• stabby_cicada@slrpnk.netOP
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    1 year ago

    I’m going to rant a little here.

    No one chooses to be a crackhead.

    No one except that one AMA guy on Reddit aspires to be a drug addict when they grow up.

    People make bad decisions from poverty and lack of education and social support, people self-medicate because they don’t have access to medical care, people get trapped in the “justice system’s” cycle of abuse and can’t get the help they need to pull out of their spiral…

    And then, yes, they end up as homeless crackheads breaking into cars.

    And none of that would have happened if we didn’t have a brutal capitalist caste system in the United States that relies on ruining people for its perpetuation. The system has to have poor people, has to have unemployed people, has to have homeless people, has to have drug addicts. Because the only reason the average worker tolerates the horrid conditions they work under is because they’re so afraid of poverty and homelessness they’d rather tolerate horrid conditions than risk losing their jobs.

    The system needs a homeless underclass as an object lesson of the consequences of unemployment, so that when bosses threaten workers with unemployment, that threat has teeth.

    The fact that every major city in the wealthiest nation in the world has thousands of homeless drug addicts on the street is not a bug in capitalism. It is deliberate. It is a feature. It is a weapon to terrify the worker and keep him in his place.

    So sure, the dude is stealing your car, but what made him have to do that in the first place?

    • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Junkies are junkies in every country. In Finland where we have extensive social safety nets and drug programs and housing provided for homeless they’ll still steal a bunch of shit. Because they always need more money for drugs.

      It’s sad for them but also they can fuck right off from stealing from me.

      • ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yes you’re going to have your failures that’s just the numbers game. Some people are just incapable of getting better even with help, but they’re few and far between.

        The point is the numbers can be drastically lowered if we actually had the safety nets our taxes are supposed to pay for.

        • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Yes the numbers can be lowered. But the point was, fucking hands off my car. Don’t care if it’s a junkie, drunkard or just opportunistic car thief.

    • pinkdrunkenelephants@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      No, many crackheads absolutely choose to become such and, more importantly, to continue living that way throughout their lives despite intervention.

      Stop telling people they don’t have agency or aren’t responsible for their actions or plight, for they absolutely are. They are exactly where they want to be.

      • WarlordSdocy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I mean all it really takes is some bad decisions to start doing it to cause someone to end up getting hooked on it. Once they end up addicted you can’t really say they can just make the choice to stop on their own. And I mean you can’t really blame someone for going to drugs when their life is shit and they’re stuck living on the street with no way out. Now you can still blame them for any crimes they do after that but I don’t think the consequences for them should be prison, that will only make their problems worse. Instead we need places we can force these people to go that are focused on getting people clean and will have the resources to do that.