Jon is the exception, and I’ve often spoken about how he would be an excellent President.
He knows, has been involved, and most importantly is disgusted in that knowledge of how the sausage gets made. He knows how to appeal for public support to tear down the institutional obstructions.
Also importantly, I don’t think he can be bought. He’s walked away from cash cow gigs after he made enough. He isn’t infinitely greedy, and that’s rare in politics because most of them get into politics explicitly to be bought. I think his combination of institutional knowledge, understanding of today’s social ills, demonstrated empathy, and ability to say no to calls of making moooooaaaaaar money make him the ideal candidate.
That’s also the problem, because I don’t think he’d want it, which makes him an even better choice.
That’s the paradox of power, from police all the way to POTUS, the ones that seek it out and fight for it tend to be the worst possible candidates to possess it.
A couple of people that drive massive vehicles they don’t need like Escalades have told me (former practicing psychologist) over the years that they know they are bad drivers, but they want to drive a tank so they can walk away from whatever accidents they know they’ll cause.
Because practicing and improving their driving skills is apparently not on the table. The lack of empathy is unsettling. They don’t care who they kill, they just don’t want to be inconvenienced.
I made a deal with myself a long time ago, my primary value:
I’d rather know than be happy.
Reality is cold and bleak. We have so many social constructs meant to obfuscate that fact. I wouldn’t change my values, but they aren’t a path to a shiny, happy life, and blissful ignorance values are among the biggest reasons our civilization’s outlook is so bleak.
A CEO has no desire to see how those they laid off are doing months later, or the children they hurt polluting a water source, or their own current employee’s subsistence living conditions despite the revenue they generate. They should have to see the pain they’ve caused to line their pockets, as should shareholders who applied pressure in willful ignorance for maximum profit(bliss), but ignorance is bliss.
Which is why, though alluring, the bliss of willful ignorance is a dangerous and antisocial value to live by.
Then we will fall to fascism in the near future. Maybe not this election, but soon.
You can’t get people en masse to support you on the message of “Your tangible situation will continue to be horrible, but letting those guys win will cause unimaginably worse horror” cycle after cycle and continue to get them to care, and it is understandable to for them to eventually wash their hands of it, because at the end of the day, voting associates you with this system, and it feels dirty to participate because it makes it feel like you bear responsibility for what a Faustian bargain it is every cycle.
I will keep showing up with a funeral dirge in my heart to vote for the lesser evil and attempt to hold back the bloodthirsty fascist horde yet again without hope for things actually improving, but I’m not the norm. Most sane people will eventually just walk away from it sooner or later because the reality is too unpalatable.
Honestly I wish the proud rigged market capitalists who don’t believe in progressive wealth redistribution, or a society with any equity, would stop calling themselves the “left.”
It’s nice that you support 2 homeless people being allowed to get married regardless of gender identity and live in the same refrigerator box in the same gutter, but the fact remains that no one should be homeless in a society that generates such wealth. This neoliberal mindset shouldn’t pass for left-wing. Our entire effective political spectrum has been reduced to “give rich people all the money and let people do what they want socially” and “give the rich people all the money and torture any non-white conservative Christians socially.”
And yes, i’m voting for Biden to stave off Jerry Lewis Hitler, just as I did last time and Clinton before, full well knowing it solves nothing and only slows the rate of descent into oligarchal madness and dystopia. It’s just voting to keep the water pumps running on the Titanic, it buys time, it is not a path to survival in itself.
I think you could drastically minimize any impact by doing the time travel in space and merely observing from high orbit, assuming your time machine has no form of exhaust, which if you have a time machine seems like a relatively small engineering challenge by comparison.
You might displace a few atoms in the void, but it’s the safest way one could go about it.
Just an aside, it’s still impressive to me with all the technical limitations they had, they were still able to make Mario feel so damn floaty swimming through the water levels.
I think modern developers are in some ways stifled by an aimless lack of limitations.
I mean, technically displacing the air with that time machine on such a massive time scale is just as likely to result in returning to a civilization of dolphin people as riding a dinosaur would.