What the purpose is about this entire project, it’s not simply to raise class consciousness but to win socialism—and obviously raising class consciousness is a critical part of that—but making sure that we have candidates that both understand that and are willing to put that forward at every which moment that they have, at every which opportunity that they’re given. We have to continue to elect more socialists, and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism.

There are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s BDS, right, or whether it’s the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment. And what I want to say is that it is critical that the way that we organize, the way that we set up our, you know, set up our work and our priorities, that we do not leave any one issue for the other. That we do not meet a moment and only look at what people are ready for, but that we are doing both of these things in tandem. Because it is critical for us to both meet people where they’re at and to also organize for what is correct and for what is right and to ensure that over time we can bring people to that issue.

The ramifications of victory here is the difference between life and death for so many of our brothers, sisters and family beyond the binary across this borough of Queens. It’s the difference between having cash bail anymore. It’s the difference between having sex work being decriminalized and not. And with every battle that we fight as socialists, we need to remember what the stakes are and ground ourselves in them and why those stakes are important and critical to us as individuals.

TIL that Disney has Dubya’s paintings on display at Epcot…truly deranged country.

https://www.wdwmagic.com/attractions/the-american-heritage-gallery/news/07jun2024-walt-disney-world-unveils-george-w.-bushs-portraits-of-courage-at-epcot.htm

Whether Democrats will listen is another matter. Some people have compared Mamdani to Barack Obama, who rose to power channeling voters’ disgust with the Democratic Party’s support for a different awful war. In its embrace of Obama, the party showed it had the capacity to adapt, to listen to reason, to recognize mistakes. He gave people a reason to believe in liberalism again, redeeming its sins. But the once clear-eyed and daring Obama, like so many others in his party, has lost his voice. He has been silent about Mamdani and the mayor’s race. He’s been virtually silent on Gaza, too.

On November 15, 2024, Zohran Mamdani released a video of himself interviewing people on the street in Queens and the Bronx who had voted for Donald Trump in the presidential election the previous week. It was one of the first of the viral posts that propelled him into the spotlight and ultimately helped him all but capture the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York. Then polling close to zero percent, Mamdani seemed more like a local news anchor than a candidate, gamely thrusting a microphone into the faces of voters and letting them take the stage. The answers to why they voted for Trump — “Food prices are going up,” “Rent is expensive” — informed Mamdani’s campaign as it homed in on the issue of affordability. But the other answer that came up again and again — one that Mamdani chose to highlight — was Gaza. “They like Trump because they don’t want their Palestinian brothers to be killed,” one man says.

This was a terrible miscalculation on the part of these voters, as is almost any attempt to make common cause with Trump. But voters’ disgust with the Democratic Party for its unstinting support of the Netanyahu regime, just like their anxiety about the high cost of living in New York, was real, and both sentiments carried over into the mayoral primary in June, a setting for the liberal left to confront itself. And once again voters punished the Democratic Party for its inability to address those issues, coming out in droves for the most un-Democratic candidate in the field — a socialist, in fact.

It was not supposed to happen this way, not in a city with nearly 1 million Jews, the historic center of the Jewish diaspora outside Israel. Mamdani’s opponents predicted that his positions on Israel — his reluctance to affirm its right to define itself as a Jewish state, his refusal to condemn the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” his assertion that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested as an indicted war criminal if he visits New York, all nearly unheard of for a Democratic-primary candidate — would sink him. What’s curious is that while panicked Democrats are now conceding that Mamdani crushed his principal rival, the Establishment favorite Andrew Cuomo, by underscoring pocketbook issues, running a galvanic campaign both on social media and IRL, and not being an alleged serial sexual harasser and all-around goon, they have yet to reckon with the fact that voters, particularly young voters, were drawn to Mamdani and supported him fervently because of his steadfast opposition to the war in Gaza. Publicly at least, the Democrats have yet to acknowledge the enormous, perhaps irreparable toll their support for the war has taken on their party.

Mamdani outperformed expectations in nearly every demographic, upending the conventional wisdom that leftist appeal is limited to young, highly educated, largely white voters. But his campaign was nevertheless powered by an overwhelming show of force from those same voters who reside in what the strategist Michael Lange in the New York Times playfully called “the Commie Corridor,” a stretch of gentrified Brooklyn and Queens that includes Ridgewood (80 percent for Mamdani), Bushwick (79 percent), and East Williamsburg (75 percent). And these voters, as anyone in New York with an Instagram account can attest, are vocal about their opposition to the appalling atrocities Israel has committed in Gaza, as are the Muslim voters whom Mamdani also unlocked.

Foreign policy was not technically a top issue in the race, which makes sense because the mayor of New York does not set U.S. foreign policy (in general, the trend of turning every food–co-op–board election into a referendum on Gaza probably isn’t the ideal way to conduct local affairs). But no matter how hard Mamdani tried to focus on his proposals for free bus rides and free child care, Gaza was still everywhere in the primary, principally because his Democratic opponents, as well as the financial elites who stand behind them and sympathetic media outlets, thought they could use his positions on Israel to turn Jewish voters against him. When Mamdani stood by the use of the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” Cuomo said those words “fuel hate” and “fuel murder” and “there are no two sides here.” But voters in the city with the most Jews outside Tel Aviv simply did not buy the notion that Mamdani is an antisemite who would discriminate against or fail to protect them. In fact, it’s clear that many Democrats, including many Jewish Democrats, voted for him because of his positions on Israel — or at the very least saw little objectionable about them. As the writer Bess Kalb put it in a recent essay explaining Jewish support for Mamdani, “I am not writing this on October 8th. It is June 25th, 2025. And if we do not change our perspective with time and events and evidence, we are living with our heads in the sand.”

Nearly 70 percent of Democrats now have an unfavorable view of Israel, according to Pew. Yet Democratic officials carry on as if full-throated support for Israel were party doctrine. An article in Politico about the lessons Democrats are drawing from Cuomo’s defeat did not contain a single mention of Gaza or Israel; titled “Mamdani’s Surprise Win Reawakens Democrats’ Internal Factions,” the article’s omission suggests there are no pro-Palestine factions to speak of. Instead, Democrats have been more than happy to jump on the much safer affordability train as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared, with his usual dead-eyed delivery, “I think what’s clear is that the relentless focus on affordability had great appeal all across the city of New York.”

Democrats have an odd habit of tuning out their own supporters even when those supporters are practically screaming at them to listen. In the past presidential election, New Yorkers were hollering at them about inflation, yes, but also immigration and crime. Democrats did eventually acknowledge they had been weak on those issues, which explains their timid response to Trump’s subsequent assault on undocumented and documented immigrants alike. The Democrats remain indifferent, however, to any pleas about Gaza, in ways that appear to be alienating to voters — especially young ones — on the left side of the spectrum who simply do not understand why the party that supposedly represents them is constantly bowing and scraping before a murderous regime.

Never was this more apparent than after Trump’s strike on Iran, which many Democrats, including Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, refused to condemn, despite the fact that Trump did not get the required congressional approval. In an instant, the pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian coalition revealed itself to be an illusion because liberal Iran hawks and their Never Trump allies viewed the demise of Israel’s sworn enemy as more important than placing a check on a demagogue they have long warned has too much power. The consistent, principled thing to do would have been to oppose the strike outright, but Democrats like Antony Blinken and Steny Hoyer instead offered toothless criticisms of Trump’s brazen warmongering while cheering on the strikes anyway — to please whom, you may ask? Nearly 80 percent of Democrats oppose them.

As Mamdani barrels toward the general election as the heavy favorite to become mayor, Israel’s supporters in New York and beyond are marshaling an effort to remind voters of his heresies. New York’s political power brokers — Schumer, Jeffries, Kathy Hochul, and others — have declined to endorse him. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand slammed him for using words she felt were “permissive for violence against Jews.” Islamophobia has been rampant in the media and the halls of Congress with Republican representative Nancy Mace suggesting Mamdani was somehow responsible for 9/11. But more loudly than ever, Democratic voters in the country’s most formidable Democratic stronghold have declared their opposition to the seemingly unbreakable bond between the Democratic political class and the current Israeli regime. When given an actual choice on the issue of Israel and Palestine, Democratic voters broke hard for the alternative to the status quo, raising the possibility of primary debates over this issue throughout the country, in places with far fewer emotional and political ties to Israel.

This was a fun little parody! Those Fighting Baseball names never get old. I also appreciate a good Airplane! reference; I like how the first one is a civilian/military thing instead so it fakes you out for the second one—didn’t see it coming at all. And I’m with Commander Dustice on this one: I find animegao kigurumi pretty unnerving.

I feel a bit silly, but I was a bit unclear about the derivation of contradesideratively. The contra-, desi, and -tive-ly parts are all clear, but it’s the dera I was flummoxed by. Looking it up, it seems the ultimate Latin root is dēsīderāre, but that second /d/ went missing in most of its descendants (Romanian being an exception). There is apparently an English word that conserves it, although I’d never seen it before: desiderate.

Appreciate the interrobang usage as well. Never really thought of it before, but it gets around the issue of cultural ordering of multiple punctuation. I think in Japanese they tend to write “!?” rather than “?!” and it always throws me because in my mind the inner punctuation gets priority (following PEMDAS order of operation rules) and so the ? should come first because the interrogative aspect is more meaningful than the exclamatory one. Likely just post hoc nonsense to justify my own cultural bias, if I’m honest, but hey.

The Ram Ranch reveal got a chuckle out of me. What a way to go…

Also, am I wrong in reading this as anti-Volcel-Police propaganda? Better hope they don’t catch you declaring that ACAB includes the Voxel Police.

[Screenshot of post from Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) on Truth Social]

Why would the so-called “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, of the war torn Country of Iran, say so blatantly and foolishly that he won the War with Israel, when he knows his statement is a lie, it is not so. As a man of great faith, he is not supposed to lie. His Country was decimated, his three evil Nuclear Sites were OBLITERATED, and I knew EXACTLY where he was sheltered, and would not let Israel, or the U.S. Armed Forces, by far the Greatest and Most Powerful in the World, terminate his life. I SAVED HIM FROM A VERY UGLY AND IGNOMINIOUS DEATH, and he does not have to say, “THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP!” In fact, in the final act of the War, I demanded that Israel bring back a very large group of planes, which were heading directly to Tehran, looking for a big day, perhaps the final knockout! Tremendous damage would have ensued, and many Iranians would have been killed. It was going to be the biggest attack of the War, by far. During the last few days, I was working on the possible removal of sanctions, and other things, which would have given a much better chance to Iran at a full, fast, and complete recovery - The sanctions are BITING! But no, instead I get hit with a statement of anger, hatred, and disgust, and immediately dropped all work on sanction relief, and more. Iran has to get back into the World Order flow, or things will only get worse for them. They are always so angry, hostile, and unhappy, and look at what it has gotten them - A burned out, blown up Country, with no future, a decimated Military, a horrible Economy, and DEATH all around them. They have no hope, and it will only get worse! I wish the leadership of Iran would realize that you often get more with HONEY than you do with VINEGAR. PEACE!!!

Jun 27, 2025 at 10:09 AM