Not just that recall
interesting, Iâll dive into that at the doctor office, but I have some strong opinions about this - chiefly that articleâs claim that the voting coalition consists of the type of people that it does.
yea like afro americans reliably vote e dem, because of course. the question Iâve been posing a lot of black voters lately is - what have democrats done for you lately? anything? can you name a single thing? weâre being shot dead in the streets by the govt, lynched, hate crimes galore, hate speech is the norm on prominent news networks. what are the people in power doing about it? I really struggle answering that.
Obviously the title is a bit of a hyperbole (headlines usually are) and some of the conclusions are a bit of a leap, but itâs a decent overview of the three major things that happened in SF regarding this âtoo far leftâ narrative.
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Itâs going to be really hard to survive politically as a left leaning DA in a city with a major homeless population without a national solve for homelessness. When you dump a national problem on a small number of localities, those localities no matter how wealthy are going to have a really hard time. This has triggered an arms race between localities over who can be a less pleasant destination for homeless people and thatâs triggering tons of human rights violations nationwide.
Itâs a huge mess that is only going to get bigger as inequality ramps up and more and more people fall off the ladder.
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Californiaâs housing situation is a disgrace, and its not just NIMBYs. The administrative nonsense and cost to comply with the regulatory burden is a real issue. It often costs well over $500,000 per unit to build apartments. What ends up happening is only the big boys can deal with the hassle of getting a project approved and built - its basically impossible for small time developers to survive.
Thatâs quite the handle
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oh man i started writing a deep response to this and it was getting long-winded. thereâs a lot going on in there I myself have been noticing, but I heavily disagree with stuff in there as well.
Ok i had to read it a bit deeper but I see now, initially it kinda pissed me off pretty bad. I still am not sure what to make of it, woo boy thereâs a lot going on in there.
CA politics and voters are a weird thing so I would immediately hesitate to use CA voting patterns as any kind of representation of a larger pattern. Californians largely donât live in the real world to begin with. CA dems piss me off particularly, many of them are far less progressive than they imagine themselves to be, and give themselves way too much credit for doing bare-minimum kind of crap that often makes shit worse.
anyway, my thoughts are always disorganized and I have trouble sometimes communicating what Iâm trying to get at so here goes:
- article concludes that pragmatism is winning the day here and will inspire change (heavy agree we need be pragmatic, extremely skeptical this doesnât just maintain the status quo)
- I do agree this is whatâs happening and what the voters believe. I myself felt that way not even that long ago, circa late 2020/early 2021ish. I do agree the progressive messaging has been poorly timed and impractical (particularly refusing to take money from corporations on purely ideological grounds - cmon man, money wins this game). I donât, however, and never truly believed they were WRONG, other than what I personally think are very minor differences in ideology, that I probably shouldnât get into, the chief one being this weird idea that capitalism and progressivism are diametrically opposed forces that cannot exist together. They can, and they have before, and since capitalism certainly isnt going the fuck away, Iâm of the mind that the role of govt is to regulate capitalism and provide economic incentives where they dont naturally exist to promote progressive policies. This happens naturally anyway sometimes - good example is in film, the industry had realized that any films that passed the Bechdel test were automatically more profitable without doing anything else. So, now we have a lot more of that, and thatâs great. Bottom line is that I think progressivism a lot of the time is good business and the reason most businesses do not function that way is because the entire system is set up to benefit those at the very very tippy top. That is not a necessary feature of capitalism at all.
- Reading that at face value, Iâd seriously just conclude that yea, the establishment has yet again duped people into buying into their shit, and nothing will get better, and they have no intention of making things better. Again. Every single one of the groups in that coalition are actively being fucked by establishment democrats even right now. That isnât sustainable and the lid will blow on that eventually.
- Iâm not saying that article isnât on to something, it is - initially, it looked like a refute of my earlier statement that progressive policies are popular. I will still stand by that even in this case, and if you look at what those voters actually want here, it aligns pretty well with progressive ideology. I think the article incorrectly makes the conclusion that those policies are actually unpopular and derides the âdeep-leftâ for promising things they couldnât deliver as if itâs a fault of the policy and not the people trying to deliver those policies. Thatâs my main major disagreement with this. I think the far-left got consumed with the chapo trap house bullshit and thatâs all anyone can think of when they think of progressives anymore, and tbh thatâs a little fair because all of the messaging around it seems to come from that wing of the party.
- They mention GrowSF in there which is interesting because in my own city we have very similar problems and this has been a very obvious kind of thing that needs to happen soon and I am far from being the only one who realizes it or is willing to do something about it. However, their conclusion is utterly moronic in my view. We donât need to get back to neoliberalism (by the way I am very aware I am describing neoliberalism as a solution, but when people talk about âgoing back to neoliberalismâ here they are not actually going back to it, what existed before was definitely NOT that), thatâs what the fuck got us here in the first place. We need to be pragmatic, yes, but we need to be pragmatic about making real change, not going back to the same old guard that got us here to begin with.
- It mentions people wanting more police and is kind of puzzling over how those same people can also want other progressive shit. I totally and completely understand, in my own situation now, why that is. Since covid a lot of cities have started imploding - definitely mine. I live in the heart of a downtown area and Iâve seen in real time the insane decline happening. Itâs utterly insane, the cops are too few and the ones that do exist are absolutely refusing to do their jobs. I donât want to defund the police, or abolish them, or hell, even have more of them - I desperately just want them to just DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS AND STOP KILLING PEOPLE FOR NO REASON. And, above all, be held accountable for it. Thatâs not an insane thing and it doesnât make me some kind of bootlicker, IN MY VIEW.
sorry if im completely missing the point here.
also this isnt directed at anyone in particular but i am absolutely not gonna fall for some ideological purity test bullshit and youâll go on turbo ignore if i even catch a whiff of it, itâs insanely annoying
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Exactly. Unconscionable that Biden and/or his HUD chief arenât pushing this issue. I guess that is what happens with a voiceless constituency when heartless people are in charge.
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You would think wealthy people in nice cities would have plenty of pull with the Dems⌠but apparently not.
attempts to solve homelessness in CA have been idiotic. like, itâs a complete misunderstanding of the root of the problem - there isnât one single fix, IMO. Like here I believe we were like âletâs just build houses for themâ and thatâs been a miserable failure for a ton of reasons - one being, well, CA is too stupid expensive to develop cost-effective units for these people in the first place, and not only that, without proper counseling/treatment/support you can house them wherever you want, theyâre gonna end up back on the street again.
The core problem is our society has no safety nets, like whatsoever. In addition weâve thrown gasoline onto this problem by being okay with society at large teetering on the edge of financial ruin 100% of the time. Covid threw even more fuel on that fire. The amount of very obvious ânew homelessâ Iâve seen around my area is so disturbing. Mental health treatment is a joke and a complete disaster. Poverty has no real escape sometimes unless youâre either a genius or a sociopath. Youâd have to start addressing all those problems before youâd have any real chance of âsolvingâ homelessness - it isnât as easy as just housing them. Even if it were that easy, the places where they do house them become crime-dens very quickly and that isnât fair to the neighbors at all - I certainly wouldnât want to live around that shit, and I dont think thatâs me channeling my inner NIMBY either.
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Yes. If wealth were even moderately re-distributed from the top .01% many of the needed nets would be amply supplied. It would also create jobs for people actually helping others rather than consulting for some stupid product or service nobody needs. I imagine that would have significant positive downstream benefits on crime.
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bUt tHaTs sOcIaLiSm
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My town is also circling the drain.
Not sure what can be done about it. Cops say their hands are tied because of new laws, but Iâm uncertain whether thatâs why they arenât doing their jobs or of theyâre silently protesting that everybody hates them.
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Republicans arenât the only ones who use fear to drum up support and votes. EDems do the exact same thing. Lots of Dem voters fall for it but thinking we should cater to it is the exact wrong deduction to make from that. The solution is to find ways to get rid of the EDems. That gets rid of the propaganda poisoning the low info Dem voter base.
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I think the reason cops donât do their jobs is the same reason as everyone else: a decreasing tolerance of criticism and unpleasantness.
Cops donât do their jobs because they werenât taught enough CRT in grade school.
itâs relatively easy for rw officials to commit basic sabotage at governance. especially in blue cities.
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