Democrat 2020

[Husar]

Doesn't really sound like you care about solving the problem, then. No help until utopia, apparently. Rising tide lifts all boats is neoliberal rhetoric. In 1990 you would have said: Nein aid für den Ostdeutschen! Universellus Sozialismus firstus, no special treatment for any Germans!

No, didn't I already say that? You're also falling for a less-than-serious reply here. I don't always have the time to write very long answers and especially homelessness is complicated and can have different reasons in different countries.
In Europe, there are "homeless people", often even disabled ones, who get carted into town by the mafia and are basically beggar slaves. Giving them money is not fighting neoliberalism as it only encourages the mafia to get more slaves.
Obviously in the US one can much easier become homeless by just losing one's job, etc. I've heard varying stories about the possibility of that happening in Germany, but then you also have to enter drug abuse, unwillingness to get government aid, inability to fill out forms, etc. into the picture. Giving someone some change mostly makes you feel better about yourself, but if they spend it on booze, how exactly did you help them? By making them die faster of liver failure?

What bandaid? Having fewer billionaires or banks is not something that will automatically eliminate these disparities. There are frankly multiple etiologies associated with any social ill you care to name. There are no panaceas, and why the hell should anyone assign you credibility when you sound like Brezhnev telling the Soviet people that their discomforts are irrelevant because "really-existing socialism" will hopefully probably solve all of them for future generations if they just shut up and persevere? How about, identify all the different parts of the status quo we don't like, and start fixing them, because each fix contributes toward the greater project? It's not the other way around. Reform does not 'trickle down', and you have to grasp that. Otherwise, why do we need free college or national healthcare? Just wait till we get rid of all the oligarchs, then we can invest in handouts like those. Unless - you benefit directly from healthcare and education but not from women or queer people being more secure...

I'm getting the impression that you misunderstand me, though maybe I helped with that by explaining my position in a weird way. I wasn't saying socialism will cure everything or that the other agenda items don't matter at all. I was saying that starting with the "wrong" agenda items means you will make much slower progress or no progress at all. If you want social justice reform, but prison owners keep bribing a sufficient number of politicians and releasing a lot of fake news or biased news stories, it can happen that you won't get any meaningful reform in 50 years. See Obama care, which was some weird compromise that barely got through, still faces opposition trying to dismantle it again anddidn't really help everyone. Yes, it's better than before, better than nothing, but how long did it take you to get this half-arsed bandaid? When was the last major healthcare reform before it?

Free college and national healthcare are core parts of "introducing socialism" or "fixing the base problem" though, as they directly benefit the lower classes and help upset the power structure. Or at least one would hope so. They're not what I meant with side issues, they're part of what the focus should be on.

As for Ilhan Omar, she does have these things in focus and again, having criminal justice reform on the agenda is a very good thing, the question is just how well that will work out if you begin there. Just today I heard that people don't overtake police cars in the US because reasons. And that it takes a lot of time and perhaps money to go to court if a police officer decides to fine you for no reason. Ah, well, there is so much to fix in your country, maybe I just don't know where to begin. I just see that progressives have been trying to fix it for 20 years or thereabouts now and what I mostly see is more gerrymandering and voter repression by the other side. Yes, you got gay marriage. And Trump. I guess that makes it progress.

Anyway, I guess reforming the justice system is close to the core issues, but why would it have to be spearheaded by black people, who also appear (from how they're described, I could be wrong) like single-issue activists? Sometimes people just sound like Harris is a better candidate than Sanders simply because she is black and because she is less focused on social justice ("Sanders is too extreme"). Well, if you think about it, prison reform is about social justice as well and I don't see how being extreme is a bad thing when Trump was voted in for being so extreme. He's extreme in the wrong way, but it's not like noone wants extreme changes.