> Wow, this is almost a parody. An able-bodied meth addict and convicted felon was illegally living in a public park for 20 years, littering the land around him and forcing rangers to spend countless time and resources cleaning up the mess he left behind, making regular emergency room visits due to his unhealthy lifestyle costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, constantly doing illegal drugs while not holding down a job and suspiciously acquiring new supplies for his encampment after every sweep (how much do you want to be he engages in illegal activity), and giving an extremely hard time to caseworkers and HHS staff who already have a busy workload (including leaving/getting kicked out of housing multiple times). That one Golden Gate Park Dweller has probably cost the city millions of dollars over the last few years while consuming valuable time from caseworkers and park rangers who could be helping someone else (they're already overloaded). Not to mention the potential damage to the park's environment caused by his littering. What this guy needs is outpatient mental health treatment, and it's honestly criminal that our country has basically no resources for people with mental illness and shoves them into jail or shelters without treating their underlying problems.
It seems US has a system that extracts maximumly from their tax payers and just keeps things in (bad) status quo as long as they can. A babying system if you well.
Which gets to the heart of why conspiracy thinking doesn't hold water, who in your theory are "they"?
As for my claim of homelessness being a threat - I’m not saying that there’s any grand conspiracy. But in the scheme of capitalism it helps to have an underclass that receive undue blame and keep people from sliding down the ladder further out of fear. No one needs to intentionally keep anyone homeless for this to be a functioning part of the system.
It’s like evolution but on a societal scale. Whatever we have now has persisted for a while. The threat of homelessness is part of why it’s persisted. Imagine if there was no uncomfortable bottom to society. All wage slaves that sell their body and time would simply choose to not work because not working would be a better life. It’s memetics. And of course we need people to do work. But we could be optimizing for happiness instead of GDP growth.
Think of religion. When a religion mandates evangelism it’s not necessarily out of a nefarious central planner trying to gain control over more people. But for religions that do mandate evangelism there is a greater chance the religion thrives. Because obviously recruiting people means you have a bigger religion. But the believers might simply each want to share their religion out of genuine belief in an afterlife.
I was raised in a specifically anti-evangelical religion. It’s pretty small as a result. There were the Shakers, a now extinct sect of Christianity. They considered sex ungodly and thus had no children. That killed the religion. Other sects promote having many children and survive.