Reply to The Atlantic on SF: is DC too a failed city or about to be one?

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "The Atlantic on SF: is DC too a failed city or about to be one?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]“I used to tell myself that San Francisco’s politics were wacky but the city was trying—really trying—to be good. But the reality is that with 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.

But this dogmatism may be buckling under pressure from reality. Earlier this year, in a landslide, San Francisco voters recalled the head of the school board and two of her most progressive colleagues. These are the people who also turned out Boudin; early results showed m that about 60 percent of voters chose to recall him.

Residents had hoped Boudin would reform the criminal-justice system and treat low-level offenders more humanely. Instead, critics argued that his policies victimized victims, allowed criminals to go free to reoffend, and did nothing to help the city’s most vulnerable. To understand just how noteworthy Boudin’s defenestration is, please keep in mind that San Francisco has only a tiny number of Republicans. This fight is about leftists versus liberals. It’s about idealists who think a perfect world is within reach—it’ll only take a little more time, a little more commitment, a little more funding, forever—and those who are fed up.“

[/quote]
I feel like San Francisco has always been a dark and cruel place, it’s just that somehow people over the last few decades have tried to pretend that it wasn’t.

Like go watch the Maltese Falcon or any other film noir set in the city. Those stories use SF as a backdrop for a reason. Go read again Call of the Wild (starts with Buck getting stolen in Santa Clara) or Kerouc’s On the Road, where he basically is a sociopath exploiting people for hundreds of pages.

I lived in the Bay Area during the early dotcom boom, the aggressive Darwinistic brutality of the place was never lost on me. Not for a moment. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics