modern high-tech state).
*I mean real showers, by the way.
I could go on for some 40 000 words on this, because the issue can be solved (we did it in under five years here, a century ago or so - then neoliberalist politics brought homelessness back in under three) but the first step (Hello, Captain Obvious!) is wanting to solve the immediate issue.
And neither Libertarians nor Socialists wants to do that: the Libertarians, being capitalistically inclined, wants a perpetual and guaranteed captured customer-base without options so there's no competetion, and the Socialists, being Marxist, wants to exert ever-growing control over anything they can imagine and thus needs a large Lumpenproletariat with which to threaten, guilt-trip and scare the workers and bourgeoisie into supporting the Socialists and handing over more power.
Anyone objecting to seeing their pet ideology besmirched thusly - go look at history and compare what has worked well when and where, to figure out why. Why do I say that?
Because wherever the ideology you favour failed, your excuse will be that it wasn't done right, or was the real thing. And that is a lesson in itself about the dangers of ideological thinking.
Your last two sentences are master level insight that everyone should seriously ponder regardless of political party or ideology. We all believe there is only one correct way to solve a "problem." When that solution doesn't work, we double down because we didn't do enough of it and we therefore need to do it bigger and better. Perfect explanation of the current state of the Loud and Proud members of the Democratic party. While I revel in their current "PhD level" lack of self-awareness, I recognize that Republicans can sadly fall into this trap.
Thank you - I really want to stress that I wish it wasn't like this, and that the trap as you aptly call it was exclusivley to specific schools of thought (one might argue succesfully that some are more susceptible than others, but we the humans do not differ in this susceptability), but alas, it is not so.
A parallel that might be of interest to you is that the Swedish counterpart to the US Democrat party, the Swedish Socialist-Democrat Workers' Party, is on an opposite course, PhD-wise. The less educated and experienced outside of politics, the better, has been the norm for about 15 years now for them. Perfect example: Annika Strandhäll, nicknamed "the bag-in-box twitterati" by some. Credentials, apart from joining the party in her youth: hairdresser. She was for years in charge of the dep. overseeing healthcare and social services...
Their counterparts are not much better, and they are also all inexperienced from any kind of career outside of politics.
Where did you find a self proclaimed libertarian that said they were against competition? Have you met a libertarian?
Are you familiar with the game "King of the Hill"?
Everyone climbing favours competition, and everyone on top fights against it.
When enough climbers reach the top and realise they can better defend if they join forces, it ceases to matter if they started out as Marxists or Libertarians, since all their action will be based in preventing challenges and competition from without.
Therefore, anyone in the group at the top not showing willingness to act in that way, will be cast down, and it becomes a rational choice to act as the group consensus dictates: elimination of competition becomes the only logical course of action.
Being a Libertarian by no means mean you won't do this too - because if you do?
Out you go.
So what is your point? That humans always will attempt to keep others out once they get to the top of the power hierarchy, regardless of what ideology they started with? If that's the case, the whole point is moot, because nothing you claim as superior is not going to fall prey to that same weakness.
Your initial response indicated that you think that a libertarian or libertarianism is somehow immune or not affected by this human behaviour.
And I can point to historical - empirical - examples that were superior to what is happening in the USA and elsewhere when people try to abolish homelessness.
Which proves that it can be done, and that it is not an issue of resources, but of the moral and ethical character and the voluntary choices of the people involved, that is the problem/solution.
And that is never a very pleasant realisation for an ideologue, but to a realist pragmatic it is his bread and butter: what worked, when, where, how.
If your solution must adhere to an ideology, you are not trying to solve a problem; you are trying to prove your ideology objectively correct.
Since an ideology is an abstract collection of ideas about reality, no matter which one is applied, it will always fail - either immediately, or gradually, since applying it changes the situation it was supposed to control, thereby making the conditions the ideology was applied different from it was applicable to.
Mull it over, and look at historical - empirical - situations where the problem was solved, rather than thinking in terms of abstract principles.
"Which proves that it can be done, and that it is not an issue of resources, but of the moral and ethical character and the voluntary choices of the people involved, that is the problem/solution."
So you are saying if you only have the right people in charge, everything will work out? Or are there specific ideas you have in mind? So far you have been long on assertions that we need to look at what worked and when, and very short on examples, specific reasons why it worked, or really anything.
I suspect that the reason is that drawing insight from the examples of reality requires creating an abstract collection of ideas about reality, and if you hope to change reality later applying the same. Indeed, that is the weakness of all so called "pragmatists": they claim to just do whatever works, but their beliefs about what will work in a given situation are based on unacknowledged and unsystematically tested or even thought through ideas. So their actions are short sighted and highly contingent on moment to moment concerns, leading to constant surprises as new problems crop up.
I wouldn't call that a minor quibble. Great points, Rikard, esp the slum/ghetto aspect which could be their way of incorporating immigrants into their Smart Cities for easier control and elimination when it comes to it.
Also your point, 'socialised losses/privatised profits' is spot-on. Funny how we lose sight of that.
Have you read the work of ICE-9 ? Highly recommended.
https://ice9.substack.com/p/the-false-prometheus
Thanks for taking the time to read and respond!
Will check ICE-9 out; misread it at first thinking it was ICD-9 and was wondering:
"Why does he want me to go read the diagnostic manual?"
D-oh, as the Greek poet said.
(The phrase "socialised losses/privatised profits" isn't my creation, just want to point that out. I don't know who was first.)
ICE-9 goes into the socialised losses/privatised profits in depth. His work is astonishing. And the cute moniker is from Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle.
"Ice-nine is a fictional material that appears in Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle. Ice-nine is described as a polymorph of ice which instead of melting at 0 °C, melts at 45.8 °C."
Excellent recommendation, thank you much. Nice reference as well.
> profit incentive for community organisers and their teams, groups, whatever to act - for pay - on the State's or the City's behalf, and the funding coming from confiscated means (taxes):
It is precisely, accurately, absolutely this. There are entire cadres of these Dolt Wranglers drawing snug paychecks inflicting these tramps on everyone else, and they also get to virtue signal over their work, among themselves and externally.
The evangelical churches in my area worship "the homeless" more than they worship Christ. Who Himself, just prior to His execution on the Cross, pointedly told his disciples that keeping an eye on the most high, and honoring it with humility, was superior to making performative gestures for The Poor. See John 12:3.
Only the left could try to justify inviting poor people from other countries into this country illegally and then giving them welfare benefits. It's obviously suicidal and very unfair to struggling Americans. But obviously, they're on the moral high ground (and able to steal untold billions in taxpayer funding along the way), so there's that.
And only idiots will complain their social security and disability checks are small and running out while fighting against people uncovering all the fraudulent spending of said money
Whenever the government allocates money to solve a problem, it creates an incentive for the problem to grow. For if the problem were actually solved, the cash would stop flowing, the government bureaucracy that was erected to the address the problem would be dismantled, all of those cushy jobs that pay well above the private sector would disappear along with the pensions, expense accounts, weekend junkets to Napa to “whiteboard” solutions, etc.
It’s a scenario that is repeated over and over again. The war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on homelessness, programs to solve “why Johnny can’t read.” None of those efforts ever came close to solving the problem they were spawned to address. On the contrary, the problems got worse and thus, the program expanded. By design.
I have called governmental homeless programs “people farming”. Expand the crop of homeless and you will need more farmers, tractors, silos, barns. It’s corruption on an industrial scale.
"People farming" is a shrewd term.
I like "dolt wrangling" better.
A simple calculation shows that LA's budget comes to #21,230 per homeless person or $1,770 per month. That's about 2/3 of my income from my pension plus Soc Sec. Now, those homeless are still homeless, with all that money. So it provides what? My bet is about 8000 bureaucrats at $120,000 each in salary. For doing what? Certainly for accounting. Maybe for martinis.
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/la-homeless-services-ceo-resigns-va-lecia-adams-kellum/
The head of the county homeless services agency made a base salary of $430,000 a year, before being invited to resign for disappearing tens of millions of dollars.
Chris, may I ask, how many times a day do you throw up, knowing as much as you do about the despotic evil that is inexorably turning the blue areas of California into a toilet and the remainder of California into paupers?
A study of Denver’s homeless programs found that the amount of money spent would be sufficient to rent two apartments for each of the “unhoused”. Not to be outdone, a journalist found that Dallas provides two apartments to some of its homeless, because no ID is required so the more enterprising bums sign up for two. Then they still live on the streets much of the time because when your brain is severely drug addled that seems like a nice hobby.
Such funding is just begging to taken advantage of!
We have a language problem. These people are not homeless, unhoused, or any other kind-hearted silliness. They are lazy, drug fiends who leach.
Yes Longstreet , that too.
The HomeLess need what they need and should not be denied. The HomeLess can barbecue our children… because… they are HomeLess. We must therefore be… comPassionate… because they are…HomeLess. We must provide them…lighter fluid. It’s only the right and comPassionate thing… to do. Because we are… comPassionate [fucking insane idiots].
Nature is selecting California for extinction. Those non-idiots in California can either flee, or they can fucking fight.
That is all.