MeowZedong

Why do you think people are living this way? Do you think it's personal failure or maybe desperation? Where else do they have to go? If you tear down the buildings but don't address the root problem, do you think they will just stop existing or will they be forced to find a new spot to live? Were these places always this way? What would you like me to call them?

Please continue making assumptions about my personal life and deriding me for my choice of words rather than contributing something useful. I try to meet people where they are at, which means speaking to what they know. In this case, you seem to know the symptom, but not the cause.

I think you missed the point of the meme and then argued about a common, tangentially related topic, which made it sound like a strawman argument. Because you seem to be more genuinely confused as to my response than arguing in bad faith, I'll drop it. Those types of dismissive comments are meant for people arguing in bad faith.

The image is not attacking urban sprawl, it's attacking the very mindset that you displayed in your comment: "why do I have to choose between these two things? I hate living in apartments, so why would you force me to do this?"

The meme is showing two different approaches to dealing with a massive housing crisis where many people did not have access to housing. In the first image, we see how the USSR dealt with it: they needed more houses for people, so they forced families with homes to share with those without until new homes had been built. The government subsidized the construction and focused on building economical housing that functionally fixed the problem, but at the expense of luxury and some comfort. Would people have liked more space? Yes. Was it reasonable to accommodate that want before the needs of people without housing? No.

The lower image is showing how the US has handled a massive housing crisis...it hasn't. If someone can't manage to find and/or afford to house themselves, they choose to force those people to live on the streets. The thought process is more individual focused rather than community focused as in the top image. "Why should the people who have houses be inconvenienced by those who do not?" This assumes that those without have some type of moral or personal failure that justifies them having nowhere to live rather than the situation being a result of a system that does not prioritize human needs. It rests on the callous assumption that people do not deserve a place to live, but they instead must earn a place to live.

As to your argument, I don't think you offered a third option so much as a complaint about the state of the things. To be honest, I agree with your complaint. Assuming the context of your comment was focused on the US, there is plenty of space for people to live in larger homes and there isn't some false dichotomy where we only have the options of urban sprawl or dense apartments. The problem with how you approached the problem is that without further analysis of why a housing crisis exists and how we can eliminate the source of the problem, saying "just build more medium-density housing" equates to no more than a complaint.

You cannot fix a problem unless you address the root of the problem. Pushing the homeless out of sight does not fix the problem. Much of the problem is caused by our economic and political systems, but there is also the influence of the cultural aspect in how we think about the problem and how we think about people (individualistic vs collective focus). When you focus on yourself and how the problem affects you, it is often at the expense of other people. For the people this hurts and the people cognizant of the cultural influence, seeing individualist-focused complaints really rubs them the wrong way.

Nonono, it's unreasonable for taxes to go toward helping the poor. They live on the street and starve by their own choice. No one wants to pay for those wretched people!

Where are the police when you need them to quickly usher the inconvenient truth of my selfish lifestyle out of my sight?

The top is meant to represent the socialist solution to homelessness. These are socialist block apartments built to ensure that everyone had housing because homelessness was a huge problem. They were functional, but because they were built to functionally address a need quickly, they weren't large or luxurious. They were built to last and the rent levels were controlled at a low rate if the people didn't outright own the place themselves.

The bottom picture is the liberal solution to homelessness. Apartments suck, fuck the homeless, jack up the rent prices. The convenience of the few is prioritized over the needs of the many.

Funny how someone who is mentally 12 could put this together, but you couldn't be bothered.

Fucking tell me about it. The best part is how they try to justify how they are only focused on themselves by shit like calling apartments "inhumane." JFC, living in an apartment is not inhumane. Living on the street is inhumane.

Nobody is saying this stupid strawman you are arguing! If the kitchen is on fire and the trashcan is full, what do you do first? Do you take out the trash first because you can't live in such a wretched state?

Your vile passion is just thinly veiled narcissism. You can get your just desserts after we take care of major societal problems affecting the wider community. POOR YOU.

You make dense housing like these apartments because it is the most practical way to house everybody quickly. Once you take care of the immediate problem, homelessness, you can continue to expand and build nicer, bigger housing for everyone.

What's more important, that we have enough resources to house everyone, but there are still people forced to live on the streets or the fact that you don't like the inconvenience of living in an apartment because it's too small for you even in the short term? Guess that makes you one of the greedy few that can't see past their own problems to think of their community.

Fuck you doubly.

Imperialism is a result of capitalism...

When the resources of your home country are insufficient to feed the need for constant growth of profits, the resources of other people begin to look attractive. It's just a matter of convincing your people that it's worth it to go take those other people's resources. Its easier to convince your people to exploit other people if you have dehumanized the other people, so you revert to racism and other tactics of making the others look like barbarians. Then you go make colonies and suppress the native population while exploiting them for labor and resources.

Fascism is imperialism turned inward...

Either the flow of resources from your colonies are insufficient to feed your need for the continual growth of profits or you don't have the means to colonize far away lands, so the resources of countries closer to home begin looking very attractive. Its easier to suppress people at home first, so you turn that imperialist oppression on for a portion of your population at home, exploiting them more than other parts of your population. This doesn't satisfy your needs for more resources for long, so you continue to exploit your own people more and expand the definition of who gets to suffer the imperialist oppression.

When your population can no longer satisfy your needs for continued growth of profits, you turn that imperialism on countries nearby. This process is why people say fascism is imperialism turned inward.

More food for thought...

Some argue this process is why Hitler and the Third Reich are looked on as the ultimate evil. The Nazis took imperialist oppression, a tool that every European country had historically only used on people in far away lands where the culture and the way the people looked was strange to the people at home and they turned that imperialist oppression on the white populations of Europe. Europeans finally began to experience the horrors they had been inflicting on the rest of the world for centuries.

Everything is political. This is why human rights get attacked by politicians.

The government shutting down a strike only worked because the union capitulated. It worked because when the government said no, they listened.

The rail workers could have held a strike anyway, legal consequences be damned. The government would likely escalate in retaliation: strikers would be jailed and potentially forced back into that labor while incarcerated. Strikers could then give in to the government's demands or further escalate on their own end. This could take the form of sabotage, armed conflict, or other methods of dissent. This is the history of labor struggles and it has often been a bloody history.

At the end of the day, it becomes a matter of how desperate each group is. If the risk posed by the government retaliating is greater than your desperation to improve conditions, then workers are more likely to back down. This doesn't address the consciousness of the workers though. They hold the true source of power (labor) in this neverending struggle and have the most to gain by taking action to exert that power over those who wish to exploit them.

Part of the problem is that taking revolutionary action isn't easy and it's much more comfortable to capitulate anywhere along the road to changing these dynamics.

What is to be done? Educate yourself and those around you. Organize yourselves against your oppressors and prepare for the fight ahead. Take action and persevere by supporting one another in this struggle.

The only thing that authority respects is a greater authority. The ones in power maintain their authority because we allow them to maintain that authority. Nothing happens without the labor of the masses and when they act in solidarity, nothing has the power to stop them.

It's a "thin blue line" flag, meant as support for the police.

Yeah and I'm sure that's the end of the story. There's no additional context to this story. Times and the problems faces by the government on that side of the wall were incredibly simple and there definitely wasn't any collusion on the other side of the wall to try to drive people to leave.

The logical first step to brain drain is definitely to build a wall. those damn commies just didn't understand how to use logic!