Shit, Oprah has the vampire vote. We may already be too late.
“For too long a ‘blood zucking government’ was just a euphemism! Ve shall make it a reality, blah blah blah!”
1 Like
The Constitution makes two stipulations to be President: you have to be born on U.S. soil and you have to be over 35. Yet I constantly hear armchair quarterbacks on social media say so and so is “too old” or so and so “doesn’t have enough experience”. If you’re part of this brain trust I would suggest you write your own Constitution.
I was going to say, if Sanders wants to really make a difference in 2020, he should be finding another candidate that he can wholeheartedly endorse rather than trying to run again himself.
Well, at least he has the sense to target a position lower than President as an entry point. I imagine many senators have some history in politics before getting into, but I did a quick check of a few names I know and it doesn’t seem like it’s uncommon to make the jump into politics at the senator level. Those stories aren’t all equal. A scholar of law who has been an advisor to congressional committees in the past clearly has more experience than a hollywood actor/WWE star despite neither having actual experience. Still, I don’t exactly write the Rock off. Al Franken was, from everything I saw, fantastic as a senator, and he basically went from comedy to activism to senate. There’s a lot of opportunity, as a senator, to learn on the job. You don’t have to go out and sponsor new, complex legislation in your first year.
I don’t have a good way of knowing about the Rock’s involvement in politics up to this point, because press about him is all about his wrestling and hollywood careers. I’d certainly give him a shot.
(And if Oprah were talking about running for senate, I’d probably be cheering that on as well)
5 Likes
/me searches chain of lazy punditry for quote from either Sanders or Warren
0/0 results found
The thirst is strong. There’s an entire election in between now and 2020. All this preemptive concern trolling over who the next Democratic presidential candidate is the exact sort of starfucking that everybody claims to be above. Let the Justice Democrats notch some House and Senate seats and demonstrate they have an actual caucus to represent before holding forth about who’s fit to lead the party.
1 Like
Not to put words in your mouth, but you don’t, or can’t, want this. I think you have absorbed the modern managerial ideology a bit too much - that there are a set of problems with good solutions, and a method for determining optimal outcomes to those solutions.
This is fucking nonsense and a half. There is no such thing as an “optimal outcome”, optimality depends entirely on what we value. Values depend entirely on, and vary drastically between, individuals. Therefore it is impossible that an individual with a different set of values from yours could, even if they applied great skill, yield an optimal outcome.
I’d say that this flawed thinking is probably THE main problem with America - Managerialism has taken root in all of our institutions, public, private, non-profit, etc. What it means is we’ve stopped having a politics that adjudicates values through public debate and discourse and instead surrendered control to a class of people who claim they are equipped to produce “optimal” outcomes, but whose “optimality” really means “we get all of the power and money”.
Stop surrendering your will. You are not an idiot; you have your own values, and the articulation of them is vital to a successful democracy. There is no “smart individual” who is magically more skilled than you at managing anything or coming up with policies. In fact, the people who end up running things have proven to be exceedingly bad at doing so (see: quantitative easing, for a prominent and trillion-dollar example of the failure of elite experts’ management, not to mention: the housing bubble that led to this attempted solution).
Democracy is not about finding smart people to make decisions for us - it is about collectively expressing our desires and building a system that is constrained (see: checks and balances on power) to produce them for us.
9 Likes
I believe the Rock is a moderate Republican. As someone else mentioned - his response to the Oprah speech was fascinating - he was REALLY into it. Who knows - maybe he would consider crossing the floor so-to-speak.
From a humanist perspective -all accounts indicate The Rock is a decent person and by that measure, better suited to represent real constituents (vs corporate interests) than most of Trump’s gang. Am I wrong? Is there dirt on Dwayne that suggests otherwise?
2 Likes
I am very confident in my own values and my own intelligence. I have high confidence in my ability to judge whether a particular outcome aligns with my values. And yes, I agree that worship of managerial skill gets taken to extreme heights, and is frequently ascribed to those who lack it, especially when it comes to things like, say, executive pay.
Nevertheless, the idea that no such thing and managerial or policy skill exists is absurd and, frankly, dangerous. Otherwise you are asserting that, for example, if all three of Trump, Obama, and the person who rang me up at the grocery store this morning all put their mind to the task of reducing illegal immigration, that 1) the policies they came up with would (if implemented) be equally impactful and cost efficient and enforcable (policy skill), 2) they would be equally able, as president, to get their bills passed (negotiating skill), and 3) they would hire staff equally able to carry the policies out and provide appropriate guidance and resources to enable their success (managerial skill).
How many people, back when they first heard about the idea of the car, predicted traffic jams and driver’s licenses and suburbs? It isn’t impossible to do, but most people aren’t trained for that kind of reasoning, and in any case it’s hard and time-consuming.
How many people, back when the US government first proposed the FDA, predicted that basically every cost-benefit analysis since has shown that it costs more lives by delaying approvals than it saves by keeping dangerous drugs off the market (how many people even believe that today despite all the evidence?)?
How often, in your own life, have you been surprised at which choices and strategies and rules are effective vs. ineffective at reaching their aims? How often have you had good vs. bad managers at work? The idea that there is no skill or talent at all that makes some people better at these things than others is just plain wrong.
4 Likes
I think you are talking about two different things:
- Expertise in implementation
- Which big ideas we want to implement
It’s great to have competent people trying to implement things, but we shouldn’t go from their knowledge of how to implement things to thinking they know what to implement. I think @astazangasta highlights a very big problem: that we left it to an expert class to tell us what we ought to be doing and walked away from the idea that we should hammer that out politically.
I think we should take the people with the skills you are talking about and hire them into the civil service, but for an election I’m looking more for someone whose values align with mine, even if they aren’t great managers.
Of course that only works if politicians listen to the civil service, which is obviously an idea that is itself under attack.
9 Likes
In a broad sense I agree (and I think that despite intentions @astazangasta did put a few words in my mouth). But you can’t decide that a big idea is worth implementing until you’ve worked out at least a reasonably accurate model of how to implement it. I mean, you can decide “It would be good if the world were this way,” but you can’t decide “This is worth doing at the present time or in the near future, i.e. during the term of the person I want to vote for.”
1 Like
Capitalists aren’t left wing.
However, when polled on the issues, the centre of American political opinion is slightly to the left of the Democrats. Roughly in line with the Berniecrats.
There are plenty of leftists in America. They just aren’t represented in Congress.
8 Likes
They vote very reliably, when a candidate comes and doesn’t pander to them, and presents them with a believable progressive platform. The problem is those candidates are few and far between. The issue isn’t with the voters; we’re making the best choices we can. The problem is with the options presented by a progressive party that’s too quick to belittle young voters and expects them to fall in line, instead of understanding their needs.
3 Likes
This depends largely on how you personally want to define “leftist”, arguably anyone left-of-center is a “leftist” whether you like it or not, which would include plenty of people who think capitalism is acceptable as long as it’s carefully regulated and taxed to help society.
Or maybe you have a very specific definition of “capitalist.” Strictly speaking, a farmer selling vegetables or an author selling books are capitalists, not just billionaires who profit from market speculation or exploiting workers. All are making a profit from a privately owned means of production.
4 Likes
So, not american so I don’t really understand: why should bernie sanders not run again?
At 80 years, statistics are very against him being a successful president making a full term.
1 Like
Oh, I see. Guy really doesn’t look 80, wow.
1 Like
He’d be 79 on Inauguration Day, 2021 which means he’d be the first POTUS to serve into his 80s. Especially since he’s a male there would be too much risk of his having a debilitating disease or dying in office.
There are other arguments against his running to be made by people like me who supported him in 2016, but the age issue can’t be ignored.
5 Likes
The problem is that the US press and political parties has defined the centre in such a way that it currently means “I’m not a fascist, but they do make some good points”. What is presented as the mainstream American left is not even the left wing of capitalism.
That is more like a social democratic mixed economy than a capitalist one.
5 Likes
