enframed wrote:
losthighway wrote: Fri Nov 21, 2025 10:03 pm
llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Fri Nov 21, 2025 8:59 pm
Thoughts on the Mamdami thing?
Let’s see if a visit to the Whitehouse with some cheesing and kowtowing to Trump results in keeping the masked gestapo out of New York City.
It could actually help - Trump essentially likes winners and strong men who treat him with the deference he feels he deserves, so it doesn’t surprise me that he took to Mamdami.
I can see me 3D-chessing myself into being embarrassed about this post in 6 months (or two weeks in 2025 time).
It’s important for Mamdami to do well as a possible blueprint and because the American left has so little going on in the mainstream.
I mean he shook his hand but he also said that Trump was a fascist on camera. Trump seemed charmed. Weird.
Trump likes being acknowledged by winners. He also probably doesn't give a fuck.
Exactly.
Buuuuuuuut... Mamdani is also up against some long odds here.
The governor is currently talking to him about the free-buses thing. Nice that he says this stuff, but as I've feared, he has not really spelled out how he will have the power or plan to implement it. Raising corporate tax (his main proposal) will not fund it from a practical standpoint. Transit unions also oppose the idea, as it makes their job way more dangerous when every homeless dude sleeps on the bus. It almost reminds me a little of Trump's too-good-to-be-true empty promises to working people. But that's what gets you elected nowadays. Not that I think he'll remotely be like some leftist Trump; he seems like a decent guy, but a naive one.
It's also kinda funny b/c New Yorkers often don't bother paying the bus fare anyway. Here's a city website from April, 2025 "Since the pandemic, the bus system has also experienced high rates of fare evasion with the MTA estimating that over 40% of riders do not pay."
Mamdani is also vocal about tearing apart some of the city's few green spaces, like community gardens, for "affordable" housing. That also sounds nice and all, maybe worth the sacrifice, right?
But what most non-New Yorkers don't realize is that "affordable" housing is often not low-income housing and certainly never "public" housing. They are not the same thing! You can make low six figures, win the housing lottery, and still live in what's termed "affordable" housing in NYC. I know a commercial photographer and a programmer who do just that.
It'd be one thing to give up much-needed and beloved community spaces to construct housing explicitly and exclusively for poor people. But that's
not what he's proposing, exactly. Only a percentage of a given building is for poor or even working-class people.
That's dangerously close to the rhetoric Giuliani, Bloomberg, and De Blasio all used to give real estate deals to developers who built hideous Dubai-like towers and threw a handful of cheaper units into the mix. Many of the Lower East Side and East Village's green spaces were cleared by Rudy in the 1990s using similar logic. De Blasio did it in Long Island City. It did not solve the housing crisis here at all, but the real estate industry sure got a boner from it.
We will see, I suppose.
