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California's Exploding Homeless Population Result of Failed Democrat Policies
Canada Free Press ^ | 02/27/18 | Katy Grimes

Posted on 02/27/2018 7:32:58 AM PST by Sean_Anthony

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To: Pollster1; Grampa Dave
Well, since GD and I are life long Calif natives, we probably have a pretty good perspective & idea of what's going on.

First and foremost, it's not a 'Democrat' thing, but rather a weather phenomonen. Hands down, no debate, California has the best climate in the world. (And please, don't bring up HI - lived/visited a million times - no comparison.) So, if you're homeless, it makes perfect sense to locate oneself in this state.

Two, as the bible states, the poor will always be with us. However, instead of taking a moralistic approach to judging bad decisions leading to financial hardships, I refer instead to the bell curve. Unfortunately, at least 5% of the general population simply does not possess sufficient cognitive ability to provide even the meanest level of subsistence support, either for themselves or anyone else.

Whether cause and/or effect from a deficient IQ, these sad creatures are the alcoholics, drug addicts and substance abusers who simply posses not even a basic animal sense of self. After years of abuse, is it any wonder they have so rotted their physical conditiond and mental facilities that they are in every sense of the word mentally ill?

Which brings up point #3: it was Reagan who closed the mental asylums and released these populations to the streets. If society had any sense, the homeless would properly viewed as individuals suffering from severe mental illness and treat/house them accordingly. Instead, everyone attempts to turn a blind eye, ignore the problem and blame the victims.

I live by the beach, and go for a walk/run almost every morning. Typically, I'm greeted with approval as I chug along as the resident homeless are cracking their first beer. They have a very distinctive vocal sound and inflection - I can tell it a mile away. It's the result of a mind rotted to an IQ of around 65 - basically, vegetables.

21 posted on 02/27/2018 9:41:00 AM PST by semantic
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To: ctdonath2

Yes, you are right. The left sold those handouts by calling bums “homeless” and pushing the narrative that their situation isn’t their fault. They are way ahead of conservatives on the importance of what words are used to label a situation.

It is easy to gin up sympathy for homeless. But not as easy to vote to give tax money to bums.


22 posted on 02/27/2018 9:42:16 AM PST by tschatski
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To: tschatski

Of course it’s easy to vote to give tax money to bums.
That’s the core of “democratic socialism”: The Party decides what you’re voting on, and what your options are - either way the vote goes is an acceptable outcome. To wit: you can’t _not_ vote to give tax money to bums.


23 posted on 02/27/2018 10:23:45 AM PST by ctdonath2 (It's not "white privilege", it's "Puritan work ethic". Behavior begets consequences.)
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To: semantic

How many of them are in such a sorry mental state precisely because the system works so hard to prevent them from suffering consequences?
How many would be _saved_ from such a mental state had natural consequences befallen them? Touchy question, as it suggests letting some expire is somehow acceptable - a point which SJW-weaponized empathy leverages for political gain.


24 posted on 02/27/2018 10:28:45 AM PST by ctdonath2 (It's not "white privilege", it's "Puritan work ethic". Behavior begets consequences.)
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To: Sean_Anthony

If you feed them, house them, pay them, cuddle them... they will come... and stay.


25 posted on 02/27/2018 10:36:24 AM PST by aquila48
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To: Sean_Anthony

Jerry Brown tried this in the 1970’s. A judge got impeached who was fronting for him and the democrats. This time they are successful. One group of criminals helping another.
This is also about votes. Crime is way up but the local police have been told to lie about it.


26 posted on 02/27/2018 10:40:26 AM PST by minnesota_bound
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To: Sean_Anthony
What is behind the explosion of drug addicted, criminal, and mentally ill homeless on California's streets?

the more parasites, the more votes for libtard candidates. The dums know what they are doing

27 posted on 02/27/2018 10:42:25 AM PST by mjp ((pro-{God, reality, reason, egoism, individualism, natural rights, limited government, capitalism}))
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To: tschatski

The homeless problem was caused when the libs forced the insane asylums (as we called them back then) to open their doors and literally put people on the street.

Even today many/most of the homeless are hopelessly mentally ill but won’t allow themselves to be committed.


28 posted on 02/27/2018 11:02:04 AM PST by freedumb2003 (obozo took 8 years to try to destroy us. Trump took 1 to rebuild us. MAGA!!)
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To: ctdonath2; Grampa Dave
Mathematically, some % of the population will be beautiful, intelligent and socially adept. Unfortunately, the other side of the coin will mean some will be like the FL shooter; literally the runts of the litter.

Small, underweight, undeveloped, low intelligence, nervous personality. Since no one chooses to be born, much less have an opportunity to "pick" what they'd like to be, it seems pretty cruel to toss the born losers to the wolves. We should remember that civilization is measured by how it serves the people - all the people.

Oftentimes when I see a homeless person (easy to do around here - there are armies of them), I try to imagine who in my HS class may have turned out this way. By 5 years old, teachers have a pretty good idea about their students. I recall standardized aptitude tests being given in 5th grade. By middle-school, the "bad" kids were already ID'd, and by HS, the "stoners" were already self-segregating.

And yet, a significant % of even these people from the bottom-of-the-barrel still have somehow managed to get by, if only marginally, without being completely debased. It's the one we see on the streets that are fully blown mentally ill addicts. Again, don't know which comes first ie which one is the cause and which one is the effect, but they go hand in hand.

Traditionally, when society still had intact extended families, there might have been some role, some function for the village idiot. Maybe mucking out the stalls, watching the cows, something. They had to live by some basic rules of behavior, otherwise the threat of becoming the 'town drunk' was very real.

As societies grew and became more complex, most civilized countries established insane asylums. How we got away from that solution is anybody's guess, but ignoring the problem is ridiculous. These mentally ill addicts are literally vegetables - they can't even care for themselves as well as a feral dog or cat.

29 posted on 02/27/2018 11:18:23 AM PST by semantic
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To: freedumb2003

Here again liberals gained the advantage by changing the words. The insane and crazy are now mentally ill. Look at how the right to life groups fought to be called right to life rather than antiabortion. They didn’t sit back and accept the liberal label.

Everything you and others said is absolutely true. All I am saying is the label used is important and has a great effect on how the average person views a subject. Our side is behind on labeling and it has hurt us.


30 posted on 02/27/2018 11:39:04 AM PST by tschatski
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To: semantic
The law that Reagan signed was the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (LPS), passed by the legislature & signed into law in 1967 by Governor Ronald Reagan. California Governors can not pass bills, our legislature does that.

The idea was to lower entry into the state hospitals by encouraging the community system to accept more patients, hopefully improving quality of care while allowing state expense to be alleviated by the newly available federal funds."

It also was designed to protect the rights of mental patients. It was considered a landmark of its time--a change in the attitude toward mental illness and its treatment.

Year-end population counts for the state hospitals had been declining by approximately 2000 people per year since 1960."

What Reagan did that the @ same time the bill was passed, was to reduce the budget for state mental hospitals. His budget bill "abolished 1700 hospital staff positions and closed several of the state-operated aftercare facilities.

Reagan promised to eliminate even more hospitals if the patient population continued to decline. The law restricted involuntary commitment, among other things. It allows people to refuse treatment for mental illness, unless they are clearly a danger to someone else or themselves. It facilitated release of many patients---supposedly to go to community mental health treatment programs.

Then, the ACLU won a land mark case for the rights of the mentally ill. The state could not keep a patient in an institution if he/she/it had a malady that could be controlled by medication.

The state had to let 80% of the patients out because of the ACLU.

The ACLU has fought for the rights of people to be free, even if freedom meant to live in alleyways and eat from trash cans. The ACLU has long held that involuntary institutionalization of an unwilling person, even if mentally or physically incapable, is the worst of two evils.

So, Reagan closed empty hospitals or about empty hospitals as any good financial steward would do.

Governor Reagan did not control the legislature that voted for the above nor the patients not admitting themselves to the mental hospitals or using the new laws to leave the mental hospitals. That is discussed below:

The point of contention revolved around interpretations of what it meant for a patient to be able to 'take care of himself.' Prior to this the interpretation was rather strict; if a patient could not earn an income and provide shelter and food for himself (and if there were no family members able to care for him), then he would normally be institutionalized.

Beginning in the late 70's, the advocacy groups began to demand a lower standard. As long as a patient could merely wash and dress himself, and could perform the mechanical tasks of shoveling food into his mouth. Then every effort was made to force the institutions to release them.

Predictably, most of the newly discharged patients were unable to take care of themselves in any meaningful sense of the word, and became the homeless people on the street. It's no coincidence that the decline in California's mental health institution population closely matched the sharp increase of homeless (in California, at least) during the same period. Why haven’t these democrat lawmakers reopened the state mental hospitals instead of spending money on trains that don’t go anywhere and other liberal wet dreams?

31 posted on 02/27/2018 1:15:35 PM PST by Grampa Dave (Never pick a fight with an angry beehive of 63+ million Trump Deplorables. You will lose!)
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To: Grampa Dave
GD, thanx for the refresher - I remember most of the details. It's a complicated issue, because the power to institutionalize lead to abuses that Kesey wrote about in Cuckoo's Nest.

So, on one hand we now have armies of mentally ill homeless roaming the streets, riverbeds & communities. On the other, the threat of imprisonment for those deemed to be unfit to live in normal society.

My belief is one of the benefits of research leading to eventual singularity will be very detailed knowledge of all brain functions. Today, medical researchers and doctors can screen & test for many, many different types of disease, pathogens, etc. At some point, perhaps they will be able to isolate either specific genes and/or expressive manifestations that act as indicators to mental illness.

If there were objective standards to measure brain cognition, then society may have a way to deal with homeless addicts while avoiding various abuses and retaliatory measures.

32 posted on 02/27/2018 2:23:15 PM PST by semantic
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