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Clever Pseudonym's avatar

What's fascinating to me as a Californian (I live in LA w many friends here and in the Bay Area) is that there is simply no changing the minds or even broaching these subjects with anyone in the upscale liberal classes—which I will more or less define/generalize as relatively affluent, relatively white college grads who work in culture media tech etc.

Of course there's always been rebels of all kinds, heretics, antinomians, "let the world burn" types, but for me the source of the great strength of Team Social Justice is they simply have a total stranglehold on modern Left morality (hey, it's even in the name!): my friends (and I assume others like them) could walk past a mound of corpses and a mountain of feces, could have their own houses robbed and cars stolen, could be shown the money schemes of the Homeless Industrial Complex etc—and yet like well-trained lab rats they'll still all sing in unison: "Hey, what can we do? Who are we to judge, blame the cops, "Society," capitalism, those darn evil Republicans...and all those social orgs and volunteers are "just trying to make the world a better place." etc etc

There is just a shocking level of learned helplessness here, bc maybe 50yrs after the Counterculture Revolution liberals no longer have the vocabulary to say one word against anyone or anything that comes coded as "Oppressed".

It is one thing to see trained lab rats obey, it's one thing to see poor uneducated masses obey, but this is supposed to be the highest educated, most enlightened sector of the richest modern country. Modern Cali liberals have locked themselves into a moral and epistemic prison and would rather perish than escape.

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Richard Albarino's avatar

One of the major factors of the demise of San Francisco that has been happening for decades: the decline and finally absence of productive working class. What now constitutes a working class in San Francisco are service workers, low paid fast food workers, but no actual working class.

My father was the co-head of a national AFL-CIO craft union, upholsterers, that had gradations of working rank from apprenticeship through master that took six years to accomplish. Most of the shops in his large local in New York City created and manufactured furniture for the so-called carriage trade. They were highly skilled workers and the backbone not only of the union movement, which peaked in the fifties, but of the city itself.

Their work culture suffused the city. The no-nonsense New York tabloids were aimed at them. The New York Post, where I was a reporter before being drafted, appeared at four pm when the working class of the city ended their working day. These were responsible family men, most of whom lived in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. Their children learned their father’s trade and joined the unions. They were good workers and had a skill that gave them stable lives. The furniture industry moved to low-wage High Point, North Carolina, and finally, like all labor intensive industry, to China. The true working class disappeared in New York and all over the country. .

I am a member of the so-called entertainment industry and in order to earn a living I had to move to Los Angeles.

But LA is the world's biggest outdoor mausoleum. As a New Yorker I was out every night. NY is a PM town, LA an AM town. A collection of suburbs, it is deadly boring. I had a number of friends who lived in San Francisco, mostly writers, screen or newspaper writers. My wife and I, before we were married (in San Francisco) who is also a New Yorker and black, used to visit the city at least once a month. They had great restaurants and great bars. Our social circle widened to include a number of San Franciscans. We loved San Francisco so much we considered buying a weekend pied a terre there.

But I began to notice something odd about San Francisco: nobody actually worked. There were no productive workers, people who made things. San Franciscans apparently lived on air, or inheritances, or the universities, or occasional "art projects." They were the "creative class". It is no accident that the hippie movement started there.

The working class, now misnamed "the middle class" set the moral tone for New York and San Francisco . Work was good in itself and, as I learned during a fallow period, after I had achieved considerable success in the industry at an early age, I went broke. I lived on unemployment benefits for a period in Vermont and New York. Of course, I had a lot of pending “projects.”

Entitlements are soul destroying. During the recession “industry” work was scarce. My life was eating away whatever moral fiber I possessed (not a lot) and it dawned on me that any work is better than no work and I went to work at the Post Office. It was, by any standard, awful.

Getting a pay check at the end of an exhausting week, however, is being bestowed with a kind of grace. Work is its own reward. It is part of the Protestant ethic that built American cities.

And was not only the export of work to China that destroyed the work ethic. The importation of millions of people who barely survived — I have travelled extensively in Mexico and Central America —- whom would work for survival pay, destroyed the local wage base.

New York and San Francisco were great cities to be out of work. If you are at all clever you can party every night and sleep late the next day and you can get laid and meet all kinds of interesting people. But living on entitlements is infantilizing. It's like still being in college. When you’re young you can live on air. Work is associated with growing up, with adulthood.

San Francisco, a place like New York only with better living conditions and much better weather, was in a moral collapse long before the horror of today, the fruit of which is now evident.

As Adam Smith noted, the aristocrat can tolerate dissolution because he can sleep it off. The dissolute working man loses his job, then his family, then his home, then his dignity.

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