Mamdani has avoided major policies that would derail his mayoralty like "police reform" so that he can focus on using public resources to campaign nonstop and very successfully on behalf of other socialist candidates who absolutely will push to implement major changes that will make everyone's lives worse.

“She is a sister. Don’t loot here, let’s go there!” Muslim rioters in France recognize the shop owner as a fellow Muslim just before nearly destroying her store by accident. Not a single Muslim-owned business or mosque has been looted in the riots.

This is one of the most viral moments of “Nathan For You,” because Fielder is such an enigmatic figure and this is one of the few moments where he seems to break character. He had gone in to film the scene with the gas station owner to film his little summary monologue, and the interaction went in such a totally unexpected direction that even Fielder, whose great improvisational talent is shaping these unscripted exchanges into comedy by “Yes and”-ing people who don’t realize they’re in a sketch, was caught off guard.

I once sold a truck to a guy who called and agreed to pay full price as long as I brought it to the airport within the hour. It was incredibly sus, but my truck had been for sale for months, and I had grown desperate. So I went. It only got weirder. The moment I arrive he hops in the drivers seat for a test drive, and a run to the bank to get the money to buy it. He’s a freakishly large porcine fellow, adorned head to toe in dirty work clothes. He looked like Hagrid if he were an alcoholic with a the world’s most unionized construction job. We get to chatting on the drive. Work, life, conspiratorial ramblings, Donald Trump, Pakis. The usual, if you know this type of guy. I come to learn he needed to buy my truck to get home. He had bought a one way plane ticket to come buy a different one, but had been ghosted by the seller when he landed. He was stranded at an airport on the other side of the country with no other plan. So I thought, “well maybe I know the guy who ghosted him. Let me see if I can help.” I asked to see his phone to read his FB Marketplace message with the seller. He had been talking to some guy with Broken English and a vaguely middle eastern sounding name for several days now. The guy was selling an incredibly desirable truck for 30% below market. A virtually impossible deal. The vehicular equivalent of a horny singles in your area add on a porn site. He turned to me and said “y’know, his listing says the truck is about an hour from here, maybe I should go look for him.” I said “bro I’m looking at his profile, he has this same truck listed in every city in North America. The plate in the photos isn’t even from our state. This truck is spammed hundreds of times across marketplace.” To which he replied, “yeah I thought that was weird. I think it’s a glitch.” “No it’s not a glitch… you didn’t send him money did you?” I asked, fearing the answer. “Yeah I sent him a money, otherwise he was gonna sell it to another guy.” I winced. “how much?” “Five thousand bucks.” “……okay.” “Well let’s look him up, we have his name.” He replies confidently. “Look him up where?” I ask. “Facebook” “I’m looking at his Facebook. It’s not real.” Just then we arrive at the bank, he parks my 2500HD in the handicap spot at a 45 degree angle. I say maybe we should pick a different spot, he tells me he isn’t picky. We set up the wire transfer, he makes a disparaging remark about brown people to the teller. She frowns, she is brown. The money luckily still gets sent. And he takes off in the truck. Hours later he calls me from the middle of nowhere. He had decided to fuck with the aftermarket tuner while driving and bricked it. He was stranded. I don’t think all you xitter users realize just how difficult the modern world already is for an 85IQ person to navigate. With 53% of youtube shorts views now coming from AI content, these people are about to be thrust into a completely incomprehensible dream realm forever.

Progressive “mainstream” news outlets intentionally buried a number of major stories harmful to Democratic candidates, most saliently Joe Biden’s decline and the Hunter Biden laptop story. It is perfectly reasonable for an outlet whose editorial leads are trying to distinguish themselves among the news monoculture to actually report out these stories and to tell the truth when other outlets will not. Abdul El-Sayed and his family have troubling links to the Muslim Brotherhood and Talarico’s disappearance from the campaign trail was odd and deserved scrutiny.

The europoor meme can be funny, but it's also midwit and wrong. As someone with both EU and US passports who's lived in both sets of elite poles (SF/NYC and BCN/BER/PAR), let me just give you the TLDR: -The percent of GDP spent on welfare in the US is the about the same as the EU (smidge under). -The effective tax rate in the coastal US is about the same as the EU (smidge under). -Both are (former) middle-class societies where much of society feels the social contract is broken. In the US, elites abandoned the middle-class decades ago, and the well-to-do in states like CA/NY have reconciled themselves to paying almost half their paychecks and getting nothing in return, planning to insulate themselves from the suck by paying for private everything: neighborhoods, schools, medical care. If their earnings keep on rising, they're OK with it. In France, that bourgeoisie hasn't been decimated yet, and they still expect (delusionally perhaps) basic social infra like schools to function (which is what these protests were initially about). The infra in Europe is a lot better than in the US, despite the GDP delta (New Yorkers can only dream of a subway like Madrid's). But that's clearly eroding in time, without the wage growth (or private social infra) to allow for a paid workaround. -The free healthcare blah blah meme is fake: the public health systems in Europe have collapsed to the point it's mostly a public/private hybrid, for anyone with a solid paycheck, and fuck you if you're poor, go to the public system (which is the ER in the US). Guess what? In Europe you've got deductibles, in/out of network and all the same shit as in the US (though yes, the cost is still lower, though more or less correlated with wages). -Boomers on both sides of the Atlantic are living in a dated lala land, but they vote to keep the system in place. In Europe it's legislation and printing money to prop up pensions; in the US, it's legislation and printing money to prop up housing prices and the stock market, which is the American 'free market' version of pensions. Rampant inflation and cost-of-living problems in both, with youth locked out of housing and living in precarity. -Both are struggling with having been historically middle-class societies US better positioned only because it has more economic growth (hello 80 hour weeks), and (obviously) leadership in critical fields like AI. But the foundational problems of an out-of-touch elite, incoherent immigration policy, and general social malaise that sees no meaning or purpose at the End of History is absolutely the same in both polities. Americans who mock what's happening in Europe simultaneously believe some X mirage about what Europe is (and have never lived there), as well as don't understand what's going on in their own country. The French Revolution happened a few years after the American one, and once again, the two countries are echoes of each other, as similar countries tend to be. France is probably the most 'American' country in Europe, in all the republican senses of the word (and no the Yookay isn't in Europe).

The thing is, France is not going to elect an Islamic party allied with socialists. France is going to elect Marine Le Pen and the National Rally, probably with a sweeping mandate. The question is whether they have the stomach to do what is necessary to take their country back.

French journalist Paul Amar: “They came prepared. They had the addresses of town halls. They had addresses of Jewish shop owners. In a street in Marseille, all businesses owned by Jews were set on fire. Businesses run by Muslims weren’t”

That is Jack Skellington in a bucket hat.

We will all soon know what it feels like to be Jewish. In France, they already do. It will be our just deserts for having abandoned the Jews, ignored their warnings, turned against them, and even marched alongside their oppressors. For three years, you useful idiots have been parading Palestinian flags, sporting keffiyehs, screaming “From the River to the Sea”, and recognizing a fictitious Palestinian state as a reward for Hamas’s October 7 massacre (looking at you, @EmmanuelMacron). You have boycotted the only Jewish state in the world, vilified the Jewish people’s right to self-determination (aka “Zionism”), and spread the “Gaza genocide” blood libel. Did you really think that if you fed the crocodile enough Jewish flesh, it would eventually be satiated? All you have done is embolden the monster and whet its appetite. So you were worried about “colonization”? Look around. The only thing being colonized here are our own Western cities. The Palestinian flag has become a victory banner, proudly waved amid the ruins of looted and vandalized historic buildings—a symbol of hatred for our civilization and everything it stands for. It never ends with the Jews.

Trucks are at it again. There should be an investigation as to why trucks keep doing this. Actually, it was a woman with her two kids in the car, and local social media in Wichita is saying it was intentional and the mother was raging because her kid didn’t get enough playing time.

Following Nayib Bukele’s example, Delcy Rodriguez has pushed the “Fix Everything Easily” button. In Venezuela, just like in El Salvador, just like in Chicago, all the crime and disorder that materially worsens everyone’s quality of life is caused by a small number of men and law enforcement is very familiar with all of them. You don’t have to build a social services bureaucracy that assigns multiple professionals to each one of them. You don’t have to pay $500 an hour for a court appointed attorney every time you arrest them to make a deal to keep them out of jail. And you don’t have to spend $150,000 per year per inmate on incarcerating them when they inevitably do something that forces even progressive officials to lock them up. You can solve a problem that America spends billions failing to deal with for the price of a bullet.

Annabel Richter was a 19 year old FIT student. She was fed fentanyl by a man named Moises Friere who told her it was cocaine. Friere knew what he was doing — he gave the drugs to two female students and didn’t take any himself. While Annabel was overdosing, Friere stripped off her clothes, took photos of her naked body, and then raped her instead of calling for help. Because of what he did, she is dead. There are no “I am Jane Doe” rallies for Annabel Richter. There is no daily coverage of her death on CNN. There are no New York Times investigations creating timelines of her last day. Unless you read local crime news in New York City, you will not have heard about this case. Why is Cornell’s Jane Doe of so much more interest to mainstream news than FIT’s Annabel Richter? Perhaps because news loves to create narratives about predatory white male college students and refuses to make national-news villains of men like Friere, who commit most of the actual crime in places like New York City. The NYT and CNN aren’t lying when they do 50 stories about Jane Doe and zero about Annabel Richter. They’re just exercising editorial judgment about which parts of the news you need to hear.

The ridiculousness of Ozymandias’s plan is obviously intentional, but Dr. Manhattan seems to think it will work and he can see the future. Obviously, the possibility of Ozymandias’s plan failing is something Moore intended to suggest, because that is the purpose of the scene where the right-wing newspaper receives Rorschach’s journal. But what will happen is left ambiguous? Will the right-wing paper publish Rorschach’s allegations or will his own people think he is a crank? Will anyone believe this publication even if they run Rorschach’s story? If Moore wanted to be clear about what was going to happen and whether the plan would work, he could have been. He was ambiguous about it on purpose. That is why the TV show’s hack fanfic resolution to this question is so profoundly offensive.

Sarcastic comments about fans notwithstanding, Alan Moore does not hate Rorschach. Rorschach is the character people love because Moore wrote him that way. What makes “Watchmen” a great work of literature is the sensitivity and humanity with which Moore writes all the characters, including not just Rorschach, but also the Comedian. And Rorschach is a hero because he is the only one who insists upon the importance of the Comedian’s humanity (which is clearly important to Moore). Rorschach, like all the other characters, represents an archetype that is being critiqued and maybe even deconstructed — he’s The Punisher, and The Question, and he’s also The Continental Op and Philip Marlowe and Jake Gittes. He’s the archetypal detective who won’t let go of the case nobody else wants looked into. He’s the white knight who will never let his integrity be sullied, so of course he’s covered in literal filth and everyone normal correctly clocks him as a nutjob. But because he’s that kind of nutjob, he demands justice for the Comedian who nobody else cares about, and because he pulls at the strings nobody else bothers with, he’s the one who uncovers Ozymandias’s plot. And he’s the only one who refuses to participate in the cover up. “Watchmen” is a complex work, so it doesn’t give an easy answer its hardest question. Was Veidt right to kill thousands of people in his hoax alien attack in order to shock the world back from the brink of nuclear war? Were Dreiberg, Laurie and Doctor Manhattan right to help cover up Veidt’s crime when they realized they were too late to stop it? Moore at least allows for the argument that Rorschach is the hero of the story for refusing to make the pragmatic moral compromise the other characters will. And he even allows the possibility that Rorschach might have prevailed over the smartest man in the world and the god made flesh with the revelation at the end of the book that Rorschach mailed his journal exposing Veidt’s scheme to the “New Frontiersman” right-wing newspaper.