Living in California, I can tell I you it most certainly is and has been for a while.
Maybe the news paints it as a bunch of cowboys trying to restrict abortions. But look at California, Oregon, Washington, New York, etc laws. They have become so liberal that it has become a meme.
Drugs are almost completely decriminalized, you can buy/sell and consume drugs openly on the street, police will not investigate property crimes under $1000 at all anymore, eviction is almost completely impossible even if the tenant hasn’t paid rent in a year.
California is about to spend 800 BILLION dollars giving money to black people even though slavery never existed there.
It’s legitimately a struggle to think up ways coastal cities in the US could be more liberal.
This thread is an interesting example on how not very well defined terms can let people talk past each other… the original poster suggested “let’s try to be more like France, where this problem is solved”, the next one said “no, more liberalism is not the solution” (apparently implying that liberalism is what France does) and now someone states you can’t get more liberal than California, listing as examples things none of which work like that in France!
Regardless of the merits of each argument (I am doubtful if you can easily transfer examples from one country to another) we obviously have people arguing with each other here based on completely different definitions of key terms in the discussion.
police will not investigate property crimes under $1000 at all anymore
That's just cops being lazy and not doing their job. They like to say "the D.A. will just throw it out!" or "they'll just be back on the street due to overcrowding!" as if either of those has anything to do with the cops' job of enforcing laws and arresting perpetrators.
I don't know if the rest of the article is behind a paywall, but I don't see anything about a policy.
The only policies I've heard of are either police department policies -- which is just codified laziness and refusal to do their job -- or district attorney policy which, as I said, shouldn't be relevant to whether or not police make arrests. It's their job to arrest people for crimes, not to solely arrest people for crimes for which they think they can get a conviction.
> Maybe the news paints it as a bunch of cowboys trying to restrict abortions.
They successfully restricted those abortions. They are trying to criminalize traveling to other states for abortions. And by abortions here we mean also medically necessary abortions.
> Drugs are almost completely decriminalized
This is simply not true. Like ... I dont think it is liberal media lying issue here. Maybe the specific subset of media you read is lying to you - which is way more likely to be conservative.
Sort of, yes. They are not restricted in any coastal cities though, the vast majority of Americans still have access to abortion.
The states I mentioned (CA, OR, WA, NY, and most other states too) have not restricted it. It's a few states in the south. These states/cities I mentioned are where most Americans actually live.
>This is simply not true.
I mean, have you driven through LA, SF, Seattle, or NY? You can watch people consuming and selling drugs 7 days a week in broad daylight. I am not relying on any news source for that information, I have lived it. Have you been assaulted or screamed at by someone high out of their mind on the street in SF? I have.
That does not remove the fact that conservatives are successfully restricting the abortion. Yes, they are trying to create more damage and enjoy the pain they cause. They also provably don't care about lives themselves - they are restricting healthcare in general and don't care about children.
The drugs in USA were not decriminalized. You lied.
They’re moving left too, just more slowly compared to the coasts. If you go issue by issue (god, guns, taxes) the only major shift for republicans has been same sex marriage, where they’ve moved significantly to the left. Democrats meanwhile have moved sharply to the left across the board: https://jabberwocking.com/if-you-hate-the-culture-wars-blame.... For example marijuana is fully legal in North Carolinian, and medical marijuana is legal all across the Deep South. But in California, the legislature passed (though Newsom vetoed, with an eye to his presidential prospects) a bill allowing cities to have government-sponsored drug injection sites.
It absolutely is. Even Trump didn’t oppose same sex marriage (when it was still illegal in several European countries) and also signed major legislation aimed at reducing incarceration: https://www.bop.gov/inmates/fsa/overview.jsp. Drug prosecutions are handled primarily at the state level, and there has been a broad move to reduce such prosecution. Marijuana has been fully decriminalized in deep red states like Ohio and North Dakota. Does anyone even remember 2000? The big kerfuffle was covering up naked statutes. It was a vastly more conservative country (with far fewer drug overdoses).