Adventures in Liberal Fascism Pt. 1

In case you cared, no the blog has not been taking a break on its updates. The horror of LPN is so overwhelming to comprehend, cope with and then describe concisely that it's taken this entire time to finally come up with a more effective editorial mechanism. What follows will be a series of snapshots from different things that have happened in the last 5 months of meetings. The idea is to keep it concise, however it is difficult to predict at the outset whether or not additional explanatory detail will be required.

On the title, admittedly it is clumsy. It could be interpreted as a conservative critique of liberals, perhaps of some imaginary situation where those with more privilege are getting saddled with the burden of sharing that privilege with those who have significantly less. To someone perhaps more familiar with the mission of this blog, it might suggest a frightful situation where liberals greatly compromise their progressive ideals. It's perhaps startling to intend to use the adjective "Liberal" to describe LPN to some, even granted the ways that Gay Shame has sought to repeatedly expose liberal hypocrisy in the past. What's happened is that LPN has shown nominal yet noticeable growth in their ability to disguise their agenda as vaguely pseudo-progressive. At this moment in San Francisco, "vaguely pseudo-progressive" is what passes as "Liberal."

Mostly though, a snappy-enough title was needed for this series of moments. Hopefully, when the series concludes we'll be all caught up, and we can continue with regular monthly updates. Okay, so let's get started.

One of the most telling moments from a recent LPN meeting was when David Chiu apologized to meeting attendees about the noise caused by the espresso machine in Cafe Yabon right in front of its owner who, after allowing his entire cafe to be completely taken over by the meeting, sat before attendees the first ever complimentary LPN meeting refreshment in 5 years of existence: homemade hummus with fresh baked bread.

In situations like this, certain things, such as the existence of a street culture created by people with little-to-no privilege in urban spaces, are simply impossible to complain about. But despite San Francisco's supposed PC heritage LPN finds a way. Meanwhile, the cafe's usual customers watch the packed-to-the-door meeting from the street as Carolyn Abst asks the person from the city attorney's office is there something that they can do to get the needle exchange that's in Hemlock Alley to move out of the neighborhood-- she's been trying for the past 8 years. Later, Captain Dillon from Northern Station notes that since sleeping on the sidewalk isn't criminalized harshly enough it's become harder to push the poor people out of sight.