I'm looking at that definition, and trying to find how you're looking at the situation. Are the homeless in this context a nation?
Replies
They don't have to be?
aug 31, 2025, 2:11 pm • 3 0 • view
They do, though. Read the definition again. Part of the definition of genocide requires targeting “a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” Homeless people are none of those.
aug 31, 2025, 3:32 pm • 6 0 • view
Destroying the few possessions of your poorest, most vulnerable citizens because their poverty looks ugly is evil. So is genocide. But not every evil thing is the same as every other evil thing. This is not genocide. There are other words we could use: heinous, monstrous, villainous… list goes on.
aug 31, 2025, 3:32 pm • 8 0 • view
Sure, that's been called "classicide" on the left. I disagree with the term because I believe violently targeting and ultimately attempting the poor on the basis of their economic class should constitute genocidal acts. I graduated high school with kids that beat a homeless man dead, I don't buy-
aug 31, 2025, 3:39 pm • 2 0 • view
-the argument that that kind of earnest hatred doesn't come from the same place as whatever drives people like the Americans or the Israelis.
aug 31, 2025, 3:40 pm • 2 0 • view
I don’t agree. This sounds to me like an attempt to justify caring about economic inequality in a neoliberal age where only identity politics have validity and weight. And I don’t think we have to use terms made for identity politics to justify that. We can just say, “This is wrong.”
aug 31, 2025, 3:46 pm • 3 0 • view
I don't understand (or sympathize with, at face value) this idea that opposing economic inequality needs to be justified. I don't recall anyone suggesting such a thing to me before, and I think it's a very strange thing to say.
aug 31, 2025, 3:53 pm • 2 0 • view
Sorry, let me explain what I mean: there’s been a tendency, in the past 30 years or so, for mainstream left/liberal parties to abandon their previous support of the working class in favor of copying the neoliberal policies of the right.
aug 31, 2025, 4:19 pm • 3 0 • view
But even as they move right economically, they’ll at least give lip service to CULTURAL left-wing movements. Identity politics don’t necessarily have to threaten the rich, because they can just let a few Black people (etc.) into the upper echelons of society and consider their job done.
aug 31, 2025, 4:19 pm • 3 0 • view
I think as a result of this, identity politics has become the default language of politics. For many people, it’s as if identity politics are the only kind of politics left. So if you want to emphasize that something is REALLY bad, you might explain why using terms from identity politics.
aug 31, 2025, 4:19 pm • 3 0 • view
You try to turn a group of victims into an identity group, even if they’re not, and describe the harm done them as an act of bigotry. Because those ideas have a huge amount of weight. It sounds more serious to call something genocide than to point out that no one deserves to be treated like this.
aug 31, 2025, 4:19 pm • 4 0 • view
I also disagree with the term because it's used more universally and it doesn't really apply to the poor and homeless. The most common use of the term usually is in reference to the Chinese people's retaliation against landlords.
aug 31, 2025, 3:50 pm • 3 0 • view
I’m going to have to do more reading on this term “classicide,” because I’d never heard it before. Just quickly browsing the wikipedia article, I definitely see what you’re talking about, and I’d agree that it might apply to what Mao did, but not to social murder against homeless people in the U.S.
aug 31, 2025, 4:24 pm • 3 0 • view
Actually, that's an interesting point about the landlord purges: there were certainly land reform measures taken by the state, but the killings themselves were largely carried out by local governments and even civilians. Mao's Chins was more keen on decentralization than the USSR was.
aug 31, 2025, 4:35 pm • 3 0 • view
China*
aug 31, 2025, 5:15 pm • 0 0 • view
Or the Russian right, for that matter, but Putin's Russia is basically just the United States in Cyrillic. With better literacy and homeownership rates, admittedly, but the former is a low bar and the latter largely a holdover from the Soviet days.
aug 31, 2025, 3:44 pm • 1 0 • view
Ok
aug 31, 2025, 2:36 pm • 1 0 • view