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.
All wrapped up nice and pretty for the Trumpians to use in the next election.
Chesa might be recalled. Maybe you’d like his retail theft record in your community.
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[I]n 2014 [California] classified possession of hard drugs for personal use and the theft of up to $950 of goods as misdemeanor offenses. In the Bay Area, the results have been stark: San Francisco’s overdose deaths rose to 81 per 100,000 people in 2020 from 19 per 100,000 people in 2014.
In the meantime, shoplifting has become endemic, brazen and increasingly well organized, culminating in mobs of looters ransacking stores and terrifying customers in the Bay Area last week. Local shops are closing, neighborhoods are decaying, encampments of drug addicts have proliferated, and streets are befouled by human excrement — a set of failures Michael Shellenberger calls in his thoroughly researched and convincing new book, “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities,” “the breakdown of civilization on America’s West Coast.”
They don’t really mean we have psychotics who mass murder. We do indeed have these; but other countries do too. UD thinks that what distinguishes the United States is that we have violent people running many of our institutions. We have violent local governments; we have violent school boards.
Let’s not talk about our obscenely violent last president and his barbarians. That’s too easy. Let’s move further down.
Very few countries on earth produce people like Chesa Boudin.
Very few produce people like George Parker, a school superintendent who packs his schools with kiddie psychopaths.
Sure, when six year olds take out their loaded guns in class and expertly shoot their teachers in the chest, George figures he’s gonna have to handle a certain amount of incoming. Like Boudin, he will explain – but not in so many words! – to parents and teachers and kids that some population is going to have to be the sacrificial location where okay a few parents and teachers and kids will be killed but it’s in the service of helping the unfortunate among us and I mean did you know that very few homeless schizophrenics (see Boudin) and psychotic six year olds who live in houses with unsecured guns are homicidal? RELAX. I mean, do the numbers. It’s not gonna happen every day that these people attack your children and their teachers. Y’all are probably gonna be okay. And even if they do attack …
During a three-hour school board meeting dedicated solely to public comment, Newport News teachers and parents said students who assaulted classmates and staff were routinely allowed to stay in the classroom with few consequences. They said the shooting of Abigail Zwerner could have been prevented if not for a toxic environment in which teachers’ concerns are systemically ignored.
“Every day in every one of our schools, teachers, students and other staff members are being hurt,” high school librarian Nicole Cooke told the board. “Every day, they’re hit. They’re bitten. They’re beaten. And they’re allowed to stay so that our [enrollment] numbers look good.”
They’re running some of our schools and local governments. In response, “Many parents are propelled into politics through service on school boards after seeing the [violent] state of their kids’ schools.”
Letting dangerous people deteriorate on the streets and in our schools is not a policy. It’s a nihilism, a degeneracy. A mental violence. You either replace these people and these structures or you run as far away as possible.
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The choices our government makes affect our kids, taxes, schools, roads and lives. They are in the hands of the people we elect — but who we pick is constrained by those willing to run. Our democracy is dodging bullets [released by threatening, violent, gun-obsessed people running in and winning American elections]. We will not be able to do so forever.
Bang.
It’s such a small crime, and the jails are already full, and hell just let em go. The results have been spectacular if you’re a fan of neighborhoods with no stores in them, and the president and trustees at Oberlin, faced with their own neighborhood shoplifting problem, wasted no time expressing the same contempt for archaic law-abiders/merchandise retainers as their model, one-time SF DA Chesa Boudin.
An archaic local bakery, on discovering an Oberlin student shoplifting, viciously accused him of the crime, and then, when he denied it, proved its truth by approaching him and opening his jacket, in which two stolen wine bottles were hidden.
The crude, reactionary nature of the bakery’s response to the theft of its merchandise outraged Oberlin, which, under the organization of one of its deans, so relentlessly harassed the business – tagged as racist – that it practically collapsed.
The business sued Oberlin and won big – a way-angry jury awarded the bakery 44 million in damages, which a judge reduced to 36 mill. Oberlin proceeded to fail to pay, sending the suit to higher courts and failing upwards, and now Ah fuck it ok we’ll pay. Though where in our measly ONE BILLION DOLLAR endowment we’ll find it I don’t know…
Background here.