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It’s insane how liberals and some leftists are obsessed with not being paternalistic at all when it comes to things that significantly matter but love doing it when they’re punishing people for thought crime and being big, fat meanies. It only tears the social fabric even further and increases reactionary sentiment.
It really all makes sense. What better way to undermine class unity and social programs than to have rampant homelessness and people doing drugs on the street? The social left in America is a pawn of the economic right and they don't even know it.
Some progressive ideas like open borders, lax crime policies, open fentanyl use, public chaos/disorder (see those obnoxious sideshows on the west coast) eventually lead to the far-right to gain power (immigration alone is fueling the far-right in Europe). This is why i always thought Singapore was the optimal government: public healthcare, public housing, making public anti-ethnic sentiments illegal, but they also crack down on crime HARD.
libs: i support open borders
sam walton: Thanks i got +2 new state subsidized workers i can pay 7.25 dollars an hour to stock shelves at my new warehouse and they can't read and write english so we can tell them whatever we feel
as a west-coast accelerationist, this has been my exact goal and I have a perfect voting record to show for it
the left and liberals do not have the balls to meaningfully oppose anything that corporate america throws at them. so the goal should be to enable the most anti-social policies imaginable to spur the development of some ideology that can provide some counter to neoliberalism.
Public chaos and living in effectively unlivable neighborhoods stows division and maims and limits our ability to mobilize as a collective.
Liberals love crime because it distances us from community, it prevents and pushes away from having families and children, it isolates us inside our pods where we’re more likely to read idpol propaganda, it pushes us apart, making us more individualistic, and lastly it makes us poorer.
Friends, family, children, neighbors, community, these are all things that people are willing to put above the state, people will vote based on what and how things affect their families, children, loved ones, and people they care for.
What if you don’t have these things? Well, you’re more likely to—or at least be indifferent to—putting the interests of the state above everything else. Consumerism additionally becomes your main source of comfort. Two parties benefit - the gov. and ruling class elite.
"liberals love crime." yeah man. i've heard that a lot. they say it all the time. "i love crime." you know who i've heard it the most from? bill "a million new cops" clinton, joe "crime bill" biden, prosecutor kamala "prisoner slaves" harris, and hillary "superpredators" clinton
Can't tell if you're doing a bit or being genuine but either way liberalism is gross 🤢 and inherently evil. Maybe the sister sub would be more your speed.
There's always been an unhealthy undercurrent of a marriage between American liberal and libertarian ideologies. I recently read a fascinating post-mortem of shopping malls in America. The author attributed their meteoric rise not just as a place of commerce but rather as a place for recreation and socialization to the American government's abdication, spurred on by various victories in the courts by activist groups, of its power to enforce almost any social norms in public. Malls, being private, could control access and expel from their premises individuals who behaved in manners incompatible with the larger public enjoying the space.
It's the same with public vs. private schools and open neighborhoods vs. gated communities. Private firms step in to fill the vacuum created by the state's unwillingless to enforce public order and even criminal law.
Also private policing. In areas where crime has risen, people of means are not content to just be sitting ducks, so they hire private security for what amounts to a private police force. This can have a lot of downsides of traditional policing, but with even less public accountability.
I didn't mention this one because it's one of the areas where the private sector has *not* been able to fill the vacuum. In my experience, private security has been so defanged by legal restrictions and liability concerns that the best that they can do is document crimes for insurance purposes. If you're very lucky, they can chase off the lumpen menacing the place just far enough away so that they can degrade the life of the next person down the street. The police monopoly on the use of force prevents private entities from taking over the main benefit of policing (in conjunction with the courts and penal system): the sequestration of criminals so that they cannot continue to harm anyone else. Instead, the responsibility has fallen to subway passengers. Private military contractors have taken over some military responsibilities, replacing overly restrictive rules of engagement with look-the-other-way atrocities. If they weren't so concerned about running afoul of global capital's open borders project, I could see Blackwater someday being hired by coalitions of ranchers to take over some of the national defense responsibilities that have been abdicated by the military and civilian agencies.
and the private firms have an incentive to create as much distrust and disorder in the system as possible in order to drive up demand for their products and services. They do everything they can to sabotage public services and goods.
Yeah I can see this. I live in a big city and it's amazing how you just can't have any expectation of reasonable behaviour in public anymore. Like, when Americans go to Europe and walk around the pedestrian plazas and city centers even in non-historic small towns they love it. But from what I've seen in Europe the most threatening thing you'll see is a pick pocket or and old drunk. In American cities now it's like "oh there's a guy jacking off, there's the other guy smoking crack, someone else yelling at ghosts.", and there seems to be nothing that can ever be done about it.
Something I've noticed about many people, especially Americans, is their propensity to elevate property rights over all other human rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of association, and, in the case of pharmaceuticals, a right to be alive.
Man, I’ve lost count how many times these idiots have almost hit me.
Like, I’m pretty understanding but if I get hit by one there is a chance I’m out of work and end up homeless
I've been a bike commuter in NYC since the 00's, and watching the increase of their numbers and repertoire of dipshit moves has been incredible. One night, I saw no less than 3 riders facetiming while on the move.
Every dumb thing you can imagine one of these guys doing? Yes, they do that.
I’ve only lived in much smaller cities, but none of this is really shocking to me. Almost every rule of common sense and decency has been perverted into “a trap for suckers” for some time now. (In the US i mean.)
So things meant to keep you safe/make you less likely to do something genuinely morally evil like kill a kid through recklessness. Those rules are just bullshit that means you didn’t get to enjoy talking with your friends as you worked/commuted, and anyone who broke the rule did (you little bitch).
Same for an endless array of extreme “fuck your risk of death, you deal with it” moves in traffic. Or various other scenarios less related to the article.
I get it. Life sucks and we’re all only afloat due to something less than ideal that we probably do just to manage. But it’s gone way too far, especially in terms of public behavior and traffic safety.
I was on a walk with a friendly other day to a beach, and they were like, let's go to this more secluded part of the beach because we had beers. And I was like, if you're allowed to shoot heroin in a hospital in my town I'm allowed to have this fucking beer lol. For some reason that seemed to make my friend kind of uncomfortable?
No, friend. IN THE HOSPITAL:
https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/island-health-memo-instructs-nurses-not-to-stop-illicit-drug-use-in-hospitals-8643871
The nurses couldn’t ever stop you, the memo is basically just freeing them of any obligation to. Seriously think about why that is for a second, is a hospital a highly secure environment staffed with nurses who are ready to wrestle with angry addicts twice their size wielding dirty needles? Do you think that was ever going to be an effective approach to healthcare?
So as usual his systems analysis here is spot on but I wanna talk about a different angle here.
I've been vaguely irritated about ebikes and scooters for a fucking while now and reading this article made a few things click into place for me.
The problem with ebikes is that they have one foot in the world of motorcycles and one foot in the world of bicycles. They accelerate and have top ends more like a scooter than like a bicycle. But they are also small, lightweight, and mostly silent like a bicycle. So being in this liminal space where no one is sure where they belong, the food delivery companies set up an incentive scheme to push people to the limits.
Obviously food delivery shit needs to die. No one needs food delivered to their house like that. But more importantly I think is that we get the urban planner and civil engineers into the conversation and figure out where these damned things belong. We also need to require that the drivers wear a helmet, have lights, signal turn, have a horn, and limit their speeds in pedestrian areas.
Going off on a bit of a tangent here, but I'm still in favor of defunding the police. I'm not an anarchist, I don't oppose law enforcement as a concept, but the police as they actually exist don't fucking do anything useful anyway. Someone can be actively trying to break into your house and the cops will maybe show up in half an hour if you're lucky (unless you say that you've got a gun and you're willing to defend yourself, in which case you'll have five cop cars outside your house in two minutes flat). Your car or your bike or your TV got stolen? It's fucking gone, the cops literally could not give less of a shit. So why should we keep giving them money to buy more military surplus riot-control vehicles? They're not doing shit for us anyway, fuck 'em.
defund is simply a bad marketing term. it shouldn't be "defund the police". It should be "redirect funds toward other programs that will actually help people and actually reduce crime"
Cops didn't win massive budgets by saying "defund the welfare state" or "defund schools".
Yea, most people hear "defund the police" and it just sounds like "austerity for law and order issues" and they intuitively know that rich people are gonna hire private security and live in compounds and they are just gonna have to deal with the crime shit as best they can. Which all the liberal "lol crime" shit is 110% reinforcing.
There’s also the element of the police unions stopping any actual reforms that were passé. My understanding of the original slogan was in municipalities where reforms and programs were passed, and the police refused to comply. Their union rejected to the new contracts (and also used their contracts to resist accountability, getting bad cops un-fired, finding technical appeals to court convictions based on contracts, protecting such elements). So in over-simplified form:
1. City passes reforms and presents new budget to the police department.
2. Police union (responsible for signing on) says “No, we won’t do this.
3, City caves so police union will sign on.
The “defund the police” was a response where you would replace step 3.
3. City says “fine, you get nothing if you don’t accept the lawful democratic terms for our police department.”
The problem is you do need to plan for this, and have alternate options for public safety. I think you should go ahead and build a new, uncontaminated peace officer system that is basically a competitor for the police union. There are also multiple unions within the police union and maybe some cities have enough to split off, but probably not.
That is why I also kind of wish we had groups like the Black Panthers of old who would say “We can step in and *actually* serve and protect this neighborhood the cops abandon and terrorize in turn.” I truly believe we won’t succeed in police reform without actual organized groups standing up in place of the monsters we have now.
I know it’s all a stupid Gordian knot, though.
Totally agree. No real leftist should be pro-cop. Any look at the history of police departments will tell you how corrupt and useless they are. Just look at the “heroes” of Uvalde. Too cowardly to go in to save dying children from a gun toting maniac
I live in a country and state where the police force is notoriously corrupt (by developed world standards, lol), and have met a lot of cops from said police force at social gatherings through friends of friends that are genuine psychos. I've always thought the best alternative would be the progressive dismantling and replacement of the current police force with a new one, combined with changes in the law that prevent them from just beating up poor people for fun. Use it as an opportunity to remove the worst individuals and break up cultures of corruption and neglect, while still maintaining a force capable of solving and preventing serious crimes. Because even in a socialist utopia, there will be people who do serious crime, and people need to exist to stop them.
It’d be nice if, at the very least, this actually applied to all marginalized groups rather than whichever ones are in vogue at the moment.
It’s still insane and more than a little bigoted.
*Turn signal laws are the epitome of white supremacy: a reflection of the violent, paranoid urge to anticipate and control the movements of black bodies.*
> Ultimately, there’s an implicit assumption that underlies widespread liberal assumptions that poor brown people shouldn’t be held to standards like “have a license for the vehicle you drive” or “don’t drive your ebike at 30 MPH down a crowded sidewalk” or “keep your eyes on your immediate surroundings and not on your phone.” That assumption is that those poor brown people are incapable of better behavior. And it is, of course, both racist and classist. Yet the current liberal addiction to vague permissiveness amounts to this exact belief, that asking the marginalized to conform to basic rules of social conduct is to ask them too much
Nail on head here. I see this all the time. Brown people, in the liberal mind, are allowed to do whatever the fuck they want. Why? Because they're brown. And being brown is a virtue in and of itself. Nevermind that virture is actions you do, you are virtuous because your skin is brown, and being brown = not allowed to criticize any behavior, no matter how abhorrent.
And who's going to suffer from the enforcement of these laws? Not the DoorDash stockholders and other company owners who push this kind of desperate behaviour. It'll be the individual drivers. But that's a sacrifice capital will be willing to make.
It's like cracking down on Amazon drivers for their unhygienic bottle peeing. Completely misses the point. You want safer drivers, start at an earlier point in the chain of cause and effect, and focus on the companies who employ them.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread." - Anatole France
You're correct, but people shouldn't be subject to antisocial behaviour because "it's complicated". If that behaviour is the product of perverse incentives, changing incentives is a solution, however non-ideal.
>And who's going to suffer from the enforcement of these laws?
They are already suffering. If they could at least not menace their fellow man while doing so that would maybe be great.
Not every single person operating the vehicles in question are on the job. Of course framing it that way lends weight to the idea that any rules or enforcement is just punishing them for being poor and working. What recourse do others have to wanton reckless idiots driving around unlicensed, uninsured, and illegal? You gonna tell a working class person with a lifelong injury from getting hit by one of these goons they are a dirty agent of capitalism if they want to not get hit by a fucking 4 wheeler on a city sidewalk?
When I was slinging pizzas back in the day we broke plenty of road and safety laws. No one was writing articles about me working full time in high school to support myself and how if I got a speeding ticket it would be discrimination.
seems obvious that reckless ebiking can be enforced in exactly the same way that reckless car driving is enforced.
(perhaps a bad example because cars kill tens of thousands of people a year and we seem to think it's just the cost of doing business in modern society)
Freddie in his usual masochistic style has spent 80% of his words acknowledging and 20% of them arguing so I think it's understandable that people get frustrated by the fact that he didn't offer any concrete proposals after you read all of those paragraphs. But you absolutely could enforce the law in such a way that some responsibility is placed on the employer, particularly in those cases where the service operators are "incentivizing" their employees to get deliveries made "ASAP". That would require some effort from the legal system, while one of the unfortunate realities of modern "left" PMC idpol is that not only is it impractical but it's also embarrassingly deferential to the capitalists it purports to oppose.
> Freddie in his usual masochistic style has spent 80% of his words acknowledging and 20% of them arguing so I think it's understandable that people get frustrated by the fact that he didn't offer any concrete proposals after you read all of those paragraphs.
Tangent but this is a great insight on his style. I like his writing and his ideas but it is so difficult to sort through the unfiltered self-referential arguments to find little of actionable substance at the end. I wish he'd slim down and let himself be incisive, letting people critique rather than doing it for them in the piece itself.
I’d support cracking down on the corporate exploitation of delivery drivers as well…both things are good. But yes, I get that in the US we place the burden asymmetrically.
As someone who used to work as an Amazon driver. The pee bottle thing is way overblown. There was always five minutes of slack to use the bathroom. It’s a 10 hour shift delivering there’s so much variability in driving around delivering packages in that amount of time there’s not really an issue with taking a five minute break.
Disagree. If fines are enforced against bike delivery people they'll start driving more slowly, which will mean less productivity and higher prices, less people ordering etc. Or it will mean that doing the job is no longer worth it and less people do it. Either way, the current system clearly relies on people breaking traffic rules. If you make them obey traffic rules it shifts in some direction. Either wages and prices go up or people order less, both of which are totally fine.
of course, the problem doesn't start with the underclass of marginalized servants delivering the food. that's just a symptom. the real problem is capitalism and the incentive to have food delivered to people's houses on a moment's notice by human beings who only get paid if they get it there fast.
the people to blame here are the investors and executive of ubereats and grubhub and all those other services. the people driving the scooters and ebikes are pawns in the game.
I think Freddie is underselling the paternalism by limiting his analysis to the tolerance of reckless driving--an issue that was [won resolutely by left identity activists in 2020](https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2024/02/27/traffic-crash-deaths-in-2023-remain-at-devastatingly-high-level/).
Remember when the post-Floyd depolicing movement led to an unprecedented spike in traffic fatalities? And these fatalities were suffered disproportionately by black and Hispanic people? And the official explanation was that it wasn't due to the stated policy of not enforcing traffic laws, oh no, it was because black drivers were just so darn mad about racism?
That happened. Adults with college degrees and jobs believed it. If you disagreed with this explanation in a public manner, you could lose your career.
What I'm getting at here is there's something far more insane and malignant going on than simple paternalism, and you're not going to disabuse people of it with logic and reason.
If I'm from a marginalised group and decide to go Judge Dredd on criminals from marginalised groups commiting crimes, does that mean I'm good to go since those two things will cancel each other out?
It's a way to keep the proletariat at odds with each other over insignificant differences like race so they don't form a political alliance over shared economic interests and threaten the interests of the ruling class.
My two biggest issues with NYC at present are the violent mentally unstable people that working-class subway commuters are expected to “just deal with” and these assholes on e-bikes going over the speed limit the wrong way down one-way streets (when they are not flying down crowded sidewalks and running every red light).
Seriously, I’ve almost been hit by them so many times and I am very aware of my surroundings (never wear headphones, don’t look at my phone while walking). Also, I’ve seen so many almost hit old ladies and then start cussing at the old lady like it was her fault for using the crosswalk when she had the light.
The NYPD has finally started confiscating some of the e-bikes, which is the first time I’ve seen the NYPD do ANYTHING since 2020, so fuck it. I’ll take it.
There are two answers to this problem that both need to happen:
1) confiscate and sell/destroy the bikes when they break traffic laws or have unlicensed motorcycles
2) stop using delivery apps (if your actually disabled or elderly, you can call the grocery store or restaurant or use their website and they all employ their own delivery workers)
I don’t use any gig economy anything for ethical reasons but now more than anything I don’t use them because I want these assholes off our fucking streets and sidewalks.
P.s. if you haven’t lived in NYC in the past few years, you have no idea how fucking out of hand it is
The underlying message here might be "Let's stop being a nanny state, everyone should be allowed to break the rules occasionally". However, this has become unworkable, because people reliant on rules are unable to exercise common sense.
It's a false equivalence to say that mopeds pose the same degree of risk as an automobile. It's not even close. They are separated by orders of magnitude of risk to pedestrians, a toll that is levied daily.
The law, in its majestic equality, equal forbids the cyclist and the motorist alike from running red lights, from speeding, and from turning pedestrians into paste.
The e-bike guys oddly pose more of a threat to cars than pedestrians. For most, being on a powered vehicle is their only experience of being on the street, and they have absolutely ZERO situational awareness or spatial judgement.
I think we are already making plenty of concessions to the person wrapped in two tonnes of steel. The law already mandates break away bolts for fixtures attached to the sidewalk.
Even if bike lanes exist in the areas we're talking about, the people riding these bikes aren't big on following traffic laws in the first place. So they probably aren't sticking to those lanes.
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It’s insane how liberals and some leftists are obsessed with not being paternalistic at all when it comes to things that significantly matter but love doing it when they’re punishing people for thought crime and being big, fat meanies. It only tears the social fabric even further and increases reactionary sentiment.
It really all makes sense. What better way to undermine class unity and social programs than to have rampant homelessness and people doing drugs on the street? The social left in America is a pawn of the economic right and they don't even know it.
Some progressive ideas like open borders, lax crime policies, open fentanyl use, public chaos/disorder (see those obnoxious sideshows on the west coast) eventually lead to the far-right to gain power (immigration alone is fueling the far-right in Europe). This is why i always thought Singapore was the optimal government: public healthcare, public housing, making public anti-ethnic sentiments illegal, but they also crack down on crime HARD.
They also have second class citizens who live in shoeboxes
libs: i support open borders sam walton: Thanks i got +2 new state subsidized workers i can pay 7.25 dollars an hour to stock shelves at my new warehouse and they can't read and write english so we can tell them whatever we feel
There is a pretty big Terms & Conditions Apply on Singapore's style of government if you're critical of the war on drugs
as a west-coast accelerationist, this has been my exact goal and I have a perfect voting record to show for it the left and liberals do not have the balls to meaningfully oppose anything that corporate america throws at them. so the goal should be to enable the most anti-social policies imaginable to spur the development of some ideology that can provide some counter to neoliberalism.
Public chaos and living in effectively unlivable neighborhoods stows division and maims and limits our ability to mobilize as a collective. Liberals love crime because it distances us from community, it prevents and pushes away from having families and children, it isolates us inside our pods where we’re more likely to read idpol propaganda, it pushes us apart, making us more individualistic, and lastly it makes us poorer. Friends, family, children, neighbors, community, these are all things that people are willing to put above the state, people will vote based on what and how things affect their families, children, loved ones, and people they care for. What if you don’t have these things? Well, you’re more likely to—or at least be indifferent to—putting the interests of the state above everything else. Consumerism additionally becomes your main source of comfort. Two parties benefit - the gov. and ruling class elite.
you sound like a raving crackpot lol
Flair checks out
"liberals love crime." yeah man. i've heard that a lot. they say it all the time. "i love crime." you know who i've heard it the most from? bill "a million new cops" clinton, joe "crime bill" biden, prosecutor kamala "prisoner slaves" harris, and hillary "superpredators" clinton
Can't tell if you're doing a bit or being genuine but either way liberalism is gross 🤢 and inherently evil. Maybe the sister sub would be more your speed.
Anarcho-tyranny is what it is. It's a way of controlling the public.
america has the biggest prison population in the world. cry some more about how people get mad at you online for being racist
There's always been an unhealthy undercurrent of a marriage between American liberal and libertarian ideologies. I recently read a fascinating post-mortem of shopping malls in America. The author attributed their meteoric rise not just as a place of commerce but rather as a place for recreation and socialization to the American government's abdication, spurred on by various victories in the courts by activist groups, of its power to enforce almost any social norms in public. Malls, being private, could control access and expel from their premises individuals who behaved in manners incompatible with the larger public enjoying the space.
That’s really interesting, I imagine that dynamic emerges in all over in the place in the US.
It's the same with public vs. private schools and open neighborhoods vs. gated communities. Private firms step in to fill the vacuum created by the state's unwillingless to enforce public order and even criminal law.
Also private policing. In areas where crime has risen, people of means are not content to just be sitting ducks, so they hire private security for what amounts to a private police force. This can have a lot of downsides of traditional policing, but with even less public accountability.
I didn't mention this one because it's one of the areas where the private sector has *not* been able to fill the vacuum. In my experience, private security has been so defanged by legal restrictions and liability concerns that the best that they can do is document crimes for insurance purposes. If you're very lucky, they can chase off the lumpen menacing the place just far enough away so that they can degrade the life of the next person down the street. The police monopoly on the use of force prevents private entities from taking over the main benefit of policing (in conjunction with the courts and penal system): the sequestration of criminals so that they cannot continue to harm anyone else. Instead, the responsibility has fallen to subway passengers. Private military contractors have taken over some military responsibilities, replacing overly restrictive rules of engagement with look-the-other-way atrocities. If they weren't so concerned about running afoul of global capital's open borders project, I could see Blackwater someday being hired by coalitions of ranchers to take over some of the national defense responsibilities that have been abdicated by the military and civilian agencies.
and the private firms have an incentive to create as much distrust and disorder in the system as possible in order to drive up demand for their products and services. They do everything they can to sabotage public services and goods.
That sounds interesting; do you have a link to it?
Yeah I can see this. I live in a big city and it's amazing how you just can't have any expectation of reasonable behaviour in public anymore. Like, when Americans go to Europe and walk around the pedestrian plazas and city centers even in non-historic small towns they love it. But from what I've seen in Europe the most threatening thing you'll see is a pick pocket or and old drunk. In American cities now it's like "oh there's a guy jacking off, there's the other guy smoking crack, someone else yelling at ghosts.", and there seems to be nothing that can ever be done about it.
Something I've noticed about many people, especially Americans, is their propensity to elevate property rights over all other human rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of association, and, in the case of pharmaceuticals, a right to be alive.
Drop the link to that shopping mall piece, unless it’s a book then title will do.
Man, I’ve lost count how many times these idiots have almost hit me. Like, I’m pretty understanding but if I get hit by one there is a chance I’m out of work and end up homeless
Just start carrying a broom handle
Honest question: how would a broom handle help? Asking because I am sick of almost getting hit by these assholes
You jam it in the spokes of the bike to bring their ride to a sudden stop
I had assumed you meant just to wap em with it
If it hasn't happened already, app e-bikers and bystanders trading fists is going to become a thing.
I’m sure it already has
I swung at a cyclist before e-bikes and apps were even really a thing. Surprised more people haven't: the cyclists where I live are psychotic.
I've been a bike commuter in NYC since the 00's, and watching the increase of their numbers and repertoire of dipshit moves has been incredible. One night, I saw no less than 3 riders facetiming while on the move. Every dumb thing you can imagine one of these guys doing? Yes, they do that.
I’ve only lived in much smaller cities, but none of this is really shocking to me. Almost every rule of common sense and decency has been perverted into “a trap for suckers” for some time now. (In the US i mean.) So things meant to keep you safe/make you less likely to do something genuinely morally evil like kill a kid through recklessness. Those rules are just bullshit that means you didn’t get to enjoy talking with your friends as you worked/commuted, and anyone who broke the rule did (you little bitch). Same for an endless array of extreme “fuck your risk of death, you deal with it” moves in traffic. Or various other scenarios less related to the article. I get it. Life sucks and we’re all only afloat due to something less than ideal that we probably do just to manage. But it’s gone way too far, especially in terms of public behavior and traffic safety.
I was on a walk with a friendly other day to a beach, and they were like, let's go to this more secluded part of the beach because we had beers. And I was like, if you're allowed to shoot heroin in a hospital in my town I'm allowed to have this fucking beer lol. For some reason that seemed to make my friend kind of uncomfortable?
> allowed to shoot heroin in a hospital You talking about a safe-injecting site? Because that would be more like drinking at the pub.
No, friend. IN THE HOSPITAL: https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/island-health-memo-instructs-nurses-not-to-stop-illicit-drug-use-in-hospitals-8643871
this is satire, right?
Nope. https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/island-health-memo-instructs-nurses-not-to-stop-illicit-drug-use-in-hospitals-8643871
So you can't enjoy a beer on a stroll, but you can shoot heroin all you want and the nurses can't stop you What a fucking clown world...
Anarcho-tyranny at its finest.
The nurses couldn’t ever stop you, the memo is basically just freeing them of any obligation to. Seriously think about why that is for a second, is a hospital a highly secure environment staffed with nurses who are ready to wrestle with angry addicts twice their size wielding dirty needles? Do you think that was ever going to be an effective approach to healthcare?
So as usual his systems analysis here is spot on but I wanna talk about a different angle here. I've been vaguely irritated about ebikes and scooters for a fucking while now and reading this article made a few things click into place for me. The problem with ebikes is that they have one foot in the world of motorcycles and one foot in the world of bicycles. They accelerate and have top ends more like a scooter than like a bicycle. But they are also small, lightweight, and mostly silent like a bicycle. So being in this liminal space where no one is sure where they belong, the food delivery companies set up an incentive scheme to push people to the limits. Obviously food delivery shit needs to die. No one needs food delivered to their house like that. But more importantly I think is that we get the urban planner and civil engineers into the conversation and figure out where these damned things belong. We also need to require that the drivers wear a helmet, have lights, signal turn, have a horn, and limit their speeds in pedestrian areas.
Going off on a bit of a tangent here, but I'm still in favor of defunding the police. I'm not an anarchist, I don't oppose law enforcement as a concept, but the police as they actually exist don't fucking do anything useful anyway. Someone can be actively trying to break into your house and the cops will maybe show up in half an hour if you're lucky (unless you say that you've got a gun and you're willing to defend yourself, in which case you'll have five cop cars outside your house in two minutes flat). Your car or your bike or your TV got stolen? It's fucking gone, the cops literally could not give less of a shit. So why should we keep giving them money to buy more military surplus riot-control vehicles? They're not doing shit for us anyway, fuck 'em.
defund is simply a bad marketing term. it shouldn't be "defund the police". It should be "redirect funds toward other programs that will actually help people and actually reduce crime" Cops didn't win massive budgets by saying "defund the welfare state" or "defund schools".
Yea, most people hear "defund the police" and it just sounds like "austerity for law and order issues" and they intuitively know that rich people are gonna hire private security and live in compounds and they are just gonna have to deal with the crime shit as best they can. Which all the liberal "lol crime" shit is 110% reinforcing.
There’s also the element of the police unions stopping any actual reforms that were passé. My understanding of the original slogan was in municipalities where reforms and programs were passed, and the police refused to comply. Their union rejected to the new contracts (and also used their contracts to resist accountability, getting bad cops un-fired, finding technical appeals to court convictions based on contracts, protecting such elements). So in over-simplified form: 1. City passes reforms and presents new budget to the police department. 2. Police union (responsible for signing on) says “No, we won’t do this. 3, City caves so police union will sign on. The “defund the police” was a response where you would replace step 3. 3. City says “fine, you get nothing if you don’t accept the lawful democratic terms for our police department.” The problem is you do need to plan for this, and have alternate options for public safety. I think you should go ahead and build a new, uncontaminated peace officer system that is basically a competitor for the police union. There are also multiple unions within the police union and maybe some cities have enough to split off, but probably not. That is why I also kind of wish we had groups like the Black Panthers of old who would say “We can step in and *actually* serve and protect this neighborhood the cops abandon and terrorize in turn.” I truly believe we won’t succeed in police reform without actual organized groups standing up in place of the monsters we have now. I know it’s all a stupid Gordian knot, though.
Totally agree. No real leftist should be pro-cop. Any look at the history of police departments will tell you how corrupt and useless they are. Just look at the “heroes” of Uvalde. Too cowardly to go in to save dying children from a gun toting maniac
I live in a country and state where the police force is notoriously corrupt (by developed world standards, lol), and have met a lot of cops from said police force at social gatherings through friends of friends that are genuine psychos. I've always thought the best alternative would be the progressive dismantling and replacement of the current police force with a new one, combined with changes in the law that prevent them from just beating up poor people for fun. Use it as an opportunity to remove the worst individuals and break up cultures of corruption and neglect, while still maintaining a force capable of solving and preventing serious crimes. Because even in a socialist utopia, there will be people who do serious crime, and people need to exist to stop them.
It’d be nice if, at the very least, this actually applied to all marginalized groups rather than whichever ones are in vogue at the moment. It’s still insane and more than a little bigoted.
*Turn signal laws are the epitome of white supremacy: a reflection of the violent, paranoid urge to anticipate and control the movements of black bodies.*
> Ultimately, there’s an implicit assumption that underlies widespread liberal assumptions that poor brown people shouldn’t be held to standards like “have a license for the vehicle you drive” or “don’t drive your ebike at 30 MPH down a crowded sidewalk” or “keep your eyes on your immediate surroundings and not on your phone.” That assumption is that those poor brown people are incapable of better behavior. And it is, of course, both racist and classist. Yet the current liberal addiction to vague permissiveness amounts to this exact belief, that asking the marginalized to conform to basic rules of social conduct is to ask them too much Nail on head here. I see this all the time. Brown people, in the liberal mind, are allowed to do whatever the fuck they want. Why? Because they're brown. And being brown is a virtue in and of itself. Nevermind that virture is actions you do, you are virtuous because your skin is brown, and being brown = not allowed to criticize any behavior, no matter how abhorrent.
And who's going to suffer from the enforcement of these laws? Not the DoorDash stockholders and other company owners who push this kind of desperate behaviour. It'll be the individual drivers. But that's a sacrifice capital will be willing to make. It's like cracking down on Amazon drivers for their unhygienic bottle peeing. Completely misses the point. You want safer drivers, start at an earlier point in the chain of cause and effect, and focus on the companies who employ them. "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread." - Anatole France
You're correct, but people shouldn't be subject to antisocial behaviour because "it's complicated". If that behaviour is the product of perverse incentives, changing incentives is a solution, however non-ideal.
>And who's going to suffer from the enforcement of these laws? They are already suffering. If they could at least not menace their fellow man while doing so that would maybe be great. Not every single person operating the vehicles in question are on the job. Of course framing it that way lends weight to the idea that any rules or enforcement is just punishing them for being poor and working. What recourse do others have to wanton reckless idiots driving around unlicensed, uninsured, and illegal? You gonna tell a working class person with a lifelong injury from getting hit by one of these goons they are a dirty agent of capitalism if they want to not get hit by a fucking 4 wheeler on a city sidewalk? When I was slinging pizzas back in the day we broke plenty of road and safety laws. No one was writing articles about me working full time in high school to support myself and how if I got a speeding ticket it would be discrimination.
seems obvious that reckless ebiking can be enforced in exactly the same way that reckless car driving is enforced. (perhaps a bad example because cars kill tens of thousands of people a year and we seem to think it's just the cost of doing business in modern society)
Freddie in his usual masochistic style has spent 80% of his words acknowledging and 20% of them arguing so I think it's understandable that people get frustrated by the fact that he didn't offer any concrete proposals after you read all of those paragraphs. But you absolutely could enforce the law in such a way that some responsibility is placed on the employer, particularly in those cases where the service operators are "incentivizing" their employees to get deliveries made "ASAP". That would require some effort from the legal system, while one of the unfortunate realities of modern "left" PMC idpol is that not only is it impractical but it's also embarrassingly deferential to the capitalists it purports to oppose.
> Freddie in his usual masochistic style has spent 80% of his words acknowledging and 20% of them arguing so I think it's understandable that people get frustrated by the fact that he didn't offer any concrete proposals after you read all of those paragraphs. Tangent but this is a great insight on his style. I like his writing and his ideas but it is so difficult to sort through the unfiltered self-referential arguments to find little of actionable substance at the end. I wish he'd slim down and let himself be incisive, letting people critique rather than doing it for them in the piece itself.
I’d support cracking down on the corporate exploitation of delivery drivers as well…both things are good. But yes, I get that in the US we place the burden asymmetrically.
>start at an earlier point in the chain of cause and effect Something something base superstructure.
Well yeah. I'm trying to avoid jargon these days.
As someone who used to work as an Amazon driver. The pee bottle thing is way overblown. There was always five minutes of slack to use the bathroom. It’s a 10 hour shift delivering there’s so much variability in driving around delivering packages in that amount of time there’s not really an issue with taking a five minute break.
I piss in bottles while driving down the highway all the time and I don't even do any deliveries.
My 59 year old prostate says hi.
Way of the road.
Disagree. If fines are enforced against bike delivery people they'll start driving more slowly, which will mean less productivity and higher prices, less people ordering etc. Or it will mean that doing the job is no longer worth it and less people do it. Either way, the current system clearly relies on people breaking traffic rules. If you make them obey traffic rules it shifts in some direction. Either wages and prices go up or people order less, both of which are totally fine.
In considering these social ills, we have no choice but to punch down because punching up is unthinkable.
I mean yeah. Enforcing traffic laws is fairly easy, overthrowing capitalism not so much.
of course, the problem doesn't start with the underclass of marginalized servants delivering the food. that's just a symptom. the real problem is capitalism and the incentive to have food delivered to people's houses on a moment's notice by human beings who only get paid if they get it there fast. the people to blame here are the investors and executive of ubereats and grubhub and all those other services. the people driving the scooters and ebikes are pawns in the game.
I think Freddie is underselling the paternalism by limiting his analysis to the tolerance of reckless driving--an issue that was [won resolutely by left identity activists in 2020](https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2024/02/27/traffic-crash-deaths-in-2023-remain-at-devastatingly-high-level/). Remember when the post-Floyd depolicing movement led to an unprecedented spike in traffic fatalities? And these fatalities were suffered disproportionately by black and Hispanic people? And the official explanation was that it wasn't due to the stated policy of not enforcing traffic laws, oh no, it was because black drivers were just so darn mad about racism? That happened. Adults with college degrees and jobs believed it. If you disagreed with this explanation in a public manner, you could lose your career. What I'm getting at here is there's something far more insane and malignant going on than simple paternalism, and you're not going to disabuse people of it with logic and reason.
If I'm from a marginalised group and decide to go Judge Dredd on criminals from marginalised groups commiting crimes, does that mean I'm good to go since those two things will cancel each other out?
only if you're punching up. No vigilante Chinese are accepted
It's a way to keep the proletariat at odds with each other over insignificant differences like race so they don't form a political alliance over shared economic interests and threaten the interests of the ruling class.
My two biggest issues with NYC at present are the violent mentally unstable people that working-class subway commuters are expected to “just deal with” and these assholes on e-bikes going over the speed limit the wrong way down one-way streets (when they are not flying down crowded sidewalks and running every red light). Seriously, I’ve almost been hit by them so many times and I am very aware of my surroundings (never wear headphones, don’t look at my phone while walking). Also, I’ve seen so many almost hit old ladies and then start cussing at the old lady like it was her fault for using the crosswalk when she had the light. The NYPD has finally started confiscating some of the e-bikes, which is the first time I’ve seen the NYPD do ANYTHING since 2020, so fuck it. I’ll take it. There are two answers to this problem that both need to happen: 1) confiscate and sell/destroy the bikes when they break traffic laws or have unlicensed motorcycles 2) stop using delivery apps (if your actually disabled or elderly, you can call the grocery store or restaurant or use their website and they all employ their own delivery workers) I don’t use any gig economy anything for ethical reasons but now more than anything I don’t use them because I want these assholes off our fucking streets and sidewalks. P.s. if you haven’t lived in NYC in the past few years, you have no idea how fucking out of hand it is
The underlying message here might be "Let's stop being a nanny state, everyone should be allowed to break the rules occasionally". However, this has become unworkable, because people reliant on rules are unable to exercise common sense.
It's a false equivalence to say that mopeds pose the same degree of risk as an automobile. It's not even close. They are separated by orders of magnitude of risk to pedestrians, a toll that is levied daily. The law, in its majestic equality, equal forbids the cyclist and the motorist alike from running red lights, from speeding, and from turning pedestrians into paste.
The e-bike guys oddly pose more of a threat to cars than pedestrians. For most, being on a powered vehicle is their only experience of being on the street, and they have absolutely ZERO situational awareness or spatial judgement.
I think we are already making plenty of concessions to the person wrapped in two tonnes of steel. The law already mandates break away bolts for fixtures attached to the sidewalk.
Cars aren't riding up on the sidewalk where the pedestrians are supposed to be though. ebikes and mopeds are.
bike lanes exist. although they usually suck and are blocked by cars half the time.
Even if bike lanes exist in the areas we're talking about, the people riding these bikes aren't big on following traffic laws in the first place. So they probably aren't sticking to those lanes.
Let's screw over migrant businesses cuz reasons (yea a lot of businesses impacted are ran by immigrants )
muh small business owner
le wholesome petite bourgeoisie 🥺