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.
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.
So SF comprises a patrician elite governing over an embattled middle- and working-class in order to feed the habits of a drug-addicted vagrant class. This patrician elite has built a massive druggie-industrial complex that now, among other things, essentially colludes with cartels to ensure that even the basic tasks of law enforcement, trial, and sentencing are heavily rigged against the forces of order.
Good! This is democracy in action. This is what the people of SF vote for, time and again. If only my local government was nearly as responsive to the electorate as that of SF. They voted for Boudin in the first place, knowing fine well what they were getting into. They voted for Mayor Breed - who oversaw this calamity - by a huge margin in 2018 and she'll win again next time, assuming she isn't parachuted into the Senate by then.
I have sympathy for the long-time, multi-generational residents who have tried to resist this, but let's face it, they are tiny in number compared to those who have enabled every step of this madness and thought themselves saints for doing so. Fuck 'em.
I see posters blaming SF voters, stereotyping them as PMC wokesters and tattooed trust fund kids who live leisurely latte-drinking lives disconnected from reality. Of course, this DOES describe perhaps five percent of the population. But in statistically real life: the actual problem is that most SF voters have to WORK LONG HOURS TO PAY FOR THEIR APARTMENTS AND MORTGAGES and are DEEPLY WORRIED ABOUT THEIR FINANCES. The problem is not political over-engagement but the contrary, under-engagement; SF voters are exhausted, stressed-out people who are more liberal than average, but have no time or energy to concern themselves with the power battles and financial incest of the nonprofits and city bureaucrats. These are well-educated but low-info, low-energy voters. They vote for Democrats and people who sound liberal, and leave it at that. In the 1980's, when rent was cheap and nobody worked much, everybody was political! You need some leisure time to be politically active! Now that the dysfunction of the city is becoming critical, I see many beginning to tentatively 'ask questions'. They are inevitably met with screams of 'racist!' or "MAGA' or ''Go back to Alabama!" (true--it happened to me when I dared to say I didn't think SFUSD eliminating calculus helped Black kids). This is a moment when SF voters--largely normal, sane, and extremely hard-working people!--need to be supported with five simple words: "It's okay to vote moderate."
My recent visit to Pittsburgh saw me go to a baseball game on foot. I walked along the monongahela river for a nice view. All the other baseball fans were walking on the other side of the street. I learned why: The Riverbank side of the street was infested with drug maniacs and unsavoury characters by the dozen. After the game on the way back I asked a young girl cop, why nothing was being done: people were doing illegal drugs in plain sight. She said it wasn’t her job she was in charge making sure a baseball fans got across the street. Other people started mocking her, she was clearly intimidated by the ball fans. The cop looked like she’s about 28 years old and maybe 125 pounds, but she had a gun. Then one wag told her to shoot’em, everyone laughed and then the light turned green and we went on our way. FUBAR!
“This is laughable and almost certainly a bad faith, cynical allegation.”
I don’t know, man. I’ll bet he’s a true believer. It’s a matter of religious faith among these people that disparate outcome = racism.
The people who storm the streets in the name of Black Lives Matter, and most registered Democrats, sincerely but wrongly believe the somewhat disparate rate at which black men are killed by cops is due to racism, rather than the obvious- that black men commit violent crimes, including against cops, at disproportionate rates, and thus are more likely to end up in tense or violent confrontations with cops.
So I take the public defender at his word when he insists he believes the disproportionate rate at which Latinos are arrested is racism. This is something much scarier than bad faith and cynicism. This is widespread insanity, concentrated most heavily among the PMC.
Are the public defenders who are so concerned about racist cops paying attention to who the drug addicts are? Surely, the drug dealers are also being racists by selling drugs to addicts who are mostly minorities.
"It would probably go too far to say that the defense lawyers who pursue these tactics are pro-cartel, or that they’re paid off. More likely, the motivation is purely ideological."
I'm not as generous as you are. There is something in between these two. A lot of ideology is consciously or unconsciously self-serving and people are abysmal at self-reflection and self-awareness. As you have many times pointed out, there is no financial incentive to get these people help or, really, to get the drug dealers off the streets. Screaming racism is a whole lot easier (and more financially rewarding) than trying to address the problems in San Francisco and on the border. And the Democrat Party has painted itself into a corner. You can't on the one hand cultivate division by screaming racism every ten seconds and then turn around and solve a problem like this when the people you would arrest are going to be decidedly of one background. They've created a monster.
But we do need to find a solution. Ethically, this is a horrendous way to treat people. No society that calls itself civilized should have people dying on the streets of drug overdoses with "non-profits" handing them the needles to do it. You might as well euthanize them all if that's going to be your approach. It would be easier on them and on us. (And, no, I don't really mean to euthanize them, but that's essentially what these people are doing, just more slowly and painfully).
I've been running my own small manufacturing business for about 18 years now. Right now we're doing about $2.5 million a year and seems like we have to fight for every dollar. I earn $80K a year, 25% of that being interest on the loan I provided to fund the company.
I guess if I was smart I'd instead have gotten in on some of that sweet, sweet HealthRight360 action.
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.
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.
So SF comprises a patrician elite governing over an embattled middle- and working-class in order to feed the habits of a drug-addicted vagrant class. This patrician elite has built a massive druggie-industrial complex that now, among other things, essentially colludes with cartels to ensure that even the basic tasks of law enforcement, trial, and sentencing are heavily rigged against the forces of order.
Good! This is democracy in action. This is what the people of SF vote for, time and again. If only my local government was nearly as responsive to the electorate as that of SF. They voted for Boudin in the first place, knowing fine well what they were getting into. They voted for Mayor Breed - who oversaw this calamity - by a huge margin in 2018 and she'll win again next time, assuming she isn't parachuted into the Senate by then.
I have sympathy for the long-time, multi-generational residents who have tried to resist this, but let's face it, they are tiny in number compared to those who have enabled every step of this madness and thought themselves saints for doing so. Fuck 'em.
I see posters blaming SF voters, stereotyping them as PMC wokesters and tattooed trust fund kids who live leisurely latte-drinking lives disconnected from reality. Of course, this DOES describe perhaps five percent of the population. But in statistically real life: the actual problem is that most SF voters have to WORK LONG HOURS TO PAY FOR THEIR APARTMENTS AND MORTGAGES and are DEEPLY WORRIED ABOUT THEIR FINANCES. The problem is not political over-engagement but the contrary, under-engagement; SF voters are exhausted, stressed-out people who are more liberal than average, but have no time or energy to concern themselves with the power battles and financial incest of the nonprofits and city bureaucrats. These are well-educated but low-info, low-energy voters. They vote for Democrats and people who sound liberal, and leave it at that. In the 1980's, when rent was cheap and nobody worked much, everybody was political! You need some leisure time to be politically active! Now that the dysfunction of the city is becoming critical, I see many beginning to tentatively 'ask questions'. They are inevitably met with screams of 'racist!' or "MAGA' or ''Go back to Alabama!" (true--it happened to me when I dared to say I didn't think SFUSD eliminating calculus helped Black kids). This is a moment when SF voters--largely normal, sane, and extremely hard-working people!--need to be supported with five simple words: "It's okay to vote moderate."
My recent visit to Pittsburgh saw me go to a baseball game on foot. I walked along the monongahela river for a nice view. All the other baseball fans were walking on the other side of the street. I learned why: The Riverbank side of the street was infested with drug maniacs and unsavoury characters by the dozen. After the game on the way back I asked a young girl cop, why nothing was being done: people were doing illegal drugs in plain sight. She said it wasn’t her job she was in charge making sure a baseball fans got across the street. Other people started mocking her, she was clearly intimidated by the ball fans. The cop looked like she’s about 28 years old and maybe 125 pounds, but she had a gun. Then one wag told her to shoot’em, everyone laughed and then the light turned green and we went on our way. FUBAR!
“This is laughable and almost certainly a bad faith, cynical allegation.”
I don’t know, man. I’ll bet he’s a true believer. It’s a matter of religious faith among these people that disparate outcome = racism.
The people who storm the streets in the name of Black Lives Matter, and most registered Democrats, sincerely but wrongly believe the somewhat disparate rate at which black men are killed by cops is due to racism, rather than the obvious- that black men commit violent crimes, including against cops, at disproportionate rates, and thus are more likely to end up in tense or violent confrontations with cops.
So I take the public defender at his word when he insists he believes the disproportionate rate at which Latinos are arrested is racism. This is something much scarier than bad faith and cynicism. This is widespread insanity, concentrated most heavily among the PMC.
Are the public defenders who are so concerned about racist cops paying attention to who the drug addicts are? Surely, the drug dealers are also being racists by selling drugs to addicts who are mostly minorities.
"It would probably go too far to say that the defense lawyers who pursue these tactics are pro-cartel, or that they’re paid off. More likely, the motivation is purely ideological."
I'm not as generous as you are. There is something in between these two. A lot of ideology is consciously or unconsciously self-serving and people are abysmal at self-reflection and self-awareness. As you have many times pointed out, there is no financial incentive to get these people help or, really, to get the drug dealers off the streets. Screaming racism is a whole lot easier (and more financially rewarding) than trying to address the problems in San Francisco and on the border. And the Democrat Party has painted itself into a corner. You can't on the one hand cultivate division by screaming racism every ten seconds and then turn around and solve a problem like this when the people you would arrest are going to be decidedly of one background. They've created a monster.
But we do need to find a solution. Ethically, this is a horrendous way to treat people. No society that calls itself civilized should have people dying on the streets of drug overdoses with "non-profits" handing them the needles to do it. You might as well euthanize them all if that's going to be your approach. It would be easier on them and on us. (And, no, I don't really mean to euthanize them, but that's essentially what these people are doing, just more slowly and painfully).
I've been running my own small manufacturing business for about 18 years now. Right now we're doing about $2.5 million a year and seems like we have to fight for every dollar. I earn $80K a year, 25% of that being interest on the loan I provided to fund the company.
I guess if I was smart I'd instead have gotten in on some of that sweet, sweet HealthRight360 action.
Now to cleanse your palette, curl up tonight in front of the teevee and watch Dirty Harry or Bullitt.