Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by preommr 1392 days ago
> The extreme left in SF politics (which in SF = the Establishment).

???

kind off topic, but I am curious what other people in SF think about this statement. I don't live there, but I find it surprising and dubious that the extreme anything is also "the establishment", not saying it's not possible but seems unlikely to me.
3 comments
wpietri 1391 days ago
20 years in SF, and I can promise you that the extreme left is not the establishment here. As an example, we had a relatively progressive prosecutor who tried occasionally to hold cops to account. After an acrimonious campaign, he was just recalled with extensive support from a chunk of the establishment. His replacement, selected by the mayor, volunteered as an active proponent in the recall. Except that it came out later that she received $100k in "consulting" fees from a billionaire via a sister organization to the recall campaign: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/reports-sf-da-brooke-jen...

San Francisco gets a lot of press as being radical, but the government strikes me as pretty middle-of-the-road and wealth-focused. i can't think of a policy here that would be out of place in any other sensibly run city in the US. And we're definitely to the right of places like Copenhagen and Amsterdam. And that goes back a long way; CA's current governor was a centrist mayor here back in the day.

link
achileas 1388 days ago
And Tan was a major backer of that recall
link
vxNsr 1392 days ago
My guess is: the administration controlling North Korea would be considered by many to be extreme (left, right, you pick) but in North Korea they are the establishment.

So too in SF, outside of cali they would be considered extreme (left, right, you pick) but in SF they are the establishment.

Not passing judgment on whether that’s right or wrong just saying that’s what that line could mean.

link
hackernewds 1392 days ago
? where do you get this?
link
preommr 1392 days ago
It's from the twitter thread by paul graham that the OC linked. It was a response to someone asking who dislikes Garry Tan, to which Paul Graham replied:

"The extreme left in SF politics (which in SF = the Establishment)"[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/stevemushero/status/1461013669114892288

link