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Comment by jker | Hacker News Reader

You don’t think there might be a connection between rampant crime and ineffective policing?

There certainly is a connection but not necessarily the one you’re suggesting. “I called the cops and they didn’t show up therefore progressive justice policies are bad” is quite a leap. Can’t it also be that cops are just jerks, who largely don’t live in the city, who are happy to collect the paychecks and watch the city fall apart because they are personally invested in the political narrative?

There are plenty of videos floating around out there of cops refusing to take reports on break-ins and robberies and even assaults. It’s really odd to me that anyone on a site like this would take the side of the armed authoritarian gang in this debate.

I suspect the person you are responding to is also invested in a certain political narrative.

People complain about progressive polices, but from what progressive candidates lol

The left is powerless, we got trounced in the last election cycle and none of our policies, even popular ones like weed legalization, has been implemented.

If anything conservative policies are more widely implemented, and are what is failing.

The current model of policing is a failure in many ways, and now it can't even keep the peace anymore, it's pathetic. But who is going to evict your grandma so a real estate company can but hey house and sell it without the police?

While it might be true nationally that left policies aren’t being implemented, it’s not true on the West Coast. Just as one example, in Portland where I live, all drugs were decriminalized in personal user amounts beginning in February 2021, in response to a ballot measure. In Seattle, one of the candidates for the city attorney’s office during this last election had previously tweeted “Eat shit” to the SPD’s benign holiday greeting, and she still secured a healthy chunk of the vote. At least one of Seattle’s city council members is a socialist and regularly advocates for seizing private housing to redistribute.

To be super precise the council member you're referring to, Kshama Sawant, is technically a self-avowed Trotskyist. If a Trotskyist can be elected to city government it's pretty fair to say the left is "winning" in that particular city. When you dust off your history books and think about Trotsky's "Permanent Revolution" for a bit, suddenly a lot of the policies that actively make people more miserable start to make more sense.

Could you elaborate on how the theory of permanent revolution is showing up? I’m curious.

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