News that makes us laugh, cry, or both

[PhoneLobster]

Wait wait, let me guess... in your blind desire to leave undisturbed the puddle of sperm Obama levied on your back you're claiming that slashdot as all publications that show your version of the godking in a less than favorable light, is a surrogate for fox news? Mop up dude, its just going to get stickier.

There are, already, reasons to (mildly) criticize Obama's administration. You aren't talking about them. You are making what is even within some very narrow and generous terms a false equivalency.

Because not only is it the case that the minor gaffes of the Obama administration pale into utter significance compared to the CRIMES of the Bush administration, but even if you ignore the crimes they pale in comparison to the minor gaffes of the Bush administration.

So for instance look at Vice presidents. So Biden mentioned something everyone knows and no one cares about. And maybe even did a good thing by doing so.

Cheney got drunk and shot a 78 year old man in the face with a shot gun.

To top even that single individual and single action by that single individual, let alone the entire two terms, Biden is seriously going to have to run over one of Obama's daughters, while drunk, in a Humvee, while having sex with Obama's wife, and his other daughter, on live TV, on the set of the live signing of a middle east peace agreement, during the signing.

[Username17]

Don't forget that in a misguided attempt at damage control, he got the old man to apologize on national television to Cheney for having the audacity to be shot in the face. Or the fact that Cheney is himself a major politician for the NRA who campaigns against gun control on the grounds that it is not needed because voluntary safety measures - like not getting drunk before handling your shotgun - can prevent accidental injuries - like shooting an old man in the face. It's like a rabbit hole of gaffery. The more you look at it, the more damaging and inane it becomes.

While I would say PL's counter gaffe suffers from hyperbole, it is extremely true that it is difficult to imagine any act or collection of mistakes that could equal the pathos of Cheney getting drunk and shooting an old man in the face. Even Biden getting drunk and shooting an old man in the face himself wouldn't do it because Biden doesn't make voluntary gun safety a major cornerstone of his domestic policy.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

There are, already, reasons to (mildly) criticize Obama's administration.

Oh, more than mild.

What's the point of closing Guantanamo if we're going to continue to keep people indefinitely in cages with no trial in Bagram, or if we simply transport a modified version of Guantanamo justice to the U.S.? How can a President who repeatedly promised vast transparency embrace the most extremist Bush/Cheney secrecy powers? How can a person who campaigned on the vow to end "Scooter Libby justice" and restore the rule of law take one extreme step after the next to shield from judicial scrutiny some of the most serious, brutal and highest-level crimes of the last eight years?

[zeruslord]

The whole shooting a guy in the face thing is way overblown. They were doing the kind of hunting where you are most likely to accidentally shoot someone in the face. There's a bunch of guys running around in the bushes scaring up birds, and when you see something moving out of the corner of your eye, you shoot it unless it is bright orange. Also, Cheney is a damn good hunter. If you had to pick one guy to accidentally shoot you in the face with a shotgun, it would be him, because he uses really light shot. If anybody else there had shot him, he would have been dead. Of course, having the vice president running around in the woods doing the one thing most likely to get him shot in the face accidentally is a really dumb idea.

On the list of things the Bush administration fucked up, that's way down towards the bottom.

[Username17]

On the list of things the Bush administration fucked up, that's way down towards the bottom.

Yeah, which is why it's merely a gaffe. Making it the worst gaffe. Since we're playing the false equivalence game where we are merely comparing the severity of humorous fumblings rather than tallying the dead from grossly negligent policies, it ranks the highest on the things that we are supposedly talking about.

We're comparing Biden wandering off topic and getting hysterical about Influenza A to um... Bush Federal Judicial Appointees having to resign after they were caught "returning" thousands of dollars in merchandise to department stores that they had in fact never purchased in the first place.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

I really couldn't be assed to care about Bushisms..

When, say, Michael Steele makes gaffes it's funny because they reveal some sort of cognitive dissonance (like the GOP needing a hip-hop makeover or women having the right to choose). The vast majority of Bush's gaffes were just him making verbal mistakes. And really, does anyone mind? Some people just don't speak very well, which is fine, since public speaking is a frankly unimportant job of the presidency that we elevate for some bullshit reason. They're mildly amusing but didn't affect my opinion of him.

I'm surprised no one brought up Obama's Special Olympics gaffe. Now that one (heh heh) is something worth criticizing. Joe Biden saying something stupid is just him saying something stupid.

[Maj]

Some people just don't speak very well, which is fine, since public speaking is a frankly unimportant job of the presidency that we elevate for some bullshit reason.

Public speaking is the first impression people get of your intelligence, much like the way you look is the first impression people get of your level of wealth and/or cleanliness. While its accuracy may be suspect, that doesn't seem to change the fact that people use it.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Some people just don't speak very well, which is fine, since public speaking is a frankly unimportant job of the presidency that we elevate for some bullshit reason.

Communicating ideas and stating positions effectively is an incredibly important part of the job. Not just because generating public support in support of an agenda is important, but because having people understand what that agenda is can be crucial.

Also, the President represents the U.S. at international summits, and I think that speaking in complete sentences while doing so should be an assumed minimum requirement. Tripping over your own tongue actually does reduce how seriously people take you, and being taken seriously is actual currency in international affairs.

[Crissa]

Funny, that story was false, LL. This was reported long before Biden was the VP. You didn't even read the Slashdot article, which says the gaffe was stupid, since it was reported they did construction (like building a bunker) in 2002.

-Crissa

[Lago PARANOIA]

Communicating ideas and stating positions effectively is an incredibly important part of the job. Not just because generating public support in support of an agenda is important, but because having people understand what that agenda is can be crucial.

Also, the President represents the U.S. at international summits, and I think that speaking in complete sentences while doing so should be an assumed minimum requirement. Tripping over your own tongue actually does reduce how seriously people take you, and being taken seriously is actual currency in international affairs.

It's important, yes, but the reason why it's important is stupid and just reflects upon the weakness of us as humans. In a fair and just world we'd care about the idea, not the person selling the idea, but we don't. And that's why it's bullshit and I try really hard not to care.

[Caedrus]

Oh. My. Fucking. God. Did you just say that? Really? LOL. Slashdot is a technical journal, not a political one. Politics are by far a rare story there unless they somehow deal with technology. Not to mention that one can gain the same information from Yahoo news or any other portal with national news on the web. Wait wait, let me guess... in your blind desire to leave undisturbed the puddle of sperm Obama levied on your back you're claiming that slashdot as all publications that show your version of the godking in a less than favorable light, is a surrogate for fox news? Mop up dude, its just going to get stickier.

That's a straw man. What I said was that you received your Fox propaganda through Slashdot (which you did), without ever needing to watch TV, and thus your comments about not watching TV except for Spongebob are stupid and irrelevant. Not that Slashdot is, in general, a surrogate for Fox News. Only that it served as one in this specific context as the mechanism by which you received your stupid idea. Incidentally, this follows your pattern of making sweeping unjustified generalizations from a single silly assumption.

Seriously, LL, all you've done is repeat utterly stupid Fox propaganda, give us a link to where you got your stupid idea from and absorbed it like a stupid impressionable child upon reading the first sentence, and then tried to make flimsy claims about how you aren't getting Fox propaganda because you didn't watch TV and because you read the Fox propaganda on Slashdot, as if either of those things were somehow relevant.

[angelfromanotherpin]

It's important, yes, but the reason why it's important is stupid and just reflects upon the weakness of us as humans. In a fair and just world we'd care about the idea, not the person selling the idea, but we don't. And that's why it's bullshit and I try really hard not to care.

If the idea is poorly communicated, you can't care about it at all. You can only care about whatever fragmented and/or distorted version of it you received.

[Caedrus]

Communicating ideas and stating positions effectively is an incredibly important part of the job. Not just because generating public support in support of an agenda is important, but because having people understand what that agenda is can be crucial.

Also, the President represents the U.S. at international summits, and I think that speaking in complete sentences while doing so should be an assumed minimum requirement. Tripping over your own tongue actually does reduce how seriously people take you, and being taken seriously is actual currency in international affairs.

It's important, yes, but the reason why it's important is stupid and just reflects upon the weakness of us as humans. In a fair and just world we'd care about the idea, not the person selling the idea, but we don't. And that's why it's bullshit and I try really hard not to care.

QFT. It is the responsibility of any, well, responsible human being to try really hard not to care about their own bullshit reptile brain impulses and override that with logic.

[Crissa]

Paul Krugman[/url]]Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back -- and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren't advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.

Hehe.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If the idea is poorly communicated, you can't care about it at all. You can only care about whatever fragmented and/or distorted version of it you received.

And that's why politics fucking suck. We shouldn't care about how some douchenozzle in a suit hams the policy up, the policy should stand on its own merits.

[Crissa]

PS: A Bushism was included in every single speech and press session W was in. They included things like misplaced words, mispronounced words, and mis-stated concepts and names, without any consciousness of making the errors. The errors were so common that the whitehouse press secretary would begin to dub over the errors in their copies of the audio, and never record them in the transcripts.

Obama asks for spicy or dijon mustard when he orders a hamburger. He cracks a joke and apologizes for it immediately. Biden make umm... Well he says funny things, but he totally meant for them to be funny. It's just not the same.

-Crissa

[angelfromanotherpin]

suck. We shouldn't care about how some douchenozzle in a suit hams the policy up, the policy should stand on its own merits.

How do you propose to know what the policy's merits even are until you know what the policy is? And how do you know what the policy is until it's been communicated to you? Magic? Psedoscientific cow fart telepathy?

Also, the same communications skills that sell people on policies are used to actually tell the people who will carry out those policies what their goals and actions are going to be. When dealing with an apparatus as large as the federal government, getting as many people as possible on the same page is a serious matter which impacts effectiveness in a real way.

[Lago PARANOIA]

How do you propose to know what the policy's merits even are until you know what the policy is? And how do you know what the policy is until it's been communicated to you? Magic? Psedoscientific cow fart telepathy?

How about some basic fucking thought and research into what someone is telling you? If someone gives a big speech on why single-payer health care is good and the deciding factor was whether that person had good hair and a manly voice then your decision-making process sucks monkey fuck.

Now, I don't mind ejecting people from key positions because of how they advertise ideas, but the fact of the matter is that in a perfect world they shouldn't have to go out of their way for how they advertise to begin with. Someone trying to convince you of something by speaking in a language you don't understand is an acceptable reason to reject the idea--but that's only because there's no way for you to even get the bare concept.

But a gaffe or looking funny or having an affair doesn't get into the way of grasping the basic idea. If you seriously go 'oh, he said is our children learning; let's ignore everything this guy says' then you're a dipshit. Now, this is America so when we do craft policy proposals and advertise them we do have to account for the people who will immediately turn off their brains if the person isn't a Christian or has a funny way of speaking or gets really mad if someone likes certain kinds of food. But if this person fails because of those reasons then that doesn't mean that they're objectively bad, it just means that they had the misfortune of having an audience of whiny, insecure dipshits.

Also, the same communications skills that sell people on policies are used to actually tell the people who will carry out those policies what their goals and actions are going to be. When dealing with an apparatus as large as the federal government, getting as many people as possible on the same page is a serious matter which impacts effectiveness in a real way.

You're talking about organization, which is a totally different skill from public speaking/advertising. They're only related because they belong to the categories of communication--an absurdly broad skill.

[Crissa]

If someone steps up with a peer-reviewed plan filled with studies and background material that have been poured over openly for years...

...It really shouldn't be an argument against the plan that said someone lives in a big house or has a degree from an effete university.

-Crissa

[Caedrus]

If someone steps up with a peer-reviewed plan filled with studies and background material that have been poured over openly for years...

...It really shouldn't be an argument against the plan that said someone lives in a big house or has a degree from an effete university.

-Crissa

Damn straight. And this is the problem with our democracy: As the saying goes, there is no freedom of choice without a sound education, and our masses are woefully uneducated and misinformed. They even like it that way.

Modern American politics resembles sheep herding more than the rational debate and secular politics that the founding fathers said was necessary for the success of democracy.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Modern American politics resembles sheep herding more than the rational debate and secular politics that the founding fathers said was necessary for the success of democracy.

Are you suggesting that early American politics were somehow more intellectual or vigorous? Because... because that's fucking tragic, this pining for an America that never existed.

If you don't believe me, look at how the campaign for James Madison--our fourth president--went. That there was classic pandering, dumbing down bullshit. Do you really think that politics degraded so much in that intervening timespace? Or do you think that was just romantic idealization of a time period so certain people today could sell us the horseylshit of 'returning to the intentions of our founding fathers?'

[Caedrus]

Are you suggesting that early American politics were somehow more intellectual or vigorous?

No. I am suggesting that this country does not embody the positive idealistic rhetoric that it's supposed to stand for. That in no way suggests that that was ever the case previously. Hence: "that the founding fathers said" not "of the founding fathers that."

look at how the campaign for James Madison--our fourth president--went. That there was classic pandering, dumbing down bullshit. Do you really think that politics degraded so much in that intervening timespace? Or do you think that was just romantic idealization of a time period so certain people today could sell us the horseylshit of 'returning to the intentions of our founding fathers?'

Preaching to the choir. Our founding fathers liked to do stuff like resolve arguments by shooting each other. Incidentally, Andrew Jackson was a badass duelist.

However, on a somewhat related note, I *would* argue that our politics has moved, in recent history, more towards being about religion and culture and stupid shit like that instead of factors like ideas about ideology or resources. I would make a detailed argument, but anything I could say on the subject would probably be explained better by Huntington:

http://history.club.fatih.edu.tr/103%20 ... 20text.htm

[Cynic]

No. I am suggesting that this country does not embody the positive idealistic rhetoric that it's supposed to stand for. That in no way suggests that that was ever the case previously.

And in no way will it embody the positive idealistic rhetoric that you claim it's supposed to stand for.

FOr the last two years we've had derision of FDR's New Deal which could possibly come very close to embodying that rhetoric out of all the years after the signing.

Seriously nobody is happy with what's on their plate. Isn't that the capitalistic dream?

[Caedrus]

And in no way will it embody the positive idealistic rhetoric that you claim it's supposed to stand for.

That's very cynical of you and I'd be willing to bet a true prediction. People have always insisted on acting like stupid sheep. Doesn't mean that progress shouldn't be striven for. All signs point to the politics of the near future being dominated more and more by religious and cultural differences, however, and that's a very bleak forecast indeed, if you ask me. I seriously was more comfortable with the Cold War. Really, at least a difference of ideologies (Communism v. Capitalism) actually *meant* something. But "you speak a different language than us" as a reason to wipe people out is just beyond stupid. And seems to be *exactly* what everyone wants.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If you think that the weaksauce 'culture wars' have any of the same hatred and ignorance thrown about as, say, Vietnam-era politics or hell any racial issues from <1970 then you are out of your gourd.

The religious/cultural wars in this country are not only nowhere near as violent or explosive as nearly any ideological debate we've had in the past but it's actually insulting to the people who actually fought in the earlier political battles--some of whom are still around. Seriously, the battles this country went through just for unionism is where I draw the line in the sand for any sort of conflict where you can wring your hands and go 'oh, this country is going down the tubes!!'. If your conflict is less exciting than that then you're just being silly.