https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/mounting-violence-casts...

Or, you know, simply replace people like Boudin with pretty much any of their opponents in the last election cycle, "tough on crime" or not. It's very difficult to express how radical Boudin is. It's difficult to say this without seeming hyperbolic, because the term has been abused to death a 1000x over by conservative outlets. But he's basically a Marxist, with both the intelligence and ambition to institute radical policies popular in the American Marxist community.[1] Here's Boudin in 2009 defending Chavez and his constitutional reform removing term limits: "Chavez for Life? There are at least three reasons why the world should congratulate Venezuela's Hugo Chávez on his recent success abolishing term limits", https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/chavez-life/

[1] With apologies to Marxists who also think Boudin's policies are too extreme and imprudent.

Boudin is not a sudden deviation from the norm. SF and other progressive cities have been on the path of electing these kind of radicals for many years. Boudins election was ultimately the result of not heeding the warnings many pundits gave.

That sounds suspiciously like a slippery slope kind of argument. But slippery slope arguments are rhetorical slights of hand. In the realm of public policy, you can usually stop a slippery slope any time you want. And I have no doubt that if the SF electorate understood what Boudin's precise policies would be, Boudin absolutely would not have won. Having lived in SF for the better part of two decades, IME SF politics is not at all like it's portrayed in the national media. But let's see what happens with the recall.

I have exceptional disdain for Boudin precisely because I believe he'll do (and is doing) damage to otherwise constructive and productive criminal justice reform movements. Those movements aren't just composed of liberals. Republicans have supported and helped to pass sentence reductions in Congress.

Literally all my life experience would seem to disagree.

Like take CRT which everyone is mad about now. I told people about it when I was in middle school and the same people against it today didn't believe me then

Anyway, I'm not some kind of policy wonk. I'm not a politician.

I'm just a guy and it seems to me the slippery slope is real. Maybe others don't see it because we've already hit bottom

While I vehemently disagree with actual CRT scholarship because of its race essentialism and rejection of objectivity, it's kind of pointless to take that stance in regular discourse. It's not possible to explain to people that the concept of structural racism predates CRT by at least a decade[1], longer if we don't require literal usage of the phrase "structural racism". MLK, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and many other writers were exploring structural racism long before the CRT school assembled. More generally, bifurcation of social analysis into structural and cultural began in the 19th century. (EDIT: There's another vein to CRT related to postmodern structuralism--which is not the same "structuralism" as discussed in earlier race scholarship or generally understood in mainstream sociology. CRT mixes and attempts to synthesize those distinct ideas.)

Similarly, CRT on the right has been thoroughly equivocated with Marxism and other radical theories. But Tucker Carlson is talking out his butt because actual Marxists have been scornful of CRT since at least the 1990s. Alot of the lexicon of CRT comes from Marxist discourse, but so what? Libertarianism arose from the American Anarchist movement and would still use a similar lexicon but for self-conscious scrubbing of its language. (The one thing CRT clearly shares with Marxism is belief in a categorical, singular cause of oppression--white supremacy in the case of CRT, class conflict over control of the means of production in Marxism.)

"CRT", like many things, has become another empty label thrown around in the culture wars.

[1] See pp4-5 of this 1964 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Bulletin: https://25thandclement.com/~william/links/pdf/SDS_Bulletin-1... It was the earliest use of the literal phrase I could find on JSTOR.

I didn't mention Marxism.

Not sure why you felt the need to

Honestly this shows the problem with many in america today.

Someone says they disagree with X. Instead of finding out what they think about X, instead people will decide that conservatives hate X, and then use the worst arguments made by conservative commentators as a strawman.

Moreover, even though there is wide agreement X is bad, since some conservatives dont have the right reasons, more energy is expended mocking conservatives than combatting the actual policy.

So if, for example, a DA wants to have a policy letting all first time non-violent offenders walk, then so be it. I don't think it'll make a difference one way or another. For the same reason I don't think prosecuting such first time offenses was particularly consequential by itself in terms of creating a criminalized underclass of poor minorities, I don't believe that abstaining from such prosecutions would result in substantial changes in behavior--i.e. more theft.

OTOH, there are qualitative boundaries. If you quite literally remove the threat of jail or other serious repercussions regardless of number of offenses, then at the end of the day marginal effects will absolutely dominate. Unlike most crimes of violence, property offenses are principally crimes of opportunity--sociologically speaking, it's far easier to become a serial thief than a serial murderer. At some point the threat of material repercussions is too remote, and so a sizable subset of people will begin taking the opportunities to violate relatively weaker norms regarding inviolability of property.

For example, take parking tickets. Parking tickets and towing fees can be a huge, even life-changing, setback for the poor. But what do you think will happen if we tell people that, while we'll still ticket unauthorized parking, failure to pay those tickets would never result in any other consequence--no enforced payment, no wage garnishment, no suspended license? Illegal parking isn't exactly morally reprehensible. It'll skyrocket. But compare that to if you say that material consequences are suspended until the 4th offense? Are a flood of people going to go out and start to park illegally? Probably not. Why change your behavior when after 3 times you're back to the status quo ante? (To be clear, I don't deny that the latter will still see some marginal effects, but it's not the kind of thing I'm going to get worked up over as matter of politics. I'll be happy to let it play out in good faith, if that's what the majority wants, and then discuss policy once we can see the concrete results.)

Here, for instance, you are talking about all sorts of generalities and abstractions and hypothetical situations. But your comment could be written exactly the same no matter who was in office and what they were doing.

Here, you paint a picture of a hypothetical line that is crossed, which is all very well, but does this really describe what has happened in SF? None of it appears to be firm statements about what has happened and who it could be attributed to.

Someone who lives in SF may have the context that I don't. And it may not be worth your while to provide it. But I'm curious, because I can at least imagine getting a job offer in the bay area and wonder whether/how much of the stuff I read is true.

Bail reform is something that's been happening in a number of places, I believe. And it sounds logical to assess the threat to the community instead of arbitrary cash bail, even if implementation is fraught.

In other threads, I've seen people attack him for his parents, which also is really wrong, both in terms of blaming him for his parents' actions and in terms of letting people make wrong assumptions about what they were.

In order to find out who Boudin is, I read the Wikipedia page at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin

I can see how people can disagree with some of the things he's done and blame him for various things.

But it's also clear from reading it that he's been honestly trying to reform things, and many of the things he's done don't at all require you to be some sort of extremist, Marxist, whatever, to think they are reasonable. Some of the reforms have been echoed in other places recently, too.

What does that mean? What attacks? And what praise?

It just says (on David Gilbert's page) "Most Weather members were not prosecuted and did not serve time in prison, despite having been sought by the police for years; police misconduct led to the dropping of many charges (see: COINTELPRO)"

Everybody's heard of COINTELPRO, right?

Every thread like this, the anti-Boudin stuff sounds like the sort of propaganda they did back in the day.

They didn't like MLK Jr. either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brink%27s_robbery_(1981)

DA Boudin's parents are David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin.

I think if you just say "murderer" it is dishonest by omission, but I doubt "felony murder" is widely understood either without an explanation.

I think most people are like "oh, felony murder, yeah, obviously those durn liberals have reduced murder to a misdemeanor in most cases, must have been really heinous to be a felony".

And every time I see someone bring it up regarding Boudin, I assess them as a particularly nasty propagandist who for some reason doesn't care about their personal credibility.

I'm not saying that his father should or shouldn't be released from prison, but the sentence clearly was a lot longer than many actual murderers get, like for instance the guy who killed George Floyd.

I don't think I need to read extensively about the events and trial for it to be obvious that at the time, it was about terrorism, and so they were being punished for being part of a group of terrorists. One may agree or disagree with it for political reasons, but it's not at all the same sort of thing as the ordinary murders in SF that people are blaming on Boudin now.

It's not universally agreed that felony murder should be a thing at all, although people of all types generally salivate at using it against their political enemies as for example after the Jan. 6th events.

If you are a patriotic person, you likely have noticed and disagreed that for political reasons people who work on national defense are sometimes equated with terrorists.

The point of calling someone a terrorist is generally to imply a lot of associated things without specifically lying. If it were worse than accurate specifics, people wouldn't substitute it.

I don't see what that has to do with his parents. As I understand it they weren't even onlookers to the killings.

She was waiting in a getaway vehicle at a different location from where the guards were killed by the people actually doing the robbery.

It seems like you are playing with ambiguous statements. If you disagree with any of my statements about the facts, could you please be specific and explain where your information comes from.

The people who were killed to rob the armored truck were the guards, not the police officers. The officers stopped them trying to get away. If I'd read about that, I'd forgotten. So I resolved the apparent inconsistency by assuming you meant the guards.

Now in the page about the robbery, I see the section titled "Car swap and second gunfight": (although, "This section does not cite any sources")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Brink%27s_robbery

So, after reading that, I would definitely not argue that 20 years in prison was too much. She may not have actually shot anyone, but I agree, was complicit. I don't think it was obviously too short a sentence, because of, like I said before, George Floyd's killer getting ~20 years.

But Gilbert isn't out. And I don't see (ctrl-F) what exactly he did. I can't judge Chesa Boudin if he has made some argument to defend his father unless I were to read it.

Since Gilbert didn't make a defense at trial, and Kathy Boudin plea-bargained, is it possible to say what specific actions they were imprisoned for?

There is a quote: "Our goal is to see that these people, who have contempt for society and have shown no remorse, will never see the streets of society again"

This seems to underline it was a political judgment, not about what was done, but about what they might do in the future. That doesn't make it arbitrary or incorrect, but it is about something other than the physical actions of those involved.

If you want to talk about why Kathy Boudin shouldn't have been released, that seems external to the topic of what Chesa Boudin has said or done that is unacceptable or reprehensible. It wasn't him that made that decision, was it? It seems like it should be moot now anyway. Surely the ongoing issue is his father?

You started this sub thread with “His parents were convicted of felony murder. That is not a violent crime per se.”

I hope you now have the facts to see that Chesa Boudin is pleading for clemency for a terrorist murderer. That is not the kind of person who should be a DA! That is the job of a defense attorney, and Chesa would have been a great candidate for the SF Public Defender’s office. But when you hire a criminal apologist to be the city’s prosecutor you get predictably disastrous results.

Why does Boudin maintain such exceptionally lenient policies wrt property crime, even more than those proposed in other cities, and even when suspects are multiple repeat, even professional offenders? Given that Boudin seems highly intelligent and sincere, I must conclude it's because he rejects on principal the salient effects of private property rights. Which isn't to say he would reject them outright in all cases, but that he sees private property rights principally as a tool of oppression, and so has no compunction jettisoning them if he feels that the harm done to minority communities in defending those rights outweighs the risk of capitalists walking away with their ball. Which also is pretty much the only way one could have honestly--albeit naively--defended Chavez.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to that view, at least intellectually. But I'm nowhere arrogant enough to believe anything good would come of imposing such radicals views. And as someone with a legal education, I think it's particularly unethical of him to use his particular office to impose such views. There are few schools of thought, Marxism and offshoots being the most well known, that believe such reforms can be effective without deep and abiding support within the broader society. Boudin is a modern day American revolutionary, and not necessarily in a good way IMNSHO. Our politics is already far too extremist, and only getting worse.

I recognize that he comes from a family that espouses similar beliefs. (Not just his parents, but his guardians and their circle of friends as well.) But I see no reason to speak to that--his own expressed views, personal and as an office holder, far more directly reflect his thinking.

I don't think you have to be particularly left-wing, let alone Marxist, to look back at history and see that fighting democratic movements because they were labeled as Communist or Marxist may not have been the right approach.

You compare Chavez to Trump. What if instead of having an election, Trump's opposition had forcibly removed him when it was clear impeachment was going nowhere? Some people would have made a sincere case for the negative consequences of that even if they opposed Trump.

>he rejects on principal the salient effects of private property rights

I think this accusation needs more support, surely Boudin constantly does things that imply private property rights.