AOC Is A Genocidal Con Artist

People who say you should criticize AOC less because there are way worse members of congress act like she’s just passively sitting there being a mediocre lawmaker. She’s not. She’s actively anchoring the leftmost edge of the Overton window of US politics to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and genocide. She’s actively stopping American politics from moving any further left than the nightmare we see before us.

Leftists shouldn’t hate AOC less than the politicians to her right, they should hate her much more. It isn’t Mike Johnson’s responsibility to move the US government to the left, and it’s not Nancy Pelosi’s job. It’s hers. That’s what she was elected to do. That’s what she framed the goals of her entire political career as being. And she’s taking her stand firmly bracing against any leftward movement from America’s genocidal, warmongering, unjust, exploitative, tyrannical status quo.

And this, libs, is why we focus so much of our ire at AOC and Bernie.

I used to just think her advisors are kinda dumb or she just didn't have great instincts. That statement was so disgusting, just an awful snake.

The thing that really gets my goat is that there was no way the MTG bill/amendment defunding the Iron Dome was gonna pass. If AOC was truly cynical she would have voted for it, instead her politics explicitly lead her to vote against it.

fuck "Israeli" "civilians" anyway, they're all settler-conscripts. Let a million warheads strike their cities and make them howl

she was just doing what the unions told her to do

In theory, a weapon like Iron Dome could be used only defensively. But in practice it doesn’t work that way,’ analyst Nathan Thrall told Jewish Currents. ‘Iron Dome facilitates greater Israeli offensive measures, because it lowers the perceived cost to Israel of escalating or extending or initiating attacks.’ In other words, while the Iron Dome may prevent the deaths of Israeli non-combatants, it has made it easier for Israel to engage in deadly operations that take Palestinian lives.”

100% correct, and this has been a well understood concept in the world of missile defence since the ABM treaty signed between the Soviet Union and United States in 1972, a limit on both sides ballistic missile defence capabilities at the time. There is no such thing as a purely defensive weapon.

Iran’s advanced missiles can’t be reliably stopped by the Iron Dome, so Iran was able to smash Israel and force it to cease its unprovoked aggressions. If Israel had had a missile defense system which could casually swat those missiles out of the sky at a high rate of success, Israel would still be bombing Iran today, and would continue doing so until Tehran looked like Gaza. Israel’s war-horny population would have supported this, because they’d have no skin in the game.

Iron Dome/Tamir doesn't defend against ballistic missiles.

Israel does have a defensse system that does shoot down medium range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) with a relatively high rate of success, which has been in development since the 1980s in a joint partnership with the US (the Arrow system), it's why we only saw dozens of direct impacts from hundreds of ballistic missiles fired, and why Israel attacked in the first place. That, and Iran's MRBMs weren't accurate enough to existentially threaten Israel's military and nuclear sites, and the Israeli military and political wing was prepared/made the calculation that Iran bombing Israeli cities was worth it in exchange for Israel getting to bomb Iran. There have been additions to the system (from the United States, and Israel repositioning defence systems internally) since the Iranian Operation True Promise II of October 2024, where a large percentage of Iranian MRBMs directly impacted. The impacts we saw this year were a lot more devastating because a MRBM has a much larger warhead and impacts at much higher speeds than Hamas or Hezbollah rockets.

The joint US-Israeli integrated Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) system used to defend Israel from Iranian MRBMs consisted of:

SM-3 Block IB interceptors fired from US Navy AEGIS missile destroyers in the Mediterranean, and Israeli Arrow 3 interceptors fired from within Israel itself, for the exo atmospheric layer of defence (outside of the earth's atmosphere, over 100km in altitude and at ranges exceeding 2000km, parts of SM-3 interceptors ended up landing in Iran itself).

The endo-exo-atmospheric layer (intercepting both inside and outside of the earth's atmosphere) consisted of US THAAD batteries/fire units located in Israel itself, operating between altitudes of 40-150km.

The endo-atmospheric layer of defence consisted of Israeli Arrow 2 interceptors operating between 8-50km altitude, and David's Sling/Stunner interceptors that operate up to 15km altitude for last second point defence. Iron Dome/Tamir was responsible for shooting down balls of debris from intercepts, and shooting down any one way attack drones that made it to Israel. At most, there is footage of Iron Dome maybe being used to intercept one MRBM as a last ditch effort.