"Ooops".
OpenStars
joined 2 years ago
I have no idea why this is so damn funny! MOAR puh-lease! :-P
~~He's The Man~~... oh no wait, what have I done!? Strike that from the record!!!
We're just talkin' bout The Dude here.
I think Obama's approach was to bypass the media, and reach out directly to the people themselves, even if through them. That way, the media dared not make fun of him. Ofc they did anyway, but quite often, it did not stick as a result.
Here I have to ignore Faux News b/c they just ruthlessly tried to tear him apart - e.g. a black kid dies by violence, and Obama sheds a tear in sympathy, and they accuse him of it being faked. Which even if so, so what? We should have, and demonstrate, sympathy to people - imagine if that were a competition, and he was winning it, rather than the exact opposite of that which is the reality that we had:-(.
So the more mainstream media made fun of Obama's pauses, and how white his hair had turned while in office. Obama himself played along, especially in the White House Correspondents speeches. Those were great relations:-D.
Somehow Gore never managed to do that. I imagine him more like an engineer (which I am myself), who might be technically quite proficient, but struggle at the more "people" aspects of the job. Nixon too in a fashion. The people want a JFK/Bill Clinton/Obama/Trump, they don't want someone who will actually get the job done, more's the pity:-(.
And now we have Biden, who similarly is quietly getting things done, though the media is eating him alive whenever/however they can. After that, whether in this upcoming election or the one after that, it'll be a GQP member - you just know that, b/c of Dems never winning successive elections in history. Rinse & Repeat.
UNLESS libs learn this lesson, finally, and put forward someone who is electable? It very much IS a popularity contest, no matter how much we may wish, demand, expect, or hope otherwise:-|.
The attitude of the Greek Stoics impresses me: we cannot impose our views upon the entire world, we can only change what WE can manage to change ourselves. Maybe that means skirting the government at the federal level - like individual states right now could pass protections against future anti-abortion laws, so why don't they? Or coalitions among cities could accomplish a lot - e.g. we can't force people to take vaccines, but we can work to make them cheap, effective, and available to anyone that will.
Navel-gazing back into the past does serve a purpose, but only to the extent that we learn from our mistakes as we move forward.
Sadly I know very little there. I know I HATE my current Samsung (mostly due to the company practices like you mentioned), and I also felt incredibly betrayed by my OnePlus 7T before that (the device itself was amazing, until an update broke it and now it literally hurts my hand, like I wonder if it's giving me cancer by radiating something through the shielding that it burned through), and before that I absolutely adored my Nexus 5 (but Pixels are a whole other thing entirely - far too much camera and too little actual phone for my tastes). The entire smartphone world is incredibly predatory. I mostly figure that the next one I get will be a cheap phone, maybe even a dumb flip... but on the other hand I do live in an area where Google (or whatever) Maps could really help out so... I don't know what I'll do when my current one craps out:-(. Probably I will research a Fairphone, but if you live in an area where that would be difficult to repair, then yeah that may not be an option for you:-(. At least you live within the EU though where such is being forced to change, so you have that going for you.:-)
(Don't let your employer hear you admitting the Truth)
THIS IS FINE, SIR/MADAM!
I see no man - I only see The Dude!:-P
Yeah this - people tout Al Gore today as if he was the same back then. He learned from what happened, and became better, but it was that failure that caused that process... or something like that, maybe?
Like, didn't he say that he invented the internet? Actually, supposedly he never said that, only that he played a key role in it (which he did), but that is the kind of thing that a "modern" politician simply cannot ever do: give comedians a reason to make fun of him, like Biden's "then you ain't black" comment. Obama understood this well: the President is mostly a face on television (these days, the internet), so portrayal is the main part of the job.
Unfortunately, Trump used that same feature to his own benefit. i.e., Trump understood this one feature better than Gore. Before everyone downvotes me to oblivion, I invite people to think about how it is correct, no matter how desperately we wish it were not, or how disgusted it makes all of us feel:-(.
I bought a Samsung as well. We should both learn from our mistakes, and never do that again - this is simply the cost of doing business with them. Maybe Fairphone would be good?
First, thank you SO MUCH for your personal service. This should never devolve into a mere academic issue, to win fake points in some impersonal debate with someone online that will never meet irl. But if it was that, then you are definitey winning in the boots-on-the-ground sense, and I for one think that's so freaking awesome!:-P
Yeah I do not know everything, I just know what I read, e.g. https://www.ajmc.com/view/us-has-highest-infant-maternal-mortality-rates-despite-the-most-health-care-spending. Ofc not every place world-wide is the same, and not every place in the USA is the same either, though I find it highly troubling that not just one but many places inside the USA has an infant mortality rate worst than SOME (though not all) nations that are considered "third-world" (e.g. https://www.uhhospitals.org/blog/articles/2019/04/addressing-the-health-crisis-of-black-maternal-death-and-infant-mortality, and this was even from several years ago before the recent data - COVID? - pushed our ranking down from 32 to 51st).
Though details aside, yes it could always be worse, I cannot argue with you there:-). Mostly I think it means that we should not pat ourselves on the back saying "good job, America!" b/c there's so much that remains to be done. But also, I don't see how telling people who are grieving the loss of their futures that it can always get much worse is going to help? Then again, we are only dancing around semantics here - regardless of how it is phrased or handled, I do agree that we need to adjust our expectations moving forward, and opening our eyes to check our first-world privileges is a fantastic start to that:-).
1979 was Jimmy Carter, a Democrat. Reagan did not start until 1980, and while he is famous for breaking the backs of unions, thus crippling their ability to fight back against this trend, he did not actually start it.
Before Carter was Ford and Nixon, both Republicans. Ford pardoned Nixon's crimes, supposedly to help "heal the nation".
According to Robert Reich's "Inequality for All" (free link) - he was the Secretary of Labor under Clinton and previously served under both the Carter and Ford administration so he was very much attuned to what was going on - this trend started due to the rise of corporations, which have super-rights that humans do not have. e.g., taxes on stock dividends were capped at like 13% while payroll taxes can go up to >35%, and while if a human commits a crime they would go to jail, but not so with a corporation. It's a great racket scheme for the rich to cover themselves in a legal fiction so as to avoid pretty much any responsibility for their actions. Hence why we see so many corporations acting so very boldly to destroy the planet - after all, why not? What's the worst that could happen to them in return?