Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was Right! Twice! In the Same Week! (Accidentally).

It is often observed, and never in a positive way, that even a broken clock is right twice daily.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — our twenty-something bartender-turned-congresswoman-turned-economist/climate scientist — managed to be right twice in the past week, which, while still falling short of an inanimate clock, is still quite an accomplishment for her.  But don’t get too excited.  On both topics on which she opined, she still managed to demonstrate the sophomoric and moronic (sophmoronic?) assumptions and defective thinking that have come to characterize her.  Even on the rare occasion that she is right, she does not even understand why. 

Still, giving
credit where it is due (which one suspects we will not have to do again for
quite some time), the Notorious AOC began the week by saying that Americans should
not worry about the rise of robots in the workplace.  If she had stopped there, she’d basically be correct.
 Automation is a good thing because it makes
the workplace much more productive.  Imagine
if our economy did not use machines to massively increase output. And if your
imagination is not that strong, just look at Mongolia, or any other technologically
backwards part of the world that never experienced the Industrial Revolution.  Without machines to multiply productivity,
economies are trapped in the Middle Ages. 
So good, bring in the machines, understanding, though, that this means
that schools need to train kids to do skilled work, and that our immigration
policy really needs to exclude the sorts of people whose jobs are easily
replaceable by machines. Otherwise, we’ll just have a perpetual underclass of
unemployables.

But at least her
opening sentence was right.  Automation
is a good thing. 

Of course, she
could not leave it at that.  She then rambled
on that machines doing all the work for us provides more leisure time (so wait,
we won’t have to work at all? They’ll earn money for us?), and about how the
reason we are not “excited” about automation in the United States is that “we live
in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die.”  Which, if it were true, would actually be a
really good reason to worry about machines taking jobs!  Especially if you’re a Millennial, though that
indolent group’s continued existence in large numbers disproves her thesis that
the unproductive are left for dead.   

No matter.  Let’s just give her half credit and move on. 

Later in the
week, the world awoke to the ghastly news that fifty innocent people had been
murdered in New Zealand.  As politicians and
their social media staff raced to their mobile devices to issue perfunctory “thoughts
and prayers” tweets (is there anything more tasteless than publicly tweeting
condolences for self-aggrandizement?), she wrote “What
good are your thoughts & prayers when they don’t even keep the pews safe?”

What… yes! 

She’s absolutely
right!  Thoughts and prayers don’t help
anybody after the fact, except, perhaps, to offer minimal consolation to
impossibly grieved family members, who’d be much happier not to have to receive
them in the first place.  We agree!

What would help
to keep the pews safe, and a lot of other places, is if politicians like her
would get out of the way and allow people to defend themselves in the event of
an active shooter.  Even Jesus, who
people sit in the pews to learn about, warned his followers to carry a sword,
and he was so adamant about it that he even advised those without a sword to
sell their cloak and buy one.  (Luke
22:36).

We can argue all
day long about what causes mass
murders, but what undeniably enables
these things to happen is having large groups of people unable to defend
themselves, which is largely a cause of politicians enacting gun control laws
that keep people unsafe.  In New Zealand,
strict
gun control laws were enacted following several shootings in the 1990s, which
prohibit law-abiding citizens from carrying a firearm, unless they apply for a
permit upon a showing of “an imminent threat of death,” which, by definition of
the word “imminent,” means it is already too late.  As a concession, New Zealand provides that VIPs
are allowed special police detail in lieu of private guards.  Unfortunately, the fifty people who were
killed over the weekend were not considered “very important people” by their
own government, so they were unprotected.

We will never
rid ourselves of murders, but the best way to maximize them is to disarm
innocent people, and just hope that the bad people follow suit.  And it’s precisely this sort of silly and
dangerous naivete that that our heroine Congresswoman favors with all
enthusiasm, a resolve which, if anything, has become even more solidified with
the New Zealand massacre.

            So,
my apologies, but if you were looking for some glimmer of hope in this essay,
that perhaps Ocasio-Cortez had seen the light or had at least stumbled and banged
her head upon some greater truth that had heretofore eluded her, crowded out as
it was by the omniscience that bartending had provided, I am sorry to disappoint.  There is no reason to believe she has learned
anything, even that she has anything to learn, certain as she is of her own inerrancy,
reinforced by her ascendancy, and reinforced further by so many people disagreeing
with her with whom she knows to disagree. 
I know I am right because I know
them to be wrong!

            Perhaps,
then, she is not so much like a broken clock which is occasionally right, but
rather like the butt end of a compass needle, forever pointing in the opposite
direction of true north.