What are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Flaws?

Sure I'll go find "some ukranians".

US private weapons of death industry - are making a killing no doubt. Yes, Ukraine are also benefitting from the situation in terms of holding off a very fucking horrible invasive war of annihilation. But what has this any of this got to do with the US army?

You said you were calling attn to AOC’s “brazen hypocrisy” but you were actually accusing her of not living up to your personal ideals

anyway the Ukraine issue is a big diversion from the fact that so called liberal left US politicians, with massive led by donkeys energy and little else are never going to change fuck all for the people that desperately need change.

Here's what she said in 2020:

“It’s incredibly irresponsible for the Army and the Navy to be recruiting impressionable young people and children via live streaming platforms," Ocasio-Cortez told Motherboard. "War is not a game, and the Marine Corps’ decision not to engage in this recruiting tool should be a clear signal to the other branches of the military to cease this practice entirely.”

Seems like she objected to this particular recruitment tool rather than to recruitment in general.

“In a statement, Ocasio-Cortez’s office told Teen Vogue that “a wide variety of opportunities” will be presented to students at the March 20 event, “from the Congressional Art and App competitions to internships with our office.” According to the statement, the presence of multiple military service academies at the fair was meant to allow applicants to receive the necessary nomination letters from their congressional representatives, “a traditionally elite and complex process which is too often most accessible to those from connected, affluent backgrounds,” and would not include military enlistment tables”

Nor tables of any sort

This is a far cry from my rural high school where the military recruiters would hang out every lunch break talking to the farm kids

I’m guessing it was bit different at Quaker high schools

Me and my friend, the other commie weirdo in the school, would laugh at them until they acted like they going to beat us up.

I never saw a recruiter on campus, they just opened an office in the strip mall across the street next to the church that gave free lunches every week if you listened to a sermon.

these got handed out in the halls every day for a year though

https://www.surge.com/content/dam/nagbrands/us/surge/en/surge/surge-16oz.png

lucky, we just had one single day where the Surge street team came to lunch, yelled out SUUUUUUUURGE and everybody rushed their table to get a free can of this exciting new soda.

Do they have Lemon Incest flavor?

I can remember going into a British Army recruiting centre drunk on cider with some daft friends when I was 13 and taking the piss out of it all. Big tache-faced army cunt says "we kick shit of the army, we don't take them in ... Now FUCK OFF!". I've barely budged an inch, politically since the age of 13, which will no doubt please condescending tedious wankers like Aimless!

No one in my graduating class died in Iraq but 12 lost a foot to diabetes.

read what you're saying

coming out against military recruitment of poor young people

then read what she's saying

a traditionally elite and complex process which is too often most accessible to those from connected, affluent backgrounds

then tell me that you're not infantilizing non-white folks

Ah yes, the moment where someone argues that making it easier for ALL people to become cannon fodder is real equality. Miss me with that.

The (academy) recruits in question are children, no?

haha milo I totally forgot in college getting the full court press on Surge every day

a more interesting question would be: how do we sustain a systemic critique of american imperialism while also recognizing that its tentacles intersect with industry in a way that disproportionately provides upward mobility for the white kids graduating as officers?

but that probably isn't as satisfying as telling HS students from the bronx that you know what's best for them.

i agree with you on the fundamentals here, i think. i'm just asking you to think clearly about the situation and what you're actually saying.

The (academy) recruits in question are children, no?

Graduation from a military service academy has measurable perquisites within US society that can put you on an escalator to financial and professional success, if you are inclined to take advantage of them. Those "children" who see and understand this reality are not mistaken that this is a very different upward path from simply enlisting in one of the service branches.

while also recognizing that its tentacles intersect with industry in a way that disproportionately provides upward mobility for the white kids graduating as officers?

A more diverse Lockheed Martin VP corps does not seem like an issue worth concerning ourselves with.

Gutting Lockheed’s military contracts OTOH…

lame and embarrassing post

Socialist or leftist antipathy to the military (and thus military academies) should not be surprising or controversial. That these institutions pave the way for some individuals to enter the ruling class is not a compelling argument if you believe the institutions themselves are destructive and should be destroyed.

It’s also the same argument used to justify recruiting other kids for cannon fodder - get a bonus, get good healthcare, get the GI Bill, ease their path to the middle class instead of the upper class. Recruiters pestering C-students to become grunts in the Marines or an officer in the Air Force are not fundamentally different.

Obviously AOC isn’t team abolish the Army, so calling it hypocritical seems incorrect but whatever support she does give the military(-industrial complex) is fair game.

i'm not talking about an ideological, DEI-style commitment to diversity within odious sectors of society; i'm talking about the material reality of folks of color within a system that currently exists, in spite of my and your antipathy for it. i'm also talking specifically about the efficacy of criticizing a congressperson for participating in a career fair as it relates to a strategy for the widespread implementation of broadly leftist policies. is this worth it? do we even know what we're saying? also: are anarchists immune from white Liberal brain syndrome and paternalistic attitudes?

i agree that the military should be dismantled and that lockheed and martin should be demonized, bu that's not the point i'm making.

um, the US military is providing some very much needed assistance to the ukrainians atm, which would not have been possible in the complete absence of a US military

lol, c'mon man

wait, how is this wrong? If the US announced that it was going to abolish all branches of its military that would have some effect on the conflict in Ukraine, no?

were those the only two posts in that exchange

those were not the only two posts in that exchange, but it seems like the way these conversations normally go is that someone expresses a political position like e.g. 'I quite literally want all branches of the US military abolished' and then when other people ask questions about what this would look like in practise, or what the effects of it would be then there is lots of eye-rolling, and it seems like the implication is that it's pedantic to ask these kind of questions because the political position is never going to be put into practise anyway, like there's an implicit acknowledgement that it's all just empty posturing.

The other thing that bugs me about this...

These academy slots are going to somebody whether you like it or not. This isn't like a generic recruitment drive where they have quotas of people to get signed up.

West Point usually has more applicants than people who get appointments. No act of defiance will change that, so much as ensure that appointments are more likely to go to other people.

Whereas many branches of the military actually missed their targets for recruitment in 2022. That's something you could actually have a material effect on by refusing to let Johnny Lifer talk to a packed auditorium and make the Army sound like Animal House:

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2022/09/several-military-branches-poised-to-miss-recruitment-targets-for-fiscal-2022/

I thought table was talking about abolishing armies in general, not just the US Army, in which case Aimless' comment might have made a bit more sense than it did.

is there anyone in the world who *isn't* in favour of 'abolishing armies in general' in theory though? The majors and generals of the world's armies would also say that they dream of a world without war and conflict, without something more specific about how you would get there it's just a Paul McCartney lyric platitude

budo jeru, I am also in favor of US football being abolished, an argument that has put me in similar trouble before, as it is one of the ways in which a number of Black kids get out of dire situations. (Yes, that has been put forward as a response to me IRL).

My answer there and my answer here are similar: supporting kids so as not to have such limited options is a start, and imho, cutting out the options that are harmful might illuminate and break the cycle in a real way.

Arguments about giving non-white populations access to wealth and prestige through officer school seems to me to be the essence of the hollowness of many arguments of this type, buoying the MIC without dealing with any of the systemic problems that cause this state of affairs in the first place.

The questions I ask are: why is it important for people to gain wealth and prestige via military officer training? Why do people seek it out in the first place? Might there be serious systemic problems making an undeniably onerous option seem like the best one? If more resources flowed to education and community sectors in poorer and less white areas, would that draw down young peoples’ desires to join an inarguably negative force in the world?

Dear non-white teens, why do you seek wealth and prestige?

The military is not known for conferring wealth. Prestige, maybe, although most patients of the VA would beg to differ.

Dear non-white teens, why do you seek wealth and prestige?

takes one to know one

The military is the best example of socialism in America!

takes one to know one

re Jeff's post:

I haven't properly read the book, but my understanding is that Fredric Jameson argues here, at length, that everyone should join the US Army as a socialist strategy:

https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Fredric-Jameson-An-American-Utopia-Dual-Power-and-the-Universal-Army-2016.pdf

I suspect that Jameson has hardly committed a violent act in his life, and he was about 83 when he published this, so being conscripted into battle wasn't much of a concern for him at this point.

Jameson also kept jars of his own piss in his home office for years, according to a person I know who grew up with his son, so not so sure I trust piss jar guy to give the best advice on praxis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DcA0p8Tvnk

You sure that's what was in the jars?

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/ybYAAOSw0pBjlSI6/s-l500.png

I think Jameson's book is an overelaboration of the Eisenhowerian gag "if the American people want socialised healthcare they should join the marines like I did", tho Kim Stanley Robinson labours the point in one of his novels that the navy has far lower pay differentials between recruits and top rank than any other organisation in the US.

Another Aaron Bastani talking point.

KSR is also in the FJ book.

Controp: conscript armies produce better war poets than voluntary ones

I like Mike Davis's summary of Jameson / New Left Review types: "Ultimately you couldn’t really understand these guys unless you’d taken showers with them when you were ten"

I don't, and think it's a cheap, vulgar insult for cheap laughs at the expense of intellectual engagement; but even if I did, I would doubt that he was talking about FJ, who did not come from the same milieu as Perry Anderson and friends. He grew up in New Jersey, has never seen the inside of Eton.

a nerve! sorry pinefox, i'm no expert, but i'm definitely on team davis in the context of this piece which is where i ran across the quote. it may be an inaccurate picture in some ways, i'm not really sure.

Although Prisoners received overwhelmingly favorable reviews in historical journals and the left press, it drew sharp criticism for presenting a closed and bleak universe that seemed almost wholly resistant to reform. In an otherwise laudatory review in The Nation, Yale labor historian David Montgomery asked, "What role are the prisoners to play in their own liberation?" At the offices of NLR, some had a similar reaction. "Mike is an exceptionally astute analyst of the enemy, but if I were an American trade union leader I wouldn't go to him to ask which way forward," editorial board member Tariq Ali told me.

By and large, however, the NLR board was elated to have a precocious American—better yet, a precocious working-class American—wash up on its shores. "Marxists have long had this feeling that America shows us our future," explains Blackburn. "Mike's very robust, American working-class style further contributed to his charm." Yet, as even this circumspect editor concedes, "tact wasn't his strong suit." Some staffers thought Davis exploited his background. "Mike could be psychotic. He was very in-your-face about his identity," says a former NLR editor. As Davis himself admits, "I've always had a sort of truck-stop attitude toward effete intellectuals."

Among the first to feel its blows was Marxist literary critic par excellence Fredric Jameson. In his classic 1984 article, "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Jameson had breathlessly described L.A.'s Hotel Bonaventure as the archetypal postmodern structure. Its multiple entryways, elevated gardens, and glass mirrored surfaces formed a delirious "hyperspace," inciting those who entered it to "expand our sensorium." While noting in passing that the hotel's glass skin "repels the city outside," Jameson breezily praised the hotel as "a popular building, visited with enthusiasm by locals and tourists alike." Davis's response was unsparing: "To speak of its 'popular' character is to miss the point of its systematic segregation from the great Hispanic-Asian city outside," he thundered in NLR (where Jameson's essay had also appeared). Cutting through Jameson's theoretical haze, Davis emphasized the "smog-poisoned reality" outside and described the hotel as part of an ominous trend of "large vivariums for the upper middle classes, protected by astonishingly complex security systems." (In the endnotes to his 1991 book, Postmodernism, Jameson curtly dismissed Davis as "characteristic of the more 'militant' sounds from the Left.")

Davis's confrontational pose made for an unusually anxious workplace. At one NLR meeting, he stunned his audience into silence with the letter he had sent to Eugene Genovese, who had complained of being spurned by the journal: "Dear Professor Genovese, Fuck you." Then there was Davis's terrifying collection of pets. The centerpiece of the office was his atrarium, filled with a garter snake, an axolotl, and a carnivorous African toad. At an explosive moment toward the end of his tenure, recalled by everyone who witnessed it, Davis spilled his reptiles onto the office's lush carpet.

When I ask Davis about this, he strikes a remorseful note. "If anyone was guilty of wild or outrageous behavior, it was me," he concedes. In the end, though, he says he never felt a part of the Etonian clique around the journal: "Ultimately you couldn't really understand these guys unless you'd taken showers with them when you were ten." He longed to go home.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4850-the-american-earthquake-mike-davis-and-the-politics-of-disaster

Map, with thanks for your reply - not wishing to derail the Critique of AOC Reason, I have redirected a reply here:

Perry Anderson

https://www.thecut.com/2021/10/partying-with-gabriel-ocasio-cortez-aocs-little-brother.html

seems cool! just to save the haters some time he used to be a real estate agent though