There's just so much here. It's too much fun. I highly recommend you quit whatever you're doing and read Tom Wolfe's essay "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's".
Mamdani: A Ugandan landowner, son of an elite professor and a filmmaker, living in a rent-controlled – i.e. for poor people – apartment, elected as a "socialist" mayor...
Lately, I've seen, stereoptically, uniformly, a reductionist definition of "fascism" as "capitalism's last ditch effort to preserve itself" or something along those lines.* Which is really funny in Mamdani's case, as he is, apparently, trying to subsidize New York capitalist elites, who don't want to pay their employees enough to live where they work, with taxpayer funds. The same goes for the "public" mass-transit system. It's a give-away to the corporate elite, paid for, almost certainly by the mass of those in the middle.
This is why communists hate socialists. They know socialists are just slow-roll "fascists" in disguise (acc. to left definitions of fascism & liberalism). Communists are accelerationists, in this case; whereas socialists are managed-declensionists. The communists would say "remove all public subsidy to these corporate entities. Let the workers feel the pain – then they might revolt and/or leave for other pursuits." But the socialists keep on enticing, promising, luring the workers back in – with promises of a better life, a kingdom to come, utopia, salvation from and within their benevolent hands.
*This is a very popular definition amongst "progressives" today. They, naturally, fail to see, or remember the New Deal State's longstanding slogan "FDR saved capitalism from itself." ("Ahh," I say, "so you admit FDR was a fascist!".) And, of course, a communist would say "FDR saved the capitalist class from imminent revolution."
Read up on Athenian Democracy sometime. I can't quote anything directly, but it seems like what we call "democracy" during that period was a kind of socialism whereby the wealthy were coerced to pay the demos to "participate" in government and social affairs – i.e. vast make-work programs that lasted as long as the money did. (We may have lived through our Peloponnesian Wars already in the U.S.) The democratic period devastated Athens and left them unable to repel the semi-barbarous Macedonians. They went from worshipping money to worshipping an oriental-style despotic god-king pretty quickly.
There's just so much here. It's too much fun. I highly recommend you quit whatever you're doing and read Tom Wolfe's essay "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's".
Mamdani: A Ugandan landowner, son of an elite professor and a filmmaker, living in a rent-controlled – i.e. for poor people – apartment, elected as a "socialist" mayor...
Lately, I've seen, stereoptically, uniformly, a reductionist definition of "fascism" as "capitalism's last ditch effort to preserve itself" or something along those lines.* Which is really funny in Mamdani's case, as he is, apparently, trying to subsidize New York capitalist elites, who don't want to pay their employees enough to live where they work, with taxpayer funds. The same goes for the "public" mass-transit system. It's a give-away to the corporate elite, paid for, almost certainly by the mass of those in the middle.
This is why communists hate socialists. They know socialists are just slow-roll "fascists" in disguise (acc. to left definitions of fascism & liberalism). Communists are accelerationists, in this case; whereas socialists are managed-declensionists. The communists would say "remove all public subsidy to these corporate entities. Let the workers feel the pain – then they might revolt and/or leave for other pursuits." But the socialists keep on enticing, promising, luring the workers back in – with promises of a better life, a kingdom to come, utopia, salvation from and within their benevolent hands.
*This is a very popular definition amongst "progressives" today. They, naturally, fail to see, or remember the New Deal State's longstanding slogan "FDR saved capitalism from itself." ("Ahh," I say, "so you admit FDR was a fascist!".) And, of course, a communist would say "FDR saved the capitalist class from imminent revolution."
Read up on Athenian Democracy sometime. I can't quote anything directly, but it seems like what we call "democracy" during that period was a kind of socialism whereby the wealthy were coerced to pay the demos to "participate" in government and social affairs – i.e. vast make-work programs that lasted as long as the money did. (We may have lived through our Peloponnesian Wars already in the U.S.) The democratic period devastated Athens and left them unable to repel the semi-barbarous Macedonians. They went from worshipping money to worshipping an oriental-style despotic god-king pretty quickly.
I was shocked at how many people who will foot the bill voted for policies like this. I guess virtue signaling is easier than doing math.