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Post by mikey on Jul 19, 2018 18:19:16 GMT -5
Fuck yeah man! Can I borrow that?
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Post by Optimus on Jul 19, 2018 18:42:37 GMT -5
Right, my second post in this thread, in response to someone addressing me specifically, is beating a dead horse. You and your horse can fuck right off. It was aimed at everyone still stuck on this lame crap about Ocasio-Cortez's childhood.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 19, 2018 18:57:48 GMT -5
Since there was a question about her background, whether she was distorting it and to what extent, and if so, whether and to what degree it reflected badly on her, and since there were also allegations that everyone, including me, was simply throwing out talking points, and I did not feel I was doing that, I felt some obligation to support my assertions about Ocasio-Cortez's background and neighborhood to demonstrate that fact. Hence why I was stuck on the lame crap. I won't speak for Christine, but I think she felt an understandable desire to respond to c.e.'s posts that were directed specifically to her.
If you are bored, you can always skip reading posts and focus your own on the aspects that interest you.
I agree with you, as I've said, that O-C's background is actually not a particularly big deal, and with the point that even if she did stretch it a bit, it's quite common and pretty benign.
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Post by Christine on Jul 19, 2018 19:05:34 GMT -5
At the risk of beating a dead horse (heh), my claim to scrub toilets is entirely honest because I do, in fact, scrub toilets. Regularly. Twice a week and we have 3. That’s more often than my housekeeper does in my house, actually. I don’t wait for weeks for her to do it. I like a clean house. Sounds like something a politician with a housekeeper would say. This may come as a shock to you, but lots of parents who don't "deal with death" every day think about death and how their kids would fare without them. Again, I think is this a bizarre conversation to have based upon a person referring to herself as a teenager when she was 19 years old. You're assuming some sort of mal-intent and you're backing it up by how *you* would feel as a mother if you died and left your two particular kids, your own perception, never mind that you don't know for a fact how each of them would react. Your 16 year old might end up being the strong one and giving support to your 20 year old. But regardless, it's not about your fucking kids or mine. The relevant fact remains that the age of nineteen falls within the definition of teenager. A person whose father dies when she is 19 is completely within her rights to refer to herself as a teenager, since she factually is. You insinuate some still-as-yet unnamed ulterior motive or bad purpose by the subject of the OP, but all it's achieved in my view is a display of your partisanship here. And it's true, you're often much more optimistic and forgiving in your posts.
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Post by Christine on Jul 19, 2018 19:11:25 GMT -5
To the OP itself, I have no argument either. Apologies if the derail has ruined the party for the host.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 19, 2018 19:40:32 GMT -5
To continue to flog the horse --
I must note that she didn't even just lose her father. As a result of his death, the family was plunged into difficult financial circumstances. That absolutely adds to the agony here. If she were a child, dealing those financial worries would pretty much entirely fall on her mother. A kid might have a limited grasp of them. But a 19 year old college student is going to understand and share in those worries. So this isn't just about sorrow. A comfortably off person who loses a loved one but is left well-provided for can focus on their grief. A person with a financial mess to contend with has a pile of other burdens.
I can add from some personal experience here -- wrestling with financial concerns and the like in the wake of a death (or during an extended final illness), not only adds to the grief and the burden, but it also adds to the guilt, because here you are worrying about yourself and material concerns and there's dad dying or dead. You are not free to simply mourn, yet part of you feels bad for wrestling with all this other stuff. At least, that was the way I felt. And oh god, the family arguments. It was sordid and horrible and awful and quite bad enough without adding my profound grief for my father.
And hey, I was a grown-up earning my own living. I was worried about my mom's position and the fact that I might have to take on the burden of supporting her, paying for dad's care/final expenses, etc., if I couldn't get the insurance company to do it. I am guessing Ms. O-C likely also had some concerns about whether she could/should stay in school under those circumstances. I don't think she likely had the luxury of just being a sad kid.
So, yeah, I think it was a difficult circumstance that went towards making her who she is, as struggling through difficult circumstances will. As Christine notes, she was in fact a teenager, so she's not even stretching here.
As far as allegations of exaggerating her background go, I think it's a nothing burger, and I don't think it makes her a bad person or indicates that she might screw over her constituents. Whether she ends up being a good congresswoman and whether she ever gets a better grip on economic issues than she currently has, well, that might be another matter. We'll have to see.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 19, 2018 21:26:39 GMT -5
Side thing that came up earlier -- my assertion that O-C appealed b/c she was more representative of constituents in that area. I wasn't just regurgitating a talking point; I just know her district. But since y'all probably don't, here's a NY Times article that touches on it. www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/nyregion/ocasio-cortez-crowley-primary-upset.htmlAs the article notes, the district she won is 49% Hispanic, and only one in five people is white. Is it really so surprising this overwhelmingly minority working-class community related more to a young Puerto Rican woman who lived in their community and came from it than to an older white dude who spent much of his time elsewhere? I'm not saying that means she'll be better. But it does help explain why they thought she might relate to their issues better. In addition, there's this: she went tirelessly door to door introducing herself and talking to people. The incumbent rode his laurels. These folks mostly don't know shit about economic principals nor do they care -- they aren't sitting around reading The Economist or musing about theories and statistics on message boards. They know they're poor. They know issues directly affecting them. They see the rich getting richer, their own benefits getting yanked, etc. etc. Ms. O-C seemed to be one of them, to get it, and to give a shit. To them, he was some white dude in DC. While she was literally at their front door, telling them how much she understood and cared about their issues. That's what happened, IMO. Simple, really. The pundits might have been shocked at the result, but I'm not in the least.
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Post by Amadan on Jul 19, 2018 21:54:28 GMT -5
At the risk of beating a dead horse (heh), my claim to scrub toilets is entirely honest because I do, in fact, scrub toilets. Regularly. Twice a week and we have 3. That’s more often than my housekeeper does in my house, actually. I don’t wait for weeks for her to do it. I like a clean house.
Yeah, so I'll give the horse another kick...
You claimed "I scrub toilets" (truthfully) while omitting the fact that you have a housecleaner. So your claim that you scrub toilets is technically true, but if you were a politician campaigning and you made that statement, people would rightfully infer that what you were trying to imply was that you are of lowly working class origins, and certainly not, say, a doctor (obviously wealthy and privileged because doctor!) who actually pays someone else to scrub her toilets.
Do you see how the level of scrutiny you are giving Ocasio-Cortez in parsing her "honesty" comes off as pretty disingenuous when you consider how it would look if the same level of scrutiny were applied to you?
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Post by Deleted on Jul 19, 2018 22:05:58 GMT -5
(continuing to flog horse)
It's entirely different to scrub your own toilet and to scrub someone else's for a living. I clean my own toilets (I don't pay a housekeeper). But I've never cleaned one that wasn't in a place where I was living.
I also give myself pedicures. But I don't give pedicures to other people. I don't consider tending my own feet to be equivalent to tending tons of strangers' feet. (Ew.)
I wipe my own ass, brush my own teeth, and blow my own nose. If I had a toddler, I'd do it for him. That's not drudgery--that's taking care of yourself and your own family. But if you are doing it for strangers for a salary, it is something else.
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Post by prozyan on Jul 19, 2018 23:05:48 GMT -5
I am a business owner. My business brought in a bit over $850k last year. My personal take home of that was just over 10%.
So yeah, a partner in a $500k architecture firm isn't all that impressive.
(I can't resist hitting a dead horse)
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Post by Optimus on Jul 20, 2018 0:29:48 GMT -5
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Post by Deleted on Jul 20, 2018 7:16:53 GMT -5
I am a business owner. My business brought in a bit over $850k last year. My personal take home of that was just over 10%. So yeah, a partner in a $500k architecture firm isn't all that impressive. (I can't resist hitting a dead horse) If something like that percentage holds for Mr. O-C (and it's reasonable to think so), I can provide this context: supporting a family in NYC on 50K, even in the mid-90s, was hard to do. It explains why they were living in a crime-ridden neighborhood in the Bronx, why Mrs. O-C had to take on two menial jobs for them to barely afford a two-bedroom house in a neighborhood with better schools, and why the family was in dire straits when Mr. O-C died. Taking aside the technical definition of "working class" -- Mr. O-C was a man who worked with his hands as well as his brain to earn what in NYC is a working class income (and who unquestionably was a self-made man, to the extent he was made), and a mom who worked cleaning toilets (and notwithstanding c.e.'s love of scrubbing her own toilets, I hope we can all agree you don't scrub someone else's for a living unless you must) and driving a bus. Gotta say, I don't think this was much of a stretcher at all.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 20, 2018 7:48:21 GMT -5
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Post by celawson on Jul 20, 2018 10:55:54 GMT -5
This is my last word in this thread (with my apologies to Opty, though I do address his concern here). I am not claiming "nefarious intent" or "malintent" here. What I am saying is that this young, clearly inexperienced, and apparently not very knowledgable candidate (or her campaign team) is portraying her bio in a way that is purposely meant to manipulate your heart strings and garner votes and campaign contributions (where the majority will come from lower socio-economic backgrounds). She has pulled in over 800k in contributions, and 61.5% is from small individual contributions of $200 or less. Since you are stressing how poor her neighborhood is, I'm assuming a significant amount of those small contributions is coming from people who don't have much. www.opensecrets.org/races/candidates?cycle=2018&id=NY14&spec=N Someone said to not mention Yorktown. Someone said to call her father working class. Someone said she should say her father died when she was a teenager rather than 19 or almost 20. She says 'scrubbed toilets' when that is a small part of cleaning houses. (If my dad works at 7-11 and part of his job is to keep the employee bathroom clean, I would say he works at 7-11 not that he scrubs toilets). So yeah, I don't like being manipulated. And of course, I don't like her politics. But hey, if it works, and if her popularity helps fracture the Democratic party like Joe Lieberman is saying (see his WaPo opinion piece), let her play folks like a fiddle. Hopefully it will help the GOP during midterms.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 20, 2018 11:10:03 GMT -5
What is fastinating is that you resent being "manipulated" by MS. O-C's "misrepresentations" (despite the efforts of several of us to show that they are not really far afield from her actual background...
...but you don't resent--indeed continually defend (or at most pooh-pooh)-- the constant stream of far, far more consequential and extreme misrepresentations, distortions, coverups, and outright lies coming daily from the White House.
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