“Westworld” premiered on October 2, 2016. If it had been delayed by 7 years, I think it would have been a cultural sensation.

Mostly Southerners, part of the original filibusters’ thinking was that if no more slave states were going to be admitted in the West, they could create new slave states by heading south, way south.

Another common anti-Mamdani thing is to **imagine** things he might do but has never actually said he wants to do:
1. Second-guess his police commissioner (which is kind of his right as her boss, no?)
2. Stop enforcing prostitution laws
3. Turn subway station into service centers for "vagrants"

... 3. Criticized landlords (said “We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants.”)
4. And one lone policy argument: Freezing rent-stabilized rents will drive up housing costs in the long run

1. Didn’t say “growth” in victory speech, but did mention Trump eight times
2. Criticized “bosses” (said unions are good because “the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed”)...

Another thing that's typical of anti-Mamdani arguments is how threadbare they are. I've gone through that WaPo Editorial Board piece several times here and I can only find four specific things they criticize him for if you ignore their handwaving...

To put things in perspective, during this crisis, nearly 3 million Venezuelans have settled in Colombia, a country with a population of about 48 million. Proportionally for the US, that would be like absorbing 21 million new residents.

Somewhere around 8 million Venezuelans have fled the Maduro regime. That’s more than the estimated number of Syrians who fled Assad, remaking much of Europe’s politics. The vast majority went to Colombia and other neighboring countries. Around 10% or ~700,000 immigrated to the US.

The Coney Island Globe was going to be a giant tower of sightseeing and 50,000 permanent residents. It was never built (aside from a few pilings) and turned out to be a massive stock swindle.

Semi-related, in terms of bubble manias, lately I have been thinking back to Thomas J. Campanella’s wonderful book “Brooklyn: The Once and Future City” which delves deeply into the Coney Island Globe (depicted on the cover)

press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

This piece by @willdouglasheaven.bsky.social is so good. For instance, it explains the rash of “AGI is coming, I hear” conversion stories that folks like Ezra Klein published: they got AGI-pilled www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/o...