I'm not sure how I follow this being fascist rhetoric and I certainly don't understand how you've inferred that the author has no problem with the wealthy doing the above. Can you expand on your reasoning?
As a Bangladeshi (and I suspect folks from almost any Asian country) these views seem to be a given, and entirely consistent with what my parents might say. I’d wager it’s a very small group of people, especially outside the West, who would consider these ideas fascist, or at all controversial.
And those policies, internationally, alienate the disenfranchized and lead them to a life of crime and likely an early grave.
Asia has a bit of an escape hatch in how essential and inescapable family is - its rare you have someone so thoroughly hopeless there because its the obligation of their blood relatives to do something about them before they are publicly homeless and drug addled. So you don't see people in this state as often, but when they are, it is the worst place to be homeless and helpless.
Its casting a wide net of "Asian" but Japan (or at least greater Tokyo) has a housing first imitative of their own that does work resoundingly well for their very infrequent homelessness cases. Its legitimately hard to perfectly "fall through the cracks" there between familial obligation and state support programs.
The article isn’t taking issue with housing first initiatives or the like. It’s taking issue with the normalization and enablement of deviant and anti-social behavior. Enforcement of laws and norms against such conduct is very aggressive in Japan (and Singapore, etc.). That doesn’t mean that, for people who are mentally incapable of following those norms, there can’t be compassionate care in an institutional setting. But they aren’t permitted to disrupt normal society.
You're putting words in her mouth, and you should try living in China or reading more history if you read anything above as remotely resembling fascism.
Also as someone who does not do drugs, I consider it a bigger problem when a homeless person who survives off of government programs does drugs than when an otherwise functional adult does drugs, especially given how much likelier the homeless are to be psychotic and violent.
> I consider it a bigger problem when a homeless person who survives off of government programs does drugs than when an otherwise functional adult does drugs
I agree! But I think the ugliness GP alludes to comes from the fact that this boils down to: the law that people want is essentially selective enforcement weighed against the people who presumably have the least as is (a consequence of their own choices or otherwise).
Alternatively, you can't legislate root causes: you have to legislate against symptoms; the problematic results of drug use. But that seems to be too hard to do too and does seem like a round about way of attacking populations in need.
I think it's a hard question that needs to start with: what rights and options do we want to extend people who for one reason or another find themselves in conflict with "civilized society."
It's stupidly easy to legislate against the results. Enforce drug laws against people shooting up in public. Problem solved.
The fact that the San Francisco public is too brainwashed to do so is a big part of why I would never consider taking a job there, and I can think of no greater karmic justice than the fact that they have to suffer the consequences of their idiotic policies towards homelessness.
Whatever rights "we want to extend people who [...] find themselves in conflict with 'civilized society'" shouldn't include defecating on and leaving discarded, infectious needles strewn over the streets of the most coveted neighborhoods in the United States.
> The fact that the San Francisco public is too brainwashed ... > why I would never consider taking a job there, > of the most coveted neighborhoods in the United States.
Look, I agree more could and should be done, but hmm... you've convinced me that maybe the system works. Stay where you are bud. It's more their city yours. I can't fathom how you've managed to feel more entitlement over a city you happily feel has been karmicly punished.
>>The author presumably has no problem with the wealthy doing drugs
1. Probably true and 2. Probably because "the wealthy" doing drugs generally does not result in outbreaks of typhus and typhoid fever; and MASSIVE rat infestations like we see in LA.
I think that while the wealthy doing drugs is bad, arguably, when they do drugs, they can both easily seek help for it, and pay for that help. When the homeless do it, the public health system picks up the tab, and it there are higher barriers for help.
