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Yes, of course, your stuck prior is in your username.
Haha, it's definitely not always true. But my general political background view is that working within the system works a lot of the time, with enough time. I think it's pretty evidence-supported by US history. I was trying to come up with a new nick for the new forum to disallow cross-looking, I knew a prolific redditor with a similar and memorable nickname, and I was at the time of the opinion that signifying prior inclinations in a username would be helpful information on the forum. So it was a deliberate decision, not an indication that I'm some sort of status-quo warrior. As I noted, there's a specific story of Menendez' political upbringing and it's far from being some "regular senator we thought was a saint turns out to be corrupt" -- a major needle-mover if true -- it ended up being "senator from corrupt state with sketchy personal history ends up being corrupt" which... just isn't all that surprising?
Please refrain from wasting space with a low-effort personal attack (the very definition of rule-breaking, I might add) if you don't have anything to contribute. Would you care to outline what your percentages might be, or at least of a particular category? Part of the point is to get a read on people's priors and see if I'm wildly divergent (or if they are).
Which senator do you have in mind? I think perhaps we’d have a better understanding of why you perceive the system the way you do if we had some specific examples of individuals who you believe are in it for wholly altruistic reasons.
For my part, there is not a single individual over the last ~fifty years that I could name. Once upon a time, in my days as a member of the Fraternal Order of Bernard - often called Bernard Brothers for short - I would have said Bernie Sanders for sure. (I also sang the praises of Barbara Boxer, attempting multiple times to convince my cynical politician-hating mother that Boxer was the genuine article, a real paragon of moral virtue, committed to the betterment of her voters and of mankind as a whole.)
Of course, this is when I, like most millennials, believed that big business was uniformly conservative. That leftist politicians couldn’t possibly be taking big money from shady mega-donors and Fortune 500 companies, because why would those entities donate to the party dedicated to curbing their power and influence? And this almost seemed a teeny tiny bit true at the time!
Of course, only a decade later we live in an era where nearly every important corporation not only donates to progressive politicians and causes, but also makes a huge public deal out of doing so. (And that’s to say nothing of slightly more under-the-radar groups like the Open Society Foundation, and of investment firms like BlackRock who literally cut off companies’ access to funding if they fail to sufficiently debase themselves to progressive activism.) So there is basically no reason to believe that Democrat politicians are receiving less money from corrupt companies and cynical mega-donors than their Republican counterparts are; in fact, the dynamic may in fact be the opposite.
Given the obscene sums of money sloshing around in DC, why do you believe that even a person who started their political career with the purest of intentions would be able to withstand the onslaught of venal incentives that are immediately thrust at any politician who gets anywhere close to that level of power and influence?
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