Alex Pareene Quotes

Vaccines don't cause autism. Vaccines, instead, prevent disease. Vaccines have wiped out a score of formerly deadly childhood diseases. Vaccine skepticism has helped to bring some of those diseases back from near extinction.

— Alex Pareene

“An American parliamentary system with proportional representation wouldn't immediately or inexorably lead to a flourishing social democracy, but it would at least correct the overrepresentation of an ideological minority and cut down on intentional tactical economic sabotage.”

— Alex Pareene

“The song 'Take This Job and Shove It' spent 18 weeks on the country charts in 1977. 1970s country music fans had a clearer understanding of the ennui of wage-slavery than modern elites.”

— Alex Pareene

“Please don't begin to believe that the American political establishment is anything but a corrupt puppet of oligarchy.”

— Alex Pareene

“Aaron Sorkin is why people hate liberals. He's a smug, condescending know-it-all who isn't as smart as he thinks he is.”

— Alex Pareene

“Apocalyptic hysteria is much more effective at getting people to open their wallets than reasonable commentary.”

— Alex Pareene

“Conservatives don't want to read good, smart books. They mostly want to read Fox and talk radio hosts writing about presidents.”

— Alex Pareene

Everyone knows how hard it can be to market to millennials.

— Alex Pareene

“Furloughing a bunch of air traffic controllers has a pretty easy-to-predict effect on air travel: It causes delays.”

— Alex Pareene

“I grew up in a politically aware household: very civically-minded, good Minnesota liberals.”

— Alex Pareene

“I guess if you want me to stop writing horrible, mean takedowns of everyone, give me a really, really cushy columnist gig.”

— Alex Pareene

“I love insults, devastating takedowns, things that could be described by Twitter hacks as 'shots fired,' and funny ad hominem attacks.”

— Alex Pareene

“In case you're unfamiliar with TED, it is a series of short lectures on a variety of subjects that stream on the Internet for free.”

— Alex Pareene

“In our system of government, an opposition party doesn't have the ability to pass legislation, but it has the ability to massively screw things up.”

— Alex Pareene

“Modern political speechwriting is certainly a skill, and one that requires experience and practice to master.”

— Alex Pareene

“Most politicians are vain. Many of them are stupid.”

— Alex Pareene

Only a small rich fringe hates Social Security for disincentivizing 80-year-olds from seeking full-time employment.

— Alex Pareene

'Political junkies' and liberals will watch MSNBC, and angry, old right-wingers will watch Fox.

— Alex Pareene

“The Pentagon budget, like all government spending, is an expression of priorities.”

— Alex Pareene

There's no good reason that reliably liberal states should be electing senators as friendly to Wall Street as Cory Booker.

— Alex Pareene

“Donald Trump, an oft-bankrupt make-believe mogul clown with a television show where he pretends to fire America's saddest former celebrities, is one of the Republican Party's most prominent national figures because he is on TV and people have heard of him.”

— Alex Pareene

American politicians are responsive almost solely to the interests and desires of their rich constituents and interest groups that primarily represent big business.

— Alex Pareene

“Anderson Cooper is fine. He is a smart, conscientious guy, and he seems to want his show to produce and highlight good journalism. But he also seems to want to replace Regis, or maybe even Oprah.”

— Alex Pareene

“As long as Rupert Murdoch has owned it, the 'New York Post' has been defined by its shamelessness and total lack of interest in taking responsibility for its worst errors and poor judgment.”

— Alex Pareene

“Because TED is for, and by, unbelievably rich people, they tiptoe around questions of the justness of a society that rewards TED attendees so much for what usually amounts to a series of lucky breaks.”

— Alex Pareene

“Cable boxes are, almost without exception, awful. They're under-powered computers running very badly designed software. Their channel guides are slow, poorly laid out, and usually riddled with ads.”

— Alex Pareene

“CNN will always be the channel people turn on when wars and horrible disasters happen. The 'trick' is getting people to also want to watch it when there aren't hundreds or thousands of people somewhere in the world currently in mortal peril.”

— Alex Pareene

“CNN's problem goes to its very core and to the identity it's sought ever since the rise of Fox News, on its right: CNN is the channel for people who don't want to watch the other channels! That's a stupid strategy.”

— Alex Pareene

“Conservatives frequently complain of being frozen out of the culture industry, though, like all industries, the culture industry will produce or sell anything it expects to profit from.”

— Alex Pareene

For CNBC, and for Wall Street, billion-dollar fines for violations of the law are just part of the price of doing business, along with litigation costs and 'compliance.'

— Alex Pareene

For most of the millions of people who watch TED videos at the office, it's a middlebrow diversion and a source of factoids to use on your friends. Except TED thinks it's changing the world, like if 'This American Life' suddenly mistook itself for Doctors Without Borders.

— Alex Pareene

“For the cable news guest, nothing happens for a while until suddenly everything happens very quickly. After you receive your television face, you stand around for a while, ignored, until you're sat down at a desk and asked to argue with strangers.”

— Alex Pareene

“For the most part, congressional Republicans represent people who are whiter, older and richer than most Americans, and our creaky old political system gives those Americans disproportionate influence over public policy.”

— Alex Pareene

“Freedom from menial work should be a rallying cry, not a cudgel to be used against the Left. How much liberty is there in having to do something you hate in order to survive?”

— Alex Pareene

“From the late David Broder on down, the most powerful and influential of the great Washington columnists and journalists tend to cultivate the driest, least lively voices possible.”

— Alex Pareene

“Ideally, in the future, you'll just pay your cable company for the stream, which you'll be able to watch and manipulate through whatever means on whatever devices you like.”

— Alex Pareene

“In many ways, Tucker Carlson's a better symbol of the pathetic state of what passes for conservative journalism than even Glenn Beck or the late Andrew Breitbart, to name two of his contemporaries with a much larger following.”

— Alex Pareene

“Is there something psychologically wrong with David Gregory? No, besides the usual superhuman vanity of a television professional. He is just not a great host of a news talk show!”

— Alex Pareene

“It's been possible for years to use a PC to watch and record over-the-air television broadcasts, and unencrypted cable television tuners have been available almost as long. But for a long time, you could only watch copyright-protected channels with a cable company-leased box.”

— Alex Pareene

“Medicare is expensive because we spend a lot on healthcare. We spend a lot on healthcare basically just because we want to, and doing so has been very good to a lot of people who work in healthcare fields.”

— Alex Pareene

“Most of us don't think forwarding a racist joke or speaking in an insulting 'comedic' accent is appropriate at the workplace. Unfortunately, for those raised in the toxic culture of conservatism, the sort of mentality that leads government employees to do those things is widespread.”

— Alex Pareene

“Obviously no one wants to give members of Congress a lot of money, because they barely do anything, and many of them are terrible, but a Congress that is made up of rich-but-not-super-rich people is going to be more corruptible than a Congress of really rich people.”

— Alex Pareene

Rush Holt would be a fine senator. He's an actual physicist, which is neat. He cares very strongly about global warming, which is probably the single most pressing issue of our era.

— Alex Pareene

“'Simplifying' the tax code is a priority mainly for people who make enough money to want to avoid paying taxes, and who make their money by means unorthodox enough to make avoiding taxes possible and desirable.”

— Alex Pareene

“The thing with 'The West Wing' is that the fantasy was legitimately better than the reality - these were smarter, better people than their real-life counterparts, working together at a better White House than the one we had.”

— Alex Pareene

“There are a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on keeping lots of conservatives terrified and ill-informed. The groups that exist to raise funds raise more funds when they endorse the crazier candidate.”

— Alex Pareene

“There are two important things to remember about 'entitlements': They are hugely popular programs for a very good reason, and actual sensible 'reform' would mean improving them, not sacrificing them at the altar of 'fiscal responsibility.'”

— Alex Pareene

“Vaccine conspiracies, like so much modern cult conspiracy culture, perpetuates itself and lives on indefinitely thanks to the community-building and archiving of the Internet.”

— Alex Pareene

“We are actually a very rich country with a lot of resources and the ability to do almost whatever we want. We could eliminate poverty in America by spending a fraction of what we spend on defense.”

— Alex Pareene

“We're getting the sort of 'compromise' American politics specializes in: the one where things are intentionally made worse for most people in the hopes that if things are made bad enough, the other side will cave.”

— Alex Pareene