Mike Pesca delivers a nice takedown of AOC’s truthiness schtick in the latest episode of his daily Slate podcast The Gist, starting at 19:30:
Note that Pesca (like me) is a center-left Democrat, and he explicitly says he would be cool with Scandinavian style democratic socialist policies, though he doubts they could get past political hurdles in the U.S. But what AOC is talking about here goes far beyond that, and what really alarms me is the Trump-style dismissal of the importance of fact checking. Just dream big, kids! :smack:
Yes, it is cluelesscrackpottery that rivals Trump’s “land a man on Mars by next Tuesday” proposal in it’s disconnect from reality. Let’s replace every building in the country! And build new railroads everywhere. But–you know–do it carbon-neuturally! Get rid of all fossil fuels and also cows!
I read a summary of the proposal, and was rather shocked to learn that all elements of the plan are non-binding. As in, the Green New Deal amounts to as much hot air as any of Trump’s stupid speeches.
So some people are going to fight tooth and nail over a statement of ideas, whereby even if they win, they get nothing concrete? Jeez, isn’t there something that can ACTUALLY be done about the problem?
ETA: and by the way, I’m not going to listen to a fucking podcast.
:rolleyes: A number of people here are so weird about podcasts. I never see this anywhere else. Do you also refuse to listen to NPR, to watch PBS Newshour segments, or YouTube videos? How is this attitude any different from some old git 20 years ago sitting in his armchair, newspaper in hand, muttering “I’m not going to look at a fucking Internet message board”? :dubious: Seriously, it’s 2019: get with the times.
I read at roughly 3x the rate that most people speak, because I’ve been reading my entire life. I was too poor for a TV as a young child, so I took my entertainment from books. When I want to fix something in my car, I look for a Hayne’s manual, not a stupid Youtube video, because the diagram is right there without having to listen to some bozo’s introduction, and explanation of the correct screw driver, and other senseless background.
No, I don’t listed to NPR or watch PBS Newshour. I will, however, read reports on significant happenings. I’ll also use, say, a forum such as this one instead of doing social media with Snapchat, Youtube, and other non-text formats.
As it happens, sometimes I’m stuck in my car, and as a captive, I will listen to audiobooks or podcasts (I’m currently going through my archive of Econtalk). But I’m not on the SDMB while in my car. The issue people have with podcasts and responding to them here is that there’s an expectation of immediateness. We can easily skim an article you might post, but we can’t drop everything to listen to some obscure podcast that you link to. That’s not how conversations happen.
“Why won’t people spend half an hour listening to audio (meaning they cannot read at their own pace and cannot listen at work) to have an argument about a subject I refuse to summarize in the BBQ pit?”
It’s Slacker. You can’t expect him to write a whole three words when he can abbreviate, anymore than you can expect him to be arsed writing a thread when he can link to a podcast.
I’m an American (although an expatriate) and had no idea what the fuck the OP was talking about either until I figured it out.
Apparently the OP thinks that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez already has the status of FDR, JFK, or LBJ to be immediately recognizable by initials. (This is a knock against the OP, not Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.)
Oh, I listen to NPR and the news because it is generally informative outside of the context of a half-assed argument that you’re trying to peddle. I’m not going to waste my time listing to god-knows how much audio – which takes much more time to digest than the written word – for the sake of an internet argument.
Mostly because her name is like 10-11 syllables if you say all of it out loud; nobody’s got time for that.
I suspect if she went by “Alex Ocasio”, that would be what she’s called, but instead, we get the Latin-style father’s surname and mother’s surname combination, both of which have several syllables as well as a rather multisyllabic first name.
It’s idiotic to think that what you see is what everyone sees. No, she’s not called that “everywhere.” The abbreviation is meaningless where I am, and in many other parts of “everywhere.” Your thinking that the US is “everywhere” is just blinkered.