My Official Response to Critics of My New York Magazine AOC Essay
freddiedeboer.substack.com
My Official Response to Critics of My New York Magazine AOC Essay
My piece for New York on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has attracted a lot of criticism. My official response to those critics is here. Please check it out and share it if you're inclined.
For subscribers, consider this an open thread. Talk about whatever you’d like.
You were really good on Rising.
One small complaint about this: "I don’t think Ralph Nader or Jill Stein cost the Democrats presidential elections; I think Al Gore and Hillary Clinton were terrible candidates who ran incompetent campaigns." You (Freddie) seems to have made a very common mistake in thinking about causation, which is to think of it as "zero sum". It's not. In the present case, BOTH of these claims can be true: "If Nader hadn't run, Gore would have won. If Gore had run a less incompetent campaign, he would have won." It's just a logical blunder (albeit a common one) to argue: "A happened because B happened; so it couldn't also have happened because C happened." This complaint doesn't affect the main point of your piece, but you're smart enough about basic conceptual stuff that it seemed worth drawing your attention to.