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Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

SF is the most progressive city in the US let alone the world and that breed of politics is 100% to blame for it being the poorest run and one of the most crime infested cities in the US. Do you even know how much SF is spending on homeless a year? $1.1B a year[1]!!. Your argument is like saying for a drug addict to get healthy they need more hard drugs.

[1] - https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...

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I think SF is the second most progressive city, after Portland. And I guess Seattle would be #3. All three of those cities have major crime issues.

have you ever heard a leftist not say that the problem is that they weren't far left enough?

SF might be the a progressive city for US standards but there are many cities in the rest of the western world with social democrat governments, sometimes even under social democrat national governments, which have much lower crime rates. If you're going to blame progressive politics in general, you need an explanation for that fact.

It seems to me that rising crime in the western world is a general pattern. The biggest port city in my (European) country (still pretty small compared to big US cities, granted) switched to a right-wing nationalist government about a decade ago, after literal decades of unbroken social democrat rule. And gang violence has only gone up since then.

I'm not blaming the current mayor for that, because other nearby cities are suffering from the same problem, including those run by social democrats. But the policies that the right wing have been shouting would definitely work to keep crime down haven't been working here, demonstrably.

I think you missed the point the person you're replying to was making. Democrats are not on the left, we have two right wing parties in the US which leaves people with no real choice

In San Francisco, the Democratic politicians are most certainly on the left, even the "moderate" wing. Look at candidate statements from any of the past decade of elections for any city-wide position, and find us anything that sounds right-wing from a top candidate, if you think otherwise.

I'm very aware of US politicians, what I'm saying is that people who think they're leftists are entirely wrong. There are no leftist US politicians, they are all right wing capitalists. All democrats, with the exception of maybe Bernie sanders, are center right or far right. If you think US politicians are leftists then you have too local of a perspective, in time and space. The spectrum is far bigger than you seem to comprehend

I used to consider myself a supporter of Sanders, and even thinking from that perspective ... no, you clearly have no clue about the state of political rhetoric in San Francisco over the last decade.

Feel free to enlighten me, I'm happy to read whatever links you post

I recommend you look at each member of the SF board of supervisors (https://sfbos.org/, each member has a descriptive blurb if you click on their name), and if you can find their campaign websites as well, it will give you a view into what politics and policies the city politicians publicly support. I would certainly expect you might not find them far-left, as you seem steadfastly far-left yourself, but I guarantee you'll not find one right-of-center thing. They also all have twitter accounts if you _really_ need more of an idea of their rhetoric.

Most of those policies in their bios I would describe as neoliberal. There's one only who describes himself as a "democratic socialist" but as I've seen from the rest of american politics that actually doesn't mean a whole lot without action

You seem to have fallen into the trap of assuming San Francisco politicians have any relationship to the Democratic Party at the national level.

The most recent Democratic Speaker of the House is a San Francisco politician.

The current Democratic Vice President of the United States is a San Francisco politician.

The Democrat who has been engaging in national political media battles with the second-ranked contender for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2024 is a San Francisco politician (also, Governor of California.)

There may be some reason to see a connection between San Francisco politicians and the Democratic Party at the national level.

> The most recent Democratic Speaker of the House is a San Francisco politician.

>The current Democratic Vice President of the United States is a San Francisco politician.

No on both counts. Nancy Pelosi has had nothing to do with San Francisco politics for the last 40 years.

“Federal politician who lives in San Francisco” != “San Francisco politician”.

In part because the corporate media largely ignores non-duopoly parties (btw, note that both the Democrat and Republican Party are private corporations).

It's a liberal city, not a progressive one. That analogy is quite bad and I think you know that - there is no answer to the problem of homelessness that does not involve spending large amounts of money, and the implying that the answer doesn't is quite dark.

No, it's a progressive one. Their policies on drugs, policing, homelessness, enforcement, housing, zoning are all progressive. Why do you think it is "liberal" and what would a "real" progressive city look like, then?

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