Yeah, I see. England gets to enslave millions, displace even more through colonization, and reap the benefits to build a mostly functioning society and gets to go without criticism.
Your gaslighting is exhausting
Yes. It’s called compartmentalizing. It means that not every conversation about every topic is overtaken by conversations about other topics.
As someone who moved away from England 15 years ago and just got citizenship in a different country so I never have to live in the country again, I agree with you: fuck England. I could list all the things I hate about it and all the reasons why I want to live in Germany instead.
But very few of those reasons have much relation on the particular issues pertinent to America, as broadly outlined in the first post in this thread.
The conversations about what ails the UK at the moment is different conversation. It’s okay for it to be a different conversation!
Sorry. But I’d just made three posts explicitly outlining the numbers I was taking about, and was asked to do so again. That’s tiring too.
Compartmentalizing is toxic in politics. It implies that certain issues are not related when everything in the world is related. Intersectionality is here whether you want it or not.
You’re not convincing me of anything I don’t already know. Of course it is all connected! But not every conversation about one thing in politics has to become the same conversation every time!
That was the question I was answering!
“Is this the same conversation?”
“No, its a different conversation.”
Not “is the entire world connected through its shared history?” Because then the answer is yes.
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But why are you so hostile to having this conversation?
What conversation?
I’m not trying to be snarky. What conversation do you want?
As far as I know, I’m trying to point out to someone in the UK that the conversation and considerations about gun control and gun violence in the UK are different to those in America.
And that the conversations about homelessness in LA, and the solutions to those problems, are different than those in the UK.
If you want another conversation, you’ve got to say what that conversation is. It can’t be “the problems of homelessness in the UK and Los Angeles are the same” because that is the opposite of what I was trying to communicate with Dazzle, and you need something to back that up.
The conversation I’m trying to have is that countries shouldn’t get a pass just because they’re not America.
Okay. Sure. But what is the title of this thread? It’s a thread about uniquely American problems.
The thread called “UK political clusterfuck” isn’t overrun by talk about American partisan politics.
You coming after me for being off topic when you’re the one who necro’d the Feminism thread to talk about Atheism? Rich.
If I remember correctly, that was pretty relevant. Sorry if it missed the mark though.
Okay, let’s have the conversation.
Let’s start with this fundamental question, because it’s on this which I base all I have to say about this kind of topic:
With a specific problem or issue, is it possible that there a scale of the problem, that when it passes a certain point, the quality of the problem changes?
So if there is always a qualitative connection between two instances of an issue, are they always directly relevant to each other, or is there a point at which the scale difference between the two becomes a larger differentiator than their common quality?
Yes, but you never proved that, nationally, America has a worse homelessness problem than the UK, only locally to California – which does have a homelessness problem unparalleled to the UK.
I just checked the Feminism thread, and the original linked article was:
A Prominent Blogger Spoke Out About Sexism in her Skeptic Community.
When I necro’d the thread, I included the line: “This might not be the best thread for it, but this is where we discussed previous atheism/social justice crossover material in the past.”
So, a bad call on my part. I guess that there was no thread on the forum called “the atheist movement” is directly addressed in that article.
Unsurprisingly, that article comes to my mind all the time when thinking about these “everything is connected to everything” moments.
The meta-framing that every situation can be examined from the different frameworks of “what is the original sin?” is super interesting.
Like, in the War on Cars thread, every problem in the world is seen through the lens of car culture. If we just removed the cars, everything would be better!
In the partisan politics thread, everything can be solved by removing the opposing party, or healing the rift between two sides. Sort out gerrymandering and it’ll all be good!
If we had a thread for colonialism, we could have the same conversation about all the ills in the world could be solved if we just solved that one thing.
To be clear, I like this wide variety of lenses to view the problems of the world. If I put on my War on Car hat on, it reveals so many things that fade into the background if I had my other hats on.
And it is definitely beyond your power to make threads 
From the start, I was specifically using LA as a stand-out example.
I think I’ve been pretty clear I was talking mostly about the west coast of America. I’ve never made any claims that America is homogeneous in regards to homelessness.
My first trips to America were all to New York City/State. The homeless population wasn’t so apparent there. I didn’t notice it.
But America has places where the weather is a lot more conducive to being homeless. The homelessness is going to be a bigger problem where the weather is better.
To connect this with the UK, I can imagine there being a time when, due to climate change, it will be as “comfortable” (totally not the right word!) to be homeless in Edinburgh on January 10th as it is in LA on January 10th. At the moment that can’t be true. Not yet.
That’s not really a good conclusion to draw from your data, which you would know if you’d just read that HUD report I linked to here:
To paraphrase you, repetition is tiring.
But you keep trying to compare different numbers. In the same sentence you link to bith a newspaper article about London with a 100 page PDF about all of America.
How do you want me to respond to that?
Someone else posted about how homelessness in the USA, from a federal point of view, is gauges by something literally called a Point Of Time survey, and that it is done in January. And that it is in the best interest of cities to show they are doing well with reducing homelessness, because then they get more funding.
And that article you shared is measuring everyone who slept rough for a single night, at any point in an entire year.
With these different sources of numbers, it’s hard to compare the situation on a one-to-one basis.
However, and this is my entire point, there reaches a scale where the quality of a problem changes. In LA, and with my experience in SF and the west coast, it seems that the scale of homelessness means it is a fundamentally different issue than it is in the UK generally or London specifically.
You can disagree with that if you want. Please tell me how I’m wrong! But more and more numbers counting different things, and arrived at by different measures, and recorded with different motivations, is too tricky to parse.
For clarity, my first answer to Dazzle wasn’t about homelessness per se. It was based more on this passage from the article I posted in the opening of this thread.
“ consider another example: the “nomadic retirees”. They live in their cars. They go from place to place, season after season, chasing whatever low-wage work they can find — spring, an Amazon warehouse, Christmas, Walmart.
Now, you might say — “well, poor people have always chased seasonal work!” But that is not really the point: absolute powerlessness and complete indignity is. In no other country I can see do retirees who should have been able to save up enough to live on now living in their cars in order to find work just to go on eating before they die — not even in desperately poor ones, where at least families live together, share resources, and care for one another. This is another pathology of collapse that is unique to America — utter powerlessness to live with dignity. Numbers don’t capture it — but comparisons paint a bleak picture.”
https://eand.co/why-were-underestimating-american-collapse-be04d9e55235
Now, if this is becoming the case within the UK too, then I think including how the symptoms of the American Collapse are also being seen there is great.
At the moment, I don’t see that quite being the case. But I might be wrong! Dazzle lives in London, and I live in Berlin.