Yes AOC, It's Creepy When People Don't Mind Their Own Business
"Hi! I'm a person! This is weird!” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a stranger who snuck up and took a photo of her meal. As a politician, she could even have said, in fine American tradition, Mind your own business. We own our own lives here in America: If it doesn't involve picking pockets or breaking legs, what someone does is nobody else's business. But back to weird. It is weird that conservatives view her companion's hamburger as a smoking gun -- yet miss the deep irony of the self-proclaimed "owner" of the Green New Deal telling anyone to mind their own business.
The irony begins with AOC speaking of the photographer "creepily (and obviously) taking a picture of me while pretending he wasn't." This reminds me of practically everything she has said about the Green New Deal. Whether or not the draft containing jokes about farting cows was released intentionally, AOC wants to make Americans eat less meat. In an interview before the photo, she said:
[W]e need to take a look at factory farming, you know? Period... It's not to say we're gonna force everybody to go vegan or anything crazy like that. But it's to say, 'Listen, we gotta address factory farming. Maybe we shouldn't be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.' Like, let's keep it real.
This is a stranger talking about passing real laws -- so the government can tell you how much or how little meat you can eat -- as if that’s, like, totally normal. Talk about creepy (and obvious)!
More ironic is that everybody is haggling over the details of this "deal" except its owner. Nancy Pelosi was right when she observed that, "nobody knows what it is." For example, this "deal" is supposed to provide everyone with "adequate" housing and retrofit a significant number of buildings across the nation to improve energy efficiency. Proponents are salivating over how many jobs this will (appear to) create while opponents are trying to guess how much it will cost. This plays to AOC’s advantage and is unnecessary, anyway: The exact details of her plan are irrelevant. We should oppose the Green New Deal because it will greatly increase the amount of money the government takes from us, and the amount of power the government wields over our lives. If I were AOC, I wouldn't just be thrilled with all this haggling; I'd be relieved because it diverts the debate from why it is proper for the government to loot our money or tell us what to do in the first place.
What takes the cake she'd have us eat though, is that her vagueness fits in with her well-documented dismissal of reality. "There's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right," she famously said after being caught in yet another factual mistake. This is revealing, starting with the questionable assertion that she is, in fact, moral. Morality, as the Soviet refugee Ayn Rand once noted, "is a code of values to guide man's choices and actions -- the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life." In AOC's mind, this translates as: "I paint the big picture and you deal with the factual details and the factual consequences." Rand, who espoused the exact opposite of AOC's conception of morality, both asked why we need morality, and regarded facts and reason as essential to developing and applying it to our lives. She especially advised thinking about it for yourself, because your life, the only one you will get, is important.
Whatever you might think of her laissez-faire politics, Rand is right about morality, and the need to carefully consider facts when making decisions. AOC and her supporters want us to panic when they declare that we have twelve years to jettison the fuels that make the lives of over 7 billion "persons" possible. They don't care that we've had about a decade to "save the planet" ever since at least 1989, when the U.N. first predicted disaster: We are to ramrod through whatever program she deems correct -- regardless of facts, however pesky to her; or consequences, however dire to ourselves. And she doesn't care. She told us this much in her reaction to the humanitarian crisis in socialist Venezuela: "I think that, you know, the humanitarian crisis is extremely concerning but, you know, when we use non-democratic means to determine leadership, that's also concerning, as well." This lack of empathy, coupled with concern for unchecked majority rule is creepy (and obvious) coming from someone constantly goading us to blindly trust her, and so quickly make huge changes through the ballot box.
