I live in that woke wasteland known as Canada and I am still confused by Maher’s descriptions of it. I’m a mid-40’s white male who is heteronormative and therefore the exact person wokeness is supposed to be oppressing. And yet here I am not feeling oppressed, despite all the recreational outrage that Canada’s right wing (and Bill Maher for some reason) throws at me. I don’t know what the situation was with the teacher in Ontario but I don’t think it serves as a particularly great example of unchecked wokeness making it so I can’t have nice things. With all due respect to my southern neighbors, I’d still choose being Canadian ten out of ten times and twice on Sundays. You don’t scare me, Bill. Work on it.
Skilled workers are a minority of newcomers to Canada recently, in large part because of the huge influx of international students.
I’m just going to throw this in here because of the incessant noise from some posters – against the first-hand experience of actual residents – that San Francisco doesn’t have a crime problem and that Bill Maher has somehow become a right-wing tool for saying otherwise.
I know, I know – anecdotes are not data. But this is rather sadly ironic, in a dark-comedy sort of way, especially because back in January we were talking about Rep. Adam Schiff being on the Maher show. I wonder how Schiff feels now about crime in San Francisco …
Who leaves valuables in parked cars anywhere?
I do. If I went shopping and stop somewhere to eat then I’m leaving valuables in the car. I put them out sight but they’re still in the car.
I do. All the time. Never had a problem.
Note that this was his freaking luggage. It probably would normally have been in the trunk but this may have been some sort of SUV that didn’t have a separate trunk.
I’m going to point here, as I noted before too in this thread(!), that what you are doing is a straw man. Most of the points mentioned were to mention evidence that the robberies in stores were a problem, but not caused by the spin Maher was misleadingly saying.
And… robberies from parked cars are not shoplifting from stores. Even less applicable to what Maher was dog whistling about.
You don’t think that property crimes like shoplifting and car break-ins have a common underlying cause? Or do you imagine that homeless drug addicts and other petty thieves graduate from Crime School with training in specific specialties of petty crime, and that’s all they know how to do?
And of course you defend your straw man with another one, well done! … Not.
Where did I say that crime is not a problem? Only by ignoring now that Maher was blaming democrats, liberals or governance as being the reason is that you can go on. What Maher said remains dumb.
As it is ignoring that crime did go down recently as per that article too, but of course, lets continue blaming what Maher told us to blame.
The underlying problem isn’t “wokeness”. It’s a system that exists to serve and enrich the wealthy first and foremost, which treats poverty and addiction as moral failures rather than a failure of social policy, values punishment over rehabilitation, and makes it almost financially impossible to recover from one bad decision or to ever rehabilitate yourself.
Of course, Bill Maher, as a multi-millionaire celebrity and pro sports team owner, benefits from that system, and addressing it would require social parasites like him to actually contribute their fair share, so it’s to his benefit to blame vaguely defined social movements and scapegoat those mean nasty libs and poors that he has to look at and even, saints preserve us, interact with on his way from first class to the limo.
I’m still in the area and was a resident of SF for years. Sorry, mate - as usually framed it’s exaggerated. Not that property crime isn’t bad in SF - it is. It’s near or at the top in terms of larceny (petty theft - aka tourist bags from cars).
But it’s very, very often framed just as crime full stop with the implication that San Francisco is a particularly dangerous place. It’s not. It doesn’t even make the top 50 in terms of murder, rape or aggravated assault. Other cities in CA do, but not SF. Burglary rate - also not top 50. Auto theft in the 30’s.
So people claiming SF is a bad place for petty theft = on perfectly safe ground. People implying SF is overall a crime-ridden hellhole resulting from liberal coddling of criminals = full of shit.
Sounds fair, except that I don’t think Maher or anyone here has made that latter statement. As far as I remember, it’s been all about property crime. Your fellow SF resident @P91noX made a similar point about the high rate of petty/property crime in the city that they observed first-hand shortly after moving there.
I’m kinda sorry I re-opened this whole can of worms but I thought the Adam Schiff car break-in was amusing in a dark-comedy sort of way because shoplifting and car break-ins appear to be so damn common over there. Here is what seems to be a fairly balanced view of crime and crime politics in San Francisco by a CNN reporter who flew to SF to interview a long-time resident. And, in a twist that would be funny if it wasn’t so sad, the reporter’s rental car was broken into and her luggage stolen while she was conducting the interview! 
That’s not quite it though. What Bill Maher, and others, are doing is ridiculing the counterproductive and frankly delusional excesses of the far left.
Why am I certain that asking you to expand on these “counterproductive and frankly delusional excesses of the far left” is going to leave me with teh blue genitals?
I bet it’s got something to do with all those cities that BLM burned to the ground, in your imagination, doesn’t it…
Big cities don’t have crime because they’re run by Democrats. They have crime because they’re big cities.
True, although I think Maher is at least partly right in blaming some of the problem on government policies. The CNN article I cited earlier tries to delve into some of the changes in San Francisco over the years and explain some of the root causes of the problem.
False. The reasons for all the property crime in SF are multifaceted and not amenable to simple single-cause explanations. That statement is the same kind of simplistic bullshit that Maher was peddling. For instance, I lived for many decades in a city much bigger than SF, and whose overall metropolitan area population was similar to that of the entire SF-Bay area. It’s also a city that was and remains extremely liberal in its politics. I’ve never had my car broken into, ever. Nor is shoplifting a particular problem. Meanwhile, as I noted in my previous post, a CNN reporter who was in town to interview a friend and long-time SF resident about why SF had so much property crime had her car broken into and luggage stolen while she was conducting the goddam interview!
Perhaps if said reporter had spent as much of their lives in big cities as you or I they’d know to put your luggage in the trunk and not in the backseat where people can see it.
I wasn’t painting everyone on the left with the same broad brush. Maher is on the left and there is obviously a growing schism between factions on the left. In part, that’s because the far left are in part truly delusional on the follower level and extraordinarily manipulative and cynical on the leader level. When they finally do hit a critical mass and can enact policy, well, we see the nutty and utterly predictable results.
Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence.
That’s part of the problem with the one-dimensional political axis we tend to default to.