“Relaxin’ at Camarillo.”

Perhaps named in honour of the (lovely) Muggsy Spanier track “Relaxing at the Touro” which was also a reference to a spell in hospital.

People who are danger to society need to be forcibly removed and separated from the rest of us. Whether that’s a funny farm or a maximum security prison or something in between is for the justice system to determine. I don’t really care–as long as I don’t have deal with them on the street, or in public places.

Though I’m for small government, I favor of spending any amount of money to build the facilities necessary to get them ALL off the street–this is actually a legitimate use of government funds.

My new neighbors down the street loved living in the center of the city but finally moved out due to the plague of homelessness. I tell my kids that mentally ill people on the street used to be rare. They find that hard to believe. A new generation will have to reinvent the wheel.

Insane asylums had their problems, undoubtedly but they served a valuable purpose. Same with Sanatoriums. There’s something to be said for large pieces of property that can be repurposed as needed to contain mentally unfit and infectious people. Both were pieces of a public heath infrastructure that were deemed outdated and too expensive to maintain.

Now they’re office parks and residential developments and we’re all worse off except for the politicians and developers.

Insane asylums were a huge expense for states. At one point (the 1950s IIRC) a whopping one third of all hospital beds were in asylums. So when the lib do gooders got SCOTUS to agree that mental illness was just a lifestyle choice and that these people would be just fine picking up their lithium at community centers, states were all in STAT.

First, LOL at the Charlie Parker title! I’m surprised you didn’t mention One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I don’t know the history of the making of it, but I’ve read that it was part of that movement, not just a movie. (Not the first of movies with agendas by any means.) Of course, Jack Nicholson is a sympathetic character, and it makes you think “yeah, weirdos are A-OK. We should let them all out, especially that big Indian BB player. He’s alright!”

James Taylor spent a short while at a mental hospital in Boston, and I wonder if it was that one in Mattapan. His great song Walk on Down a Country Road had something to do with it..

As I related before, I was in one of the State Hospitals before….

… Wait! I know you figured that, but no, I mean I was doing some surveying type work, and it was in my area. I was inside there for a day or two. One patient sold me one of those Tandy leather kit-made wallets for a buck. It wasn’t a quality job, I gotta say, but maybe some of that China work could come back here …

Back to your main point, once the buildings got run down, and nobody wanted to pay for new stuff, I guess it was a variant of privatize the profits, socialize the losses, as illegal alien labor is. In this case, it’s shed all the costs for the State, socialize the losses among the people.

Pure, cheap, and de facto legal methamphetamine is greatly increasing the population of violent paranoid lunatics. Another gift from our libertarian friends.

You completely strawmanned the article. Absolutely shameful behavior but unsurprising coming from a shameless person.

The “do gooders” have a hell of a lot to answer for in multiple arenas.

Considering the authoritarian turn our government has taken of late, I’m not sure I want to give it the power to forcibly institutionalize the “insane”.

“Building insane asylums was seen for a century as a major step forward. But eventually the 19th Century buildings on the East Coast wore out. Rather than upgrade them or replace them with steel and glass buildings in the modern style,”

Was the issue real estate values? The original 1900s idea was to shift unsightly unruly, mostly, men from city centers (near rail stations and ports) to rural institutional buildings. Then some time in the 1960s highway based transportation meant those rural areas could be profitably developed, so the unsightly unruly, mostly, men were institutionalized in smaller buildings in the now degrading city centers. But then, perhaps due to technological changes in construction, center city real estate got valuable again. In the 70s New York State, Upstate NY, then home to then unstoppable IBM, Xerox, Kodak, Sperry-Rand-Univac, Westinghouse, GE, and others was able to bail out the then bankrupt New York City. But then things changed again. Maybe people noticed that New York City was a collection of islands overlooking the ocean while Upstate NY was freezing cold in winter. Gov Cuomo, the elder, went on a rural prison building spree, while IBM, Xerox, Kodak, Sperry-Rand-Univac, Westinghouse, GE entered the pantheon of rustbelt industries. But now we are in a possible transition from Cuomo the Elder’s rural jails to something else?

Once upon a time in Upstate NY:
How Steinmetz became the “Wizard of Schenectady”

In fairness to the old time progressives, at least they sort of realized that they needed institutions other than jail.

Something tells me Malcolm Gladwell has never known many working class Italians. Not very many are or were involved in organized crime. The Italians were never as disorderly as the Irish who have the dubious honor of having a police vehicle named after them, the “Paddy Wagon”.

The rise from poverty has more to to with strong families, packed churches, tight communities and very important- virtually no ‘baby daddies.”

Conversely, Malcolm explained, the reason Philadelphia Italians eventually rose above poverty and organized crime was because there were fewer police around back in their day.

A recent study of which countries provide the best mental health care listed the factors it considered. The first two were hours devoted to care, and leisure. Then came green spaces. Next was climate. 26 countries listed, US does not make the list.

https://www.william-russell.com/blog/countries-best-mental-healthcare/

l

Let’s hear from those happy lands always chiding us about our school shootings– just what do they do with their own “nutters”? I bet it’s a little stricter than us. Just as homelessness is illegal.

In case anyone was wondering about cratering birthrate in the West, this woman’s attitude and experience before the “gender reveal” that upended her life explains a lot:

‘I thought my boyfriend of 10 years was going to propose – then he told me he was trans’

Ten years? Why even ten months? Huge swaths of our population belong in

a serene location in a superb climate

…with trees and flowers and chirping birds and basket weavers who twiddle their thumbs and toes…

Dr. Sharfstein,

Ok… Funny, there’s always some *stein doctor somewhere in those issues.

Anyway, nothing against humane treatment for those poor people, but why not in an asylum far away from large towns? It sure beats having them roaming around, homeless, smearing feces around or pushing people onto the subway tracks.

By the way, I have known people with serious problems (schizophrenia) and they had to be interned for their own good for a certain period of time. So even they know it may be needed.

Of course, legalizing marijuana, meth, heroin, etc, doesn’t really help…

In a related story, it turns out New York is still practicing stop-and-frisk after all. Sort of.

https://mol.im/a/11297977

Dr. Steven Sharfstein

When you fall you hit dirt; when you rise up
You rise toward the sky, since the sky’s up.
They say Jews are smart;
Clever brain, foolish heart.
The Jewish heart never will wise up.

… it was decided by progressive opinion over the course of the 1960s that the problem was not that some percentage of the population would always be dangerous crazy men but that society was trying to corral the dangerous crazy men.

Minoritarianism.

I’m a broken record, but it’s true. That’s the root of 90% of our problems. And basically 100% of the “replace the white people!” drumbeat that is killing us.

Advocates of a community-based approach argued that even the sickest psychiatric patients deserved to live in or near their own communities, that they should be cared for in the least restrictive settings possible …

Note the logic. The–nutty, troublesome–minority deserves …. access to the “their communities”. The communities belong to them! The interests of the majority–i.e. the normal productive people who get up every morning, work and take care of their children, the people who actually make the nation function and continue–do not matter.

This whole idea that minorities matter, that their interests trump the majority’s interest–is a cancer. No, for any nation, civilization to survive its people, norms, culture are what must survive and reproduce–math. Minoritarianism as an ideology, has to go if Western civilization, Western people are to survive.

‘I thought my boyfriend of 10 years was going to propose – then he told me he was trans’

To be fair to the girlfriend, it appears that the boyfriend in question did not cut off his penis or put on fake boobs (yet). He just said he might be considering “transitioning”. Which doesn’t make him less insane, nor his girlfriend for putting out with him for 10 years, but still. When society pushes crazy ideas onto people, don’t wonder why the number of actual crazy people starts to skyrocket.

Covid policies and now transgender policies will be causing a huge amount of long-term mental and psychological issues for some time.

They shouldn’t be allowed to procreate, and they shouldn’t be allowed to own animals.

Lefty types always say “Nazi! Why shouldn’t they have as many kids as they want!”

I ask if that’s remotely fair to the kids. Trying to grow up with every imaginable disadvantage? They scream “Nazi Nazi Nazi!”

………………

Comic relief:

the reformer Dorothea Dix begged health officials to create asylums where those patients could be treated more humanely.

Little known fact: she gave all her kids names starting with the letter D, just like herself. Worked out fine til they got to her second son, Donald K. Dix..

Cat Stevens did his best work after being released from a sanitorium, though in his case it was for tuberculosis, not madness.

The societal cost of not keeping people in asylums is huge. Being forced to move out to live where it’s safe has its own costs inflicted on the average person, and interferes with their ability to deploy their capital so they can live in a cheap area.

This means they’re forced to take on extra living expenses, which results in having to marry later or not at all because the cost of forming a family is too high.

Letting crazies roam the streets and attack people is hideously expensive for a society, far more so than keeping crazies in asylums.

My mother, who suffered from acute paranoia (probably brought on by onset menopause), was hospitalized for a total of a year. They managed to treat the symptoms with medication but she was never really the same after that. Nevertheless, it was better that she had been there rather than at home where she would have been a danger to herself and others. But that was then, this is now–and “now” it’s seemingly the patients who are calling the shots.

Given that mental asylums are basically non-existent now, I’m not sure how much harder they can be shut down.

The left got their way on this, as on everything else, and now they’re not happy with the result.

Who could have foreseen that? Well, the people the left works to silence every day, for one.

The insane are just another weapon to be used against normal white Americans.

Can’t believe you could bring up this topic without mentioning
Thomas Szasz and The Myth of Mental Illness.

Anyone who lives in a decent sized city cannot help but notice the huge increase in on-the-streets homeless people over the last 10 years or so. For what it’s worth, I have had a number of conversations with people left of center who are just as frustrated as everyone else and wondering why there is no talk about bringing back mental institutions to deal with the problem. Maybe the Overton window on this is starting to be dragged back to normalcy a bit.

Considering the authoritarian turn our government has taken of late, I’m not sure I want to give it the power to forcibly institutionalize the “insane”.

Correct. Basically nothing works until normal people have control of their government again.

But once you have that, I do not think it is too hard to square this up, without having the police state slapping dissidents in the “hospital”.

The basic idea is simply the right of communities to enforce their norms.

— Homeless people? “You do not have the right to sleep/camp/hangout/do drugs here.

It’s pretty easy to setup “homeless reservations” where people can pitch their tents and do whatever. And provide the job/housing help for people who are actually interested to get back on their feet. But any community can say “no”, you do not get to be here.

— Drugs? “You do not have the right to do drugs here.

The libertarian “my body” folks can go do their drugs in the druggie reservation. But they do not have the right to bring drugs–or their drugged up selves–into communities that do not want them and those communities can be extremely harsh in dealing with folks who do. (I don’t have any problem with hanging the dude who tries to peddle meth, much less fentanyl–like our dear departed St. George.) Maybe you simply have a separate “legalized drugs” nation for the people who think that’s a great idea.

Again separation. A community can only really have one set of public norms. And I believe normal productive people–who make the community function, prosper–are the people who get to set those norms, and run the community in their own interests. People who don’t like it can get the hell out. The community of normal people has the inherent natural right to toss them out.

The lights didn’t always work

A damning indictment if ever there was one.

What choice was there–but–to let the violent crazies roam free?

Too bad Charlie Parker he didn’t live long enough to be “rehabilitated” at Synanon. Synanon appeared to have helped Joe Pass and Art Pepper.

Both continued to perform for decades after their stays at Synanon and Art Pepper produced a biography, “Straight Life,” that is a compelling read into the mind of a junkie.

Aside: I lived 2.5 miles from Boston State Hospital in the 60s. There were definitely violent crazies roaming our neighborhood.

Maybe they like having streets full of dangerous people, along with lots of poverty and ugly art. Because our Fake Elites measure their status by distance from other Americans (they live in nice White, gated areas while most other communities are destroyed by forced federal social engineering).

How many trillions were spent on White Flight? How many thousands of lives lost? How many millions suffered despair and misery from having their neighborhoods destroyed?

Fire and Rain too, yes. I should have mentioned it. Walk on Down a Country Road is said to be about the road to that asylum he stayed at. It must have left a big impression on him, or it gave him more quiet time to write, haha.

Indeed, more deep thoughts in your mind can mean more depression.

Miss Goffman wrote:

Once a man fears that he will be taken by the police, it is precisely a stable and public daily routine of work and family life…that allows the police to locate him…. A man in legal jeopardy finds that his efforts to stay out of prison are aligned not with upstanding, respectable action but with being a shady and distrustful character.

Maybe America, the West doesn’t really need these high-IQ genius insights–and diktats–from the Goffmans?

The unspeakable problem here is that the cause of the horribleness of the asylums is the character and behavior of the inmates.

Given that mental asylums are basically non-existent now, I’m not sure how much harder they can be shut down.

TPTB want disorder at home and abroad just like the devil whom they serve. As they refuse to prosecute and/or release criminals here at home they sow instability abroad (like the stirring up of trouble in Kashmir as we speak).

I favor of spending any amount of money to build the facilities necessary to get them ALL off the street–this is actually a legitimate use of government funds.

That may be legitimate, but it might get expensive. Art Deco posted a figure from somewhere of $80 billion to house the current 600,000 homeless. I can tell you from existing programs that the real figure will be at least double that. Then of course when the government starts writing 12-figure checks, fresh clients will magically emerge, the service providers will lobby to expand the programs in scope and clientele, and evil globalists will import foreign derelicts to fill the “demand”. It will be amazing if the metastasizing programs don’t reach a 13-digit budget. (For scale, the Federal budget is a 13-digit number. The US GDP is a 14-digit number.)

Nevertheless, if the Feds are just gonna write 12-digit checks to kill people in southeast Europe anyway, I would prefer that they would spend that to help our street people at home instead. By Art Deco’s original number, the Feds could already have solved homelessness in 2022 with the money they are currently using to start a nuclear war, but I guess that’s more important to them. Oh well, that’s what it means to be in “our democracy” with “our values”.

The big problem with any treatment for severe mental illness is similar (but not maybe not ethically similar) to the problem with “sane” very violent people. We don’t get better, and by and large, we are more trouble than we are worth.

With exceptions (like bipolar women) we don’t get better! Being smart does not help. Here’s an analogy. One time as a kid I was having a terrible nightmare. Something strange happened, and I realized, “hey, this is a dream! I can just wake up.” Problem was, there was no way for dream-me to wake up real-me. Mental illness is like that. There’s no way out.

If crazy people could reason their way out of it, they wouldn’t be crazy!

I think we need different terms for depressed or highly anxious people, dysfunctional people, and violent people regardless of “sanity.” For the last category, I propose “deranged.”

Though I’m for small government, I favor of spending any amount of money to build the facilities necessary to get them ALL off the street–this is actually a legitimate use of government funds.

But you don’t just need to build the facilities, you need to staff them with well trained and compassionate employees, and you need to provide them with medical and dental care and keep them entertained, and give them constructive things to do, and police the facility so it is not full of illegal drugs. And you need to provide those worthy employees with pensions.

Everybody is for small government except for the things that they personally want, like a strong military, or interstate highways, or safe drinking water, or sewerage, or education, or control of infectious diseases, or safe drugs, or effective policing, or speed limits, or clean rivers and oceans with healthy fish, or contraception for undesirables, or abortions, or lack of abortions, or immigration control. Or locking up the mentally ill

Behind every small government conservative lurks a communist commissar.

If anyone was really sincere about small government, they would have to acknowledge that their endpoint would be something like the Wild West giving all the power to local warlords.

The big hit “They’re coming to take me away” was probably the theme song of the movement…

Well, we could shut the destructive-when-it’s-not-just-useless Education Department ($88B). Then we can add in all the money used for Section 8 housing. Then we can shut the Dept of Labor ($100B).

That would be a good start for funding a new wave of mental institutions. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg in what funding can be made available by shutting destructive and stupid agencies.

Yes we do.

You ok, grandpa? I’m here if you need to talk.

I guess it was a variant of privatize the profits, socialize the losses, as illegal alien labor is. In this case, it’s shed all the costs for the State, socialize the losses among the people.

Wow, you have posted something that is true. Well done!

By maintaining mental patients in “the community” the state has performed an immense service that benefits slumlords and owners of rundown motels on US highways that have long since been bypassed by interstate highways.

Here former mental patients who are capable of avoiding being arrested can live on Medicare (federal) disability checks and while away the hours watching TV, and smoking cigarettes and throwing the toxic butts on the ground. They can also supplement their incomes with drug dealing and prostitution, thus providing a benefit to the economy.

At the same time they are getting a lifelong supply of psychoactive drugs, which benefits big pharma, some of which can be shared with friends or retailed on for additional income. For example, a hard-earned diagnosis of attention deficit disorder can be parlayed into a useful supply of always popular amphetamines.

Hard-headed Gentile
Soft-hearted Jew
SHJ’s been winning for at least since World War Two

I’m a frumpy Geordie horsefaced trout
Here’s my fetlock
Here’s my snout

When the nice Mr Goldberg
Pulls my tail
The pc nonsense all pours out

The left got their way on this, as on everything else, and now they’re not happy with the result.

The Supreme Court carries a lot of the responsibility for the shutting down of the mental asylums, by imposing conditions that made them economically inoperable.

I guess that was a liberal Supreme Court.

Maybe the new back-to-the-enlightenment Supreme Court can figure out what the prophets Washington and Jefferson really intended the USA to look like 150 years after the abolition of slavery.

Another gift from our libertarian friends.

If you imagine that “libertarian friends” have been in control of any state government, ever, then the man in the picture is not the only one who’s delusional. Even granting the governorships of Gary Johnson, Butch Otter, and Sarah Palin, that’s barely one percent of the US population.

Loosing the criminally insane on the general public was the bipartisan project of progressives with backwards priorities and conservatives who were tired of being taxed for others’ upkeep.

Also, you said nothing about those bizarre pockmarks on the man’s arms, like he was some Maori tribesman. If such self-mutilation isn’t a sign of mental illness, I don’t know what is. But now that Oklahoma has fallen, it is legal in all 50 states to set up a business which caters to it.

He couldn’t do this in Denmark, Turkey, or Iran, or get a government position in India, or use a public bath in much of Japan, and could even be deported from Sri Lanka. But America has a “libertarian” attitude about self-mutilation. We just don’t have the heart to force people like this into the painful process of removing them.

You completely strawmanned the article.

“Maybe you simply have a separate “legalized drugs” nation for the people who think that’s a great idea.”
We have one, its’ called Oregon, and the results are not pretty.

Whoa, I gotta stop reading iSteve right before bedtime. I woke up at 4 AM and realized I’d just dreamed in realistic detail that I was looking at a new post.

It was something about a prominent Asian scientist/professor around Boston or maybe the Beltway, with an old-money high-society American wife, and the scientist has been exposed in some kind of tawdry affair and metoo scenario. It was the usual plodding, deceitful and race-obsessed NYT or WaPo feature, with Steve’s usual quick acerbic comments sprinkled in. And I was seeing it all plain as day.

NYT:

Dorothea Dix begged health officials to create asylums where those patients could be treated more humanely. The first such facilities were small, designed for short-term, therapeutic care, and functioned more or less as Dix had hoped they would.

Fascinating documentary on early Victorian lunatic asylums:

I’m confused.

Is “asylum” a good thing or a bad thing now? (That is, is “asylum” currently good or bad according to the PTB / masters-of-the-universe –or– is it one of those cases where one holds two mutually conflicting opinions at the same time?)

Just which demographic comprises the majority of the violent mentally ill [rhetorical question]? First problem, as posters have pointed out in other threads, it’s difficult to separate feral blacks from legitimately mentally ill blacks. And even if the funding is approved for these asylums, you can bet the Negro politicians will be demanding “equity” re %s of inmates–eg, don’t commit too many Africans. And finding QUALIFIED staff for these mental patients will be most difficult, as blacks will want the jobs.

Art Deco posted a figure from somewhere of $80 billion to house the current 600,000 homeless. I can tell you from existing programs that the real figure will be at least double that.

NYC is already talking several billion just to serve the relative handful of illegals now showing up at its door. And these are mostly just people who have ventured into the wrong country, not carrying the pathologies of so many US homeless

yet they were still building mental hospitals in the sixties and performing lobotomies.

My cousin was institutionalized in the Haverford State Hospital in 1985. This modern hospital was built in 1962 just outside Philadelphia. My cousin became psychophrenic when she was 18 and my uncle placed her in the Haverford State Hospital…She soon escaped and was found a few weeks later, homeless living in Virginia beach. I was visiting my grandmother when she got the call from the Virginia Beach police. My uncle drove down to get her and she was again locked-up in the hospital. I would sometimes take my grandmother to visit her. She was in the lock-up section, so it was not a pleasant place to visit. After a few years my uncle was able to get her into a private mental hospital. They shuttered the Haverford State Hospital in 1998 and converted the hospital into expensive condos and townhouses.

I had a family member that lived at Haverford State Hospital Thank God he died before they desmantled it. I know they say very bad things about State hospitals but they took good care of my brother.
The grounds are now a community park pic.twitter.com/xHgP4VSAvY

— Eucharistic Jesus (@TheBread_OfLife) July 3, 2020

Note in just mental illnesses how many important parts of life they are now allowed to intrude into.

Homelessness is getting a lot of deserved attention, because with force off the table you can’t make enough people take their meds. Which were wonder drugs; my mother in the 1950s nursing career witnessed the before and after of this for schizophrenia. Lithium for bipolar disorder per Wikipedia had to wait until 1970 in the US for the very credible reason of its very narrow therapeutic index, the distance between an effective and toxic dose (knew someone long ago who was taking it, it was effective but he sure drank a lot of water).

So you mention children: in way too many public school systems mentally ill children are “mainstreamed” into classes with normies. This happened with the very messed up Stoneman shooter, he wouldn’t stop for example throwing chairs/desks around (for better or worse an elderly Hispanic couple adopted him and died early for him, the mother three months before his rampage). You can imagine how much real learning happened in those classes (and note in different ways disruptive black students are no longer disciplined).

Of course this is just another inversion in where the ostensible mission of an institution became a skinsuit for more sinister purposes. I like to use 1930 for the real start with K-12 schools when our ruling trash started implementing a system that deliberately didn’t teach a lot of children how to read, a fight which is still going on as we discussed not long ago WRT Oakland, California.

Of course all of these are effective solvents to a society and most of its normal population.

I don’t really care–as long as I don’t have deal with them on the street, or in public places.

Societal and legal acceptance of mutual combat is a more likely solution:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/sympathy-for-the-karen/#comment-5589127 (#33)

The unspeakable problem here is that the cause of the horribleness of the asylums is the character and behavior of the inmates.

It’s a good point. Time and again people fall for the fallacy of blaming a place for the people who are congregated there. They then naturally conclude that getting problem people away from there will somehow solve their problems. But it just spreads the problem people around.

Insane asylums are the ultimate “tragic dirt,” to use Steve’s phrase.

I’d never heard that Country Road was related to the road to JT’s asylum–I’m oblivious to many things–but it makes sense. Here’s a fine old (low-res) live-performance video of it, though it takes forty seconds of noodling before they get down to business.

Country Road

Maybe America, the West doesn’t really need these high-IQ genius insights–and diktats–from the Goffmans?

(((Goffmans))) of course. From a broken family, and it turns out she just made up a great deal of the stuff in the book from which that passage is in, which otherwise makes her a self-declared felon. She was ultimately was denied tenure in 2019, I wonder what mischief she’s up to now. Then again isn’t this insight correct, if not exactly helpful especially in the way she intends?

There’s also this gem of a paragraph in her Wikipedia entry:

The popularity of On the Run in the mainstream media has put the practice of ethnography under scrutiny. Journalist Gideon Lewis-Kraus published a longform defense of Goffman’s book in The New York Times Magazine, in which he argued that most sociologists consider the alleged errors found in On the Run to be the inevitable result of her university’s Institutional Review Board requirement that informants be anonymized and field notes be destroyed.

Yeah, sociology today is a real science for sure.

I once heard a group of older black people talking about school discipline. They all agreed black schools didn’t have a discipline problem until nice white ladies stopped them from beating their kids when they needed it.

Much better recording here:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q6BsWOwScw

There is so much that can be done nowadays to clean up old recordings and then you can actually listen to the music as you would to a contemporary work and not as some distant crackly relic of another time.

Sure, America is going to be MUCH better when high-IQ Jews are replaced by People of Color. No need to counter such subtle arguments (BTW, you don’t address her arguments at all – all you do is implicitly accuse her of being a Jew). Everything will be understandable in simple Black and white terms.

The big problem with any treatment for severe mental illness is similar (but not maybe not ethically similar) to the problem with “sane” very violent people. We don’t get better, and by and large, we are more trouble than we are worth.

I’m not at all certain of your latter claim, but that’s probably because you refuse to accept that for the really severe mental illnesses, the ones that make it impossible for most with them to live normal lives, actually have drugs that really can make most of them “get better.” These are for bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia; they’re generally nasty and a great many people have to be forced to take them, thus the problem after that tool was removed. Ultimately the threat that if you don’t take them, we’ll send you back to the asylum … that we closed. So doubly off the table.

There’s apparently also problems with “recreational” drug use induced disorders that I think generally fall under the schizophrenia category in symptoms, I have no idea if and how much those can be remediated. Recently came across a claim that current extremely high dosing of THC compared to times past is causing very serious problems as it gets decriminalized at the state level (and now “Biden” for the midterms). Prior to that it looked like it could help induce schizophrenia at a greater rate than the normal incidence.

I think we need different terms for depressed or highly anxious people, dysfunctional people, and violent people regardless of “sanity.” For the last category, I propose “deranged.”

The former are not “severe” like the above two, I’m not sure a name more than “severe” is needed. And for that matter for depression we have drugs and therapy (CBT, people can reason themselves out of depression), for anxiety we don’t have any good answers if CBT or the like doesn’t work.

Then we get to the personality disorders which I gather are totally refractory, and some of those result in violent people you want to label “deranged,” which I suppose I wouldn’t disagree with. Except the severe two really can earn the label deranged in my mind, even if most of them aren’t violent. Listen to certain unmedicated schizophrenics talking, it’s very clear their minds are broken.

…an immense service that benefits slumlords and owners of rundown motels on US highways that have long since been bypassed by interstate highways.

So that’s how Apu makes ends meet!

Still, those 140°F blowers can run to four figures per room.

The Outer Limits poked at this issue in a grimly ahead-of-its-time 1963 drama, The Zanti Misfits — yes, the bug-eyed ants. The narrator sets the scene:

Throughout history, compassionate minds have pondered this dark and disturbing question: what is society to do with those misfits whose behavior undermines the foundations of civilization? Misfits have been burned, branded and banished … Other planets use other methods…

The Zantis pressure Earth into taking their most dangerous criminals, with predictably bloody results. The prisoners are all killed, along with numerous US soldiers, but back on Zanti the head ants are surprisingly pleased. “We are incapable of executing our own species, but you are not — you are practiced executioners. We thank you.”

Throughout history, various societies have tried various methods of exterminating those members who have proven their inability to live sanely amongst their fellow men. The Zantis tried merely one more method; neither better nor worse, neither more human nor less human. Perhaps merely … non-human.

Democrats are the real conservatives.

Louise Fletcher — famed as the soul-crushing Nurse Ratched — died just a week or two ago. She was a more sympathetic character in Brainstorm, the fine early Christopher Walken flick and Natalie Wood’s swansong

How about this: you get three hots and a cot and toilet facilities on the homeless reservation. You will keep yourself clean, you will keep your living space clean and you will refrain from assaulting or harassing others. We will give you coffee and cigarettes for your mental stimulation. If you want something stronger, get a job and a fixed address and pay for it yourself. If you get sick, we already provide the poor with Medicaid.

If you can’t perform these tasks, we will institutionalize you and if need be tranquilize you to a manageable state. I figure we can do this for $40K per year for each of the 600,000 homeless people in this country, given that millions of the rest of us are able to live independently on $25K a year or less. If the eaters need further stimulation, they can read books, play horseshoes, pick up litter, chat with the volunteers who stop by to help out. Whatever.

By the way, we will have to close the borders to avoid exacerbating the problem.

The means and the funds are at hand. What is lacking is the will.

Government is for the administration of the very few actual public goods. Keeping the rest of us free from mentally ill, intoxicated, unsanitary, unsightly vagrants is an appropriate function of government, like clean air and water, national defense and safe streets and sidewalks.

‘It’s now the fine campus of Cal State Channel Islands.’

I wonder if that works like building on an Indian cemetery? Do the students start getting urges concerning butcher knives and inoffensive neighbors or anything?

There called psychiatric hospitals or psychiatric wards and are in short supply. Remember the Virginia State Senator and former candidate for governor who was almost killed by his son because they could not find a psychiatric bed for the son.

https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/19/politics/virginia-politician-attack

Such an idea is legally impossible. Try again but consult legal counsel.

Mike Harris’ “conservative” government started emptying the asylums in Ontario as a way to lower taxes in the 90s.

There is simply no way to vote our way out of these problems. When under pressure, so called conservatives will always take the left/liberal position on pretty much any issue. And they’ll find a way to make it look like they are being “conservative”.

You know and I know and everyone knows that liberals Can Never Be Wrong, because as Thomas Sowell writes, they are Anointed.

Get used to it, you Benighted peasant.

Our ancestors from centuries ago had it really right: Do society a favor and put the crazies out of their misery.

Fewer crazies. Fewer asylums. Fewer wasted tax dollars. Fewer incentives to act crazy.

I’ve believed for quite some time that the emptying of mental institutions was not so much because of clinical or medical reasons, but because the countercultural Left identified with psychopathology as a way to attack what they regarded as the totalitarianism of conservative bourgeois society. Norman Mailer made this argument explicitly in The White Negro:

…even Lindner who was the most imaginative and most sympathetic of the psychoanalysts who have studied the psychopathic personality was not ready to project himself into the essential sympathy— which is that the psychopath may indeed be the perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality which could become the central expression of human nature before the twentieth century is over.

…when one lives in a civilized world, and still can enjoy none of the cultural nectar of such a world because the paradoxes on which civilization is built demands that there remain a cultureless and alienated bottom of exploitable human material, then the logic of becoming a sexual outlaw (if one’s psychological roots are bedded in the bottom) is that one has at least a running competitive chance to be physically healthy so long as one stays alive. It is therefore no accident that psychopathy is most prevalent with the Negro…

…Hip, which would return us to ourselves, at no matter what price in individual violence, is the affirmation of the barbarian for it requires a primitive passion about human nature to believe that individual acts of violence are always to be preferred to the collective violence of the State; it takes literal faith in the creative possibilities of the human being to envisage acts of violence as the catharsis which prepares growth.

I was living in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood in the Seventies when the mainstreaming of “marginally” mentally challenged or ill people began. It was supposed to be more humane than institutionalizing them. It was a cash cow for anyone who owned an apartment building or old hotel than could be converted into small apartments which the government was more than happy to subsidize. Some images have remained with me to this day: Some poor soul who obviously had no idea what planet he was on rummaging through the trash can on the corner in front of the Uptown Baptist Church at Sheridan and Wilson. Or the totally confused guy strolling into the laundromat and pulling a discarded fast-food beverage cup out of the trash and proceeding to drink the leftovers.

Another possibility that deserves more attention is that smoking a lot of grass in adolescence is bad for you.

I grew up in Berkeley in the Sixties and Seventies, and long ago, I noticed the catastrophic outcomes for a lot of my peers. There was one actual suicide, another death from suicidal behavior, and an early death from alcoholism. Of the four remaining individuals whose adult state I’m familiar with, one lives alone in an apartment in East Oakland, another drifted in and out of heroin addiction, and the two remaining individuals, while technically functional, are decidedly not quite ‘right.’

I used to assume that this was all a result of the general culture of those years, but as a consequence of some personal history, I missed out on the massive marijuana binging all these individuals indulged in in adolescence. I’d say I’m reasonably functional — which can’t be said for most of those I knew back in the day.

I think it’s reasonable to consider the possible effects of smoking massive quantities of marijuana — and that might account for a lot of these vagrants.

More generally, it would be a good idea if the whole issue was seriously studied. Everyone speculates — but no one looks at a representative sample of vagrants and asks ‘what went wrong with these people?’

They’re not just the loonies we’ve always had. These people literally weren’t there twenty years ago — not in these numbers. What’s up?

“Insane asylums had their problems, undoubtedly [sic] but they served a valuable purpose.”

The moon looked particularly artificial this morning. They’re not even trying anymore. They are laughing at us.

“Same with Sanatoriums.”

No barking dogs. No TV. Debussy and Arvo Part streaming from the overheads. Cucumber soup and liverwurst sandwiches for lunch. Room temps at 68. Lots of naps. Man, that’s the life.

Off Topic: Steve, I’m assuming the only reason you haven’t written anything yet, that I have seen, on the LA City Council audio leak controversy is because you’re preparing a tour de force. This story has everything!

Anyone who lives in a decent sized city cannot help but notice the huge increase in on-the-streets homeless people over the last 10 years or so.

https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/hud_no_21_041

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/size-and-census-coverage-us-homeless-population

HUD estimates 580,000 in 2020. These two other surveys suggest between 420,000 and
640,000 in 2010.

The left got their way on this

The shuttering of insane asylums was the result of a left-right coalition, the kind we need now in the anti-interventionist foreign policy arena, but that’s just a pipe dream of mine.

The LOLbertarian right wanted the asylums shut because they saw them as expensive, coercive tools of state power. The left wanted them shut because of Hungarian “reformer” Thomas Szasz, as the American left always looks to Europe for its bright ideas. Frederick Wiseman’s Titticut Follies (1967) also was significant, although if you watch it today, that facility doesn’t seem bad at all, and certainly much better than schizos randomly shoving people onto subway tracks.

“Recently came across a claim that current extremely high dosing of THC compared to times past is causing serious problems …”

You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I said the man had a tiny head.

I’m all for treating the homeless and the insane in a humane manner, in any way that keeps them away from the streets, and I don’t mind if they use the taxpayer money for it (they can take from the CIA and Pentagon budget). It is not a big price to pay for having nice, livable cities without the risk to step on human feces or be pushed onto the subway tracks.

P.S. Meanwhile, in Kiev, I notice they’re not making fun of the Crimea bridge explosion anymore… Weird. But human nature is that way — attacks on others are funny, but attacks on oneself, not so much. Unfortunately, this means things will probably escalate all over. Already this is impacting Western Europe, as they will have even more energy problems now, as they were getting some electricity from Kiev.

His great song Walk on Down a Country Road had something to do with it.

It isn’t that bad a song–he didn’t deserve to be institutionalized for it.

Actually James checked himself into McLean Hospital in the Boston suburb of Belmont, on very nice campus-like grounds.

“If you imagine that “libertarian friends” have been in control of any state government, ever, then the man in the picture is not the only one who’s delusional…. that’s barely one percent of the US population.”

Libertarian power comes not from the ballot box but from three interrelated sources: (1) more than $3 billion in subsidies from the Koch brothers (2) the fact that about a third of non-left academics and thinktankers are libertarians (3) something like 25% of other non-left and GOP elites are libertarians, e.g. lawyers, CEOs, tech and media moguls, investment bankers.

Even non-left elites who are not full on libertarians are generally open to their ideas. A good illustration of this was the Javanka/Kanye/Trump crime bill, which wasn’t especially consequential but on balance bad. It got a ton of GOP support because of libertarian influence. You think the average GOP voter wanted a softer crime policy?

IIRC, R.D. Laing was the one who was popular on the left while Szasz was promoted by libertarians. Ideas similar, but they belonged to different clubs.

Those estimates do not reflect what I see with my own eyes in SF, LA, OC, San Diego, and several inner suburbs of them.

E.g., are entire multi-block stretches of SF that once had few or no bums but now are lined with tents.

Keep in mind definitions of homeless vary widely. Sleeping on a relative’s couch or a weekly-rate hotel counts as homeless by many methods, even when they are stable and sanitary long-term abodes.

Wow, you have posted something that is true. Well done!

See, there’s hope for you Jonathan. Maybe you will too someday.

Strong weed has been around for decades but over the last decade has become cheap. Wholesale cost in places like Oregon and BC have dropped about 90% versus 2010.

Also now easily available is 90% pure THC oil, which is vaporized rather than smoked further increasing potency.

Some places that still restrict weed sale have very cheap “spice” synthetic cannabinoids sold at sleazy gas stations and which anecdotally have very negative effects on lumpenproles.

First, a little history on this. After the introduction of Chlorpromazine, the first modern, effective antipsychotic, there was miraculous improvement in a large percentage of long-term mental patients. The question then arose, why keep them locked up? It was like keeping lepers in the leper colony after the introduction of penicillin. This was what spurred the idea of deinstitutionalization.

Anyway, deinstitutionalization is a good idea that has been predictably fucked up by our illustrious leaders by at once being taken too far and also being not taken far enough.

It has been taken too far because, while many crazy people can function in the community given appropriate services, many others simply cannot. When deinstitutionalization happened, they discharged many people who simply could not function in the community, no matter how many supportive services they received.

It was also not taken far enough, because, in many cases, the supportive services that were supposed to treat these people in the community simply never materialized, leaving even the higher-functioning ones, the good candidates for deinstitutionalization, high and dry.

I myself have some experience in this matter. I have a family member with a mental disorder who lives in the community. He doesn’t bother anyone, has no serious criminal record, and has been stably housed for years. Unfortunately, you will never see a headline about him that reads “MENTALLY ILL MAN LIVES IN COMMUNITY FOR DECADES, DOESN”T HARM ANYONE.”

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. What we have here is a problem with execution, not with concept.

True we seem to have more today. One reason is drugs. Another reason is economics, too many seemingly “middle class” families can no longer afford to take care of their damaged children. Also fewer aunts and uncles around to offer help.

When my cousin was booted from his house when he was 27, due to his drug use, my parents took him in off the streets when he was 29 years-old. After a year another uncle took him in…eventually he did quit drugs when he was about 35 years-old. He is now 52 and has been working regular jobs for the past 14 years and lives on his own. I suspect if not for some helpful uncles he would have died before turning 35.

They’re not just the loonies we’ve always had. These people literally weren’t there twenty years ago — not in these numbers. What’s up?

I think you are right. Pot may well have had a lot to do with it. Perhaps also the decline in belief in God. That old saying – that if God didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him – perhaps it was said for a reason.

Even non-left elites who are not full on libertarians are generally open to their ideas.

Corollary to Conquest’s Law– everyone is most libertarian on those things he wants left alone. Even when, as with elective abortion and immigration, it’s utter nonsense by any true standard of liberty.

I dunno about the link between pot and schiz. Could be that people prone to schiz also really like weed. Plus, pretty sure the schizophrenia rate has been decreasing (within populations) even though marijuana use is up over the past 20 years or so. Now, schizophrenia could be rarer for other reasons, like fewer kids deprived of oxygen during birth, or whatever, despite pot use pushing the other way.

Maybe lots of people who would have been schizophrenic have just burned out their dopamine systems with meth, so they can’t hallucinate or find false patterns in noise so easily?

Taylor was at McLean Hospital, which is located in Mitt Romney’s old hometown, Belmont, a lovely suburb. McLean is Harvard affiliated, and Taylor’s father was a doc at Mass General, Harvard’s teaching hospital. It’s where the nice white people are sent. John Nash, Ray Charles, and David Foster Wallace all spent time at McLean.

Mattapan, on the other hand, is as not the country as it gets. Well, this country anyway, as 75% of Mattapan residents were born outside the US (50% from Haiti or Jamaica).

Debussy and Arvo Part streaming from the overheads.

Don’t forget Erik Satie:

WHAT MAKES GYMNOPÉDIE NO. 1 SO SPECIAL?

It was O’Connor vs Donaldson 1975 423 USC 563 a Supreme Court majority decision that closed the insane asylums nationwide. And of course the counsel for plaintiff O’Connor was the mostly Jewish supported and staffed ACLU.

For the past few years ACLU has been filing pronouns and abolish 2 genders male and female lawsuits in the courts.

From protecting Soviet agents to legal pornography school desegregation to affirmative action to close the mental hospitals to the 20 gender movement in schools it’s been the ACLU for more than 100 years

BTW, Ronald Reagan was not President in 1975 when the Satanic Supremes made that decision. He was governor of California in 1975. But a new governor was elected in November of 1975 The California mental hospitals began to close in 1976 under Governor Jerry Brown.

The mental patients were given greyhound bus tickets to the nearest big city. The city welfare housing and mental health services were given no warning that the patients were in their way.

Liberal millionaires and the activist lawyers they hire have been responsible for most of what’s wrong with America for the past 100 years.

As I enjoy telling ignorant liberals when they blame Ronald Reagan. By the time he became president in 1981 most of the hospitals were closed.

‘I think we need different terms for depressed or highly anxious people, dysfunctional people, and violent people regardless of “sanity.” For the last category, I propose “deranged.”’

Yeah. The term ‘mental illness’ is kind of like ‘sexual harassment’ or ‘child abuse.’ What precisely are you referring to? Slapping your kid or sodomizing him?

Off Topic: Steve, I’m assuming the only reason you haven’t written anything yet, that I have seen, on the LA City Council audio leak controversy is because you’re preparing a tour de force. This story has everything!

Except legs:

LA City Council president resigns leadership post following leaked recording of racist remarks

Stand by for the burial. For those not following, she and another councilor made disparaging remarks, evidently in Spanish, about the adopted black son of another, white councilor and his “husband”.

If there is anyone not laughable in this story– other than the poor boy himself– I’ve seen no evidence thereof.

BTW, Happy Thanksgiving to our Canuck friends. No mail delivery in the States today, but it’s a far bigger deal in Canada. Do not attempt to drive on the roads leaving Montreal. We made that mistake a few years ago.

The Camarillo Mental Hospital is widely reputed to be “The Hotel California,” of the Eagles’ song. I don’t know where the theory originated but it sounds plausible based on the lyrics and the fact that the California Mission-style building on the album cover bears a strong resemblance. According to a “person familiar with the matter” (aka some guy with a blog):

The hospital is rumored to be the Eagles’ inspiration for the classic rock song “Hotel California.” However, Glen Frey and Don Henley denied that story in the documentary History of the Eagles.

It’s possible that the site did inspire the Eagles, but concerns over retaining the “Hotel California” trademark led their lawyers to recommend to band members that they deny it. Indeed the band sued a Mexican hotel for using the name, settling for an undisclosed amount. https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/hotel-california-426f07f5bfd8

The Supreme Court didn’t impose any conditions on mental hospitals. It just ordered all the patients released. O’Connor vs Donaldson 1975 422 USC 563.

No, you’re right. I knew this was coming, too. Though I was hoping Martinez would put up more of a fight. I’m assuming more resignations are coming. But also sailer-ient is the Conquistor-American v. Indigenous (i.e. “short little dark” koreans lol) angle. I’m surprised the white gays aren’t making more of the “homophobia” thing– calling Bonin a “bitch” and then implying that the adopted black kid (i.e. el parece changuito) is little more than a political accoutrement, who, as a poorly behaved black kid, needs to be treated with a firmer hand. Like I said, the story has it all.

I went through a libertarian phase and read just about everything Thomas Szasz wrote, on this subject as well as others. It is true that he objected to civil commitment and to all nonvoluntary “treatment” of anyone. But he was at the same time a staunch advocate of holding everyone, including the “insane,” fully responsible for their actions. He had no compunctions against, for instance, the death penalty, and he argued that no one should be excused from responsibility for his crimes because of any supposed “mental illness”. I wouldn’t want to defend all his views, but he did have a point that giving the government the right to incarcerate people merely because they were considered to be “crazy” was not compatible with basic American principles.

Neither Martinez nor de Leon are resigning from their city council seats. That is the real source of their political power.

Martinez resigning isn’t even analogous to a representative stepping down from being Speaker of the House in the U.S. Congress.

OT? I’m not even sure anymore:

31 year old negro shoots a 21 year old negress to death for beating him in a game of pickup basketball at the park:

https://vidmax.com/video/215314-woman-is-shot-to-death-by-man-for-beating-him-in-a-game-of-basketball-in-dallas

What’s the label for bums who sit around typing inanities on other people’s blogs all day?

You’d think that the City Council of Los Angeles would take extra care in ensuring that their hastily and very expensively erected Tiny Home Villages for the crazy homeless would feature flame retardant materials everywhere in the homes possible, as well as equipping the village with adequate fire hoses, so that the entire village wouldn’t go up in flames due to the incompetence, or lack of care, or over abundance of insanity by its occupants. Just as a matter of common sense.

If you did… you fuckin’… thought… WRONG!!

Next up in rational discourse is which government employee responsible for the oversight for constructing the destroyed village is to be recalled or fired for stupidity and/or incompetence?

Since we don’t operate via rational discourse around here, the answer is… nobody:

https://knock-la.com/west-la-va-tiny-home-fire/

But the nice White ladies didn’t stop them from beating their kids when they needed it. Blacks still have the highest percentage of kids being beaten to death or seriously injured by big fat mamma and relatives. Remember the black adopted mother who beat her White 3 year old to death?

Blacks have been the most criminal and child woman abusive since NYC Philadelphia and other cities began keeping statistics in the 1830s.

Blacks blame Whites for every detrimental thing they do. It’s never the blacks fault, always the Whites. Including the Whites who object to black woman beating their kids to death and black men beating their women to death.

You must be another ignorant liberal always blame the Whites for black dysfunction. Or as a MAN OF UNZ always blame White women. Despite the fact that it was an all male Supreme Court O’Connor vs Donaldson 422 USC 563 that ordered the mental hospitals closed. And that it was White male judges at the state and federal levels that ended corporal punishment ended in the schools.

And the child protective services police and foster parents that deal with beaten to death and abused children haven’t been nice White ladies for 50 years now. But affirmative action blacks and Hispanics.

If you believe it’s nice White ladies who prevented black parents from raising civilized kids. You’re either black yourself or an anti White racist liberal typical Jewish . Your blame Whites for black behavior is race treason. And standard ignorant moron liberal belief.

The communists loved releasing the mentally sick onto the street. For a variety of reasons.

Meanwhile, as Marxist are usually the wealthiest/most privileged 1% and brutal exploiters of others, they live in multi-layered protection far away from these problems.

Indeed the band sued a Mexican hotel for using the name, settling for an undisclosed amount.

Does that mean nobody can call a hotel Hotel California without the Eagles’ consent (and maybe licensing fees)? There are some crazy cases like that. Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones sued a music journalist for going by the name of Bill Wyman. It was the journalist’s real name, and he was using it before Stones Wyman, who only adopted it as a pseudonym in the 1960s.

OT. Careful using PayPal to pay your iSteve subscription. They’ve gotten even worse than before.

They’ve now given themselves the right to fine users $2500 if they think something you said or did gives aid and comfort to white people. It’s not even clear that I’m exaggerating here.

Eugene Volokh :

Instead, the point is that more money should be poured down the rathole of a failed 1960s theory because to not do that would be to admit that the theories of our ancestors 60 years ago turned out to be wrong.

Two thoughts:
1: Given the current, mainstreamish acceptance of all things woke, the concept of a special place to treat (warehouse) DSM-IV subjects is high irony.
2. Were he still with us, Emmett Till would be a leader in pioneering therapeutic techniques such as kindler, gentler rape, mostly nonviolent rape, rape as an ice breaker in awkward social situations, and rape.

A lot of our current predicaments arise from the fact that there is a growing proportion of the population who can’t stand to see the world as it is red in tooth in claw. The things one must do to maintain civil order and law – apprehending criminals who don’t feel like being arrested today, or handling lunatics who are a danger to themselves and others, or the mundane production of energy and food – they all require doing some things that just don’t look nice. The world needs trash collectors and sewer workers – but there exists human trash too that needs collecting and segregation far away from the rest of us.

Strapping someone to a bed under heavy medication in a cell is not a pleasant thing to contemplate. It’s just that it’s way more pleasant than that same someone masturbating furiously in front of a playground audience of children, or stabbing passersby to satisfy the pangs of a delusion.

I think leftoids were influenced by R.D. Laing. Szasz influenced libertarians. Fuller Torrey and Clayton Cramer have offered critiques of Szasz. IMO, Szasz is often sensible and requires well-considered rebuttals.

Suggest Frisco is a collecting pool due to stupid public policy.

Just going to “ctrl f reagan” and see what comes up in the article and replies.

America has arrived at a different solution from the Zanti – let the misfits teach small children in schools and libraries.

Copyright and trademark law are some niche areas where artistic types really reveal their true money-grubbing, image-conscious, back-stabbing nature.

Note how many biopics/biographies of famous musicians have a courtroom sequence where the artist is suing for withheld royalties or copyright infringement or something else inherently boring but the movie/book has to do it because the lawsuit was so central to the artist’s later life.

Yoko Ono has been very cagey in her lifetime about her rights to various artistic endeavors she owns. She’s never ended up destitute as a result. She may come off as horribly advant-garde, but she’s pure shark businesswoman when it comes to the bottom line.

The Rolling Stones are also quite vicious in their legal fu, and have been for a very long time. Famously, to satisfy a dead-end record deal, the Stones wrote and fully recorded “Schoolboy Blues”, a filthy homosexual anthem with so many dirty words and innuendo that they knew the record company could never release it as a result.

https://infogalactic.com/info/Schoolboy_Blues

At least they didn’t entitle the record, “Come Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa”

David Axelrod wrote an NYT op-ed about the campus for his daughter (epileptic, not loony) which he portrayed as threatened by fed-gov’s bias toward “community care”–

https://www.misericordia.com/assets/1/16/David_Axelrod,_New_York_Times_2.pdf

Can anyone comment on this, i.e. that current funding priorities are to pay salaries of social-work lieutenants of the regime, rather than the operating expense of a place with a physical plant, which is easily lawyered into oblivion and also grist for activism/journalism (not that journalists seem to have qualms these days about targeting certain individuals)? Note, I may be “strawpersoning” Axe’s argument here.

Interesting turn in the life of the transfer state when the power advantage lies in moving more regulation away from institutions and onto NPC contractors.

Because to defend Emmett Till is sane, right?

OT

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11284819/How-Ukrainian-intelligence-chiefs-tracking-collaborators-worked-Russians.html

‘We’re hunting them down and shooting them like pigs’: How the Ukrainians are taking brutal revenge on the collaborators who’ve betrayed their neighbours – and country – to the Russians

The girl, young and long-legged, is led by two Azov “men” above the pit in Kupiansk, recaptured by Ukraine, where already several other young people lie dead, hands tied behind their backs.

https://t.me/DonbassDevushka/29066

In the video I posted earlier, her body is thrown into the pit with the others.

Just another thing you won’t see on the western news today or any other day.

would be to admit that the theories of our ancestors 60 years ago turned out to be wrong.

No the theories weren’t wrong, of course, but the execution of the plan deteriorated because it was thought to be cheaper just to drug up the crazies for a while and turn them loose.

“Someone else” would have to pay in “the community” for actual custodial care.

Of course there is no actual “community” and no one paid except in blood and tears.

You have to admit, though, that “Relaxin’ at the Camarillo” was a pretty cool name for Parker’s album. You got to own it Charlie! Plus, it looks pretty nice, though might not have been for insiders.

Now the “theory” of the experts is that the dangerous fellow holding a knife and talking to himself on the bus seat next to you probably won’t kill you. Odds are…

Los Angeles’s mentally ill were served by the Camarillo State Mental Hospital in a serene location in a superb climate a few miles from the Pacific… It’s now the fine campus of Cal State Channel Islands

Geraldo Rivera made his bones by going undercover as an employee at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, New York, in 1972. The conditions were so deplorable that it closed in 1987. The College of Staten Island took over the campus in 1993. It has the largest college campus in New York City.

In the UK the old “loony-bins” were pretty much emptied out by the end of the 1970s – they are now hotels or apartments as many of them were really rather impressive buildings.

There was one in (or more usually a few miles outside) every large country town, and more than one near cities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friern_Hospital

Friern Hospital (formerly Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum) was a psychiatric hospital in the parish of Friern Barnet close to a crossroads which had a hamlet known as Colney Hatch. In 1965, it became part of the London Borough of Barnet and in the early 21st century was converted to residential housing as Princess Park Manor and Friern Village. The hospital was built as the Second Middlesex County Asylum and was in operation from 1851 to 1993. After the County of London was created in 1889 it continued to serve much of Middlesex and of the newer county, London.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powick_Hospital

The doctors at the Asylum in the 1870s showed a remarkably enlightened attitude when they instituted a series of orchestral concerts there, as well as the Friday night dances for the inmates. Elgar, as a young violinist in the district played in the concerts from 1877, and in January 1879 succeeded Fred S. May in the post of Band Instructor. In 1879, at the age of 22, Elgar composed a number of works, the Powick Asylum Music, for the attendants’ band. His job consisted of conducting the Asylum Band, made up of the staff of the Asylum, and composing music for the Friday dances. The authorities paid him £4 per annum less than his predecessor, no doubt because of his inexperience, but he received about £30 per year, plus 5 shillings for every polka and quadrille and one shilling and sixpence for accompaniments to the Christy’s Minstrels ditties of the day. The last set of dances he composed in 1884.

There are no fewer than 117 wiki entries for closed psychiatric hospitals in England.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Former_psychiatric_hospitals_in_England

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/how-convenient-that-kanye-wests-behavior

How Convenient, That Kanye West's Behavior Could Not Possibly Be Influenced by His Mental Illness https://t.co/YqWfZrFYoZ pic.twitter.com/5fvMvC6gK5

— FreddiedeBoer.Substack.com (@freddiesubstack) October 8, 2022

There was a New Frontier scheme to replace asylums with “community mental health centers,” the idea being that with the new medications as managed by those centers these people could live normal enough lives. Around the same time or not long after the courts removed the option of force, so that plan was dead even before politicians could underfund or failed to create the centers, and you can imagine the NIMBY they’d generate.

One other factor I’ve not seen people mention: JFK was not pleased by his sister’s fate, and he signed the bill getting this started less than a month before he was assassinated. So you didn’t even have whatever follow through he and his team could have provided to get the scheme up and going, course correct perhaps, etc.

North of New York City, in fact all over the state, there are whole village sized hospitals that once housed the mentally ill. The scale of the projects are overwhelming. Nearly all now abandoned.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/letchworth-village-2

The old State Hospital:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traverse_City_State_Hospital

Has now become fancy condos & restaurants
https://www.facebook.com/thevillagetc/

There are gardens & event facilities at the old hospital barns & farm

The mentally ill, alcoholic, and drug addicted live in tents in the surrounding woods of the old hospital grounds and shuffle between the churches that provide meals.

Are they better off now than their predecessors that lived at the hospital, worked at the grounds and farm, and were fed in large part from the bounty of their own work?

Well I guess they have less worry of receiving electroshock or a lobotomy.

If right-wing conservatives had their wau, they would lock in insane asylums all those people that they find “icky” and “mentally ill”: gays, transgenders, pot smokers, atheists, “degenerates” like creative artists(who are almost 100% liberals), animal rights activists, anti-segregationaists. etc.

Of course, right-wing conservatives don’t see their xenophobia, their pathological fear of innovation and change and of what is different and unusual in general, their lack of empathy bordering on sociopathy, and their extraordinary ability to experience disgust and revulsion as mental illness at all. Depression and addiction, especially to alcohol and opiates, are actually more common among right-wing conservatives than among liberals – maybe because conservatives have genetically lower levels of dopamine.

One of the things that I’ve noticed about right-wingers is how negative they are as people. They define their entire existence through negative emotions: fear, repulse, hostility, separation. Liberals see the future full of possibilities and optimism. Right-wing conservatives are innately hostile to change, and think the future will always be worst than the present, which is always worst than the past. The past, when most people had lost all their teeth at 30 and most didn’t live to 50, and half of all women died of child birth, and some people were put in collar chains and sold as products because of the color of their skin, was a “golden age” to right-wing conservatives. Liberals see peoples from different cultures, backgrounds and personalities and they feel curiosity and as an opportunity for learning. Conservastives react to the same situation with intense hostility, as they dislike difference and are completely incurious about it. In fact, a lack of curiosity and intelligence is an all-defining characteristic of right-wing conservatives, which is they the bulk of the best artists and intellectuals are liberals.

Steve Sailer,. right-wing conservative, laments the lunatics that are allowed to bother him and his family. Never mind that the vast, vast, vast majority of them are not violent. He would much rather not have to look at them at all, because of all those “icky” feelings that right-wingers experience when confronted by that which is unusual or different from themselves. Steve Sailer, right-wing conservative, would much rather have these “icky” people locked up out of his site in tiny cubicles against their wills, and forced to be medicated. To Steve Sailer, right-winger piece of ST, only people like him should be allowed to be free and treated as human beings.

To right-wing conservatives, the definition of who is mentall ill is very broad but also very shallow: anyone who is not exactly like them. Gays, leftists, environmentalists, atheists, etc, all “degenerates” that are “obviously mentall ill”. That is what conservatives did to Alan Turing. A war hero, Turing was locked up, given electro shock therapy and hormone treatgment for no other reason than being gay.

I was absolutely shocked and enraged by Sailer’s review of “The Imitation Game” where Sailer was making all sorts of excuses to justify the behavior of the British government in locking up Turing. The only possible attitude of a civilized and decent human being in response to that is absolute and utter condemnation of what they did to Turing. But then, Sailer is a proto-fascist and not a civilized and decent human being, and his genteel journalist persona is just an attempt on his part to gain mainstream respectability because deep down he knows that his views are morally biased, unfair and unaccetable to decent human beings. So he plays a character(poorly).

But yes, lots and lots and lots of people would get locked up in loony bins if right-wing conservatives had their way. Gay men would be locked up and electroshocked to send them a clear message that they must go back to the closet.,..or else. Lesbians would probably get a pass because right-wing men find lesbian sex “hot”, not out of any sympathy for them as human beings. Pot smokers would be locked up too as addiction will be mental illness too, unless it is to tobbacco in which case it is ok since it makes money for Philip morris and gives jobs to tobbacco planters. Environmentalists, animal-rights activists, creative artists and atheists will also be put into loony bins for “degeneracy” which will also be considered by the right-wing conservative government as “mentall illness”. Artists better only do oil paintings of pretty flowers like they did 200 years ago otherwise the conservative right-wing government will frame them for “degeneration” which is included in the mental illness category, and the penalty for which is, you guessed it, the loony bin and forced chemical treatment. For right-wing conservatives, mental health: heterosexual men and women that are married with kids and go to Church every Sunday preferably white.. |”Mentally ill”= everybody else.

Speaking of religion, the other thing that I noticed is what colossal hypocrites right-wing conservatives are. They are big on Christianity, and yet their entire lifestyles are the polar opposite of what Christ preached: Christ preached tolerance; right-wingers are intolerant. Christ preached that the poor are blessed and that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to go to Heaven; right-wing conservatives worship the rich and love giving them tax breaks and want to be just like them. Christ said that, if someone strikes you, that you should turn the other cheek; right-wing conservatives are into brutal retaliation and love it, and are the biggest supporters of Capital Punishment. Hahahahahah.,..you right-wing conservatives are so stupid. You don’t even realize your cognitive dissonance.

OT: I’m sure Steve’s already working on a blog post (or perhaps a Taki’s article) on this story, but here we have a perfect illustration of the Coalition of the Fringes forming a circular firing squad:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/los-angeles-city-council-tape-leak.html

In the profanity-laced recording, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times and which was first reported by The Los Angeles Times on Sunday, Ms. Martinez, who is Latina, compared the Black child of a white council member to a “changuito,” Spanish for little monkey. She also called Oaxacan immigrants living in Koreatown “short little dark people.”

Ms. Martinez, who is not up for re-election until 2024, added that Nithya Raman, a council member of South Asian descent, should not represent Koreatown, which is now largely Latino.

So a group of Hispanic city council members are casually tossing around racial slurs and complaining that a South Asian council member shouldn’t be representing Koreatown, which is now majority Hispanic… Diversity is our strength!

Can anyone comment on this, i.e. that current funding priorities are to pay salaries of social-work lieutenants of the regime, rather than the operating expense of a place with a physical plant, which is easily lawyered into oblivion and also grist for activism/journalism

See my previous comment. The community mental health center concept was entirely outpatient, no custodial care which is what Axelrod’s daughter required. State centers for the developmentally disabled lasted a lot longer than asylums for the insane since there’s of course no silver bullet for these people, but even they’ve fallen due to the usual cost cutting and more efficient ways to buy votes motivation.

I would not be surprised if the remnants of JFK’s plan have ended up paying the “salaries of social-work lieutenants of the regime” instead of providing what care was in the plan. That’s the general fate of such social programs and it’s long been noted we could just transfer the money with a small staff to manage that vs. pay zillions of dollars for the reliable Democratic voters who administer the multitude of programs that have built up over the decades. (We might even cancel some that have proven not to work like Head Start, but that would never do.)

And I can meet you halfway on the lawyered and grist issue you correctly bring up, even these outpatient centers would not be welcomed by many.

I doubt all the homeless are mentally ill drug addicts. A major major reason homeless ness has increased us due to immigration legal and illegal.

The population of the United States was 203 million in the 1970 census. Population was 330 million in the 2020 census. The US census department claims there are about 18 million USA residents not counted in the 2020 census; Underserved minorities of course

An increase of 110 million USA residents in 50 years means homeless ness is structural. No way was housing increased since 1970 to provide for more than 110 people.

The poor people who used to live in skid row apartments and residential hotels are now homeless. The people who used to live in shabby studios now live in skid row hotels. The people who used to live in comfortable one bedroom apartments now live in shabby studios or what are called bachelor apartments. An 11 by 11 room with a tiny bathroom no kitchen.

The people whose occupations paid enough to buy a 4 bedroom house in a good suburb with good schools by age 30 now live in 2 bedroom condos in shabby suburbs. Condos they weren’t able to buy till in their late 30s.

As with most problems in America unlimited legal and illegal immigration is a major cause of homelessness. Every time I read an article about the high cost and crowded housing in Silicon Valley I’m happy. I hope that someday all the Chinese and Indian immigrants there end up either homeless or living 50 to a 3 bedroom house.

I went to college with the young White men who created Silicon Valley and sent men to the moon. . By the mid 1980s most were laid off never to work in tech again. Or had to move to Texas. The only good thing about Hispanic immigrants is that they are better than blacks. Which is like getting 40 rather than 20 on a school test.

More to come.

Considering the authoritarian turn our government has taken of late, I’m not sure I want to give it the power to forcibly institutionalize the “insane”.

Exactly right. The government would deem us all to have some kind of “mental health” condition so that we could all be put under some form of custodianship. They are already trying to normalize such a thing:

Task Force Recommends Anxiety Screening for All Adults Under 65

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2022-09-20/task-force-recommends-anxiety-screening-for-all-adults-under-65

Yes, rock musicians and their agents are very greedy like that. I remember reading a copy of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine some years ago and there was an article by one of the editors about using lines from songs in stories it published. It wasn’t unusual to have to pay $500 just for reproducing a few lines of a rock song. The magazine doesn’t have a very large circulation, despite the famous name attached to it.

You know, there’s a bunch of current Unz.com items where this would be entirely on topic….

But, yes, the subject of genocidal Ukrainian “filtration” of the populations Putin catastrophically left behind is a significant one, and should be significant for Putin himself and perhaps the military etc. under him. It’s inexcusable and will cost him moral capital, should cost him a great deal of it. Betray the people you’re ostensibly saving, waste the lives of a lot of men under your command, these are not winning moves, especially when you’re not a Stalin in the USSR who can send complainers to the GULAG.

It’s a good point. Time and again people fall for the fallacy of blaming a place for the people who are congregated there.

Magic Dirt Theory is a two way street.

Strapping someone to a bed under heavy medication in a cell is not a pleasant thing to contemplate.

The hit movie, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” made it a lot easier to contemplate, and worse.

Looney bins are a bit like communism. It looks great on paper, but the execution of it can leave a lot to be desired, since it involves people with assumed power convening over people with no power.

When the game is set up that way explicitly, no good comes of it in the long run. Intrinsically good people, given power and general impunity by the state, can tend to devolve into pleasant little monsters.

Since the human condition has always included that feature, humanely operating and managing looney bins is always perpetually problematic.

The street invasion of crazy homeless was caused by a perfect cooperation between liberals and conservatives. Liberals, being at the time strict constructionists, wanted people out of state hospitals because they were being held against their will. They won. But their solution depended on a system of half-way houses and community centers to take the state hospitals’ place. Conservatives then stepped in and choked off the money supply for half-way houses and community centers, in the name of, what? fiscal responsibility or some shit?, and voila, the streets are full of crazed homeless.

I remember a friend complaining that her husband used to go off on monthlong drunks, and when they found him in a hospital a state away, constitutional rights or something meant they couldn’t hold him until she got there, and so it was off to the races again trying to track him down.

But if they did find a solution, count on conservatives to choke off the funding. That is their only job. And it is a shit job.

Goffman’s arguments are very close to retardedness, so I took AnotherDad’s reference to a high IQ as ironic. You on the other hand seem to be a smart guy, and probably know that the elimination of State punishment will not in the least change the fugitive and erratic behavior of criminals. It is abundantly obvious that, in the absence of the State, private citizens will take its place (i.e. vigilantism). I live in Brazil, and only a few days ago a curious variation of that phenomenon happened here. I guy raped a woman who was walking back from school on a deserted street. A few days later the guy presented himself to the police and confessed (he was accompanied there by his wife and child!), because he had been recognized on the street surveillance video by people living in his neighborhood, and preferred jail over private justice.
Suspeito de estuprar universitária se entrega à Polícia Civil em BH
https://g1.globo.com/mg/minas-gerais/noticia/2022/10/09/suspeito-de-estuprar-universitaria-se-entrega-a-policia-em-belo-horizonte.ghtml

TNB as usual. The baby mammie and most likely not baby daddy sure look broken up – “she died doin what she love.” Lol.

Thanks, Brutusale. You learn something new every day – not just about JT, but that Ray Charles is a White guy. I had no idea. Probably he still doesn’t. :-}

Stop hair discrimination.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/crown-act-hair-discrimination-united-states

LOL! Good one, Ralph!

Ripple ED, thanks also.

I watched that one, KF. All I can recall is there was a scene with a women in panties. Was that Natalie Wood or Nurse Ratchet?

Cope

When the game is set up that way explicitly, no good comes of it in the long run. Intrinsically good people, given power and general impunity by the state, can tend to devolve into pleasant little monsters.

OK, I see that the pea under twenty five mattresses will not allow you to sleep, Princess. I have my doubts that a drug-influenced 1970s film accurately depicts life inside of asylums rather than cleverly holding lunatics up as quirky paragons of a counterculture.

The issue becomes that once dangerous lunatics are not locked inside, they’re locked outside with the rest of us.

Both. An asylum, where psychos are housed, is bad. Asylum, as in giving such to illegal turds coming over the border is good. Of course, libtards would not consider those to be mutually conflicting opinions…

Lots of propaganda goes into casting homelessness as a housing problem rather than a drug-addicted, end-stage alcoholic, or mentally ill people problem.

A commenter somewhere mentioned the CATO 4-3-2-1 acronym that apparently gets whispered by people actually trying to deal seriously with vagrancy: 40% of homeless are Crazy, 30% are Addicts, 20% are Tramps (the “happy homeless”) and 10% are Zeroed Out, people who got hit with a financial or emotional calamity that put them on the street. In other words, the lack of “affordable housing” is the problem for only around 10% of the homeless. So we can give them housing and a job, discharge their debts, and get them back on their feet. All the rest are incapable of maintaining a house or apartment and a household budget. They just need to be institutionalized or given a tent in a camp somewhere.

Re: the marijuana issue, there seem to be an awful lot of random crazies–pushing people into subways, driving 120 mph thru intersections, stabbing showgirls–which nobody really worried about when I was a kid. We stayed away from bad parts of town and avoided bikers and people with tattoos. Now, you have to keep your situational awareness on constantly in any public space. And the crazies manage to put on the trappings of stable individuals and acquire clean clothes, weapons, vehicles, housing, and jobs. Is it mimid intelligence or predatory camouflage? Does marijuana contribute–is anybody even asking this besides Colin Wright and Alex Berenson? I don’t know.

The Constitution was a great founding charter for a bunch of Anglo-Saxon rebels with a whole frontier to expand into. Now it’s a suicide pact.

And I’m sure the military would survive a few billion trimmed off it here and there. The US has 750 bases scattered across every continent except Antarctica, while its Southern border can be crossed by any invader with a functioning pair of legs.

Below is an example of a Sanatorium covering almost a square mile. Closed in 1957 and then went from treating infectious disease to mental patients, then a prison. There were lots of facilities like this. A much more humane way of handling mentally ill homeless then what we do now.

https://www.mcall.com/opinion/mc-xpm-2010-07-12-mc-tb-cresson-chuck-felton-yv-0712-20100712-story.html

In the 2020s truth is stranger than (science) fiction

What’s the label for bums who sit around typing inanities on other people’s blogs all day?

In my case it’s “independently wealthy.”

What’s your’s?

Any chance that is part of the inspiration for Frank Zappa’s “Camarillo Brillo”?

Growing up in the 60s and 70s, “homeless” were a handful of down-and-out white people, hoofing it to try and reach family members or friends. Now, whole encampmnents across the two states I’ve lived in. If HUD is not under-counting then the other conclusoin is that the homeless are just inordinately visible, like gay men and trannies.

If, in fact, the homeless are .18% of the population then I’m not sure what the problem is. Put them in camps or asylums; they’re a radar blip except when they’re allowed to wander freely, burning up stacks of polybutylene pipe and causing bridges to collapse.

Just as long as it wasn’t Walken

I gather one of ActBlue’s recruits has alighted here.

Um, no, JT wasn’t at what Bostonians of the day called “the Mattapan Nut House.” He was at McClean Hospital in Belmont, a private psychiatric hospital. I believe Mattapan was either closed or in the process of being closed under the terms of a lawsuit by then. You had to have dough – or insurance – to be treated at McClean, and the Taylor family had it. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe JT was being detoxed there; at the time, there was less social stigma in claiming you were being treated for “a nervous breakdown” [there is, of course, no such thing] than in admitting you had been shooting heroin and got a monkey on your back.

The poor people who used to live in skid row apartments and residential hotels are now homeless. The people who used to live in shabby studios now live in skid row hotels. The people who used to live in comfortable one bedroom apartments now live in shabby studios or what are called bachelor apartments. An 11 by 11 room with a tiny bathroom no kitchen.

The people whose occupations paid enough to buy a 4 bedroom house in a good suburb with good schools by age 30 now live in 2 bedroom condos in shabby suburbs. Condos they weren’t able to buy till in their late 30s.

As with most problems in America unlimited legal and illegal immigration is a major cause of homelessness. Every time I read an article about the high cost and crowded housing in Silicon Valley I’m happy. I hope that someday all the Chinese and Indian immigrants there end up either homeless or living 50 to a 3 bedroom house.

I went to college with the young White men who created Silicon Valley and sent men to the moon. . By the mid 1980s most were laid off never to work in tech again. Or had to move to Texas. The only good thing about Hispanic immigrants is that they are better than blacks. Which is like getting 40 rather than 20 on a school test.

This is the biggest issue — the massive increase in housing costs due to immigration. Remember that the people whose homes have been downsized don’t have an extra bedroom to put up a relative or friend who needs housing anymore.

The societal [sic] cost of not keeping people in asylums is huge”

Just wondering why you chose the made-up adjective “societal” when the English language already has a perfectly good adjective form of the noun “society;” to wit: SOCIAL? Did you choose “societal” because you’re parroting the chattering classes who try to sound erudite? I believe “societal” is appropriate in some very limited contexts, but 90% or more of the time, plain ol’ “social” is more than adequate in conveying one’s meaning. You may say this is nitpicking, but language is part of the culture and therefore should be defended. Just in passing, I’ll offer another example of a made-up word “concerning,” as in “This is a trend that’s rather concerning.” Where did this word come from? Simple: the proper word in the context is DISCONCERTING but it got morphed into “concerning” by the illiterates and, again, the chattering class trying to sound smart.

I skipped most of your post as it was pretty boring. But I just wanted to add that Turing was actually treated relatively well for the time, especially when you look at how he would have been treated on the continent.

Also, no one with any integrity respects The Imitation Game. It was despicable garbage produced by far-left activists.

Does marijuana contribute….”

Given that the dope being smoked or otherwise consumed today can be twenty times – or more – as potent as the “Mexican ditch weed” that kids bought for $15-$20 an Oz. back in the 60’s and 70’s, and could make you a bit giggly and munchy for a few hours rather than chronically paranoid delusional, my answer would have to be “Yes.” I’d also add that when we smoked the stuff in a social setting, everyone would profess to being “stoned” or “wasted” especially if someone else was sharing his stash. It was regarded as particularly poor form to badmouth free weed.

‘A commenter somewhere mentioned the CATO 4-3-2-1 acronym that apparently gets whispered by people actually trying to deal seriously with vagrancy: 40% of homeless are Crazy, 30% are Addicts, 20% are Tramps (the “happy homeless”) and 10% are Zeroed Out, people who got hit with a financial or emotional calamity that put them on the street. In other words, the lack of “affordable housing” is the problem for only around 10% of the homeless. So we can give them housing and a job, discharge their debts, and get them back on their feet. All the rest are incapable of maintaining a house or apartment and a household budget. They just need to be institutionalized or given a tent in a camp somewhere…’

I still remember the comment some guy who works with vagrants in LA made.

Just about everyone he dealt with was homeless either on account of drugs or mental illness; the only question was which, or what the proportion was. Every now and then — like once or twice a year — he would get some schnook who’d had a run of bad luck and bad judgement, and was actually out on the street for that reason. He’d get those guys a shit job and a room some place — and never see them again. Once on their feet, they were gone.

These people have something wrong with them. What, and why, is a relevant question.

‘A commenter somewhere mentioned the CATO 4-3-2-1 acronym that apparently gets whispered by people actually trying to deal seriously with vagrancy: 40% of homeless are Crazy, 30% are Addicts, 20% are Tramps (the “happy homeless”) and 10% are Zeroed Out, people who got hit with a financial or emotional calamity that put them on the street. In other words, the lack of “affordable housing” is the problem for only around 10% of the homeless. So we can give them housing and a job, discharge their debts, and get them back on their feet. All the rest are incapable of maintaining a house or apartment and a household budget. They just need to be institutionalized or given a tent in a camp somewhere…’

I still remember the comment some guy who works with vagrants in LA made.

Just about everyone he dealt with was homeless either on account of drugs or mental illness; the only question was which, or what the proportion was. Every now and then — like once or twice a year — he would get some schnook who’d had a run of bad luck and bad judgement, and was actually out on the street for that reason. He’d get those guys a shit job and a room some place — and never see them again. Once on their feet, they were gone.

These people have something wrong with them.

“Bitch posted me up.”

“You said rape four times.”

“I like rape.”

The key guy here was Bruce Ennis of the (left-wing) NY Civil Liberties Union. His specialty was suing psychatric facilities into financial ruin. Ennis basically said he knew nothing about mental health policy until he read Szasz.

hey define their entire existence through negative emotions: fear, repulse, hostility, separation. Liberals see the future full of possibilities and optimism.

Funny, then, how it is you liberals DEMAND that us Conservatives, who just want to be left the hell alone, separate, DEMAND that we partake in all their future full of possibilities (most of which, a cold-eyed look at reality shows is going to lead to LESS good, not more) whether we want to or not. No mental illness in your insane desire for power to foist your utopia on us, nosiree.

“Hahahahahah.,..you right-wing conservatives are so stupid.”

And you hate us SO MUCH, but you won’t let us go away. Funny, that. Instead you IMPORT people we don’t like, to rub our faces in your “happy optimism.”

Just go away. That’s all we want. Separation.

The Supreme Court didn’t impose any conditions on mental hospitals. It just ordered all the patients released. O’Connor vs Donaldson 1975 422 USC 563.

Not exactly. The Supreme Court introduced the standard of “danger to self for others” for commitment to residential mental health treatment facilities, without really defining that condition.

The outcome of Donaldson was that people with mental illness could not be detained in a hospital against their will unless they were deemed to be dangerous or suicidal.

However mentally ill people soon learned that if they wanted to be committed to a hospital, then they should tell the evaluating doctor that they felt suicidal, all that they plan to kill somebody.

One way of doing this would be to inflict a few superficial scratches on the forearm of the non-dominant hand. This seems to be widely accepted as an indication of danger to self.

Under current legislation hospitals are obliged to provide proof that they are providing treatment that addresses all aspects of the welfare of the patient. This involves several health care disciplines. The paperwork and personnel requirements are so onerous that they make running a mental hospital a very expensive business.

I suppose one of the states could try this as a pilot project.

After all the Supreme Court wants to encourage states to be different from each other. But I think that such a plan wouldn’t work, because it would conflict with other laws, or perhaps the homeless in the relevant state would just relocate to other states.

“And I don’t mean just Red Sox fans.” 😉

“Rape” is just “Pear” spelled inside out and sideays, and as we all know, the pear was Emmett Till’s favorite fruit. So when you think of pears, think of Emmett Till, and when you think of Emmett Till, think of rape.

The Tramps don’t present a problem–they don’t leave a big footprint. They’ll sneak in and out of restrooms and keep a low profile leading a monkish existence. The Zeroed Out, like you say, just need to get put back on their feet.

But filthy encampments of deranged people hallucinating from drugs and/or mental breakdown, no society should permit.

It’s called federalism, 13 experiments in self-rule, which Brits in thrall to their appalling imperium would never understand. That’s why we kicked you lot into Canada.

Thanks IJ-

How long is it before the government starts defining anyone to the right of Joe Biden as insane and beyond the pale?

Aren’t we seeing some of that already with anyone that questions the results of the 2020 election or how the 1/6 protesters are being dealt with?

We do need to do something with the mentally ill, but the first step is making sure we define exactly what mentally ill means…I have a feeling that for the Left: that would mean us, not the maniacs we see on the streets.

Lol. Definitely not at the Mattapan Nut House.

Mattapan is a run down section of Boston that is overwhelmingly black, even back then, I think.

(I seem to recollect that there was even a small black neighborhood in Mattapan in the 19th century. The then small black community of Boston was relatively well integrated in the 19th century, mostly having to put up with a lot of baloney from the Irish…who were very, how shall we say, feisty, regarding those that were clearly not their own).

McLean is affiliated with Harvard and is a very nice place to be treated for all sorts of psych/drug conditions.

I think that is called “HA”

Libertarian? How can you blame them for anything? None are in office. Democrats are behind the soft on drugs trend. Republicans don’t combat it because the only social issue they care about anymore is abortion.

My dad was a social worker at the Salvation Army in Uptown in the 80s & 90s. I remember going with him to work a few times when I was a kid and being so jolted to see all the crazies and vagrants in the neighborhood walking around.

We lived close to Horner Park at the time. Two miles to the west, but a whole different world.

It seems like America has turned into one big Uptown these days.

By extremely white you probably mean wasp. Funny, wasps are cultural outliers in the broader European culture. It’s no coincidence that puritans and calvinists were kicked out virtually from every mainstream European country and ended up in backwaters like Switzerland and America ( backwaters then).

Bum fights shouldn’t only be for bums.

A couple of years ago, the BBC, which has long been known for its recording quality and audio engineering skills put up this clip from 1970 of James Taylor playing “Fire and Rain.” Sound quality aside, it is an extraordinary live performance by him.

Be careful what you with for. I could see the woke using the new insane asylums to lock up what the left calls crazy people, like Evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, Mormons, conservatives, and of course any and all Trump supporters.

Is this satire? Mental illness? Genuine?

If genuine, ponder this. If you illiberally suppress the 10% furthest to the right then of the remaining 90% of the population you have a new 10% “far-right”to suppress. And then of the remaining 80% you have a new 10% far-right to suppress, and so on, until you end up with Leninist tyranny of purists and finally the party devouring its own in periodic massacres. You would be among those murdered for insufficient purity.

Let me condense : right-wingers live in the real world, left-wingers in dream world. Now wasn’t that easy? But of course the point is never to see the world as it is, the point is to trumpet how virtuous you are compared to the rest of us.

Not all Jews are soft hearted towards the homeless and criminals. I’m certainly not. Back when I lived in Las Vegas Jewish Mayor Oscar Goodman was very hard hearted towards the homeless and wanted them out of the city. All the liberal groups went crazy. I remember he was interviewed and he criticized the “homeless and their needles”. He had such disgust and animosity towards them. I loved him for this. I have never heard a politician talk this negative about the homeless since. I found this 2001 article about it.

https://m.lasvegassun.com/news/2001/nov/12/homeless-problem-haunts-goodman/

He doesn’t seem to have tattoos on his neck, head, or hands. I see plenty of people in Denmark with more (and uglier) tattoos than his. I have a family member who is a police man, he has more tattoos (but they are not ugly).

I also occasionally see people with head and neck tattoos — usually young men with a psychopathic look and obvious gang connections. I see about half and half of native Danes and imported people with them.

I also occasionally see young women with a few discrete hand tattoos (a couple of small stars, for example).

Maybe Denmark isn’t what you think it is.

There have been a variety of atrocities and incitements to atrocity documented during this war, each attributed to the other side by each side. But there have also been some atrocities and incitements to atrocity proudly posted by the side doing them, as if they don’t think there is anything wrong with them. In every instance of this I have seen, it has been by the US-backed Ukrainian side. Fortunately for them, the Media Industrial Complex rapidly scrubs such instances from the mainstream internet, before they garner significant attention in the West. If you can still find them, they’re on fringe sites or foreign-hosted sites, which the MIC can denounce as “disinformation”.

The shuttering of insane asylums was the result of a left-right coalition

How many liberals were in office or on the Supreme Courts versus how many libertarians were in office or on the Supreme Courts?

Thomas Szasz provided some libertarian rhetorical cover, but the actual decisions were taken overwhelmingly by the left.

PayPal deplatformed Steve years ago.

You know Boston, right? Think of it as the difference between McLean, the asylum of nice white people (good), and Lemuel Shattuck, where my girlfriend’s crazy crackheads end up (a Dantean hellhole).

Maybe Denmark isn’t what you think it is.

Du mener at sige, måske dansk lov er ikke, hvad denne journalist siger, er loven.

Are they getting these tattoos in Denmark? Or hopping over to Sweden or Germany for them, the way Oklahomans had to travel to Texas or Arkansas? Statute law and enforcement also often diverge– abortion was illegal in Puerto Rico before the Roe decision, but that was the go-to destination for rich girls on the mainland because the authorities looked the other way.

Make it an open-air asylum and locate it where Idaho, Wyoming and Utah currently stand. It’ll be a lot like ‘Coventry’ by Robert Heinlein or Harold Covington’s North West Front.

Of course, right-wing conservatives don’t see their xenophobia, their pathological fear of innovation and change…

Liberals see peoples from different cultures, backgrounds and personalities and they feel curiosity and as an opportunity for learning.

Somebody’s angry that Trump finally enforced Patricia Schroeder’s FGM bill, which was only meant for show. Same with the embassy move, another right-wing policy of the ’90s he dusted off.

Just can’t let multicultural families make their own decisions without interference. He never considered that they love their daughters as much as we* love ours. The very definition of racism!

*well, not Trump, who “anonymous” believes would send his own daughter to Auschwitz. Talk about cognitive dissonance!

To paraphrase Dan Jenkins, he played himself white.

You live in a country where Snoop Dogg’s involvement in drugs and killing hasn’t stopped him from becoming the mellow spokesman for Corona beer.

One can only wonder about how the destruction of the economy is going to depress white reproduction even further.

One thing to be said for the humane and progressive policy of housing the mentally ill under highway overpasses, is that it is cheap.

Not for the people who have to put up with psychotic vagrants mind you, but you don’t have to pay for expensive stuff like insane asylums.

Almost all government institutions were built in rural areas where land was cheap, there were no property owners to buy out no buildings to tear down. So were most colleges and universities. The small towns welcomed and lobbied for these institutions.

Because it would mean a base population of government university hospital medical center employees with life long employment at living wages. So no layoffs, no moving out of town, no going out of business. Therefore no recession in towns with a population base of career employees.

The conservative Republican President Ronald Reagan promises to abolish the US department of education by executive order when he ran for President.

Education department was only about 3 years old when Raegan became president. It would have been easy. But as in everything else Raegan lies to his conservative Republican voters and expanded the department of liberal indoctrination.

It’s nothing but a full employment program for women of color lesbians and radicals of all types.

It wasn’t the mentally ill who wanted to be released from the hospitals. It was the ACLU plaintiff’s attorneys in O’Connor vs Donaldson ADL AJC NOW and numerous other liberal organizations that pressured the hospitals to close down.

As usual, you don’t know what you’re talking about. And your comment sounds like a clip and paste from some article you just read.

Yes, the O’Connor decision was somewhat but only somewhat based on arrangements the Florida ACLU made for housing medical treatment and disability and welfare income for plaintiff O’Connor.

But what you don’t know is that court decisions on just one case applied to every person and institution in the country.

Example gay lovers being as responsible as next of kin for power of attorney and medical decisions. Another is affirmative action which the court claimed was only a quota system. That soon morphed into a no White men need apply system. Especially for government jobs.

Another example is how insane men were able to abolish male and female bathrooms in public buildings commercial buildings and schools in one year through the courts.

You are so ignorant about America and how things are done in America. Why do you keep posting your ignorant comments from S America.

” In every instance of this I have seen, it has been by the US-backed Ukrainian side. “

The video of the girl being led to her death is on the Telegram account of the Azov guy who was gloating about the murdered people in Severodonetsk. Apparently there’s a clumsy fake version where someone’s tried to add a Russian red stripe to one of the killers uniform.

https://southfront.org/massacre-in-kupyansk-nazi-propagandist-fail-to-whitewash-ukraine/

And there’s this

"We haven't any time to put them in jail. They disappeared… somewhere"

A local official jokes of massacring pro-Russian citizens of Ukraine in towns vacated by Russian forces

The human rights industry is basically forbidden from acknowledging this https://t.co/v8KKubOktq

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 10, 2022

“Fortunately for them, the Media Industrial Complex rapidly scrubs such instances from the mainstream internet”

About a week ago there were horrified reports in every paper the about the evil Russians bombing a civilian convoy inside Ukraine, killing 30-odd people, and I pointed out that they were waiting to cross to the Russian side, why would Russia try to kill them?

That incident has gone down the memory hole quicker than you can say ‘war crime’.

It was (((Mattapan))) in my youth when I was a kid growing up in the Back Bay. A regular Friday night thing then was going to Mattapan to buy meat at one of the kosher butchers (as a former farm boy my dad liked his meat fresh killed, I guess) and to get dinner at one of the delis or, much more preferable to me and my brother, Simco’s on the Bridge. Simco’s is still there. Read the comment from Mr. F:

https://www.yelp.com/biz/simcos-mattapan?start=40

Wiki on 60s Mattapan:
The period from 1968 to 1970 made up the most dramatic period of ethnic transition in Boston. Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon, in their 1991 book The Death of an American Jewish Community, argue that redlining, blockbusting, and fear in neighborhood residents created by real estate agents brought about panic selling and white flight. The banking consortium Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (B-BURG) allegedly drove the Jewish community out of Mattapan and are held partially responsible for the ensuing deterioration of the neighborhood, especially along the Blue Hill Avenue corridor. According to Levine and Harmon, the reason behind this orchestrated attack on the community was to lower market values to buy property, sell the housing with federally guaranteed loans at inflated prices to black families who could not afford it, and to get the white community to buy property owned by the banks in the suburbs. Gerald Gamm disputes these allegations in his 1999 book Urban Exodus, arguing that differences between the Jewish and Catholic communities in Boston constituted the greater contributing factor.[14] As Jewish people moved out of Mattapan, Caribbean Americans and African Americans began to move in.

The Department of Education was incorporated by statutory law, and could not be eliminated by executive order. He and Terrell Bell had a plan to replace it with a foundation. The plan received 19 votes in the Senate.

Almost all government institutions were built in rural areas where land was cheap, there were no property owners to buy out no buildings to tear down. So were most colleges and universities. The small towns welcomed and lobbied for these institutions.

Your local federal building is not in the countryside. Neither is your local post office. It’s been a common practice to build institutions on the fringe of current settlement, whether the adjoining settlement is large or small. In New York, there are few colleges in the countryside. New York planted six community colleges in rural locations to serve those within commuting distance and there are six four year colleges in residential villages or in the country (Bard, Houghton, Keuka, Paul Smith’s, Wells, and West Point). The total enrollment of the four year colleges is < 10,000. It's in small towns that you see colleges. These are teaching institutions, public and private. The only research university outside the cities is Cornell.

Yes, the O’Connor decision was somewhat but only somewhat based on arrangements the Florida ACLU made for housing medical treatment and disability and welfare income for plaintiff O’Connor.

LOL. O’Connor was the medical superintendent of the hospital, and Kenneth Donaldson was the patient!

The complaint was that he had been in the hospital for 15 years without treatment (because he refused treatment.)

Today he would have a right to go before a judge and request his release. The judge would also listen to evidence from his psychiatrist and determine whether he was a danger to himself or other people. Today mental hospitals have a lawyer on staff who represents patients who are petitioning for their release.

No, my comment was not clip and pasted.

Thanks for sharing. Interesting stuff!

We lived close to the intersection of Blue Hill Ave and Morton St when I was very little, 1970 to NLT 1972.

We had to get the hell out because, as you mention the area went from Jewish (we aren’t Jewish, but they are perfectly fine neighbors, etc) to black over night.

We had moved to Morton Street from…the Fenway.

My mom used to say: “when you were born, the Fenway was full of children and families: now it is just homos with dogs.” Haha.

We used to live on Queensberry Street.

I think a lot of the Jewish exit (should I say “Exodus”? :-)) wasn’t just the blacks. I think the traditional Jewish community that had been in Roxbury/Mattapan/parts of Dorchester had grown much better off over time.

A lot of the Jewish folks had moved from being working class people in the 1910s and 20s to middle class by the 1950s-60s, yet still lived in the same triple deckers etc. They could easily afford to pack up and move to Sharon, Newton, etc.

(I think similar to a lot of the Irish and Italians, same
period, making an exit to the South Shore or North Shore, respectively).

A really good book about this period is by Nat Hentoff: “Boston Boy”. Autobiography. Describes his experience as a Jewish working class kid in Roxbury in the 1930s-1950s.

Please know: when I say “really good”
I read it as a college kid back in the mid-80s, so perhaps my recollection is poor.

However: Hentoff was a decent writer (and a decent person from what I can tell, over looking the Iraq War
Support, etc).

Thanks for the interesting post.

Well, if you say so, but FWIW every iSteve page has this as the first item under ‘panhandling’ …

First: You can use PayPal (non-tax deductible) by going to the page on my old blog here. PayPal accepts most credit cards. Contributions can be either one-time only, monthly, or annual.

Of course, right-wing conservatives don’t see their xenophobia, their pathological fear of innovation and change and of what is different and unusual in general, their lack of empathy bordering on sociopathy, and their e̶x̶t̶r̶a̶o̶r̶d̶i̶n̶a̶r̶y̶ perfectly ordinary ability to experience disgust and revulsion as mental illness at all.

FIFY

These White people never put any single man on the moon : the ultimate employer of them all was the CIA and the CIA’s only concern was that no American citizen should believe in anything real except for personal malevolent purposes.

I am not against departments of education but education should be the individual states’ resort, together with the municipalities’ when the latter grow beyond a certain size. Not the federal government’s.

You live in a country where Snoop Dogg’s involvement in drugs and killing hasn’t stopped him from becoming the mellow spokesman for Corona beer.

Thanks for the reminder. This is infuriating. I have a fantasy of showing up to a Q/A session with Snoop Dogg (not that this would ever happen) and giving him a really hard time about his behaviour. Everyone would hate me but it would be kind of fun.

Actually their ideas were not similar. Laing criticized ordinary psychiatry because he believed that madmen were saner than the sane. Szasz criticized ordinary psychiatry because it aligned itself with the coercive power of the government. Szasz was a radical libertarian who believed that everyone, not excepting those we might want to call insane, is responsible for his actions; thus, he was an ardent opponent of the notion of “not guilty by reason of insanity”. In a similar vein, he was a strong opponent of all governmental restrictions on the availability of drugs, whether medicinal or “recreational”. In short he was a radical supporter of individual rights.

It’s always funny to me when politicians talk about going to Washington and eliminating one of the departments that bug them. It shows a certain ignorance of reality, that these departments are staffed by a good number of people put there by the very DC insiders that they’re pining to join.

They’re not going anywhere.

I grew up on Park Drive, three blocks from the ballpark. All BU students now.

“Rather than upgrade them or replace them with steel and glass buildings in the modern style, it was decided by progressive opinion over the course of the 1960s that the problem was not that some percentage of the population would always be dangerous crazy men but that society was trying to corral the dangerous crazy men.”

Sweeping generalization on your part. Next time, do your homework.

—1963 President John F. Kennedy signs the Community Mental Health Act. This pushes the responsibility of mentally ill patients from the state toward the federal government. JFK wanted to create a network of community mental health centers where mentally ill people could live in the community while receiving care. JFK could have been inspired to act because his younger sister, Rosemary, was mentally disabled, received a lobotomy and spent her life hidden away.

Less than a month after signing the new legislation, JFK is assassinated. The community mental health centers never receive stable funding, and even 15 years later less than half the promised centers are built.

—1967 Ronald Reagan is elected governor of California. At this point, the number of patients in state hospitals had fallen to 22,000, and the Reagan administration uses the decline as a reason to make cuts to the Department of Mental Hygiene. They cut 2,600 jobs and 10 percent of the budget despite reports showing that hospitals were already below recommended staffing levels.

—1967 Reagan signs the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act and ends the practice of institutionalizing patients against their will, or for indefinite amounts of time. This law is regarded by some as a “patient’s bill of rights”. Sadly, the care outside state hospitals was inadequate. The year after the law goes into effect, a study shows the number of mentally ill people entering San Mateo’s criminal justice system doubles.

—1969 Reagan reverses earlier budget cuts. He increases spending on the Department of Mental Hygiene by a record $28 million.

When deinstitutionalization began 60 years ago, states relied on community treatment facilities which were never built. The consequence became abundantly clear—the number of mentally ill people entering the criminal justice system in California doubled the first year after the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act was enacted.

We ought to fond a middle ground between incarceration, and untreated, unsupervised, and at-risk mentally ill people. Maybe you could promote this noble cause rather than be a liability.

Thank you! Beware the TYRANNY of the Minority AGAINST the Majority.

Alas a Tipping Point is coming. The Majority is slowly becoming SICK of the depredations of the Minority. Things are getting uglier by the second. The Majority is still trying to be “nice” and helpful – but resources are wearing thin…..

I have had to deal with an elderly in-law, for the past year and a half, who FINALLY died. He descended into dementia, inch by inch, day by day. His dementia was exacerbated by an extremely selfish, NASTY innate personality. He was extremely proud of his nastiness. He had tremendous strength and energy and willpower, even into advanced old age. My husband and I spent most of our time chasing after him, so he wouldn’t wander outside and fall down, and enduring gruesome verbal abuse all the while. He’d scream and yell on and off all night. He’d try to physically attack us when we tried to help him. We’d spend time trying to catch up on sleep when we could. The “mood altering” drugs, prescribed to him when my husband finally agreed to obtain them, didn’t do a THING. The old demon would quiet down for a day or so, and then be right back to howling and screaming obscenities day and night. I’ve stayed with my husband because I love my husband, and we can, hopefully, FINALLY get to enjoy our marriage again.

Our house has been a one man insane asylum. I am worn to shreds, and just because of one little old rotten man. Have YOU ever dealt with a crazy/deranged/demented person, one on one? I had a co-worker, years ago, who cared for her senile demented aunt. Barbara was half crazy herself, due to the stress. I was bewildered by her behavior, then. I was so very young, and I didn’t understand what she was enduring, due to my inexperience. Now I do. I think of her all the time now. We lost touch ages ago. I’ve tried to track her down, to see if she finally found peace. I pray she did.

So DO NOT CITE clips of a STUPID movie, DESIGNED to extort sympathy from dupes like YOU. I think crazies should be drugged to the GILLS. You go spend a week with violent lunatics, 24/7, and get back to me.