We don’t really have evidence of Jesus’ historicity.

We have multiple written testimonials, period artwork, and documentation of the resulting mass movement.

Almost nothing that would point to historicity in the gospels is corroborated by archeology… like was Pilot a person who existed? Yes, very likely he was. Is there biographies of him? Yes, there are contemporaneous sources showing him to be real. Is there anything, outside of the gospels, recount him meeting Jesus in any capacity let alone a whole trial and execution? No, there’s nothing like that.

You could play the same game with Socrates. Dismiss the fragmented reproductions of - periodically contradictory and occasionally fantastical - accounts of the pupils of his pupils and he doesn’t exist either. Indeed, there Socratic problem tackles the root challenge of reconstructing the veracity of a 2000 year old figure’s existence. To complicate things, some of the earliest writings on Socrates known to exist are Gnostic Gospels (which contains fragments of a transcribed copy of Plato’s Republic).

You disabuse yourself of historical Christian accounts at the peril of ignoring the accumulated history of the ancient world.

just because New York exists it doesn’t mean Spiderman is real.

We have real life video accounts of people in costumes identical to that of the cartoon character climbing buildings. What’s the line here? Are we saying nobody’s ever gained superpowers from a radioactive spider? Or that nobody’s ever dressed up in a costume like that to chase after petty criminals? Or that nobody’s ever climbed a building in that iconic outfit?

If, two-thousand years from now, we discovered a written account of one of these performers along with a handful of comic book fragments discovered in a book case buried in a cave in the deserted island of Manhattan… what kind of conversation would you have?

If we then somehow managed to resurrect a snippet of footage what would be concluding, then?

You can dispute Magical Jesus with the same cavalier attitude as Spiderman. But this is more akin to disputing the existence of Eliot Ness by pointing to a stack of Dick Tracey cartoons and saying “Unbelievable!”

Anyway, cool for AOC to be honest, but unfortunately her views (specifically support of MMT) are a certain way to nuke the economy of the USA.

The US economy gets nuked every 8-12 years thanks to private equity and boom-bust capital trends. MMT just moves the ball out of the hands of a cartel of hedge funds and into the hands of the US Treasury. I’ll happily agree that its not sufficient to solving the problem of malinvestment and industrial waste. But that’s precisely because its an extension of Keynesian-cum-Friedmanite monetary theory of economics. At some point, you have to take account of real assets, not just float around fictitious capital.

if USD as a currency takes a 10000x inflation in a year

You don’t get inflation like that under Eisenhower/Carter era tax laws. MMT, in practice, is still predicated on some degree of currency recapture. You’re just replacing credit elasticity through private lenders with spending elasticity through public spenders. “Here’s a $500k loan, build a house and pay me back at 6% APY” isn’t meaningfully different than “Here’s a $500k grant, built a house and your builders are going to pay me back 6% VAT”.

Except that’s not the way people like AOC promise.

AOC promises a large public investment in value-adding infrastructure. She’s just proposing direct payment rather than tax-incentivized private investment.

Houses don’t all cost half a million dollars there and retirement is funded through taxation.

I suppose we could be cheeky, take Solidium - the Finnish sovereign wealth fund - and amortize assets across the population as “collective wealth”. But holding individuals with 401ks to account for being “rich” because they’re doing the only legally expedient form of retirement savings is absurd, I agree.

Americans are obligated to save individually for retirement and tax-incentivized to stockpile appreciating assets in personal trusts, in anticipation of becoming too old to work.

It is not that unusual at all for a 30-something professional earning a six-figure salary to set aside 10-20% of that in savings. I suppose you can argue Congresscritters are overpaid and therefore anyone in a federally elected office is de facto not trying to help people. But then you’ve got a problem with how we handle retirement, not with how AOC handles her politics.

AOC is a prodigious fundraiser with a significant national following. She might only have a half-million in the bank, but her name and her reputation are worth orders of magnitude more.

Conservatives have a hard time believing someone like that isn’t getting rich quick on $AOCCoin or LeftyBear merch offerings.

there’s zero evidence that he was even real.

There is abundant testimonial of his existence, enormous bodies of archeological evidence dating the nascent Christian church to the period immediately following his life, and plenty of contemporary evidence describing the more prominent figures central to the gospels and the various letters that follow.

We have at least as much evidence of Jesus as we do Socrates or Confucius or Boudica or Pakal the Elder.

I’m saying if you read the Bible, Jesus’s teachings align with socialism.

Not exactly. Socialists are not a Millenarian Cult eagerly awaiting the end of the world. The early disciples believed the apocalypse was nigh and material wealth would be of no consequence in the Next Life. Their socialist policies were heavily informed by their dogmatic belief in a Final Judgement coming within their lifetime.

Modern socialists don’t hold this view at all. On the contrary, they tend to be deeply concerned with the long term health and well-being of their communities, their economies, and the global ecology. One of the major distinctions between modern Friedmanian free market thinking and MLM economic central planning is the focus on fluctuations in market price relative to the long term socio-economic consequences of current economic policy.

If anything, it is the capitalists (particularly the more Millenarian-minded Protestant cults) who behave like there’s no tomorrow. The socialists are the ones talking about the next century of climate change and the next millennium of biodiversity / sustainability.

Those weren’t Real Christians. They were followers of some fringe leftist ideology from the Middle East.

Capitalism is based on slavery and genocide

Feudalism is based on slavery and genocide. Capitalism is based on industrial development yielding a compounding rate of return.

It is fucked, nothing good about it

Its a historical stage of economic development every society ultimately passes through. Again, go back and read Das Kapital. Go pick up a copy of Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century. Get a book on Lenin’s NEP or Dengism or the modernization of Castro’s Cuba. Even the most staunch leftist cannot escape the materialist need to industrialize.

Wasn’t this specifically against Harris?

It was specifically against the current administration, which was funding and propagandizing a genocide.

I just don’t know why they were only “Abandon Harris” instead of abandoning the whole process

The turnout for Democrats plunged between 2020 and 2024. A big chunk of that came from liberal Midwesterners staying out of the election entirely because they had no candidate to support in the race.

I know you’re very afraid because your favorite genocider lost and now you’re having a taste of your own medecine

Joe Biden to rich donors: “Nothing would fundamentally change” if he’s elected

And then nothing fundamentally changed, people were still mad, and the groundswell of support he enjoyed in 2020 collapsed under his successor in 2024. We should believe this is the fault of checks notes one of the Dems’ largest constituencies and not checks notes again the massive surplus of Mayo-Americans who flooded into Donald Trump’s camp over egg prices.

Liberals put a ton of effort into winning conservative voters, failed to win any conservative voters, and then blamed their base for only turning out 6M more votes than what put Obama into the White House in a landslide.

why was only Harris punished for it

Trump: “I’m doing genocide.”

Harris: “I’m also doing genocide.”

Palestinians: “I can’t vote for either of these two.”

Liberals: “Well then, I guess you deserve the genocide you get.”

Capitalism has zero benefits whatsoever

Even Marx didn’t believe that. Capitalism is an outgrowth of industrialization, repetitively turning low-surplus undeveloped real estate into high-surplus improved real estate. If you’re not generating and then reinvesting your surplus, you’re not going to move past a feudal agrarian economy into a post-scarcity socialist state.

you have American brainrot

This is, at absolute worst, British/German brainrot. The Americans fetishized the idea of capitalism and hid from its excesses with westward migration. But the Old World scholars were shoved into the maw and out the anus of it a century earlier.

Capitalism has its benefits. Namely, the rapid economic growth afforded through exploitation of natural resources by unemployed labor mixed with cash-rich / debt-friendly entrepreneurs. You don’t want an economic system that loses the benefits of industrialization and domestic improvement.

On the flip side, capitalism also has a huge problem of wealth distribution. Bottlenecks within the flow of revenue create huge pools of malinvestment, squandered natural resources on vanity projects, and a strong incentive for public sector militarization / police violence as a tool to maintain the disproportionate wealth distribution.

We need a system in which individuals can still cooperatively administer an economy with an eye towards long term economic prosperity, but one in which the surpluses aren’t horded or wasted by a rigid hierarchy of generationally wealthy lenders and carnival barker entrepreneurs. Communism provides a roadmap for redistributing titles and incomes across entire populations, while still socially reproducing a bureaucracy capable of managing industrial-scale and national-scale projects.