Is there something in New York City’s water that has made it more insane than usual lately?
A couple of days ago, the New York Post described how there apparently has been a growing beef between the non-dog owners and dog owners in Brooklyn (and had a lot of fun doing it).
By itself, I could understand people complaining about dogs in a more densely populated space, wanting them leashed and owners cleaning up after them. After all, my wife lives in Lima, where plenty of people have good boys and girls (she has an old Cocker named Lioh), and she has told me about people who complain about dogs.
The problem is, that’s in Latin America, where people do not make asinine reasons to dislike dogs or complain about dog owners.
As the Post described, a guy calling himself “Wellstonist,” who is apparently part of some group called “Marxist Unity,” posted a now-deleted take on X: “Dogs in large cities are essentially settler-colonial — a way for their owners to move into and occupy more of the urban space than they are allotted while making it everyone else’s problem.”
Apparently, there was more, but he deleted the tweet, and his account is now protected.
However, he did follow up by apparently saying, “To be clear, the synthesis of this is that trying to create a policy around ‘good dog owners’ and ‘bad dog owners’ is nonsensical. We need to pass common-sense supply-side policy to maintain an agreed-upon amount [of] dogs in major cities through licensing and registration fees.”
But yes, this Wellstonist guy compared owning a dog in a big city to establishing a colony and exploiting the area’s resources, sometimes at the expense of the natives.
You know why else this is worth writing about? Leftists usually apply the phrase “settler-colonial” to Israel, and it’s a favorite phrase of anti-Israel leftists and pro-Hamas activists in the West, as the Post also noted.
Back in October, my friend Victoria Taft provided an example of the term’s use, when Cal Berkeley professor Victoria Huynh offered students extra credit if they were to “attend the national student walkout tomorrow against the settler-colonial occupation of Gaza.”
What makes the use of “settler-colonial” to describe dog ownership in big cities even crazier and oddly-timed is that just a bit further uptown, Columbia University students have been happily cheering on Hamas and calling for the destruction of Israel, something other writers here at PJ Media have been covering.
Why? Hamas is Muslim, and Islam considers dogs ritually unclean.
As one of our resident experts on Islam, Raymond Ibrahim, described back in August, the prophet Muhammad regularly ordered the killing of dogs but later said exceptions could be made for dogs used in herding, hunting, or guarding. Even then, keeping dogs as pets is frowned upon within Islam to the point where one sheik said this risked damnation.
I do not know if this Wellstonist guy was intentionally making an analogy of comparing dogs to Jews through this remark, but the fact that he made such a bizarre take by borrowing anti-Israel language to describe owning a good boy or girl in a big city just demonstrates the weird, fun-hating synthesis of Islam and progressivism we’re seeing in America lately.