Would Stephen Hawking have had even a reasonably sized fraction of the attention had he not been so utterly physically ravaged by Lou Gehrig's disease? Of course I don't know the answer to this but there are undoubtedly scores of disabled people of notoriety that would not be so known had they not been disabled.

Anyway, I was going to bring up the Captain Marvel situation in the Anything Movies thread so I'm glad somebody else brought it up. I really found this odd. It was clear that Disney was responding to the accurate negative reviews of TLJ by smearing criticism which, of course, inspired the exact criticism they manufactured. With Captain Marvel, they preemptively trolled for the criticism before even a review was public. Most of this pre-review criticism was just complaining about that stuff. The reviews ended up being okay on average. I was actually excited about the film before what's her face from Kong Skull Island starting souring me on it. I was glad to find out that the film isn't really considered necessary to the others.

Black Panther and Captain Marvel (as I understand it) are just okay films at best but Disney has positioned them as some sort of global phenomenon and it's worked. They have both well over performed.

I've heard that Stephen Hawking was almost as passionate about science advocacy as he was about astrophysics, so I imagine he would have attracted at least some attention.

The real question is... if Stephen Hawking had contracted ALS before getting into Oxford, would he have ever been able to become a physicist? I've visited. I saw lots of stone steps and not a lot of ramps.

Stella Young apparently died in 2014. Very inspiring woman.

Cursorily looking over these college admission scandal stories again, I can't help but think that this batch of "rich" people who happened to get caught were simply not rich enough: if they had done things the old fashioned way, they surely wouldn't have needed to embarrass themselves by stooping to the bribing of coaches or the faking athletic records, right?

Right. Also, the wrong people were being bribed. Bribery is only legal when everyone involved is an oligarch.

That actually makes a hell of a lot of sense. It also explains why liberals can be so mad about this scandal but totally oblivious to the ordinary systemic corruption.

You could also say there's a parallel here to "mass shootings": the Wikipedia article for "List of terrorist incidents in 2019" doesn't even include the New Zealand terror attack, because in the _year-long_ breakdown, there is only room for those with 100+ deaths (there are two this year so far, neither in New Zealand). And if you go to the monthly page, there were nine attacks having at least 20 deaths in February alone. And yet the New Zealand attack gets all the coverage because the nature of who did it makes for a much more interesting story.

But there are even sad, missed connections here: the terrorist was incited to violence because of the immigration of Middle Eastern people to Europe he observed. But I'll bet that half of those immigrants (I could be wrong) wouldn't be in Europe if their home countries weren't themselves the victims of constant terrorism.

Edit: Anyway, I guess people can't address problems properly if the biggest parts of the problem are invisible to them, causing them to blow what is visible far out of proportion. If I had cancer and neck pain, I'd treat the first one with more urgency, but probably not if I lived in a country with no conception of modern medicine (that is, dealing with systemic relationships rather than surface perceptions of pain).

But, yeah... the bank accounts of the oligarchs really are silent like a cancer grows...

I think you borked up that reference?

silence...

So is the point that the bank accounts of oligarchs are growing, specifically silently?

Cuz in the song, silence itself is the thing that's growing, like a cancer.

Wait what? I thought Paul Simon was saying that something bad grows silently. Why would silence itself be the cancer??

Ugh, I just read the lyrics again, and I had the wrong idea all this time about the song!

The meaning behind the lyrics is ambiguous, but it's pretty clear that silence is the absence of people communicating ("talking without speaking", "hearing without listening") and spreading music/art(/love/peace/whatever?) ("people writing songs that voices never shared"), and that silence has spread and crept up on an unknowing society or something.

Oh heh, yep. Happens to me all the time with old music that you've heard your whole life and filed away as meaning something or other at one point in your past.

Anyway, it's pretty exciting!! that TX is putting up two Democratic candidates for Prez. Wish I could be more excited about the candidates themselves, tho... Beto was such an easy candidate to back when his opponent was Ted Cruz. Comparing him to other Dem hopefuls throws things into a different light.

I had always assumed the song didn't have much meaning at all! I thought it was just `60's mumbo-jumbo, but I think what you wrote here makes it sound surprisingly coherent.

But yeah, like you suggested, I'll confess I originally decided that when I was like 14 or something, so...

I keep seeing a lot of weird stories about Beto in the press lately. They mostly seem to be trying way too hard to peg him as some kind of privileged goofball.

Didn't we learn our lesson about electing rich white heirs who've never had to work and feel entitled to be president?

Serious? 'Heir' seems like a stretch for somebody who from what I gathered from his Wikipedia bio, is at best comfortably upper middle class, with successful parents.

His parents are millionaires, his in-laws are billionaires. Upper middle class indeed. Just like Jared Kushner.

Ah, I hadn't seen that he married into wealth. Either way, he has worked in his life, once at an ISP and another time as a live-in caregiver (for example).

At any rate, I think the terms "millionaire" and "billionaire" don't make much sense here. His parents almost certainly aren't in the top 1% percentile of wealth if they are of the more modest variety of "millionaire" (I haven't looked up their net worth if it is in fact available, but are we now disqualifying the "10%" from representing the 90%?), but on the other hand, his father-in-law is worth a billion dollars if you round up (his net worth is estimated to be "just" $500M, but this squarely puts him in the 1%).

I may have to backpedal on that quite a bit, now that I've read a bit more. O'Rourke has an estimated net worth of $9M, which at 46 years old makes him independently wealthy, and it seems he hasn't had to work too hard, either: he went to an elite boarding school, and together with his parents own a multi-generation family business and related real estate holdings. I am sure it wasn't too hard to meet his heiress wife, given that he clearly comes from a privileged background.

Beto, Biden, and the Electability Trap
Choosing the safe candidate makes sense — until you look at the history of choosing safe candidates
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/beto-orourke-joe-biden-electability-2020-807651/

I still support Warren first, Sanders second. Probably Beto over Harris. No clue about Biden...

Trump will be elected to a second term. Republicans will maintain control of the senate, democrats will maintain control of the house.

I think what's pretty hilarious about these charts is how they imply somehow that Harris is the vastly superior candidate among black voters. If that's true, I guess we're ****ed, although I may have to eat my words if she wins the general election and black voters overlook her record as a prosecutor and vote purely along racial (she's technically not even African-American, but Caribbean-American and Indian-American) lines.

According to “A national survey of women of color political organizers, activists, donors, and party leaders”, or in other words, people privileged enough that they aren’t that worried about what a California prosecutor is doing to poor black people.

I will eat my hat.

The funny thing about that Nate Silver article is that he thinks that criticism of Harris for her record as a prosecutor is a "whiteMale / leftist" thing:

[quote=Nate Silver]
Harris’s worst group — despite a highly liberal, anti-Trump voting record — might actually be The Left, the whitest and most male group, from which she’s drawn occasional criticism for her decisions as a prosecutor and a district attorney.
[/quote]

lol

Another insufferable part of that analysis is where he suggests that centrists ("party loyalists") are more informed voters:



Although I would expect this to be the case, since privilege probably correlates with how educated one is about the issues and candidates.

in other words the TL;DR seems to be, "centrists can beat Trump in 2020 by selling out both white and black voters!"

I am beginning to think that the 1% and big donor party influences are actively trying to railroad the one part of the electorate (the left) that poses a threat to their wealth, by associating them with the most unpopular demographic (white males), and thus changing the conversation from one about class to one about race. It's like the minute somebody (like the voters on this board) has enough privilege to spend their free time reading about socialist solutions, the renters panic and try to paint them as misogynists and softcore white supremacists (like they did with Bernie).

(oligarchs be tossin` all us a bunch of "Uncle Tom" candidates... maybe we'll be fortunate to have AOC for prez in 2024 after another four years of Trump though)

Edit: One more thing: if Biden wins, would he have the guts to let Trump serve out his prison sentence, or would he pardon him?

Dem insiders would pardon, absolutely. Don’t want to set the precedent that they might get prosecuted for the crimes they commit in office either.

Wife: I want a sedan

Husband: I want a van

Centrist, tapping his temple: I have the perfect solution

I just skimmed the posts, sure, but what did I miss about Trump going to prison?

****ing lmao

There have been reports in the media that Trump's most motivating reason to stay in office is to avoid prosecution.

For what? Or do we even know?

for colluding with Russia, haven't you been watching the news for the last two years

Perhaps you can ask Trump himself that question, since he seems to be the one who's worried.

This is the same **** they've been saying, from anonymous sources and "people close to Trump."

Don't get me wrong, I think trump is human garbage, but if you throw enough mud at the wall, some of it will stick. I think we should put every president under such scrutiny, not just the unpopular/republican ones.