31 Comments

I remember reading, I think it was in The Rape of Nanking, that one of the ways that people can convince themselves or others to commit genocide is to convince them that the “other people” are something less than human.

Sometimes I wonder if stuff like this is the same thing but just looks different in application.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Thanks Leighton.

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Well, I'm convinced. Let's do it.

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"Everything that allows the triumph of the revolution is moral. Everything that stands in its way is immoral." Sergey Nechayev

Whenever Leftists get anywhere near power they make the same exact totalizing demands: either cede all power to us and install our ideology everywhere, or we will make your society stink.

It is an aggressive form of moral blackmail where nothing matters but WHO/WHOM and since they are on the side of the [peasant/proletariat/Latinx] this means that they represent the righteous stainless victim and any opposition is ipso facto evil oppression.

As we can see here in Cali, they are very hard to oppose because they seem to be "on the side of the good" and "making the world a better place" which most people take at face value, esp when 1) every media outlet and Hollywood product preaches the same doctrine; and 2) any dissenters know that they will be opposed by an angry pack of True Believers ready to denounce and destroy you.

One of the interesting questions of this decade is will there be any force that arises to oppose the Social Justice Revolution. But they have tremendous power in this state and will leave a wide trail of wreckage no matter what.

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A simple refrain that might help all of us: “being a victim doesn’t make one virtuous.”

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Clever: well said as usual. Building on what you said and agreeing wholeheartedly, I ask, what is the solution when the source of this silliness is school? Answer: none, nada, the horse has bolted, no need to close the barn door. 

Every educational institution is fully captured by and culpable for this thinking. Your children have been marinated in this logic for their entire lives. This is what they think and how they think; if you don’t believe me put it to a test, go ask anyone under age 40. 

We are lost and doomed.

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My wife is a writer who mentors young women writers/artists, so you don't have to tell me about the complete and totalizing worldview of our under-40 cultural class. It constantly gives me a weird cognitive headache: they come through our door bc they want to write books movies songs etc, to "express themselves" as we say, and yet when they open their mouths they all regurgitate the exact same rigid jargon and express the exact same uniform belief system. It seems a contradiction in terms to me to want to be yourself by being like everyone else, but I am a cranky antiquated skeptic.

My only suggestion (which I've made recently to friends in publishing and theater who have found themselves boxed out of opportunities for being people of pallor) is to just go samizdat. The New Left did not just successfully wage a 50-yr campaign to seize the means of cultural production to give it up anytime soon.

Anyone not willing to work under their dispensation needs to step outside of official channels and publish independently, put on plays in attics, put up private art shows in their homes, teach classes outside the University.

Much like what we're doing here on Substack....

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Dude, swinging for the fences, home run. I love people of pallor (whites), samizdat (!) and “seize the means of cultural production”, what fun! I love language.

Substack is a godsend and as an atheist I don’t say that lightly.

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thanks!

substack inspires me...

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Exactly that which is why I'm here. I started writing for submission in the early spring of my looming elderly years, and did pretty well with acceptances on a medium-circulation online fiction magazine (not for filthy lucre but for ephemeral fame) but the conformity of most of the other accepted writers, and the fury in the comments if one had the bad taste to be honest in one's estimations, was very educational. Eventually I got banned for my unfortunate opinions (which I felt free to express since my own work was there to be skewered to anyone else's heart's delight).

But I found it alarming, for the future of the art, how much truly dreadful stuff came out of MFA programs (including by MFA professors) and how all the exceptional writing was done by solitary untutored unwashed likely attic-dwelling miscreantal types.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZdWoPDeJyM

It's Saturday - King Missile

"I wanna be different, like everybody else I want to be like. I wanna be just like all the different people."

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People of 'pallor' - ha ha ha...now that got me laughing this morning. Good one! I am sure before long that will be widely used. Very Clever !

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The ones laughing the most at the protective umbrella of anti-racism are the black and Latino drug dealers who could care the least about who they draw into addiction, including other people to color. The idea that drug dealers can’t be arrested and rehabilitated is absurd and just lazy. It’s a combination of white guilt, and white privilege and white conflict aversion.

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I was in school today and the students were acting up as usual, on their phones, cursing, being snarky. My co-teacher and I just shook our heads in frustration. There is absolutely no accountability for bad behavior in some of these schools-- and the students know it. One kid already has an ankle monitor on and the counselor told me "don't engage." This means that he can scream obscenities at me (which he did yesterday) leave the classroom, be on his phone and not do any work. AND still pass. IF this is what I'm seeing in some high schools-- and now hearing about San Francisco-- it makes me think that California will become a state without rules. Anything goes.

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Well, the fine intelligent people of SF support and encourage this by paying tons of taxes to be wasted as the fine city fathers choose; by the moron donors to the organizations that keep this going endlessly.

It's hard for people to grasp, I think, that truly smart, interesting, creative people often make terrible life choices and every individual must eventually choose the healthy way, or not. When I was 22 one of my best friends was a low-level drug dealer working with a slightly higher-level drug dealer who worked with people I'm glad I know nothing about, other than that they seemed a little on the dangerous side.

My friend kept me out of the worst of it because he recognized what a naive fool I was, and he liked me and didn't want anything bad to happen to me. He was a black guy from the South who wasn't much of a support to his six or so kids down there and their mother, though he was a good car mechanic and had a real job in a garage, too. I always had a hard time reconciling how responsible he was towards me and not to anyone else in his life. Same with the guy, next level up. After a year of living somewhat dangerously, and admiring all those incredibly sophisticated-seeming people in that world fucking and using with ever so much condescension toward me, the dumb kid from Queens, I realized I wanted something more from life.

I once worked in an office with a woman who'd been, for years, a prostitute and a "loop girl" in porn films. A drug-dealing husband got her into it, and onto drugs too. Eventually she wanted to stop completely destroying her life and she got herself off drugs by getting off drugs. She'd tried a career as a singer, in her earlier days, and she had a lot of real gifts, but she'd stayed too long in a life where she was wrapping her shit in tinfoil and freezing it for one of her freakier clients.

Something inside has to want to live, and be clean, in all the meanings of that term, and hunger for an ordinary simple life with no illusions.

Californians keep electing people who are addicted to philosophies and theories and aren't fit for having a finger in anyone else's life, but they'll need to see it and solve it. Everyone who saw it already should get out and leave the cesspool to 'em.

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I like your writing style. I was a little pothead, acid guy in high school and my father asked me one day - are you one of them or are you just hanging with them because it’s fun. About a year later I figured it out and ended my “living dangerously” dalliance. My dad was so sanguine about it. He didn’t load it up with moralism; I think that helped because he didn’t forbid, thereby creating a rebellious urge in me. I think he partied pretty good too. 

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Thank you.

When my kid was an adolescent I spoke very frankly about my moderately wastrel youth, how normal it is to want to experiment with all sorts of things; how lucky I was to be alive when so many, who weren't any less worthy than I to survive our stupidities, died from just one careless choice; that being young is really hard and painful but that it was better to talk to me about anything than to try to deal with it without a little help from someone a lot more than a friend.

The now un-husband was horrified I was so direct and unashamed of revealing the idiocies of my youth. Turned out good though.

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Wastrel: made me laugh.

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This strategy sounds illegal to me unless the accused accepted the ban voluntarily as an alternative to jail (a la pre-trial diversion). I don’t want the state to have the power to ban someone from a public place without being convicted of a crime. The reality is that SF does not consider drug dealing to be a crime. It is just one of the many services offered to the indigent.

As long as the customers are there, the cartel will be there. The city can only make it slightly more risky for the cartel by prosecuting dealers and going after their bosses and suppliers) who aren’t in SF.

Or- they could attack the homeless problem by making vagrancy a state and local crime. First offense is 30 days in jail (or consigned to an NGO for private supervision) with a daily requirement of 4 hours of community service, drug treatment, job training or mental health counseling and no drugs or alcohol allowed.

Second offense, the vagrants are sent to campsites in the Central Valley for housing and for intensive counseling for 90 days. Each county is obligated to take “graduates” and help them find public housing and jobs. Cities like SF with limited and expensive housing should have to pay other counties to take their homeless.

One can argue that the state and cities don’t have the resources for this. The reality is that the homeless population will fall by 80 percent once the “lifestyle” is outlawed and the homeless realize they are going to be made to work and to live cleanly as an alternative. We should be able to find the resources to help the remaining hard core on an ongoing basis.

Many will be able to receive disability, housing vouchers and food stamps. The state should use these cash resources to assure the hard core is fed, clothed, housed and treated in a supervised manner (just as social security is garnisheed by Medicaid nursing homes).

Providing resources for the homeless means that working people are paying more in taxes or enjoying less in other services. If we are asking working people and their families to sacrifice it is only fair to ask the homeless to have some skin in the game.

Of course the state (and the 9th circuit) will never allow this so it is all moot. What they don’t realize is that, by making it easier and more acceptable for people to live a drug and alcohol-addled lifestyle of sloth and petty crime, many more people are drawn to it. It takes a lot for someone “on the edge” of mental stability and intellectual competence to hold it together

and build a life with work. Rather than supporting people in this difficult endeavor we are paying them to be dysfunctional as an easy alternative.. We need to focus on getting more people into productive society and helping them make a go of it with support, counseling, etc

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This is absurd, to allow these people to poison vulnerable neighborhoods under the guise of social justice.

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Sep 21, 2022·edited Sep 21, 2022

Look, we all know that if conservatives were even a fraction as racist as liberals paint them, they would whole-heartedly endorse so-called "Progressive" policies that kill tens of thousands of "Black and Brown" people every year (many more than that if you count abortions).

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We have a growing tent city/blatant street drug problem happening in our beautiful Vancouver, BC Canada. I am originally from Vancouver and my recent trip was shocking! The situation grows more desperate all the time. Nothing is being done to quell its burgeoning ranks of squalidness - people walk past as if nothing is wrong - politicians yap on as they have done for decades now! So this type of situation isn't a unique US problem - its happening all over where similar dynamics underplay our lives.

Off topic probably but isn't this the same situation that goes on in hell holes like Pakistan/Afghanistan/Yemen? Root cause: desperation/hopelessness of the human spirit - whatever dynamics got people there.

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I disagree. Places like Afghanistan/Yemen are war torn countries. Their tent cities are the products of displaced refugees, not policy decisions by their political leaders. Nearly all of the woes of Western society are self inflicted. We are also plagued by a scarcity of purpose. Too many people in our society simply exist, with nothing to lose or live for. I’m really not sure how we can fix that.

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This is a very powerful piece. It's almost unbelievable that these policies are happening because of its obvious irrationality, but it makes it clear that 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions' also applies to the San Francisco political establishment.

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Progressivism is religious extremism, replete with insane thinking.

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I wonder where the breaking point is for cities like SF, LA and NYC? At some point, they will either self destruct or the normal citizens will revolt, although a revolt without arms may prove difficult.

I’d also be interested to see how much taxpayer money is wasted by politicians to fund the non-profits that “provide” help to those on the street in the way of addiction and housing services.

Most readers of Leighton likely know that Michael Shellenberger has put an enormous spotlight on the problem but it isn’t reaching most people I know in Ohio where I live. I assume the politicians in most of the country don’t know about it or don’t care. Disease, left untreated, spreads.

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People want to leave Los Angeles. I'm one of them.

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Absolute insanity

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Legalize it, the overdoses will drop to almost nothing.

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author

Nope.

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"So a lack of convictions is neither here nor there."

I emphatically disagree. Government enforced infringement of civil rights must always be accompanied by a conviction. That the government of San Francisco refuses to convict offenders is -- excuse me -- neither here nor there. That's where you need to address the issue.

The fact that the entire controversy is discussed in the language DEI, rather than criminal justice, means your aren't going to get anywhere with reform. That has to change as well.

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author

Procedurally I agree, but my point is that a lack of convictions under Boudin has no bearing on whether or not they were actually dealing drugs (as opposed to “loitering “).

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