His personal verse is the "searching to find my own place" etc. And the bit that is SUCH A CLEAR case of him cold-reading is "we finish each other's - " "Sandwiches!" " . .that's what I was going to say!"
I honestly run into "plus ça change, plus c'est le meme chose"? Like. Reagan was an actor and spent the majority of his second term suffering from total dementia. Mackenzie-King, our PM during WWII, got serious strategic advice from the ghost of his dog. James Monroe physically attacked his subordinates more than once. Andrew Jackson literally killed a guy. I'm sure I could find horrors from British PMs but I do not really have time. >.>
The news was full of lies, bias and misinformation from the time it was founded . . . like it's almost surprising that we managed a century or so where they had to at least PRETEND to be non-violent, calm, rational human beings in public, and I suspect that if previous political eras had the saturation of long-lasting accessible record that we have now, they'd look much worse.
Humans are bad at making smart long-term decisions, extremely easily swayed by in-group identities and herded by people exploiting fear and confusion, and attracted by dynamic personalities making sweeping promises, especially when prone to blame the status quo for things that are Bad.
/ramble
None of which is to say that we should all give up and go home and lounge around in superior gloom, because that never helps. Just. It's the problem of the Children of the Revolution, as outlined in Night Watch: we always have the wrong kind of people, because the people are pretty small-minded and petty and stubborn and hugely prone to cling to their Identity over obvious demonstrable facts while at the same time being absolutely certain that their pov is Self Evidently True and anyone that disagrees is a either a self-deceiving moron or actively out with sinister intentions, and self-centred, and prone to get derailed by simian dominance hierarchy games and just . . . people often suck. And recently, the worst parts of us have been better at appealing to fear and greed and in-group identity and self-satisfaction than we have been at appealing to the better parts of us.
Some of that's been through media manipulation, some of that's from other things (including our tendency to injured righteousness when people choose against us, leading us to make it clear that we think anyone who disagrees with us is a morally reprehensible idiot, which . . . is not something that inclines the undecided or the mildly opposed to incline to our side), but it's all just . . . people.
Hopefully we can learn to be better at people, and sort out the current bad dips back to the general slow arc of Sucking Less. But right now the far-right spin-machine is better at knowing how to push people's buttons than we are, and that's a problem. *sigh*
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Date: 2016-11-18 12:27 am (UTC)I honestly run into "plus ça change, plus c'est le meme chose"? Like. Reagan was an actor and spent the majority of his second term suffering from total dementia. Mackenzie-King, our PM during WWII, got serious strategic advice from the ghost of his dog. James Monroe physically attacked his subordinates more than once. Andrew Jackson literally killed a guy. I'm sure I could find horrors from British PMs but I do not really have time. >.>
The news was full of lies, bias and misinformation from the time it was founded . . . like it's almost surprising that we managed a century or so where they had to at least PRETEND to be non-violent, calm, rational human beings in public, and I suspect that if previous political eras had the saturation of long-lasting accessible record that we have now, they'd look much worse.
Humans are bad at making smart long-term decisions, extremely easily swayed by in-group identities and herded by people exploiting fear and confusion, and attracted by dynamic personalities making sweeping promises, especially when prone to blame the status quo for things that are Bad.
/ramble
None of which is to say that we should all give up and go home and lounge around in superior gloom, because that never helps. Just. It's the problem of the Children of the Revolution, as outlined in Night Watch: we always have the wrong kind of people, because the people are pretty small-minded and petty and stubborn and hugely prone to cling to their Identity over obvious demonstrable facts while at the same time being absolutely certain that their pov is Self Evidently True and anyone that disagrees is a either a self-deceiving moron or actively out with sinister intentions, and self-centred, and prone to get derailed by simian dominance hierarchy games and just . . . people often suck. And recently, the worst parts of us have been better at appealing to fear and greed and in-group identity and self-satisfaction than we have been at appealing to the better parts of us.
Some of that's been through media manipulation, some of that's from other things (including our tendency to injured righteousness when people choose against us, leading us to make it clear that we think anyone who disagrees with us is a morally reprehensible idiot, which . . . is not something that inclines the undecided or the mildly opposed to incline to our side), but it's all just . . . people.
Hopefully we can learn to be better at people, and sort out the current bad dips back to the general slow arc of Sucking Less. But right now the far-right spin-machine is better at knowing how to push people's buttons than we are, and that's a problem. *sigh*
. . . sorry, rambling. A lot.