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Comment by TimDotC | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for adopting policies that resemble that of Japan/Tokyo. However, half the country would accuse you of autocratic behavior and infringing on constitutional rights.

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I don't believe the low crime levels in Japan/Tokyo are the result of policy decisions. I suspect they are the result of a community-oriented culture enforced by other means.

No, that couldn't be further from the truth. The police have extremely prominent placement in Japanese society. Look up "kōban" ("police boxes")[0]. If you visit Japan, you'll see these things everywhere, on every street corner.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%c5%8dban

I don't see how a cop sitting in a little box on various street corners equals "extremely prominent placement in society". In fact, I rarely see cops on patrol in the city, unless there's something going on.

I am having hard time thinking about any example where San Francisco government did not implement some policy because the other half of the country didn't like it. If anything, that'd be even more reason for them to implement it, just to "own" "those stupid idiots".

The San Francisco government is not the only source of policy in San Francisco. If the San Francisco government wanted to implement strict gun control like they have in Tokyo, for example, they would be blocked by the Supreme Court judges elected by the rest of the country.

> Supreme Court judges elected

Not how that works.

I'm well aware of how it works. The country votes into office the politicians who nominate and vote for the Supreme Court judges.

If I was being more careful I could have written the country "indirectly elects" the Supreme Court judges. My basic point still stands, San Francisco policy is in many ways set by the entire country.

Err, SF had strict gun control for years. Getting carry permit in the whole Bay Area has been mostly a "who do you know" thing. Recent SCOTUS decisions made that approach theoretically illegal, but in practice the city is still requires long procedure to get a permit, and is not very generous with permits:

So far the city is processing 72 applications, and they expect to get nearly 100 to 200 more over the next year. Which is very different from the four we processed in the past 10 or so years

Source: https://californiaglobe.com/articles/san-francisco-begins-is...

Certainly 100 permits a year are not going to change things much and definitely four issued in the last 10 years didn't, and if anything sounds like "strict gun control", then four people allowed to carry in 10 years is it.

Some public policy can't be effectively implemented on the local level. Tokyo's gun control is it's nation's gun control.

Nah, the far right are quite happy to point to Tokyo as an example of the superiority of an ethnically/culturally homogenous society.

Singapore is a better example, but requires a form of authoritarianism to pull off that would be unacceptable to both the right and the left.

It would only be unacceptable to the right because that hypothetical authoritarianism would apply equally to themselves

What if ethnically/culturally homogenous societies are just superior?

I’d like to think they aren’t, other people are just used as scapegoats to blame bad things on

You don't have the courage to be openly racist?

Exactly which race is his statement advocating as superior? There's a bunch of ethnically homogeneous nations in the world, and their ethnicities are quite different from each other. Japanese are not the same ethnicity as Norwegians.

Which policies? Which constitutional rights, and are they unimportant to you?

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