Someone mentioned how homeless people are to americans what roma are to europeans and it stuck with me.
Both groups elicit frothing hatred in bourgeois hateful anglos.
Now imagine how homeless roma people are treated here in evropa
Again,
I don't know a ton about Roma, but it always seemed like they have their own culture and a mild support system with each other in some way. I feel like being American homeless has got to be lonely as fuck most of the time.
Really? I feel like the homeless people, at least in SF also try to support each other pretty well
I see them chatting and hanging out pretty often, and a lot of times when I'm talking to them while handing out stuff they'll tell me to head over to where their friends' tent is
for sure, i don't think there is 100% support in either group, but Roma have a history and culture to rally around which I think helps.
Roma are pretty cool and I've had the pleasure of calling some friends...but while they have a culture I've not seen the active hostility towards homeless people in the way even centrist Euros see the Roma.
Like talk to a balding French accountant and in the middle of a dinner he'll say he saw a Roma family playing football in a nearby courtyard and suggest someone set their house on fire while they were distracted. And not as a joke, as a suggestion for a fun evening activity that had to be gently dissuaded.
Like shit you associate with straight up Nazis or the pre civil rights kkk coming from people you know vote centre left.
It's not better or worse...but...there's an aggressiveness there and I think with homelessnes it's more "I don't want to see them and don't care how" instead of "I care how and it involves bullets"
Centrist Euros are just Nazis on a time delay
Anyway, Europe is a barbaric backwards “civilization” that is permanently stuck on the pogroms and genocide phase
The anti-Roma racism is so deeply ingrained in our society it's basically background radiation. Children are misbehaving? Scare them into obedience by threatening to "send them away to the [slur]s". Invite your normal looking centre left friends to the countryside for a barbecue? Casually get asked if the neighbors are colored. At family dinner with generic centrist parents? Random racist remark out of nowhere. Lunch break with white collar coworkers? Unprompted rant about how one of them saw a man who claimed to be [slur] say on the internet that he is okay with [slur] and this is why it's settled that it's okay to use [slur] instead of Roma and anything else is silly wokeness.
I worked with a bunch of Roma on the hop farm and they were honestly the best people I've ever worked with. There was a really strong culture of sharing food and Jan found me a banger of a VW Passat for only £500. Jan would disappear off into the woods every lunch and forage tons of cob nuts and apples and we'd all chow down together. Farm owner treated them like shit though which was fucking typical.
Many homeless folks band together and form community, though it's tough because it's often ripped apart by the state.
One good point is that Roma people share an ethnic identity, whereas the homeless in the US are the poorest and most in need across a whole set of ethnicities - though disproportionately the marginalized, as the function of marginalization is to make these violences, like being unhoused, tolerable to the rest of society. So Roma face a fundamentally racist and genocidal attitude directed towards them (a decent amount of their tradition of traveling is due to being forced out by various Euros - forced to adapt to that status quo).
Sure, [slur] support each other, but they're also generationally perpetuating their way of living
Wow what do you think culture is? You do know that eradicating culture is a form of genocide? Roma people keeping their culture is a good thing, not a bad thing. Being sedentary is not superior to being nomadic, and there's a huge bias against the Roma and other traditionally nomadic peoples from people with sedentary-supremacist mindsets.
Interesting…
I'll never forget the time a dude was busking with a trumpet. And he was good! La vie en rose and shit.
Then this old white dude came in the shop and told me "you know, if he put as much effort into getting a job as playing that horn..."
It's free fucking music! For everyone! Why you gotta drag down the mood?
Fuck them chuds
Over here it's traditional to invite Romani musicians for big celebrations like weddings. They come in blazing with the whole brass section, drums, singers, get literally covered with money, and after a few songs they fuck off to play somewhere else.
Here's a few songs if someone's interested
https://youtu.be/4vOQ_WUE-gY?si=h1QhRUx4fjYTktVO
I'll add to the list. Being a working class person from anywhere rural or the south. These are the powerful people(?) that are dictating our politics.
That's a good one. There are so many, it's hard to list them all
Your post manage to elevate hitler particles of at least one European so far.
Good post. Discussing these groups is the most common way to see the think mask of liberal tolerance slip off.
Also, I think the word is elicit with an e, rather than illicit which means illegal, ie "making money through illicit activities"
Noted fixed thanks.
I mean, I know Europeans who hate homeless too.
Definitely true but there's a significant difference. Here in the UK for example it's definitely frowned upon to hate the homeless, everyone understands they're unlucky people. Dickens probably helped a lot there but also socialist movements the country has had.
As a result of this we have aproximately 5000-6000 rough sleepers. The US on the other hand has 550,000+ despite being only 5x larger in population they have 110x more people sleeping in the streets.
In my experience there are similar attitudes to homeless in other western-european countries. Whereas when I've visited the US it's been as OP describes, very similar attitudes to how people discuss Roma here.
In my old town, a significant portion of the homeless population were homeless as a direct result of the municipal government closing a mental health facility in the early 00s. Besides the obvious moral implications of that, now you have the "upstanding" citizens reinforcing their prejudice of homelessness as a personal failing, something that happens to people because they deserve it or are wicked somehow. Not to even question the notion that a human's right to not starve, in a society which has the means to feed everyone, need not depend on whether you want to be their friend.
I live in Europe now and while poverty still exists in my area, it does not have the same character, because there are still vestiges of social programs that will, in the last resort, keep people from the absolute destitution that exists in all major US cities, even and especially the wealthy ones.
In South Africa it's foreigners. When people start going on about the Nigerians and Zimbabweans you know that you're about to hear the most xenophobic shit in your life.
I hate the word xenophobia, it's too Greek
P sure if you just meet a white person in South Africa you can get ready for the most xenophobic shit in your life
Not really, xenophobia is more a problem amongst black Africans. Your average white South African knows jack shit about regional differences and culture. At most, white South Africans will like foreigners that are in the country illegally or undocumented, because they'll work for cheap and harder and can be taken advantage of, because of the implication...
I get called idealistic and naive a lot (usually with harsher vocab than that though) for thinking that the homeless are victims in need of protection and support. I kind of appreciate it now though because it lets me keep that rebellious young person vibe into my 30s
As someone who is just grnuine friends with a lot of homeless people in my town and when I lived in a bigger place with a couple roommates who had been on the streets or in prison and we gave people a couch to crash on, the homeless are just like...people. A lot will fuck you over and tske advantage cause they've been taught fuck or be fucked and then were really really really fucked by our system. There can for sure be a give a mouse a cookie factor that you gotta set limits and keep em enforced (most of the people thst came through in my situation were also crack and or opiate addicts). Homelessness and desperation can make you need or feel you need to do some pretty shitty things same with addiction but those are circumstantial factors that need to be handled realistically and not treated as the overall quality of someone's character. You can judge a person but you can't judge desperation or addiction, doesn't mean you gotta take the shit that comes with it, but you gotta just tske that as part of being there to help people get fed and sheltered and warm and stuff
A few times in the past I've given rides to homeless guys or cash to them, sometimes just conversation even if that's what they're after. At the end of the day it's not like I'm doing volunteer work, but treating any homeless person who approaches me with the same respect I would anyone else has so far left me unharmed and even helped--I've had homeless people help me change tires, for instance. I get the feeling that even with the damage to your mind that the stress of homeless can do, people are still people and people like to feel useful and respected.
Yeah I've noticed I'm getting to a point where people 10 years younger than me will think of me as foolishly young and naive for expressing leftist stuff. It's kinda neat. I can only assume it will exaggerate more as I get older until I'm considered a old crank
How is that skin bag not banned yet?
I see the point but I would point out that homeless people in the USA aren't in general bound by any shared ethnic identity, geographic origin, culture, or body of languages that makes them an outgroup the way Roma in Europe are. I don't see them as perfectly analogous at all. There's even a world Romani congress whereas there is no such organization for homeless people. homeless people might tend to be from certain marginalized groups more often than not, but they aren't inherently from any one group. Hope I make sense. Not trying to minimize anyone's victimization here, just drawing a distinction.
The original comparison was limited to the frothing hatred that they elicit from Americans and Europeans respectively. Not saying the homeless are like the Roma of America or anything like that
gotcha, my bad
It was me who mentioned it in the thread on how to detect people with sus political views. And looking at this thread, holy shit did I hit the bullseye
I disagree. The assertion isn't that the two groups are the same. It's the mainstream desire to kill them that's the same. Probably, allegedly, maybe...I think so.
