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Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

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Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#421

Post by EgregiousCube »

marricks wrote: post #276
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he called for universal health care but once he was elected he started saying it was "too radical" ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress. This line of argument reminds of the folks who complained about Sinema and Manchin. You know what we’d have with a few more Sinemas and Manchins in the party right now? A majority. The bill that passes is better than the…

> ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress. People aren’t excited by half measures that let health insurance companies generate tons of money and CONTINUOUSLY raise premiums. People still go bankrupt receiving cancer care here. The person who gets free healthcare and cuts overall costs by destroying health insurance middle man will be massively popular and, onc…

“It works in Europe” isn’t a very good American political rallying cry though; Americans generally don’t have the opinion that Europe works very well.

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#422

Post by kingofmen »

BrenBarn wrote: post #371
jgoodhcg wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I think an honest attempt at doing something "radical" economically for the working class can cross the divides we have.

I think there's an argument to be made that many of the allegedly "radical" Democratic policies fall into an uncanny valley of wonkiness, where they're enough of a reach to get people riled up emotionally but not enough to have the kind of punchy, obvious benefits that would get people to be supporting on a similarly gut-level basis. Arguments about whether the minimum wage should be $X or $X+2 seem like accounting t…

> There's no appetite for saying stuff like "we will seize $100 billion from the wealthiest individuals and give it to everyone else as cash payments".

Indeed. Because anyone who is numerate enough to do the division quickly realizes that this works out to about $300 per person, and stops being excited about the Wowie Big Number.

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#423

Post by wredcoll »

jrm4 wrote: post #402
yesbut wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the framing today: "Trump is doing all these terrible things, making all of these drastic changes, exploiting the system to his will." The Dems can no longer use the excuse that the president is handcuffed. Trump 2.0 is showing us what the president can do. The dems consistently use that excuse to prevent popular policies from being enacted. Obama even had a ~6mo super majority where he could have codified a…

It is astoundingly naive to think that the forces in America make it such that "whoever is the president has unlimited power, whether they're an old rich white billionaire or a relatively young black guy on the Dem side." Again, I implore you all to grow a bit smarter.

People acting like the supreme court would overturn laws in favor of obama the way they do for trump...

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#425

Post by JumpCrisscross »

somenameforme wrote: post #334
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he called for universal health care but once he was elected he started saying it was "too radical" ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress. This line of argument reminds of the folks who complained about Sinema and Manchin. You know what we’d have with a few more Sinemas and Manchins in the party right now? A majority. The bill that passes is better than the…

I think people had rose colored glasses about Obama because he was, by far, the most charismatic President we've had in modern times. His speeches still give me goose bumps, even when I disagree with what he's saying! That man has the gift of gab. Him also being intelligent further, sadly, makes him an outlier in modern times. But many of the things he did were dubious and ACA is a perfect example of this. It's littl…

> there is no way this was even remotely close to the most socially motivated (I don't see radical as a desirable adjective) package he could get have gotten passed

What are you basing this on? Again, Pelosi lost her House because of ACA. Republicans shut down the government multiple times trying to repeal it. They narrowly missed, but because the compromise was powerful. Had Pelosi and Obama pushed harder on ACA, chances are high it would have never passed.

I’m not saying it was perfectly calibrated. But the problems you’re mentioning would have meant battling entire new categories of powerful interest groups. That's what, in part, sank HillaryCare.

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#426

Post by aeternum »

chasil wrote: post #253
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where the historic tolerance of the middle east is most direly needed Sure. Broadly. But there is one correct answer a mayoral candidate could give on such an issue, and it’s the one Mamdani gave.

This is from Eisenhower's "Cross of Iron" speech: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies—in the final sense—a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is t…

China found a way around this by manufacturing all their civilian ships to military standards.

Maybe guns or butter is a false dichotomy. Or perhaps the even tougher lesson: a country with an information economy ends up with neither.

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#427

Post by ThrowMeAway1618 »

nemo44x wrote: post #157

Republicans have completely given up on cities and without being able to even field a worthy candidate it’s the sign of a dying party longer term. You simply have to have some influence in cities. But they had none after a 20 year run where they remade NYC after decades of failure. Bloomberg went independent but he got in as a Republican after a successful Giuliani admin (yes he’s tarnished that). But what happened?…

>after a successful Giuliani admin (yes he’s tarnished that).

Successful? Try again.

Rudy Guiliani was the most hated man in NYC on September 10, 2001.

I'm not really sure why that changed, he was a horror. Anti-democratic (small 'd') anti-freedom of expression and spent most of his time being a boot stomping on the faces of hard working New Yorkers.

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#428

Post by kelnos »

dluan wrote: post #372

Zohran is exactly the kind of change candidate that the San Francisco machine with Grow SF would actively seek to squash. But Zohran's not alone, today's election was a massive swing back in almost every single race. School boards, city councils, state houses and senates, all swung radically left. It should be ringing alarm bells that the SF / YC / startup community that used to champion utilitarian, meritocratic QoL…

> Zohran is exactly the kind of change candidate that the San Francisco machine with Grow SF would actively seek to squash.

GrowSF is a conservative group with a right-wing policy platform trying to pretend it's progressive, so I'm not sure why that would be surprising.

The SF tech millionaires/billionaires are not progressive. They may have claimed to be in the past, but that was either opportunism, or they lost it as they made more money and saw people like Trump and Musk gain power.

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#429

Post by JumpCrisscross »

chasil wrote: post #253
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where the historic tolerance of the middle east is most direly needed Sure. Broadly. But there is one correct answer a mayoral candidate could give on such an issue, and it’s the one Mamdani gave.

This is from Eisenhower's "Cross of Iron" speech: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies—in the final sense—a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is t…

President Eisenhower. Not mayor. President Eisenhower’s portfolio properly contains these things. Mayors should not be travelling to foreign countries on official business outside a very narrow remit. Humanitarian activism isn’t one of them.

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#430

Post by bradlys »

I left nyc a couple months ago after living there for three years. The city has so many issues and something only someone like Mamdani (with good support) could fix.

It’s been said that it’s impossible for a New York City mayor to be uncorrupt. By the nature of getting the position, you must be a corrupt individual. That’s why you see so many past mayors and potentials having such a shameful history.

Mamdani feels like a break from that tradition. I wish the Bay Area could replicate something similar. We suffer from similar issues as NYC but we are constantly getting conservative leaning officials who refuse to get law enforcement to do their job. Breed was a center politician (right leaning in any other western country), and now we have a center right mayor. I’ve not really noticed much improvement in the bay - even with the current mayor’s constant posting on TikTok. I just see him blocking housing development and congratulating developers on building more empty office space in a city that desperately needs more housing.

Not a surprise if you’ve lived here for a while. The Bay Area is incredibly conservative for all its performative wokeism.

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