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Cuomo defeated in NYC Democratic Mayoral Primary

Hercules56 said:
Ask the New York Times.
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The New York Times manufactures animosity by conflating the entire NY Jewish Community with the pro-Israel advocacy groups that they use as their issue experts. Jewish New Yorkers (of which I am one) care about housing and affordability, not just Israel. In a primary with two Jewish opponents, polling indicates that Mamdani's support among Jewish voters is roughly in line with his overall popularity. Brad Lander gets a lot of credit for this by showing it was OK for Jews to like Zohran.
 
Hercules56 said:
Columbus never enslaved or persecuted any Americans.
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Shame on whomever taught you history.

Columbus' log:
They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want... As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts..
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He offered to the Crowns of Europe, in exchange for financing his next expedition, "as much gold as they need, and as many slaves as they ask." In 1495 they rounded up 1500 Arawak men and put them in pens guarded by dogs, then loaded the 500 strongest into ships to Spain. 200 died en route and the remainder put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town. Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."

When too many died in captivity, gold became the means for making good on his promises. The Arawaks throughout Hispaniola were given impossible quotas of gold they had to deliver and were maimed when they failed to meet the quotas. They fled, and were hunted and killed.

Howard Zinn:
In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.
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This history has now been purged from most public school curricula in the United States.
 
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Slavery is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, and the pen of the translator. By some standards he doesn't seem to have been as wicked as many who followed him, but whatever fairly benign attitude he showed on first appearance, his willingness to implement severe policies and exploitation is well documented.

I'm willing to cut old Columbus a little slack - a man of his time and culture, after all. But if we should not single him out as worse than his fellows or judge him by standards he could not have shared, neither should we single him out as a hero in a time he could not have foreseen. Correcting history is not erasing it.
 
bruto said:
I'm willing to cut old Columbus a little slack - a man of his time and culture, after all. But if we should not single him out as worse than his fellows or judge him by standards he could not have shared, neither should we single him out as a hero in a time he could not have foreseen. Correcting history is not erasing it.
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It's a problem then that Columbus was imprisoned by Spain for his actions in Hispaniola. Even by the standards of his day, he was considered brutal and incompetent.
 
mumblethrax said:
It's a problem then that Columbus was imprisoned by Spain for his actions in Hispaniola. Even by the standards of his day, he was considered brutal and incompetent.
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tbf, he was arrested by Bobadilla, who had a conflict of interest and animus towards the Columbuses (it was a family enterprise). The King quickly freed him and restored his wealth. He did not, however, reinstate Columbus as governor of Hispaniola.
 
Reformed Offlian said:
tbf, he was arrested by Bobadilla, who had a conflict of interest and animus towards the Columbuses (it was a family enterprise). The King quickly freed him and restored his wealth. He did not, however, reinstate Columbus as governor of Hispaniola.
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True, but Bobadilla was sent to Hispaniola precisely because allegations of Columbus' brutality had already reached Spain. You can completely ignore Bobadilla's report and Columbus still does not seem up to contemporary moral standards, shoddy as they were.
 
mumblethrax said:
True, but Bobadilla was sent to Hispaniola precisely because allegations of Columbus' brutality had already reached Spain. You can completely ignore Bobadilla's report and Columbus still does not seem up to contemporary moral standards, shoddy as they were.
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Agreed. I'm just quibbling with the description that he was "imprisoned by Spain". There was no due process that put him there for any crimes, and the King quickly decided that the official who had put Columbus in chains had exceeded his authority.
 
grunion said:
Shame on whomever taught you history.

Columbus' log:


He offered to the Crowns of Europe, in exchange for financing his next expedition, "as much gold as they need, and as many slaves as they ask." In 1495 they rounded up 1500 Arawak men and put them in pens guarded by dogs, then loaded the 500 strongest into ships to Spain. 200 died en route and the remainder put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town. Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."

When too many died in captivity, gold became the means for making good on his promises. The Arawaks throughout Hispaniola were given impossible quotas of gold they had to deliver and were maimed when they failed to meet the quotas. They fled, and were hunted and killed.

Howard Zinn:

This history has now been purged from most public school curricula in the United States.
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Just because the Arawak were born in America, that doesn't make them 'Americans'....
 
kookbreaker said:
That's nice. But this is a political party, not a court of law. If I have a group and I find a sex pest is among the members I don't need a lawsuit or conviction to toss them out. If you are an employer and you find multiple people accusing your employee of unwanted sexual advances you don't need a trial to fire them if your investigation finds the accusations credible.

The New York Attorney General says 11 women made credible accusations of unwanted sexual advances and Cuomo resigned the Governorship as a result.

The Democratic Party does a decent job of getting rid of sex pests in its ranks - at least once revealed - and getting rid of them. I've already told the story of my own state representative on this forum.

Inviting the same sex pest back to run for mayor undermines almost all of that work. And for what? To stop a social democrat from winning a job nobody has advanced from since the 19th century?
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Well, working for the people who've elected them demeans the main powerbrokers within the party. Better for them to associate with sexual assaulters than work for the good of the country.
 
mumblethrax said:
I mean, I don't think he's going to have a useful response, because "innocent until proven guilty" was never a good faith attempt to redeem Cuomo in the first place. Cuomo is still under active criminal investigation for the nursing home scandal, and that's reason enough not to vote for him. If Mamdani was found to have said something genuinely anti-Semitic, that would be a major scandal and sufficient reason not to support him, despite the fact that no crime had been commited. The idea that you need to have been convicted of a crime or be found liable in a civil action (where "innocent until proven guilty" is not a thing) in order to be considered unelectable is just an transparent feint from someone trying to redeem the irredeemable.
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And I would also say criticism of the genocidal actions of the most anti-semitic* state in the middle east cannot by definition be itself anti-semitic.

*The Palestinian people are a semitic people themselves, descended from the inhabitants of the region from 2,000+ years ago, intermingled with other semitic groups living nearby and since moved into the region.
 
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