the thinking woman's crumpet

- "What's with all the rubber ducks?" - "Well, it's sort of a secret, but we can tell the story."

It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.

It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.

The video contrasts Trump and Mamdani- basically, Mamdani uses aesthetic and the flashy, “look at me helping you” social media vibe of his to get the less flashy but more important stuff done. It will help New Yorkers, but they don’t care about that until after it’s already done, and even then they might not realize what actually happened.

Trump, on the other hand, does aesthetic and that’s it. His policies don’t make logical sense because he doesn’t care about logic- he does something because it sounds tough or it sounds patriotic. There’s two problems with this- tough and patriotic in the American sense are incredibly violent and bigoted, and Trump is really good at being “tough and patriotic”.

Musical: Kiss Me, Kate

Composer: Cole Porter