Sidewalk lords
More actions
""Sidewalk lords — Haz's provocation about the homeless, deployed to scandalize liberal compassion-talk and right contempt simultaneously.
From the Heated political debate stream
Deflecting a critic: "You're linking me a tweet of Laconian saying that I— because I said that the homeless are sidewalk lords or something, very serious, obviously... He's just making a fucking statement about me. What do you want?"
The concept
Originating on Twitter (where Haz affirmed the comparison of the homeless to landlords in Mao's time), the phrase makes a materialist point through scandal: public space has been privatized and its occupants constitute a de facto territorial authority the state manages rather than houses. Not mockery of the homeless — mockery of a society that produces lords without land, and of a left that responds with sentimentality instead of housing policy (Housing crisis, Class).