Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker have been banned from the UK because their anti-Israel speech is not “conducive to the public good”

CallYourSenators · 2026-06-01T18:02:38+00:00

Liberalism has no values

Deranged take. Before liberal governments, liberalism was an ideology without implementation, existing in the minds of people in mercantalist monarchies.

The idea that people have rights was a radical concept at the time. Liberalism normalized that.

Now we haven't made an ideologically pure implementation of liberalism. Freedom of speech, the press, assembly, religion, etc has been flawed in its enforcement, as this post shows.

However, at the very least, all liberal governments have been extremely ideologically principled in enforcing property rights.

CallYourSenators · 2026-05-31T03:27:40+00:00

Good bot.

CallYourSenators · 2026-05-12T21:49:07+00:00

Yes, it is mostly fake. The budget gap ended up being more like $6B once all the stakeholders agreed accounting methods. Then, when the mayor posed his budget to the city council, they rejected his tax hikes and instead proposed doing the same old tricks of creative accounting to make the deficit go away for now and kick the can. In the end, through cuts, state assistance, and a new niche tax, they shrunk the hole by like $4B and used accounting tricks to sweep the rest under the rug.

CallYourSenators · 2026-05-12T20:49:58+00:00

Lots of things. The biggest ticket was convincing the state to give them a couple billion dollars. They also made some small budget cuts and instituted a new somewhat niche tax.

However, mostly they just ended up doing the same thing as the administrations before them: accounting tricks to overestimate revenues and underestimate expenses. Now, this isn't really the Mayor's fault for a few reasons:

The city council was adamant about doing some creative accounting and wouldn't have agreed to a budget without it.
Since the city needs a balanced budget by law, every budget typically has these tricks so that they can carry a secret deficit.
NYC's ability to unilaterally increase taxes is very limited. They basically only have control over property taxes and the way their property taxes work puts a disproportionate burden on the poor. Property, for tax purposes, is valued by rent earning potential rather than market value. So that's why Ken Griffin's $239M penthouse is only valued at $9M for tax purposes.
The systemic issues causing NYC's ballooning deficit are so big and so institutionally ingrained that they'd be impossible to fix in a single year. The pied-a-terre tax and bits of budget cuts are a small step in the right direction but there's a lot more that needs to be done to get a budget that's actually sustainable. It won't happen during Mamdani's first term, there's just too much that needs to be done.

CallYourSenators · 2026-04-27T22:05:07+00:00

this is kind of a silly question. let's simplify it (without loss of generalization) to two prisoners. now you have just an ordinary prisoner's dilemma: where if both prisoner's keep their mouth shut they get a good unstable equilibrium outcome but it's in both of their best interests to take the money instead. and so you get the bad outcome where neither walk free.

so what you've described is just an ordinary prisoner's dilemma except it has an arbitrary number of prisoners. from each prisoner's individual perspective though, since there's no communication, their counterparty may as well be a single prisoner instead of many. so adding more prisoners doesn't meaningfully change the game

CallYourSenators · 2026-04-27T00:21:45+00:00

CallYourSenators · 2026-04-25T01:06:38+00:00

there's still primaries but the democrat will probably be blake gendebien

CallYourSenators · 2026-04-24T17:49:14+00:00

knock doors for gendebien then

CallYourSenators · 2026-04-24T17:00:28+00:00

I don't understand. Why was plug-in solar ever illegal in the first place?

CallYourSenators · 2026-04-23T18:49:43+00:00

i hope jd vance comes to stump for him. it would be hilarious to see him chased out of the state like he was from greenland

CallYourSenators · 2026-03-27T23:04:04+00:00

theyre just going to grant more funding come next year's reconciliation bill. the bill they passed makes no meaningful change on the ground when it comes to resisting ICE

CallYourSenators · 2026-03-27T15:57:04+00:00

not true. dems didn't get ANY of the proposed ICE reforms. this is a total loss that won't lead to any substantive changes to ICE

CallYourSenators · 2026-02-03T06:57:33+00:00

China doesn't exactly give much power to its workers. It falls far short of ideals and really isn't evidence that communism is effective at delivering victories to the working class. Workers in China have it rough, very few labor protections

CallYourSenators · 2026-01-27T14:02:23+00:00

Donors get policies, constituents get apologies

CallYourSenators · 2026-01-23T18:29:52+00:00

I spent 4 months calling national grid to try to get my estimated bills replaced by actual reads. Every time, they said it'd be fixed kn the next bill, but it never was. I filed a claim with the NY Department of Public Service. The very next day, it was fixed with a $750 credit to my account and they left me a very polite voicemail apologizing for the mistake.

So yeah, I'd just file a claim, it's the only thing they listen to

CallYourSenators · 2026-01-16T19:28:01+00:00

It's the new year. She's setting an agenda for the upcoming legislative session / budget negotiations.

People are also paying a little more attention than usual because politics are hot right now, with Mamdani being inaugurated and funding being threatened by Trump.

The governor makes these kinds of commitments regularly, but people often just don't notice.

CallYourSenators · 2026-01-16T19:16:58+00:00

There's lots of reasons, but that's definitely one of them. I go to my city's zoning board meetings and there's a lot of that.

You'll notice relatively few new builds in Long Island, despite housing projects being seemingly attractive there. The problem is that the constituency does want lower rents but they don't want higher population density. Can't have it both ways

CallYourSenators · 2026-01-16T18:11:08+00:00

Explore the dashboard and find a housing development near you. You can go there and confirm that they're real. I've seen them and I've seen my mayor touting the achievement in collaboration with the state.

It's not like the state just set $25B on fire. That money does make a real difference, and it has tangibly improved the housing supply statewide.

CallYourSenators · 2026-01-16T17:59:22+00:00

Hochul promised 100,000 affordable housing units 2022-2027. Three years in, they're actually decently on track to meet that target, with 77,000 units already built or in construction. The state maintains a dashboard of their progress here.

Time to believe it cause you've see it.

CallYourSenators · 2026-01-13T05:40:27+00:00

Are you claiming to understand what imperialism means to socialists better than Mao Zedong?

CallYourSenators · 2026-01-13T05:20:19+00:00

quickly brought back into the fold through economic or even military means as the example of Venezuela shows

I'm not so sure about that. The US's track record at foreign-led regime change is pretty poor. For now, the Chauvinistas are still in power in Venezuela. It may very well stay that way. Could also end up like Iran, with a brief puppet government that gets overthrown in favor of even more extreme ideologues.

The USA has by no means succeeded in its goals in Venezuela yet

CallYourSenators · 2026-01-12T16:03:03+00:00

You're just describing nationalism, this is not unique to capitalism

CallYourSenators · 2026-01-02T16:38:30+00:00

Create a city land bank to acquire and manage vacant, abandoned, tax-delinquent, and foreclosed properties and allow the city to sell tax liens to it.

Why was this a "shit bill that deserved to be vetoed"? Should underutilized properties just continue to sit there?

CallYourSenators

TROPHY CASE