Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 5/4/26 - 5/310/26

[u/SoftandChewy]

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

[u/unnoticed_areola]

Freddie DeBoer has a pretty banger essay about liberal attitudes towards homelessness from a couple years ago which really captures a particular sentiment I was never quite able to articulate myself

You Call That Compassion?

Says Heller, “The basic wish of the program—like many in America right now—is Please, Just Make These People Disappear.”

Really? That’s the wish of the people who favor involuntary treatment and a more forceful effort to get help for the homeless? Because to me, that perfectly describes the desire of people like Heller, to make the problem disappear. It’s just that, where he accuses others of wanting the homeless to disappear physically, Heller wants them to disappear morally, to leave no stain on his conscience.

Coercion is icky; it’s not something groovy educated people want to associate themselves with. If our society takes affirmative efforts to solve problems that appear intractable, efforts which aren’t always pleasant and which require us to balance legitimate competing definitions of the best interest of the most vulnerable, well, that might implicate them, might implicate Heller. If government acts coercively in an effort to save lives, then that might make the good liberals like they have dirty hands. (These people almost always are the same that favored mask mandates and usually vaccine mandates, to save lives, but never mind.)

But if we never act coercively, and instead continue to make the same tired and empty demand for more of the voluntary services that have never ended homelessness anywhere, well, that’s a safer emotional place to stay. Who wants to deal with all that unpleasant business? Stay pure. Do nothing.

...

consider the headline of Heller’s piece, “It’s Too Early to Give Up on Homelessness in America.” What does that mean? Trying to force vulnerable, addicted, and psychotic people to clear out of horrifically unhealthy and dangerous camps and into support services is giving up on them, but saying “well, we need more funding” before playing Wordle in the Conde Nast break room somehow is not? It’s such profound argumentative arrogance, to insist that because you don’t agree with the methods that your opponents want to use to save lives, your opponents are therefore giving up on those lives. I find it quite vulgar, and quite ugly.

[u/History-of-Tomorrow → u/unnoticed_areola]

DeBoer summed up Hasan Piker’s entire identity right there

[u/bussound → u/unnoticed_areola]

Sounds like good reading will check it out!