In Defense of Wonks

 

Klippenstein is a good reporter and a generally good egg, but my God, the juxtaposition of housing as a problem (which can be understood in terms of zoning, affordability, Nimby-ism, etc.) and matters of foreign policy, that are obviously understood as federal in nature, is just...

Look, I would like it if HUD had a strong hand and a strong plan for overriding local twattery that keeps housing unaffordable. But there are limits to what can be legally done at the executive level to demand housing access--it's complicated!

Foreign aid is a bit different, isn't it--it's one thing, it doesn't go through state and muni filters You're not dictating to developers and actual neighborhoods with people in them about what they do and don't want. It doesn't have a myriad of red tape things to fool about with. 

We're not talking about the difference between apples and oranges, but apples and eggs. Knowing the difference is very useful, because you really shouldn't expect apples to fall out of any aperture of a hen. Klippenstein isn't an idiot and isn't juxtaposing those things thinking otherwise. 

SCOTUS and the Conclusions

 

It's really not hard to draw an obvious and unpleasant conclusion regarding the conservative justices' rulings regarding effectively legalizing bribery and privileging the opinions of courts over subject matter experts in government agencies with respects to regulatory matters, and to keep this blog post terribly brief, let me just sum it up this way:

The Republican-appointed justices have shown us what they are, and all that's left is billionaires haggling over the price. I'm sure putting it this way would offend Sam Alito and his missus, so to also keep this blog post brief, I will refrain from suggesting what else they can run up a flagpole if they don't like it.

I really shudder at conservative justices using their slapdash "textural" approach to the law as a "public service" to overrule agency decisions based on science. What this means for climate change, curbing pollution, food and drug regulation....

Ron DeSantis Just Dropped Some New Racism

 

This signifying white supremacist just came out in favor of choking out homeless people of color by smearing progressive DAs as being controlled by a (((globalist))))? This is deeply racist. Manslaughter is not what a Good Samaritan does. https://t.co/QaJUiBXChO

— Vixen Strangely (@VixenStrangely) May 13, 2023

In 2018, Ron DeSantis' gubernatorial opponent made the most succinct summation of what DeSantis was about: The racists believe he's a racist.  The racists had every reason to believe DeSantis was a fellow traveler. We know pretty well from what Tommy Tuberville thinks about MAGA and white supremacy what the score is with MAGA Republicans. If you want to score MAGA points, you have to signify white supremacy.

You have to deny the Ocoee Massacre and the Rosewood Massacre (they aren't even teaching positive Black history there, as far as I hear it.) You have to direct a policy of downplaying white complicity in a systematic degradation of people of color. You have to pretend this is because it's mean to depict white people as racist--and then, be this guy. The guy who can't say "Boo" when racists broadcast anti-Semitism all over his state. And then celebrate a guy who choked a homeless man to death for being publicly upset about an actually very upsetting reality: Hunger and thirst and no place to lay his head where the law would not call him a vagrant and penalize him for the sin of being an unhomed person.

 

Bleeding America

 

It comes out that the mass shooter at the Allen, TX outlet mall was a man named Mauricio Garcia, who was fascinated with right-wing politics and white supremacy, and wore a "Right Wing Death Squad" badge. So, cue up the right wing defenders of the faith, saying it's unpossible that a Hispanic man is also a white supremacist. Nick Fuentes and Enrique Tarrio and so on and so on aside.  Leave it to normie suburban Republicans to try and defend actual white supremacists by saying they wouldn't allow freaking mestizos in the country club. Why are our racists not more racist?  is quite the realization for the party that accepted Trump and birtherism and wanted Muslin bans and mass deportations. 

Of course, here at this blog, we've been aware of the love some right wingers have for Pinochet. And know very well why Garcia's politics might be swept under the rug. It doesn't fit the narrative that it's always and only mental illness, and Garcia also suffered from that.  

Just today, another incident in TX claimed lives without guns: an SUV rammed into a bus stop claiming eight lives and injuring multiple others. And it is both senseless and fraught with meaning--did someone decide that immigrants were just people who could be killed because it was politically determined to be fine? I mean, don't people plow into crowds and have other people deem it to be fine? They were only illegal aliens, after all. 

Look, I can be hard on Texas, but we have a violence problem throughout this country. Sure, it's a North Texas meteorologist who is on high alert because a six year old with a missing kitten might ***gasp*** ring his doorbell, for which he needs to be strapped and locked and loaded, but also, we just have trigger happy herpderps out here for non-being Texan reasons. 

The Unhomed and the Inhumanity!

 

San Francisco art gallery owner Collier Gwin used a hose to spray water at a homeless woman sitting on a sidewalk on January 9.

The victim “declined further police action," according to The Standard, citing the San Francisco Police Department pic.twitter.com/t2TUKXqXbV

— TRT World (@trtworld) January 11, 2023

This man is hosing this woman off the sidewalk like she was no more than refuse or dog droppings. He has no more respect for her human dignity than to do this. This man has an art gallery. What can a soul who does this to another human being know about art? He knows money and status. This man pimps the vision of souls for status. That woman may as well not have a soul to him because she has nothing of negotiable value. She brought down his property value by having a body existing outside of his place of business. He needed her body elsewhere, and this was the obnoxious way he chose to do it.

Being alive means having a body and needing to put it somewhere. It's a blessing and a curse. I've known absurd sensations of pleasure, and also what it's like not to sit or stand or even lie down comfortably.  But I've been able to enjoy my pain and delight alike indoors, because I've always had the fee for convenient body storage. I can sleep indoors any time I like, even if my bed feels like a stone to me. 

I sleep knowing others sleep on stones. How fucked up is it that we do this? We sleep knowing other human beings can have their tents, their tarps, their possessions, however meager, scattered because someone anywhere doesn't care for the basic physical fact that these people need to lay their bodies somewhere? That when we aren't awake (as no one can be, healthfully, forever) we need to put our physical, food and oxygen and water requiring selves somewhere. We need access to money to negotiate our nutritious and hygienic needs. We need blankets and clothes in absence of heating.  And we pretend other human beings who can't afford that basic allowance of humanity--don't need this? And sweep away their lives and give them nothing in recompense? 

There's another way, of course. If the unhoused require being homed to not be homeless, what if someone just put them in housing?  It sounds radical, but it just might work! What if this could be done nationwide to reduce homelessness by just putting people in homes? (The Finns--they have good ideas about cherishing people, and I respect it.)

This is something we could easily do. We can build convenience stores overnight--making affordable housing should not be more expensive than the stupid things we do to deter people with bodies from having comfortable places to lay themselves down, like pigeon-repellers except for people placed under overpasses and increasingly unseatworthy benches. Giving the homeless somewhere to live--permanently, not a shelter, is the most cost-effective solution, and the one people are avoiding because it is actually kind and decent. 

Treating human beings as human beings is a choice and one we can afford to make, and should, because the cost of not doing that is our humanity.  What if we treated human beings as human beings, and no one got hosed? 

Trump Talked to People Today and It Was Dystopian

 

Somehow, the former president of the United States suggested that permanent Hoovervilles were some kind of reasonable accommodation for the homeless instead of, I dunno, actually finding them real homes they could affordably live in with dignity and without having to crowd about with abusive and dangerous people. He also suggested that the federal government should be able to take control of state National Guard units in emergencies, like, I presume uprisings that fall out from unhomed people having access to a fucking tent among other desperate people instead of anything halfway approaching a shot at a somewhat normal and dignified life. 

This is exactly the kind of dystopia we've seen in SF. The proposal itself is suggestive of just clearing away inconvenient people and pretending their lives don't matter. It suggests a willingness to use violence to let everyone know how not-valued certain life actually is. 

This person cannot ever be near power again. He doesn't see any people as people, but as problems. and this is always a bad sign. He is a monster,  and thinks monstrous things. 

UPDATE: No this was not a neat change from comparing things to the Handmaids or even Orwell. That multiple dystopian narratives start sounding really plausible is not actually a great takeaway or either me finally understanding that my English Lit degree has value, it's me realizing I should know a lot more about firearms and jarring vegetables than I actually do because the shit is basically right on top of us. Welcome to my nightmare, says a Generation Xer primed for Soylent Green and the rise of the machines. I mean. Seriously? We are overrun with hammerheads and require merely people of competence to show up. 

And I think these people will.  I have to.