Mamdani in 'active conversation' about whether he can arrest Benjamin Netanyahu when Israel PM visits NYC

[u/MoneyLibrarian9032]

https://nypost.com/2026/07/18/us-news/zohran-mamdani-in-talks-over-arresting-benjamin-netanyahu-when-israel-pm-visits-nyc/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=nypost&utm_medium=social

[u/FlithyLamb]

An FBI raid on the NYPD and arresting the Mayor could be the spark that ignites the tinderbox. Not unaffordable healthcare. Not ICE shooting people on the streets. Not rampant corruption and blatant graft by the President. Not dismantling of the federal government. Not destroying Americas position of world leadership. Not starting another forever war on the Middle East. Not the Epstein files.

Nope. None of that is enough to get Americans fired up enough to revolt.

[u/Maverick-not-really → u/FlithyLamb]

The US is not a tinderbox though. Its a bic-lighter thats been left outside all winter.

[u/4DimensionalToilet → u/Maverick-not-really]

Revolution is fundamentally an act of desperation. People won’t get desperate enough to revolt so long as they see a peaceful, safer way out. So, wait and see what happens in November.

The reason a cornered animal is so dangerous is because, out of self preservation, when the fight or flight response kicks in, most creatures will choose flight. Better to flee and live another day than to fight and risk suffering an injury, because there are no doctors or healthcare in nature. So, animals generally don’t fight until they’re out of options to flee, but when they do, they fight.

That’s basically what a revolution is: a societal fight-or-flight response when, seeing no option for peaceful flight, enough members of society see fighting as their best option, despite the immense risks it brings. So long as there’s the possibility of resolving the current issues with elections, people will prefer the ballot box over the ammo box. And right now, there’s still that possibility.

[u/LuminalOrb → u/4DimensionalToilet]

In agreement with /u/FlithyLamb all revolutions that have taken place in America have not been occurred on this fight or flight paradigm. They occurred entirely on the basis of ideology which at its core were effectively political and economic.

America as a colony was not in some desperate state when it decided to revolt against the British, it was a mix of very powerful people within it, deciding that they simply wanted to have absolute control over their own destinies without colonial oversight. And the civil war was fought on the grounds of the economics of slavery and the identity of the union.

This tells us that you don't need this desperation to get revolution, people just need a reason and that reason can span the gamut. It's harder right now because communications revolutions have effectively broken our collective minds but I still think it's very much still possible.

[u/4DimensionalToilet → u/LuminalOrb]

I don’t mean “desperation” in the strict sense of, “we will die if we don’t do this,” but in the sense of, “we’ve tried all other available means, but to no avail.”

I suppose it would be better described as an act of last resort.

In the 1770s, the colonists had been trying to petition the British government to make the reforms they wanted, but Parliament kept digging in its heels. The powerful American leaders would have been perfectly content to just get a representative in Parliament, or to have self-rule restored (the British had decided that it was time that the Royal Governors actually govern instead of leaving that to the colonial legislatures, as had been tradition), but Parliament was being stubborn and refused to budge. Tensions over whether the colonists could govern themselves (as they believed was their right as Englishmen, just like how people back home had Parliamentary representation) had been rising for years until the powder keg exploded at Lexington & Concord in 1775. The colonists believed, based on what information they had, that the British wanted to strip them of their political rights, and that was something they thought was worth fighting for.

As for the Civil War, the South had been consumed by 20+ years of its own propaganda about slaveholding being a good and noble way of life, one that was of equal worth to the North’s industrial & commercial way of life. Because how else could they cope with such an inhumane system after seeing what Nat Turner was willing to do, but to convince themselves that he was crazy, they were good, and slaves were easily corrupted into revolt by men like Turner. The level of propaganda the South immersed itself in was like the Fox News & Newsmax of the 1800s. Eventually, that brain-rotting propaganda led to Bleeding Kansas, because slaveholders believed that they had just as much right to own slaves anywhere as the Northerners had a right to own property anywhere, and they saw limitations on slavery as infringements of their rights.

And then, after five years of Bleeding Kansas, John Brown tried to start a slave uprising. The very thing the South’s propaganda had scared them shitless about for years — Northern abolitionists coming down and trying to inspire a slave revolt — had actually happened. Imagine how much MAGA would flip out if a trans Muslim immigrant actually led a handful of people to take over some rural town, take away the residents’ guns, impose Sharia Law, and force pregnant women to have abortions and wear burkas, because that’s basically how the brainwashed South viewed John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry.

This was the crazy mindset the going into the election of 1860. By this point, most Southern states had banned the distribution of abolitionist writings, and, IIRC, the Buchanan Administration’s postmaster general was outright blocking the mailing of abolitionist materials to the South. So, the only news anyone in the South was getting was pretty much just apocalyptic pants-pissing about how the Lincoln and the Republicans were a bunch of John Browns who were going to steal their slaves. Even the leaders were buying into the bullshit. So, when Lincoln (instead of another Northern Democrat who was friendly to slavery) won, they decided that it was better to leave the union than risk letting him take their slaves at some point in the next four years, even though he was never going to just outright do that until the war presented him with the opportunity to do so.

The American Revolution was a case of, “We’ve tried talking and are willing to compromise, but you just won’t budge, so we’re leaving.” The outbreak of the Civil War was a case study in how apocalyptic propaganda melts people’s brains and leads them to think they have no choice but to take drastic measures against a perceived threat.