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I'll give AOC this: she's honest and not apparently corrupt. And she's put a bigass target on her back. I'm a little concerned for her safety ngl.
But hero worship is always a mistake. Nobody's perfect, we're all just humans on a dirt ball. Be inspired, be motivated, be whatever their actions and words drive you to be. But you, little human, are full of the same muscles and fibers they are.
Don't worship heroes.
AOC told a story about how a pro Israel person offered her a huge campaign donation, which she declined. One of the reasons she could easily decline it was that she already had enough money. By that time, her seat wasn't in that much danger.
I'm not saying that AOC would have taken the money if she had a smaller campaign fund. There's no way to know that.
But you can be sure that if we did proper campaign finance reform, and stopped every instance where a single source of money can create undue influence, then a lot more politicians would be able to afford to be honest.
Our current system nearly guarantees that honest politicians will be forced out by corrupt politicians who can easily accept huge donations.
Yeah, I've seen a few stories like that about her. She's still not rich IIRC, her net worth is below a mil. I respect that.
Thats why I dont understand conservatives at all when they tell me their values. For one, they do worship their politicians. They get all their positions from what those politicians tell them they should think, and all those politicians only hold those positions and evangelize them because they've been paid millions of dollars by a lobbying firm to do exactly that.
They're like three degrees removed from having any actual personal convictions about anything. It's why anytime you argue with a conservative and they say something that just inherently doesn't make sense you cant ask them to expand on what they mean. You can't dig in to any of their beliefs because the extent of their knowledge is the canned responses they've learned from fox news.
I've gone through my adulthood deconstructing all different manner of beliefs I held and tracing them back to the think tanks that came up with them. Odds are SOMETHING you believe and hold as a conviction was carefully crafted by a policy institute some time in the 80s or 90s. It's not inherently bad to hold positions that were developed by people hired to craft a specific outcome, but to do so uncritically and without regard for whether the position is factual and based in reality is bad. If you unironically go around saying climate change is unsettled science without knowing that an oil company created the lab that made the report saying climate science was unsettled then you are a bad person lol
Back on topic: lobbying creates this cognitive dissonance field around american politics that I dont think exists anywhere else in the world. People are identifying themselves with politicians and then becoming walking ambassadors for israel because the guy they identify with got 10 million dollars from a zionist lobby. Nobody in real life is walking around having the original thought of "mass murder of children is good actually, for reasons I can explain" because its an insane position you'd have to be paid millions of dollars to hold. Idk how people don't realize how badly this distortion has affected our actual lives.
It's beyond what AOC did or didnt take from which lobby. The entire monetary superstructure around our government needs to be dismantled. We cant let the government just make decisions based on who is paying the most money for any given law. We cant actually fix any of the problems facing our society if the entity responsible for the problem is also the only one wealthy enough to impact legislation that will stop the problem. That's how we end up with climate legislation that has oil subsidies and healthcare laws but no Healthcare. We've built a society by and for corporations that no human being (or planet) could survive.
Obligatory:
Living Colour - Cult of Personality
Context for Zoomers or Gen Alpha lemmings
The song is almost certainly referring JFK, possibly RFK... not RFK Jr. It came out in 1988... and well, America still hasn't managed to kill all the Kennedys yet, and they continue to influential in politics.
Oh, also: All those noises you hear when someone isn't singing, between the verses?
Those are called guitar solos. =P
People let themselves influence by celebrity status and tribalist feeling and don't pass through the same skeptical filters everything from their "favorite" "stars" as they might do for the rest.
Whilst this an absolutelly normal human behaviour, it makes people very easy to swindle by famous politicians in parties with a long enough history to have cultivated a following.
Yep
Goes for left and right. Politics done right would be a boring thing where we chose people to do a job, but instead of that it has divulged into a popularity contest where the loudest asshole wins
Parasocial relationships are a thing and not necessarily insane.
It all comes down to how reasonable it is to like a public figure: what it says about the liker, how realistic their picture of that figure is, how likeable that figure really is (not their picture), what they stand for, what they do...
Aren’t they widely considered to be unhealthy?
yes, but there's a pretty big gap between unhealthy and insane.
is it healthy to become addicted to cigarettes? no. is it unusual or insane? also no. I may not understand how a person can look at all the downside of cigarettes and decide to smoke them anyway, but they're not insane.
Bothsider nonsense.
“Fact” “from the Onion” XD
