Well Yang, if the government can't - or won't - protect its citizens who are just trying to get back and forth to work and home to their families, why are we paying taxes to them? Securing "domestic tranquility" is the number one function of government (in addition to the common defense), if they can't even do that, we have no need for them. And so society continues to devolve and spirals down to the law of the jungle. Democrats are the problem, not the answer.
"Laws will have to be passed and enforced to give mental-health professionals more authority in deciding how long someone can be involuntarily hospitalized"
Nice Idea, but I doubt that any Democrat currently holding elected office would dare to vote for that.
"—and to greatly expand institutionalization for chronically homeless EDPs."
And I doubt that any Republican currently holding elected office would dare to vote to pay for that.
> EDPs are usually middle-aged homeless men with a long psychiatric history. They seem to especially be concentrated in subway stations and inside train cars, where a literally captive audience has to watch them stumble around, often either screaming or mumbling incoherently.
I think this graph from the economist explains a lot of what's happening [https://www.economist.com/united-states/2013/08/03/locked-in]. We really haven't figured out what to do with people who have these extreme psychiatric issues. In the mid 1900's we decided it was inhumane to put them in mental hospitals so now we wait for them to commit crimes and then put them in prison instead. And that doesn't seem to have made anything better.
There are a number of older terms for "EDP" that I prefer -- I think it is important to resist the ever-proceeding infiltration of acronymizing & psychobabble terms into daily conversation. These neologisms obscure the subject at hand and serve to confuse rather than inform.
For example -- what we are discussing is not simply an "emotionally disturbed person." The normal, literal sense of those words would include, say, a man sobbing, or a woman ranting frothily, or vice versa. These sorts of "disturbance" are not the problem.
Medical professionals have to use euphemisms to avoid liability & to communicate without patients necessarily being aware of what they mean. We are not medical professionals (and also not on the scene), so we should use accurate everyday terminology -- here I might use "psycho hobos" or "knife-wielding nutjobs" but you can probably think of something more professional while still more accurate than "EDP."
The problem is not that they are crazy, it is that they are violent. Their violence is not "worse" than everyday violence committed by "sane" people. Michelle Go is not more dead because a crazy hobo killed her rather than a robber or a jilted lover. What's more, some of these "sane" people even commit their crimes without even being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and without even being so disturbed that they drop out of society and live on the street.
To put it simply: it is far more disturbing to me when a "sane" man kills his wife than when an "insane" hobo commits a random act of violence after years of living on the street & likely decades of substance abuse. Which one of those is more common? "Sane" wife-killers, by a mile.
The solution, here, is not difficult. Ignore the psychologizers entirely. Their distinctions are not actionable, meaningful or evidence-based. If we haven't learned that by now, the joke is on us. Send violent people to jail, whether they are "sane" or "emotionally disturbed."
As ever - please explain to me how somebody can be a murderer and "sane." It's a plain contradiction in terms! Eject the evidence-free, unscientific assertions of psychologizing hucksters from our legal system, and from your personal considerations. Repeat after me: if psychologists have a near-zero success rate at things as simple as helping people stick to diets or quit smoking - and the success rate here really is near zero - why do we believe they can do a single gosh darn thing reliably, let alone something as complex as resolving years-fermenting cases of drug-reinforced street madness? It isn't going to happen.
These psychobabbling people suck endless quantities of money out of public & individual pockets, and what do we have to show for it? A borderline-useless "institution" system that won't even hold people who sh*t in public or attack people. How do we have a million suburban psychologists & psychiatrists happy to prescribe middle class kids everything under the sun & chat with them for hours, and such a shortage of similar professionals where they would seem to be most needed? Which is more important, curing Trevor's C in math with some Adderall, or having the guts to sign a hold on a violent person even if it might get you in trouble from certain quarters? The societal answer is evidently Trevor's C. (The problem is, the Adderall doesn't really help Trevor in the long run, either.)
These people have proven themselves not just stupid but utterly cowardly. Replace them with police & let police do their most important job: separating violent people from the general public. People shouldn't earn kid-glove treatment by being *extra* off-the-rails. That's pants-on-head backwards.
>Middle-class liberal parents often give their kids a lot of freedom. And it usually works for them because they're surrounded by people that are ambitious and want to succeed educationally. Those parents then assume that their styles work for everyone. But it's not true.
This is a strange thing to say. By every measure, the independence available to middle-class children has contracted dramatically in the past few decades. The "independence" you speak of is more like, "You can look at whatever you like on your phone, but if you want to leave the house there's gonna be an inquisition as to how, when, where, why, who with, and how long." This is very, very far from a style that works for everyone - as evidenced by across-the-board declines in reading and math scores.
>We live in a liberal democracy where we are taught that all humans are created equal—but that means that we all have equal moral worth, not that all humans have the the same capabilities.
Small quibble. "All men are created equal" is a fundamentally novel part of the American constitutional framework, but it is not inherent to "liberal democracy." It's not even really sensible to call something "a democracy" -- there are, I'm sure you will acknowledge, degrees of democracy. We would, you might say, have "more democracy" if we allowed 16-year-olds or green-card holders or felons to vote -- we would be getting taking more people's preferences into account. Yet we don't do that - we make some choices as to who may vote.
The notion of "free & equal citizens" is rather a fundamental part of the notion of a *republic* -- which, note carefully, does not say anything about *who* is a citizen with a vote. That could be very few people, as in the Republic of Venice, or it could be very many, as in our republic.
To exemplify: Britain is presently a liberal democracy, but it does not have free & equal citizens - it has a royal family and a landed aristocracy that still have legal privileges over commoners. Britain is not a republic, but it is a liberal democracy. These little words matter!
Because the United States is constituted on the notion of free & equal citizens, it is a republic, and because we believe liberality & democracy are positives, we attempt to render our republic as liberal and democratic as possible. The republic is the framework, and the backstop. The people, in their wisdom, have many times in history democratically chosen to elevate an individual above the law: this happened with Caesar and it happened with Alessandro Medici. That this was a democratic choice does not mean it must be respected -- in the same way that we consider it right to restrain someone attempting suicide, it is right to correct the people by any means necessary when they seek to elect a tyrant over themselves.
A long way around just saying, Sweep them up and institutionalize them.
Of which I am in favor.
I have spent absolutely decades in subway cars musing, If that guy comes near me and attacks me, how can I disable or kill him?
These dangerous sad sacks are usually hulking, wild-eyed, half-dressed, loud, and uncontrolled in their gesticulations. They break people's jaws and eye sockets, and they do it every time they're released. If their maladies are part genetic and part bad parenting, then that's that. Most of us New Yorkers have gotten over compassion for them.
It's not difficult to identity who's crazy in our subways and on our streets. Any New Yorker, except those hopelessly progressive, or our pandering politicos, is capable of seeing who's someone to avoid. It's time to bring back Creedmore, build more, and get badly behaved people out of our public spaces.
It's because an "EDP" is a human being, that he (it will usually be a he) is our problem. Because people are not blank slates, but they are, indeed, slates, and it is our society and our culture that wrote "not my problem" on human beings who needed, and need, to be assisted by their community, which is us, that they are our problem. Not just to avoid one or two "innocent" people dying every year, but to avoid the horrible living conditions that thousands of people labelled EDPs, experience. Most are "innocent", if by innocent we mean that they did not choose to be mentally unstable, distressed, socially dysfunctional, homeless and alone...
Well Yang, if the government can't - or won't - protect its citizens who are just trying to get back and forth to work and home to their families, why are we paying taxes to them? Securing "domestic tranquility" is the number one function of government (in addition to the common defense), if they can't even do that, we have no need for them. And so society continues to devolve and spirals down to the law of the jungle. Democrats are the problem, not the answer.
"Laws will have to be passed and enforced to give mental-health professionals more authority in deciding how long someone can be involuntarily hospitalized"
Nice Idea, but I doubt that any Democrat currently holding elected office would dare to vote for that.
"—and to greatly expand institutionalization for chronically homeless EDPs."
And I doubt that any Republican currently holding elected office would dare to vote to pay for that.
> EDPs are usually middle-aged homeless men with a long psychiatric history. They seem to especially be concentrated in subway stations and inside train cars, where a literally captive audience has to watch them stumble around, often either screaming or mumbling incoherently.
I think this graph from the economist explains a lot of what's happening [https://www.economist.com/united-states/2013/08/03/locked-in]. We really haven't figured out what to do with people who have these extreme psychiatric issues. In the mid 1900's we decided it was inhumane to put them in mental hospitals so now we wait for them to commit crimes and then put them in prison instead. And that doesn't seem to have made anything better.
There are a number of older terms for "EDP" that I prefer -- I think it is important to resist the ever-proceeding infiltration of acronymizing & psychobabble terms into daily conversation. These neologisms obscure the subject at hand and serve to confuse rather than inform.
For example -- what we are discussing is not simply an "emotionally disturbed person." The normal, literal sense of those words would include, say, a man sobbing, or a woman ranting frothily, or vice versa. These sorts of "disturbance" are not the problem.
Medical professionals have to use euphemisms to avoid liability & to communicate without patients necessarily being aware of what they mean. We are not medical professionals (and also not on the scene), so we should use accurate everyday terminology -- here I might use "psycho hobos" or "knife-wielding nutjobs" but you can probably think of something more professional while still more accurate than "EDP."
The problem is not that they are crazy, it is that they are violent. Their violence is not "worse" than everyday violence committed by "sane" people. Michelle Go is not more dead because a crazy hobo killed her rather than a robber or a jilted lover. What's more, some of these "sane" people even commit their crimes without even being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and without even being so disturbed that they drop out of society and live on the street.
To put it simply: it is far more disturbing to me when a "sane" man kills his wife than when an "insane" hobo commits a random act of violence after years of living on the street & likely decades of substance abuse. Which one of those is more common? "Sane" wife-killers, by a mile.
The solution, here, is not difficult. Ignore the psychologizers entirely. Their distinctions are not actionable, meaningful or evidence-based. If we haven't learned that by now, the joke is on us. Send violent people to jail, whether they are "sane" or "emotionally disturbed."
As ever - please explain to me how somebody can be a murderer and "sane." It's a plain contradiction in terms! Eject the evidence-free, unscientific assertions of psychologizing hucksters from our legal system, and from your personal considerations. Repeat after me: if psychologists have a near-zero success rate at things as simple as helping people stick to diets or quit smoking - and the success rate here really is near zero - why do we believe they can do a single gosh darn thing reliably, let alone something as complex as resolving years-fermenting cases of drug-reinforced street madness? It isn't going to happen.
These psychobabbling people suck endless quantities of money out of public & individual pockets, and what do we have to show for it? A borderline-useless "institution" system that won't even hold people who sh*t in public or attack people. How do we have a million suburban psychologists & psychiatrists happy to prescribe middle class kids everything under the sun & chat with them for hours, and such a shortage of similar professionals where they would seem to be most needed? Which is more important, curing Trevor's C in math with some Adderall, or having the guts to sign a hold on a violent person even if it might get you in trouble from certain quarters? The societal answer is evidently Trevor's C. (The problem is, the Adderall doesn't really help Trevor in the long run, either.)
These people have proven themselves not just stupid but utterly cowardly. Replace them with police & let police do their most important job: separating violent people from the general public. People shouldn't earn kid-glove treatment by being *extra* off-the-rails. That's pants-on-head backwards.
>Middle-class liberal parents often give their kids a lot of freedom. And it usually works for them because they're surrounded by people that are ambitious and want to succeed educationally. Those parents then assume that their styles work for everyone. But it's not true.
This is a strange thing to say. By every measure, the independence available to middle-class children has contracted dramatically in the past few decades. The "independence" you speak of is more like, "You can look at whatever you like on your phone, but if you want to leave the house there's gonna be an inquisition as to how, when, where, why, who with, and how long." This is very, very far from a style that works for everyone - as evidenced by across-the-board declines in reading and math scores.
>We live in a liberal democracy where we are taught that all humans are created equal—but that means that we all have equal moral worth, not that all humans have the the same capabilities.
Small quibble. "All men are created equal" is a fundamentally novel part of the American constitutional framework, but it is not inherent to "liberal democracy." It's not even really sensible to call something "a democracy" -- there are, I'm sure you will acknowledge, degrees of democracy. We would, you might say, have "more democracy" if we allowed 16-year-olds or green-card holders or felons to vote -- we would be getting taking more people's preferences into account. Yet we don't do that - we make some choices as to who may vote.
The notion of "free & equal citizens" is rather a fundamental part of the notion of a *republic* -- which, note carefully, does not say anything about *who* is a citizen with a vote. That could be very few people, as in the Republic of Venice, or it could be very many, as in our republic.
To exemplify: Britain is presently a liberal democracy, but it does not have free & equal citizens - it has a royal family and a landed aristocracy that still have legal privileges over commoners. Britain is not a republic, but it is a liberal democracy. These little words matter!
Because the United States is constituted on the notion of free & equal citizens, it is a republic, and because we believe liberality & democracy are positives, we attempt to render our republic as liberal and democratic as possible. The republic is the framework, and the backstop. The people, in their wisdom, have many times in history democratically chosen to elevate an individual above the law: this happened with Caesar and it happened with Alessandro Medici. That this was a democratic choice does not mean it must be respected -- in the same way that we consider it right to restrain someone attempting suicide, it is right to correct the people by any means necessary when they seek to elect a tyrant over themselves.
Sheluyang, you’ll be happy to know Seamus Coughlin took a swing at this awhile back.
https://youtu.be/VCDYoT1zPtk?si=t-ZhzPc0oJIzP18B
A long way around just saying, Sweep them up and institutionalize them.
Of which I am in favor.
I have spent absolutely decades in subway cars musing, If that guy comes near me and attacks me, how can I disable or kill him?
These dangerous sad sacks are usually hulking, wild-eyed, half-dressed, loud, and uncontrolled in their gesticulations. They break people's jaws and eye sockets, and they do it every time they're released. If their maladies are part genetic and part bad parenting, then that's that. Most of us New Yorkers have gotten over compassion for them.
It's not difficult to identity who's crazy in our subways and on our streets. Any New Yorker, except those hopelessly progressive, or our pandering politicos, is capable of seeing who's someone to avoid. It's time to bring back Creedmore, build more, and get badly behaved people out of our public spaces.
It's because an "EDP" is a human being, that he (it will usually be a he) is our problem. Because people are not blank slates, but they are, indeed, slates, and it is our society and our culture that wrote "not my problem" on human beings who needed, and need, to be assisted by their community, which is us, that they are our problem. Not just to avoid one or two "innocent" people dying every year, but to avoid the horrible living conditions that thousands of people labelled EDPs, experience. Most are "innocent", if by innocent we mean that they did not choose to be mentally unstable, distressed, socially dysfunctional, homeless and alone...
Yes this is a society issue needs to be solved on government level!