"The rollout could’ve been better. Absolutely, I said the rollout has to be cleaned up and fixed."

Said Governor Kathy Hochul, quoted in "How New York’s Second-Home Tax Turned Into a Headache for Mamdani/The bumpy rollout of the tax created an opportunity for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s opponents to fight him in court and in the City Council" (NYT gift link).

Ms. Hochul, was concerned about what she saw as clumsy messaging by Mr. Mamdani as he introduced the esoteric tax to New Yorkers. She told the mayor that he needed to be clearer about how the tax would be administered and whom it would affect, according to two people familiar with their talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. The governor had taken note of how the mayor, a democratic socialist who campaigned on “taxing the rich,” was talking about the policy. In a widely seen video, for instance, the mayor had decided to highlight an especially expensive second home owned by a hedge fund manager, Kenneth C. Griffin.

“There’s a better way to do it,” said, Ms. Hochul a pro-business moderate. “Point to Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes” rather than someone who invests in the city, she added.

Here's that widely seen video, which, exclaiming "Oh, no!," I impulsively clicked off at the 5-second mark:

I did finally watch the whole minute. From the transcript: "This pied-a-terre tax is specifically designed for the richest of the rich, those who store their wealth in New York City real estate, but who don't actually live here.... This is a fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers." 

What's "fundamentally unfair"? It's a child's reasoning: If someone has something that he's not using, it should be mine. 

The NYT calls the new tax "esoteric." I wonder what other adjectives it considered. Is it esoteric because it's hard for the general public to understand, or is it esoteric because it only applies to a discrete group of people?

Socialists in shorts.

I'm reading the NYT article "Is the Democratic Party Facing Its Own Tea Party Moment? A string of primary wins by progressive candidates has revealed the strength of a high-energy insurgent movement but also its potential limitations," which you can read for yourself at that gift link.

It's a topic I'm following, and I've recently blogged about. I said it a week ago: "The socialists are to the Democratic Party what the Tea Party was to the GOP."

So right now, all I want to do is put up something I cropped from one of the photographs:

"Dr. Abdul El-Sayed tried to attract young voters," and he did. They came toddling in wearing shorts, shuffling in slides and sneakers.

If I were a NYT essayist, I'd muse that they are showing us what real, human, embodied and, yes male power can look like.

ADDED: After publishing this post, I dashed off a question to Grok, "Can the males wear shorts and slides to the revolution?" Answer:

"A Wisconsin city spent millions on a grocery store. It didn’t go well/Madison spent millions to build a supermarket across the street from another one."

An opinion piece in The Washington Post.

After eight years of development and more than $8 million spent by the city of Madison, Wisconsin, Maurer’s Urban Market will open in the Bay Creek neighborhood later this month. Local officials have pitched the store as a measure to prevent a “food desert” in that part of town. The truth: Maurer’s is right across the street from another grocery store. And within a mile of three others. How this glut came to be is a good illustration of why the government is not cut out for the grocery business....

"Starting in the mid-2000s, the Democratic Party adopted a position that retail politics was due for an internet upgrade."

"Turning up for church hall meetings was well and fine. But haven’t you heard that Americans are bowling alone? Better to email. Phone banking turned into text-a-thons, where volunteers sent millions of text messages to cellphones we had not yet learned to ignore.... That... felt like the future in 2008.... By 2020, the Democratic advantage in digital campaigning was long gone.... As algorithms turned neighbors into unrecognizable partisans with crazy conspiracy theories, Silicon Valley abandoned the Democrats for Trump. Through it all, the frantic fund-raising text messages just kept coming.... [In the Michigan primary,] Abdul El-Sayed upset the deep-pocketed, establishment choice, Haley Stevens, by building a relational campaign on an economic populist message. El-Sayed won, in part, by characterizing the $62 million in outside money that backed Stevens’s campaign as a sign of... political corruption...."

Writes Tressie McMillan Cottom, in "Socialists Are Winning Because They Listen to People" (NYT gift link).

So... money isn't the answer. You need something other than money, and the socialists do have something. How, then, can they be stopped? The linked column puts it like this: "I’d be looking for the candidates who are thinking and running as if they know that bases are made of people, not dollars."

If you really wanted to show that you are about people, you wouldn't say "bases are made of people." You'd say people matter and hide that the reason they matter to you is they're what is required to make a "base."

The socialists are to the Democratic Party what the Tea Party was to the GOP. All they need now is their Trump.

"It is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potentially presidential swing states."

Said Jonathan Cowan, president of Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, quoted in "Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left/One moderate group says the progressive wins are 'deeply troubling' and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism" (NYT gift link.) 

Top-rated comment over there: "Third Way and some other centrist groups seem far more interested in defeating progressives than defeating MAGA and far more interested in telling Democratic voters they’re wrong than earning their votes. If moderates are losing, then the problem is with those candidates, not the progressives who beat them."

The article notes that "the next big test is only a week away": "In Wisconsin, Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist and state assemblywoman representing the progressive hotbed of Madison, has emerged as the party’s front-runner for governor in another key battleground race." There's not one word about the candidate/candidates the moderates are pushing. 

"I think that these things are going to create a radical spectacle and exuberance for socialist policies that’s going to kind of light a fire for socialism around the country — unfortunately."

David Friedberg explains why Mamdani’s government grocery stores will actually succeed in the short term, and why that’s the entire point.

They don’t need them to work long-term.
They just need the spectacle in time for 2028.

“I think that these things are going to create a… pic.twitter.com/vp0U5iX4vL

— jay plemons (@jayplemons) July 31, 2026

"The DSA, in fact, seems to despise the Democratic Party. Darializa Avila Chevalier has called Joe Biden a 'rapist' and wrote 'Fuck Kamala Harris'..."

"... on social media. She proceeded to be nominated for a House race in New York last week by Democratic voters who presumably do not all share those feelings. The DSA now includes a growing caucus of supporters in Congress, has mayoral candidates well positioned to win in several big cities, and has plans to throw its weight behind a yet-to-be-determined presidential candidate in 2028. The DSA’s feelings about Democrats encompass not only the party’s leadership but also the philosophical commitments that have guided it since the New Deal: a mixed economy undergirded by democratic values. Chevalier, for instance, joined a post–October 7 celebratory rally and portrayed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a defensive response to Western 'bullying.' She previously called for seizing land and the means of production and has repeatedly praised communism. These positions are not holdovers from the idealism of youth or a bygone 'woke' era. They are a by-product of the DSA’s core ideology. The DSA has become a force in Democratic Party politics even as it has grown more hostile to the party, more illiberal, and more dogmatic...."

I'm reading "There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists," by Jonathan Chait, at The Atlantic.

Mamdani's notion of "collectivism" as "warmth" finds its way into the WaPo editorial about Venezuela.

I'm reading "Trump’s bold capture of Maduro was a victory for America. What’s next?" by The Editorial Board of The Washington Post. That's the front page headline. Inside it's "Justice in Venezuela/The next challenge is setting the country up for long-term success."

The editorial ends: "For years, Maduro was a symbol of the false warmth of Latin American collectivism. Now he should spend the rest of his life in a humane American prison. His downfall is good news."

That can't be unrelated to Mamdani's recent assertion: "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."

Look for more "collectivism" as "warmth" rhetoric. I'm not making a new tag for that. Not yet. I'm sticking with the tags "socialism" and "hotness." How absurd is that?

Anyway, the WaPo editors seem rather positive about Trump's action in Venezuela. The mood at The New York Times is different: "Trump’s Attack on Venezuela Is Illegal and Unwise." It ends:

"We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani: "We'll replace rugged individualism with collectivism" pic.twitter.com/dhUqGm2X26

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 1, 2026

He really said that. It's not AI. I checked. From the transcript of the inaugural speech:

"No violence is legitimate, whether verbal or against people. We have to work in depth to counter this process of decivilisation."

Said President Macron, quoted in "Radical left threatens civilisation in France, says Macron/President speaks out after pension reform protests and attacks on elected officials" (London Times).

Presidential advisers said the term was a reference to Norbert Elias, the 20th century German sociologist who described how self-restraint and social inhibitions had civilised Europe, first in royal courts and then among the rest of the population, in his book The Civilizing Process.

This resonates with me because I once used the word "civilized" in the presence of sociologists and experienced the iciest silence of my entire life. Used it jocosely... I'd thought. 

Macron is said to believe the process has gone into reverse in what one adviser called a “Trumpisation of minds and a denial of reality”. 

Trump gets blame for what the left is doing... in France.  

Now, I'm thinking I have 2 kinds of readers: the ones who are saying why should I know or care about the Madison Public Market and...

... the ones who are saying yes, that's the thing that Althouse questioned that one time and Paul Soglin, the Mayor of Madison, instead of engaging respectfully, decided to attack her big time, so she was forced to resort to reason and mockery?

I'm reading "Madison Public Market all but scrapped, as officials make one last plea to alders for funding" (WKOW).

Here's the post I wrote on January 10, 2017:

"Although Piketty favors much higher income tax rates ('virtually confiscatory tax rates have been an immense historical success'), policies that redistribute property rather than income are the heart of his program."

"These would include reparations for descendants of enslaved and colonized people, encouraging countries in the global south to tax the fortunes of nonresidents who do business there, cancellation of debts and a program he calls 'inheritance for all,' in which wealth taxes would reduce large fortunes and provide everyone with a financial cushion. He would also take a large measure of control over corporations away from their managers and shareholders and give it to employees, and create 'a system of egalitarian funding for political campaigns, the media and think tanks.'... He is well aware that changes on the scale he is proposing never happen incrementally.... Piketty doesn’t make predictions, but he treats the current system of 'hypercapitalism' as being obviously doomed. Other than socialism, the only real alternatives are authoritarianism, Chinese-style Communism or 'reactionary projects' like ISIS. ... Absent disaster, it seems possible, or even likely, that [incremental adjustments] will move economic policy in the direction Piketty would want... though to an extent that he would consider pathetically inadequate."

From Nicholas Lemann's NYT review of Thomas Piketty's new book "A Brief History of Equality."

"A socialist since college, Mr. Jacobs sees his family’s 'extreme, plutocratic wealth' as both a moral and economic failure."

"He wants to put his inheritance toward ending capitalism, and by that he means using his money to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top, and that have played a large role in widening economic and racial inequality.... Any leftist trying to shake off an inheritance will, at some point, find their way to Resource Generation; all of the heirs in this article did. The organization, founded in 1998, is a politicization machine for wealthy 18- to 35-year-olds. The nonprofit offers programming that encourages members to see capitalism not as a market-based equalizer promising upward mobility, but as a damaging system predicated on, as Resource Generation puts it, 'stolen land, stolen labor and stolen lives.' In go young people knotted by tension between their progressive values and their wealth; out come determined campaigners with a plan to redistribute...."

From "The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism/Socialist-minded millennial heirs are trying to live their values by getting rid of their money" (NYT).

"[The Hispanic] community is not a get-out-the-vote universe... We’re a persuasion universe and should be treated like whites."

Said Chuck Rocha, "a longtime Democratic consultant," criticizing Democrats who "see Black and brown people as the same," quoted in "There Was No Knockout, So Democrats and G.O.P. Regroup for Next Round/Voters delivered a convincing victory for Joseph R. Biden Jr. but a split decision for the two parties. Now they face perhaps the most up-for-grabs electoral map the country has seen in a generation" (NYT).

He's saying — to put it bluntly — that black people can be counted on to vote for Democrats if you can just get them to vote. They're in the "get-out-the-vote universe." But Hispanic people are like white people. They're in the "persuasion universe." Just getting them out to vote doesn't work. They can — and did — vote for Republicans. The House districts that the GOP flipped in this past election were in what the NYT calls "heavily Hispanic or Asian regions." 

What's wrong with the Democrat's persuasion to Hispanic-Americans and Asian-Americans? 

“Defund police, open borders, socialism — it’s killing us,” said Representative Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat from South Texas... The “average white person,” Mr. Gonzalez added, may associate socialism with Nordic countries, but to Asian and Hispanic migrants it recalls despotic “left-wing regimes.”

Representative Harley Rouda of California, an Orange County Democrat who narrowly lost his bid for re-election... said he suffered with centrist voters and his district’s numerous Vietnamese-American voters, many of whom recoil from the rhetoric of socialism....

"Remember, from the Democratic primary onward, party leaders warned against running on Medicare-for-all, a Green New Deal and other progressive ideas...."

"Instead, Democrats went small, focusing on saving the Affordable Care Act and providing a check on President Trump. But after the party lost House seats and failed to retake the Senate, the knives are out for the left anyway.... It’s understandable that congressional Democratic leaders want to blame something other than their own candidate recruitment process.... [I]t is simply false to claim that standing up proudly for policies such as Medicare-for-all and a Green New Deal hasn’t worked, when the truth is it hasn’t been tried. For decades, congressional Democrats have run every cycle with a moderate message engineered by moderate, high-priced consultants. When this plan succeeds, the party establishment trumpets their wisdom. Yet when it more frequently fails, the leadership and moderates blame the progressives they rejected the entire campaign."

From "Democratic leaders play a ridiculous blame game with progressives" by James Downie (WaPo).

"We’ve got a president who actually suggested selling Puerto Rico. Believe it or not, it could have been worse. He once asked our national security officials if he could nuke hurricanes."

"I mean, at least he didn’t do that. A nuclear hurricane seems like it would have been bad. I mean, it would be funny if it wasn’t. Look. Some of the rhetoric you’re hearing down here in South Florida, it’s just made up. It’s just nonsense. Listening to the Republicans, you’d think Joe was more Communist than the Castros. Don’t fall for that garbage, don’t fall for that okey-doke. Joe Biden is not a socialist. He was a senator from Delaware. He was my vice president. I think folks would know if he’s a secret socialist by now.... [The President] likes to act tough and talk tough. He thinks scowling and being mean is tough, and being rude is tough. But when 60 Minutes and Lesley Stahl are too tough for you, you ain’t all that tough. You got to walk out of a 60 Minutes interview, then you’re never going to stand up to a dictator. If you’re spending all your time complaining about how mean reporters are to you, you’re not going to stand up to Putin.... With Joe and Kamala at the helm, you won’t have to think about them every single day. There might be a whole day where they don’t be on TV. There might be a whole day where they don’t tweet some craziness. You won’t have to argue about them every day. It won’t be so exhausting. Just having a normal president.... We’re not going to have a president that goes out of his way to insult anybody who he doesn’t think is nice enough to him. We won’t have a president who threatens people with jail for just criticizing him. That’s not normal behavior, Florida. You wouldn’t tolerate it from a co-worker. You wouldn’t tolerate it from a high-school principal. You won’t tolerate it from a coach. You wouldn’t tolerate it from a family member. Florida Man wouldn’t even do this stuff."

Said Barack Obama at his Florida rally speech yesterday. Transcript.

"By the way, Kamala will not be your first female president. She will not be your first female president. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be."

"We’re not supposed to have the socialist… Look, we’re not going to be a socialist nation. We’re not going to have a socialist president, especially any female socialist president. We’re not going to have it. We’re not going to put up with it. It’s not going to happen." 

Said Trump, at his rally in The Villages, Florida. Transcript. He chuckles over "especially a female socialist president" — so it's a joke, an inside joke for you people who think women are irrational and disabled by empathy. 

Presumably, he realizes that many of us are picturing Joe Biden stepping — or getting pushed  — aside soon after he wins, if he wins, and Kamala Harris elevated to the presidency. Trump is scaring us about socialism and mixing in the idea that socialism presided over by a female is an especially dangerous form of socialism. He does go on to say that Harris is the most liberal member of the Senate, so there's something especially dangerous about Harris's "socialism," but he does say "any female socialist president," so he frames it as a stereotype of women. I see that he's using that form in a kind of stand-up comedian mode, and I recognize it as humor, but it only works as humor because the stereotype is understood and has some relationship to what people believe is true. 

Should Trump have said "especially any female socialist president"?

Yes, because women are highly empathetic, and it is a real problem.

Yes, because it's a funny joke to ordinary people.

No, because it doesn't help the cause of equality.

No, because it fuels accusations of sexism.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Adolph Reed and his ilk believe that if we talk about race too much we will alienate too many, and that will keep us from building a movement."

"We don’t want that — we want to win white people to an understanding of how their racism has fundamentally distorted the lives of Black people," said Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a Princeton professor of African-American studies and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, quoted in "A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury/The cancellation of a speech reflects an intense debate on the left: Is racism the primary problem in America today, or the outgrowth of a system that oppresses all poor people?" (NYT).

Also quoted, Cornel West, the Harvard professor of philosophy, who is a Socialist: “God have mercy, Adolph is the greatest democratic theorist of his generation. He has taken some very unpopular stands on identity politics, but he has a track record of a half-century. If you give up discussion, your movement moves toward narrowness."

From Reed himself: "An obsession with disparities of race has colonized the thinking of left and liberal types. There’s this insistence that race and racism are fundamental determinants of all Black people’s existence."

Buried in the article is Reed's opinion of Joe Biden: his “tender mercies have been reserved for the banking and credit card industries.” I'd like to hear more of that — skepticism about Biden's racial politics.

"It shall be the policy of the United States to establish a statuary park named the National Garden of American Heroes... All statues... should be lifelike or realistic representations of the persons they depict, not abstract or modernist representations."

"The National Garden should be located on a site of natural beauty that enables visitors to enjoy nature, walk among the statues, and be inspired to learn about great figures of America’s history. The site should be proximate to at least one major population center, and the site should not cause significant disruption to the local community."

From Trump's "Executive Order on Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes."

These realistic statues must be of "historically significant Americans" and "Americans" is deemed to include those who "lived prior to or during the American Revolution and were not American citizens, but who made substantive historical contributions to the discovery, development, or independence of the future United States." In that category, he names Christopher Columbus, Junipero Serra, and the Marquis de La Fayette.

There's a list of the kinds of people who are deemed to "have contributed positively to America." The list includes "opponents of national socialism or international socialism" — a phrase that must rankle the hell out of present-day American socialists — e.g., Bernie Sanders. It implies that no socialist can be among the heroes — only opponents of socialism. What about James Baldwin? Woody Guthrie? Noam Chomsky? W.E.B. Du Bois? Kurt Vonnegut? Madalyn Murray O'Hair? Gloria Steinem? Pete Seeger? Margaret Sanger? Paul Robeson? Dorothy Parker?

Who are your heroes? Who are mine? I tend to eschew idolatry, but if we're going to make a list of American heroes, I want the left wing represented.

And speaking of idolatry, is anyone talking about the impact of this sculpture garden on people who have a strong moral or religious opposition to statues? I'm thinking in particular of Muslims. From the Wikipedia article, "Aniconism in Islam":

Aniconism is the avoidance of images of sentient beings in some forms of Islamic art. Islamic aniconism stems in part from the prohibition of idolatry and in part from the belief that creation of living forms is God's prerogative. Although the Quran does not explicitly prohibit visual representation of any living being, it uses the word musawwir (maker of forms, artist) as an epithet of God. The corpus of hadith (sayings attributed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad) contains more explicit prohibitions of images of living beings, challenging painters [who] "breathe life" into their images and threatening them with punishment on the Day of Judgment....

Note that Trump's requirement that the statues be "lifelike or realistic" mandates the very quality that is the problem for Muslims (who have traditionally sought ways to depict human beings without competing with God, the maker of forms).

"Most fungi take the form of tiny cylindrical threads, from which hyphal tips branch in all directions, creating a meandering, gossamer-like network..."

"... known as mycelium. Fungus has been breaking down organic matter for millions of years, transforming it into soil. A handful of healthy soil might contain miles of mycelia, invisible to the human eye. It’s estimated that there are a million and a half species of fungus, though nearly ninety per cent of them remain undocumented.... [T]he hyphal tips of mycelium seem to communicate with one another, making decisions without a real center.... ...Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist who was taken with Thomas Piketty’s 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' and its insights on inequality. She wondered how mycorrhizal networks, the symbiotic intertwining of plant systems and mycelium, deal with their own, natural encounters with inequity. Kiers exposed a single fungus to an unequally distributed supply of phosphorus. Somehow the fungus 'coordinated its trading behavior across the network'... essentially shuttling phosphorus to parts of the mycelial network for trade with the plant system according to a 'buy low, sell high' logic.... Scientists still don’t understand how fungi coördinate, control, and learn from such behaviors, just that they do. 'How best to think about shared mycorrhizal networks?... Are we dealing with a superorganism? A metropolis? A living Internet? Nursery school for trees? Socialism in the soil? Deregulated markets of late capitalism, with fungi jostling on the trading floor of a forest stock exchange? Or maybe it’s fungal feudalism, with mycorrhizal overlords presiding over the lives of their plant laborers for their own ultimate benefit.'"

From "The Secret Lives of Fungi/They shape the world—and offer lessons for how to live in it" (in The New Yorker)(with the note: "Published in the print edition of the May 18, 2020, issue, with the headline 'Fungus Among Us.'" I can see why they regretted that title, but maybe just own it. You did it. Live with it.)