+1 for rats playing poker and the cat joining them
“Background details rulz”
Looks like Texas holdem?
They should only be holding 2 cards for Texas Hold'em... So I'm not sure what this is.
Omaha
Huh. Never heard of that one. Seems to check out though
It’s a pretty fun variant imo. Basically same rules, but you hold 4 in your hand, and must play 2 (whereas you can play only 1 in Texas Holdem)
Very unrealistic. How come he's still alive after talking back to a cop while being black?
Didn't you see the last panel - he's rich.
Wait y'all have cops that don't just start wailing on that guy for not moving? Cops in my city absolutely call backup and go squad deep when homeless people stand their ground.
Or when they dont. In my twenties I worked with unhoused populations, and someone who I was kind of point of contact for came inafter being missing for a couple weeks. She had really weird injuries. I recognized a few of them, not all, and I'm pretty familiar with broken bodies so that was surprising. Apparently she'd been kidnapped and tortured by cops for at least a week. I found out basically everyone has a few of those. The cops just do that. Theres no reason, There's no jusrification; they just take who they can.
And why should someone who's been thrown away like that give a shit about your comfort? I know when I was thrown away and ended up homeless, I lost a lot of respect for my environment and 'normal' people. I didn't get as bad as a lot of people.
Do you have a good reason for them to care? To care about something other than the next fix? Maybe a future, or a chat with a friend? No? Then maybe shut the hell up about how icky the actual living human beings you let get thrown away like trash make you feel when you have to walk through their fucking homes.
Who the heck is downvoting this? This is such a reflection of our society.
The cop in the comic, probably
They want free prison labor instead of helping people. All programs that gave people shelter and UBI had high success rates of getting people off the streets. If you give people resources and real help. They can be housed, it isn't unsolvable at all.
They want free prison labor instead of helping people.
They don't even really want that, at this point. Prisoners are increasingly geriatric, malnourished, and prone to mental illness, making them unreliable employees at their best and completely unprofitable more often than not.
All programs that gave people shelter and UBI had high success rates of getting people off the streets.
Ah, but you're forgetting the mystery third option. Pack undesirable people into cages during a plague or a heat wave and kill them from behind bars. This is significantly less expensive than either enslaving them at a loss or funding housing/UBI.
Open sufficient shelter and then ban camping.
Sorry, but I’ve worked in SF and Portland and getting yelled at while avoiding shit and syringes is not great.
Have to get rid of the "no drugs" rules then.
If it's a choice between heroin and a roof, then one of them they can do without. The roof isn't going to win.
I think the best solution would be daily free drugs in exchange for maintaining behavior in and around the shelter.
This is exactly it: The best treatment for opioid addiction is tapering them over time (though with the likes of fentanyl you want to downgrade to heroin) flanked by socio-psychological treatment. Crime suddenly plummets, when not having to fear for their dose and life addicts become functional, some of them might be too far gone to get the curve but it's still going to be cheaper overall to society because pharmaceutical-grade heroin is cheap as fuck and, as said, you're slashing crime. Heroin is not a drug that, in itself, makes you non-functioning, or would be particularly dangerous to health -- gotta monitor respiration while under but that's it, it doesn't kill your organs or something.
Meth and crack are quite a bit harder in the sense that tapering doesn't really work, but it's still not a good idea having addicts running around looking for copper to sell and dicks to suck. Similar issue as with alcohol, actually: Tapering doesn't work there, either, but if you can get people stabilised and away from binge drinking things suddenly look way better and possibilities open. That is, instead of getting up, noticing that there's no alcohol, then hustling for a bottle or two of liqueur to binge come evening, you get them on a regular glass of wine every few hours, enough to stave off withdrawal and suddenly they can actually develop clarity instead of being either restless or completely plastered.
Too bad most people won't listen to that argument and will stop listening 3-5 sentences in to shout "REEEEEEE FREE DRUGS FOR LAZY PEOPLE REEEEEEE" because they don't understand the underlying causes of crime and only care about punishing the effects, not preventing them.
I hate how much this country is infected with the protestant work ethic, because it's destroying us.
It's not a Protestant thing but individualism and competitiveness taken to American degrees. Ask an OG European Lutheran theologist and they'd say something along the lines of "As you hand a construction worker a shovel, so you hand an addict the necessary tools to do their work", and to the addict "as you work on yourself, god will see and smile on you". A work ethics can exist without getting societal atomisation, "fuck you got mine", and "the result of work is money, if it doesn't earn money it's not work" into play.
Sorry, I was referring to the socioeconomic theory about the protestant work ethic, which is part of the basis for taking stuff to "American degrees".
Which doesn't really have anything to do with protestantism, though.
To give an armchair diagnosis of the American condition from the psychological/theological POV, it's Calvinist focus on predetermination combined with not understanding the "lazy argument" as the Stoics call it: The universe is deterministic thus things are predetermined, so the Stoics say, and then detractors say "if it is predetermined whether I live or die, it doesn't matter whether I go to the doctor". "Bullshit", say the Stoics, "the proper argument goes like this: If it's ordained by the fates that you live, you will go to the doctor, if it is ordained that you die, you won't". If that argument now convinces you that you can "change" your fate by going to the doctor, then the fates always intended you to be swayed by it. But in any case: Actions matter. The fates won't bend physics to accommodate you not wanting to go to the doctor, their machinations are weaved into, indeed are, the very laws of the universe.
That is, as far as this kind of doctrine is concerned seeing an addict and saying "this is one who does no work, he's not one who will reach the heavens, he can be discarded" only means that you, yourself, are not doing the work demanded of a Christian, as you do not know whether even a simple kind word might not change their life for the better, and you were there, and you said nothing, and you will be judged by god for judging without qualification, and the addict will be judged by god, and god will see that the addict has done their part of the work, and they will go to heaven.
(Not Christian btw I just like to preach the real stuff to people who pretend they are)
Some say there is a missing panel where a acorn hits the cop and he unloads a full mag on the guy.
I love that the cat just joins the rats playing poker.
Background Details Rulz
And then in a few years, after making no efforts to create a space where homeless people can live the way they want or a path for them to get a job and a home, the enforcement of these laws will loosen up and you'll be back to stepping over people on the sidewalk.
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