2mo ago

Montreal shopping mall plays “Baby Shark” on repeat to prevent unhoused people from loittering

montreal.ctvnews.ca Montreal shopping mall playing 'Baby Shark' song to prevent unhoused from loitering

A shopping mall and office complex in downtown Montreal is being criticized for using the popular children's song 'Baby Shark' to discourage unhoused people from loitering in its emergency exit stairwells.

You're viewing a single thread.

182 comments

What's with the wording of this title? "Unhoused people" instead of "Homeless"/"Homeless people"
- It's like the difference between calling someone wittless and uneducated.
  One implies that's just how the person is, the other implies a failing of society/family.
- I like the word unhoused, it implies they should just be housed if they are homeless. Everyone should be housed, even if they don't own a home
- A home is an abstract thing, a house is a quantifiable object.
  Also it kind of implies that society should provide a house for them.
- Homeless and "actually sleeps on the streets" are different things.
- If you are crashing on someone's couch then you are housed but still homeless. It's a bit of a dilution of the usual meaning of homeless but it also emphasises that housing is very precarious for the homeless.
- It's another one of those whack a mole words people are pushing. Once everyone gives in and we start using unhoused, it will suddenly switch to uninhabited because it's racists to houses or something!
  It's annoying as hell, because instead of fixing the issues we're mastrubating about words and alienating people that we need to fix the issue.
  
  @madcaesar There are plenty of people I block just for being needlessly tiresome, on the logic that they will probably never say anything that will make anything better for me or anyone else, but will still fill up the world and my life with pointless, irritating noise.
  You're today's winner.
  
  What a sad way to live :/
  
  So you're saying we can make you go away with repetitive noise? Hmm....
  
  @Warl0k3 What I've learned from decades of being online is that many people are just kind of pointlessly tiresome, essentially just producing meaningless noise that benefits no one, though maybe it helps them in some way, I don't know. There's a vast over-abundance of this kind of online noise, and it's always disposable.
  Even many total assholes online have something useful of interesting to say. But useless noise is just that, and I have no problem blocking such people.
  
  "Bay-bee shark doo-doo, doo-doo doo-doo..."
  Sarcasm aside though, I think you might have fallen into the habit of using your disinterest performatively to try and discourage the kind of noise you're talking about. I get it, I do, but calling people out that you're intending to block either hurts the people who've made one dick comment or encourages the kind of people who make said dicks comments because it amuses them. The people you don't like aren't going to start respecting your opinion or regarding your actions as understandably reasoned just because you point out what you're doing.
  The third option is that you're doing it to be smug? But from a brief scroll through your comment history that seems really unlikely. So, given the absolute hell the world is devolving into, does this really do anything positive for you? Because to an outside observer, this seems like the non-cathartic type of void screaming. I'm truly sympathetic there, and it might be worth it for your own peace of mind to start blocking more frequently but just moving on from there. Giving attention to people you write off as without value cannot be personally constructive.
  
  @Warl0k3 If your goal is to be useless and annoying to others, you've succeeded. Bye-bye.
  
  On the offchance you didn't actually block me here, you may want to go and see the full comment instead of the one I fat-fingered send on.
- I heard a really good explanation of this on NPR. Homeless is a label put on a person, similar to saying a person is a redhead. The implication of saying that someone is homeless is that it defines who they are, that it cannot be easily changed.
  Unhoused is more descriptive of the situation that a person is in. This is a condition that can be changed, it isn't who the person is.
  As I revisit this and think it through though, it seems like another way of pushing the goal. There are absolutely negative connotations with the word homeless, but the same venom will eventually attach to unhoused as well.

182 comments