–“The Family Business: Behind the Lens of San Francisco’s Camera Obscura”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioZ_pHZsFc8

Only 4:19 long and one of the most beautiful indie films I’ve ever watched.

The Giant Camera or Camera Obscura took a major storm hit in January 2023, closed for a while, but is presumably back full-time.

Really, this is a hidden treasure of San Francisco. Should you ever find yourself there and close to Ocean Beach, it’s more than a worth a visit.

https://secretsanfrancisco.com/camera-obscura-sf/

March Hare:

Not sure if I’m on your point, but as a long-time resident of SF (1982-2016) I discovered there was once a thriving amusement park at Ocean Beach below the Golden Gate called Playland.

On weekends throngs of ordinary San Franciscan families would ride the wooden roller coaster, eat cotton candy, and enjoy the usual such amusements.

By the time I got to SF that was all gone but for a few remnants. There was a wonderful exhibit called the Giant Camera which used an optical effect to display the 360 degree beach area in real time, but everything else (not much) was sad and dilapidated, yielding no insight of the glory which went before.
___________________________________

It’s hard to imagine now, but for the majority of the 20th Century the most visible feature on the San Francisco coastline was a sprawling amusement park that stretched across Oceaqn Beach north of Golden Gate Park…

https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/visuals/playland-at-the-beach/
___________________________________

If you don’t know what an It’s It is, you never lived in San Francisco or you weren’t paying attention.

But is there really that much disagreement between businessmen and woke politicians? Yes, the businessmen want derelicts and human waste kept out of their neighborhoods, but if you think politics and government are an impossible labyrinth of corruption and incompetence, you would appreciate someone knowledgeable who could guide you through the maze and get you want you want — and you’d appreciate it all the more if they were from your neighborhood, shared your background, and spoke your language. If woke politicians and their staffers have any shrewdness at all, they realize the importance of constituent service and can satisfy local businessmen, so there’s no necessary opposition between the two.

What made the early 20th century’s urban reform movement possible was Protestant moralism and local pride. Not all of the urban progressives were Protestant, but they did share a belief in old fashioned rectitude, and most of them were native-born Protestants. That’s one group that’s rare in American cities nowadays, and Protestant moralism has morphed into wokeness. In blue cities college-educated local elites share the beliefs of their universities and the national corporate, media, and political elite.

And if I make an argument, I’m asked, “How do you know that?” It’s not that they think I’m a real encyclopedia. It’s that they’re annoyed I stepped on their righteous indignation. Can’t have that.

But and so

… for those who are not resigned to letting cities and their self-determining populations either,

– self-destruct,
Or, more plausibly and demonstrably
– totter on corruptly until they inevitably overreach legally and then reach out socially and geographically as they are now doing, in order to dominate or to incite an actual, violent, social war,

… what is to be done?

I assume that moving in preemptively is out of the question; as the inhabitants are presumptively not yet admitted as existential enemies … not formally anyways, though they have published enough declaring it, to eradicate any doubt as to who is an outright enemy of your lifeways and even existence: it being them by a plurality at least.

So what to do, Mr. Rogers? What now, now that it is no longer a beautiful day in the neighborhood, and they have proclaimed no interest in being your friend?

How do you propose to negotiate with implacable stalinists elected democratically? What modus vivendi, do you see as workable, since even constitutional limitations are seen as scoff worthy by them? In fact all limits on the satisfaction and gratification of their welling sovereign urges are seen as such, and admitted by them as being seen as such, i.e. invalid.

Yet conservatives, who have managed to conserve almost nothing and pathetic creatures that they traditionally are, remain trapped in a web of rules and taboos and comittments – and mostly faith based concerning the redeemability of the opposition – a concept which the opposition sees as comical and deploys against them as Rule Number 4.

Yet, the sensitive conservative keeps clasping the proudly, the self-proclaimedly, soulless viper to its breast: and chanting “I do believe, I do believe,” over and over. And sometimes, albeit rarely and insignificantly, getting all worked up like a true sensitive conservative, when the progressive’s life value is measured against the yardstick which it has itself designed.

Yeah? You secular salvationists who are so reluctant to admit that at base this is an anthopological question, you believe in what resolution, exactly? And what do you expect it will cost to obtain it?

Now as for me? I don’t know the future. Maybe people will lose their fear of being marginalized, labeled, and mocked, and will simply start speaking up and showing some spine. And then, maybe the problem itself will just evaporate away, on the political level at least, with the election of a fearless chief executive dedicated to liberty.

Maybe. But I would not count on it.

Lots of Black workers & Hispanic workers will stop their Dem voting habit this year.
Maybe.
Hopefully it will get better, tho it can keep getting worse.

well explain larry krasner, that san francisco twit or gascon, if they were any whiter they would be translucent, same with newsom, no prog idiocy is not color coded just stupid coated,”

Guess I’m a little slow on the uptake, or just was not reading carefully. But, if I understand the corellation being proposed with “race”, understood as a proxy for culture, then a case could probably be partly and with serious provisos established with allowances for both views accurately reflecting historic states of affairs.

So, on the one hand you have the obvious counter examples of rule of law collapse obtaining in “white” Frisco, Portland, Seattle, and at a critical point Minneapolis.

On the other hand it is probably indisputable that the “great migration” of surplus rural agricultural labor occasioned by the late blooming mechanization of agriculture in the South, had serious negative effects on some northern metropolises.

And just as political machines had made use of illiterate and behaviorally volitile Irish in the 19th century, Democrat politicians in the North, leveraged minority support into the politically advantageous but civilizationally destructive phenomenon we see today.

Mayor Jerry Cavanaugh of Detroit, being a prime innovator in that area.

Of course you can argue from any number of perspectives, and I am always left asking, “Who was it that invited Attila in, in the first place?”