- This topic has 9 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated 1 year, 11 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
-
Chesa Boudin, son of terrorists, ousted from the San Francisco District Attorney position. Chicago’s progressive Kim Foxx didn’t run again and was replaced by a former judge who promised to prosecute retail theft as a felony. In LA, George Gascon is facing a challenge from a former Republican, Nathan Hochman, decrying a “culture of lawlessness.”
And a progressive DA in Portland, Mike Schmidt, fighting for his job against Nathan Vasquez who states that people want public safety. No kidding. Oregon’s Democratic governor approved a bill to recriminalize possession of small amounts of drugs, in a state that saw opioid overdoses more than double between 2019 and 2023.
78% of voters in metro Portland believe homelessness is a “very serious problem” and over 60% believe government should fine or arrest people who refuse to leave public places. In Portland.
Democrats Beware: A Progressive DA Fights for His Job — in Hipster Portland – POLITICO
Audaces fortuna iuvat
-
Portland citizens are beyond weary with the nonsense presented as progessivism. Four years ago, Mike Schmidt was all about not prosecuting property crimes. Well, car thefts suddenly spiked to over 1000 cars per month. Break ins, flash mob theft and petty theft left business owners no option – move or close your doors. Often times there was no choice- businesses could not get insurance, or it was so expensive it became unaffordable.
Today, DA Schmidt is all about law and order, getting behind new police initiatives to curb auto theft, reduce drug use and prosecuting flash mob gang robberies as organized crime. Liberals are slowly starting to realize that soft on crime does not reduce r
-
Schmidt got smoked in yesterdays primary election by 12 points. A big chunk of his funding came from Working Families Party, headquartered in New York. Another large contributor is the Drug Policy Alliance.
“The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) is a New York City–based nonprofit organization that seeks to advance policies that “reduce the harms of both drug use and drug prohibition, and to promote the sovereignty of individuals over their minds and bodies”. The organization prioritizes reducing the role of criminalization in drug policy, advocating for the legal regulation of marijuana, and promoting health-centered drug policies”- Willamette Weekly.
George Soros is a contributor to both PACs.
Local media could no longer cover for Schmidt. The results of his progressive policies are out there for all to see. Record levels homicides, robberies, auto thefts, vandalism and assault didn’t leave much to run on as incumbent.
It will take years for Portland to recover.
-
How could it get that bad? Serious question. What voter in their right minds thinks that defunding police and decriminalizing crime and drugs would have anything but a horrific effect on quality of life in a metro (or any other) area?
Washington Post article on the fentanyl epidemic. You don’t need to read it, it’s exactly what you think it is. It’s awful, it’s getting worse, no end in sight.
807 overdose deaths in SF in 2023, up from 647 overdose deaths in 2022, a 24.7% increase. And so it goes…
Audaces fortuna iuvat
-
Two of the big issues contributing to the collapse of our culture are the decimation of our education system and the erosion of our society’s connection to a spiritual identity.
You ask how a community could vote the way Portland residents have, and ultimately the value systems have eroded because we have failed to model them and younger generations have not embraced them.
-
Two of the big issues contributing to the collapse of our culture are the decimation of our education system and the erosion of our society’s connection to a spiritual identity. You ask how a community could vote the way Portland residents have, and ultimately the value systems have eroded because we have failed to model them and younger generations have not embraced them.
My mom has a very definite take on precisely when the decimation of the education occurred. It was when “Welcome Back Kotter” aired . It made it acceptable to both backtalk teachers and not treat school seriously.
Audaces fortuna iuvat
-
-
[quote quote=8410]
Two of the big issues contributing to the collapse of our culture are the decimation of our education system and the erosion of our society’s connection to a spiritual identity. You ask how a community could vote the way Portland residents have, and ultimately the value systems have eroded because we have failed to model them and younger generations have not embraced them.
My mom has a very definite take on precisely when the decimation of the education occurred. It was when “Welcome Back Kotter” aired . It made it acceptable to both backtalk teachers and not treat school seriously.[/quote]
Respectfully disagree with your mom. My take is the decline in our education system started with the Dept of Education, formed in 1980.
Just one man’s opinion….
-
Associating the recent crime wave issue with causes that arose in the 80’s ignores the remarkable drop in crime statistics in the 90’s. There were many causes for this, including demographic, but one of the major reasons was the adoption of the ‘broken windows’ theory of policing. I wish I could link John Wilson’s original article in 1982 in the Atlantic Monthly, which I read at the time. The best I can do is this Wikipedia article
Wilson’s approach has been under attack the last few years, because elevated levels of enforcement lead to racially disparate results. That these are based on the spectacularly different levels of violent crime – 4x to 6x the rate of Caucasians, which is itself too high when compared with Asians, immigrants (the legal kind), and so on.
And there is a counter narrative that has some validity, that these arrests for comparatively minor crimes set up the youthful offender for steady progress (or regress) into the criminal justice system, That’s the reason why all these progressives come to office determined not to prosecute low level crimes.
Except that it doesn’t work. Wilson was right. More to the point, African-American communities are even less tolerant of disorderly streets than more upscale communi
The only one who doesn’t seem to get it is Joe Biden, who’s commencement address at Morehouse that was a flat out pandering to the African-American intellectuals who remain True Believers. As summarized by Andrew Sullivan on his substack blog – https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-psychology-of-being-in-a-minority. (Might require a subscription, but worth it – Sullivan is a real force for common sense.
I wouldn't give you two cents for all your fancy rules if, behind them, they didn't have a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness - yeah, and a little looking out for the other fella, too.
-
I think this might be the original “Broken Windows” article. There’s a section in it where Philip Zimbardo of Stanford attempted to replicate the study’s results:
Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, reported in 1969 on some experiments testing the broken-window theory. He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California. The car in the Bronx was attacked by “vandals” within ten minutes of its “abandonment.” The first to arrive were a family — father, mother, and young son — who removed the radiator and battery. Within twenty-four hours, virtually everything of value had been removed. Then random destruction began — windows were
smashed, parts torn off, upholstery ripped. Children began to use the car as a playground. Most of the adult “vandals” were well dressed, apparently clean-cut whites. The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for
more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passersby were joining in. Within a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed. Again, the ‘vandals”appeared to be primarily respectable whites.Harvard researchers tried a variation of the experiment in Lowell, Mass., essentially proving the theory correct:
And this is exactly what Brenda Bond of Suffolk University and Anthony Braga of Harvard Kennedy’s School of Government found. Cleaning up the physical environment was revealed to be very effective, misdemeanor arrests were less so, and increasing social services had no impact.
There were similar results in Japan and the Netherlands:
Branas and MacDonald thinks the problem begins earlier, that the “broken windows” are a symptom, not the disease, and that the disease is early abandonment and neglect of property. When I lived in Detroit, that was their fundamental take as their population declined from 2.1 million to less than 700k. There were more than 100,000 unoccupied residences. Detroit’s leaders tried to get people to move to occupied blocks and bulldozed abandoned buildings and turned them into parks or urban gardens. Seemed to work.
Audaces fortuna iuvat
-
-
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.