To glimpse the future of homelessness policy in the age of President Trump, consider 16 acres of scrubby pasture on the outskirts of Salt Lake City where the state plans to place as many as 1,300 homeless people in what supporters call a services campus and critics deem a detention camp.
State planners say the site, announced last month after a secretive search, will treat addiction and mental illness and provide a humane alternative to the streets, where afflictions often go untreated and people die at alarming rates.
They also vow stern measures to move homeless people to the remote site and force many of them to undergo treatment, reflecting a nationwide push by some conservatives for a new approach to homelessness, one embraced and promoted by Mr. Trump.
With outdoor sleeping banned, removal to the edge of town may become the only way some homeless Utahns can avoid jail. Planners say the facility will also hold hundreds of mentally ill homeless people under court-ordered civil commitment and the effort will include an “accountability center” for those with addictions.
“An accountability center is involuntary, OK — you’re not coming in and out,” Randy Shumway, chairman of the state Homeless Services Board, said in an interview. Utah will end a harmful “culture of permissiveness,” he said, and guide homeless people “towards human thriving.”
I’m 54, never in my wildest dreams did I think we would become the Nazis. And it’s not like I’m ignorant of history, yet I guess I was. “Can’t happen here.” :(
This recommendation is a few years late, but consider reading Legends of the Galactic Heroes. It tells the tale of a benevolent dictator named Reinhard who conquers his own corrupt autocracy before then consolidating a corrupt democracy into his empire. At every step the dictator is hindered by a pro-democracy historian-strategist named Yang.
Long story short, democracy mostly fails, but it’s that little bit of not-failure that manages to scrap on that I find most interesting.
It’s been painful to read about people throwing their freedoms away simply because they get tired of thinking about politics any more complicated than “Strong man king. We trust strong man’s family.”. Yang knows that, historically, democracies have potential to consistently appoint more talented leaders because autocracies centralize power around bloodline dynasties (often proactively via genocide and eugenics), reducing the pool from which candidate leaders may be selected. However, the MAGA movement in the US makes the description of how this fictional democracy collapsed feel much more relatable. (See my notes)
Top anime soap space opera.
It also didn’t help the leader of the democracy hated his people which i thought was crazy till now.