2022 Midterm Elections (Abandon hope all ye who enter here) butnahhh. or maybe?

Politics & News
1936

(God help me I have no idea why I’m doing this. I guess I just feel like having my character blasted today.)

The Atlantic piece goes off the rails at the end, but it does make some good points imo about SF voters being fed up with open drug use, endless car break-ins, brazen shoplifting, etc. At some point you have to actually consider the needs of the people living in the city who have to deal with the fallout of these policies, or they will vote you out.

Here’s a better article that gives a snapshot of the situation in SF at a ground level:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/rescuing-jessica-san-francisco-fentanyl-addiction/
(non-paywall)

The guy in the article above who actually lives in the Tenderloin and spends a ton of time and effort trying to help addicts resonates with me a lot more people more than the people who don’t live anywhere near the neighborhood, but still castigate anyone who questions the current policies as racist, elitist scum.

People in the Tenderloin are not rich. It’s one of the few remotely affordable neighborhoods in SF. So we’re not talking about “rich people who don’t like to see homeless”. We’re talking about working class people who don’t want their cars broken into or have to deal with open-air drug use in front of their home.

The handwavy “well the problem is we need more affordable housing” that the Vice article throws around seems like the lefty version of the Republican “we need to do something about mental health” when there’s a mass shooting. Is there any remotely realistic plan that will make housing affordable in SF anytime soon?

Affordable housing also doesn’t address mental health problems or drug addiction. Giving addicts money to buy drugs with no strings attached, and a safe place to do drugs, sounds good to some in principle, but only seems to be making the problem worse in practice.

Decriminalizing drugs and not arresting shoplifters sounds great in principle, until the two combine to create an epidemic of brazen shoplifting and people smoking crack and shooting up on the sidewalks. This is one of those areas I think progressives have gone off the rails some. Some people need tough love. You have to try to filter out addicts who actually want to get clean from people like the girl in the SF Chronicle piece who seems to still be having fun with drugs, and has no intention of quitting. Are you really helping people like that by giving them money, or are you enabling them?

3 Likes
1938

It isn’t making the problem worse. The problem seems to be that upper classes see drug users, rather have those people fuck off and die in a corner.

3 Likes
1940

Maybe the crime, homelessness and drug use has gotten worse since you left. The voters seem to think so.

1941

He also didn’t expect to bet he only one cited in the fracas - for trespassing and simple assault.

Hate to say it, but this protester is a moron if he didn’t immediately know he’d be the only one arrested if he hung around to find out. I mean, for fuck’s sake, he was wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt. He was protesting the police and he thought the police were going to help him? Shit man, he’s a retired cop! He should know better!

1943

This seems a weird appeal to authority that the voters must be right. When DeSantia wins the presidency will that mean things like CRT and the grooming of children were actually out of control?

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1944

Well when super-lefty SF votes the other way and starts recalling progressive school board members and DAs, that seems noteworthy to me. It feels to me like unworkable lofty ideals butting up against reality on the ground. But I could be wrong.

I consider myself progressive. But that doesn’t mean I have to dogmatically agree with every policy.

1945

You cant get your insurance $ without reporting it, how dumb are these people.

Edit: obviously ponied*

1947

The one thing I’ll disagree with here is the “shoplifting isn’t bad” stuff we get from time to time. A lot of people work retail. Theft makes their jobs worse and it’s usually people who are well off and will never have to deal with it telling them to do so.

A local example is our liquor stores in Canada are provincial run. ~4 years ago there was an epidemic of theft. Gangs were sending in kids to just fill up garbage/shopping bags knowing the crown doesn’t really proceed with juvenile cases often. In the cases with security present, bottles were thrown, swung, mace was used. It was happening at my local location probably ~3-5x a day.
They installed security doors at every location, ID to get in, problem solved!

1 Like
1949

image

3 Likes
1950

I don’t know anything about them as a group. Mounk writes and talks about authoritarianism and the threat to liberal democracy. He struck me as somewhat in denial about the prospects for engagement when the other side is all about by any means necessary and or batshit crazy, but who else is going to take him seriously nevermind actually participate in his community if not hyper-idealists? Or Koch brothers plants I guess.

Anyway, the podcast I mentioned is here: recorded during peak Trump.

1951

So you think SF voters are riled up because they see too much homelessness, crime and drug use on their local news?

1952

The majority were not violent here, but the violent ones were the ones that spurred action.

1953

Well crime is still quite low historically right? But yeah the vibes are bad and here’s this “lefty” DA that you can blame all your rising anxiety on.

3 Likes
1954

It’s complicated. When progressives take power, the cops go on strike to turn voters against them. Long history of that.

So could be true that there is “more crime” with stats being down and also it’s the fault of cops rather than progressives.

1955

What changed to make the “vibes” bad?

Sure we can dream up lots of reasons why the people who actually live in SF are deluded. But ultimately we don’t vote in their jurisdiction and they do. The people who actually live amongst the chaos know better than any of us what it’s like.

At some point people are going to get fed up with hearing that nothing can be done except throw more money at the problem with negligible results, especially when you can travel to other cities and see nothing like what you see in SF and LA.

https://archive.ph/GY6w5

Jessica said she doesn’t even get high from fentanyl anymore, but it helps with an intense pain in her left leg that she has refused to let doctors examine because she hates hospitals. She keeps the wound, which smells rancid and oozes pus, wrapped in dirty bandages.

Jessica had mostly lived on the streets for years but was staying at the Monarch, a shelter-in-place hotel on Geary Street, during the pandemic. Free room. Free food. Free drug paraphernalia. She just needed money to buy drugs, she said, and she openly acknowledged she gets that money by swiping goods from Target and reselling them.

The Monarch is one of 25 hotels used by the city during the pandemic to house homeless people. Still, the city seems to have mostly missed the opportunity to coax people living in the hotels and addicted to drugs into treatment. Of the roughly 4,000 people who lived in the hotels at any point in the pandemic, just 10 — one quarter of 1% — moved into residential drug treatment programs, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

Department of Public Health outreach teams made contact with 1,500 people living in the hotels during the pandemic, and nearly half of them were connected to mental health care, drug treatment or medical care, but there’s no data on the outcomes, said Angelica Almeida, director of street-based and justice-involved behavioral health services for the city’s Department of Public Health.

Jessica said her life might seem hard, but it’s actually pretty carefree, and she offered a sweeping explanation of one reason why her mom would face such long odds trying to pull her out of San Francisco.

“The city is way too easy for people with nothing to get by,” she said. “That’s why I’m still here nine years later. You get by with doing drugs and suffer no consequences. I like it here.”

How is this woman being helped by these policies?

1956

SF cops were literally refusing to arrest people to get rid of the DA. Total lunacy.

1957

The vibes are always bad. Even 6 figga centrists are feeling the squeeze of the ever accelerating treadmill of capitalism. But there wasn’t a totem for the narrative before it was just generalized anxiety now it’s overreaching leftism which is a boogeyman that feels like home for rich liberals.

1 Like
1958

Right, any criticism of any lefty/progressive policy is always because of some moral deficiency or secret right-wing leanings on the part of the criticizer. It can never be because they actually have a point.

1959

See: public unions

1960

Seems like she’s living a chill life. That seems pretty helpful to me. How is a vicious crackdown going to help her?

1 Like