Yes! Make the situation goofy so Trump has a harder time with his strong man shit! We need something like this for the fist picture!
Yeah! How are we expected to compete with AI beauty? Break our fingers and glue six extra ones onto our hands?
Common usage the the norm are literally the same thing.
Prescriptivists act like 'the norm' is some ordained perfection and everything in their own lifetime is an aberration, but that's just temporal exceptionalism. Do you really think you just happened to be born at a time when the people writing style guides pointed at the be all the all of the English language and all advances are just corruption?
Y'all are just pushing this narrative daily aren't you? It's really transparent
Are we meant to believe that this is a real criticism?
Right. The one where this magical replacement for Biden that doesn't have a name or a face could have jumped on a primary ticket if they had wanted to.
Do you really think that's not a possibility? Did you forget 2016 already? Sanders certainly wasn't wanted by the DNC establishment, and they even found ways to put their foot on the scale, but he was still on the ballot in a high-profile democratic primary.
If someone had wanted to replace Biden, as in like, actually thought they had a good chance of winning and wanted to do the job, there was plenty of time for that before the Russian propaganda machine started wiggling its way into center-left media outlets.
Failing to run the incumbent was the bad strategic move. Also giving her control of the DNC, but Biden would have been an easy win at the time.
Like, I would have loved to see Sanders, personally. Strategically, though? If you're just thinking about getting a Democrat in the office? Biden was the play.
Hit on 16 in blackjack, run your incumbent in elections. The odds do, in fact, matter. The actual odds, not the figures arrived at by making a few hundred thousand cold calls and finding the people who actually want to talk about politics, as if that weren't a biasing factor in political position.
If he's unopposed, who exactly is this great new candidate who is going to magically appear?
This is almost certainly a Russian talking point. It's completely unstrategic, it's spreading largely through broadcast media, and it's easy to regurgitate with zero thought. Literally 10 articles per day about this, and none of them seem aware that the primary even existed.
Bullshit. Propagandistic bullshit.
And she lost. Because it's a bad strategic move.
Okay, but part of it is phones. Not in like, a 'kids are always staring at their phones' sense, but in terms of the ease of communication changing the social landscape.
When I was in my late teens and early 20s, if you wanted to go hang out with someone, you'd go downtown. You might run into the person you were looking for, you might run into someone completely different and have some crazy unexpected adventure, but it mostly happened in the same place. Even with old flip-phones, they facilitated communication but they didn't derail or substitute it.
Want to see what someone's doing now? You can immediately message them and either know they're free or busy or that they're not responding. And yeah, you could call somebody's phone, but it was different. There was little incentive to keep a phone charged once you were off with your friends, and those early batteries did not last! I remember my mom giving me shit about never having a charge in my phone when she'd try to call me.
Every day was an unexpected adventure. Very little of it was planned beyond 'go hang out in town', but every day was something different. Once all my friends were on social media and carrying smart phones, it changed dramatically. I didn't have to either go find someone or talk on the phone if I wanted to check in, I just have to message them. There's no need to go have an adventure to just say 'hey, what's up?'. There's no built-in incentive to team up and go find something to do the way there was when I had to physically get to someone to hang out.
And yeah, we can still make plans, but that's different. 'Plans' were always there, just as something special and organized, but the default was just hanging around. I don't feel that anymore in the same way. It's still there, to some extent, because I see some younger folks hanging around, but not in the numbers we had. Plans require planning and come with some pressure that just seeing people around town never did.
I think that need to go out and run into random people in order to have a social experience gave us something that we're missing now.
Also, like, we know a lot more now. We can see how screwed up humanity is. We know that a lot of our food is the direct result of dystopian sci-fi level torture of entire species. We know that the richest people are happy to light the world on fire to make a buck and that our measures for stopping them have so far not been as effective as we kind of need them to be. We know a lot of the horrible shit people have been doing to one another behind closed doors, and even out in the light of day.
We know a lot more about everything, but we haven't really had the time to heal from it as a society or even really fully process it all, let alone change it. Given the limits of youthful autonomy until adulthood, it's hardly surprising that it's kinda distressing being stuck in the back seat of a car that's careening toward a cliff while the previous generation's driver mindlessly stares at a Facebook meme about kids be on their phones.
The whole thing is a mess, and younger people are right to be distressed about it. But technology and our struggle to adapt to it is part of that mess.