>After the murder, I had to read scores of comments like this[...]
>I had to read scores of tech bros [...]
Did you though? I can't recommend enough cutting out reading people's comments that you don't want to read. If other people's comments stress you out and make you angry, there are typically actions you can take to expose yourself less to them.
The problem is that these reality-deficient narratives spill out into the real world where they have real consequences.
For example, the pitchforks came out to recall the "soft on crime" DA and replace him with a "tough on crime" one. Why didn't that fix anything? And why was the DA ever the problem when crime was actually down during his tenure, but had simply shifted neighborhoods as a result of covid emptying out the previous high-property-crime areas (downtown and fisherman's wharf)? People in other neighborhoods had every right to be upset that crime shifted to their area, but alleged city-wide policy changes never made any sense as an explanation for that.
Every time there's a crime panic, a bunch of "no more mr. nice guy" politicians throw a few thousand more people in prison for minor crimes in this country, which already imprisons more people per capita than any other country except this very short list of places: El Salvador, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, Cuba. Think we can beat them?
It was obvious that commenters on HN were wilding out about this specific case—but even though the outpouring of rage about homelessness/Chesa Boudin/race/etc was clearly out of proportion with this single incident, it was useful to read people's thoughts. Just because people think differently than I do, doesn't make me less inclined to want to hear them or understand them. In this case, it was illuminating to see that there were so many people who were primed to perpetuate that narrative.
>I had to read scores of tech bros [...]
Did you though? I can't recommend enough cutting out reading people's comments that you don't want to read. If other people's comments stress you out and make you angry, there are typically actions you can take to expose yourself less to them.