Former president Barack Obama endorsed AOC in last year's mid-terms. You can look it up. What does an endorsement mean, exactly? You figure it out. But come 2020, an Obama endorsement of a Dem candidate will amount to jack shit. He squandered his endorsement-credibility big-time, the goddamn fool.
Anyway, AOC's 'Green New Deal' [link added 2/9] is completely idiotic and immoral. (Think of it like a Soviet 5-year plan, only 10 years this time. Like all socialisms, it begins with "good" intentions and ambitions but turns ugly in practice, and fast.) So much for her superior moral compass. She's not just a dolt, she's a moral dolt. Many people would die if it were implemented. It couldn't be implemented, just as pure socialism could never be implemented. The closest that anyone tried was Mao with his 'Great Leap Forward': scores of millions of people perished through famine. Do the socialism-embracing millennials have a clue? Now they have to redefine 'socialism' to mean Scandinavia to maintain a semblance of credibility, except there are free markets in Scandinavia. And now AOC want's to abolish those, plus seize the imaginary proceeds to fund Scandinavian-style welfare (the moral-dolt part...).
AOC doesn't care about doing her homework before coming up with a policy position. Did she do any homework for her so-called Econ degree from Boston U.? Exactly how lazy a student was she? What is a degree from Boston U. worth? About as much as an Obama endorsement? Did she ever read a word of Mises or Hayek? Did she spend a minute in the HB section of her university library? (How about the B section, where any serious student of the liberal arts would spend oodles of time?) These are legitimate questions.
If she had done her homework, she would know that homework-doing people like NASA's James Hansen propose nuclear power as a viable alternative to fossil fuels if we really want to get serious about combating their evident effects on climate change
[Edit 2/8: it appears that details about nuclear energy in AOC's 'Deal' are hard to come by this early on. (Shitty mainstream media.) No matter; I can just 'do the AOC thing' and recklessly and unaccountably assert things about it, right?] [Edit 2/9: the text of the 'Deal', now linked above, doesn't mention nuclear, but: "The ultimate goal is to stop using fossil fuels entirely, Ocasio-Cortez's office told NPR, as well as to transition away from nuclear energy." ffs, nuclear would be required to make this proposal credible, and AOC's track record already sucks credibility-wise.]
Any 'Green New Deal' would be especially idiotic if it required the USA to make changes unilaterally while nations like China continue their carbon-intensive ways.
[Edit 2/8: it appears that details about nuclear energy in AOC's 'Deal' are hard to come by this early on. (Shitty mainstream media.) No matter; I can just 'do the AOC thing' and recklessly and unaccountably assert things about it, right?] [Edit 2/9: the text of the 'Deal', now linked above, doesn't mention nuclear, but: "The ultimate goal is to stop using fossil fuels entirely, Ocasio-Cortez's office told NPR, as well as to transition away from nuclear energy." ffs, nuclear would be required to make this proposal credible, and AOC's track record already sucks credibility-wise.]
Any 'Green New Deal' would be especially idiotic if it required the USA to make changes unilaterally while nations like China continue their carbon-intensive ways.
She just doesn't fucking care about what's realistic, does she. (Echoing the rightists who embraced Palin for VP, "she has the right valyoos" and for such mentalities that's all that matters.) Just always remember, though: Obama endorsed AOC. How fucking stupid is he?
The left - however you care to define it, be it the commies, the socialists, the socialists-lite (i.e., the "mainstream" left), the pinkos, the pomos, the SJW intersectionalists, Ta Nehisi-Coates, the Democrat Party, "progressives," CNN, MSNBC, the lower-IQ university disciplines, the "higher-IQ" disciplines at Boston U., the University of Pennsylvania (where did the anti-Waxers ever get the idea that their anti-debate, strawman, outrage-mob approach was appropriate, and for an academic setting no less, I wonder?), social media moral-outrage mobs, Obama - are in intellectual free-fall. The evidence is all over the place.
Was it bound to happen, given the nature of leftism? Yes. Leftists have shit the bed time and time again, and it's high time we all figured out why. They're shit at dialectic and doing their homework. Applying Mises' dictum about Marxoids to socialists/leftists generally: they cling to socialism/leftism and stubbornly refuse to listen to its critics because they want socialism/leftism for emotional reasons. Whatever usefulness lefties had when it came to civil rights (including some form or other of equal legal treatment for gay couples - although even Ted Olson is a conservative), is now outlived. Even on cannabis legalization - where the Blue States are well ahead of the Red Ones (Red States can be stupid, too, and it's high time to figure out why) - the libertarians have been way ahead of them this whole time.
Leftists don't do philosophy these days; they do political activism first and foremost, with the smallness of intellect that comes with that. In lieu of Better Living Through Philosophy, they've reduced themselves to offering Better Living Through Big Government. Pathetic.
Was it bound to happen, given the nature of leftism? Yes. Leftists have shit the bed time and time again, and it's high time we all figured out why. They're shit at dialectic and doing their homework. Applying Mises' dictum about Marxoids to socialists/leftists generally: they cling to socialism/leftism and stubbornly refuse to listen to its critics because they want socialism/leftism for emotional reasons. Whatever usefulness lefties had when it came to civil rights (including some form or other of equal legal treatment for gay couples - although even Ted Olson is a conservative), is now outlived. Even on cannabis legalization - where the Blue States are well ahead of the Red Ones (Red States can be stupid, too, and it's high time to figure out why) - the libertarians have been way ahead of them this whole time.
Leftists don't do philosophy these days; they do political activism first and foremost, with the smallness of intellect that comes with that. In lieu of Better Living Through Philosophy, they've reduced themselves to offering Better Living Through Big Government. Pathetic.
Before you know it, lefties will be debating (amongst only themselves, before insisting the results lightning-fast on everyone else) whether it is transphobic to regard "She is a good man" as linguistically incorrect.
Obama endorsed AOC, after all. He gave the accelerated intellectual free-fall the green light.
This is on him.
[Addendum: (a fresh facebook comment of mine) I propose entertaining the hypothesis that the nature of leftism itself is to degenerate into a toxic version of itself over time. The higher-ed (sic) sector has devolved over time into something more and more insulated from conservative/libertarian/capitalist thought and I have doubts that the more reasonable 'liberals' know how to contain the degeneration (without taking 'rightist' ideas a lot more seriously, giving them an honest hearing...which leads if not to Rand then to more academically-beefed up versions like the Dougs [Den Uyl and Rasmussen] and Sciabarra who tend toward dialectical completeness). The 'liberal' left has the habit of mind that the coercive institution that is the state is a legitimate mechanism for "improving people's lives," and is short on ideas for how people can actually realize their potentials, Aristotelian-like, via the mediating institutions of civil society as well as irreducibly individual initiative. Both are bad habits of thought that, left unchecked, very probably lead to toxicity. "The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied in time a thousandfold." [Aristotle] What if the truly best minds in political philosophy have already gravitated toward Aristotelian and Randian and libertarian and better strains of conservative thought [e.g., Krauthammer, a Democrat until the 1980s - what's the rest of the Democrats' excuse?], leaving the left with only the superficial semblance of having the best minds? Their hubris combined with insulation from serious debate already tells a lot of the story. Not even to mention the minds that go into the business world. Hence my hypothesis.]
[Addendum: (a fresh facebook comment of mine) I propose entertaining the hypothesis that the nature of leftism itself is to degenerate into a toxic version of itself over time. The higher-ed (sic) sector has devolved over time into something more and more insulated from conservative/libertarian/capitalist thought and I have doubts that the more reasonable 'liberals' know how to contain the degeneration (without taking 'rightist' ideas a lot more seriously, giving them an honest hearing...which leads if not to Rand then to more academically-beefed up versions like the Dougs [Den Uyl and Rasmussen] and Sciabarra who tend toward dialectical completeness). The 'liberal' left has the habit of mind that the coercive institution that is the state is a legitimate mechanism for "improving people's lives," and is short on ideas for how people can actually realize their potentials, Aristotelian-like, via the mediating institutions of civil society as well as irreducibly individual initiative. Both are bad habits of thought that, left unchecked, very probably lead to toxicity. "The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied in time a thousandfold." [Aristotle] What if the truly best minds in political philosophy have already gravitated toward Aristotelian and Randian and libertarian and better strains of conservative thought [e.g., Krauthammer, a Democrat until the 1980s - what's the rest of the Democrats' excuse?], leaving the left with only the superficial semblance of having the best minds? Their hubris combined with insulation from serious debate already tells a lot of the story. Not even to mention the minds that go into the business world. Hence my hypothesis.]
