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Obama Warns Against Irresponsible Social Media Use (bbc.com)
In his first interview since leaving the White House in January, former President Barack Obama spoke about the dangers of irresponsible use of social media. From a report on BBC: He warned that such actions were distorting people's understanding of complex issues, and spreading misinformation. "All of us in leadership have to find ways in which we can recreate a common space on the internet," he said. The former president expressed concern about a future where facts are discarded and people only read and listen to things that reinforce their own views. "One of the dangers of the internet is that people can have entirely different realities. They can be cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases. The question has to do with how do we harness this technology in a way that allows a multiplicity of voices, allows a diversity of views, but doesn't lead to a Balkanisation of society and allows ways of finding common ground," he said.
You can't really call him divisive just because the GOP blew all their dog whistles to ferment a fury of hatred from their minions... His policies were nothing approaching controversial and he had not a single scandal in his whole 8 years in the White House.
This is entirely accurate. Obama didn't create division himself, he didn't do identity politics either. That was all other people using him to create rage.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
People are little more than hairless chimps: we chatter and squeal (and sometimes kill) anyone we don't recognize as part of our in-group.
We only have the intellectual capacity to identify a small number of individuals personally as part of that group; beyond that we build more ephemeral identities based on communicated reputation and shared biases to identify 'tribes' of commonality with whom we perceive a commonality of interest, at least in the categories of behavior and belief that we feel are personally important.
Outside of THAT, we simply cannot know everyone individually; we base our expectations on stereotypes. What makes those stereotypes to enduring is that they are indeed based on FACT to a greater or larger degree - there is, for example, no stereotype that Asian men have 3 heads or that Muslims breathe water: unfortunately, the building of these stereotypes is rarely today based on personal experience, but on 'shared wisdom' which is just as likely to come from CNN or Breitbart as it is from someone trustworthy.
Finally, this is coupled with a deeply-felt (but never actually proved?) faith in little-L liberal tenets of western civilization: that if we "just communicate more", if we "just understand each other better" we'll all get along better. SIMULTANEOUSLY we profess that people should be coerced as little as possible, that the ideal (in fact, the very essence of democracy) is freedom of choice for each self-aware individual.
I don't believe our ideals are reconcilable with our fundamental animal natures without large scale dictatorial reprogramming. So there's the question: do we get to be ourselves and make free choices, or shall we embark on a Great Leap Forward where a beneficent overclass tells us all how to live so we can be happy?
Frankly speaking: I think John Calhoun's experiments into mouse dystopias are far more predictive of the ultimate outcome of this experiment than some sort of idealized utopia of unicorns and rainbows where we all love each other.
-Styopa
at the Democratic party, which basically ran Romney Bot 2.0, right down the the comment attacking the electorate and having $700 million pocketed by consultants who figured they already won.
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It's difficult for me to admit, but this comment is lucid and downright Presidential compared to what comes out of the Oval Office currently.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
he had not a single scandal
Fast and Furious. Benghazi was not because of a film. The entire Syrian conflict, fuelled by the CIA and Pentagon. Drone strikes in how many countries across Africa, north Africa, the middle east, and central Asia?
The contrast with the current administration is so depressingly stark...
Yes, we do. We live in an age where the POTUS lashes out via Twitter on a daily basis.
Obama would quickly take the side of a black person on any white vs black incident, way before any facts came out. He sure as hell created division.
[citation needed]
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I really do want a citation which shows that Obama took the side of black people before facts came out. If your position cannot survive requests for clarification, then it is garbage. In this case, trolling, racist garbage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Your guy makes 'bad decisions', the other side has 'scandals'. That is the 'different'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I warned my liberal friends back in 2008: Obama isn't some kind of leftist firebrand. He's a center-left moderate who will govern somewhere to the right of Richard Nixon, because basically he's a 60s era Republican "moderate".
Liberals couldn't get over Obama's penchant for drone strikes; Obama never pursued an idealistic foreign policy which was ruled by *values*, although he talked a good game. He used military force freely to maintain the international status quo.
On the environment he was unreliable. Yes, he expanded some protected areas, but he also quietly but aggressively promoted fracking and expanded domestic oil production -- to the point where the US is expected to become a net energy exporter soon. Again foreign policy was a driver; not only did Obama take America to the brink of energy independence, he also greatly curtailed Russian military spending by strangling their energy-based economy; by becoming a gas exporter the US also limited Russia's use of natural gas supply as leverage over Europe. This is why Putin hated Obama and Clinton so much.
And his landmark health care reform? It was originally developed by Republican think tanks for Bob Dole's presidential campaign -- right down to the individual mandate. It not only maintained private health care delivery, it propped up the private insurance industry. It didn't even *have* a public option, which was the party left wing's line in the sand. He basically ignored them.
But while policy-wise Obama pursued stability and continuity, politically he represented change, because of his race. It's kind of the flip side of the "only Nixon can go to China".
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