The same KLA who's been here for years

by glass_museum on tiktok

Everbody wants third spaces until a homeless guy shows up. Now theres a lot of talk about third spaces for a reason. We need places to form community beyond just home and work, but that begs the question of who gets to be a part of our communities? You want more parks, more libraries but then you complain when these public infrastructures are, well public.

For the unhoused the importance of public spaces isn't just a matter of wanting somewhere to chill with friends it's a matter of existence and freedom. In his landmark essay "homelessness and the issue of freedom," Jeremy Waldron argues that the freedoms of the poor are dispraportionately restricted under the law since their material conditions coerce them into a state in which they must choose between survival and the violation of the law. He writes that freedom exists for the homeless "only to the extent that our society is communist."

Now before your redscare ass starts to hemmorage over the C-word let me explain, but first let's define our terms. Specifically let's distinguish between postive freedoms and negative freedoms. While postive freedom is the capacity to act according to ones free will, negative freedom is the capacity to act free from the coercion of others.

So things like loitering laws [and] public indecency violations though they apply to the rich and poor alike, they apply disproportionatly to those who posses no private property of their own and thus who exist solely in the collective space, and so while a homeless person may posses the positive freedom to, say, physically lay down in a park, they have their negative freedom restricted since they'll be forcebly removed for doing so, because of the regulations placed on public spaces that prohibit certain actions that are typically relegated to the private, like sleeping, pissing, showering.

All these actions are natural and necessary, and yet theyre prohibited in the public space. And this limitation is no problem for owners of private property, since the public is conceived of as being complementary to the private.

However, as Waldron notes, "This complementarity works only for those who have the benefit of both sorts of places" so if youre homeless you're stuck in a situation where you're forced to violate the law in order to survive, because in order to exist, one needs somewhere they can exist.

There's oftentimes a contradiction with how people consider the homeless if they even consider them at all, people don't want them pissing in the streets, but they also don't want them pissing in the Mcdonald's bathroom. People don't want encampments, but they also oppose the construction of affordable public housing.

There seems to be a desire for increased public life, but only a certain kind of public.

Edited to add: Since a lot of people are reblogging this original post, I'm adding the updated version I did that incorporates the intersex circle...

this our new flag because

this looks cool as fuck

Laypeople (and also a concerning number of scientists) have often got the idea that unethical human experimentation is some sort of ultra-effective super science that would fix all the disease and discover all of the medicine and we only don't do it because it isn't nice (see: every science fiction show ever). No! Jumping straight from abstract theory to human trials is a terrible way to do science. It produces incoherent results and useless observations and nonsensical conclusions. We have pages and pages of historical precedent demonstrating this.

And lots of people have got the idea that totalitarianism is some sort of magic super-government that does all the government stuff really effectively abd efficiently and we only don't do it because it isn't nice. No!!!! "Let's put one idiot in charge and do whatever dumb shit they say" is the worst way to organize any project at all, let alone an economy and a political machine. Fascist regimes are models of corruption, waste, and inefficiency.