From: hjkhjkhd@hhhh.com   
      
   "Martha Bridegam"  wrote in message   
   news:_HK3i.21299$YL5.17267@newssvr29.news.prodigy.net...   
   > ROBBIE wrote:   
   >   
   >> ...I am not an addict. Addicts cannot Go Without. I am an abuser,   
   >> different matter entirely.   
   >>   
   >> But I find it fascinating that you simply don;t want to look at the   
   >> nuances of personal behaviour. Yet surely this is a way of getting beyond   
   >> vagaries. You like to look at the shelter system with a macro lens but   
   >> you smear vaseline all over it when it comes to the people who use it.   
   >> Why?   
   >>   
   >   
   > It's not necessary to approve of people morally to treat them as human   
   > beings.   
      
   So your crowning intellectual achievement is one-eyed amorality. Bully for   
   you!   
      
      
    The impulse to judge between the deserving and undeserving is   
   > strongest in people who are overanxious to prove they belong on the   
   > wielder's end of the stick.   
   >   
      
   By your own logic, the impulse not to judge between the deserving and the   
   undeserving is strongest in people who are overanxious to rid themselves of   
   a misplaced guilt. Of course, if you hadn't been middle-class/harvard, you   
   wouldn't be helping any of them in the first place.   
      
   I've nothing against the homeless - i've helped enough of them and talked to   
   them as well - except when they want to abuse me and shout in my ear when   
   I'm trying to get to work and they're lying in the street drunk. I don't   
   mind some money being spent on giving them shelter (though you should   
   understand that I'm working my arse off in London and can barely afford a   
   bedsit, and nobody's piping up on behalf of the deserving worker that finds   
   himself outside the big unionized 'key worker' housing schemes) but I   
   wouldn't want to live next door to it and I would argue that people should   
   be moved on from it if they're just going to carry on as they were being a   
   public nuisance. Most liberal/left legislators would be all for it, but   
   would contrive to live far from such a building. You, mad with a thirst for   
   righteousness, wouldn't be happy unless you lived on top of it (sorry, in a   
   bunker underneath), but you cannot be surprised if the orderly and law   
   abiding want to avoid the company of sociopaths.   
      
      
      
   > Which brings up one of my earlier questions: since the denial of shelter   
   > is so widely considered a therapeutic incentive to treatment for   
   > addiction, why not evict all housed people who have untreated addictions   
   > until they comply with treatment?   
      
   Because their behaviour hasn't landed them in the streets, where, you surely   
   agree, it becomes a public problem. You won't accept this because, as we;ve   
   said, you go to some lengths to avoid thinking about how people end on the   
   street in the first place. Your insatiable thirst for righteousness freezes   
   an intellect which otherwise seems to be very active.   
      
   If sleeping in doorways is such a   
   > benefit to the poor, why should it be denied to everyone else?   
   >   
   > /M   
      
   'Inside the head of every revolutionary there is a policeman.'   
      
   You remind me of Hitchens Minor, who accused me in an email row about   
   censoring the word nigger - he wanted it censored from old films on TV - of   
   wanting to *insert* swear words in the works of authors who didn't use them.   
   It's funny how mad lefties and mad lefties who've swung completely to the   
   opposite, have the same wonky hysterical logic.   
      
   ROBBIE   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)