Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes and Director of Public Defense for King County Anita Khandelwal and their agenda of "restorative justice" are the disease killing Seattle.

Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes and Director of Public Defense for King County Anita Khandelwal and their agenda of "restorative justice" is part of the disease killing Seattle.

Impartiality before law. The restorative justice construct fails in this sense - if a millionaire's nineteen year old son from Bellevue came into Seattle and struck a random stranger in the face, would the restorative justice inclined city attorney advocate for a harsher sentence than this homeless drug addict with 72 previous convictions?

That is not equality.

Finally, redeeming souls is not the job of the city or county, they are mixing religious valuation of individuals in with their mission of making the city high functional. From a secular political philosophy standpoint that is a wrong.

See more deeply why it is wrong here:  why-we-want-monsters-and-should-want-to.html

Reference:
https://komonews.com/news/project-seattle/why-this-seattle-judge-filed-a-complaint-against-himself

Tao Te Ting Poem 80

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 80

A small country has fewer people.
Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred times faster
     than man, they are not needed.
The people take death seriously and do not travel far.
Though they have boats and carriages, no on uses them.
Though they have armor and weapons, no one displays them.
Men return to the knotting of rope in place of writing.
Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple,
     their homes secure;
They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbors,
And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way.


This is an ancient Chinese thought from around 500 BC. It is before the emergence of a Chinese Empire, which is antithetical to the vision in this poem. The poem is saying stay local, stay simple with no machines, and it even opposes literacy.

While the Far East abandoned this view, some in the West, and Native people's, embrace it as a preferred way.

It's always going to be the losing way, subsumed and consumed by a more powerful global mechanized society. There is no other outcome.

So it is not an option for mitigating climate change.

Reference: https://www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu80.html

Wealthy Tech Created the Homeless: The Ultimate Bad Narrative

Crosscut Media: Seattle is addicted to bad narratives about homelessness

Crosscut Media as offered the ultimate reference for the sick, wrong narrative that propels the political/activist/NGO machine that has created the homeless epidemics of Seattle and San Francisco. It is an erroneous narrative divorced from reality.

The truth is Seattle and San Fancisco are temperate cities with lots of services and law enforcement leniency for the homeless, and the visible homeless are not from these cities but rather vagabond drug addicts and mental cases from all over rural and suburban America. Seattle/San Francisco are destinations for the nation's homeless.

No matter how one feels about the homeless and the addicted - on a regional policy level - creating the beacon of services and leniency for the whole nation of vagabonds to migrate to creates an untenable, unsolvable problem.

My bus route serves a major addiction services methadone clinic (I support these clinics, no negative connotation intended). I've ridden the bus with hundreds of these patients. From what I can tell, they are from rural and suburban places all over the country.

The software engineers making 150,000 are not the problem, and Chinese millionaires investing in highrise condos are not either. They have made the city prettier. Those who have gotten priced out of the city have moved to bedroom communities from White Center to Tacoma. I personally have many long time friends who have made the move to a home or apartment further out in the Seattle metro, including myself. I have absolutely no friends that were priced out of their Seattle residence and are now an addict living in a tent or RV in the city...absolutely none.

A word about the software engineers making an average of 150K annual salary, and the high tech, high rise offices that have increased in the city. I love the city this transformation has created. No matter my own status, I love the city Amazon and other tech giants have helped create. This is the very kind of city I want to experience.

The only cancer this city has is the narrative politicians and activists subscribe to and serve -the narrative of the software engineer pushing the lower middle class towards substance abuse and homelessness.

I'm tired of accomodating that cancer, and the voices that spread it.

Why We Want Monsters, And Should Want to Jail Them Too

A society that creates a few murderers and insanely violent people is a society where we can say liberty and diversity are alive and well.

I am not saying murderers and insanely violent people have a right to live as they want, in complete freedom. I am saying we should create them, then jail them. 

The last thing we should want is to be a society that has eradicated these monsters. Specifically, we should never want the surest death of all -homostasis. If we somehow intervened in everyone's upbringing and had uniformly great outcomes for all, that would be a society that had cutoff the non-linear dynamism needed for evolution and iterative adaptation. It would mean certain jeopardy for that society. They would be uniformily healthy and happy as seen from within, and easily crushed by an external society capable of novel mutations.

In essence - homeostasis is terminal. 

We are successfully producing our murderers and other monsters through, essentially, freedom. By this I mean the solitary lives we in the USA have made possible. With this solitude comes the ability to devise deeply personal perspectives on the meaning of life, and what is a proper pursuit of happiness. With this many people coming up with their unique internal self, the variety is staggering, and scary. 

We don't want the scary ones, but they are byproduct of creating the totally original ones that are useful. 

So we should accept that the monsters are steadily going to be produced, and accept that we have only two choices: they are left to be free and pursue their goals, or stop them from having their freedom through incarceration or death.

We seem to currently have a third way of dealing with the monsters, by desiring to intervene and convert them to another kind of person. Reform. This impulse goes back thousands of years, to religions as diverse as Christianity and Taoism.  

This is wrong. There is no right to convert people, to change their current deep seated goals. It is right to stop them, but not right to change their internal selves.

Our laws are not discovered absolute truths. They are not operating within a moral plane, or aiding a moral agenda. They should be a constellation of rules that output a society that has a coherent sustaining organization with power over its environment, and power to project goals and control over ever more territory (such as outer space), and power to project goals and control into the future. 

We have missplaced relativism. The proper place to allow relativism is allowing that a person with violent designs is a perfectly functioning person.  Where we should have less relativism is in the belief in our wider social enterprise....this sustaining organization of people, materials, machines and infrastructure that projects power over the environment and the future. We should be unflinching in liking its power, and seeing this power as a better thing, and not having that power as a worse thing.

We only jail the monsters because of their threat to the rest of us who want to exist for some time in this sustained culture, not because the monsters are psychologically wrong.