Noticing Failure

This Twitter thread, by a progressive in San Francisco, discussing her city's descent into degeneracy, is utterly fascinating. I had ThreadReader form it into a single page, which is there at that link. It's easy to consume and doesn't require a Twitter account. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

Here are some snippets from it.

What do progressives stand for, exactly?

I thought it was about making things more fair.

About standing up for the little guy.

About human rights, equality (equity?), compassion.

San Francisco (to me) looks like the least compassionate city on the planet...

I grew up in a Progressive family and went to a Progressive school, and have mostly Progressive friends.

Yet what I see in SF - if this what Progressive stands for - I want the opposite.

The words used here: "harm reduction", "housing first", "criminal justice", "social justice", "equity" -- they don't align with what I'm seeing at all.

Our strategy might as well be called "harm increased", "housing last", "victim injustice", "social injustice", "unfairness"...

Progressives tend to blame Republicans for almost everything.

Yet here we are - not a Republican in sight - and I think we may be the most deranged city on the planet.

Nowhere is there such inequality. I have never seen destitution at this scale...

+ Why, after decades of Progressive rule in SF are 8,000 people in the streets?

+ Why do we have the highest overdose rate in the nation?

+ Why do we have the highest property crime rate?

+ Why do we have fewest children per capita? 

Thought experiment -- what would San Francisco look like if Republicans were in charge?

She took a drive in the rain and photographed some of what she saw. Here was one homeless encampment.

 My Take

She's seeing almost all of the dots, but she's drawing the wrong picture. If Republicans ran the place, it might look different or it might not. Your political bent is a symptom of your world view, not the central part of it.

What she's describing here is what Jordan Peterson and Bishop Robert Barron would call a crisis of meaning. She was told by the establishment that if she voted blue, she was voting for compassion and kindness. She dutifully voted blue and she got suffering and human degradation. Her thread is a cry of distress. "Why aren't things the way I was told they would be?"

She bought into the Marxist dynamic of oppressor groups and oppressed groups. She didn't buy into the people-as-individuals idea. That's one of the problems right there. The people in those tents could well be unsalvageable. Their brains might be permanently ruined by drugs. If that's the case, warehousing them is the only humanitarian option, something neither red nor blue discuss.

Put not your trust in princes and all that.

The bigger problem with her world view is that she, and by extension, her city, cannot derive a code of behavior from first principles. She turns to politics instead of faith or philosophy and so do the others. They voted blue and now they can go back to consume weed, porn, expensive wines and plan vacations. That doesn't work and it's that failure that distresses her so.

Her philosophy blew up first. Her politics failing were just a secondary explosion.