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It's truly tragic. I'm a former midwesterner and Bay Area resident now for 20 years. For someone who has to work professionally but enjoys the cultural and natural wonders the city as to offer (world class surfing, mountain biking, and many other sports are withing a stone's throw of downtown), the place is paradise.

It's always been offbeat, but 20 years ago San Franicsco's quirks were rather tame and amusing footnotes, rather than society-defining mantras.

The city today is a joke---self obsessed, smug, self congratulatory and aggrandising in it's far left positions...looney liberal left ground zero. The city council actually had to have a debate---remember this?---about whether taking a crap in the middle of the street was against the law. The city hates the military, has turned the homeless into saints (and well-off ones at that), rabidly promotes the radical gay agenda as a social norm (and views anyone contrary as homophobic), loathes all religious belief except Kaballah and Islam, openly tolerates drugs and prostituion as victimless crimes, and has an air of moral and intellectual superiority that boggles the imagination (after Gray Davis was thrown out on his ass---never a more corrupt and incompetent politician has there ever been---San Francisco was one of the few counties that voted to keep him in office. Every article published in the local papers claimed that it was the fact that San Franciscans were "better educated and better informed" as the reason they voted the way they did).

Truly a tragedy.

Twenty years ago, the AIDS epidemic was gathering force in SF, forcing gay men to fight for their lives and change their behaviors after a decade of wild excess.

In 1978, the Mayor and an openly gay city supervisor were assassinated by a supervisor who had resigned in protest of the passage of a gay-rights bill; the result was three days of gays rioting in the street.

In the mid to late 1960s, SF was a mecca for psychedelic drug users, who lived in degraded conditions on the street, developing diseases not seen in developing countries for generations.

So is SF really so bad these days?

The city today is a joke---self obsessed, smug, self congratulatory and aggrandising in it's far left positions...looney liberal left ground zero. The city council actually had to have a debate---remember this?---about whether taking a crap in the middle of the street was against the law. The city hates the military, has turned the homeless into saints (and well-off ones at that), rabidly promotes the radical gay agenda as a social norm (and views anyone contrary as homophobic), loathes all religious belief except Kaballah and Islam, openly tolerates drugs and prostituion as victimless crimes, and has an air of moral and intellectual superiority that boggles the imagination (after Gray Davis was thrown out on his ass---never a more corrupt and incompetent politician has there ever been---San Francisco was one of the few counties that voted to keep him in office. Every article published in the local papers claimed that it was the fact that San Franciscans were "better educated and better informed" as the reason they voted the way they did).

Sounds just like Austin, Texas to me!

That's the best description of SF I've seen. I remember the first time I ever went there, probably in the early'90s and I was shocked at having to literally step over "homeless" on every sidewalk. Later visits showed that the corner squeege man or will work for food sign holders were on every street corner harrasing cars. By this time Guliani had already cleaned up NY and I could only get the feeling that they all migrated westward.

It truly is a beautiful area and a unique city but I just can't stomach the place. NY may be liberal but at least it has some pretense of decency.