• AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    Reading his Wikipedia article and comparing it with other people like Corbyn and Maduro makes him look so bad in comparison. But I’m not taking about the obvious like comparing what they are now or what they have done because Mamdani obviously hasn’t done much by virtue of not having a real political career. Even comparing their very early forays into politics make Mamdani look like a fraud.

    Maduro:

    • Formed an illegal union and slowly climbed up the ranks within unions.
    • Went to Cuba where he was ideologically trained by Cuban communists.

    Morales:

    • Started out being just some dude who’s really interested in football, which was his foot into a coca grower union.
    • Slowly climbed the ranks of the union until he became general secretary of the union.

    Corbyn:

    • Joined the Labour Party and various student activist groups at an early age.
    • Attended a May Day parade in Allende’s Chile which radicalized him.

    Mamdani:

    • Ran a bunch of fake elections (student president and so on)
    • Worked as a foreclosure prevention and housing counselor
    • Got involved in NYC politics

    Overall, Mamdani’s backstory paints him as some dude who just wants to be an elected politician and have always wanted to be an elected politician since he was little. He was never involved in any labor organizing or political activism. Given his backstory, it will isn’t that surprising he would completely capitulate because none of his history thus far show him as someone who cares about anything but the trajectory of his own political career. He’s just young enough that he doesn’t have much of a political career yet, so there’s less opportunity for him to go mask off in being a careerist.

    Edit: I thought about it some more, and my impression of him is even worse now. Let’s look at Sanders. Sanders started out as a participant of the civil rights movement. Mamdani is a millennial, and the millennial equivalent of civil rights activism is stuff like anti-Iraq war protests and BLM. But was he even a participant in those activism or any activism at all? Was he protesting against the Iraq war? Was he protesting against police brutality? Was he even involved in Occupy, the millennial movement that first started in the same exact city he’s running for mayor?

    Damn, I didn’t care for him at all, and even I feel bamboozled after reading his Wikipedia article. Shoulda done the bare amount of investigation by reading a Wikipedia article and going off on him when a lot of his stans are still around lmao

    • Pieplup (They/Them)
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      2 months ago

      Wasn’t his father like a very influential academic of african geopolitics or something i feel like it’s kinda bad faith to leave that out.

      • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        That literally means nothing. Castro’s father was some shitty plantation owner, yet Castro threw out Batista (around the same age as Mamdani I might add) and expropriate all plantations to the socialist state, starting first with his father’s.

        • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz
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          2 months ago

          That baffles me. A child of a Marxist becoming an imperialist ghoul would at least make sense, but instead we get people like Kamala or Buttigeig who seem like they haven’t spent 5 minutes in a room with a marxist, or they wouldn’t be shocked that “titans of industry” side with fascism.

          Its not that they rebel against their parents or use what they’ve learned to evil ends, its like they go their entire childhood without ever listening.

      • redchert
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        2 months ago

        In western academia that means more like helping a think tank manufacture consent to overthrow african governments or inform the cia on how to best archive it.

        • Pieplup (They/Them)
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          2 months ago

          I haven’t personally read his work but that’s not really what the leftists i’ve seen talk about it made it seem like. Made it seem more marxist or marxist-adjacent. anti-imperialist at the very least

    • boboblaw [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      Was he protesting against the Iraq war?

      He would have been like 12 years old.

      During Occupy, at least a teenager or maybe 18.

      I agree with the rest. The “millennial” category just spans such a large range and I guess he’s closer to the zoomer end.

    • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      He was never involved in any labor organizing or political activism.

      Didn’t he play a prominent role in his campus’s SJP, before the 2014 war?

    • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      Next year when I’m eating affordable Halal while in the sewers taking pot shots at the invading South Carolinian Nation Guard I’m going to remember this.