So here’s how laws criminalizing homelessness work and why they’re so fundamentally repulsive.

You’re homeless. Let’s say you just got evicted and you’re broke so you’re sleeping in your car.

A cop sees you being homeless in the wrong place. You get a ticket with a fine.

You can’t pay the fine, because you have no money, because you’re homeless.

The system sends out a notice for you to appear in court. Which you don’t get, because you have no mailing address, because you’re homeless.

When you don’t show up for court, a warrant is put out for your arrest. Along with a bigger fine.

You get arrested and thrown in jail.

The prison charges you $50 a night.

When you get out, you have to pay the prison fees. Which you can’t, because you’re homeless.

Meanwhile, cops keep writing you tickets for being homeless. Which you can’t pay, because you’re homeless.

And you keep getting arrested for not paying, and you keep going back to jail, for longer and longer periods, because now you have a criminal record.

And by this time you probably have PTSD from the torture and other forms of abuse which are routine in American prisons Franklin, which doesn’t help you at all.

And ultimately you go from “temporarily financially unstable” to permanently institutionalized in a for-profit prison. Your state government pays the prison $400 a night to house you, and a fraction of that is paid back to the politicians who passed the anti-homeless laws as campaign donations and legal “gratuities”, so everyone benefits except you and the taxpayers. And even if you had a legal route to fight back, the odds are you wouldn’t be physically or mentally capable of it at that point.

And once the Supreme Court makes forced labor in prisons legal again, those for profit prisons will rent your labor out for agricultural work, and you’ll be even more profitable working the fields for the rest of your short, ugly life.

And this is how the system is designed to work, because capitalism only works if people fear poverty enough to accept abusive working conditions, and the worse America becomes for the unhoused the more power capital gains over labor.

Welcome to capitalist America. Please leave your unalienable human rights at the door.

You might be interested in this climate misinformation chart.

Hint: you’re at the top of the “climate delay” section.

Environmental groups are considered more dangerous now than they were in the 90s/00s when Earth First and ELF were burning down homes, Sea Shepherds were sinking whaling ships, and there was this guy named Ted in a cabin in Montana you may have heard of?

Citation fucking needed.

So here’s the thing. Just Stop Oil is performing symbolic disruption and vandalism. And they are doing it to exactly the targets you say they should - for example, Taylor Swift’s private jet.

And they are also performing symbolic vandalism against works of art and history.

And I submit the way you feel about them targeting Stonehenge is very similar to the way a wealthy conservative feels about them targeting private jets - it offends you even though it does no actual harm because it’s an attack on something you value and something you feel should be respected, which makes you feel like it’s an attack on you personally.

Just Stop Oil has been very clear about why they symbolically vandalize works of art - because every dollar you spent on preserving human art and history is meaningless if the human species drives itself to extinction, and anyone who cares about art and history needs to get off their asses and demand political change. They do it because people who care more about art than the environment are the people they’re trying to shake up and motivate.

Preserving art is a bourgeois luxury. If we as a species don’t get off our asses and fight climate change we won’t have any art left to preserve or any human beings left to appreciate it.