International Socialism

AVI makes a good point:  

...liberals have become more and more European, and have oriented themselves toward Western European comparisons, just as Europe itself is disintegrating. They have castigated conservatives for being provincial and prided themselves on being internationalists.  But international means China, Japan, India, Indonesia, and Singapore now.

The Chinese would tell you that they remain part of the original international socialism, which was supposedly going to spread to all the capitalist world by Marxist revolution. This was supposedly going to bring, inter alia, equality between the sexes. How's that project going?

China's new divorce law changes everything: wives can only keep what they can prove they bought or paid for, eliminating the automatic division of assets..... According to local media, courts in Shanghai and Beijing have already applied the new rule in recent trials, and the first cases resulted in decisions largely favorable to the husbands, consolidating the new legal understanding. The Chinese reform reflects a trend of tightening family laws in several Asian countries, which seek inhibit marriages motivated by economic gain. However, international experts note that the social impact could be profound: in a country where more than 70% of urban properties are registered only in men's names, millions of women may be left without the right to housing in the event of separation.

There are several uses of "international" and "global" in that article. 

Meanwhile, as this article co-authored by my friend Jim Hanson points out, there's some real internationalism going on in New York city. 

Mamdani’s political mentor, Linda Sarsour, boasted that the Hamas-linked nonprofit Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was the “largest institutional donor to the pro-Zohran PAC.” Public records confirm the connections: CAIR Action funneled money to the “Unity and Justice Fund PAC.” That political action committee dropped $120,000 into the pro-Mamdani Super PAC....

This operation exploited New York’s public financing. Staffers from the Islamic Circle of North America—a group critics identify as a South Asian Islamist branch—made donations totaling $1,300. The city’s matching funds program multiplied that contribution, turning it into $7,700 in public money.

Mamdani’s associations reveal his allegiances. He praised Imam Siraj Wahhaj—an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—as a “pillar of the Bed-Stuy community.” 

What's the women's rights situation like in those Muslim countries, again? Must be pretty good! Surely that explains his extraordinary popularity with young women. They're just voting their self-interests.

One of the good things about our remaining Federalism is how little what happens in NYC matters to me in Western NC. I'm glad they don't have much control over my life; I imagine they wouldn't like it if I had more control over theirs. I'm glad to leave them to their own devices in return for getting to be left alone to mine. Still, if they think they're voting themselves Norway and Sweden, they might be in for a surprise. (Or maybe they are; Sweden's got a lot more crime and violence in their "once utopian" city of Malmö these days, now ranked as more dangerous than Baghdad.)