What are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Flaws?

just like black helicopters and similarly far-fetched nonsense that have stuck.

remember the "death panels" mandated by the ACA?

definitely, they executed my grandma last year after a televised trial, it was awful

i don't worry too much about people believing really dumb fake shit about GND because if those people weren't spending their time believing that dumb fake shit they'd be spending it believing some other dumb fake shit

[obligatory these people have more time than you think quip post]

karl otm

they can still sense your strong desire to piss on them, especially when you say "piss on those people". it's a what they call "a tell".

if those people weren't spending their time believing that dumb fake shit they'd be spending it believing some other dumb fake shit

the pity is, all the dumb fake shit they're fed is weighted toward keeping the power and money flowing toward the worst sort of people, but if the 'good people' were to propagate a counter-offensive of dumb fake shit that favored the 'right policies', it would quickly extinguish the very principles that made the 'good people' good people to begin with. you'd end up with The Protocols of the Elders of Wall Street, or some such garbage.

Has anyone pointed out how shitty this thread title is for the AOC conversation hub?

No, but it IS annoying having to keep opening three political threads!

we should have one for everyone

What are Matt Whitaker's Flaws?

have you seen his hair?

no

re: climate change. I think we're doomed to a future world with deeply curtailed human carrying capacity, which means a lot of suffering over the next couple centuries till a new equilibrium of remaining resources and population is achieved. Science communicators have systematically underplayed how grave the consequences, and how difficult total decarbonization will be. More importantly, even later this century as social collapse expands from the most insecure developing nations to their neighbors and right to the borders of the "rich" world, there won't be political will to live smaller, within the planet's limits. As a species, we're just not wired to think of indirect consequences that span millenia into the future. Hell, many go right back to eating cheeseburgers after coronary bypasses.

However, its just awful living with constant reminders of how hopeless the situation may in fact be. I personally aim to live small (vegan, public transport, small apt, sweaters over heating, etc), certainly well below my means, but I'm so tired of the despair, which infects everything. Better that we have politicians that at least make the right noises that they're aware of the situation and offer some sense of hope, than the willfully ignorant making arguments from personal incredulity. So, while I've got reservations that any politically palatable Green New Deal will deter people from using fossil fuels enough to make a marked difference in the world's fate, I'm 100% behind AOC and her GND just so we can have the illusion of hope.

xps i'm holding out for "do you think alexandria ocasio-cortez is a sociopath?"

lol!

Jonathan Chait thinks she's a socio-something].

While rightly insisting on the primacy of climate change, it betrays its own confidence by submerging climate policy into a broader array of priorities. It simultaneously argues that we must move with urgent speed on climate, but that we must first achieve comprehensive socialism in order to move.

life's a bitch

thread title is a ref to the old "what are barack obama's flaws" thread i assume

right

ILX can be hard to follow if you’re just tuning in; you gotta read some recaps of the backstory at least

Shoulda called it "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: New, Green, and Deal!"

Wait, there’s a thread called What Are Barack Obama’s Flaws? I just thought it would be appropriate to highlight her shortcomings. Weird!

Alfred, actually it’s even worse, there are 4 politics threads to click back and forth between. It’s living hell!!!!!

lol xp

Climate scientists I've talked to, even the most hopeless about prospects for preventing catastrophic warming, tell me there's one thing that changes our orientation to the crisis. There's one thing that changes our sense of our shared capacity to fight for something better than falling victim to forces far beyond our control. It's not changing how we talk about it, or reading more or reading less about what's happening. It's taking action. It's easy to see No Future. It's harder to see something better -- and the only way we ever will is if we start building it today.

hoos for president

hoos sounding like he's on the stump!

definitely, they executed my grandma last year after a televised trial, it was awful

wow, your grandma got a trial?

I would be happy to have 4 AOC threads.

okay I waited six hours, this is some of the worst coffee I've ever had several cups of

http://www.quoteswave.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Even-Bad-Coffee-Is-Better-Than-No-Coffee-At-All.jpg

- Bob Marley

Man that's good

- Bob Marley

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Saturday, February 9, 2019 12:01 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

marilyn monroe iirc

It’s pretty wild that the GOP can’t decide whether they’re going to run with the conspiracy theory that I’m secretly rich, or the exaggeration & mockery of my family’s struggle after my dad died during the financial crisis.

Instead, they decide to defy logic and run with both.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 9, 2019

And her subjects gathered 'round her/Like the leaves around a tree.

GND rollout hasn’t exactly been the greatest the thing

ya. i hope she ditches Kelton soon

trump has weighed in on the GND, and he has no idea what a carbon footprint is

I think it is very important for the Democrats to press forward with their Green New Deal. It would be great for the so-called “Carbon Footprint” to permanently eliminate all Planes, Cars, Cows, Oil, Gas & the Military - even if no other country would do the same. Brilliant!

Doesn't sound so bad to me. Always found cows kinda smug tbh

this so-called "widely used unit of measurement"

Climate change produced extreme weather in Australia has been eliminating cows by the hundreds of thousands this summer.

ya. i hope she ditches Kelton soon

why flopson

This interview was interesting. Chuck Todd couldn't totally turn off his essential Chuck Todd-ness, but it's worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wypN0PChAtg

xp- j.

you don't pay for socialism by printing money. Scandinavia don't print money, they pay for popular social programs with high (by US standards) progressive but broad-based taxes. there is no other way to do it. it's true that deficit hysteria is overblown, but you don't need MMT to know that. and you can't pay for a permanent expansion in spending/transfers by printing money without costs. using taxes, we can make those costs transparent and choose them democratically. using MMT, the costs are opaque, depend on inflation, and ultimately punted into the future

MMT is a scam with significant parallels to cryptocurrency: shrouded in confusing jargon and terminology (accounting minutiae of fed balance sheets), funded by shady finance billionaires (Warren Mosler Jerome Levy, others), a large online community of die-hard believers who recite its arguments like the fn catechism in the mentions of anyone who tweets about it. seriously, it sucks so bad and i really hope the new gen of progressive politicians don't buy it. it's snake oil twitternomics. there's promising signs that AOC is reconsidering after the backlash to the GND FAQ they posted (and almost immediately took down, and are now claiming doesn't even exist) that cited MMT heavily. to the extent that AOC represents the dems' 'tea party' and exists to shift the overton window the center left, maybe citing crazypants MMT is a good thing. but i don't think MMT deserves to get play at the national level, from the left, and i think AOC's long-term ambitions are more than to be just a strategic counterweight

quotes below are from an MMT profile in the Atlantic a couple years ago. both Mosler and Levy are billionaire financiers

MMT didn’t get much traction outside of academia at first. In fact, it was (and remains) on the fringes of the economics profession itself. “We all had offices in the same alley at the Levy Institute,” Kelton recalls.

Then along came Warren Mosler, a wealthy financier who, as a result of his banking work, had come to some unorthodox and complementary ideas about money. Eager to share his views, Mosler finagled a meeting with Donald Rumsfeld in the steam room of the Chicago Racquet Club. Rumsfeld led him to Arthur Laffer, the right-wing economist who came up with the “Laffer curve” theory promoting low taxes, and Laffer, in turn, connected Mosler with his future collaborator, the economist Mark McNary. In an independently published paper titled “Soft-Currency Economics,” Mosler, drawing on McNary’s research, argued that taxes are what create a demand for federal spending and that deficits don’t cause countries to default on their debt.

Kelton is an intellectually disingenuous hack who went to bat for Trump tax cuts on MMT grounds that the deficit increases didn't matter. it's a total coincidence that she is associated with the left, which she herself has admitted in the past. from the same profile:

Kelton sees the fundamentals of her work as “a descriptive analysis that could be exploited by either side: Democrats and Republicans can use the insight to push tax cuts or increase spending.” Indeed, the idea of a big-spending economic stimulus to fix the country’s infrastructure served as a common ground for Trump and Sanders voters who liked the idea of jobs perhaps more than they disliked the idea of national indebtedness. If that’s what voters want, then MMT is a rare bird: an economic theory that not only validates their hunches, but contends that they’re the key to a healthy, stable, prosperous economy for all.

there are very good reasons we don't use functional finance rules (which were first proposed by Abba Lerner in the 50s, if not earlier) where treasury and central bank are consolidated and fiscal policy is used to control inflation. it's very hard for a government to credibly commit to controlling inflation, which is why every country has an independent CB that controls money supply/interest rates.

if you try to follow MMT logic all the way through you'll notice there's a huge bait and switch involved. we can print money to fund spending, and deficits don't matter because we can pay it off by printing money. the only thing that matter is if inflation erodes the value of the money we are using to pay off the deficit. but then we'll just use fiscal policy (cut spending, raise taxes) to bring down inflation. so all they did is punt the taxes and spending down the road, to something we'll deal with when inflation hits. they don't like saying this, that all gets you is to shift the budget constraint out to the inflation frontier, because (i) it's not original, everyone has known this for at least 50 years, and (ii) they prefer to present MMT as a magical new world with no constraints. to the left this means you can have a green new deal, basic income, job guarantee without raising taxes, to the right it means Republicans can pass an insanely regressive tax cut and that's perfectly fine because the deficit doesn't matter

if it’s wrong to believe the deficit doesn’t matter I don’t want to be right.

oh well that is disappointing. she's certainly talking herself up well then

i think i must have seen that marshall steinbaum fellow, who seemed legit, say something approving of her and hence

if it’s wrong to believe the deficit doesn’t matter I don’t want to be right.

― Norm’s Superego (silby), Saturday, February 9, 2019 8:44 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

saying 'the deficit doesn't matter' in the sense of, we don't need to freak out and pay it off is one thing. saying you can pay for anything forever and revenue doesn't matter is a different thing

i think i must have seen that marshall steinbaum fellow, who seemed legit, say something approving of her and hence

― j., Saturday, February 9, 2019 8:51 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

marshall is semi-legit and strategically neutral on MMT. he and kelton have work together about student debt that crisis that doesn't really rely on MMT

Her speaking voice sucks and she's going to have vocal problems pretty soon if she doesn't change it. I genuinely think a lot of "SHE'S DUMB!!!!" stuff coming from the right is an unconscious reaction to her voice. I think she's pretty all right generally, but the voice messes me up because 1. I'm old and 2. moms was an opera singer.

i like her voice

You're welcome to.

I mean, vernacular changes because folks like the new way of speaking. Dinosaurs don't like change, folks into voice production don't like undersupport and speaking head voice.