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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • I find this take fascinating because, although I also like watching athletes and sports, I see the fandom and names as a huge soap opera cast. I just can’t keep up with any of it, the names, the injuries, the rivalries, the trades. It’s all just a bunch of banal meaningless drama to me that I will never have the enthusiasm to track. It’s all the same old shit from season to season with a rotating cast of hot young fools, just like General Hospital. As such I can’t talk sports with people. I can watch, but the events wash over me without the same meaning or substance. For that reason, flamboyant and over-the-top drama (like hot tempers, trash talking, and general mischief) that happens during play is actually interesting as long as it isn’t too unsportsman-like and doesn’t interfere with the game too much. The soap opera drama is boring, the sports is interesting, but the performance and affectations are spicy.

    To be clear, your take is totally valid and I’m not really critical of it at all. I just have a different perspective.














  • Judge appointments work in a similar way, I assume other offices do as well. Judges often decide precisely when they are going to retire in order to manipulate how their replacement is chosen, by vote or by appointment. These positions SHOULD be mostly non-political and merit based in general. In reality, just like economics, politics is inevitably everywhere. The real solution here is to get out the vote for every election at every level, not just the big federal one every 4 years.

    That’s the way voting in a Republic, where you’re not voting directly for every position, law, and amendment, should work. The Republic falls apart and corruption and manipulation of the public will becomes easier when people don’t turn out to vote at the smaller election cycles. The death of local news plays into this too as it becomes much more difficult to stay informed about the people and politics of those smaller local elections. If you think our representative system is broken and needs to change, the solution is the same, get out and vote for every election and support local investigative journalism.




  • I think we agree here. “A few” is debatable, based on opinion, but also context matters. If I say I need a few minutes to either put on my shoes, prepare dinner, wake up, take a shower, or take dump, those are all different lengths of time. I just feel that conversation and interviews take a lot more time than the edited results we commonly see in print and on TV. Things like pauses to reflect on questions, introductions, and warm up questions never make it to publication. If I was asked to sit for an interview and it ended after 35 minutes, I would absolutely characterise that as “a few minutes”. And unless I’d ended it myself, I’d be concerned that it ended too quickly. If it had ended that wuickly, I’d be worried about what insane things I had done in those few minutes to provide them with enough material for a piece or that they had cancelled the piece entirely because they quickly determined I wasn’t worth continuing the interview. That is my opinion, but I feel that it’s well grounded in my experience and expectations, especially for a sit down interview with a candidate. I can see how calling 35 minutes “a few minutes” could be characterised as exaggerated, but getting incensed over it in a headline (a large font single line intended to grab attention in a few words) is overcompensating a bit.