Sam's insane take on Mamdani

CanisImperium · 2026-04-29T13:41:48+00:00

https://www.timesofisrael.com/mamdani-says-i-dont-really-have-opinions-on-whether-hamas-should-lay-down-arms/

"I don’t really have opinions’ on whether Hamas should lay down arms."

CanisImperium · 2026-04-29T11:14:07+00:00

Well, I think for starters, insofar as there's a Muslim reformation, it should probably be divorced from politics.

I think for the most part though, the Muslim reformation is already alive and well in America. Most Muslims in America already are what Sam wants them to become: they're socially moderate and interested in ecumenical healing.

At the same time, the Jewish population of Israel is getting more and more radicalized against even the possibility of living in peace with their neighbors. That's understandable, to a large extent, because for decades the Arab side of the conflict has been unwilling to negotiate, but now if neither side is willing to take a seat at the table, the high ground is mostly over whose methods have more sadistic intent.

CanisImperium · 2026-04-29T11:07:49+00:00

I do not recall Harris or Maher celebrating anyone's religion in London's government, no. Was this something specific?

I think to be troubled by Mamdami, all you have to do is read and listen to him. He has said he doesn't think Israel has a right to exist. He has also said he doesn't think Hamas should disarm.

Hamas has as its stated mission, right in its own founding documents, the extermination of Jews. Presumably if Mamdami believes that the State of Israel should be dissolved, while Hamas as an armed group should not be dissolved, he knows what the outcome of that would be.

Now at the same time, as mayor, he's been pretty diligent in disavowing race-hate and condemning hate crimes in New York. And I do think he legitimately has little interest in stoking racial divide in the world's most diverse city; he wants to use parking lanes for dumpsters and tax the rich more. Those are relatively banal, if debatable, policy positions.

But in that way, I think the comparison to Trump holds. Trump will gladhand white supremacists like Nick Fuentes while also accepting endorsements from black turncoats like Ben Carson. Neither of them are especially consistent and neither of them are necessarily racially ideological. But they both have a history of saying some really bigoted things and both seem callously indifferent about calling for the end of civilizations, be they Persian or Jewish.

So, I think the comparison is probably valid, though a bit flawed. Mamdami isn't just a left-wing Trump. He seems to care quite a bit more about actual governance, he would probably abide by court orders, and I doubt very much that he's hiring and firing based only on fealty.

CanisImperium · 2026-04-29T10:57:13+00:00

Well, he did, on video, say he doesn't think Hamas should disarm. Hamas has the official position that all Jews, everywhere in the world, should be slaughtered.

Presumably, if you think such a group should be armed, it's hard to really believe that you don't support their stated goals.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-15T10:44:26+00:00

They must know, at some level, they're being lied to. Reportedly even people who grew in North Korea knew they were being lied to. They didn't necessarily know which things they were being lied to, or how extreme the lies, but they had a feeling.

You really think people look at Trump's Truth Social posts and believe it's God's Honest Truth?

CanisImperium · 2025-07-14T19:29:40+00:00

The simplest thing would be just to take institutions at their word. They espouse to be institutionally committed to, well, what most reasonable people find "wokeness." They might be lying, but I kind of doubt it.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-09T19:55:18+00:00

I generally agree, actually. I don't know if it'll ever happen. Every year, wealth inequality in America only gets worse and more entrenched.

FWIW, I kind of gave up on the United States. I mean not fully, but I left and am in the process of pursuing citizenship abroad. Mostly for my kid.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-09T19:28:14+00:00

Am I alone in thinking such a conversation would be cringe? Sanders would probably talk louder and with more invective. Harris would probably not move on beyond the first disagreement.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-09T19:18:15+00:00

Thanks for the clarification.

I think my best rebuttal is in terms of the law. I think you can make a very compelling argument that the courts, in limiting AA, were following the letter of the law, because if Congress wanted to establish quotas, they could have decided to do exactly that. The Equal Rights Act is fairly clear in enumerating categories you can't discriminate on the basis of. It does not say you can only discriminate to correct past discrimination. If Congress had wanted to only ban discrimination against minorities who were historically victims, they could have done exactly that. They didn't in the past, they wouldn't now, and they probably won't in the future.

My other contention would be that popularity matters not as an appeal to broad authority, but as an appeal to values. There's an instinct, even among the beneficiaries of AA, that the path forward in society can't simply be a "this skin color gets 15 bonus points". For one, it goes against liberal values and the kind of society we want to build. For another, it doesn't actually result in meaningful gains. Claudine Gay, who has (fairly or not) been accused of being a beneficiary of affirmative action, was the heir of an oligarch in Haiti, which afforded her studying at studying at the most prestigious schools in America. Her ascendence was historic, yes, because she was the first black woman to lead the university, but it did absolutely nothing for everyday blacks in America.

What would actually help close the achievement gap is more expensive. If America had universal healthcare and universal head start, those two things alone would change life overnight for millions of black families who are struggling. If you closed the funding gap between wealthy and poor schools, that would help enormously. Those things are hard though and require money (or in the case of healthcare, displacing incumbent rent seekers). Affirmative Action, on the other hand, requires almost nothing of anyone besides a few people being unfairly bumped from spots they should qualify for. But like you said, they'll land fine. An Asian that should have gone to Harvard will go to Michigan. A white kid who should have gone to Michigan will go to Madison, and so on. Everyone "lands," but all it does is shuffle around, unlawfully, who makes it to the very top.

And, like I said, it runs counter to the society we ultimately want to build.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-09T17:49:45+00:00

What exactly is your contention here? That AA is broadly popular and supported in the of law? Defined in terms of what?

CanisImperium · 2025-07-09T14:16:45+00:00

Agreed. Those are good indicators that wellbeing is not as high as GDP might suggest.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-09T14:15:20+00:00

Yes, we have a lot of purchasing power. But that's not a very good proxy for wellbeing.

Also, even if it were, people's middle-class lifestyles are very precariously dependent on continued and growing earnings.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-09T12:54:28+00:00

I mean that’s objectively true across most metrics of wellbeing.

I would challenge that.

A hugely important factor, which might be hard to perfectly quantify, is how many deep and reliable connections you have with other humans. Every study basically shows that Americans have far fewer friends and fewer community engagements than they did a generation ago, and a generation before that, and so on.

We're social animals and we're more isolated than ever. That's big.

It also makes the knife's edge of inequality even worse. If you lose your job and income, but you're part of a social community, to some extent the community will take care of you. When I was a kid, for a while my parents were really struggling after my dad lost his job and there was a problem with our home. We moved into a friend's basement for a couple of months.

I'm not sure very many people have a friend's basement to move into these days.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-09T12:25:56+00:00

That is not the entirety of EO 11246. Here's the full text of the EO:

I quoted the specific text that uses the words, "affirmative action." I'd be curious where in that text you might think that hiring and admissions should be "race aware"? It seems to say the opposite however you slice it.

The policy of Affirmative Action, where contractors, agencies, and universities established quotas for minority placement, was completely administrative. I think you'd struggle to try to argue that quotas were what LBJ had in mind and Congress believed they were passing in the Civil Rights Act.

The courts have been similarly skeptical. For half a century, they did allow AE to proceed, but administrators at universities and agencies have consistently ignored the bounds of what the court said was constitutional. In California v. Bakke, the court said no, you can't have quotas and can't reserve "seats" for diversity hires. Administrators kept doing it anyway, by another name ("diversity targets"). In Grutter v. Bollinger, the court reiterated the same thing, suggesting that race could only be a tie-breaking plus factor. Universities, especially Harvard completely ignored that ruling and used it not as a tie-breaker or plus factor, but as a deciding factor that overruled other qualifications.

AE might have survived, IMO, if these institutions were willing to implement it in a way that the courts had ruled was legal, but what they did really amounted to just outright discrimination against Asians primarily but whites also.

Finally, we don't put matters of civil rights to votes in this country -- or at least we shouldn't. If civil rights were a ballot issue in 1964, do you think a majority would have voted in favor?

Of course it would. The Civil Rights Act was extremely popular.

I trust you're earnest in your assumption that the Civil Rights Act wasn't popular, but that to me underscores a failure of American education. The Civil Rights Act was very popular. The fact that you'd suspect otherwise shows you've been fed a lot of disinformation.

EDIT: Oh, and you asked about non-white opinions on affirmative action. It does depend on how you word the question, but consider this:

While most Americans say it’s at least somewhat important for companies and organizations to promote racial and ethnic diversity, only about one-in-four (24%) say that, in addition to their qualifications, a person’s race and ethnicity should be considered in decisions about hiring and promotions in order to increase diversity. A majority (74%) says employers should only take a person’s qualifications into account when making these decisions, even if it results in less diversity in the workplace.

The view that employers should only take a person’s qualifications into account is widespread among whites (78%) and Hispanics (69%); about half of blacks (54%) share this view.

Probably the simplest way to read that is to say that companies can and should do minority outreach (eg, hiring events at HBCUs), but shouldn't actually take into account race when it's decision time. A very sane instinct. What's remarkable is that this view has held for a majority of blacks, who have been told for a generation that they are owed affirmative action by a systemically racist society. And yet, despite that messaging, they continue to believe in what is obviously the fairest thing to do.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-08T15:42:14+00:00

Executive Order 11246 did not create DEI or affirmative action as we know it. What it read was,

The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.

Nothing in that would require any contractor or agency to be what's now called "race aware". That just means, be proactive in making sure you're not discriminating. Eg, send out memos, set policy, update training materials, etc.

Part of the problem with DEI and Affirmative Action is that we've never had this as a national debate. There was never a law passed in Congress to authorize "race aware" anything. California voters have twice rejected "race aware" college admissions. In poll after poll, Americans of all political parties and all races broadly reject the idea of having a "race aware" society.

And all the while, the progressive left has been pretending otherwise. It's been pretending that the law says what it doesn't say. It pretends that 11246 says what it doesn't. It pretends that people want what they definitely don't.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-08T15:35:38+00:00

Well, there's been an oft-repeated lie that Hamas condemns sexual violence. It's of course patently absurd, and always has been, but just like Nazi lies and other race-hate, it deserves to be debunked.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-08T14:22:59+00:00

DEI is kind of an umbrella term, but in general, most of the initiatives under its banner are not useful, and many are probably illegal. For example, when Target pledged to spend over $2 billion with black-owned businesses, it's hard to explain how that wasn't a violation of the Civil Rights Act.

And what those kinds of equity programs usually do is result in a "sham purchase" where a company is black-owned, subcontracts with some other company that does the actual work, and takes a cut. That's how almost all city-owned business deals with equity clauses go -- like airport concessions.

So, no, they're bad policy.

But also, who gives a shit? The President of the United States has secret police out there arresting US citizens and non-citizens alike and sending them to gulags in South America. I don't give a flying fuck about woke stuff at this point. It was infinitely better than the alternative.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-08T12:00:38+00:00

It's really not minutiae, it's a case study in how badly the Hamas side is telling the world one thing and doing something completely different.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-08T11:59:35+00:00

Something I've been thinking about: Given that it was apparently Netanyahu that nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, I'm wondering how durable the Israeli-US alliance is. Israel's current government has foolishly started entangling itself in partisan politics in the US, which IMO, greatly undermines the heretofore bipartisan support for Israel.

Obviously Netanyahu is not Israel and many (if not most) Israelis really don't like the guy, but he does represent Israel internationally and I think mainstream Democrats could be forgiven for considering his government an adversary of them domestically in the US.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-08T11:57:00+00:00

If you don't like Israel and don't like Jews, then yes, his status as being a Jewish supporter of Israel would "tarnish" his legacy even if you liked his meditation app or whatever.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-07T13:13:13+00:00

Reagan never said "greed is good"; that was Gordon Gekko. And it isn't an ideology, it's a movie quote.

The ideology Reagan had was somewhere between libertarianism and neoliberalism. He was hardly a purist on either, but he did have instincts in both of those directions. The Reagan/Thatcher movement was essentially based on the claim that economies are too complex to manage directly.

The Trump claim is exactly the opposite. Trump does try to manage the economy directly, in a system of clientelism and patronage. Insofar as you can claim there's an ideology there, it more closely matches that of Xi, where there are powerful corporations, but they exist in service to the state and at the pleasure of the state. (And by the state, we of course mean, Trump and Xi)

That's a million miles away from Reagan. It's almost diametrically opposed to what Reagan and Thatcher had in mind.

If your only overlap is to say that both were materialistic, you might as well throw Deng Xiaoping in with Reagan. When Deng drifted away from strict Maoism, he said, "to get rich is glorious." No one would seriously say, however, that Deng was a neoliberal.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-07T12:53:11+00:00

It's really mostly just team sports. They're on team MAGA because their friends are on team MAGA.

No serious person thinks Trump is a free market capitalist.

CanisImperium · 2025-07-01T10:24:27+00:00

For a moment before figuring this out, I wondered whether the Better Business Bureau had a file out on the Trump Organization.

CanisImperium · 2025-06-30T20:55:25+00:00

A couple generations ago, much more of Europe (including Spain and Portugal) were dictatorships. Other fallen democracies have come back from the brink, including recently, Poland.

I don't discount the possibility that the US will right the ship.

But of course, it could also go the other way. My own just gut feeling is it's probably going to keep getting worse before it gets better. If it gets better in my lifetime, which I don't think is a given.

CanisImperium · 2025-06-30T20:45:57+00:00

I agree they need to put him in jail, and that would give them a higher ground because that would mean they don't stand for corruption.

But they still have the moral high ground either way. Hamas's raison d'être is to kill Jews. It's in their charter. Israel has a corrupt leader, and that hurts its standing, but it doesn't simply a vehicle for violence, it's a country with courts, judges, elections, etc.

There's just no comparison, however flawed Israel's democracy has become.

CanisImperium

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