[blackjack21]

@Rancid why are they focusing on AOC? She is one congresswoman in a sea of liberal congresspeople? Why single her out?

It's not unlike when Eric Cantor got bounced from the Republican leadership. It was a safe Democrat seat and challenging a party leader in the primaries is almost unheard of; yet, her boldness sent shockwaves through the Democratic party, because a leader with longstanding seniority was easily taken down by a political neophyte.

Because she is a democratic Socialist talking about going after the liberals in the Democratic party and dealing with the sellouts in the Republican party.

That's almost incidental. First and foremost, she took down a contender for a leadership position, which in the Democratic party comes with seniority. Secondly and importantly, the right made her the poster girl of the Democratic party because she is a democratic socialist.

She is considered an éxtremist....and they fear these socialistic tactics of dealing with banks and exposing the dirty laundry of these aging pieces of corrupt shit in the Democratic party like Pelosi and Schumer and the vast majority of those CLinton drones who follow Clinton. I can't stand that Wasserman Schultz pendeja! They are such corrupt lying pieces of political hypocrisy and they are bloated with dirty money.

But they have tremendous power in the Democratic party.

Well, she is a bit extreme. The problem with the Democratic party is that they sold out the blue collar working class factory workers with trade deals, and came to hold them in contempt. Transgender identity issues isn't going to hold the party together. Even Obama has come out, albeit gently, against the "woke" culture as it is killing the Democratic party.

She's also young, which I think scares old people as she might be a harbinger for what younger voters want.

She scared Bezos enough to prevent Amazon from building anything in New York State.

No I'm saying that the Democrats are pretrified of a 30 year old with very little life history, ignorant to the world,and no political experience.

No prior political experience. She certainly has some now. However, she's got the typical millennial attention span of a gnat. It's unlikely she will get anything of substance done herself.

They probably secretly despise her.

They openly despise her. Don't be surprised if she faces a primary challenge.

Her destiny is a seat on The View.

Probably a more appropriate role for her...

Trump only resembles Reagan insofar as he's in favor of lowering taxes for the rich and deregulating the economy. Otherwise they couldn't be more different.

Culturally, of course they are different people. However, they won the same way. Reagan was also very popular among blue collar working class people. That's why they came to be called Reagan Democrats.

Oh she was supposed to forgive Crowley for not living in there, hardly visiting, not being from the demographic of her district but saying he represented their interests and not pointing out the obvious?

Maxine Waters doesn't live in her district either, and SpecialOlypian thinks it clever to make her likeness his avatar. Same problem; although, Waters is black. Do you think your political interests are defined by your skin color primarily? I certainly don't think my views are determined by my skin color. There are lots of people with my background who have a wide variety of political views.

That she is in fact Puerto Rican from the Bronx (her father grew up there) and she is not white and not a man.

In America, she's considered white Hispanic, whereas I'm considered non-Hispanic white.

Doesn't make a bad impression. Only to the ones who don't like positions she takes on politics. Hee hee. Like you.

I don't have a problem with her style. I was the first person on PoFo to champion her--not you. Let's not forget that. I don't hate people just because I don't like their political positions.

Unconvinced on your conclusions if your foundation is lack of equality. You believe in class consciousness?

I am not a Marxist. I am not axiomatically the antagonist that the Marixsts identify. I just find Jefferson and Marx to have poetically overstretched something like equality before the law and some sort of universal access to basic dignity into a strident claim that is utterly unsupported by the facts and hence is no longer fit for its intended purpose.

You will wind up believing in a lot of stuff that just doesn't turn out to be effective because you think people are somehow naturally not able to change. You better take a look at the nature of mutation and alleles and all that very closely. The very fabric of life is about change in constant motion.

Um... that was my entire point in gene hacking with CRISPR cas-9. Things may change quite radically from here. You should debate me and what I say, not the relampaguito image you've created in your own head. Keep in mind I've been working in cloud storage and now cloud computing with a focus on 5G telco--I make my money on nearly constant change, not some sort of static world.

Class consciousness has no leg to stand on Relampaguito.

Modernism in juxtaposition to post-modernism most certainly has a leg to stand on.

That the Anglo influence is basically not going anywhere.

The Spanish influence never left either.

It wasn't a place where Europe was the big influence unless you want to include the El Camino Real and the founding of Roman Catholic California Missions as the big European influence? Lol.

I'm sure Pants-of-dog and the native Americans don't think that's too funny.

Imagine living with them and working with them and being their neighbors and dealing with their reactions and attitudes...towards the patronizing realities of people who deep in their brains you are inferior....to them. They might not say it, or they might show it...but they think it....and people are SMART Blackjack. They know what you truly think of them in your thoughts. You might not think they do....oh, but they do.

He he he. Relampaguito doesn't fit in your mould. My next door neighbors are black. I watch videos with a wide array of people of different races and ethnicities. My next door neighbors watch BET almost exclusively. Americans are pretty aware of this tendency, and that's part of why they are finding the force feeding of multicultural programming to white people and ethnic and racial programming to everyone else a bit tiresome. Hulu, Fubo, etc. have big tabs that say "Latino" for their Spanish content. How much more often did you watch Univision and Telemundo in the United States than programming from the major networks?

Orange County aint what it used to be. It is getting increasingly more liberal. Even with the Asian store owners, etc in OC.

Asian store owners aren't exactly liberal. Socially, Asians are pretty conservative people, but like blacks often vote exclusively for the Democratic party. That's starting to change now too as they make more money and face discrimination by the Democratic coalition and higher education institutions.

Noemon doesn't lie about that stuff BJ....even though it is hard for you to accept that a white American Californian can say such outrageous anti-white things about his own.

Is he American or Irish? I am a citizen of Ireland and I don't consider myself culturally Irish at all. I have spent time there and the cultural milieu is quite different. The Irish, for example, can spin yarns for hours about the oppression of being under the British yoke, something they could have thrown off a lot sooner than they did; however, they find themselves puzzled that Brexit means they cannot control their own borders between the Republic and the UK, because they sold their sovereignty out to a foreign power without a shot being fired in anger. For this reason, they oppose Brexit--not because they are desperate to be in political union with the British once again.

He yanks your chain all the time. Lol. I find his humor hilarious. We don't share the same sense of humor. I have not seen yours.

You just don't realize that I am laughing half the time I am writing. You think of American political conservatives with fear, so you cannot dispassionately consider what they are saying and why. It's not like the European right at all.

Caused by a bad economy, caused by capitalism being saturated with problems between high taxes and Reaganomics, etc. and a lot of Clintonian shit as well.

Reaganomics didn't hurt California at all. The big problems started under Bush and Clinton. First, there were huge cuts to the military budget. California had a lot of military bases and defense contractors that got shut down. If you like Michael Douglas as an actor, his favorite movie he starred in was Falling Down--a recently laid of engineer of a defense contractor. Militarily, I think America is a bit misfigured for defense of the nation as a result. In California, Alameda NAS, Moffet NAS, Mather AFB, Naval Station San Francisco, Norton AFB, Presidio of San Francisco (originally Spanish), Salton Sea Test Base, Beale AFB (realigned, still operates U2s), Castle AFB, Fort Ord (uncles served there), Hunters Point (where my buddy is a cop), Marine Corps Air Station Tustin (Orange County), Mare Island (I used to see subs in SF Bay), Naval Station Long Beach, Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Point Mugu NAS, Presidio Monterey (originally Spanish), Sacramento Army Depot, Marine Air Corps Station El Toro (Orange County), Naval Hospital Oakland, Treasure Island Naval Station, Naval Training Center San Diego, McClellan AFB, Oakland Army Base, etc. There are more. Like Concord Naval Weapons very close to where I grew up. I remember a protester lying on the train tracks to try to stop a train moving arms to ships headed for Nicaragua back in the 1980s. It just cut the guy's legs off. Anyway, all of that is gone.

What's left? Beale AFB has U2s and some C-17s and tankers. Travis AFB, which is mostly C5s and C-17s. NAS Lemoore, where they train F-18 pilots. Edwards AFB, where shuttles used to land. San Diego is pretty much where the military is in California now. Oh, and 29 Palms. Can anyone else think of anything?

I mean it frigging gutted California. Then, they let in tons of illegal aliens, and passed NAFTA and GATT and shipped tons of jobs overseas. So basically, people like me who are high tech, high skilled workers, government employees, and agricultural workers. The blue collar working class was absolutely decimated. Reagan passed only one of twelve base realignment plans. Most were Clinton, with Bush II doing a number as well. It also tells you a lot about why Americans want to bring the troops home, and strangely why people overseas who constantly lament the United States do not want us to leave.

Don't blame immigrants.

They drove wages down for blue collar working class people forced to return to unskilled labor.

I don't blame working class people looking for bread. I am not like that Sorry....

In other people's countries while breaking the law to do it... I understand it, but I don't sympathize compared to my fellow Americans.

Whoever insisted on Political Correctness should have been shot dead. Really.

Indeed.

That is not right wing thought BJ. It is called assessing your surroundings and your reality and making good decisions.

Libertine thought is mostly among the Democrats in the US.

[Rancid]

She scared Bezos enough to prevent Amazon from building anything in New York State.

I think that was really more about the unions and locals.

[Zionist Nationalist]

As you know, I was referring to your goofiness.

But learn to spell, get real, and we can talk.

Who do you think you are.
You are not as smart as you think Mr.progressive

[Tainari88]

It's not unlike when Eric Cantor got bounced from the Republican leadership. It was a safe Democrat seat and challenging a party leader in the primaries is almost unheard of; yet, her boldness sent shockwaves through the Democratic party, because a leader with longstanding seniority was easily taken down by a political neophyte.

It is the demographics of the 14th district Relampaguito. And her door-to-door campaigning and her efforts. She did it on old fashioned political campaigning combining that with technology, and social media outreach. She also attracted a lot of first time voters and like I keep telling people, millions of young Americans turn 18 every year. And now? That means mostly Latino kids, immigrant parents that have kids who identify with their ethnic first generation roots, and a lot of other factors BJ. If you take that into account? The future is going to bend to the farther left....but? You might get your crack at your political column taking over? If it does? You will have tremendous problems trying to push down all these groups you can't cope with because you refuse to share power with them. And unless you are flexible? You will have a big war on your hands that if you are not careful? Your group will be out of power in the USA for the rest of that nation's existence. For sure. The young people are not British and Irish anymore BJ. They have not been that for a long time. Got to accept that.

That's almost incidental. First and foremost, she took down a contender for a leadership position, which in the Democratic party comes with seniority. Secondly and importantly, the right made her the poster girl of the Democratic party because she is a democratic socialist.

Yes, and if the Right is not careful about screaming against 'socialism' like it was the bubonic plague and keeps up smugly thinking that all their smear campaigns over the generations have made it go away permanently? They need to look at the joining up numbers for the socialist parties in the USA right now. They have tripled and in some cases gone above that in membership and most of them are young people. Not old fogies who will die soon. I can picture the day when an éxtremist socialist Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx might land in the White House someday. And if you thought that wishy washy liberal Obama was so bad......Lol. Well, I am sure you will be writing letters to many nations thinking of an exit strategy for yourself BJ. Lol. I am just suggesting....no te pujilatees....

Well, she is a bit extreme. The problem with the Democratic party is that they sold out the blue collar working class factory workers with trade deals, and came to hold them in contempt. Transgender identity issues isn't going to hold the party together. Even Obama has come out, albeit gently, against the "woke" culture as it is killing the Democratic party.

Time to drop the non issues of transgender bathrooms and start coping with gaining back the working class columns of the USA. I agree. But? I have serious doubts about that Democratic party filled with sellout liberals with bad rotten values. I have my serious doubts....

She scared Bezos enough to prevent Amazon from building anything in New York State.

Those people need to get scared. They should have been taxed and spanked a lot harder LONG ago....they are used to being left to wallow in wealth and throwing crumbs at the state. Lol. Let them quake in their boots. Lol. I don't care BJ for corporate greedy people. Maybe you love them? I don't. Alla tu.

No prior political experience. She certainly has some now. However, she's got the typical millennial attention span of a gnat. It's unlikely she will get anything of substance done herself.

You think she is by herself? No, Relampaguito. No socialist is ever by themselves. You might think they are? But none of us are. Not by a long shot. Ever. I have been around Puerto Rican socialists my whole life. If she doesn't know something about a field? She will pick up the phone and find a Puerto Rican socialist, Chilean socialist, Mexican socialist, or someone who is a socialist expert from her culture and her background and also from the USA who will make it happen for her. If socialists, she will have backup. Of that I am completely sure.

They openly despise her. Don't be surprised if she faces a primary challenge.

Of course she will. I see things over long historical periods of time BJ. Not just something short and quick. Over time the nations of the world are going to have pool their resources and start coping with income gaps that are causing austerity and problems. It is just the reality. If some face huge oppositions and lose elections for now? So what? Over time? Reality seeps in. Human history and human life events and national events have a funny tendency to always force something to happen for growth to finally be able to gain traction. For me socialism is not a new concept at all. The conspiracy of equals had to do with the incompetence and bloatedness of the aristrocracy in France, and the thirst for a French Republic. Did they keep the French monarchy? No. Did they adopt finally after Bonaparte and all the problems? Were they able to become a Republic? Yes. So, they moved on. It took a while. But they moved on. That is human history for you. The American experiment with bad systems might implode, but the beginnings of a new wave of young socialists is coming. And that is what the bad liberal leadership forced with rotten value systems--like betraying the blue collar workers and not dealing with stabilizing society and coping with reigning in Big Pharma and their greed, etc. All of it has consequences. Socialists scaring these fools is part of the reality. The consequence.

Probably a more appropriate role for her...

She knows what her role is. La Alexandria. I like her Spanish. It is fluent. I can't say the same for all Puerto Rican democrats. Lol.

Culturally, of course they are different people. However, they won the same way. Reagan was also very popular among blue collar working class people. That's why they came to be called Reagan Democrats.

Reagan also passed Amnesty in 1986 for the supposedly illegal aliens. Mostly because the grape growers, wine growers, agricultural lobbies and powerful economic interests did not want to have their workers shipped on out when they were making money. He did what the big money people asked him to do--in order to hold on to his seat in California....he was pragmatic about got to feed my backers. Even if I don't want the illegal aliens. Lol. All these politicians are in the end interested in keeping powerful people in their support networks. You nationalistic types don't seem to get it do you? Capitalism trumps nationalism every single time. Ironically the solution to containing these rabid capitalists without nationalist loyalties are far left socialists. All of us. Whom all of you hate with a passion akin to a rabid dog's. When we are the only ones capable of containing those greedy soulless nationless freaks. But you don't see it....still holding on to ideas of capitalism is the solution to it all. No, it is not. But who cares? La Historia Me Absolvera....a famous essay by a Cuban bearded one. Lol. Hee hee hee.

Maxine Waters doesn't live in her district either, and SpecialOlypian thinks it clever to make her likeness his avatar. Same problem; although, Waters is black. Do you think your political interests are defined by your skin color primarily? I certainly don't think my views are determined by my skin color. There are lots of people with my background who have a wide variety of political views.

Now you are sounding like Martin Luther King Jr. who famously stated Relampaguito, that a person should be judged by the content of the their character and not by their skin color right? I knew this for a very long time or forever actually BJ...the ones who keep thinking that skin color defines their political thoughts are people who never really understood human history. Just being white defines you Relampaguito? Yes or no? No, it doesn't. So why should I be defined by something like "Hispanic"? Which I disagree with. That term by the way is bullshit. It is like calling you Englishman. You are an American who is not English due to being born and raised in another continent with another history. Not even Spaniards define themselves by generic terms. Most of them are a bunch of regionalistic types. They are catalanes, gallegos, andaluces, etc Not some generic "Hispano". That is a very old word from Roman times in which the Romans had a word for the land of Spain. Espagna....Espana....lol. It came for the root word of "Rabbit" in vulgar Latin. So, it comes from good rabbit hunting land. That is what Hispanic is all about. Latin America is complex. Lots of Indian civilizations that were there for thousands of years with interesting histories, languages and customs, etc and African slaves, and then the Asians as well. all mixed now together. Most of Latin America is like that. The land of the Rabbits is not the right word for Latin Americans. It excludes Indians and Africans. So I don't prefer it. Period. BJ, I got to solve a crisis with some pools over here. Got to go. But will be back later on to debate you. The one who stereotypes others horribly is not I. But your political column is not known for cultural tolerances dude. Think about it.

In America, she's considered white Hispanic, whereas I'm considered non-Hispanic white.


I don't have a problem with her style. I was the first person on PoFo to champion her--not you. Let's not forget that. I don't hate people just because I don't like their political positions.

You got to get over the trauma those white liberals with the hidden racism have done on your political position. I never had to cope with the 'white man's burden'. That is not my trip BJ. Once you accept all human beings of all ethnic backgrounds and colors, races and etc are your equals? You don't have to worry anymore about the white man's burden. But if you keep on believing Indians, Blacks and "Hispanics" are your inferiors? You will have the damn burden forever...and ever...AMEN. That is the problem with racism. It forces people to have to be constantly aware and conscious of thinking....the underlings, the lower ones, the ones who envy my status, the ones who I got to FEAR...the ones...who are this or that....YOU RELEASE ALL THAT SHIT AND LET IT GO. But until you do that? You are stuck with fighting the white racist liberals, fighting the real racist Southern bible thumpers, the x or the y or whatever...and you got issues forever. I discriminate in this forum. I do. I discriminate against political positions. Otherwise what the hell is one doing in this forum if you can't argue against a political point of view.....you don't agree with. Might as well just do a kumbaya we are the world....we are the children....For my exact political and historical point of view? I will argue against the American Imperialists from the Right til my last dying breath. They caused the imprisonment of my nation. And you are upset a bit about the Irish hating the Tories and associating the American Right with Nazi haters dummies with guns? You should see what your American imperialism has wrought in other nations who have to deal with that horribly, nasty, oppressive mentality. It is karma...simple karma.

I got to go BJ....will be back to deal with the rest later....reality is in Mexico and I got things to do. Hee hee.

[Tainari88]

I am not a Marxist. I am not axiomatically the antagonist that the Marixsts identify. I just find Jefferson and Marx to have poetically overstretched something like equality before the law and some sort of universal access to basic dignity into a strident claim that is utterly unsupported by the facts and hence is no longer fit for its intended purpose.

No, Relampaguito @blackjack21 you need to take a good look at why France and the USA had such a close relationship at that period in history. France was the place where a new system was taking hold. I don't have time for a complete rundown of Jefferson, Sally Hemmings, Monticello, his contradictions in Virginia, Paris, and so on and so forth? That would be a great topic for another thread. What is important for you to understand is that systems of economics and of social organization over time evolve. You read Harari's book....there is a chapter in his book on Homo Sapiens where he is talking about the Israeli Jewish people being angered he did not emphasize the many great accomplishments of the Jewish people over history. The many inventors, and scholars, scientists, and intellectuals, etc. of the Jewish ethnicity. Why didn't he do that? His answer was interesting. He did not want to contribute to an hubris and a pride that turns into an excuse to opress and to subjugate other people or to belittle their accomplishments. He summed it talking about how many cultures and many nations and many societies over human history made modern life possible. To allow a sense of self aggrandizement leads to serious problems for societies. And Harari has an illustrious academic career. He doesn't hide his politics at all or his sexual orientation. But his work is very very well researched and well supported. Equality is the right political path for what a prosperous, well balanced and well run and orderly and creative and vibrant society looks like. It is. Your center for organizing society is based on FEAR Blackjack. Fear of the other. Fear of the lower classes, fear of what you think is so much different than you can't allow the possibility of total identification with it because it is somehow 'taking' something from you. For you? The Marxists are envious, are wanting the wealth, are wanting the status...are wanting to be the bourgeoisie and the elite....they are the ultimate deceivers. It never ocurrs to you that it might be about the dialectic as Engels claimed. Lol. It might be about....dealing with not making human society run exclusively on capital and all its demands to expand and to exploit...and finally have a society that is about humanity, and human needs and not objects, or resources, territories and things and power based on position and class....but instead on the premise of being human. Having a basic right to human dignity. That economies are scientific and that society has a function based on human needs. Not on a hierarchy created to serve an elite. That is all.

Um... that was my entire point in gene hacking with CRISPR cas-9. Things may change quite radically from here. You should debate me and what I say, not the relampaguito image you've created in your own head. Keep in mind I've been working in cloud storage and now cloud computing with a focus on 5G telco--I make my money on nearly constant change, not some sort of static world.

I do debate you on what you say Relampaguito. That is why I took the liberty of interpreting your messages and Jimjam read my summary of your messages...you never said, "Tainari88 is LYING on my ass. She doesn't know how to interpret my writings!"That was your chance. You basically agreed. Lol. I am listening to you Senor Blackjack. I always like debating you Senor. You are a thinker. My issues with you has to do with your heart, your values and what your political positions centers on. And I fundamentally disagree with it. I gave you the questions you need to address about the issues with genetic engineering that I posed to you....smarty pants. You still have not done that. When will you?

The Human Genome being mapped is a big deal. But it also teaches us a lot of how nature and science gives us our instructions for being who we are...have you noticed a pattern? To it? We carry the past in our codes, but we also carry the potential for a great future...but to think differences are to be feared or to be thought of as a bone of contention instead of an option for solving conflict, problems and challenges? Is what we need to respect about the purpose of variation....good old variation....that has always saved our lives...through all these thousands of years. Variation does not mean inequality or that we are supposed to think differences are a threat. Instead they are our salvation. When are we going to bring that home to our human constructed societies? When are we going to start constructing societies using that deep and nature bound wisdom? No se cuando....cuando Relampaguito cambia su conciencia. Entonces si. Translation: I don't know when....when the Little Lightning Bolt changes his conscience. That is when it will happen.

Modernism in juxtaposition to post-modernism most certainly has a leg to stand on.

You need to define and elaborate on that statement Senor Blackjack. Too general. Make it more specific.

The Spanish influence never left either.

No it did not. But anyone speaking Spanish for a long while was punished for it in a state that has had that culture for a very very long time. That is called a form of colonialism as well. Not a good form of it.

I'm sure Pants-of-dog and the native Americans don't think that's too funny.

Pants, is the son of a couple of Chilean socialists who fled Chile and landed in Canada due to political persecution. Chile has a very long and rich history of democratic governments until 1973. When you got some interferences because Allende wanted a mixed economy and Kissinger and his ilk....disagreed. Talk about spitting in the face of the democratic will of a people who vote in a democracy? And you stated that the politicians despise the working people? In the USA? The voters? The USA's government has despised the will of democracy and voters for a long time....and then you wonder if the chickens come home to roost? With the same lack of respect for the working class of the USA? When some horrible violence happens to the seat of USA government areas on 9/11 the same as the 9/11 in el Palacio de la Moneda in Santiago de Chile...one in 1973 and another in 2001. Almost a generation later. Karma. Blowback...you see how this works BJ? You treat other people as you should be treated and you respect their essential rights like if they were your own....and somehow the fuse that lights all the enemies of the world....becomes pacified and never is ignited. It is all about where you place your values in this world. Over eons of time and over many centuries of human struggle. That is it.

He he he. Relampaguito doesn't fit in your mould. My next door neighbors are black. I watch videos with a wide array of people of different races and ethnicities. My next door neighbors watch BET almost exclusively. Americans are pretty aware of this tendency, and that's part of why they are finding the force feeding of multicultural programming to white people and ethnic and racial programming to everyone else a bit tiresome. Hulu, Fubo, etc. have big tabs that say "Latino" for their Spanish content. How much more often did you watch Univision and Telemundo in the United States than programming from the major networks?

I am not surprised. Walnut Creek California and the Bay Area is diverse. But I bet they are people with some money. Lol. Socioeconomics. Lol. BET? Well, you force feed American Hollywood movies to the entire world. For profit. That is where all the bullshit ideas that everyone is swimming in dough is a real problem in Central America, Mexico. People live in their own worlds BJ. They do. Ethnocentrism is a reality for many. The only people they socialize with, and have real emotional ties to tend to be of the same socioeconomic background, ethnic background, linguistic background, etc. People feel safe with the familiar. I am a weird one BJ. I tend to watch a lot of stuff in foreign languages, Swedish, Chinese, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, British, etc etc. I watch Telemundo, Univision. Lol. Univision did a biography on my mother's life. A short 20 minute piece. It was great. I don't think the Anglo community cared about making sure Latino kids got great educations. But the Latinos do. So my mother got a spot. Lol. But? If there wasn't any segregation of cultures going on in the USA? No need for all the multicultural programming. But since everyone had to watch Bob Hope and Doris Day and so on and so forth for a long time even though they were called Leroy Jones, or Jose Garcia, or Eddie Chung in San Francisco for a long time....? Lol. Include everyone and everyone will feel included. That is my motto. What is yours?

Asian store owners aren't exactly liberal. Socially, Asians are pretty conservative people, but like blacks often vote exclusively for the Democratic party. That's starting to change now too as they make more money and face discrimination by the Democratic coalition and higher education institutions.

You talk to people from different backgrounds. Again, they are not stupid. They know how the rich, the Republican etc feel about them deep in their brains. People are not dumb BJ. About social acceptance they have never been.

Is he American or Irish? I am a citizen of Ireland and I don't consider myself culturally Irish at all. I have spent time there and the cultural milieu is quite different. The Irish, for example, can spin yarns for hours about the oppression of being under the British yoke, something they could have thrown off a lot sooner than they did; however, they find themselves puzzled that Brexit means they cannot control their own borders between the Republic and the UK, because they sold their sovereignty out to a foreign power without a shot being fired in anger. For this reason, they oppose Brexit--not because they are desperate to be in political union with the British once again.

No, you are not culturally Irish. And you did not struggle for Ireland's independence. Michael Collins and James Connelly you are not. Lol. How passionate you defend the independence of and control of Ireland's borders, England's borders....but the USA has a right to destroy Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, US Virgin Islands, etc. and deny them sovereignty...because why? The Irish are real people and the others are not? You see what I mean about equality? No?

For them being oppressed is not a yarn or a spin. It is a reality. They got deep roots. I will be honest. Irish culture I love and admire deeply. I love James Joyce, and Eugene O'Neill's plays and so many other greats...Ireland produces beautiful poetry, song, music, art, dance, architecture, and life....a most beautiful culture. And what I love most about it? They kept on fighting and struggling for something better. Something I love. Special Olympian is a special man. American. And he is more importantly HUMAN. And for that? And for his ability to get you so riled as to take such an interest in his background and ethnicity. He won. Lol. With his humor and as we say in Spanish jodiendo contigo. County Cork is an interesting place. I am sure you have visited? It is good to visit your roots.

You just don't realize that I am laughing half the time I am writing. You think of American political conservatives with fear, so you cannot dispassionately consider what they are saying and why. It's not like the European right at all.

Why do you think I like writing to you BJ. I know you are not full of yourself half the time. Lol. Otherwise I would not be able to pay attention to such long quote bombs. You hold my attention because I know...you are being cheeky. You NUT! I don't think of American political conservatives with fear. I don't even live in the USA anymore BJ. The European Right is the European Right. The American Right is the American Right. What I don't forget to do ever...is know that both of them are manifestations of human politics and humans got a whole lot of shit in common BJ. They do.

Reaganomics didn't hurt California at all. The big problems started under Bush and Clinton. First, there were huge cuts to the military budget. California had a lot of military bases and defense contractors that got shut down. If you like Michael Douglas as an actor, his favorite movie he starred in was Falling Down--a recently laid of engineer of a defense contractor. Militarily, I think America is a bit misfigured for defense of the nation as a result. In California, Alameda NAS, Moffet NAS, Mather AFB, Naval Station San Francisco, Norton AFB, Presidio of San Francisco (originally Spanish), Salton Sea Test Base, Beale AFB (realigned, still operates U2s), Castle AFB, Fort Ord (uncles served there), Hunters Point (where my buddy is a cop), Marine Corps Air Station Tustin (Orange County), Mare Island (I used to see subs in SF Bay), Naval Station Long Beach, Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Point Mugu NAS, Presidio Monterey (originally Spanish), Sacramento Army Depot, Marine Air Corps Station El Toro (Orange County), Naval Hospital Oakland, Treasure Island Naval Station, Naval Training Center San Diego, McClellan AFB, Oakland Army Base, etc. There are more. Like Concord Naval Weapons very close to where I grew up. I remember a protester lying on the train tracks to try to stop a train moving arms to ships headed for Nicaragua back in the 1980s. It just cut the guy's legs off. Anyway, all of that is gone.

BJ, you got to realize that wars and military bases are expensive and wasteful. You invest in some planes and stealth bombers, etc and then oops, they become obsolete. Got to stockpile the old models or shove them off on some other nations who might want to buy less updated technology. How can you be expending so much on war and militarism and think it won't have to be re-evaluated down the road? How much money has the USA spent on all these wars over the years and if they had not been the world's cops? How much would they have saves and could have reinvested in infrastructure projects and many other things? War is expensive. Why do you think the Japanese were able to rebuild their destroyed nation after WWII. No more money on defense. Concentrate on consumer and other economic concerns. War is not really a great place to invest everything in if the majority of the people are civilians.

What's left? Beale AFB has U2s and some C-17s and tankers. Travis AFB, which is mostly C5s and C-17s. NAS Lemoore, where they train F-18 pilots. Edwards AFB, where shuttles used to land. San Diego is pretty much where the military is in California now. Oh, and 29 Palms. Can anyone else think of anything?

They had to abandon Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico and the Naval presence in Vieques too...all of it after a while is a losing proposition for many reasons. Yet, if that is your plan to revive the dead California economy? Bring back closed military bases? I don't think it is going to happen. Technology is replacing a lot of that as well. Many people aren't needed to be bombing from a drone in the sky anymore.

I mean it frigging gutted California. Then, they let in tons of illegal aliens, and passed NAFTA and GATT and shipped tons of jobs overseas. So basically, people like me who are high tech, high skilled workers, government employees, and agricultural workers. The blue collar working class was absolutely decimated. Reagan passed only one of twelve base realignment plans. Most were Clinton, with Bush II doing a number as well. It also tells you a lot about why Americans want to bring the troops home, and strangely why people overseas who constantly lament the United States do not want us to leave.

The military is an expense. A very expensive thing to feed soldiers who are not farmers, clothe them when they are not a textile fabric factory worker, and so on and so forth. That is ancient BJ. Rome complained of Roman troops forcing people to feed and house soldiers and they were just simple peasants trying to make a living in the Roman countryside. They resented that expense. In the USA documents including the Bill of Rights? USA Constitution it talks about soldiers can't just take over someone's house and eat their food and force them to lodge them for free etc. They used to do that you know...people resented it in those days. Lol. Public taxes pay for all that stuff BJ. Collective wealth. Pooled. The military deals with things in a very systemic way. You are a part of the society in the military. You serve and you have rights and obligations...and you are also entitled to benefits and a certain predictable security. Otherwise? Where is the impulse for solidarity for all eh? Humans are truly socialist in many ways. Always.

They drove wages down for blue collar working class people forced to return to unskilled labor.

There you go again BJ. Us versus Them mentality. For international socialists all working class blue collar people have if not the same interests, very similar interests...and they grow stronger as a solid block. Unseparated by nationalism and tribalism and racism and many other things...of that nature. It is only about working class of the world UNITE. Lol. I know you don't see it. Nationalism limits the vision....I know. I only want a good decent life for my group only. I don't think that way. Again....that PESKY EQUALITY thing of which is the center of my politics!

In other people's countries while breaking the law to do it... I understand it, but I don't sympathize compared to my fellow Americans.

Again, limited. What is a 'real' American for you? I wish you would define the markers for the American ideal? I am truly curious what you think being a real American is about? I am. I am all ears BJ. Vamonos....

Indeed.

Well we can line up the politically incorrect insistance pendejos and do away with those. Lol.

Libertine thought is mostly among the Democrats in the US.

I think it is evenly spread among both.

[Tainari88]

AOC on economics and on generational differences....why she rocks...and is intelligent! Lol. For you liars with your pants on fire about her 'being dumb'. Lol.

[Tainari88]

AOC speaking Spanish and answering questions in Spanish and AOC talking about FOX News obsession with her....the fear factor...hee hee.

[blackjack21]

If you take that into account? The future is going to bend to the farther left....but?

Hispanic cultures have produced far more right wing governments in this hemisphere than left wing ones. I hardly think the notion that moving left is a foregone conclusion. A lot of people come here to escape the poverty imposed by socialism, not to recreate it in North America.

You will have tremendous problems trying to push down all these groups you can't cope with because you refuse to share power with them.

Your politics assumes racial identity groups and people voting their race. Mine does not. If they did, whites would easily win in North America.

Yes, and if the Right is not careful about screaming against 'socialism' like it was the bubonic plague and keeps up smugly thinking that all their smear campaigns over the generations have made it go away permanently? They need to look at the joining up numbers for the socialist parties in the USA right now.

Oh, I don't think there is no movement that way. Bernie Sanders is far more popular than Warren or Biden in spite of the fact that he's never accomplished a thing politically, and he's the oldest of the candidates.

I have serious doubts about that Democratic party filled with sellout liberals with bad rotten values. I have my serious doubts....

You're not the only one.

They should have been taxed and spanked a lot harder LONG ago....they are used to being left to wallow in wealth and throwing crumbs at the state.

Income taxes are on income. If you increase your expenses to match your revenue, no income; ergo, no income tax. That's Amazon's method. How do you plan to address that? Revenue tax?

Reagan also passed Amnesty in 1986 for the supposedly illegal aliens. Mostly because the grape growers, wine growers, agricultural lobbies and powerful economic interests did not want to have their workers shipped on out when they were making money. He did what the big money people asked him to do--in order to hold on to his seat in California....he was pragmatic about got to feed my backers.

Yes. It was his deepest regret. Now California is broken completely.

All these politicians are in the end interested in keeping powerful people in their support networks. You nationalistic types don't seem to get it do you?

Of course we do. That's why we lead the way. AOC is only copying what the Tea Party has been doing for 10+ years now.

Capitalism trumps nationalism every single time.

Capitalism depends on nationalism. Nation-states coin money, nation-states charter corporations, and nation-states enforce contracts. No nation state, no capitalism.

Now you are sounding like Martin Luther King Jr. who famously stated Relampaguito, that a person should be judged by the content of the their character and not by their skin color right?

Indeed. That's not the right wing Nazi you seem to think I am.

I will argue against the American Imperialists from the Right til my last dying breath. They caused the imprisonment of my nation.

That was Progressives. People like Barack Obama, Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, et. al.

No, Relampaguito @blackjack21 you need to take a good look at why France and the USA had such a close relationship at that period in history. France was the place where a new system was taking hold.

Britain already had a parliament for quite a long time. That's why British colonists were able to implement new egalitarian ideas quicker than the French. It took hold and bore a new government in America first, not France. However, the impetus as an anti-royalty, anti-nobility sentiment. It wasn't some radical notion that the poorest beggar and the bourgeois entrepreneur where equal in all things.

You read Harari's book....there is a chapter in his book on Homo Sapiens where he is talking about the Israeli Jewish people being angered he did not emphasize the many great accomplishments of the Jewish people over history. The many inventors, and scholars, scientists, and intellectuals, etc. of the Jewish ethnicity. Why didn't he do that? His answer was interesting. He did not want to contribute to an hubris and a pride that turns into an excuse to opress and to subjugate other people or to belittle their accomplishments.

That would be a very different book. It would have clouded from the main thesis of the book.

Equality is the right political path for what a prosperous, well balanced and well run and orderly and creative and vibrant society looks like.

Equality before the law... Assuming men and women are equal, idiots and geniuses are equal, strongmen and wimps are equal is just pointless drivel.

Variation does not mean inequality or that we are supposed to think differences are a threat.

Difference implies inequality. That doesn't imply that they are a threat, but that they are indeed different.

Instead they are our salvation. When are we going to bring that home to our human constructed societies? When are we going to start constructing societies using that deep and nature bound wisdom?

Uniformity is what enables scale: a currency, a marketplace, a common language. It is that uniformity that allows for specialization of labor.

When you got some interferences because Allende wanted a mixed economy and Kissinger and his ilk....disagreed.

Stealing private assets was Allende's method. It's that method that always fails. It's why socialism is known for its breach of its creed more than the observance of it.

Walnut Creek California and the Bay Area is diverse. But I bet they are people with some money. Lol.

A nurse and a tradesman. Their house is about 500 sq ft. bigger than mine. Their daughter and son in law live with them. They have one car for they share as a couple, and the son-in-law and daughter also have one car. By contrast, a black lady moved in across the street. First thing she did was put solar on the roof. I haven't had a chance to talk with her yet, but I assume she's got some math skills. I've been telling my next door neighbor to do it for two years. I don't think he understands the math.

Ethnocentrism is a reality for many. The only people they socialize with, and have real emotional ties to tend to be of the same socioeconomic background, ethnic background, linguistic background, etc.

Indeed. That's why multiculturalism is a dangerous idea. It works well for high IQ people, but not low IQ people.

I tend to watch a lot of stuff in foreign languages, Swedish, Chinese, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, British, etc etc.

I do too, but rely heavily on subtitles.

No need for all the multicultural programming.

Some of that is due to language. With blacks it's generally due to identity.

What is yours?

I prefer more of a realist depiction. I don't like pushing an ideology through what Hollywood considers a "franchise." They destroyed Star Wars that way.

but the USA has a right to destroy Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, US Virgin Islands, etc. and deny them sovereignty...because why?

Because you can't have a progressive income tax under the US constitution. The 16th Amendment didn't create a progressive system. You also cannot have gun control if citizens are presumed to have the right to keep and bear arms.

26 CFR § 31.3121(e)-1 - State, United States, and citizen.

§ 31.3121(e)-1 State, United States, and citizen.
(a) When used in the regulations in this subpart, the term “State” includes the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Territories of Alaska and Hawaii before their admission as States, and (when used with respect to services performed after 1960) Guam and American Samoa.

(b) When used in the regulations in this subpart, the term “United States”, when used in a geographical sense, means the several states (including the Territories of Alaska and Hawaii before their admission as States), the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. When used in the regulations in this subpart with respect to services performed after 1960, the term “United States” also includes Guam and American Samoa when the term is used in a geographical sense. The term “citizen of the United States” includes a citizen of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands, and, effective January 1, 1961, a citizen of Guam or American Samoa.

See? The term "State" means places over which the United States is sovereign, not the several states. See? Make a citizen of Puerto Rico a citizen of the United States, and the citizen of Puerto Rico still doesn't have the right to keep and bear arms. It makes it easy to use the commerce clause to enact gun control. The 16th Amendment did not repeal the need for federal taxes to be apportioned or uniform. Yet, we have an indirect excise with graduated rates. How did that happen? You have to read the insular cases to understand why. America as founded was not a welfare state at all, and equality before the law isn't anything like universal dignity.

Legally, the territories and possessions of the United States are not equal. I didn't say anybody was not a real person.

I am sure you have visited? It is good to visit your roots.

Of course. My sisters and I took my mothers parents back home to Ireland and the UK in their dotage. My grandfather was 97 at the time.

BJ, you got to realize that wars and military bases are expensive and wasteful.

According to Keynes, it's +GDP for every government dollar spent. However, Keynes' assumption was that the dollars were spent domestically. That's why I contend that Keynesianism doesn't work in a free trade context. Keynesianism is inherently nationalist.

War is not really a great place to invest everything in if the majority of the people are civilians.

War is a great place for technical innovation. We wouldn't be having this conversation without it. George Friedman does an excellent job of describing it:

Back in the early 1990s when I was first working in radio frequency engineering, I learned how much of that technology was from the military. Dr Lee, whom I wrote for, even had some formulas for radar signal jamming.

They had to abandon Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico and the Naval presence in Vieques too...all of it after a while is a losing proposition for many reasons. Yet, if that is your plan to revive the dead California economy? Bring back closed military bases? I don't think it is going to happen. Technology is replacing a lot of that as well. Many people aren't needed to be bombing from a drone in the sky anymore.

You jump to a lot of conclusions from what I've said. Keep in mind, I didn't say we needed to have tons of military bases in California--only that we are a bit misconfigured for the defense of North America.

Humans are truly socialist in many ways.

Social, not socialist. Dogs are social too, but they aren't flying red flags and cursing the man.

There you go again BJ. Us versus Them mentality. For international socialists all working class blue collar people have if not the same interests, very similar interests...and they grow stronger as a solid block. Unseparated by nationalism and tribalism and racism and many other things...of that nature. It is only about working class of the world UNITE. Lol.

The reason the left became disaffected with the working class is because they spent generations on them, and the working class never revolted in the way the left had hoped. Now they are finding the same problem with women. Women do not vote as a bloc.

Again....that PESKY EQUALITY thing of which is the center of my politics!

Well, it's very nice you are so empathetic to the needs of the Congolese, the British, the Japanese and every other person on Earth. I'm more concerned with my local surroundings.

Again, limited.

Scope is good.

What is a 'real' American for you?

Citizen of the United States.

[Tainari88]

@blackjack21

Indeed. That's not the right wing Nazi you seem to think I am.

I love science Blackjack. I have had very long conversations with Potemkin most of all about science. But, I have always always been a person of a lot of intuition as well. It has served me well over the years. The issue I have with you? Is you have such an abundance of beautiful qualities--but you allow an emotional hardness to keep you from getting there. It could be distrust or something there....el corazon....and something. I can't quite put my finger on it.

If you ever decide to open that heart of yours Blackjack....todo el mundo sera tuyo. The whole world would be yours.

I have to work on a school project with my baby boy. He is not a baby anymore, but still...I think of him as that.

I finally got to the core of your values and your thoughts Senor Blackjack.

I work on the answers tomorrow. Pound out some more differences tomorrow.

I forgot to mention that I read all of Harari's books. Homo Sapiens and Homo Deus. And I do believe that the part on Israeli angered folk was in Homo Deus. The second book. The one about Artificial Intelligence and the future of human beings. I think that part he discusses in the latter part of the book. Unfortunately BJ all my books are still in Colorado in storage. I am supposed to start receiving them soon.

If I told you what goes on in my life? It is enough to fill a lot of very very action packed novels. Lol. And political thrillers and high drama. And things that are considered real life is weirder than fiction.

Asi es la vida.

You revealed a lot about something I suspected all this time you had a deficit about. But, I am going to respect your boundaries Relampaguito. You decide if you want an educational explanation on it. If you don't? You won't get it.

I don't know much about cloud storage technology Blackjack.

So many small things you have said made me think of you in a different light. If ever you want me to tell you what that was...just PM me. If you don't want to? Tambien. That is fine.

AOC the Rock Star....she is just another sweet Puerto Rican young woman. Out of so many I have known in my life. If ever I am a fan of a group of people Blackjack? It is Puerto Rican women. For sure.

[Rugoz]

Culturally, of course they are different people. However, they won the same way. Reagan was also very popular among blue collar working class people. That's why they came to be called Reagan Democrats.

They're similar in the sense that they were both elected by the working class to fuck them over. For that purpose, Reagan had to make certain consessions, such as being socially conservative, while Trump had to make more, i.e. being (or pretending to be) anti-trade and anti-immigration. Meanwhile income and wealth have concentrated at the top like never before.

[blackjack21]

AOC the Rock Star....she is just another sweet Puerto Rican young woman. Out of so many I have known in my life. If ever I am a fan of a group of people Blackjack? It is Puerto Rican women. For sure.

Personally, quite possibly. Her public actions are those of an extremely immature public figure. For example, she encouraged protesters to punch cops in the face. You may find that funny, but punching a police officer is a felony in most jurisdictions and will get you some jail time. Who's likely to be taking her up on that kind of ridiculous rhetoric? Probably some Afro-Caribbean kid who sees a PR congresswoman and thinks the world has turned or something, and it's okay to go out an punch a cop only to find that now he has a jail sentence awaiting him and a felony criminal record. He cannot vote and cannot so much as get pulled over for a broken taillight without the police drawing their guns. I like that she is challenging a broken system. That's good. Telling people to punch cops is a tragically bad move that is going to seriously adversely affect some people's lives, and since she is on the political left she will never have to be confronted for those kinds of remarks, apologize or even reflect on whose life she ruined or seriously adversely affected because they listened to her heated rhetoric and acted on her advice. That part is sad.

They're similar in the sense that they were both elected by the working class to fuck them over.

The working class did not vote for people to fuck them over. Reagan cut tax rates substantially, helped small businesses, and even pushed the Tower Accord when Japan was dumping. Foreign dumping in US markets has been going on for a long time. In terms of economic theory, it's a good thing--the closest thing you can get to a free lunch. In terms of national security strategy, it's a bad idea.

For that purpose, Reagan had to make certain consessions, such as being socially conservative, while Trump had to make more, i.e. being (or pretending to be) anti-trade and anti-immigration.

Trump is neither anti-trade nor anti-immigration and is not pretending to be. Trump is anti-dumping/anti-reciprocity in trade, focusing primarily on China's mercantile policy; and, anti-illegal immigration. The constant effort to the media to blur very clear distinctions has seriously eroded the trust of the American people in media institutions.

Meanwhile income and wealth have concentrated at the top like never before.

Why and how are good questions to ask. In the US, there are some very good reasons: first, industrial capitalism required physical inputs, but information capitalism's inputs are a tiny fraction of those of industrial capitalism. Consequently, each copy of a song or a piece of software or a movie is nearly free. Shifting the aggregate demand curve to the right doesn't dramatically increase costs or produce significant inflation with information capitalism. So we have a very different dynamic. Early on, rock stars and movie stars realized these gains and lived extravagant and sometimes tragic lives as a result of it. It took until the 1980s for that dynamic to reach broader audiences with software engineers, etc. As a result of commoditized office software, anyone can write a book, do millions of calculations per second, draw diagrams or make compelling presentations. That was unheard of in the 1970s. Back then, if you wrote a book, you were something special. Today, there are many books that should never have been written. When there were significant physical constraints to publishing, the need to sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of authors was significant. The same has happened to music. Anyone with a computer, a decent i/o card, a decent microphone and some instruments can produce top quality recordings. Even in the 1980s, as a kid I was pretty well off and could buy a 4-track recorder on credit. Limitation to 4 tracks seems ridiculous now. Yet, one result of it is that we have a torrent of very well produced shit music. There is no need to press vinyl, record tape or burn CDs. There's no inflation from increased demand for these things. Most of the electronic effects--reverb, compression, harmonizing, flanging, phasing, chorusing, noise gates, envelope filtering, etc. is basically free with a good DAW program. It would cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to outfit a studio with that in the 1970s. Today, maybe $1200? Unless you really want physical pedals or rack gear. The same is true of videos. YouTube--although it is a fraction of what it used to be--provided a platform for mostly non-professional content creators--democratizing what used to be the province of broadcast television.

Working in open source software, I can tell you that things like Facebook would have been unlikely and incredibly expensive if they relied on Unix, Oracle, and C++ programmers. Getting Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP for free made things like Facebook possible. The production possibilities curve shifted to the right.

I mean, we can agree that socially Mark Zuckerburg is a douche bag, but can we say that he has oppressed people in the way that Carnegie and Frick did initially? A lot of you guys love Marxism, but a lot of what made Marxism relevant was that workers were not getting a fair share of what was produced. There is a significant aspect of that today, but it's largely unnoticed because of international labor arbitrage. For Chinese workers, living standards have skyrocketed over the last 40 years. By contrast, many workers in the West found themselves laid off/made redundant. In other words, in the West the working class industrial workers haven't been exploited at all. They don't have any work. So Zuckerburg, socially speaking, is a douchebag. However, it's a different matter to say he underpays his workers, creates miserable working conditions, or is unendingly cruel. His use of people's private data is questionable, but it's not like giving someone two weeks pay if their arm gets cut off in some industrial machinery and wishing them well. Of today's American billionaires--the public personality ones anyway--Jeff Bezos is a much bigger douchebag in doing things like cutting healthcare benefits to WholeFoods part-time employees to "make the company more efficient." That's a prick move.

Trump moreso than Reagan is addressing part of the how--illegal immigration to keep location-dependent labor costs lower, and free trade to outsource more expensive labor to cheaper markets.

Some of these problems are likely to get worse. For example, self-driving cars may leave a lot of people unemployed. There are positive externalities. Like once the systems are good enough, we'll probably eliminate scores of serious accidents, road fatalities, drunk or distracted drivers, etc. It will change licensing, taxation and insurance significantly as well. Uber and Lyft are good examples of how governments are not always able to cope with technological change. Remember, fax machines were criminal at one point, because they violated the government's monopoly on first class mail.

So in one sense, it's really good that we have a bar maid speaking truth to power with a seat in Congress. On the other hand, she has no viable solutions to economic dislocations as they are not simply a problem of one class of people exploiting another.

[Tainari88]

Some background on the barmaid @blackjack21 ....lol. She is not some airhead. She never was.

In terms of the economics I endorse, I like Richard Wolff's economics. If you have an issue with his 'remedies' for economics? Then that would be a fine thread to hash it out.

I have always thought one should not dismiss people just because they come across as kind of gentle. That is just my opinion though.

From Wikipedia:

Ocasio-Cortez attended Yorktown High School, graduating in 2007.[17] She came in second in the Microbiology category of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair with a microbiology research project on the effect of antioxidants on the lifespan of the nematode C. elegans.[18] In a show of appreciation for her efforts, the MIT Lincoln Laboratory named a small asteroid after her: 23238 Ocasio-Cortez.[19][20] In high school, she took part in the National Hispanic Institute's Lorenzo de Zavala (LDZ) Youth Legislative Session. She later became the LDZ Secretary of State while she attended Boston University. Ocasio-Cortez had a John F. Lopez Fellowship.[9]

In 2008, while Ocasio-Cortez was a sophomore at Boston University, her father died of lung cancer.[21][22] Ocasio-Cortez became involved in a lengthy probate battle to settle his estate. She has said that the experience helped her learn "firsthand how attorneys appointed by the court to administer an estate can enrich themselves at the expense of the families struggling to make sense of the bureaucracy".[23]

During college, Ocasio-Cortez served as an intern for U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, in his section on foreign affairs and immigration issues.[24] She recalled, "I was the only Spanish speaker, and as a result, as basically a kid—a 19-, 20-year-old kid—whenever a frantic call would come into the office because someone is looking for their husband because they have been snatched off the street by ICE, I was the one that had to pick up that phone. I was the one that had to help that person navigate that system."[24]

Ocasio-Cortez graduated cum laude from Boston University College of Arts and Sciences with a BA in 2011, majoring in international relations and economics.[9][25][26]

I guess if you want to hammer down what she knows exactly about economics you would have to find out the content of her economics classes. But in the real world? You got to let young people go out there and work with what is available.

There are a whole lot of interesting economic models that work well. The real obstacle to many of them is no political will to implement them because many people are afraid of it. They are afraid of it all.

Why be afraid to try something innovative? It is better than living with a predictable failing system in which workers get nothing and have their part time Whole Foods health insurance yanked by a Bezos prick. Don't you think so BJ?

Ave maria.

[Tainari88]

Do you think this dude might have been a Trump voter? I always thought the problem was....lack of personalism. See in other places not in corporate Whammy world....people become real only if you threaten them with something....they don't want. It reminds me of politicians. The voter is Michael Douglas and the politicians are the employees. Lol. Haha.

Angry dudes....

Who believed in the system. But the system let them down. I never believed in the system. It was always rotten with a lot of problems. The ones who are upset by it are the ones like Snowden who thought it was fair and correct and find out with time and experience it was a false front. Like a bad Hollywood set. Fake.

AOC is always going to scare some folks. When people are scared of young women with some enthusiasm? Lol. You got problems.

[Rugoz]

The working class did not vote for people to fuck them over.

There's zero doubt that Reagan's economic policies contributed to the increase of economic inequality in the US.

Trump is neither anti-trade nor anti-immigration and is not pretending to be. Trump is anti-dumping/anti-reciprocity in trade, focusing primarily on China's mercantile policy;

While Trump focuses mainly on China, my country is also affected by some of Trump's tariffs even though it is more open to trade than the US. Your claim that Trump is only anti-dumping/anti-reciprocity is not generally true.

Also, being anti-trade and anti-immigration can theoretically work somewhat in favor of the working class, so I don't know why you're suddenly arguing Trump is neither, making Trump not pro-working class in any way or form.

Why and how are good questions to ask. In the US, there are some very good reasons: first, industrial capitalism required physical inputs, but information capitalism's inputs are a tiny fraction of those of industrial capitalism. Consequently, each copy of a song or a piece of software or a movie is nearly free. Shifting the aggregate demand curve to the right doesn't dramatically increase costs or produce significant inflation with information capitalism. So we have a very different dynamic. Early on, rock stars and movie stars realized these gains and lived extravagant and sometimes tragic lives as a result of it. It took until the 1980s for that dynamic to reach broader audiences with software engineers, etc. As a result of commoditized office software, anyone can write a book, do millions of calculations per second, draw diagrams or make compelling presentations. That was unheard of in the 1970s. Back then, if you wrote a book, you were something special. Today, there are many books that should never have been written. When there were significant physical constraints to publishing, the need to sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of authors was significant. The same has happened to music. Anyone with a computer, a decent i/o card, a decent microphone and some instruments can produce top quality recordings. Even in the 1980s, as a kid I was pretty well off and could buy a 4-track recorder on credit. Limitation to 4 tracks seems ridiculous now. Yet, one result of it is that we have a torrent of very well produced shit music. There is no need to press vinyl, record tape or burn CDs. There's no inflation from increased demand for these things. Most of the electronic effects--reverb, compression, harmonizing, flanging, phasing, chorusing, noise gates, envelope filtering, etc. is basically free with a good DAW program. It would cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to outfit a studio with that in the 1970s. Today, maybe $1200? Unless you really want physical pedals or rack gear. The same is true of videos. YouTube--although it is a fraction of what it used to be--provided a platform for mostly non-professional content creators--democratizing what used to be the province of broadcast television.

Working in open source software, I can tell you that things like Facebook would have been unlikely and incredibly expensive if they relied on Unix, Oracle, and C++ programmers. Getting Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP for free made things like Facebook possible. The production possibilities curve shifted to the right.

I mean, we can agree that socially Mark Zuckerburg is a douche bag, but can we say that he has oppressed people in the way that Carnegie and Frick did initially? A lot of you guys love Marxism, but a lot of what made Marxism relevant was that workers were not getting a fair share of what was produced. There is a significant aspect of that today, but it's largely unnoticed because of international labor arbitrage. For Chinese workers, living standards have skyrocketed over the last 40 years. By contrast, many workers in the West found themselves laid off/made redundant. In other words, in the West the working class industrial workers haven't been exploited at all. They don't have any work. So Zuckerburg, socially speaking, is a douchebag. However, it's a different matter to say he underpays his workers, creates miserable working conditions, or is unendingly cruel. His use of people's private data is questionable, but it's not like giving someone two weeks pay if their arm gets cut off in some industrial machinery and wishing them well. Of today's American billionaires--the public personality ones anyway--Jeff Bezos is a much bigger douchebag in doing things like cutting healthcare benefits to WholeFoods part-time employees to "make the company more efficient." That's a prick move.

Trump moreso than Reagan is addressing part of the how--illegal immigration to keep location-dependent labor costs lower, and free trade to outsource more expensive labor to cheaper markets.

Some of these problems are likely to get worse. For example, self-driving cars may leave a lot of people unemployed. There are positive externalities. Like once the systems are good enough, we'll probably eliminate scores of serious accidents, road fatalities, drunk or distracted drivers, etc. It will change licensing, taxation and insurance significantly as well. Uber and Lyft are good examples of how governments are not always able to cope with technological change. Remember, fax machines were criminal at one point, because they violated the government's monopoly on first class mail.

So in one sense, it's really good that we have a bar maid speaking truth to power with a seat in Congress. On the other hand, she has no viable solutions to economic dislocations as they are not simply a problem of one class of people exploiting another.

Try to be concise for a change.

"Everybody getting is fair share" is only true in a market economy under very restrictive unrealistic assumptions. That doesn't make me a Marxist, it's obvious from mainstream economic theory (and even more so if you reject some of its premises).

Ultimately you end up with a variety of reasons for the increase in inequality, some of them are due to "exploitation", e.g. increase in corporate profits and managerial wages, some due to changing requirements at the work place (due to the automation of routine manual and cognitive tasks) and some due to changing institutional circumstances (lower taxes on high incomes and on profits).

Countries are also affected quite differently, in the US it's rather extreme.

[Finfinder]

Hispanic cultures have produced far more right wing governments in this hemisphere than left wing ones. I hardly think the notion that moving left is a foregone conclusion. A lot of people come here to escape the poverty imposed by socialism, not to recreate it in North America.

Not all hispanics/Latinos agree or even get along, for instance ask a Cuban what they think of Peurto Rico.

It's not unlike when Eric Cantor got bounced from the Republican leadership. It was a safe Democrat seat and challenging a party leader in the primaries is almost unheard of; yet, her boldness sent shockwaves through the Democratic party, because a leader with longstanding seniority was easily taken down by a political neophyte.


That's almost incidental. First and foremost, she took down a contender for a leadership position, which in the Democratic party comes with seniority. Secondly and importantly, the right made her the poster girl of the Democratic party because she is a democratic socialist.

She got 16,000 votes total in a closed Democratic primary.

[Tainari88]

Not all hispanics/Latinos agree or even get along, for instance ask a Cuban what they think of Peurto Rico.




She got 16,000 votes total in a closed Democratic primary.

Well, I am compelled to answer this Fin. Lol. Since it mentions Puerto Rico and Cuba. Lol. You are quite right. Remember I said humans act similarly in many circumstances. Just because people share a similar ethnic background doesn't mean they will see eye-to-eye and get along. Why should they? Human beings of all races, nationalities and religions have differences. In political thought, religious thought, philosophical thought and value systems that clash and clash violently many times.

Cuba is no exception or Puerto Rico. We have terrible internal fights all the time. Between ourselves and between other Latin American nations. South America had wars between other nations. Panama used to be part of Colombia. But the Panama canal zone was coveted by the USA to unite the East Coast of the US with the West Coast of the US without having to go all through the bottom of South America and up. Wasted time and money. So they came up with a scheme to separate Panama from Colombia.

The history of Latin America is very very interesting Fin. I hope you study it a lot someday.

Right wing dictatorships full of fascist killing turned off most of the people who lived in the nations that had them. That is something Blackjack21 el Relampaguito should realize.

And the US can become one of those too....if the conditions for it are ripe. For example in the 1930's there was a plot by rich industrialists to do a state overthrow via the military and oust FDR. They did not like his reforms and wanted him assassinated and out of that. It came on the news. One of the Major Generals outed the plot. He was against fascism and was horrified at the thought of rich industrialists running a democracy.

There are similar instances in Latin America.

But if BJ is not an internationalist and doesn't respect that history? He will be making a lot of mistakes. International relations and the history between nations is a very interesting field.

And worth a lot of study. But? If you are a nationalist and think that is the only thing in the world worth anything in your 'government' plan? You will come out in a bad way in many ways, economically, politically, etc.

I got to go. I got a lot of things to do today.

Fin, you should study Cuban history. I have. I have dedicated enormous amounts of time to Caribbean history. Cuba is the largest island in this region by far....I studied the history of that island nation for many years. Along with many others, such as Curacao, Trinidad and Tobago (that had a brilliant intellectual PM called Eric Williams), Jamaica, DR, Haiti, Guadaloupe, Bahamas, Aruba, etc etc. The Caribbean is a very interesting region and it is where the first clash of the Americas with the European powers happened.

It is worth studying. Adios Fin. Have a great day!

[Tainari88]

AOC and Mark Zuckerberg:

[Finfinder]

Well, I am compelled to answer this Fin. Lol. Since it mentions Puerto Rico and Cuba. Lol. You are quite right. Remember I said humans act similarly in many circumstances. Just because people share a similar ethnic background doesn't mean they will see eye-to-eye and get along. Why should they? Human beings of all races, nationalities and religions have differences. In political thought, religious thought, philosophical thought and value systems that clash and clash violently many times.

Cuba is no exception or Puerto Rico. We have terrible internal fights all the time. Between ourselves and between other Latin American nations. South America had wars between other nations. Panama used to be part of Colombia. But the Panama canal zone was coveted by the USA to unite the East Coast of the US with the West Coast of the US without having to go all through the bottom of South America and up. Wasted time and money. So they came up with a scheme to separate Panama from Colombia.

The history of Latin America is very very interesting Fin. I hope you study it a lot someday.

Right wing dictatorships full of fascist killing turned off most of the people who lived in the nations that had them. That is something Blackjack21 el Relampaguito should realize.

And the US can become one of those too....if the conditions for it are ripe. For example in the 1930's there was a plot by rich industrialists to do a state overthrow via the military and oust FDR. They did not like his reforms and wanted him assassinated and out of that. It came on the news. One of the Major Generals outed the plot. He was against fascism and was horrified at the thought of rich industrialists running a democracy.

There are similar instances in Latin America.

But if BJ is not an internationalist and doesn't respect that history? He will be making a lot of mistakes. International relations and the history between nations is a very interesting field.

And worth a lot of study. But? If you are a nationalist and think that is the only thing in the world worth anything in your 'government' plan? You will come out in a bad way in many ways, economically, politically, etc.

I got to go. I got a lot of things to do today.

Fin, you should study Cuban history. I have. I have dedicated enormous amounts of time to Caribbean history. Cuba is the largest island in this region by far....I studied the history of that island nation for many years. Along with many others, such as Curacao, Trinidad and Tobago (that had a brilliant intellectual PM called Eric Williams), Jamaica, DR, Haiti, Guadaloupe, Bahamas, Aruba, etc etc. The Caribbean is a very interesting region and it is where the first clash of the Americas with the European powers happened.

It is worth studying. Adios Fin. Have a great day!

I read a novel that revolved around the Santeria in Cuba was very interesting.

[Tainari88]

I read a novel that revolved around the Santeria in Cuba was very interesting.

Santeria has to do with a thing that happens with intermingling of cultures, in anthropology they call it, synchronicity, the West African gods are called orishas.

Certain saints are really substituting for African gods from some African tribes like the Yoruba.

Cuba still sings songs in Yoruba. You find songs in Yoruba in Cuba til this very day.

Jose Marti is considered the father of the Cuban republic Finfinder.

Jose Marti was a very very interesting figure. Pivotal in everything regarding Cuban independence. Here in this city I live in in Mexico? They have a park called Parque Las Americas, it has a library called Jose Marti Library. I tried to get a library card but I could not because I did not bring my passport with me and proof of address. Lol. I will next time. It is a very nice library. Merida is an interesting city with many Cubans. I have met quite a few so far.

A brief history of Jose Marti:

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mart%C3%AD

Explanation of this intermingling of cultures:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pope-fran ... ria-shrine

[Finfinder]

Bernie Sanders is in 4th place in the New Hampshire polls has AOC helped or hurt the Bern?