What are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Flaws?

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.

There were some super-elderly partners who still occasionally came to the office at my last job, one of whom I suspected very strongly had to be literally spoon-fed by his assistant.

But it's the idea again that you are only worth something if you go to a specific place, during specific hours and are paid a specific amount for it. It's so boring.

that SXSW talk is good listening

the bits DJI quoted starts from a guy's question at 55:15. best part of that answer imo:

"... Our technological advancement as a society has outpaced our system for handling finite resources. Because now we are approaching infinite resources. And how do - - - capitalism is based on scarcity, and what happens when there is enough for everyone to eat? What happens when there is enough for everyone to be clothed? Then you have to make scarcity artificial(ly). And that is what has happened. We have created artificial scarcity and that is why we are driven to work eighty hours a week when we are being our most productive at any point in American history. And so we... you know, we should be working the least amount we've ever worked... if we were actually paid based on how much wealth we're producing. But we're not, we're paid on how little we're desperate enough to accept, and then the rest is skimmed off and given to a billionaire."

wonder if she read Inventing the Future

Around 2009ish I was working at a bank that had hours like 8am-6pm and I put together a whole alternative schedule where I could do my same job but just in an abbreviated timeframe ( I think it was ~32 hrs/wk) and I was happy to take a salary cut and to do it on a trial basis to make sure I could cover all the work. It totally got denied because it would "look bad" to my teammates and because I wasn't going to use my spare time doing something work-related/enrichment, like going to law school or getting an MBA. It was so ridiculous (I quit). I forgot about it until my friend, who I worked with there, brought it up when I was consulting at her firm this past fall. Because that firm and so many other firms are all about "agile working" now.

they have to be. it's like work from home, once a few companies start doing it, everyone's going to have to either start or have trouble attracting top-rate talent

Harry Enten still dumb as a wooden pundit: https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/16/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-polls-like-trump-poll-of-the-week/index.html

(The fact that AOC is not running for national office and therefore has no reason to give a shit how she's polling nationally does not occur to him until paragraph 11:

It could be the case that Ocasio-Cortez doesn't and perhaps shouldn't care that her ratings have gone south. She clearly has a core group of supporters and is able to drive the national press conversation. For her own electoral sake, the group of voters who will decide her fate are in a slice of the Bronx and Queens' sections of New York City.

There's also nothing unique about nationally known politicians being unpopular with the general electorate. As I have noted on Twitter, almost every single candidate running for president in 2020 is more disliked than liked among all voters.

Still...

get ready for lots more tedious silliness of this kind in the months and years to come

I think we are entering an era where every single politician with a national rep is going to have either essentially 0% approval from Dems and some measurable amount of disapproval among their fellow Republicans, or vice versa, which is to say that everybody's going to have negative approval ratings overall.

I have never been polled about a candidate in my life.

Or any politician.

Me neither. I’ve never been polled about anything. I guess maybe it’s because I don’t answer calls from numbers I don’t recognize

Try moving to a swing state.

maybe eventually enough state legislatures will pass the national popular vote interstate compact and everyone's vote will actually count again

I was polled and I voted for AOC over Joseph Crowley.

Socialists in Congress expose how big capitalists rip off US taxpayers. Ex: tax-money helps pay for drug research but none of the "private" profits made on those drugs flow to the public that invested. So taxpayers subsidize drug company "private" profits.https://t.co/lClcYvPBYx

— Richard D. Wolff (@profwolff) March 19, 2019

not trying to defending big pharma here, that's for fucking sure, but the counterargument to that line of thinking is that the benefit to taxpayers comes in the form of greater availability of drugs, improved effectiveness of drugs, etc. obviously there are a ton of issues with that (for example, miracle drugs like oxycontin), but it's not like taxpayers funded a private yacht company and never see any changes in their lives - it's medical research that directly affects the drugs that become available.

similar areas where taxpayers are providing the funding for R&D and don't see "direct" returns: NASA, DARPA.

the question is whether the pharmaceutical research that's being funded by taxpayers would still take place if it was entirely funded by the pharmaceutical industry. i have no idea about that.

again, not saying that big pharma doesn't totally abuse the system and that maybe (like they allude to in the clip) it would be possible for them to funnel some of their ludicrously high profits back to the government. but i don't think it's scandalous or unusual that drug research is partly funded by taxpayers, or that taxpayers don't see a "direct" return