Maison Blanche roflmao.
I’d post Biden’s farewell address here. But its just too sad and deluded to qualify as farce.
Curios what you found funny. I admit it’s not the verbal diarrhea of your deal leader but I didn’t find any humor in it.
That was a pretty straightforward and reasonable speech. Of course he dwelled more on accomplishments than negatives, but he touched on concerns like abuse of the power of the Presidency, and the encroachment of oligarchy in government. Twice he spoke about the power of the tech industry to essentially shape public opinion, with AI being a separate but related topic. And I certainly think he did little about these impending concerns during his presidency, and we’re about to find out some consequences in the next four years.
I feel like if he had spent the last few years touting his many accomplishments we would be looking at president-elect Harris. The last 4 years have been really impressive when you look at all they had to overcome, but they didn’t do a good enough job of communicating that to the public. Media is to blame for some of that failure, but Democrats could have done way more to get the word out instead of falling for all the culture war distractions. It’s frustrating to see such a disconnect between reality and people’s perceptions.
I think we’re learning a couple of things.
First, politics is vibes-based. You can throw out stats of millions of people with healthcare, of record employment, whatever. People only care about what they’ve heard recently, and their attention span is short.
Second, mass communication technology/social media is more important than traditional advertising or official communications or actual accomplishments. Elon Musk in particular has shown his willingness to purchase or otherwise influence elections in multiple countries. Billionaires will have a vastly outsized and rising impact on election outcomes for the foreseeable future. I assume we’ll see more developing nations electing governments amenable to future business ventures with oligarchs.
Agree with all that. It’s a frightening time to be aware of all this. Must be nice to be oblivious to it and just live your life as if everything is normal. It feels like we are on the cusp of a new dark ages, ironically spurred on by science and technology.
I think it might be more accurate to say that people only care about what they’ve experienced recently.
In term of Presidential elections, “recently” will be “where I was 4 years ago vs. now”. All other considerations will likely be in the last 6-12 months.
I agree, except that Democrats didn’t get distracted by culture wars so much as that was a key part of what they were trying to sell. I agree if they stopped trying to sell their side of culture wars they’d win more elections.
Can you give an example? You guys always say this but I never get a clear response. imo you have it backwards.
