Forcibly evicted by the citizens of SF, the city’s appalling district attorney discovers (no he doesn’t, and he never will; but the rest of us discover it again today) that acting on assumptions and theories rather than acting on reality is murderously stupid.

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Nellie Bowles:

[H]e didn’t seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality. It’s not just about Boudin, though. There is a sense that, on everything from housing to schools, San Francisco has lost the plot—that progressive leaders here have been LARPing left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city…

[W]ith the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results...

Policy makers and residents largely embraced the exciting idea that people should be able to do whatever they want to do, including live in tent cities and have fun with drugs and make their own medical decisions, even if they are out of their mind sometimes. But then fentanyl arrived, and more and more people started dying in those tents...

[It’s] a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, …the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice...

During his campaign, Boudin said he wouldn’t prosecute quality-of-life crimes. He wanted to “break the cycle of recidivism” by addressing the social causes of crime—poverty, addiction, mental-health issues. Boudin was selling revolution, and San Francisco was ready. In theory.

But not in fact. Because it turns out that people on the left also own property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they sell...

We tricked ourselves into thinking psychosis and addiction on the sidewalk were just part of the city’s diversity, even as the homelessness and the housing prices drove out the city’s actual diversity. Now residents are coming to their senses. The recalls mean there’s a limit to how far we will let the decay of this great city go. And thank God.

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Don’t read the section on the school board unless you’re absolutely vomit-proof.

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The thing on nihilism and congratulating yourself on your radical personal freedom morality when someone dies on the street dovetails wonderfully with the same contemptible shit deep in the far-right libertarian weeds… The same necrophiliac splendor… Congratulating yourself, really, on your corpse-love… (“In February 2021, at a corner in the lovely Japantown neighborhood, just a few feet from a house that would soon sell for $4.8 million, a 37-year-old homeless man named Dustin Walker died by the side of the road. His body lay there for at least 11 hours.”) On the right, excitement at the big bloody holes in place of children a truly superior sporting rifle can make; on the left, the same excitement at the big bloody holes fentanyl can make all over dead bodies in city plazas. I wish I were Cormac McCarthy or William Burroughs or Irvine Welsh or Anthony Burgess or John Fowles or hey even Jonathan Swift so I could begin to be adequate to the blood-soaked hard right/hard left orgasms of this my beloved country. So many of our teenage massacrists spent all their time, before they picked themselves up out of their chairs, getting off on exactly this via unspeakable video games. No gun restrictions for this country. The pleasure is too deep, and lots of our senators either share the bloodlust or would never think of getting in its way.