Way, way too high on your own supply

Wait I’ve got to stick an unrelated image at the top here so the banner image for this post isn’t a wall of text. Here you go:

(That’s Lego SF City Hall btw, from the weird mini-Legoland in the big outlet mall in Milpitas. I will not be taking questions at this time.)

OK, on to the main event. An “SF is in the trash” local guy with 56,000 Twitter followers posted this today and it is, uhhhh, less than convincing.

For context, what Elon Musk was saying was that the area around Twitter HQ is a “zomobie apocalypse,” nothing we haven’t heard a million times before. And it’s indisputable that drug overdose deaths are way, way up in San Francisco - from 222 in 2017 to 647 last year and maybe above 800 this year, if current trends hold.

Here’s where we go off the rails. Was this increase caused by far left progressive woke policies? Who the fuck knows, that doesn’t mean anything. I responded on Twitter to ask what policies he means but I never heard back. Certainly the ready availability of fentanyl is part of the problem; the Chronicle story linked above explains, “Fentanyl was involved in 73% percent of accidental overdose deaths in 2020, most often in combination with other drugs. The synthetic opioid, which is manufactured in labs, is ‘often added to other drugs because of its extreme potency, which makes drugs cheaper, more powerful, more addictive and more dangerous,’ according to the CDC.”

Maybe some policies contribute, like the city’s relatively generous General Assistance program, but that’s been around far longer than the opioid crisis. My guess is it’s a combination of lax law enforcement that doesn’t prosecute open drug dealing and using, cheap fentanyl, the closing of halfway houses, the cost of housing in SF, and a host of other factors that could hardly be described as “woke policies.”

The writer says it wasn’t this way when he arrived in 1990 and coincidentally, that’s the same year I moved here, and although there wasn’t the open drug use, there was still a huge homeless problem. A homeless guy spit in my face after I’d been here a couple of months! That hasn’t happened since, thankfully. But to imply this is all a recent problem is a joke. Homeless people took over Civic Center Plaza in 1989 to the extent it was called Camp Agnos, after the then-mayor Art Agnos. This is not a new thing.

Then he sort of segues into the popular right-wing notion that Twitter was “censoring” conservatives, which is blatant nonsense, unless your conservatism was of the Nazi variety. And then he just gets into some weird-ass Elon hagiography about how Elon is gifting the world a “free and uncensored Twitter” (unless, you know, he doesn’t like what you have to say.)

In conclusion, don’t ever take anyone seriously who uses “woke” unironically.