The Four-Year-Old Competence Test: What It Is and Why You Should Be Annoyed

Let me get this straight. In the same 24-hour doomscroll, I’m supposed to care about a disgraced ex-governor deliberately butchering a mayoral candidate's name, a fatal four-car pile-up on some random highway in upstate New York, and a police chase in England that ended in a field.

This isn’t news. This is a digital confetti cannon of chaos, and we’re all just standing in the middle of it with our mouths open, wondering why we feel so sick all the time.

The Performance Art of Disrespect

Let’s start with the main event, the political theater. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who might actually run New York City soon, has a name that career politicians like Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul apparently find as complex as quantum physics. They keep mispronouncing "Mamdani." Even after he spelled it out for Cuomo in a debate. You could almost see the gears grinding in Cuomo's head, the sheer physical effort of trying to wrap his mouth around a non-Anglo name.

Mamdani himself said he doesn’t care about an honest mistake. It’s the "repeated intentional mispronunciation" that gets him. He calls it the experience of being seen as a "forever other."

And he’s right. This isn't a slip of the tongue. It's a calculated act of political vandalism. No, "vandalism" doesn't even cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of manufactured disrespect. These people can memorize the most convoluted tax loopholes to please their donors, but five simple syllables are a bridge too far? Give me a break.

This whole name game is like a dog pissing on a fire hydrant to mark its territory. It's a primal, stupid, and deeply pathetic way of saying, "You're not from around here. You don't belong in our club." Trump did it constantly with "Kamala," and that smirking ghoul David Perdue turned it into a whole bit before getting shipped off to China as an ambassador. The punchline writes itself. Are we really supposed to believe these are serious people governing a nation? Or are they just overgrown middle-school bullies who’ve traded swirlies for soundbites?

The most damning part of this whole charade comes from columnist Arwa Mahdawi, who points out that her four-year-old’s friends can pronounce her "difficult" name just fine. A toddler has more decency and cognitive ability than a former governor of New York. Let that sink in.

And In Other News, The World Burns (Quietly)

While the political class is busy with their kindergarten theatrics, the world outside the debate stage keeps spinning, often with brutal results. A 29-year-old woman was killed Tuesday on Route 12 in Oneida County. Four vehicles involved. Route 12 was shut down for hours. That’s it. That’s the whole story.

There’s no angle, no hot take. Just a sudden, violent end to a life. A fact that gets a few hundred words in a local news blotter (Woman killed in four vehicle crash in Oneida County Tuesday) before being buried by the next story about a politician’s gaffe.

Then you have the blip from across the pond. A police chase in Scarborough (Four arrests after Scarborough pursuit damages police cars). A car linked to "suspicious activity" rams a few patrol vehicles and ends up in a field. Four people arrested. It’s the kind of story that feels like it was generated by an algorithm to fill space. It’s procedural, sterile, and utterly devoid of meaning to anyone outside that immediate area.

This is the information diet we’re fed. A firehose of high-stakes political performance, genuine human tragedy, and low-stakes local crime, all mashed together into one endless, incoherent feed. We're supposed to process it all as one coherent narrative, and I just can't—

It reminds me of my own local news app. One notification is about a city council zoning dispute, the next is a multi-state manhunt, and the one after that is a picture of a lost cat named Mittens. And offcourse, that’s the point. It’s designed to flatten the world, to numb you into submission. To make the deliberate, cynical act of mispronouncing a name feel just as important as a life cut short in a wreck. Maybe I’m the crazy one for even trying to connect these dots.

It's All Just Static

Look, the problem isn't just that politicians are petty, disrespectful clowns. We’ve known that for decades. The real sickness is the media ecosystem that presents their choreographed insults as headline news while a real tragedy is relegated to a brief, emotionless summary.

The name thing isn't the story. The real story is that we're all forced to watch this garbage, to treat it as a serious political issue, while a family somewhere in Oneida County is planning a funeral for their 29-year-old daughter. The intentional mispronunciation of "Mamdani" and the quiet horror of that car crash are presented on the same digital platter, with the same weight.

It’s all just static, designed to overwhelm and exhaust you until you can’t tell the difference between a political strategy and a human catastrophe. And that ain't a bug in the system; it's the entire goddamn point.