A San Francisco library is turning off Wi-Fi at night to keep people without housing from using it

withersailor@aussie.zone to World News@beehaw.org – 153 points –
A San Francisco library is turning off Wi-Fi at night to keep people without housing from using it
theverge.com
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because it costs $0 and unhoused people deserve access to education and resources at night same as those who are housed and have their own wifi?

this isnt about the wifi anyway, it's an attempt to chase homeless people out of populated areas bc rich people are scared to be confronted with the human cost of their actions.

you're fucking disgusting. i wish you the worst things.

Not the person you are replying to, but that's really uncalled for. It's a difference of opinion and none of us are in the position of decision making for the San Francisco Public Library.

A better policy would be for the city to provide universal Wi-Fi access across the city, instead of putting the burden on one public entity in one part of the city.

To be fair, several of these responses have been pretty disgusting in their disregard for homeless people. Also, why is it "unhoused" now and not "homeless". Seems like the semantics are something George Carlin would have fun with.

what people call you and how you're referred to affects how you're treated, directly. this is why propaganda works. i'd like to think carlin would understand that fucking around with marginalized groups trying to better their perception and situation is probably not super cool, and that it'd be much more chill to go after the powerful assholes doing the marginalizing. but who knows.

the word homeless has stigma attached thanks to movies, tv, politicians, news. unhoused drops alot of that stigma. removing that stigma is important in the interest of allowing people to feel empathy for those affected rather than fear. i still slip every now and again but the rationale makes sense and i'm trying to do better.

I'm guessing you've never seen the bit where Carlin goes from Shell Shocked -> Battle Fatigued -> Operational Exhaustion -> Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The whole thing about changing these terms is it tends to undermine the seriousness of the issues being discussed. And the marginalized people that are effected.

it categorically does not undermine the seriousness of what's being discussed. it casts aside stigma and hatred lumped onto groups from the outside and allows people in marginalized groups some degree of agency or choice in how they're named which usually results in more accurate terminology that's adaptive and capable of shifting away from terms and meanings applied by unaffected people in media and politics. these changes also create community and organization in marginalized groups

source: being gay and trans

i haven't seen the bit. but there is literally no evidence that seriousness gets undermined. sure, bigots will use shifts in terminology to mock their targets, but bigots were always going to do bigot shit anyway. again, i'd like to believe that carlin would've seen how things progressed into the 2010s and 2020s and painted targets on the powerful instead of the powerless.

bigots will use shifts in terminology to mock their targets, but bigots were always going to do bigot shit anyway

Yep, exactly how I think.

Changing terminology sucks oxygen out of the room. Sometimes it's important. Often it's not. We end up talking about Latino vs Latin vs Latinx, instead of immigration reform or better esl resources.

I'm not sure what their preferred would be. Homeless, unsheltered, unhoused, I guess it would be important to find out from them. Homeless might be a misnomer as some of them may find that anywhere is their home? Not sure, not my space

I've been homeless. We didn't give a fuck. Call us whatever as long as it's not insulting.

I was with you until the end there. Really uncalled for to call someone disgusting and wish harm upon them because they have a different opinion than yours.

If you read the article, it’s not about rich people seeing homeless folks, it’s about vandalism and open drug use on the sidewalks. You don’t have to be rich or white to feel uneasy while stepping over bodies sprawled out on the sidewalk or walking by human waste and needles in the bushes the next morning.

Perhaps there’s a middle ground like keeping the Wi-Fi on but requiring login with a (free) library card.

if your opinion is, it's correct to chase homeless people out of the few spaces they have access to, being told you're an anti-social monster who doesn't deserve anything good until you fix your revolting black heart, is getting off super easy.

opinions on how to best reorganize urban settings to promote access to parks and public transportation? i'll be respectful. "opinions" that displace and kill people? they create complicity in murder and violence and you deserve to be absolutely and firmly cast out of any meaningful discussion.

if you're uncomfortable with unhoused people existing, go do some activism. when enough of you murderous clowns come around and something gets done to house these people, great. we're good. until then, shut the fuck up you monster, they hang out in populated spaces as means of survival, not to inconvenience dumb privileged slobs like you.

there's no middle ground or space for debate here in ethical or pragmatic terms. your behaviour is disgusting and violent. it doesn't matter that you're too stupid or selfish to know or care.

Congrats, you’re one of the first lunatics I’ve seen since joining the Fediverse!

Just a reminder that Jello Biafra from the San Francisco group Dead Kennedys wrote a song called Kill The Poor, satirizing the heartless attitudes even back in 1980. He also ran for mayor of SF. Part of his platform was businessmen in downtown would have to wear clown suits. Would have been great if he had won.

hahahahah i know little bits about biafra's delightful weirdness. i'd rather see a well-meaning bonkers ass joke mayor than a serious one who gets a bunch of people killed on purpose

100%. I completely understand those news stories you hear where some town elected a dog to be their mayor.

Please don't attack and insult each other. Give the other user the benefit of doubt and assume good faith even if it comes alongside ignorance. You're free to ask questions to get them to clarify their point if you think they're spreading hate speech but please wait for unambiguous intolerance before launching off on someone 💜

i'm like the barest thread away from homelessness. i don't think it's fair to tone police me down when people are expressing disgust about people in a position i'll probably be in when i'm too old to pay my bills with unwanted subsistence sex work. when people are supporting measures designed to make life more hostile for people like that.

people who express disgust about unhoused people, and believe it's okay to throttle their already super limited access to society, are lost causes. that's violent instigation against people who can't defend themselves and these attitudes get. people. killed.

it's weird how even spaces on fedi require that you Politely and Respectfully Debate people who lead with genocidal intent. think about who was impolite or intolerant first. think about whether anything i said was "unprovoked." anyway speaking of tolerance i have none for environments that aren't safe for poor and unhoused folk and it's, all things considered, unsurprising that a model based on reddit ended up being, predominantly, another That.

best of luck and goodbye i guess. you can have the genocide people or you can have their victims but you can't have both.

I'm not sure if you're already gone and I tried to make it as clear as possible that I didn't think you were wrong. I understand this can read as tone policing, I was just asking for you to drop the very final part of your post because the other person didn't directly attack you and could have been coming from a place of ignorance. It's not on you to educate them either. To be clear I wasn't going to take any negative action on you and I didn't remove your post either because I believe both of those would be tone policing. But it's also really hard to have a place where people feel welcome and think it's nice while also explicitly being a safe space- in fact this is proof that for some people it might not work. My read on this person was that they were uninformed, not that they were necessarily attacking you. Their post consisted of nothing more than a question which comes from the ignorance and privilege of never being homeless. Yes, they might be an asshole worthy of scorn, I'm mostly just asking we confirm someone's a Nazi before we start punching.

If you're still around and want to talk in more depth about this let me know. I'm sorry I failed you 😔

I agree with you. I also agree with her. At the same time, you are correct, it was unprovoked and this was the correct mod action (not that you need my approval or anything, I just an really happy to see mods step in on stuff like this).

Thank you for making Beehaw such a wonderful place <3 I have never enjoyed social media as much as I have in the past 2 days or so.