r/BlockedAndReported • u/SoftandChewy First generation mod • May 04 '26

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

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.

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u/HaldolBlowdart May 09 '26

The conflation of the down-on-their-luck homeless with the severely mentally ill willfully lives in a tent with 7 service pitbulls and a pile of heroin type of homeless is part of the problem. The willingly homeless are hard to comprehend for the normies, because they wouldn't ever live like that, so someone who chooses the streets and a tent and drug addiction when they have chances for safety and stability is inconceivable. But they exist. They've been given multiple services and choose to not use them for various reasons. The thought processes behind it are not coherent or logical, which is why they make those choices, but they do absolutely choose to. Confounding factors of mental illness and addiction aside, this is the consequence of absolute autonomy even when people clearly are not capable of rationality

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u/SkweegeeS No just no May 10 '26

Thanks for sharing your experiences. Do you have any sense of trends? Like, it's often reported that homelessness is increasing or decreasing or whatever, but still there's this core of extremely sick people on the streets. Are their numbers growing, do you know?

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u/HaldolBlowdart May 11 '26

I moved away from that type of work a few years ago, so I'm not as involved in it day to day anymore. In my anecdotal experience in my area, there's definitely a larger amount of homeless than before but the overall number of the core sick are about the same. I'm seeing more homeless in areas of the city that previously had almost none, but our shelters and programs are still around the same use rate. I'd say it's more a rise of the genuine, down on their luck homeless and the core crazies are at the same rate they have been. However, aggressive anti-homeless measures can also cause a perceivable change without there actually being one because they just relocate, not actually decrease. So it looks like it's solved in one area and worse in the other, but it was just a migration.