Somehow, treating vulnerable people with dignity by helping them out without strings attached helps our society overall. Who would’ve thought.
But conservatism requires a lesser people to scapegoat and oppress. Could we perhaps criminalize homelessness, and instead of housing we imprison them, so I feel satisfied that they’re being punished for their god given misfortune?
It is ironic that you are scapegoating republicans for this political failure of liberals, who also support the policies that are the cause of these issues.
Liberals also support prioritization of private property laws over personal living standards.
Only socialists support prioritizing human well-being and socialism is a bad word in the US.
I helped an older lady change her flat tire 🛞 today, and guess what, 😱 she didn’t pay me….
USA: Spends billions on hostile infrastructure to keep homeless people out of sight from the rich
Scandinavia: Just builds lots of free apartments, turning the homeless people into productive workers, thus injecting a lot more money into society
Capitalism only makes sense if you’re exclusively looking out for yourself, and if you happen to be at the top.
Unfortunately the situation isn’t solved in Scandinavia or Finland either. I’ve seen plenty of homeless looking people in Sweden sleeping around Stockholm. Many of them seemed like immigrants, not sure what the situation is there. I doubt they’re all those pretend homeless beggars. And with Finland we have our own homeless. Even with housing and all kinds of programs to help people and whatnot, some don’t take the housing, want to go into programs and so on. Usually it’s addiction (often alcohol, drugs have become more common though) or mental health related. I’m not sure what could be done about that that isn’t being done or tried already.
We’re capitalist countries too, we just have extensive social safety nets. But there always seems to be people who fall through the cracks, for one reason or another.
That’s just the way of life I think, not everyone needs or wants help - like you pointed out a lot of this is linked to addiction and mental health. But as long as everyone can access help when they’re ready your government seems to be doing as much as they can right now. More than most countries including the US.
It’s not just addiction, though that always plays a part. For many it’s also about trust. I may be reaching as my knowledge is mostly for here in the U.S., though lack of trust in institutions is a learned reaction. They do not accept help because it has ended badly in the past, and badly may have been as simple as given some hope and had it swept out from under them.
I support aiding homelessness not through the creation of programs alone. Those programs should also come with trained specialists willing to work over time to gain the trust of these people. Who act as mobile case workers and intake personnel into these programs, and keep tabs throughout the process. Now I am sure some personnel exist, and perhaps it is being done this exact way. If it isn’t though, some changes should be made. Elimination is unlikely, though there is a huge difference between perfection and incompetence.
The lack of trust in institutions is kind of in the American DNA. The country was formed by a revolt against institutions, natives who trusted the institutions were killed or forced onto reservations, when it looked like slavery was outlawed a bunch of people took up arms. The labor movement didn’t have pleasant protests - they got shot and bombed by the government. More recently you’ve got things like COINTELPRO and the Tuskegee experiments and the war on drugs that had the CIA importing drugs.
If you know enough US history you learn that the institutions are not to be trusted.
Trust in institutions is really high here in Finland. Anecdotally, from what I’ve seen and heard from people who have struggled with issues (including addiction and on-off homelessness) they seem to regard those people well. Social workers, police, healthcare workers, volunteer people, those people from the “system” or close to it that interacts with them a lot are usually held in high or at least moderate regard. Of course miffed if the police “hassle” them by making them leave or stop drinking in public or something like that, but still respected and considered at least alright.
Not to say that the lack of trust couldn’t exist. If we believe that most seem to have some level of trust, then it would fit in with the numbers in that Finland has fairly low levels of homelessness.
When it comes to the beggars in Sweden, they’re generally not Swedish citizens, and as such I don’t think they qualify for the housing assistance programmes we have here. There definitely are homeless people in Sweden, according to this report from Socialstyrelsen there’s more than 27000 homeless people in Sweden.
There are a couple of definitions of homeless here though.
Situation 1: Acute Homelessness
Individuals sleeping outdoors or in stairwells, cars, tents, etc., and also those staying in emergency shelters, hostels, or similar temporary accommodations.
Situation 2: Institutional Stay and Supported Housing
Pertains to individuals in prison, healthcare institutions, or supported living who will leave within three months but do not have a home to go to.
Situation 3: Long-term Housing Solutions
Refers to living in special housing solutions provided by social services, where the accommodation is linked with supervision and specific conditions or rules, like trial apartments, training apartments, and social contracts.
Situation 4: Self-arranged Short-term Housing
Living temporarily without a contract with friends/acquaintances, family/relatives, or under a temporary lodging or subletting arrangement with a private individual.
This page on Boverket claims that in 2017 there were 32400 homeless people, 18% of those (5900) were classified as acutely homeless.
I used to think this was a great idea and was confused why it wasn’t implemented in the states until I realized the capitalist class doesn’t want to convert more people into labor and that the goal is to split the profits of the company with the least amount of people as possible.
Homelessness and benches you can’t rest on, it’s by design.
Finland is a capitalist country, like the rest of the Nordics. Social safety nets = socialism/communism is a tired old propaganda meme.
(Yes, I know we’re technically a mixed economy like 99,99999% of the rest of the world)
I realized the capitalist class doesn’t want to convert more people into labor and that the goal is to split the profits of the company with the least amount of people as possible.
Not quite. They DO want more workers but they also want to pay them less, which is why they’d rather let millions of illegals into the country before they’ll take care of their own citizens.
I don’t see why people have to make things into dastardly schemes. Systems have negative externalities, it can still be a bad thing without having a person trying to cause a bad thing behind it.
Who invented the systems, bacteria? 🦠
I mean, you’re not wrong, but it’s the choices the humans make when those externalities become dastardly:
Exxon scientists in the 1970s accurately predicted climate change
They are not for nothing the country with the happiest people on the planet.
Of course our country is the happiest when all the severely unhappy people kill themselves. Also our current government is garbage and has several Nazis among its ranks. There is a brilliant editorial about the subject in English, this is the first that came to my mind: https://www.mtvuutiset.fi/artikkeli/david-mac-dougall-about-press-freedom-is-finland-sleepwalking-into-orbanisation-crucial-moment-for-orpo/8733706
The garbage government seems to be not exclusive to Finland though. Concerning nevertheless.
And regarding homelessness in Finland: here it takes actual effort to be homeless, as in living in the streets. I knew one person several summers ago who lived in a hammock because of a complicated scheme involving violence and money. One female friend broke up with her BF and lived with her friends until she got an apartment from another city, so she didn’t have to live on the streets.
There is no good government. You either have direct democracy or bad government.
Of course our country is the happiest when all the severely unhappy people kill themselves.
This is such a tired and old take. We’ve advanced miles in getting suicides down and even with them they don’t represent anywhere close to big enough group to move our ranking one way or another.
To be honest, when you have half of the year filled with such long nights and it is generally cold, depression isn’t really going to be as rare as in some more sunny countries.
As for the nazzis, yeah, there is a trend in that. I think many voters get racist because of capitalism gets them in difficult economic situation and they fear migrants will take their jobs. And migrants are there in the first place because their regions got destroyed by wars for oil and CIA funded terrorist groups and global warming. So both wars and global warming are due to oil companies .And both difficult economic situations of the citizens and prioritization of profit for oil companies are due to capitalism. So overall, this is simply how capitalism works. It is a feature, not a bug. Without getting rid of capitalism, we will never be able to solve these issues.
Yeah gotta love the American approach.
Have a problem?
Don’t talk about it! 🤫 Hide it! Pretend it doesn’t exist! Shoot it, arrest it, prosecute it, imprison it. Make a profit from it! Blame political party for it!
Wonder why the problem never goes away 🤔 fashion elaborate conspiracy theories. Complain about it!
Repeat.
American society and governance is thoroughly dysfunctional and that’s why it’s a failure.
American society and governance is thoroughly dysfunctional and that’s why it’s a failure.
Covid transformed into a pandemic because the US, like many other “western countries” have reached a breaking point of dysfunction in policy making, billionaire capture of the government, and general quality of life for average people.
In that sense a disease like Covid was inevitable, the stage was set and all ready to go before Covid even showed up.
In the wake of Covid becoming a massive pandemic there was a moment where American society eased up grinding people to dust with covid relief checks, eviction bans, work from home accommodation, childcare support, free vaccines and other policies. It was a chance for American society to realize how insane a for profit healthcare system is, but the door was slammed shut by the ruling class as soon as they could.
We are in a weird moment before a broader societal collapse, the ruling class is telling us the economy is doing great and that we are out of the pandemic but the average American is extremely beat up right now and not doing good but nobody is really acknowledging that on a broader level. Everybody is suffering in their individual lives not being able to afford rent, healthcare and any number of other necessities not to mention they are too tired to socialize with friends and family. It is a mercy we have smartphones to zone out on at the end of the day after a long day of work when we are too burnt out to participate in our lives….
We are at a moment where Americans are drowning and just physically can’t tread water for that much longer and centrist democrats like Biden are completely unfit to meet the gravity of it (republicans even less so).
We just have to hope that when we reach that breaking point that it creates the opportunity for progressive change and it doesn’t just send us spiraling into deeper levels of hell.
India: let’s just pretend they don’t exist. and when someone visits, let’s build big walls to hide them.
