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The Telegraph
Tuesday 04 December 2012

Amsterdam to create 'scum villages'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... lages.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"Repeat offenders should be forcibly removed from their neighbourhood and sent to a village for scum," he suggested last year. "Put all the trash together."

There are already several small-scale trial projects in the Netherlands, including in Amsterdam, where 10 shipping container homes have been set aside for persistent offenders, living under 24-hour supervision from social workers and police.

A team of district "harassment directors" have already been appointed to spot signals of problems and to gather reports of nuisance tenants.

So if you have a couple of neighbors who think that you are a trouble maker, you get to go to live in a shipping container? Oh, I forgot. Amsterdam is an "enlightened" city who has seen their way to approve of drugs and prostitution. Trouble making neighbors, not so much.

It would be interesting to see what actions one would actually have to take to be labeled a troublemaker.
Edit: corrected misspelling.

It sounds good to me.

Go to any public housing project or trailer park. You find people who are surrounded by their own trash and filth, barking dogs, junk cars, weeds, people who deal drugs and or cook meth, play loud music all the time, have loud fights, threaten their neighbors ... I could go on. If you're really unlucky, one of these people will move in next door to you.

I'd like to fence off a big stretch of Nevada and send them there.

- Jim

I thought we already had one of those! They call it Manhattan in New York City.

How many times have you been to Manhattan? How does it compare to Washington, D.C.?

- Jim

I've been to Manhattan twice. Both times, the phrase that Ben Kenobi uses to describe the city where he and Luke Skywalker found Han Solo in the very first Star Wars movie comes to mind:

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.

Never been to DC.

seamusTX wrote:Go to any public housing project or trailer park.

Wow.. really?
That's pretty broad brush you're wielding there..

Probably most people who live in public housing or a trailer park are doing their best with the hand they were dealt, but you are going to find a lot more antisocial behavior there, or at least less well disguised than in River Oaks or your local gated community.

I live where I choose to live, but there are plenty of people that I would like to vote off the island (literally).

I see comments on this forum all the time about "the ghetto," "Katrina refugees," wards in Houston, or neighborhoods in other cities that I don't know enough about to have an opinion.

- Jim

For nonviolent offenders, it sounds more cost effective than typical minimum security incarceration.

seamusTX wrote:Probably most people who live in public housing or a trailer park are doing their best with the hand they were dealt, but you are going to find a lot more antisocial behavior there, or at least less well disguised than in River Oaks or your local gated community.

I live where I choose to live, but there are plenty of people that I would like to vote off the island (literally).

I see comments on this forum all the time about "the ghetto," "Katrina refugees," wards in Houston, or neighborhoods in other cities that I don't know enough about to have an opinion.

- Jim

While I agree with you that there are some people who are just a blight on the neighborhood, the slope seems very slippery and steep to allow a committee to make the decision about who gets voted off. No where in the article was there any criteria for the errant behavior other than reports from the neighbors. That part really bothers me.

I put out quite a flag display on Memorial Day and an even larger one on July 4th. I know that some of my neighbors don't like it. I'd hate the thought that I could loose my home because of my display of patriotism. One of the neighbors called the police on the guy across the street 10s of times for something that the police repeatedly told her was not illegal. She marshaled some her neighbors to help in making those calls when the police threatened to arrest her for making harassing reports. Given the way that governmental "committees" work, my neighbor could have been a victim of the scum law.

I see the scum village situation the way that I view parts of the Patriot Act. In the right hands, it could do some good. In the wrong hands, like it is now, it is a weapon which could benefit a tyrannical government. I'd put up a really bad neighbor rather than go down that road.

The Netherlands is a parliamentary democracy/constitutional monarchy. They can govern themselves as they like. They do a pretty good job. It's a prosperous country with low crime rates.

What works there would not work here, even setting aside our constitution and history. It is much more of a homogenous culture (from what I know—I have never been there).

However, I suspect a factoid that has been overlooked in news reports is that the people being characterized as antisocial are most likely clients of the country's cradle-to-grave welfare system, who are living at the expense of the taxpayers, and flout social convention. They are not simply free thinkers and eccentrics.

BTW, a lot of people in this forum would call me a liberal if they knew enough about me; but I don't tolerate antisocial behavior, and I am emphatically unwilling to pay people to engage in it.

- Jim

Jim,

Please define some of what constitutes anti-social" behavior and I think few would disagree with banishing these monsters...

I'm not speaking of the eccentric / simply odd or those who display flags or paint their house with colors not of our choosing.

I've lived (well in the past) when I had to work up my courage to go outside because the immediate environment was akin to post apocalyptic with a large percentage of my neighbors (a kind descriptive...) were to be very wary of and the powers that be just couldn't do much.

I already did: Criminal behavior such as drug dealing or threatening the neighbors, multiple animals (there are municipal code about this, usually three pets, no livestock in a town), accumulating trash, burning noxious material like old tires, intentionally damaging the neighbors' property, frequent loud parties.

I'm not talking about issues like paint (or lack thereof) or decorations. I don't want to live in a gated community or one of those places that has a busybody homeowners association.

There was a guy around here (fortunately for me not within sight of my house) whose yard was completely full of junk with weeds growing up between the inanimate objects. People called it a rat ranch. He was elderly, lived alone, and probably had mental problems. The city went through the motions of citing and fining him and getting court orders. Nothing much changed. IIRC Ike wiped out the place.

- Jim

RoyGBiv wrote:

seamusTX wrote:Go to any public housing project or trailer park.

Wow.. really?
That's pretty broad brush you're wielding there..

That brush is too broad, Jim, and/or lacks specificity to city and state.

Jim,

Yes, you did.

I need to pay more attention.

Sorry..

And thanks, those are fine examples.

seamusTX wrote:The Netherlands is a parliamentary democracy/constitutional monarchy. They can govern themselves as they like. They do a pretty good job. It's a prosperous country with low crime rates.

What works there would not work here, even setting aside our constitution and history. It is much more of a homogenous culture (from what I know—I have never been there).

However, I suspect a factoid that has been overlooked in news reports is that the people being characterized as antisocial are most likely clients of the country's cradle-to-grave welfare system, who are living at the expense of the taxpayers, and flout social convention. They are not simply free thinkers and eccentrics.

BTW, a lot of people in this forum would call me a liberal if they knew enough about me; but I don't tolerate antisocial behavior, and I am emphatically unwilling to pay people to engage in it.

- Jim

I've spent time in Amsterdam and agree that they have a different outlook on many things. My point wasn't that I have any quarrel with the way that they govern themselves but about the way that our Federal government seems on a fast path to try to make us look like them. While the Fed's haven't condoned the State approvals for recreational MJ, there is no movement afoot to challenge it either. So we only need to start legalizing prostitution outside of Nevada and we are going to look a lot more like the Netherlands than what the US used to look like.

I found all of the residents of Amsterdam that I met to be very engaged in the political process. How they govern really seems to be a product of the people. That is in stark contrast to what is more and more an adolescent minded, disengaged American electorate. The scum village concept here would, I fear, take on a much more malevolent appearance. There are a lot of tin foil hat types that think that the Federal government is already preparing those kinds of facilities. I'm not in that tin foil hat group - yet.