SF’s appalling street life repels residents — now it’s driven away a convention

San Francisco Chronicle ^

[Albion Wilde]

Wasn’t it California that boycotted North Carolina because of their bathroom bill? Karma, baby.

[Albion Wilde]

[vpintheak]

Behold the destruction leftists have wrought.

[NobleFree]

They probably plan to hold their convention in a safer and more sanitary place.

Calcutta comes to mind.

ROTFL!

[Chickensoup]

This: from the BELL CURVE is prescient. Written in the early 90’s it is an amazing tome.

The Way We Are Headed

The underclass will grow. During the 1980s, scholars found evidence that the size of the underclass was no longer expanding. 17 But even as they wrote, the welfare rolls, which had moved within a narrow range since the late 1970s, began to surge again. The government will try yet
another round of the customary social programs — sex education, job training, parenting training, and the like — and they will be as ineffec- tual this round as they were in the 1960s and 1970s. 18

Meanwhile, many low-income parents who try to do all the right things and pass their values on to their children will be increasingly unable to do so. They can- not propagate their norms in the face of a local culture in which illegitimacy, welfare, crime, and drugs are commonplace, and there is nothing magically invulnerable about them or their children. Some of the reforms we have described will be improvements — crime might actually drop in the inner city as well as in the other parts of town, for example — but the main effect will be to make it harder for the children in these solid and conventional working-class families to emulate their parents.

Marriage, steady employment, and responsible behavior of many kinds will fall among the next generation, and some portion of the working class will become members of the underclass. Few children of those already in the underclass will escape. Social budgets and measures for social control will become still more centralized.

The growing numbers of illegitimate children born to poor women will have multiplier effects on social welfare budgets — directly and through increased indirect costs generated in the educational and law enforcement systems. As states become overwhelmed, the current cost sharing between the states and federal government will shift toward
the federal budget.

The mounting costs will also generate intense po- litical pressure on Washington to do something. Unable to bring itself to do away with the welfare edifice — for by that time it will be assumed that social chaos will follow any radical cutback — the government will continue to try to engineer behavior through new programs and regulations. As time goes on and hostility toward the welfare-dependent in-
creases, those policies are likely to become authoritarian and rely increasingly on custodial care.

Racism will reemerge in a new and more virulent form. The tension between what the white elite is supposed to think and what it is actually thinking about race will reach something close to a breaking point. This pessimistic prognosis must be contemplated: When the break comes,
the result, as so often happens when cognitive dissonance is resolved, will be an overreaction in the other direction.

Instead of the candor and realism about race that is so urgently needed, the nation will be faced with racial divisiveness and hostility that is as great as, or greater, than America experienced before the civil rights movement.

We realize how outlandish it seems to predict that educated and influential Americans, who have been so puritanical about racial conversation, will openly re- vert to racism. We would not go so far as to say it is probable. It is, how-
ever, more than just possible. If it were to happen, all the scenarios for the custodial state would be more unpleasant — more vicious — than anyone can now imagine.

In short, by custodial state, we have in mind a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation’s population, while the rest of America tries to go about its business. In its less benign forms, the solutions will become more and more totalitarian. Benign or otherwise, “going about its business” in the old sense will not be possible.

It is difficult to imagine the United Stares preserving its heritage of individualism, equal rights before the law, free people running their own lives, once it is accepted that a significant part of the population must be made permanent wards of the state.

Extrapolating from current trends, we project that the policies of cus- todialism will be not only tolerated but actively supported by a consen- sus of the cognitive elite. To some extent, we are not even really projecting but reporting. The main difference between the position of
the cognitive elite that we portray here and the one that exists today is to some extent nothing more than the distinction between tacit and explicit.

If we wish to avoid this prospect for the future, we cannot count on the natural course of events to make things come out right. Now is the time to think hard about how a society in which a cognitive elite dom- inates and in which below-average cognitive ability is increasingly a handicap can also be a society that makes good on the fundamental
promise of the American tradition: the opportunity for everyone, not just the lucky ones, to live a satisfying life. That is the task to which we now turn.

[YogicCowboy]

The Streets of Sanitation Free.

[Mastador1]

I haven’t been to San Franshitco since the 80’s and that trip was enough to keep me from ever going back. Also on my list of never returns are Oakland,CA, Portland,OR, Seattle,WA, Las Vegas,NE.

[Oiao]

Your Regressively Leftist Utopia.

Death Spiral! The hard deck is approaching faster....

I have not gone into that hell hole for near 10 years.

Spend my time and money elsewhere.

[deadrock]

That was fantastic. Thanks for the laugh.

[BookmanTheJanitor]

It’s the first time that we have had an out-and-out cancellation over the issue, and this is a group that has been coming here every three or four years since the 1980s,” said Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of S.F. Travel, the city’s convention bureau

It’s the first time you've been told that is the reason.

[qwerty1234]

>>When a possible move to Baltimore or Chicago was brought up, the Doctors preferred Vegas or Aruba.

Vegas is not a perfect city by any means, I am quite certain they have there share of homeless and drug problems - but its the best city I know of to host conventions - and one of my favorite places to travel even though I don’t gamble (or go to bars or even hire hookers), but I do appreciate that even at 3AM (when I get up) I feel completely safe walking around the strip by myself.

I’ve done the same in Washington DC and SFC out looking for my morning coffee at 3AM and in both of those places I felt the risk of being attacked was ever-present.

Gave up going to SFC years ago, which is a shame because I work in the tech industry and there are lots of big tech conferences I would like to attend there - hoping they will move them to LV at some point.

[Ron H.]

..... He got so disgusted he left the next day; his wife got so disgusted she left the day after he did.

LOL. Now that's funny but sad at the same time.

[Ron H.]

I haven’t been to San Franshitco since the 80’s and that trip was enough to keep me from ever going back. Also on my list of never returns are Oakland,CA, Portland,OR, Seattle,WA, Las Vegas,NE.

1971 for me. And agree with your list. I'd add one more since its in my state, Austin, TX but only because you can't toss a wadded up piece of (soiled??) toilet paper and throw it without hitting a stinking liberal.