>Just a month ago an engineer at AWS, a young Asian woman, had her skull cracked open when a random assailant hit her in the head with a baseball bat completely unprovoked. This was in the same neighborhood by the way.

There needs to be a new Law of the Internet that describes this situation.

"When there's little outrage over a hate crime, the probability of the perpetrator being non-White approaches 1."

Something like Coulter's Law [0].

[0] https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/coulters-law/

There's nothing in this article suggesting it was a hate crime. It appears to be someone with serious, untreated mental health issues.

Why did you assume this was a hate crime?

Because there are hundreds of these attacks since the coronavirus epidemic started against Asian-Americans, 99% of the time the assailant is non-white.

Yeah the real culprit is the media. This is the world they wish to come into existence.

Orwell gave this behavior a name - doublethink - ability to believe in two opposite things simultaneously, in this case it's "our city is great, safe and progressive" and "we aren't going down this street to the pub because even police wouldn't come to save us." The actual art of doublethink is believing in the opposites, not just pretending to believe.

If anyone actually thinks those two things and lives in Seattle they make up a very tiny, and paranoid minority.

Things have definitely gotten bad (I visit downtown every weekend and live in Ballard), but the same thing has happened in other cities as well for similar reasons. So on the one hand, people saying “it’s nothing” are wrong, but people say “Seattle is dead” are also incorrect. These problems can be solved, well, managed, with a bit of a swing to the right (from the far left, which is happening now).

I remember Seattle from the late 70s (as a preschooler), the 80s, and the 90s. I even worked at 3rd and Pine McDonald’s in 1994, and it was pretty bad back then, except the retail and office crowd kept things from getting bad until about 7PM each night (I often closed). The new thing now is (a) laws not enforced at all and (b) downtown was completely drained of office workers. Both of those can be fixed.

Can be solved? Sure, it’s theoretically possible.

Will be solved? Lol. Not in the next twenty years, if ever.

90% of the population gives each other reach arounds for banning plastic straws and calling people living on the streets “unhoused neighbors”

They could do something useful, but damn, doing nothing and bragging about it feels sooooooo good.

More like 5%, they just won’t shut up about it and the rest of us silently think they’re morons.

The current progressive politics is completely deranged and detached from the classic liberal politics. It is not at all what I know as a lifelong liberal. Portland went from 3rd most desirable city to 66th in the nation after the continued self-destruction: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/06/12/portland-...

The destruction of Portland exists only in the mind of people who won't turn their TV off. I've had commenters on here tell me it's been burned down and they can't leave their houses.

Although "a highly desirable city" isn't the most accurate description of Portland either. It's more like a theme park for white people with waxed mustaches.

I wouldn’t say the media analysis is entirely overblown. The pearl district turned from a beautiful and fun place to visit to a place I can no longer safely walk through. Most shops are shuttered and people in clear psychosis are roaming the streets screaming at each other, threatening violence at passer-bys, etc. Even the 23rd avenue area is taking a turn for the worse in terms of being safe to walk through.

I’m curious what you think of those areas specifically.

The Pearl is most definitely still a safe place to walk around. Like any other big city there will be instances where you encounter a houseless person or someone with mental problems but the neighborhood is still one of the nicest in the downtown area. Granted crime has gone up but this is something that is taking place all over the city (and country for that matter)

Same thing can be said about 23rd street. Maybe you have your own personal fears but the two areas you called out are not nearly as shuttered as they were at the peak of pandemic / protests, or when compared to downtown. Also, people seem to be totally comfortable enjoying those two areas. Not sure if you’ve noticed but on sunny days you cannot keep people from congregating in the pearl and around 21st / 23rd ave.

Sounds like SF. All I mean to say is, my people there tell me it isn't literally on fire or being tear gassed.

I'm not sure about the homeless issues there, though I do know some of their affordable housing laws are counterproductive:

https://twitter.com/amyliztweets/status/1501645850707054593

By shuttered do you mean fully closed? That happened to SF because it has so many office workers who don't live there, but it's worse because it takes years to get approval to open a replacement business there anyway.

If it's either covid or safety it'll come back soon - bad neighborhoods attract first wave gentrifiers.

> Most shops are shuttered and people in clear psychosis are roaming the streets screaming at each other, threatening violence at passer-bys, etc.

I have to think Covid exacerbated business closures and mental health issues for poor / homeless folks, due to fewer in-person services, etc. Can't think of any city in America that wasn't similarly affected.

To be honest though, I think the US really screwed itself here. One big issue is that the mentally ill can get to the point where they are no longer of sound mind and should be committed. But involuntary commitment draws flack as well, so the response becomes to do nothing.

It's also interesting how much impact a single movie had on mental health treatment in the us.

You’re being downvoted, but this is an entirely accurate view of Seattle. I just left that hellhole after 22 years.

The last five years have been consistently hell. Nobody wanted to do anything that will actually help people in the city; just things that allow them to humble brag on Facebook.

Seattle is dead.

> Seattle is dead.

Would the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?

> Billboard reading "Will the Last Person Leaving SEATTLE — Turn Out the Lights" appears near Sea-Tac International Airport on April 16, 1971.

https://www.historylink.org/file/1287

I heard of it.

Ya, Seattle has died before and came back (and we are actually still growing right now because of the hot economy, as opposed to back then which was a full out recession).

Really surprised no one got this.

If it is dead then why can’t I afford a condo there?

The better question is, “why would you want to?”

Greed and money are always the answers to these pseudo-righteous questions. Greed and money.

I already know the answer to your question: It is a great city with a lot to offer. I'm happy to own a house nearby for the time being.

Also happy when people like the GP leave this place altogether.

Moreover; whether youre talking about Detroit, London, NY, Baltimore, SF, Seattle, Dubai - _whatever_ - claiming a place where millions of real people live their lives is "dead" or a "shithole" or whatever, is an entirely graceless act. Nobody is forcing you to live here, move on with your life, or I'm going to assume you have some sort of weird insecurity that causes you to do behave this way. Presumably that is why the GP created an account just to make this claim; they didn't want it associated with their other internet identities.

You know millions of people don’t live in Seattle right? In fact, not even a single million people live there. Unless you count all the posers that claim they are from Seattle.

I bet you do. Since you love the city so much, but can’t be bothered to live there.

The Seattle metro contains over 4 million people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area

When people refer to cities it tends to include the immediately surrounding suburbs and exurbs, but honestly I shouldn’t have to explain this to you. Just because you don’t live in shoreline or Renton or whatever doesn’t make you special at all. Have a nice life.

This is normal in a country where inequality is too high. The lower class starts to feel excluded from society. Over time as the groups are separated from each other by wealth, security gates, policing etc, they lose empathy for each other. As inequality grows, the underclass grows resentful, then eventually hostile.

"Reaching out" and "being compassionate" won't work, because it does nothing to solve the underlying problem (poverty and exclusion). In fact, it just comes off as condescending (which it is). "Getting tough on crime" only accelerates the decline because now you're declaring war on the underclass. Now they REALLY have nothing to lose, and are fighting for survival.

And so you watch in horror as your once beautiful city goes into decline, feeling powerless to do anything. The left pushes for more leniency, the right pushes for more punishment, and the whole city goes to shit while everyone ignores the elephant in the room.

Lumping together the violent criminal class as the underclass is pretty offensive. Just because you're poor/working class doesn't mean you have to resort to... er... cracking people's head open with a baseball bat unprovoked.

This is not normal.

Actually, it's quite normal in highly unequal societies, and has been documented time and time again throughout history, as has the cycle of wealth redistribution. Nobody has managed to stop the inevitable march to redistribution, although they have managed to mitigate the late-stage violent period in some cases, and even avoid violent revolution.

there are many much more unequal societies than the US where this just isn't a problem. russia or china, for example. their rates of violent crimes like this are far below that of the US.

it's a pretty idiotic trend in recent years to reduce every societal problem to a income, wealth or other types of inequalities. there are societal problems that are completely and utterly caused by different issues, and this is one of them.

China has a huge wealth gap like in the US, yes, but _everyone_, even peasant farmers, can afford health care and real food that isn’t McDonalds. The lowest class materially knows their life is improving, year over year, so they don’t have cause to act out.

Saying “look at their rates of violent crime” overlooks how the Chinese government _very heavily_ cracks down on dissent or violent offenders in the general case, usually by shooting everyone indiscriminately or making a public example out of them.

Anecdotally, I’ve been at a Chinese bar when a fight broke out. People tried resolving it quickly, before the police found out. If a situation escalates enough, a whole truck of police show up and beat everyone there, including bystanders, for not “keeping the peace”.

> russia or china, for example. their rates of violent crimes like this are far below that of the US.

Hm. I am myself not from Russia exactly but from 90s Baltics and I personally remember repeated occasions I had to do end up in fights with local “trash”.

Once that ended with a guy punching one of the girls from our crowd in the face because she was being too outspoken about him trying to incite a fight with one of us. To be fair we should have expected that but none of us had any time to react.

To be clear that is actually quite a normal thing. Well, at least at the time it was and the area I lived in was not one of those incredibly poor areas. Russia has way worse places.

So yeah, we never reported that because truth to be told it was very usual and the whole general philosophy is to endure or to fight back yourself and not go to the police. So I would not think this stuff ends up in statistics.

What ends up in the stats is all of the really bad stuff like rape and killings at the same time. I would not even expect any medium-hard definition of “rape” would be reported on a regular basis let alone someone getting punched in their face.

china has been working continuously to get people out of poverty and that work continues. from the perspective of the people they mostly feel that they are better off than they were a decade or more ago.

this is the difference to the US. poor people in the US do not see that things are getting better for them.

also in china, everyone, even the poorest have access to affordable healthcare.

most poor people in china do not live in cities but outside where they have land to sustain themselves, so while their life may be poor for our standards, it is nothing like the experience of poor people in the US.

china values social stability first and foremost and works to keep it that way while in the US poor people are blamed for their own condition, like they should just work harder to get out of poverty, little is done to actually enable them to do so.

so no, china is absolutely not more unequal. much less so. there are poor areas and richer areas, but within each area everyone is pretty much equal.

So your preferred solution is to segregate poor people? Wild.

Tell that to the police, who target the working class with crimes like loitering, jaywalking, or "driving on a suspended license" (inability to keep up with court fine on top of court fine)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/04/coronavirus-ne...

From what I have seen in Minneapolis/St. Paul, those are things (low-level, livability crimes) which have stopped being enforced over the past 5-10 years. We are starting to see the effects of this inverse-broken-windows social experiment, and it's not looking good, at least where I live.

e.g. Aggressive panhandling, tent cities, traffic infractions, public transit fare evasion, shoplifting (<$1k), etc.

And that will continue getting steadily worse until public outcry causes the city to reverse course and get "tough on crime" again. After that, the "us vs them" mentality crystallises into fractured communities that eventually start to be run by gangs, similar to what you get in Brazil.

cool, the typically slippery slope. wonder if there could be other reasons for latin american countries being destabilized... hmm

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

b/c there could be no other reasons for this to be the case, and the only solution is to arrest, jail, or fine people potentially exacerbating their poverty?

this sounds like pearl clutching and not wanting to think more about an issue with tons of variables.

If you maltreat 10 poverty stricken people to the point of desperation, one or two probably will act out this way.

More will probably kill themselves, though.

I think we have to talk in broad swaths here, we can't zoom in on individuals.

Unprovoked? Neither “class” has realistic access to social services or health care in the US, so the mental health and addiction issues that often lead a person down this road go unaddressed.

Further, the US legal system (and US society) heavily stigmatizes “offenders”. Once a person is down its extremely hard to get back up, and people need money survive.

Not saying that violence is ok, but in many cases people just need help instead of punishment.

Agreed, we need to treat addiction much much more aggressively.

Here in CA/SF the current policy is to simply ignore low-level crime (which funds their drug addiction aka "to survive")... instead let's take people off the street (and take them off drugs).

Inequality is problem, but the problem sure as heck can’t be solved at the local level. Being tough on crime can help push the problem somewhere else at least: next door Bellevue will send SWAT out on anybody who so much as lays down on a bench (annoying the homeless population enough that they move on to Seattle). Being compassionate works in the opposite way: Seattle attracts people from as far away as Texas who have no chance at housing really anywhere, because they will get more support here than where they are from (recently read about some guy who decided to use their on release Texan prison open bus ticket to head to Seattle and then got caught breaking into someone’s house to sleep). Local solutions obviously have adverse impractical effects: you can push the problem to someone else or try to solve the entire country’s problem, there isn’t much middle ground to be had.

Some sort of federal solution really is needed, or our cities could be in huge trouble.

Unfortunately, history doesn't offer much comfort. The usual way that wealth is redistributed after a period of high inequality is via revolution. FDR managed to stave off disaster last time with the new deal, but congress was far less split along ideological lines then.

Most social revolutions only occurred because the people in charge were incompetent and almost completely clueless. As long as the regime can co-opt (or otherwise remove) the potential leaders of this revolution and commit to some modest reforms it can survive almost indefinitely (without external interference, e.g. climate change, plague or war) at least this seems to have almost always been the case historically.

The USA has gone through periods of high inequality before without relying on revolutions to solve the problem. Higher taxes on income and wealth, more support programs for the poor, etc… our political system is robust enough that we can solve our problems without shooting each other (I hope).

> Higher taxes on income and wealth, more support programs for the poor, etc…

Half of the country thinks that doing those things will literally destroy the country. The other half is willing to compromise with the first half. The same folks who preach no compromise, and tend to own more than one gun apiece.

Not holding my breath here.

My impression here that this sort of problem is a progressive problem though, seeing that the worst cases I see around here are always the progressive cities(Sf, etc). The right have their own issues, but this doesn't seem as severe in their strongholds?

Or perhaps it's a city thing. How does this compare to other cities?

Pretty much every major city is seeing skyrocketing housing prices amid wage stagnation. The economy is driving homelessness. Progressive policies attempt to serve the homeless population where in place, authoritarian policies house and feed the homeless in jails. Either approach works in a steady state, but they're addressing symptoms and not the root cause, a sick economy.

Are there conservative "strongholds" with rising or high population? That's most likely where you would see more of this stuff, areas with more people

No clue to be honest. I've seen the finger pointed at progressive handling of crime in SF and Seattle, so I was curious if anyone had a counterexample for this.

Stop excusing bad behavior.

Stop spoiling The Batman, please

Thanks for posting this

I was strongly considering Seattle, but it looks like LA 2.0

Out of control homelessness, lax criminal enforcement, sky rocking rents.

Everyone is liberal until you step in human waste. It appears in Red States they don’t play these games.

Even in California, Orange County won’t just let you put up a tent

It’s LA, without the sunshine, and the sprawl is confined by geography: Seattle is smack dab between two big bodies of water.

It's so odd to be a Washingtonian from Snohomish, and hear about what a shithole Seattle is. Everett has a lot of the same problems but nowhere NEAR as bad as I hear things get down there.

Broadly speaking I love Washington. I think the people are nice, I think the state is beautiful, I think the towns are generally clean. The experience that I hear Seattleites talk about is not in any way representative of what I see in the rest of the state. And that's crazy to me. It's like Seattle is its own little world, completely insulated from the outside.

It's probably not as bad as you hear. I think there are two fallacies one can draw: 1. Everything is rosy in the Emerald City 2. Everything is Mad Max in the Emerald City.

The corner by McDonalds on 3rd has always been bad, and truly these days it is worse. I was recently down that way and was pretty shocked. But that also isn't most of Seattle these days.

WA is beautiful. Every city has its good and bad areas.

Seattle may not be quite as bad as “dead”, but many of the descriptions are accurate *for a given neighborhood* — there far more crappy areas these days than there used to be.

I have hope it’ll get better one day. It’s a lovely place most of the time.

I think you and I are solidly in agreement on all points. When it’s good, it’s really good. But the bad is heartbreaking and does rather seem to have increased of late.

This is happening well beyond Seattle, not sure if it is a West coast thing. In Vancouver, it is a similar story [0]. It has gotten substantially worse in the last 5 or so years to the point that it is feeling lawless [1].

I have noticed that there are a lot of policies that seem local but are actual not and are being resold/implemented. I'm really curious what's changed and why are we still digging a hole in this spot where it is clearly not working.

The city and province are now spending incredible amounts of money on homelessness saying this will solve the problem but crime is going in the other direction. Some stats are saying otherwise, but reporting is now way down. I was in a parking lot last week downtown and a guy was all messed up and had a fire going in the parking lot. I talked to the security guy he shrugged. When I came back the fire was out, but he was still doing his drug dance. I don't think there was any reporting. I think the security approach was to get the fire out and no other confrontation. The stairwell was full of feces, urine, cat litter, and garbage. I don't think that the parking company can keep up anymore.

There seems to be a sense that criminality is ok for those that want to be criminals. I fully get the idea of not criminalizing poverty or addiction, but it is going well beyond the self and creating an ever larger blast radius. A real debate about whose freedoms get protected and whose get run over would be interesting to watch by policy makers. Not sure how they are seeing this, they are as another person mentioned in the Orwellian mode so it isn't decipherable.

Is it city and policing policy? Is it the drugs are just too strong and people are beyond help or being expected to have any agency? I really don't understand why this is going on in this direction? I think that politicians are are tied in their own knot and don't know a way out.

[0] - https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/local-news/robbed-vandali... [1] - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-ch...

Is it true that we should blame Campbell for closing that big mental hospital? I'm a compassionate guy but I'm getting pretty sick of schizos yelling on the street. It doesn't feel dangerous though - I think a lot of people come downtown from the suburbs and get kinda spooked. Living downtown, you just avoid Granville (cause it's disgusting) and realize that schizophrenics are more scared of you than you are of them.

I really don't have the right answers. Better mental health support is likely part of it. BC is abysmal for mental health in general.

I have a friend that lives at Main and Keefer and we hangout on the patio and people watch. It is clear that there are people that are really locked into a major mental illness whether it is schizophrenia or something else. They are being given a place to stay and a meal, which I think is important, but they are left to figure out the rest on the streets. They look like prey for dealers. Once someone is mixing drugs with their illness it gets really messy and anit-social.

I've grown up in and around Vancouver. I've never felt that it was dangerous. I'm somewhat regularly down at Hastings and Main and not fearful. Like you mentioned people yelling etc. But business owners are taking it on the chin pretty hard with theft, vandalism and loss of customers.

I love Chinatown, but it is definitely at a low right now. I take my daughter, I don't want her to be intimidated and when it does come back I want her there. It is a great part of the city. It should be thriving.

It's domestic terrorism abetted by the media. Sometimes instigated by the media.