Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

And yet if you asked SF progressives if they'd be okay with having a highly-profitable, multi-billion dollar foreign corporation sell on their sidewalks a highly addictive product, which kills two people a day, most would say "no."

https://twitter.com/citizenj17/status/1472420277334069248

Meanwhile, San Francisco won't let law-abiding citizens open an ice cream store even after they invested $200,000 on rent, fees, and lawyers...

sfchronicle.com/local/heatherk…

And San Francisco remains a national leader in stomping out second-hand cigarette smoke whose harm is significantly less and far-longer term than instantaneous death from Chinese-Honduran fentanyl

apnews.com/article/smokin…

The reason is because progressive leaders believe the Hondurans fentanyl dealers are victim of trafficking. In truth, they are here at-will to make money, little different from the young Mexican heroin dealers profiled by @samquinones7 in Dreamland.

amazon.com/Dreamland-True…

San Francisco actually protects through its Sanctuary Law the Honduran fentanyl dealers who kill 2 people a day. If SF didn't have it, the INS could just deport the young men and threaten to throw them in prison if they tried to return. Would take mere hours. Easy.

Naturally, progressives act some amount of shocked or helpless when such a possibility is raised, as though it would be immoral to stop people from killing people, or impractical to use the full power of the American government down on a bunch of petty drug dealers.

This has led some on this web site to speculate secret financial relations. I have only heard rumors and seen no evidence. What's happening appears to be ideology-driven stupidity and immortality. A bad idea, victimology, taken to its extreme, which in this case is mass death.

What's consistent about victimology is how it defines victims, its freezing of victim status so there's no possibility of agency much less heroism, and its view that to victims everything and nothing required. What's inconsistent is everything else.

Victimologists said police don't prevent crime. they demonized & demoralized them. After officers resigned & withdrew, crime rose. Victimolgists denied crime's rise for 18 months until it became untenable. Now they're saying the police are to blame for not doing their jobs.

To which, the natural question is, "Wait, what?" Progressives Woke just got done saying police didn't prevent crime. Now they're saying a) the police are big babies for resigning and b) that the police pity party to blame for... crime rising.

They're not interested in consistency because they're not interested in the truth. Nor are they particularly interested in saving the "Black bodies" they claim to care so much about. If they did, they'd care about the 30x more African Americans killed by civilians than by police.

The defund police movement wasn't about saving black lives so much as delegitimizing the entire system, which they view as the cause of most if not all suffering, inequality, and oppression.

Likewise, the progressive movements that protect deadly and dangerous Honduran fentanyl dealers aren't really about saving victims. If they were, they'd have not only demanded but succeeded in their deportation years ago. They're interested in delegitimizing the system.

The movement that calls itself "harm reduction" isn't about reducing harm. If it were, it would support the enforcement of laws when street addicts break them so that they could receive medical treatments for their brain diseases, addiction & mental illness.

The progressive movement opposes enforcing laws when addicts and mentally ill people break them because they believe the system is evil and more of it is bad and less of it is good.

This also explains why progressive DAs don't do what they promised to do when it comes to alternatives to incarceration. They're just releasing suspects go without probationary measures, such as drug testing and monitoring, even though both are proven to reduce recidivism.

Underneath the contradictions is the view that the "the system" is bad and that less of it, and its institutions, the better. This explains why progressives take such radical anti-institution views on everything from psych hospitals to shelters to police stations to probation.

Why are progressives so strict about covid vaccine & laissez-faire with fentanyl dealing? Because the vaccines are for all of us and the fentanyl dealing is perceived to be by and for poor people of color. Vaccines escape victimology's simplistic anti-system view.

Progressives believe anti-vaxxers could hurt them personally, whereas they have no fear that Honduran fentanyl dealers could hurt them. Again, they are victims, and thus perceived as weaker, if also holier.

What about the ice cream store entrepreneurs? They were entrepreneurs, not victims. They had $200,000 to spend.

Nobody's victimized by not having an ice cream, whereas drug dealers & addicts are victimized by law enforcement. Yes, that's the argument progressives make.👇

When people with good intentions are doing something immoral, e.g. letting a multi-billion foreign corporation kill two people a day and chemically enslave thousands of others, it's worth understanding the morality upon which they're operating. In this case, it's victimology.

The same is happening on meritocracy. Victimologists are destroying the meritocracy because it's one of the underpinnings of our system which they believe is responsibility for the racial inequality in education they, naturally, have made worse by lowering standards.

The most important question we face as a civilization is why are our most progressive citizens undermining it? Why are they undermining equality under law, meritocracy, citizenship, anti-segregation, girls/women's sports, cheap & reliable energy, policing, and criminal justice?

When challenged they retreat into "Oh, we're just trying to make x better" but in practice they seek to shut down rather than reform standardized testing, psych hospitals, police stations, homeless shelters, centralized power stations, prosecutor's offices, probation, & rehab.

Sometimes the line does indeed seem fine. In HBO's "Judas and the Black Messiah," there's a scene where the black, Latino, and white anti-police activists unite. The white leader is complaining, rightly, of police violence, but then says, "We don't want police in our communities"

That's where the line is crossed. We need meritocracy, equality under law, psych hospitals, cheap and reliable electricity, girls/women sports, homeless shelters, rehab clinics, and higher treatment of citizens than non-citizens in order to be a civilization.

We need police officers, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, and we need the prosecutors to act like prosecutors, and not like defense attorneys, because we have a fundamentally antagonistic system that requires balance. Both sides go hard at each other. That's how it works.

It doesn't have to be that way. I tend to admire the judicial systems of the Dutch and other European governments that are less antagonistic. Trials are often speedier and the people involved more expert. There's less antagonism.

But we're not the Dutch and our system remains antagonistic and if the DAs of Philly, Chicago, SF, LA and other cities are going to act like Public Defenders then we shouldn't be surprised when many more of the people who are released reoffend, or that there's little probation.

It doesn't have to be this way. Victimology operates by hypnotic trance. Rising crime and violence are snapping people out of it. Breed rejected it in her speech. Our liberal democratic Enlightenment equality-under-law system works and most people want to keep it.

The same goes with the rest of our civilization. We need to remind each other of why it's so important. We need to defend its institutions sooner and more aggressively, from meritocracy and equality-under-law to policing & psychiatry to cheap energy & food. They are essential.

So too are safe streets and accountability.

Breed took a good strong first step. If she's going to make it stick, she & her allies need to build new institutions: shelters, psych care, & rehab.

And they need to deport the fentanyl dealers.

/END

@LondonBreed @JoeBiden