Just Another Avocado Toast Eating, Venti Frappuccino Drinking Millennial
Or maybe there’s more than meets the eye…
Except I actually hate avocados, and I’d never publicly admit to drinking Starbucks. And apparently the Millennial Generation ends in 1995/1996, so I guess I’m technically in Gen Z. But Millennial sounds better, so I’m going to stick with that.
But let’s get on to the main issue at hand… why am I here? To tell you the honest truth, I like to argue. Constructively when it comes to politics, but ruthlessly tribalistic when it comes to sports. And there’s only so many friends one can have who are willing to put up with all the very civil and polite discussions that come up in a day, so I figured why not bring the fun to Medium?
Let’s start with the easy stuff. Gregg Popovich, Steven Stamkos, Drew Brees, and Evan Longoria compose my personal sports Mount Rushmore. Just a quality group of guys, can’t really argue their immense contributions to their respective teams. Kawhi Leonard is a snake who betrayed the organization that developed him because his uncle wanted him in Los Angeles. We could’ve given him all the apples he wanted… We don’t talk about the Lightning’s 2019 season, even though they had the best regular season in NHL history. Just don’t mention it. The LA Zebras (I mean referees) stole a Super Bowl appearance from Brees and NOLA just to watch the Rams get thrown into a ditch by Tom Brady. And Evan Longoria led the Rays in their glory days and had one too many plantar fasciitis bouts than the Rays would tolerate.
And now that I’ve got you reading this far, we should talk about the hard stuff.
As told in my bio, I identify as a Social Democrat. Switch the words and add an -ism and I’ve already lost a good chunk of people. But let me preempt the jump to conclusions. I am not a Socialist. I am not a Communist. I am someone who believes in maintaining the Capitalist framework of our economy, but also in ensuring a strong regulatory state and in utilizing the federal government to address areas of market failure, i.e. the environment, healthcare, etc.
Being a Social Democrat (or a green square), I lean Libertarian on social issues and am fiscally liberal. (I highly recommend you take the Political Compass Test to see where you fall in politics) We will get into the nuts and bolts of what that means and where I stand on specific policy areas in other stories, but to give a general sense of my politics I would identify most readily with the likes of Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Tulsi Gabbard, among others.
My goal in most of my posts will be to either make an argument for a given position or to point out cool data trends, mixing philosophy with some data analytics. AKA using a lot of Python, Pandas, and NumPy to make a bunch of fancy charts to make my points. Looking forward to sharing what I find with all of the instant fans I made by the end of this post and to convincing a few people along the way to be green squares.
