Hypocrites. Leftist one percenters love to live in and impose their misguided, holier-than-though, race-baiting, inflammatory ideological fantasies on society; the socialist, progressive fantasy that they assured everyone would lead to utopia has led to San Fransisco becoming a third-world city.
The question is, in the face of this failure will any of these progressives change their worldview?
My pessimistic answer is no, they are insulated enough from the consequences of their actions that they will continue with more policies that garner approval from their social group.
They are so deluded they don't even realize the only reason they do it is to virtue signal how much better they are than everyone else, which is just another contest to come out on top in the pecking order.
Once upon I time a read a saying whose exact form I no longer remember, but the gist was in "Whoever is meek to the cruel ones, is cruel to the meek."
Living in unsafe places is one of the worst horrors of poverty. I think there is a subset of progressives that does not want to accept the idea that some people really are psychopathic predators. Or perhaps only limits that idea to the rich, bankers etc., while finding all kind of excuses for anyone else.
There is no denying that a lot of successful psychopaths accrue at the top of the societal ladder, but the violent ones often inhibit the bottom, terrorizing the rest.
When I was a single mother's kid in the early 1990s in a country with a rudimentary welfare system, I was poor-ish enough to be in the bottom fifth of the society, and I knew plenty of similar people. It is my experience that mere lack of money won't turn an otherwise kind person into a violent criminal. They may be driven to steal or cheat, but deliberately injuring or killing other people, for that you need to be quite a bad apple yourself.
It’s long known that poverty in itself doesn’t cause crime. I also was on the bottom rungs when I was very young.
Poverty next to wealth does. Suddenly that poor but adequate lifestyle isn’t enough when the guy down the street is driving a Porsche.
We are in a pretty extreme wealth gap and we celebrate wealth too much. On top of that, people confuse being soft on crime with helping the poor. Poor people don’t break into cars to eat. Criminals break into cars.
Furthermore, being soft on crime often hurts the poor, because they're the most at risk to criminal behavior. If you're poor, you can't afford a security guard, or a fancy home security system, or a Ring camera when you're away from your home. The rich can handle having their wallet or phone stolen -- it's just an inconvenience. But if you're poor, the fees and time associated with recovering from that are a monumental burden that could break your ability to put food on the table.
Enforcing laws gives comfort to everyone because they know we're all on a level playing field. But once you start ignoring laws and letting people off, suddenly lawbreakers can get ahead while law abiders fall behind. Let's try to punish criminals instead of rewarding them.
> There is no denying that a lot of successful psychopaths accrue at the top of the societal ladder, but the violent ones often inhibit the bottom, terrorizing the rest.
The difference is that most criminals at the top don't need to use violence as a tool to get what they want, at least not usually.
> They may be driven to steal or cheat, but deliberately injuring or killing other people, for that you need to be quite a bad apple yourself.
A small percentage may be born bad, but a lot more are subjected to consistent physical and psychological violence and trauma, and becoming bad ends up being a kind of short term focused survival mechanism. Exposure to drugs and environmental toxins at a young age also damages neurological development.
As I like to say, one does not have to be racist/sexist/homophonic/etc to be an asshole.
It certainly does seems to be a belief on the left that if one were to use the n word one time (not even directed at anyone), they should be shunned from society and they life as they know it should be over. Shop lifting to the point where a business has to shut down, or breaking into cars and stealing irreplaceable possessions—that maybe shouldn’t even be illegal.
I’m in favor of reasonable penalties for bad behavior, and leniency and forgiveness when it’s warranted. But as another posters said: we need to live in reality.
Based on who San Franciscans has been electing, it seems too many live in world of progressive delusion far removed from reality. Reality got too real, now elected officials react. If only the citizens of SF could bring themselves to support and elect politicians who would’ve nipped this tragedy, years in the making, in the bud. Breed talks about the need to change course now — SF needed to change course long ago.
There are conservatives in the SF Bay Area than people want to admit to and I think that number went up heavily in the past two years of covid fascism.
Good question. I didn't mean this to refer to a specific politician, I meant that SF isn't the kind of place where such a politician could thrive. I think in a healthy place, you would see a healthy balance of right and left politicians who genuinely have to contend with one another. I would expect conservative politicians to win elections when things like crime and quality of life start to go the wrong direction. I don't think the delusional climate in SF is conducive to this healthy balance.
My recollection of the election when Breed won was there was one Republican, and I don't think he got many votes. Ideally there would be multiple Republican and Democratic candidates, with strong and worthwhile candidates from each party, each getting a decent share of votes. I recall the two other popular Democratic candidates competing with Breed banded together (don't remember what that meant exactly, I think they were recommending voters to vote for both of them in their ranked choices) and their platform for dealing with homelessness was to give them all cleaning supplies and have them clean the streets of SF, thereby killing two birds with one stone (giving the homeless productive, gainful occupation and dealing with all the litter, needles, human waste, etc. on the streets). I can't think of a more out-of-touch idea than that, but this was the #2 choice for San Franciscans.
I think anyone sensible would have simply asked for what Breed is now proposing to do. Voicing that opinion in SF years ago would've made you a pariah. It's a common sense opinion if you're living in and observing reality, but that's simply not what SF culture has been about.
> My recollection of the election when Breed won was there was one Republican, and I don’t think he got many votes.
There were two Republicans, and the one that got more votes (both first preference and total, since it was an IRV not first-past-the-post election) of the two wasn’t a “he”. (The one that got fewer votes was the one endorsed by most local Republican institutions.)
But if you are thinking of her 2019 reelection in the regular election and not the 2018 special election…
The other candidates were (in order of most to least final votes)
Ellen Lee Zhou (R) – the leading Republican from the special election
Joel Ventresca (endorsed by Green Party, subsequently ran in the gubernatorial recall as a Democrat)
Paul Ybarra Robertson (no apparent party affiliation)
Wilma Pang (previously Peace and Freedom, but not sure if that was current in 2019)
Robert L. Jordan (a "street minister" with no apparent party affiliation)
> Ideally there would be multiple Republican and Democratic candidates
There were in the open seat election where Breed was first elected; there was one of each in the regular election where she was reelected.
But San Francisco has 316k registered Democrats, 137K registered with no party preference, 33K registered Republicans, and 15K registered with other parties. Expecting symmetry between the nationally major parties in San Francisco is silly. Many individual factions within the Democratic Party are larger, in terms of electorate, than the Republican Party in SF, and the ratio in support between the Democratic and Republican parties is smaller than that between the Republican and American Independent parties and almost the same as that between the Republican and Libertarian parties.
> I recall the two other popular Democratic candidates competing with Breed banded together (don’t remember what that meant exactly, I think they were recommending voters to vote for both of them in their ranked choices) and their platform for dealing with homelessness was to give them all cleaning supplies and have them clean the streets of SF, thereby killing two birds with one stone
That…didn’t happen. None of the major Democrats either banded together or had a platform like that. (There were some institutional cross-endorsements for Breed and Leno.)
I was thinking of 2018, but I don't remember Ellen Lee Zhou being Republican, only Richie Greenberg. Four unaffiliated-but-Democratic candidates ranked higher, Ellen and Richie were next both with less than 5% of the vote. Mark Leno and Jane Kim were the two I recall banding together; they were #2 and #3 respectively after London.
> But San Francisco has 316k registered Democrats, 137K registered with no party preference, 33K registered Republicans, and 15K registered with other parties. Expecting symmetry between the nationally major parties in San Francisco is silly.
It's up to Republicans to find a way to appeal to San Franciscans.
The bottom line is that they're deeply out of step with the city on culture war issues they themselves whipped up. Forcing women to give birth to corpses, legalizing discrimination based on sexual orientation, opposing all pandemic mitigations, etc. Even if an individual politician doesn't support these positions,they define the brand.
I think the problem is San Franciscans are out of touch with reality. The root problem is not the GOP brand; despite the flaws in the GOP brand that is not the bottom line.
Both can be true. Even if there are many San Franciscans who are out of touch with reality, the GOP is not providing a good option for those who aren’t.
Both problems may be present, but I think one of them is the bottom line/root cause. It’s a numbers game. I don’t think there are enough who are in touch with reality to influence election results.
Yeah, it's a matter of whether you want to address problems proactively (nip them in the bud), or reactively after you have a crisis on your hands. If you live in reality, you can see problems and growing trends, and take action (or at least demand of politicians) to do something about it. People SF instead are so deeply mired in a cult-like ideology that they'd rather stick their head in the sand for a very long time denying there's a problem, in fact castigating anyone who points out there's a problem, and instead vote for people who will further an agenda while exacerbating the problem. Read some of the comments on Breed's Medium post: https://londonbreed.medium.com/a-safer-san-francisco-eb40d9d.... You can't help people who won't help themselves.
Why would the GOP even want to run San Francisco? San Francisco deteriorating under left-wing politicians has great propaganda value for the GOP in the rest of the country.
> Why is it silly to expect it to be less extreme?
It's silly to expect that national distribution of political thought to be approximated in every geographic subdivision. It has never been even approximately, the case. Structurally, the US electoral system encourages coalition building and dividing so that factions that nationally are roughly balanced form the major national parties, but there is no reason that that's even a privileged frame to decide what is “balanced”.
No one is saying every geographical subdivision needs to reflect exactly the aggregate distribution at the national level. I expect the split in individual cities to deviate from the national mean split. Based on my subjective experience living in SF, and based on the data, SF’s deviation is too extreme.
Sure, we can regress to a form of solipsism and just say there’s no possible discussion to be had about whether SF is too extreme. Yes, God has not written down a cosmological constant of what threshold determines too extreme vs not too extreme. I think it’s pointless for us to gaslight ourselves into this belief. If we can’t say SF is too extreme, how can we say crime is too high, or persecution of LGBTQ is too high, or anything else?
In the link I shared above, SF deviates as far left as the scale can go. If you think it is possible to have an inter-subjective conversation about whether SF is too extreme, but think SF isn’t, what would need to be true for you to declare SF past the threshold?
> Based on my subjective experience living in SF, and based on the data, SF’s deviation is too extreme.
What data? What data could even support the idea of a threshold of acceptable deviation from the national average distribution of political thought?
Honestly, I think that while there is a problem, you have conceptualized it entirely incorrectly. The problem is not with the diversity of distribution of political thought, the problem is national political duopoly and the electoral systems that support it, among the many manifestations of which (and far from the most important) is an absence of partisan competition in jurisdictions whose political center isn't very close to the national political center.
> If you think it is possible to have an inter-subjective conversation about whether SF is too extreme
It's not (and I think obviously not), unless you specific for what. If you specify that, it's may be that such a discussion is possible (and even, though less likely, possible that it is meaningful and not a distraction from more important considerations for that purpose.) But I’m not optimistic.
1.
The data I’m referring to is in the link I was referring to. See how far left on the spectrum SF is. Take also your figures on registered voters in each party. I suspect SF is many standards deviations from the national mean split.
Can we agree on any possible intersubjective standard for too extreme? If not, fine, we revert to solipsism.
If either of the data mentioned in the first paragraph is a possible metric, how many standard deviations is too many?
If not this standard/metric, will you propose another? I challenge anyone to propose a metric or set of metrics that reasonable people will entertain as a standard of measuring a cities extremes, plus a set of thresholds that reasonable people will entertain as determining too extreme/not too extreme, and then coming to the conclusion under these metrics that SF is not too extreme. In other words, any way you want to slice it, SF is too extreme, unless you refuse to “slice it”.
2.
National political duopoly is problematic, but we live in a democracy. Every citizen is free to have their own positions, vote for whoever they want, and run for office if they don’t like who’s running. Your perspective is not your skin color, you can change it and update it as you participate in the real world. Citizens of SF simply cannot blame the national duopoly for their choices. It’s completely possible to foster, appreciate, and embody diversity and non-partisanship of thought. It’s possible to foster a culture of balance and diversity, which in turn could encourage the partisan competition you mention.
SF even has ranked choice voting which should weaken the duopoly’s death grip, in theory.
The national structural problems you mention are true for every city. There’s nothing in the water or Karl the Fog that uniquely prevents people in SF from doing what I mentioned above. But they don’t, that’s their choice, that’s SF culture, and that’s the problem.
London Breed is a bad mayor for SF. She defunded the police by $120 million during the movement [1] while she spent $12.4 million on her own personal security detail [2]. And now she pledges more police. It's a slap on her own face. She dances in a nightclub without a mask, breaking the very rule she set herself [3]. She partied at the French Laundry restaurant while she encouraged everyone else to shelter in place [4]. London Breed is a terrible mayor for SF. As the innovation center of the world, SF deserves better. Can anyone shed some light on how she got elected?
It's been a while, so I had to look. It seems she was actually interim mayor, and was then recalled as interim mayor. After she was recalled, she won the special election.
Good catch; I remembered she wasn’t elected as an incumbent, and found a reference to Farrell as interim mayor at the time, but hadn’t recalled all the preceding mess.
I presume there was a line of succession like we have for the President and other public offices for these contingencies. Sure, she's had relationships with city officials like Mohammad Nuru, but I didn't get the sense that there was any corruption around her succeeding Ed Lee.
Based on this article, it looks like Y/Y spending on law enforcement was flat, maybe even up when you include funding to the SF Sheriff, DA, and Probation offices.
Given that the crimes in SF have spiked during Covid, a flat police budget is de facto defunding [7]. To keep up with the crimes, police budget should increase proportionally as well. Otherwise, crimes will not be controlled.
The article you are citing shows that some crimes have increased (Homicide, Burglaries, Vehicle Thefts) but several other categories have decreased. If you go to the SFPD Dashboard linked[1], overall crime in 2020 was down 23% vs 2019.
For 2021, overall crime is up 10% vs 2021, but is still seems to be on track to be down 15% vs 2019.
A lot of this is probably due to COVID restrictions rather than any change in policing or enforcement, but using the metrics you've cited, crime is actually at a low.
If we follow your argument about adjusting police budget proportionally, we should have cut the police budget 23% in FY 2020, or $160M. FWIW, I don't think cutting the budget 23% in 1 year is a great idea.
Some have increased while other have decreased. The total number of crimes have increased by my own experience. Many of the crimes are not reported. It is the experience of other residents as well [8]. For example, my experience is that car window breaking has increased dramatically. I did not have any car window breaking in the first 5 years in SF (I live in a relatively safer neighborhood). This year, my window was smashed. I see glasses all over the streets nowadays. I did bother to report to the police because i did not think the police would be able to do something about it.
Anyway, as a mayor, if London Breed promised to do something and she did not, it is a sign of incompetency. It erodes her own credibility.
I don’t mean to sound idiotic on my end, but clearly she was a voted in elected official…whats to stop her from being voted in again? I honestly don’t understand.
Now that SF didn't materialize as the Progressive Utopia they'd hoped for, they can always move to a different state, and vote the same way as they always did!
I don't think people can make politicians accountable as long as primary incentives for those politicians are campaign contributions from corporations and wealthy donors. A politician only has motivation to do bare minimum not to lose elected office. As we have seen with CA governor - even utterly failed governance, mandate firings and senseless school closures do not sway the public enough. If _that_ can't do it, what else can? It seems that the only real way to vote in US is with your "legs" - i.e. move to another state (an option that countries like Austria do not even have :-( )
> as long as primary incentives for those politicians are campaign contributions from corporations and wealthy donors
I would imagine corporations funding politicians would want their businesses not be vandalized. I get some NIMBY policies are pushed by wealthy donors w/ real estate but that should be balanced out by developers.
Something deeper is wrong. It's almost as these politicians are purposely destroying the vast amount of wealth built up over the years and letting in chaos.
I’m very pro defund the police because I am very pro privatize the police. Local areas should be able to pay for their own police. A single police force cannot meet all requirements.
The fact that we have defacto private police is exemplified by:
- It is well known that wealthy neighborhoods get more patrols and faster responses.
- It is well known that if your restaurant or store gives free stuff or otherwise encourages police you will be better protected
- It is well known that opposing the police leads to poorer protection
All of these are not just well known but often backed up by the police themselves. Any store that says they want more accountability for police will get told “when you’re in trouble, don’t expect to get the best response” and so on.
There is a clear thing going on here. The police are clearly effectively privatized but the privatization is subsidized. Instead, let’s just remove the pretense.
I think we should just have police be privatized and regulated and whatever group of people can pay for them should be able to pay for them. Open up the market and stop funding the police out of state money.
That way, if you want to spend no money on the local police, you can defund them. If you want to spend lots of money you can fund them.
If you want to band together with your neighborhood, go right ahead.
Yes. But the problem is they don't give you your tax money back, so the service is gone but the involuntary subscription remains.
Now what do you pay private security with, and why should the politicians get away with yet another form of theft in the first place?
If they want to wind it down, they should return then money by lowering taxes.
One of the great strengths of America is that there are thousands of different municipalities, police departments, and justice systems.
A given city can try out a new policy. It works, or even if it doesn't cause a breakdown in society, then it can spread, and all cities benefit. But if works badly, then that city takes the hit, and hopefully everyone else benefits by avoiding that. (The real world is of course messier than that simple model.)
It's hard to parse the actual policy change from only mayor's remarks that are quoted in the article. It sounds like it's not heading to law and order policing, but rather trying to hybrid of increased surveillance and faster response times to some kinds of problems. I'm not sure it will work, but either if works or does not, another datapoint will have been explored.
San Francisco is becoming a deeply unpleasant place to visit across the board. Large parts of the city stink of human refuse. The downtown core is a corporate wasteland. The other half of the city is a NIMBY wasteland. The public transit is embarrassing. Everyone is grumpy and pretentious. You don't feel safe walking across town alone.
It's a city that seems to hate itself. It is constantly offering you a protective bubble - private cars, bars on rooftops, an apartment with a doorman.
It seems the only people who earnestly enjoy SF are those who can afford to maintain their own world somewhere in it.
I can just point out, that is the reality in the Latin/South America. We expected that South/Latin America would become like North America, but looks like it comes the other way around. What a mess can do a small buch of bad politicians!
“ANDRÉ: . . . And when I was at Findhorn I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted himself to saving trees, and he’d just got back from Washington lobbying to save the Redwoods. And he was eighty-four years old, and he always travels with a backpack because he never knows where he’s going to be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, “Where are you from?” And I said, “New York.” And he said, “Ah, New York, yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes.” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” And I gave him different banal theories. And he said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison—and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” And he put it in my hand. And he said, “Escape before it’s too late.”
This is like the 10,000th bitch-post about San Francisco. You're not welcome. Go back to whatever shithole suburb you're from, and don't let the door hit you nazi libertarian pricks on your fat asses on the way out.
Really, I don't spend hours every day bitching about your shitty home town.
What I’ve heard is the problem is not police lacking but that the AG no longer prosecutes criminals. It’s kind of catch and release and no punishment at all means crime just keeps going up. Police rarely stop crime in the act, they sometimes catch criminals after the fact, but that doesn’t even work if criminals never get prosecuted.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmOIQv0yu-U
You offer no solutions, you just bitch and moan that people don't conform to your white-wing politics.
Boot liking Rimmer.
You wouldn't know what socialism is if it shot you in the face.
Living in unsafe places is one of the worst horrors of poverty. I think there is a subset of progressives that does not want to accept the idea that some people really are psychopathic predators. Or perhaps only limits that idea to the rich, bankers etc., while finding all kind of excuses for anyone else.
There is no denying that a lot of successful psychopaths accrue at the top of the societal ladder, but the violent ones often inhibit the bottom, terrorizing the rest.
When I was a single mother's kid in the early 1990s in a country with a rudimentary welfare system, I was poor-ish enough to be in the bottom fifth of the society, and I knew plenty of similar people. It is my experience that mere lack of money won't turn an otherwise kind person into a violent criminal. They may be driven to steal or cheat, but deliberately injuring or killing other people, for that you need to be quite a bad apple yourself.
Poverty next to wealth does. Suddenly that poor but adequate lifestyle isn’t enough when the guy down the street is driving a Porsche.
We are in a pretty extreme wealth gap and we celebrate wealth too much. On top of that, people confuse being soft on crime with helping the poor. Poor people don’t break into cars to eat. Criminals break into cars.
Enforcing laws gives comfort to everyone because they know we're all on a level playing field. But once you start ignoring laws and letting people off, suddenly lawbreakers can get ahead while law abiders fall behind. Let's try to punish criminals instead of rewarding them.
The difference is that most criminals at the top don't need to use violence as a tool to get what they want, at least not usually.
> They may be driven to steal or cheat, but deliberately injuring or killing other people, for that you need to be quite a bad apple yourself.
A small percentage may be born bad, but a lot more are subjected to consistent physical and psychological violence and trauma, and becoming bad ends up being a kind of short term focused survival mechanism. Exposure to drugs and environmental toxins at a young age also damages neurological development.
Black mold, lead paint, etc can ruin your life.
It certainly does seems to be a belief on the left that if one were to use the n word one time (not even directed at anyone), they should be shunned from society and they life as they know it should be over. Shop lifting to the point where a business has to shut down, or breaking into cars and stealing irreplaceable possessions—that maybe shouldn’t even be illegal.
I’m in favor of reasonable penalties for bad behavior, and leniency and forgiveness when it’s warranted. But as another posters said: we need to live in reality.
There are conservatives in the SF Bay Area than people want to admit to and I think that number went up heavily in the past two years of covid fascism.
Don't hire these people.
Don't let them on your board.
Fire every single one you can at your company.
This isn’t meant to be a trick question. I simply haven’t seen any obvious choices.
My recollection of the election when Breed won was there was one Republican, and I don't think he got many votes. Ideally there would be multiple Republican and Democratic candidates, with strong and worthwhile candidates from each party, each getting a decent share of votes. I recall the two other popular Democratic candidates competing with Breed banded together (don't remember what that meant exactly, I think they were recommending voters to vote for both of them in their ranked choices) and their platform for dealing with homelessness was to give them all cleaning supplies and have them clean the streets of SF, thereby killing two birds with one stone (giving the homeless productive, gainful occupation and dealing with all the litter, needles, human waste, etc. on the streets). I can't think of a more out-of-touch idea than that, but this was the #2 choice for San Franciscans.
I think anyone sensible would have simply asked for what Breed is now proposing to do. Voicing that opinion in SF years ago would've made you a pariah. It's a common sense opinion if you're living in and observing reality, but that's simply not what SF culture has been about.
There were two Republicans, and the one that got more votes (both first preference and total, since it was an IRV not first-past-the-post election) of the two wasn’t a “he”. (The one that got fewer votes was the one endorsed by most local Republican institutions.)
But if you are thinking of her 2019 reelection in the regular election and not the 2018 special election…
The other candidates were (in order of most to least final votes)
Ellen Lee Zhou (R) – the leading Republican from the special election
Joel Ventresca (endorsed by Green Party, subsequently ran in the gubernatorial recall as a Democrat)
Paul Ybarra Robertson (no apparent party affiliation)
Wilma Pang (previously Peace and Freedom, but not sure if that was current in 2019)
Robert L. Jordan (a "street minister" with no apparent party affiliation)
> Ideally there would be multiple Republican and Democratic candidates
There were in the open seat election where Breed was first elected; there was one of each in the regular election where she was reelected.
But San Francisco has 316k registered Democrats, 137K registered with no party preference, 33K registered Republicans, and 15K registered with other parties. Expecting symmetry between the nationally major parties in San Francisco is silly. Many individual factions within the Democratic Party are larger, in terms of electorate, than the Republican Party in SF, and the ratio in support between the Democratic and Republican parties is smaller than that between the Republican and American Independent parties and almost the same as that between the Republican and Libertarian parties.
> I recall the two other popular Democratic candidates competing with Breed banded together (don’t remember what that meant exactly, I think they were recommending voters to vote for both of them in their ranked choices) and their platform for dealing with homelessness was to give them all cleaning supplies and have them clean the streets of SF, thereby killing two birds with one stone
That…didn’t happen. None of the major Democrats either banded together or had a platform like that. (There were some institutional cross-endorsements for Breed and Leno.)
> But San Francisco has 316k registered Democrats, 137K registered with no party preference, 33K registered Republicans, and 15K registered with other parties. Expecting symmetry between the nationally major parties in San Francisco is silly.
SF is extremely unbalanced. See: https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/california/san_franci.... Why is it silly to expect it to be less extreme?
The bottom line is that they're deeply out of step with the city on culture war issues they themselves whipped up. Forcing women to give birth to corpses, legalizing discrimination based on sexual orientation, opposing all pandemic mitigations, etc. Even if an individual politician doesn't support these positions,they define the brand.
It's silly to expect that national distribution of political thought to be approximated in every geographic subdivision. It has never been even approximately, the case. Structurally, the US electoral system encourages coalition building and dividing so that factions that nationally are roughly balanced form the major national parties, but there is no reason that that's even a privileged frame to decide what is “balanced”.
Sure, we can regress to a form of solipsism and just say there’s no possible discussion to be had about whether SF is too extreme. Yes, God has not written down a cosmological constant of what threshold determines too extreme vs not too extreme. I think it’s pointless for us to gaslight ourselves into this belief. If we can’t say SF is too extreme, how can we say crime is too high, or persecution of LGBTQ is too high, or anything else?
In the link I shared above, SF deviates as far left as the scale can go. If you think it is possible to have an inter-subjective conversation about whether SF is too extreme, but think SF isn’t, what would need to be true for you to declare SF past the threshold?
What data? What data could even support the idea of a threshold of acceptable deviation from the national average distribution of political thought?
Honestly, I think that while there is a problem, you have conceptualized it entirely incorrectly. The problem is not with the diversity of distribution of political thought, the problem is national political duopoly and the electoral systems that support it, among the many manifestations of which (and far from the most important) is an absence of partisan competition in jurisdictions whose political center isn't very close to the national political center.
> If you think it is possible to have an inter-subjective conversation about whether SF is too extreme
It's not (and I think obviously not), unless you specific for what. If you specify that, it's may be that such a discussion is possible (and even, though less likely, possible that it is meaningful and not a distraction from more important considerations for that purpose.) But I’m not optimistic.
Can we agree on any possible intersubjective standard for too extreme? If not, fine, we revert to solipsism.
If either of the data mentioned in the first paragraph is a possible metric, how many standard deviations is too many?
If not this standard/metric, will you propose another? I challenge anyone to propose a metric or set of metrics that reasonable people will entertain as a standard of measuring a cities extremes, plus a set of thresholds that reasonable people will entertain as determining too extreme/not too extreme, and then coming to the conclusion under these metrics that SF is not too extreme. In other words, any way you want to slice it, SF is too extreme, unless you refuse to “slice it”.
2. National political duopoly is problematic, but we live in a democracy. Every citizen is free to have their own positions, vote for whoever they want, and run for office if they don’t like who’s running. Your perspective is not your skin color, you can change it and update it as you participate in the real world. Citizens of SF simply cannot blame the national duopoly for their choices. It’s completely possible to foster, appreciate, and embody diversity and non-partisanship of thought. It’s possible to foster a culture of balance and diversity, which in turn could encourage the partisan competition you mention.
SF even has ranked choice voting which should weaken the duopoly’s death grip, in theory.
The national structural problems you mention are true for every city. There’s nothing in the water or Karl the Fog that uniquely prevents people in SF from doing what I mentioned above. But they don’t, that’s their choice, that’s SF culture, and that’s the problem.
[1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11862094/sf-mayor-breed-unveils-pl...
[2] https://www.thesfnews.com/mayor-breed-cuts-police-budget-hir...
[3] https://californiaglobe.com/articles/sf-mayor-london-breed-g...
[4] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/S-...
When Mayor Lee died, Supervisor Mark Farrell became interim mayor.
London Breed won the subsequent special election to become mayor.
EDIT: Actually, as noted downthread, its more complicated. But Breed’s stint as acting mayor did not immediately proceed her time as elected mayor.
https://sacobserver.com/2018/01/residents-protest-board-vote...
https://abc7news.com/michael-nuru-sf-mayor-breed-london-publ...
https://www.sfweekly.com/news/is-san-francisco-re-funding-th...
Based on this article, it looks like Y/Y spending on law enforcement was flat, maybe even up when you include funding to the SF Sheriff, DA, and Probation offices.
[7] https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/San-Francisco-s-cr...
For 2021, overall crime is up 10% vs 2021, but is still seems to be on track to be down 15% vs 2019.
A lot of this is probably due to COVID restrictions rather than any change in policing or enforcement, but using the metrics you've cited, crime is actually at a low.
If we follow your argument about adjusting police budget proportionally, we should have cut the police budget 23% in FY 2020, or $160M. FWIW, I don't think cutting the budget 23% in 1 year is a great idea.
[1] https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
Anyway, as a mayor, if London Breed promised to do something and she did not, it is a sign of incompetency. It erodes her own credibility.
[8] https://www.change.org/p/resign-or-recall-san-francisco-da-c...
[5] https://sfethics.org/ethics/2021/08/ethics-commission-fines-...
[6] https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/mayor-breeds-brother-will-ge...
This time it will work.
I would imagine corporations funding politicians would want their businesses not be vandalized. I get some NIMBY policies are pushed by wealthy donors w/ real estate but that should be balanced out by developers.
Something deeper is wrong. It's almost as these politicians are purposely destroying the vast amount of wealth built up over the years and letting in chaos.
Why not just lockdown the criminals?
Seriously, Breed and her army of fascist nazis all need to hang!
Fuck every single SF politician and fuck those who voted for them. They all belong behind bars.
FUCKING NAZIS!
Fuck this illegitimate piece of raging shit.
I hope she catches aids and cancer and FUCKING DIES!
She herself was fined for ethics violation.
Breed belongs in San Quentin!
Notably absent from the press conference: Chesa Boudin. Go ahead and arrest anyone you want. Boudin will have them back in society post haste.
The fact that we have defacto private police is exemplified by:
- It is well known that wealthy neighborhoods get more patrols and faster responses.
- It is well known that if your restaurant or store gives free stuff or otherwise encourages police you will be better protected
- It is well known that opposing the police leads to poorer protection
All of these are not just well known but often backed up by the police themselves. Any store that says they want more accountability for police will get told “when you’re in trouble, don’t expect to get the best response” and so on.
There is a clear thing going on here. The police are clearly effectively privatized but the privatization is subsidized. Instead, let’s just remove the pretense.
I think we should just have police be privatized and regulated and whatever group of people can pay for them should be able to pay for them. Open up the market and stop funding the police out of state money.
That way, if you want to spend no money on the local police, you can defund them. If you want to spend lots of money you can fund them.
If you want to band together with your neighborhood, go right ahead.
A given city can try out a new policy. It works, or even if it doesn't cause a breakdown in society, then it can spread, and all cities benefit. But if works badly, then that city takes the hit, and hopefully everyone else benefits by avoiding that. (The real world is of course messier than that simple model.)
It's hard to parse the actual policy change from only mayor's remarks that are quoted in the article. It sounds like it's not heading to law and order policing, but rather trying to hybrid of increased surveillance and faster response times to some kinds of problems. I'm not sure it will work, but either if works or does not, another datapoint will have been explored.
San Francisco is becoming a deeply unpleasant place to visit across the board. Large parts of the city stink of human refuse. The downtown core is a corporate wasteland. The other half of the city is a NIMBY wasteland. The public transit is embarrassing. Everyone is grumpy and pretentious. You don't feel safe walking across town alone.
It's a city that seems to hate itself. It is constantly offering you a protective bubble - private cars, bars on rooftops, an apartment with a doorman.
It seems the only people who earnestly enjoy SF are those who can afford to maintain their own world somewhere in it.
― Wallace Shawn, My Dinner With André
This is like the 10,000th bitch-post about San Francisco. You're not welcome. Go back to whatever shithole suburb you're from, and don't let the door hit you nazi libertarian pricks on your fat asses on the way out.
Really, I don't spend hours every day bitching about your shitty home town.
If you don't like it, fucking leave bitches.
Is it poor?
How could it be, considering it's in middle of one of the richest cities in the world?