• OpenStars@startrek.website
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    9 months ago

    Yeah this - people tout Al Gore today as if he was the same back then. He learned from what happened, and became better, but it was that failure that caused that process… or something like that, maybe?

    Like, didn’t he say that he invented the internet? Actually, supposedly he never said that, only that he played a key role in it (which he did), but that is the kind of thing that a “modern” politician simply cannot ever do: give comedians a reason to make fun of him, like Biden’s “then you ain’t black” comment. Obama understood this well: the President is mostly a face on television (these days, the internet), so portrayal is the main part of the job.

    Unfortunately, Trump used that same feature to his own benefit. i.e., Trump understood this one feature better than Gore. Before everyone downvotes me to oblivion, I invite people to think about how it is correct, no matter how desperately we wish it were not, or how disgusted it makes all of us feel:-(.

    • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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      9 months ago

      Gore was one of the senators who saw early on the potential of the internet and fought for funding for it. Vint Cerf said that Gore’s actual statement (which, of course, was not that he “invented the internet”) was completely accurate in terms of taking credit for what he’d accomplished and the value of it. It’s the same quality he had that put him ahead of the curve on climate change (he would actually still be ahead of the curve today, in terms of the woeful bullshit people in Washington consider “the curve”).

      If your goal is to live your political life in such a way that no one can twist your words around and make you look bad, you’re not going to succeed. I think a better approach would be uprooting and demolishing as much as possible of the powerful media systems that are engineered and funded to take good politicians’ words and twist them around to produce malevolent results and make those politicians artificially look bad. How to get that done, I wish I knew.

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        If your goal is to live your political life in such a way that no one can twist your words around and make you look bad, you’re not going to succeed.

        You’re not going to succeed, nor will you ever care about anything that matters

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      He never said he invented the Internet. You saying that kinda shows how much you know.