Like... damn...
Liberals seem to have this downright Reagan-tier rhetoric towards homeless people, you'd hear the phrase "contributes nothing to society..." so fucking often you'd swear reality was repeating itself.
Their so smug and shameless about it too; " Sorry sweaty 🤗 But Fuck The Homeless and I frankly couldn't care less if the police were to bash their skulls in and drag them down to the fiery pits of hell ✨ 💅". They take such a ruthless 'Tough-on-Crime' stance it would make Rodrigo Duterte blush.
I get that it isn't JUST Liberals who express these sentiments, but aren't these the same people who tout themselves as being 'Progressive' and wanting everyone to be free?
If you've internalized that capitalism is meritocratic and rewards people for their academic skills or entrepreneurial ingenuity, then you'd have to come to the conclusion homeless people are somehow less valuable as people. Liberals and "progressives" often dance around that conclusion because they admit things like systemic racism exist, but they often don't seem to include labor rights or homelessness as part of that. They also often misidentify the most brutal aspects of systemic oppression by blaming things like a lack of positive representations in superhero movies. That's often why you'll see liberals speak in eugenics level terms when talking about southerners.
It's been said here too that homeless people are one of the most immediately visible aspects of widespread poverty and can't simply be ignored or explained away using academic woke lingo, so liberals just have a mental short-circuit.
I'll be honest, I find that liberals' views on homelessness are no worse than conservatives, and people who are online aren't any worse than those IRL. Americans have really shitty attitudes about the homeless.
Some more traditional religious conservatives at least have the decency to say “they should take advantage of charities like churches.” Obviously it’s not enough to fix a systemic problem, but at least the trads don’t think the problem will fix itself
Because liberals are just polite fashists. They are fundamentally bad. We have just been trained to see their politeness as a virtue
Anymore I just view liberals and conservatives as two sides of the same coin of american fascism. But like you said, because liberals are nicer to people we see them as better, even though we can't see that the niceness is cynical.
Fortunately this is not a problem in the UK... Not even slightly.
In fact, if you treated or said anything bad about the homeless you're honestly likely to get decked. There might be some rhetoric about drug use etcetc but people pretty much universally understand the homeless are victims.
Amongst younger and/or lower class people I'd say you're largely right, but people can still get pretty rude if you're talking to the middle class/boomers. My grandma openly believes that homeless people do have homes, but are just running a scam on "normal" people to get your money; I think some people just can't admit that this is a country in decline that will leave you to die if you're not profitable now.
I think non-american countries, even the libshit ones, are generally better at understanding certain things to be systematic issues, because we weren't literally built on that whole rugged individual every man for himself bullshit like the USA was. Other western neoliberal countries may not have society and community anymore, but, culturally, we seem to remember that we used to.
that's not true there's a lot of anti-homeless rhetoric in the UK and it's pretty much the same as what they say in America
Sounds like a better society than USA / Canada, even if it's mostly the same
It's easy when you buy into hyper-individualist mythology where environmental factors have no influence on anything and history doesn't exist. When everyone's standing in society is determined exclusively by having the right ideas and making the right choices, clearly the only reason anyone would end up on the street within the perfect equity of liberal democracy is because they're idiots who make terrible decisions.
On a broader scope, contempt of the poor is necessary for people to support austerity and neo-colonialism while still believing themselves to be on the right side of history. If the poor weren't inherently evil it would be bad when homeless encampments get bulldozed and families get drone striked, but since poverty is a personal failing any and all punishments are really just a way to motivate people to lift themselves up by their bootstraps so these sort of things don't happen. Hating the homeless is helping them, actually.
also, "if the world isn't just, then maybe i don't actually deserve my status? well shit that can't be right"
it's the Victorian model of working backwards from everyone basically makes enough money because the system is good to the poor must have brought this on themselves
but aren’t these the same people who tout themselves as being ‘Progressive’ and wanting everyone to be free?
Middle class libs take up progressive beliefs to feel morally superior to other people and/or assuage the feelings of guilt they have for occupying positions of power within capitalism. Its easy to see the facade shatter when faced with the direct human consequences of their so called "meritocracy". As everybody else said, its all just cope and projection with shitlibs, they are on the other side to the chud on the same rotten coin.
A person who believes the hiperindividualist mindset of neoliberalism as something good, cannot be empathic.
I know the police cause you trouble They cause trouble everywhere But when you die and go to heaven There'll be no policemen there
That's my number 2 favorite bedtime song for my kids. You've got to prepare them with some immunity to officer friendly propaganda.
I have started to flip that shit around on my chud friends to dunk on them for debasing the poor. I ask them if poverty is a choice than why aren't they rich? Wouldn't that also mean not wanting to be wealthy is also a choice. I mean look at bill gates he DIDN'T EVEN GO TO COLLEGE so whats your excuse? I mean you even went to college and here you are? I guess you are also making a choice to be a broke bitch?
Than they usually see how fucking stupid they sound and realize what they are saying is fucked up which is amazing to watch.
That's the key to pounding shit into whatever chuds have in place of a brain...make them pit their ideology against their ego.
pounding shit into whatever chuds have in place of a brain
also shit
Anybody who actually believes in the class hierarchy as an expression of meritocracy is inevitably going to have dogshit attitudes towards poor people, and especially the homeless. Liberals are essentially as willfully ignorant of systemic poverty as chuds are of systemic racism, they just pay more lip-service to the concept of systemic issues to seem more educated and worldly.
I remember I realized I was unironically turning into a communist when I would talk with liberals and say stuff like "don't you think there's deeper issues with stuff like homelessness and poverty? Why would anyone choose that kind of lifestyle willingly?" and the responses I get ranged from hostile to passive aggressive deflection. This was before I read any theory too....."progressive" liberals are really a strange bunch, I remember thinking as a teenager why none of the "woke" progressive people I knew hung out with minorities unless they were really sanitized and white washed, and a very nascent understanding of class differences began to take root in my head. I never saw those kids hanging out with people like me whose dad dropped them off in a $500 van he bought from the junkyard and only spoke Spanish at home and felt comfortable going into the barrio...
If you want to see the mask come off just throw communist agitprop as a brown person at them, most of them will start to show their racism and begin to condescend like crazy or if they're not actually racist they'll show that it's more important to them to stay in treatville while some Mexican guy like my fucking dad as a teenager works 80 hours a week below minimium wage to give them their treats and it's ok because they chose that arrangement
They like to bark furiously on the internet because they piss their pants any time a homeless person talks to them in real life.
It’s terrifying. A lot of us are just a few paychecks away from being homeless and know we don’t have family to fall back on, is this what we can expect from people if just a few bad things happen in a row that put us there too?
is this what we can expect from people if just a few bad things happen in a row that put us there too?
yep
A person who believes the hiperindividualist mindset of neoliberalism as something good, cannot be empathic.
Liberals have a visceral reaction to people experiencing homelessness because their visibility (particularly in a market with extreme excess of housing) challenges the existence of a "Just World." Within the liberal conception of the world, everything is freely exchangeable, good action results in good results, and evil action results in some sort of punishment or negative result. The lib knows that a homeless person isn't evil, and even if some have made bad decisions or committed crimes in the past, living on constant danger and discomfort without a home is disproportionate as a punishment. This short-circuits the lib brain- leading to the kind of outburst you describe
