Yup. Attention-seeking behavior is incentivized in the current social media environment. This too shall pass.
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That seems obvious.
He’s being elected by Muslims and other recent legal or illegal immigrants who don’t speak English, New York will go the way of London.
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Of course now that he’s won, a lot more Muz will come to the city. I just got back from New York, and the sparkling metropolis at night gave me the familiar excitement, a sense of unlimited opportunity, of infinite choice.
Then I remembered the election.
My BMD, a native Brooklyn boy, reminded me that there have been other ethnic takeovers of the city. When he was growing up, everyone was Jewish. So now, for awhile, everyone will be Muslim.
May as well look at it that way, I suppose.
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What makes me happy about the NYC mayoral election:
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H.L. Mencken
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HP Lovecraft thought New York City was lost already in 1920s:
Lovecraft moved to New York on March 2, 1924, marrying Greene the next day at St. Paul’s Chapel in Manhattan, the oldest church building in New York City. Lovecraft and Greene moved in 1924 to Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood. After Greene relocated to Cincinnati for work, Lovecraft moved to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
Lovecraft disliked New York’s “crude, foreign hostility and underbreeding”, its "vulgar trade spirit and plebian hustle.” He called the city “an Asiatic hell’s huddle of the world’s cowed, broken, inartistic, and unfit.” He moved out of Brooklyn and back to Providence in 1926.
He wrote three stories set in New York during his time there: “The Horror at Red Hook”, written on August 1-2, 1925:
Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor’s Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall… The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles… From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their way through.
“He”, written less than two weeks later on August 11, expresses directly his frustration with his New York move:
My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me.
And then there is “Cool Air”. written in March 1926.
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Thanks, I never reаd Lovecraft but it sounds like good stuff (from a literary point of view).
My fave paean to the city has always been in Thomas Wolfe’s The Web and the Rock.
Maybe it’ll survive. I’ve always believed there is a deep reason, ley lines or sump’n, that great cities are located where they are. Somewhere I read that there was a period in NYC history where the city had no water system, you could smell it for miles away. Yet it wasn’t abandoned
I wonder how many of the unlettered young and the foreign-born who elected Mamdani were hearing the name Eugene V. Debs for the first time? I wonder who’ll play him in the movie..?
Last night’s election results convinced me that American Socialism is the wave of the future. WE were the “youth quake” of the late ‘60s. Now we’re in the audience. I hate to say it, but, “The times they are a-changing’.”
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P.S.: I checked out my recollection of NYC’s water crisis . It was in 1799 when Aaron Burr established the Manhattan Company, ostensibly for the purpose of improving/establishing a water system for NYC. But actually all he really wanted was to establish a bank (which became Chase Manhattan). So very little $$ was spent on the NYC system; the article I read says they used “wooden pipes”! I had no idea you could make pipes outta wood!
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Michael Kinsley, who is a Jewish Democrat, defended Buchanan. They are friends after being colleagues on Crossfire for many years.
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Ultra Orthodox in Israel maintain solid high TFR of ~6.5 children/women while secular & traditional Jewish women see fertility rates plummet by comparison. Israel to be far far more Haredi & ultra religious in the future. TFR of ~6 vs ~2.0 makes that a near inevitability.
Haredim (Ultra Orthodox) currently make up 13.5% of Israel’s total population & ~19% of the Jewish population. By 2030 this will likely rise to 25% of the total population & more than 30% of the Israeli Jewish population by 2050. The makeup of Israeli society is changing significantly.
TFR decline in Israel has been more pronounced among less religious Jewish women, below is TFR from 2016-18 period vs 2021-23, so change over 5 year period.
— Annatar (@Annatar_I) November 11, 2025
Ultra orthodox: 6.67 > 6.48 (-3%)
Traditional, less religious: 2.4 > 2.2 (-8%)
Not religious, secular: 2.19 > 1.96 (-11%)
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Good news.
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Elsewhere, in a debate about Tucker Carlson, somebody asked the poster whether he “seriously” believed that if you criticize the government of Israel, that means you hate Jews.
I’m so glad that came up because as you might imagine, I’ve had that thrown up to me so many times. It’s a conversation stopper, especially when the interlocutor follows it up with, “Well, don’t you ever criticize OUR government? So that means you hate Americans?”
But I now know what I’ll say next time:
We Americans don’t criticize the governments of countries which are our allies. Not very much. Not to the point of violent disagreement and even social amputation.
Yes, we criticize our own government, and we SHOULD: it’s OURS, what it does affects our lives.
But the governments of other allied countries? We may joke or even deplore the fact that, for example, there is no such thing as free speech in the UK or the EU doesn’t t really abide by the results of elections if the leadership doesn’t agree, but that’s it: “but a word and a jest” as Yeats said. We don’t even know, most of the time, what particular individuals ARE “the government” of most of our allies. Who cares?
I certainly do not think we would “criticize” any of them for defending themselves, nor for punitive action, if their citizens were violently attacked by another country in the cause of avowed race-hatred.
So why Israel?
So, next time I get the question:
ME: “Why, yes, I do believe that if you “criticize” (meaning in this case, accuse, disbelieve, villainize) the Israeli government, that means you hate Jews.”
Seriously.
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That is indistinguishable from my own take on anti-Zionism in general.
When pushed, such people invariably fall back on blood libels and variations on “how dare the Jews defend themselves against Muslim barbarity”.
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Not to mention the glaringly obvious fact that Israel is continually held to standards applied to no other nation. I just can’t imagine why that is…. can you?? There is virtually no nation on Earth today which is not the result of population displacement, absorption, and/or genocide. It’s only a matter of setting an arbitrary date to define it as “illegitimate”.. Further, of all nations, Israel’s past is best in evidence - biblical, historical and archeological - including the fact that the ONLY entity to ever exist on the land in question - was the Kingdom of Israel. Anywhere else, return of peoples to their historic homeland following diaspora would be celebrated. Until recently, the only “Palestinians” were the Jews. Other than their inflated victimization, nothing distinguishes “Palestinians” of today from any other Arabic culture.
As to the significant increase in haredi population, I’m not sure what this portends, as at least some of the ultra-orthodox do not support Zionism and/or even the existence of a secular Jewish state. Are they willing to participate in its defense? Isn’t that issue a current ‘thing’ in Israeli politics?
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Everyone in Israel has to serve in the military except the ultra orthodox Haredi… how did they get this exemption?
I’ve read that they got it because the govt originally thought they were just a dying remnant, like the Amish ( yes I know they weren’t automatically granted CO status but I’m sure it didn’t hurt.) So, leave them alone, let them concentrate on their scholarship. But they didn’t and aren’t dying out, they’re breeding prodigiously as you point out.
But it’s moot now: in 2024 the Israeli Supreme Court ended their exemption.
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What?
England is constantly criticized on social media. I actually see much more criticism of England than of Israel.
Isn’t Ukraine an Ally now? They receive constant criticism right here on this forum.
There is also a difference between Israel and the rest of our allies. Israel goes to war. All Western countries have a percentage of ant-war in their population. All the other allies don’t go to war, they either support or don’t support the US going to war.
I happen to fully support Israel doing whatever they think is necessary for their country, but I am in a small minority that thinks war is a total win or loss proposition. I don’t criticize Israel’s actions unless they impact the US actions. To the extent any government whether ally or not interferes with the US government actions, they should be criticized.
I didn’t support of Ukraine (which I am changing my opinion) and I don’t support our support of Israel.
I also am highly critical of US citizens that use their influence to gain US support for Israel or Jews not because it advances US interests, but because they want to help Jews.
if you think that is antisemitism so be it. The incessant use of calling people antisemitic is actually am doing Jews a disfavor.
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As far as I know Americans aren’t ghosting each other over differences about England’s government. It‘s just “a word and a jest”. ( In my experience of course.) I don’t and didn’t support our getting involved with the internecine struggle between Ukraine and Russia, but nobody is castigating me for it, nobody has cut me off or even violently argued with me about it.
That’s what I’m talkin’ about in connection with Israel:
the heat.
I get it: you don’t care what I think. S’mutual. Go thy ways.
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Apropos to The present subject…
There are exceptions of course. For example when 90% of the people continuously opposed increasing immigration rates for decades they got it good and hard from a 10% minority including majority of Jews.