US "The Squad" Megathread - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talib Derangement Syndrome

I honestly only know about American politics from what I read on the Internet but since we all love shitting on leftists I figured we'd get a kick out of this. Also it's trending on Twitter so you know it's important.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...irect=on&noredirect=on&utm_term=.960552c9ba53

NEW YORK — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old political novice running on a low budget and an unabashedly liberal platform, upset longtime U.S. Rep. Joseph Crowley on Tuesday in the Democratic congressional primary in New York.

The surprise victory by the community organizer in a district that includes parts of the Bronx and Queens came after an energetic, grassroots campaign that mustered more than enough support in a low-turnout race that many had expected to be an easy win for Crowley, a member of the Democratic House leadership.

“The community is ready for a movement of economic and social justice. That is what we tried to deliver,” said Ocasio-Cortez, who has never held elected office and whose candidacy attracted only modest media attention.

She told The Associated Press after her victory that she didn’t have enough money to do polling in the race, but felt in her gut that her message had a chance to connect.

“I live in this community. I organized in this community. I felt the absence of the incumbent. I knew he didn’t have a strong presence,” she said.

Crowley has been in Congress since 1999 and hadn’t faced an opponent in a primary election since 2004, when Ocasio-Cortez was just a teenager. He was considered a candidate to become the next House speaker if Democrats win the majority.

“It’s not about me,” Crowley, 56, told his supporters at a campaign party following his loss. “It’s about America. I want nothing but the best for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. I want her to be victorious.”

He later played guitar with a band at the election night gathering, and dedicated the first song, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” to Ocasio-Cortez.

Crowley represents New York’s 14th Congressional District, where he is also the leader of the Queens Democratic party.

Ocasio-Cortez was outspent by an 18-1 margin during her race but won the endorsement of some influential groups on the party’s far left, including MoveOn, as well as the actress Cynthia Nixon, who is running for governor. She defeated Crowley by 15 percentage points.

Born in the Bronx to a mother from Puerto Rico and a father who died in 2008, Ocasio-Cortez said she decided to challenge Crowley to push a more progressive stance on economic and other issues.

She attended Boston University, where she earned degrees in economics and international relations, and also spent time working in the office of the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy.

After graduating, she returned to the Bronx where she became a community organizer. In the 2016 presidential campaign she worked for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Among her issues is expanding the Medicare program to people of all ages and abolishing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. She recently went to Tornillo, Texas, to protest against policies that have separated parents from their children at the southern U.S. border.

Ocasio-Cortez gained some internet attention for a campaign video called “The Courage to Change,” a two-minute spot for which she wrote the script and featured footage from her own home.

Crowley is chair of the House Democratic Caucus, the fourth-highest ranking position in Democratic leadership in that chamber of Congress.

His loss drew the attention of President Donald Trump.

“Wow! Big Trump Hater Congressman Joe Crowley, who many expected was going to take Nancy Pelosi’s place, just LOST his primary election. In other words, he’s out! That is a big one that nobody saw happening. Perhaps he should have been nicer, and more respectful, to his President!” he tweeted.

The Republican candidate for the office, Anthony Pappas, is running unopposed and had no primary. Pappas teaches economics at St. John’s University.

She was a Bernie campaigner, is supported by BLM, and wants to abolish Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Also this was in a solid-blue Congressional District so you know she's a shoo-in for next Congress.

But hey, we did get to see Trump laugh at Crowley on Twitter.

 

[not william stenchever]

Even if it was just napkin math the number doesn't seem unreasonable, because that's how retarded her pipe dream is.

 

[Shadfan666xxx000]

Triggered snowflake?

Stolen meme?

 

[JacobRyanSimmerson]

That’s the estimated cost. You can find the source in this thread somewhere. Logistically speaking, having free college, free healthcare, passenger railway systems throughout the country and new (“environmentally friendly”) construction plans for every building in the United States is insane. No country can support that.

So? It will fail if that's true. Logistics nothing. Public mass transit would be an absolute dream. What is being done with your tax money right now?

Like what?

She has already changed the political landscape, very exciting.

The numbers come from a study that was released publicly (archive). Although the study was run by a conservative group, their numbers and relevant justifications are included in the report. It'd be more helpful for you to disagree with the specifics of the estimate and how it was built rather than lamely say "wow you obviously don't know anything about economics, markets, etc". I'm sure there is plenty to critique so if you're going to disagree please do so in a way that doesn't make you seem stupid and lazy.

I do not care. It could cost 100 times that and I wouldn't care. She has made a proposal of sorts, nothing has changed. Do we even get to vote on it? What is the point in talking about it at all?

 

[Jigglyjogglers]

@Ron /pol/ Is this you on a new account or do you have fresh competition?

 

[Shugo]

She has made a proposal of sorts, nothing has changed. Do we even get to vote on it?

She complained it was sabotage when they wanted to put it up for a vote.

 

[Weppers]

I do not care. It could cost 100 times that and I wouldn't care. She has made a proposal of sorts, nothing has changed. Do we even get to vote on it? What is the point in talking about it at all?

It could cost 102 times more than the total amount of money that exists and you say that you would support it anyway.

You consider this to blind dedication be some kind of point in your favor.

That would be the whole story, but we also have the bonus that Mitch McConnell wanted to put it to a vote in the Senate immediately, and AOC herself cried about how voting on the Green New Deal was some kind of unfair manipulation.

Fuck off, retard.

 

[JambledUpWords]

So? It will fail if that's true. Logistics nothing. Public mass transit would be an absolute dream. What is being done with your tax money right

You don’t understand how massive an undertaking this is. We’d have to uproot most of our infrastructure and change city planning to accommodate this. Public transit on a small scale is fine, but trying to do that for the entirety of the United States is preposterous. I’m fine with tax money going towards public transit, but to make it nationalized is just exceptional. In places like Japan it makes sense, but that’s because the country is minscule in size compared to the United States and there’s less space between big cities. Not to mention, trains are too slow compared to planes so I don’t think it will take away air travel like AOC thinks it will.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

I do not care. It could cost 100 times that and I wouldn't care.

So you do not care if it costs 100 times more than "more than all the money that exists in the world"...?

I mean, that seems like a thing you should care about.

She has made a proposal of sorts, nothing has changed. Do we even get to vote on it? What is the point in talking about it at all?

Because stupidity and evil are like mushrooms.

 

[JacobRyanSimmerson]

@Ron /pol/ Is this you on a new account or do you have fresh competition?

I do not know who that person is.

She complained it was sabotage when they wanted to put it up for a vote.

I would like to see evidence of this.

It could cost 102 times more than the total amount of money that exists and you say that you would support it anyway.

You consider this to blind dedication be some kind of point in your favor.

That would be the whole story, but we also have the bonus that Mitch McConnell wanted to put it to a vote in the Senate immediately, and AOC herself cried about how voting on the Green New Deal was some kind of unfair manipulation.

Fuck off, exceptional individual.

Yes I would. Do you have lots of money? I don't. I don't care what happens to it. Perhaps she is waiting for a more opportune time to vote on it, why do I care about Mitch McConnell?

You don’t understand how massive an undertaking this is. We’d have to uproot most of our infrastructure and change city planning to accommodate this. Public transit on a small scale is fine, but trying to do that for the entirety of the United States is preposterous. I’m fine with tax money going towards public transit, but to make it nationalized is just exceptional. In places like Japan it makes sense, but that’s because the country is minscule in size compared to the United States and there’s less space between big cities. Not to mention, trains are too slow compared to planes so I don’t think it will take away air travel like AOC thinks it will.

All that seems reasonable to me. We have many people who have no job whatsoever. This would give many people something to do for a living. I personally hate riding on planes and would love an alternative, especially one that costs less.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

I would like to see evidence of this.

It wasn't donkeyface, to be fair. It was the other sponsor of the GND, Ed Markey, D-Mass.

"“Don’t let Mitch McConnell fool you: this is nothing but an attempt to sabotage the movement we are building. He wants to silence your voice so Republicans don’t have to explain why they are climate change deniers. McConnell wants this to be the end, this is just the beginning,” Markey tweeted. “This isn't a new Republican trick. By rushing a vote on the #GreenNewDeal resolution, Republicans want to avoid a true national debate & kill our efforts to organize. We’re having the first national conversation on climate change in a decade. We can’t let Republicans sabotage it.” "

Yes I would. Do you have lots of money? I don't. I don't care what happens to it. Perhaps she is waiting for a more opportune time to vote on it, why do I care about Mitch McConnell?

Again. More money than exists in the entire global economy.

All that seems reasonable to me. We have many people who have no job whatsoever. This would give many people something to do for a living. I personally hate riding on planes and would love an alternative, especially one that costs less.

Judging by the nearest analog to what is being proposed, the Shinkansen, it would barely be cheaper, if it was at all, and you would still have the same miserable experience of flying, it would just take much longer.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Didn't California just shut down their high-speed rail project that they spent $77bn on, that produced nothing? They wanted to create a fast train between Los Angeles and San Fransisco but...

Maybe the real mistake was not giving them $7.7 trillion to lay that track, maybe the projected construction time would have shrunk from ~20 years to 2 months as well. Makes you think doesn't it?

 

[JacobRyanSimmerson]

It wasn't donkeyface, to be fair. It was the other sponsor of the GND, Ed Markey, D-Mass.

"“Don’t let Mitch McConnell fool you: this is nothing but an attempt to sabotage the movement we are building. He wants to silence your voice so Republicans don’t have to explain why they are climate change deniers. McConnell wants this to be the end, this is just the beginning,” Markey tweeted. “This isn't a new Republican trick. By rushing a vote on the #GreenNewDeal resolution, Republicans want to avoid a true national debate & kill our efforts to organize. We’re having the first national conversation on climate change in a decade. We can’t let Republicans sabotage it.” "

If we are not voting on it I am not sure why we care. It sounds as if they will do whatever they want regardless of how we feel.

Again. More money than exists in the entire global economy.

If that's true it will fail. Why worry about it?

Judging by the nearest analog to what is being proposed, the Shinkansen, it would barely be cheaper, if it was at all, and you would still have the same miserable experience of flying, it would just take much longer.

At least we would all have a stake in it. We would all have to make transport better, rich and poor, as we all rely on it.

 

[JambledUpWords]

All that seems reasonable to me. We have many people who have no job whatsoever. This would give many people something to do for a living. I personally hate riding on planes and would love an alternative, especially one that costs less.

It won’t necessarily cost less. Long distance train travel would still be in the hundreds, if not thousands range. You’d also go slower too. Trains are only viable for passengers on short distances.

 

[Vorhtbame]

All that seems reasonable to me.

Anything seems reasonable to a person with no understanding of what's being discussed. For example:

If that's true it will fail. Why worry about it?

Because once you spend it to tear up wide swaths of the countryside, to curtail people's rights and lower their standard of living, to seize property from middle-class and poor people, to purchase resources that you then consume pointlessly and irretrievably, you can't just hit Ctrl-Z and undo it. This ain't SimCity, son; you can't revert to a previous save. You borrowed all that money and now you have to pay your creditors. And that much money? Oh, buddy, you have no idea whom we'd now owe money.

Again, real-world experience. You need some before you start insisting other people are wrong.

I personally hate riding on planes and would love an alternative, especially one that costs less.

Rent a car. Take Amtrak. Take a Greyhound bus. Are you sure you've ever been anywhere that isn't your mom's basement or your local public school?

 

[Dracula's Spirit Animal]

With all the exceptional bits of the GND, it's really hard to even believe an adult wrote it, but here we are. The 93 trillion seems like it would be low end. Anything that goes through the government seems to balloon in cost by an order of magnitude. In reality, I think actually doing the GND would end up creeping into the quadrillion dollar range, take many generations to complete (probably hundreds of years), and leave the US an impoverished wasteland.

I think it would be hard to figure out in any meaningful way, but it would be interesting to see some scientific wild assed guess about the pollution costs implementing the GND would require. All the steel foundries, construction pollution, all the mining and refining of rare-earth metals and toxic chemical slag generated from manufacturing these "green" solutions. I suspect it would make our current pollution levels look like "the good old days".

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

If we are not voting on it I am not sure why we care. It sounds as if they will do whatever they want regardless of how we feel.

"We" do not directly vote on anything. We don't live in a democracy. You're right. We do, however, vote on our representatives. Which is why we care. It's why we pay attention. And it's why we should get fucking mad as hell over things like this.

If that's true it will fail. Why worry about it?

You are (probably faciciously) cheerleading a person who is threatening to destroy the DNC if they do not support a plan that would cost more money than exists on earth.

And you ask "why worry about it"?

Because if it fails, and it will, because it can't not fail, we are irrevocably fucked beyond recovery.

At least we would all have a stake in it. We would all have to make transport better, rich and poor, as we all rely on it.

That's never been true, not once, not anywhere, in the history of the whole fucking planet. Not in the more free-market capitalist systems nor the most tyrannical communist ones, nor any other system inbtween. And you know it wouldn't be true now, either. So why are you lying?

 

[Malodorous Merkin]

I happen to quite like AOC myself. Not sure where the hatred comes from to be honest. She is one of the few politicians that is actually trying to make changes.

No hatred here. She provides great entertainment, and the destruction and division she's bringing to the DNC is an absolute gift to the GOP.

While you're here, could you please point out to me the flaws in my logic here.

Here's my call out...

AOC's "green energy" plans are absolutely self-defeating when you take her "deadline" into account. To make the switch to solar, wind, and(necessarily) storage batteries, and build an entire new grid to accomodate all of the new power-generation equipment, it would require a huge amount of mining of raw material, and heavy industrial manufacturing. All of which would require huge amounts of fossil fuels, because we kinda don't have an extensive green energy grid yet, you see? We can't build it green, because we ain't got the green stuff yet. All that manufacturing, and mining, and all the fossil fuel it would burn, would create a YUGE carbon emission output over the next 12 years, and it would take as long as that even if we went full-bore with AOC's plan starting tomorrow.

But, remember, we only have 12 years left to live, right? We'll all be dead before we get the green grid up and running.

It's going to take a shitload of carbon emissions in order to make all the green energy stuff which will reduce the emissions. That's carved in stone, and there's no way to get around it.

If AOC had given us a 30-year-to-pockyclypse deadline, then we could've built all the stuff we needed in the next 10 years while belching out the carbon, but then mitigated the damage with our up-and-running zero-emission gird over the following 20 years, and saved our hides from the pockyclypse.

But, instead, in her infinite idiocy, what AOC has handed us is a ticking time bomb that is utterly impossible to defuse before time runs out, and, if we do try and defuse the bomb, it'll only make the timer run faster.

I'd like to see somebody try and explain that simple reality to Cortez-Dunderwits though. It'd probably take you longer than twelve years to pound it through her skull.

View attachment 681605

How inspiring. Or exceptional. It's one of the two.

Have these people seriously never heard of coffee shops?

Where do these people live that their only late-night options are bars, or home alone?

 

[JacobRyanSimmerson]

It won’t necessarily cost less. Long distance train travel would still be in the hundreds, if not thousands range. You’d also go slower too. Trains are only viable for passengers on short distances.

I may still choose it, I get sick on planes. Turbulence is awful.

Because once you spend it to tear up wide swaths of the countryside, to curtail people's rights and lower their standard of living, to seize property from middle-class and poor people, to purchase resources that you then consume pointlessly and irretrievably, you can't just hit Ctrl-Z and undo it. This ain't SimCity, son; you can't revert to a previous save. You borrowed all that money and now you have to pay your creditors. And that much money? Oh, buddy, you have no idea whom we'd now owe money.

Again, real-world experience. You need some before you start insisting other people are wrong.

Rent a car. Take Amtrak. Take a Greyhound bus. Are you sure you've ever been anywhere that isn't your mom's basement or your local public school?

I again fail to see why I care. What rights? What standard of living? You cannot hit Ctrl-Z, but you can move forward, like we always do. Mistakes will be made no matter what we decide, what are we to do? Nothing like we have been?

"We" do not directly vote on anything. We don't live in a democracy. You're right. We do, however, vote on our representatives. Which is why we care. It's why we pay attention. And it's why we should get fucking mad as hell over things like this.

Do you feel represented? I do not. I have never felt represented by any politician.

You are (probably faciciously) cheerleading a person who is threatening to destroy the DNC if they do not support a plan that would cost more money than exists on earth.

And you ask "why worry about it"?

I am very much against the two party system.

That's never been true, not once, not anywhere, in the history of the whole fucking planet. Not in the more free-market capitalist systems nor the most tyrannical communist ones, nor any other system inbtween. And you know it wouldn't be true now, either. So why are you lying?

A man can dream!

While you're here, could you please point out to me the flaws in my logic here.

I do not think she is serious about everything she says. I have seen her livestreams where she talks about these issues and she seems to be joking about some of her claims. Perhaps to get the very attention you give her.

 

[Malodorous Merkin]

I do not think she is serious about everything she says. I have seen her livestreams where she talks about these issues and she seems to be joking about some of her claims. Perhaps to get the very attention you give her.

She should shit her pants to get attention, it'd be less humiliating for her than saying the dumb jokes she says for attention.

 

[Vorhtbame]

I again fail to see why I care. What rights? What standard of living?

Finish the list, don't stop there: "What should I care if poor people's property is seized? What resources consumed that could have been used to improve the lives of others instead of wasting them lining the pockets of the wealthy? What pristine countryside destroyed beyond repair that will take decades to reclaim, if at all? What is that to me? They'll never do anything that affects me, so it's not my problem."

Really, at this point, you leave me only two options: To assume that you are trolling, badly, or to conclude that the only people who would support this plan are sociopathic idiots.