What are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Flaws?

orange peels, that's recycling

Enjoying flying for another five years, its what I say.

Meantime:

pic.twitter.com/D1U7GQdnDg

— /var/tmp/steckel (@steckel) March 9, 2019

The notion that Obama's policies were basically the same as Trump but only more polished is laughable bullshit. There's plenty to criticize with Obama. However, if your goal is a more keynesian mixed economy or anything to the left of that, the list of complaints with Trump is of clearly of another magnitude.

She's claiming there's common policy ground between them and cautioning against varnishing the past, which is healthy imho

xp You're really bad at reading.

I think one can disagree without insulting reading skills.

"Obama's policies were basically the same as Trump but only more polished" is dubious as a summary of what Omar actually said.

'perpetuating the status quo' 'fundamentally the same framework' 'his policies are bad but many of his predecessors policies also had really bad policies'

This is straight 'centrists and GOP are too similar' argument, which is a legitimate argument, especially for anyone who's political goal is building new voice left of center. It is just not an argument I agree with wrt Obama's presidency.

xxp - no, seriously, it's not a disagreement, you just seem really bad at reading comprehension.

Well explain then.

You're either too dumb to understand Omar's words or you're trolling with a bad faith reading of them. I prefer to think the best of people, so I assume you're just kind of dumb.

Anyway thanks Simon.

VHS you're putting words in her mouth. She said "many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies." You have rewritten this as either "Obama's policies were basically the same as Trump's" or as "centrists and GOP are too similar," both of which are substantive tweaks to what she said, filling in an argument she COULD have been leading to, but was not unambiguously making.

I could just as easily say that in context, and common-sensically, the argument she was actually leading to was: "Trump's immigration and drone-war policy are awful, but focusing on this one guy misses that Obama got away with horrible (if in some ways different) shit in both areas, and so if we just focus on the one bad guy we're not going to arrive at a more moral policy." It doesn't require a "basically the same" construction, which imho is being flung around the Internet now as essentially a straw-quote: "she said they're basically the same, which is obviously wrong, therefore she'd a tendentious dummy." Why not just say "I don't brook any comparison of Obama and Trump's immigration and drone policies, in my view the two are so fundamentally different as to make this absurd," and then try to defend that position?

She horrified centrists on morning shows today with her remarks about FDR and racism, but, uh, the skewing of the New Deal toward Southern Democrats who needed the federal beneficence but not liberty for the black men whose votes and civil liberties they'd quashed is standard history at this point.

she seemed kinda skittish about the DSA endorsement so I figured she'd be backpedaling on this sort of talk. but I guess not so much

"Capitalism is an ideology of capital — the most important thing is the concentration of capital and to seek and maximize profit," she said during an interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, according to Bloomberg News.

"To me, capitalism is irredeemable," she added, arguing that capitalism's goals come at a cost to people and the environment, Bloomberg reported.

The congresswoman, who has described herself as a democratic socialist, added during her interview that "we should be scared."

"Just as there’s all this fearmongering that government is going to take over every corporation and government is going to take over every business or every form of production, we should be scared right now because corporations have taken over our government," she said.

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/433394-ocasio-cortez-capitalism-is-irredeemable

oh YES

Ok great, now talk about Reagan and:
- Iran-Contra +
- The gutting of our mental health system +
- The explosion of homelessness under his watch +
- The crack epidemic

Maybe instead of insinuating I’ve never read a book, be open to the idea that we’ve read different ones. https://t.co/aP96oCCBwm

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 11, 2019

Shd have led w HIV stuff bc the second tweet is also v dope

All else aside, how on earth can 'never read a book on ____/never read a book full stop' possibly function as a criticism of a politician at this point in time, how.

She needs to appear on a Killer Mike track stat

i am catching that AOC fever

“"To me, capitalism is irredeemable," she added, arguing that capitalism's goals come at a cost to people and the environment, Bloomberg reported.”

Should I read neo-liberalism or libertarianism instead of capitalism? Because these nordic model nations still rely heavily on free market economics to achieve their desired progress.

and ethnically homogenous populations

and they are also fucking up the environment

tbf, she started that by saying "Capitalism is an ideology of capital — the most important thing is the concentration of capital and to seek and maximize profit." So it could be that she's saying is irredeemable is *that*. Back the capitalism-ism vs. capitalism discussion we were just having on one of these threads... capitalism as gospel/ideology definition, not as economic definition. I think you could think that ideology is irredeemable, and (possibly) still think that markets might be valid mechanisms for various things. But she might be taking a more radical stance than that.

Norway I get. Sweden and Denmark too?

xpost

Gotcha, and I agree with her if she is talking about the gospel of the invisible hand and profit.

That was what I took from it.

all economically advanced countries are economically advanced bc of fucking the environment up. swe and den just do it less than most.

xxp

and most developing/poor countries are poor despite of fucking up the environment, too :)

True. It’s been GOP vs. the people of the United States for almost my entire life https://t.co/4veHq1i5hh

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 12, 2019

So weird and refreshing to have a Democrat congressperson who actually doesn’t give a shit what the other party thinks of her

and most developing/poor countries are poor despite of fucking up the environment, too :)

― flopson, Monday, March 11, 2019 8:48 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if we're talking GHG emissions per cap this is mostly not true

if we're talking GHG emissions per cap this is mostly not true

Also not true if we're talking about historical gross GHG emissions.

Ilhan Omar on the difference between Obama & Trump: "One is human, the other is not"

starting to think she may actually be better than AOC

why are we still ranking them?

why is this still a thread?

why do i have it bookmarked?

Eh, attempts at expelling awfulness from the human race are kind of annoying. Trump is one of us and a lot of us – most of us – are shit.

I accidentally bookmark threads all the time somehow

Saw this on Kottke:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU-SE5eNt04

We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should not feel nervous about the toll booth collector not having to collect tolls anymore. We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.

Then she went on to say:

We should be excited about automation, because what it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing in and investigating the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in. Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage.

<3

^^^ xs a 1000. I don't work a traditional wage/salary job all the time (by choice). Most jobs are meaningless, playacting wastes of time and should be automated or streamlined.

Seems like common sense to me, but the sheer amount of sadomasochists who disagree will fuck it all up for the rest of us.

It's all the people who don't know how to handle free time that isn't dictated out to them.

It's fucking Puritanism!

slash people whose entire concept of human worthiness it tied up in work for work's sake xp

If we had a universal income I would be more than happy to never take another nice job away from a mediocre white man ever again.

what if trump was one of us

why are we still ranking them?

look who didn't get invited to a Fantasy Congress league this year

people whose entire concept of human worthiness it tied up in work for work's sake yachts and gold plated toilets.

I used to work with too many 70-80 year old men who would. not. retire. They would have to eventually be tricked/forced out and given sunset agreements so they could still do some client meetings and get paid but at least they freed up office space. They literally did not want to leave.

and those bitches had so much support staff because they didn't know how to use computers or how to call people themselves.

I can sympathize with feeling strong enough to want to work as opposed to the seventy-one-year-old bag man at Publix who can't live on his Social Security check, but the imaginations of these men are limited to driving their wives to the beauty parlor. That's why my dad won't retire: he won't sit at home yet he's too old for manual labor.

^^^These were rich guys who only knew how to make money. That is all they were interested in, that is who they were.