Only Suckers Pay Their Way
I paraphrase, of course. Though, judging by this piece in the San Francisco Standard, not by much:
“I don’t pay,” said a 35-year-old man wearing an orange puffy vest and clutching a beige shoulder bag and a banana. The man said he earns $75,000 working for an Oakland-based climate nonprofit. “Muni should be free, to make it accessible.”
Or, my activist lifestyle should be subsidised by others, the less important.
Ah, that community spirit, a triumph of fairness over selfishness, in a city of good people. Good people who steal as a matter of routine. Because when it comes to paying their way, well, they’d rather not.
Behold the moral clarity of Our Betters. The unwavering righteousness.
You see, stiffing others with the bill, the cost of you getting from A to B, is the very measure of politeness. It’s altruistic fare-dodging. Another terribly progressive innovation.
As one might imagine, this modish, habitual freeloading, now estimated at 20% of users, possibly higher, has had certain consequences, including the alienation of many paying customers. Say, those not impressed by orange-vested climate activists who repeatedly screw the law-abiding, and the taxpayer, while applauding themselves for their belief that “Muni should be free.”
Left unchallenged or actively reinforced, the disregard for paying bills may of course spill into other areas of life, and losses from municipal parking garages are also mentioned as a “concern.” The fiscal state of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is described by insiders as “incredibly dire,” with a deficit projected to rise from a mere $15 million to a rather more impressive $322 million.
Rafael Mandelman, the chair of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, is one of those concerned, though more by the election of Donald Trump, and the consequently dimmed prospects of further federal bailouts, than by the culture of fare-dodging among the network’s own supposed customers. Suggested solutions to these economic woes include taxing ride-share companies, parcel taxes, increased parking charges, and bake sales.
Action of a sort is, belatedly, being taken:
However, this being San Francisco, an uphill struggle is expected:
Ms Malan, whose progressive charisma can be viewed here, is, she says, “working smarter, not harder.”
@theedoodlebop Suddenly im having the best day of my life ! #sanfrancisco #sf #hotweatherhacks #fypシ゚ #missionsf #goldengatepark #sanfranciscobayarea ♬ original sound – Tasha 🧍🏻
Again, good people, Giving It To The Man. Or at least, giving it to those unhip, fare-paying suckers.
Ms Malan, a self-styled “artist,” was later caught fare-dodging by the aforementioned fare enforcement officers, or Muni cops, and given a $130 citation – an indignity Ms Malan describes, quite vehemently, as “bullshit.”
@theedoodlebop FINE yall win this time😔 #sf #sanfrancisco ♬ original sound – Tasha 🧍🏻
It’s worth noting that the replies to Ms Malan’s fare-dodging dramas are almost entirely sympathetic. Her admirers applaud her recreational mooching, a measure of hipness, and offer tips on doing the same. “Best way to live,” says one. “God, I love this city,” adds a likeminded bint. “It’s a simple and beautiful life,” says another. Albeit a life based on exploiting, and sneering at, those more honest. The ones being left to pick up the tab.
Other attempts at fare enforcement have, inevitably, resulted in hair-trigger accusations of “racism,” presumably on grounds that Magical Brownness entitles those so endowed to an indefinite exemption from normal proprieties.
Readers may recall our previous visits to the world of glamorised fare-dodging – for instance, in Washington DC, where progressive commuters, including lecturers, lawyers and screenwriters, aired their “exhausted rage,” not at the rapidly growing number of freeloaders eroding social trust and bankrupting the transport network, but at those careless enough to notice such things.
Because noticing routine and shameless thievery is apparently much worse than indulging in it. And certainly more likely to result in opprobrium.
Some will doubtless recall Ms Claudia Balducci, a scrupulously progressive woman responsible for Seattle’s public transport network, and who, when faced with evidence that up to 70% of passengers are now fare-dodging with impunity, replied:
Which, we’re to believe, is progress. An achievement unlocked.
Oh, and we mustn’t forget this feat of Bay Area ingenuity, complete with magic cardboard and public masturbators.
Update, via the comments:
Responding to this rather convenient excuse,
Clam replies, not unfairly,
Given the nature of public infrastructure and its bureaucracy, and given the city’s pronounced progressive leanings, I don’t doubt that the transportation system may be suboptimally conceived and suboptimally implemented. But as we noted recently, rules and systems can only do so much, and whether a system works, or works to some extent, will also depend on compliance and enforcement, on human capital, the quality of its inputs, its users.
And it’s not obvious how any system that one might realistically devise could function adequately if subjected to large enough numbers of people much like our “artist,” Ms Tasha Malan, or the activist with the banana, or the research associate who excuses her habitual freeloading as being “like a San Francisco thing, I guess.”
The weight of shitty, selfish people is not to be underestimated.
Update 2:
Regarding the self-satisfied justifications for being a selfish bum, a – dare I say it – parasite – commenter [+] adds,
Well, yes. And I’m not sure how a struggling transport system can overcome the prevalence of such attitudes, unless the people running it are willing to add some serious Find Out to all the Fucking About. And I suspect that wouldn’t be regarded as “a San Francisco thing,” man.
It’s also, I think, worth pondering how those announcing their habitual freeloading, even boasting of it, don’t seem to regard themselves as being in any way uncivilised or morally questionable.
As if their behaviour – their choices, made repeatedly – couldn’t possibly indicate something untoward or unsavoury. Something warranting shame. Perhaps they assume that “working for a climate nonprofit,” or being a “research associate for a Google-owned subsidiary,” or just living in San Francisco, a progressive Mecca, makes them a good person. An unassailable being.
It seems to me that political attitudes are to a very large extent downstream of personality and psychology, the kind of person you are. Say, the kind of adult, statusfully employed, who will make the kind of noises more typically expected from thick, delinquent teenagers. And if your super-progressive city has attracted a lot of shitty, self-entitled narcissists, the morally juvenile, creatures like Ms Malan, well, things will tend to degrade.
Whether the degradation can be reversed without addressing the underlying psychology, those shitty personalities, I leave to the reader.
This blog, since you ask, is kept afloat by the tip jar buttons below.
Another commenter disputes the facts of the report, but at this point I don’t know what or whom to believe.
Make sure you read a few tweets down: the good Sire de Coucy reveals the origin of the Cramerism and why it doesn’t merit a Frog of Shame.
Culture matters.
Well, yes. As I’ve just added to the post:
Others only want to know where she gets her burritos. It’s a lifestyle thing.
Poking through the replies by Ms Malan’s peers, it’s hard to miss the unshiftable mix of entitlement and self-preoccupation. The default mindset. And I’m not sure how a struggling transport system can overcome the prevalence of such attitudes, unless the people running it are willing to add some serious Find Out to all the Fucking About.
And I suspect that wouldn’t be regarded as “a San Francisco thing,” man.
[ Post updated again. ]
It seems to me that political attitudes are to a very large extent downstream of personality and psychology, the kind of person you are. And if your super-progressive city has attracted a lot of shitty, self-entitled narcissists, the mentally and morally juvenile, well, things will tend to degrade.
Whether the degradation can be reversed without addressing the underlying psychology, those shitty personalities, I leave to the reader.
Maybe someday the San Andreas fault will take care of it for us. A heap of destruction can sober people up pretty quick, or it can accelerate the demise if people aren’t inclined to rise to the occasion.
[ Post updated one more time. ]
It’s also, I think, worth pondering how those announcing their habitual freeloading, even boasting of it, don’t seem to regard themselves as being in any way uncivilised or morally questionable.
As if their behaviour, their choices, made repeatedly, couldn’t possibly indicate the kind of person they are. Perhaps they assume that “working for a climate nonprofit,” or being a “research associate for a Google-owned subsidiary,” or just living in San Francisco, a progressive Mecca, makes them a good person. An unassailable being.
Bezmenov says no.
The point of Soviet demoralizaton was to destroy the common values that underpin the target society. When no one can agree on what moral behaviour is, the society is riven by internal conflict and unable to defend itself from an outside aggressor.
Bezmenov claimed that after a single generation of demoralization the damage was irreparable because there would be no one left – or at least, nowhere near enough left – who remembered the original values to pass them down to the next generation.
Remember: Bezmenov said this in 1983.
[ checks watch ]
I have a great deal of sympathy for Californians who are now too old to move.
As someone who moved out of California in middle age, I don’t. And chances are they are the old hippies who helped set up what it is today.
*reads post*
*reads comments*
*buys season ticket to David’s fun ride*
Heh. Bless you, sir. May your enemies discover a tiny, irritating cut that they can’t account for.
Good stuff, seriously.
Thank you. I do try.
Of course they do.
I suppose it might be liberating, or at least convenient, to have a sense of virtue, of moral superiority, that seemingly has little to do with how you actually behave.
If they’ll steal from the transit authority, who else will they steal from? I used to pointedly ask such questions of liberals who defended this. And then, when they persisted, ask them why I should trust them.
Just remember to bring your own bar snacks.
[ Slides intriguing dish to pst314. ]
Thank you. I do try.
Notice, however, that the ping came after “reads comments”…no thanks necessary, we are all just doing our bit for the war effort.
Just as long as it’s understood I’m not sharing the fur coat.
[ Strokes fur coat. ]
Speaking of pilfering, it’s easy to forget, or not wish to remember, just how shameless and trashy some people are.
As Justice Cardozo put it, “The half truths of one generation tend at times to perpetuate themselves in the law as the whole truth of another, when constant repetition brings it about that qualifications, taken once for granted, are disregarded or forgotten.”
A few conservative counterexamples: Thomas Sowell, who is in his 90’s. SF writer and emeritus physics professor Gregory Benford, who is in his 80’s and who is slowly recovering from a stroke. Larry Niven. Jerry Pournelle, if he hadn’t died in 2017. Victor Davis Hanson, who is in his 70’s and who has strong ties to the family farm and the Hoover Institution.
Yes, it’s a mystery.
Yes, I noticed that. And it made me laugh even harder. Thieves steal everything she owns and she still sees them as victims.
Academic culture is just as morally rotten as ghetto culture.
Alter the behaviours, with whatever force, legal, moral, or physical, necessary, and let the personalities sort themselves out.
Hasn’t tried the bar snacks yet.
The term, no longer in wide usage, is ‘morally insane’.
Trans-clowns are a thing?
Worse.
Much worse.
They’re supposed to know better.
Stop trans deer violence!
It is telling that they let their sense of moral superiority in allowing or encouraging criminal behavior over-ride any concern for the many people terrorized or even killed by the thugs.
I was thinking about Fox news vs other media. It is clear that fox has a bias. That is ok. When it comes to facts, they report them accurately. The bias of the other media is likewise not a problem per se. The problem is that they throw around terms like “nazi”, call catholics terrorists, never question insane stories planted by the left (like that Trump told people to drink bleach) and repeat “mostly peaceful” during 2020 cities burning. It is the blatant disregard for the truth that is sickening.
Daniel Penny acquitted. I’m happy, but this should have never gone to trial and he’s still at great risk.
It does have a certain symbolic resonance. A vibeshift, as someone on X put it.
And I see the degenerates are unhappy.
And I see the degenerates are unhappy.
All the usual suspects have a sad – stolen from Ace, according to the appropriately named bigbrother1984, Neely, with a rap sheet not quite as long as anything written by Tolstoy, was just trying to bring joy to the people of New York. Who among us hasn’t felt joy at being threatened to be killed, after all?
These people do not have any grasp on reality.
It’s almost as if they’ve made a career of it.
On a lighter note . . .
[ Returns from shopping expedition, considers gin and tonic. ]
Stress of shopping? Reading the news? Seeing our bright smiling faces?
[ Sound of limes being chopped, ice dropped into a glass, gin being gargled. ]
All the usual suspects have a sad – stolen from Ace
These people have no grasp of reality. They live in a made-up world. No wonder they all scurried to the dark little bubble of BlueSky after the lights were turned on at Twitter.
[ Sound of limes being chopped, ice dropped into a glass, gin being gargled. ]
And what is your preferred gin for a g & t?
Ideally, this:
Alas, I had to make do with Gordon’s. Like a peasant.
Ideally, this:
Sadly, unavailable in my locale. Gordon’s is available everywhere, but I prefer Tanqueray or Beefeater if I’m going to drink that style. Gin’s have really taken off in the last couple of years. There are now dozens available when before their were maybe 10. Unfortunately, it has been reflected in the price too. Gin used to be the cheapest liquor. Not anymore.
Stoker fan?
Not particularly. As a novel, Dracula is a bit of a slog.
I was talked into going on a distillery tour last year by Beloved Sister-In-Law #2. Samples were handed out, followed by more samples. It was more fun than I expected.
And the Original Edition and Prince of Darkness are both belters.