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Demoralized and abandoned — 29 Comments

  1. I wonder what New Yorkers thought would happen when they elected a Marxist as mayor – the ones who voted for him, or the majority who shrugged, stayed home from the polls, and let it happen.

    neo: Don’t intend this as a gotcha. What is your understanding of 21st C. New Yorkers?

    I had the merry thought that after 9-11 New Yorkers would become more conservative.

    It seems I was mistaken.

  2. RE: “I wonder what New Yorkers thought would happen when they elected a Marxist as mayor.”
    Short answer: they didn’t think.

    Longer answer: New Yorkers feel about their city the same way that many leftists think about their country. They can’t imagine that the institutions will ever fail. It doesn’t matter how dishonest, corrupt, and incompetent leftist leadership is, everything will be fine, because it always has been. It never occurs to them that civilization is always more fragile than they imagine. (That happens when you don’t understand history or human behavior.) Their vision of the future is entirely faith-based.

    I also agree with Richard Aubrey: Good. And. Hard.

  3. The 1920’s were the roaring 20’s. The 2020’s are going to be the burning 20’s.

  4. Diversity (i.e. denial of individual dignity, denial of individual conscience), not limited to racism, and exclusion, breeds adversity.

  5. I had the merry thought that after 9-11 New Yorkers would become more conservative.

    They were, for about two months, electing Bloomberg as Mayor over some garden-variety leftist. But as always, they get complacent when things go well. Turnout for Deblasio’s elections was something like 25%. I think a strong centrist, law and order candidate would have a chance next year given how bad things have gotten (relatively–it’s still much better than the days of Dinkins that led to Giuliani), but I’m not sure such a candidate can be found.

  6. Do not be surprised if New York City’s denizens vote in a next mayor just as leftist, or more leftist, then DeCommio.
    It was the NYC City Council , with DeCommio’s blessing, that voted to “defund” the police, so there are many potential candidates to continue and expand DeCommio’s neo-communist policies.
    Recall that when Guiliani was Mayor – the guy the cleaned up the city – he was hated by the uber liberal, neo-communist, upper west side liberals.
    It is no coincidence that the CPUSA headquarters are in Manhattan, despite the fact that this pseudo-religious ideology caused more deaths than any other ideology in the history of the world; 100,000,000 million or so.
    I guess that enough folks have not yet been murdered by communists to have NYC denizens think twice about who and what they support.

    Unless the Wall Street banks (which, by the way, are very, very large donors to demokrat party) and other big corporations leave NYC, its population will stay relatively constant.
    The well off can afford the sky hi taxes and cost of living (after all, they can afford the world’s best tax accountants to shelter their income), and they have the means to “exempt” themselves , and are immune to, from the horrible liberal policies that affect the common citizen there.
    As Nassim Taleb would say; “they have no skin in the game.”

    Of course there is a “good” side to NYC folks staying put; they won’t spread their cancerous and deadly policies to the more civilized places in the USA.

  7. Minneapolis/St. Paul: a local commentator says he has begged men and women he knows to run for city council or mayor. He has promised money, organization and get out the vote. None will even consider it. When political diversity consists of left and hard left, who wants to be the only person to the right?

  8. As I’ve probably written here before, my reading of history is that “civilization” is actually something that is fairly fragile; it’s a idea, a state of mind, and certain linked expectations, values, and behaviors that flow from that state of mind.

    Disrupt enough of it’s constituent parts—these links–and it all—civilization–just starts to fall apart.

    (I note that relatively competent, fair, objective, and efficient police forces, that similarly constituted military, judicial, educational/informational, religious/moral, and political systems are some of those key links.)

    The other major factor playing out here is how few people know history, and have a deep realization of the fact that—throughout both the thousands of years of written history, and the hundreds of thousands of years of recognizably “human” history that preceded the invention of writing before that—the lot of 99.9999% of humans has been one of short and miserable lives, of poverty, disease, cold, starvation, and violence, of the weak being dominated, plundered, savaged, and enslaved by the strong.

    Moreover, the fact that most people do not recognize that our lives here in these United States are the extremely rare–you might even argue the only real and long-standing exception that there has ever been to that ancient and almost universal tale of human misery, violence, repression, and woe that has been the lives of our ancestors.

    One would hope that if people knew what history really taught, and how rare–actually singular and unique–our relatively, free, prosperous, and egalitarian society actually was, that they would value, protect, defend, nurture, and make every effort to preserve it.

    But, as we have seen, such a stout and almost universal defense of our Heritage is not what has been happening, quite the opposite.

  9. I wish commenters here would not refer to famous public figures by some pet name, meant to be witty perhaps. Others have done this here before and it’s never amusing. You might have interesting things to say but you make yourself look stupid.

  10. New York is not an American city. In governance and power structures it runs more like Late Ottoman Istanbul than (say) Duluth MN. If anything, a somewhat over-egged rhyming version of that historical pudding. If only it had more Phanariots and Armenians to leaven the mix 😛

    An odious comparison, but positively fragrant in comparison with the polity under discussion here.

    Still, there’s more ‘progress’ to be made. UK and Australia have taken to appointing bulky lesbians as police commissioners. Still, it’s not like de Blasio has his finger in the dike, so won’t be long to wait.

    PS: Hell, Duluth probably isn’t Duluth anymore either… but if so please don’t tell me. A man must dream.

  11. I’m a lifelong New Yorker and I’ve lived through the decline of the ’60s and the rebirth in the ’90s. The place does exert a pull on you but in the last 10 years I have slowly come to the realization that I cannot stay here. That process paralleled my walkaway from the Dem party. I stuck around because of family, particularly my elderly mother, but I’m at a point where I think I have to go sooner than I’d wished. I don’t want to cower at home to stay safe and I don’t want to take a total bath on my house when I sell. The only question is, where can you go to escape the madness? It’s infected many places I considered retiring to. Running shouldn’t be the answer. We need to figure out how to fight back.

  12. Gothamite—That is the problem, isn’t it?

    Here is the U.S. you might want to decamp to the “Heartland”—the central, more conservative states–but which part of the heartland?

    Moreover, which “conservative” state/city/area can you be guaranteed to stay conservative?

    Wyoming? Idaho? The Dakotas?

    If these U.S. destinations are too uncertain, which among a small number of likely countries should you choose to relocate to—Canada, New Zealand, Australia, some of the countries of Eastern Europe—perhaps Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, or even Singapore?

    Considering all the options, it seems to me that somewhere in the U.S. is still your best bet, so defending our Heritage is the option that should be tried first, before you head for the Conservative hills,

  13. Zaphod:

    Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

    ________________________________________________________________

    MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) News
    June 17, 2020 7:22 p.m.
    https://tinyurl.com/yblek78f

    “The city of Duluth is moving to delete the word ‘chief’ from the titles of two of its administrative leadership positions in an effort to remove language that some Native Americans and others find offensive.”

  14. Cornflour–Hell, it’s all “racist,” so why not just eliminate racially tainted languages altogether, and just move to sign language, or an artificial language like Esperanto, or do they contain objectionable words or ideas as well?

  15. Snow on Pine:

    You betray yourself by writing a comment. March or die! But don’t ever write about it.

    All written languages are oppressive, patriarchal tools of white privilege — or white-adjacent privilege. To the extent that language itself can be permitted, it must be screamed, and all screams should be accompanied by violent acts against white males — or white-adjacent males. Only in this way, can our world be purified. All hail BLM.

  16. This is what happens when you stop spanking kids.

    Okay. Not really. Though I would bet money that 99.9999% of the Lefty agitators out there weren’t spanked when they misbehaved.

    Mike

  17. The 75% who did not vote in NYC’s last mayoral election have enabled de Blasio aka Warren Wilhelm Jr. mayoral reign. They are starting to reap what they’ve sown and the blood of de Blasio’s current and future victims is on their hands as well.

    What consequence will de Blasio suffer for the thousands in the nursing homes he sent to their deaths? For the consequent murders by those released from jail? Now that de Blasio has given his assent to more protests, how many more New Yorkers will die from protestors infecting them with Covid-19?

    But then, mass murder is what communists have always done.

    Historically, only Islam can claim more victims.

  18. Though I would bet money that 99.9999% of the Lefty agitators out there weren’t spanked when they misbehaved.

    MBunge: Probably not. Spanking is still common especially among blacks. T-N Coates reported being beaten by his father.
    ______________________________________________

    A 2015 Pew Research survey found 45 percent of all parents asked still spanked their children. And black parents were more likely to do so over white or hispanic parents. The survey found 64 percent of black respondents still spanked.

    –https://openmicroc.com/black-parents-spanking/
    _______________________________________________

    On an early comedy record Bill Cosby had a chilling routine about his father coming for him and his brother with a belt. Cosby told it funny, but still…

  19. We had that very funny record and Cosby stated in the skit that they’d never seen the belt but ‘knew’ it was ready to be used.

    And there’s a vast difference between being spanked and beaten.

  20. What Geoffrey said.

    When we were raising kids, the parental threat-of-choice was “You have until the count of three to do (or quit doing) X.”
    Said in the proper tone of voice, that always got results for us.
    I once overheard one of the younger kids ask an older brother, quite seriously, “What is Mom going to do to us after she says three?”
    The reply was: “I don’t know. We never let her get that far.”

    Loss of privileges and grounding would have been applied as needed, but spanking was not entirely off the menu for really egregious misbehavior.
    So far, the resulting adults have been satisfactory.

  21. “On an early comedy record Bill Cosby had a chilling routine about his father coming for him and his brother with a belt. Cosby told it funny, but still…” – huxley

    Nine feet long and eight feet wide, with hooks on it – to tear the meat off ya.

    My father (white) used a belt, though not as formidable as Cosby pater’s.

  22. I think sending social workers instead of cops is a great idea — just give them all red shirts first!

  23. “Let’s see NY replace them with social workers – right, that’ll work.”

    As a social worker, I say no. Nope. Nope. Nope. People who call for defunding or the disbandment of the police force know little of what they talk about. It’s just a dream, a vision, without much thought. It’s just a given that it’s a fine, fantastic and sound idea. Sure, social workers are needed but to have them replace the police? C’mon now.

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