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Comment by dederp | Hacker News Reader

I read his article. He is right, San Francisco has severe, unbelievable problems with homelessness and drugs which are so painfully obvious to anyone who has ever visited I felt like I was reading something out of the twilight zone.

I hate the climate of hostility towards anyone who remotely points this problem out. The reaction and tone of this article is exactly why I hate looking at Twitter now. It has become a platform for lecturing and shaming other people for stepping out of a very oppressive and narrow range of opinion or expression.

I now find articles like this and these daily recurrent societal witch hunts to be infinitely more offensive than anything this guy wrote. I don't want to live in a self imposed culture of toxic silence so no, Hacker News, I will not join in with your witch hunt and participate in group shaming of some random guy who wrote a bad letter.

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Dude, he didn't say "we should ensure that we offer social programs and housing supply to address the needs of the poor, mentally ill, addicted, or otherwise disadvantaged", he said (literally) "I shouldn't have to see the pain".

He clearly doesn't care that people who are being priced out of the city they've lived in longer than he has are helped, just that they're gone. What a disgusting attitude.

You can cherry-pick from his letter, but it's obvious that his first concern is about safety:

  > Worst of all, it is unsafe.

  > The residents of this amazing city no longer feel safe.

  > I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted.

Nice cherry-picking.

Extrapolating that the guy doesn't care about people from 1 quote < extrapolating that he cares about safety from 3 quotes.

As the quantity of cherry picking approaches the number of possible quotes in an article, the conveyed meaning approaches the meaning the article as a whole.

As I said, nice cherry-picking.

If that's his central message, he's wrong. Aside from some dips in 2013-2014, most crime rates in the city are lower than over the past ~15 years.

Anecdotally, I live here now and I also lived here in 2006-2007, and most of downtown feels much safer. I am not a mind reader, but I think the guy sees poverty and feels threatened, and lacks the empathy to understand that the poors are human beings getting fucked by surging costs they literally have no control over.

His comment that the city's wealthy people earned their spots implies that he thinks that the less wealthy who've lived here longer and simply can't afford current prices didn't. Like I said above, not a very nice attitude.

> the poors are human beings getting fucked by surging costs they literally have no control over.

Just like they have no control over committing crime? Give me a break. Bad things happen to people. Use that as an excuse to terrorize residents and you're a far bigger piece of shit than someone who is being "insensitive" to their feelings.

The hostility is warranted when you think you're solving a problem by whining about it on Medium. We all have homeless problems in our cities. We get accosted by mentally ill people, drunk people, high people, strung out people, dirty people. We smell piss on the street corners. But we don't publish it on the internet because of some grandiose vision that our words will suddenly shine light on the issue and spur someone to action.

Vote for city officials that will do something about it. Participate in city council meetings. Work at homeless shelters. Talk to people in your city who try and can do something about it, if it means that much to you.

You're allowed to point out problems on a worldwide platform. But when you can't even make your argument without using pejorative language, you've failed. And this reaction is what you get, so the rest of us can see this isn't how you fix the problem.

I don't have that problem. I've lived in lots of cities and have never had that problem.

So it doesn't exist, eh?

I'm just disputing the claim that "We [all] get accosted by mentally ill people, drunk people, high people, strung out people, dirty people. We smell piss on the street corners."

It isn't meant to be taken literally. But to be literal, in my previous sentence, "We all have homeless problems in our cities" implicitly means "not just the people in San Francisco, California." I go on not to say "We all get accosted," but rather "We get accosted..." which due to the context of the previous sentence, simply exemplifies some of the people and situations that we (that is, people other than you or the author) come into contact with in the various cities we live in.

You said yourself you've been lucky enough to live and work in particularly nice parts of town. That sort of makes your dispute moot, and I still ask, "so does that mean the issue doesn't exist?"

Perhaps you just never went into the "right" areas to experience it but I've seen it in many cities.

Instead of basing your thoughts on personal anecdotes you should look towards statistics. For instance the New York City Department of Homeless Services estimated, in 2013, they had almost 50,000 homeless living in the city[1]. But this is just an example; you can look at a huge variety of statistics for many types of places to see how widespread the issues are.

Overall there are over 500,000 homeless people in America on any given night[2]. There are real problems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta... (shitty source I know; it references a dead article but this is mostly just an example).

[2] http://www.endhomelessness.org/library/entry/the-state-of-ho... (though perhaps a little bit of a bias source; sorry didn't feel like reading too deeply into the government documents to find their data)

You never lived in NYC, SF, LA, Philly, Rome, London or Paris then (And I'm just talking from personal experience, must be many more)

I have actually, but I've been lucky enough to live and work in particularly nice parts of the cities I live in. My comment was meant in reply specifically to "We [all] get accosted by mentally ill people, drunk people, high people, strung out people, dirty people. We smell piss on the street corners."

I've only ever had that experience while visiting SF.

There is simply no justification for the level of backlash he is receiving. None.

>But we don't publish it on the internet because of some grandiose vision that our words will suddenly shine light on the issue and spur someone to action.

Sure, we all just step over the homeless, ignore the problem, and go about our day. Justin expressed his frustration, and guess what we're all talking about now - that uncomfortable thing we all choose to ignore.

>But when you can't even make your argument without using pejorative language, you've failed.

Then the author of the Washington Post article failed as well. Wielding the might of a nationally syndicated newspaper to rant about "tech bros" and publicly eviscerate a single individual is disgusting.

>And this reaction is what you get, so the rest of us can see this isn't how you fix the problem.

So unless we can provide the solution to a problem we're not allowed to complain about it or expression frustration about it? That sounds like a great way to suppress any conversation about the problem. And judging by the current situation in SF this is exactly what has happened.

Well guess what - by writing that article this "tech bro" has brought more attention to the problem of homelessness than has been paid in years, and although it all could have been written with more nuance, it's a hell of a lot more than most people are doing; which is exactly nothing.

Yes, that's what it's about: changing the things you're frustrated by. Because the world expects more from the people who build the hardware and software they depend on everyday than some petulant whining. This evisceration is a testament to that. It should be celebrated.

So if you're frustrated, great. Write it in your diary, and then tell us all when you come up with a good solution. But if you have to dehumanize people to get your point across, then yes, to the rest of the world you're just a "tech bro" sitting behind your computer screen who can't handle the realities of human life.

P.S. being offended by the term "tech bro" is like being offended by the word "nerd" or "geek." Come on. We're not being oppressed here.

> But if you have to dehumanize people to get your point across, then yes, to the rest of the world you're just a "tech bro" sitting behind your computer screen who can't handle the realities of human life.

People dehumanize tech workers, the wealthy, and other "privileged" people all the time. And frankly, I'm fine with it. It's hard to acknowledge the human aspect of a problem when you're talking about it from a high level. Statisticians and scientists dehumanize people all the time because they need to remain subjective. There's nothing inherently wrong with dehumanizing people and sometimes it's necessary in order to make hard decisions about real problems.

What I'm not cool with are virtual lynch mobs doxxing and inciting people to attack someone for holding an unpopular opinion.

And for the record, I find no offense in the term "tech bro".

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