I just want to emphasize that that opening quote is my characterization of her, not her own words. The second passage you cite are her words verbatim.
This is just another confession of faith. […]
What would really be interesting to me is if these girls had a discussion of what/who they trust and why. (I’ll go ahead and venture a guess: the girls who trust the government do so because it’s supposedly a “democracy”, which supposedly means they have some amount of control over what it does.)
Yes. Neither of them have much else than assertions or non-sequiturs. While it does seem that the girls in the middle trust aggression to solve everything I don’t find it implied in what they say that they trust democracy in particular to solve problems- although they would probably hold democracy as the highest form of governance if the question were posed to them. Most naive was Jackie’s comment that she doubts Julie’s argument that the legislative lobbyists cooked up this Paycheck Fairness Act (this is talked about at around the 30:00 mark) in order to cause conflict so that they can be called on to resolve this; Jackie thinks that such a conspiracy is the naive idea and doesn’t want to credit lobbyists with that much intelligence. I’d argue the opposite- indeed, she seems to have an ideal form conception of the US government. If she had even taken AP Govt. & Politics in high school she’d know that Congress is virtually nothing but an association of committees which are incessently badgered by special interest groups. All that is needed to totally vindicate Julie’s argument from the realm of “the absurd” [as it is regarded by Jackie] is the simple premise (as Clayton notes helped totally alter his perspective; see the top lines of the third paragraph, as well as the entire fifth paragraph in particular) that politicians are self-interested, too.
With regard to her respect for med students on the argument of the PPACA it’s not even an interesting appeal to popularity. She’s no understanding of economics apart from her dropping the word “demand” once during an argument (I pretty sure that was her). If it were something like the promise of a new drug and its effect on a certain illness and weighing potential pros and potential cons, she could appeal to the medical community’s findings with a bit more relevance (although, this doesn’t automatically make their opinion the truth; appeal to popularity is logical fallacy). But no, as John James critiqued, these are students being asked about the signature legislation of the guy who had overwhelming support of the twenty-something demographic. Yeah, they’re a good source of ethical/economic knowledge on this matter simply because they’ve been studying medicine (not economics, medicine; and they’ve been studying for the last few years, not acting in the market which actually requires conformity to regulations and subjecting one’s practice/operations to economic calculation) for the last few years.
If you haven’t seen the 'bate yet, Autolykos, I’d recommend it. If you’re not gonna laugh at the two girls in the middle then you’ll be exposed to ABillyRock and TokenLibertarianGirl; they ain’t just easy on the eyes.