To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

Re:To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use by thworp on Tuesday December 12, 2023 @09:40AM (#38612719)

I think you accurately characterized a sizable portion of the electorate, not just in the US but in many Western countries. That still leaves me wondering what the social workers, homeless advocates, Mission workers etc were doing.

Either they have been screaming that this is a disaster and nobody wanted to hear (or amplify) them, or they thought it could work on a fully voluntary basis. The latter despite them being in contact with homeless and/or drug addicts regularly. Neither explanation bodes well for civil society.

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Re:To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use by mips_r4300i on Tuesday December 12, 2023 @04:17PM (#38618676)

I think people in western countries have been a victim of our own successes, where we enjoy such a prosperous (relative to most of history) life that we now unwittingly afford the luxury of forgetting how raw human behavior actually works.

People don't start out being nice, altruistic and self sacrificing. That is socially conditioned and a learned behavior. However, we have conflated those positive traits as the base class of humanity, when it's really not.

I worry that we will need to return to widespread suffering just to relearn the same things we knew only a free short generations ago.

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