Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/27/alexandra-ocasio-cortezs-com.html
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It’s getting harder and harder to “immunize” the right wing base against some of these ideas. “Healthcare bad! Education bad!”. Yes, there’s always your authoritarian dingbat dittoheads that will eat up anything if it’s shouted at them in an angry enough voice, but that’s not a sustainable core of voters.
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What a perfect line - “Jesus didn’t say - look, I’d heal your leprosy, but you’re out of the network.” Nice work Stephen and his writers.
Always enjoyed Colbert and Stewart.
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Meyers spoke about this very same thing too.
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Christ, what an asshole
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But you CAN cheat your way into riding that core of voters for as long as possible!
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The only way I can attempt understand this kind of thinking is to assume that conservatives suffer from a constant, blinding fear that life circumstances are not actually based on personal merit, and therefore they, too, may one day need healthcare that they cannot afford and therefore presumably do not deserve, and the only way they can cope is to remain in total denial. “There but for the grace of God go I”… except instead of the grace of God, it’s their inherent superiority? Mostly I can’t seriously believe that a human being wrote those sentences, what the hell.
It boggles my mind that so many low-income people buy into this. It’s one thing to convince someone that they don’t deserve help, but it’s entirely another to have them believe that not receiving help when they need it is a coveted position that they should be proud to have achieved through their own merits, even as they die on a stretcher because all the hospitals within 50 miles have closed because capitalism.
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“… annnnnd I’m dead.”
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True, but they’re very fickle and prone to hijacking. Anyone willing be be shoutier and nastier and basically doing the human equivalent of faking a silverback gorilla aggression-show can snatch these idiot-fucks up, and that’s more or less what happened with Trump (and his Russian playbook and helpers).
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We also need to remember the Red Scare and McCarthyism. Generations of people were indoctrinated in to the idea that socialism is immoral and unworkable. We jailed people for belonging to a political party. We kept lists of citizens we suspected of being sympathetic to socialist goals and ideals. We did this for decades and we are still suffering from that culture of hate and paranoia created by the military industrial complex wanting to sell more bombs and guns and death. We did all this while ignoring the simple truth that this nation is and has always been a socialist representative democracy. It’s ignorance and indoctrination that brought us to this point where we can’t do what’s right for the people because we are scared of the word socialism.
edit to add: Anyone else notice that the right wings biggest boogeyman is Antifa? Think about that for a moment. Their biggest fear is a group of anti fascist people. Isn’t that all we really need to know?
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It’s part of believing in the just-world fallacy, often supercharged by religion. It’s a major component of American conservatives’ mindset, affecting their views on a wide range of issues based on who’s “deserving” and who’s “undeserving”.
I’ve seen it in truly sad circumstances where a dying person is wracked by anger and bitterness because he cannot believe that he is in this situation after “doing everything right.” It can make a bad death much worse.
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The great thing about the quote is that at first you’re thinking Colbert’s joke is going to be about how all the talk about populist rallies is projection on her part, which would have been funny enough without her veering off onto the last turn to Crazyville.
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and ironically speaking about our current POTUS…you’d think the conservative mantra would be “AMERICA CAN DO IT BETTER”
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That hasn’t ever been the conservative line. We’re number one, you see, but we can’t do anything. Put a man on the moon? Cure polio? Hell, we can’t even educate our children. But we’re still number one, because those other countries that seem to be doing things aren’t really doing things, and who are you going to believe, the President of the United States or your lying eyes?
(Example: the six-month wait for health care in those socialist countries, which is all of them, and the lying immigrants who claim it isn’t so.)
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I thought I saw something about how she had a rather embarrassing interview about Israel, but trying to look it up just now it seems that right-wing news sites may be blowing it out of proportion.
From her twitter : “What do you think has killed more people worldwide? A lack of free health insurance or socialism? I’ll wait while you do the math.”
Answer: To borrow a line from the NRA, socialism doesn’t kill people, people kill people. You can do the math on all the people killed by capitalism too (slave labor, child labor, unsafe working conditions, etc.), or Christianity (pogroms, Spanish Inquisition, Crusades, etc.), that doesn’t mean these things are pure evil at their very core. The logic behind the idea that state health care = socialism = mass murder is about the same as saying a leisurely walk = a marathon = a forced death march.
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She kind of stuck her foot in her mouth - then admitted she didn’t know much about the issue.
The second part is what has the nutjobs all aghast - someone isn’t an EXPERT on geopolitics!
I mean - according to Reddit - everyone is an expert.
When I speak to conservatives, they believe that society should have a higher bar before they take your earnings. Too much money is spent on wasteful things. (So far I’m with them). Then they go off the rails because they don’t understand math or have empathy. They think too much money goes to people who don’t deserve it because ‘those people’ have made the choice to be born poor, or are less intelligent. Too much money goes to people who don’t deserve it because ‘that type’ had pre-marital sex or only have part-time jobs or are lazy. You cannot persuade them that their taxes would be much lower if only we would stop giving tax breaks and special exceptions, and ‘incentives’ to every industry special interest. They hate welfare queens but they can’t see that Exxon is a welfare queen! The Koch Brothers are the welfare queens!
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