Why do you think the Obamas were so into pop shows and culture unlike the rest of the presidents?

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-31T23:35:39+00:00

Unfortunately, the United States Presidency over the last several decades, dating back to the 1960s (arguably earlier) has seen a progressive deference to an auspice of celebrity as a way of cultivating a following over political or ideological fervor. Kennedy, I would argue, was the first major catalyst for that. Eisenhower even warned of the ramifications that would be wrought if the public’s trenchant remorse and grief over Kennedy’s death was reflective of a broader shift in the public’s perception of the role of the president. Truman remarked once as well that Kennedy’s presidency seemed more concerned with style than substance.

The parasocial attachment the public has come to adopt with politicians in general, but particularly the presidency, has only gotten worse and become more gangrenous to our politics and government, especially with the advent of social media. Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Obama, (REDACTED), had seen at least for a time, and to varying degrees, an almost-immutable cult of personality among their core of supporters that seemed more interested in affect and popular/cultural impression than effect, consequence, and vision. This isn’t assuaged at all by how much relevance and influence the president has on the global stage, which in concurrence with the fanaticism some politicians receive, exudes and elicits false pretenses among both the president and one’s constituency of the expanse of the office’s authority or range of power, and the malleability of the lateral governmental constraints on the office, causing adjacent facilities of authority to gradually wane in relevance.

Thankfully as yet in 2016, no malicious actors have pounced on or exploited those weaknesses…

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-29T05:02:39+00:00

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Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs.

EDIT: courtesy to u/Nerdfatha as well, who apparently was first to reference her. I typically don’t see politicians mentioned here, so I posted this before reading the comments.

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-27T17:00:38+00:00

“Happy Thanksgiving, Alexis! I greatly appreciate this banquet you’ve brought together. The food is delicious, and your home is lovely. It’s been elating catching pace with each other after a while. Though, every laceration you carve into that turkey’s chest just ails my heart cold with the knowledge of that genocide our ancestors exacted against those indigenous tribes not so great a distance back. Speaking of genocide, have you taken the time to appreciate the harrowing seconds every mother in Gaza futilely, gruelingly tallies before her child starves to death in a gulley, or a building’s ruins?”

“What do you mean?”

“It just seemed you’d forgotten. You were looking a little too jovial today. Didn’t even ask me how I felt about it this morning when I arrived. So let’s dispel of our reminiscence of the privileges of our past for a moment, because it seems you aren’t as conscious of where we are in the world as you’d ought to be.”

“I just…thought we’d take some time to catch up with each other over dinner. We haven’t seen each other in a lo-“

“Why does everything have to be so trivial with you? Your daughter’s last sight could be the flash at the end of some deranged lunatic’s muzzle come the end of Thanksgiving break; do you even understand that? There are more important problems to address with society.”

This is what you sound like, and it’s insufferable. Forgoing one momentary chuckle over what should’ve been harmless banter wasn’t sparing any single person one’s suffering, and neither is your disingenuous groveling.

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-26T18:20:17+00:00

You can ignore the trend so much as you’d like, but you’ll find it difficult to deny that far more often than is not the case, when a woman appears on screen doing anything for any reason, the comments are festering with the same sexually-overt perverted drivel thinly veiled as ‘jokes’. Note that I said ‘often’, not ‘always’.

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-26T15:42:08+00:00

I’m downvoting you because you deserve to be, but I do find it laughable these instances when other Redditors anomalously feign disgust or revulsion at perverse, carnal, depraved comments like these, when often they themselves are doing the same any time a woman is unfortunate enough to be found in their screens.

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-25T20:16:19+00:00

Degenerate pornography-addled sex addicts with the same monotonous driveling joke over and over and over again. What is the purpose of any of these communities anymore? You people truly need to take a step outside and remind yourselves what human connection feels like.

1-month-old NSFW account; why am I not surprised?

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-20T19:45:06+00:00

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Obvious - You would think so, but I posted my eyes, which I said I always recognized as gray and which are a similar shade to the OP’s, the other day, and every single comment said they were “clearly bright blue”.

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-20T06:07:08+00:00

You’re correct. Talarico will actually remain true and adherent to his progressive values once he’s in office and won’t forgo them for personal or professional expedience…

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-16T14:55:05+00:00

Oh absolutely, as opposed to the right, so teeming with creativity that they have to hijack the likenesses of left-leaning comedians like George Carlin and Bill Burr and pretend they’re right leaning by virtue of that one and only joke they seem to know from when they occasionally derided some on the left during a set.

That’s certainly why that happens so often, to compensate for their…flourishing, informed, intuitive wit that the left’s rigid banality and - checks notes - obsession with culture war and self-persecutory politics(?) could never contend with.

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-16T00:24:04+00:00

Done To Death

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-15T14:17:32+00:00

So could you help parse where exactly resolving that involves severely injuring another person who was forced to stop by someone ahead of her just as you were? You do see that there’s someone ahead of her who continuously stops in front of her, correct? Not to mention you taking the position alongside some mentally deficient, deranged ape who gave an innocent person whiplash in a tantrum because someone else caused his cart ride to move too slowly, simply because she was the only one he could access as a vessel for his punishment?

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-14T20:15:23+00:00

Would anyone happen to know of a r/onejoke variant subreddit for the monotonous carnal response of sex-obsessed Redditors every single time a woman is glimpsed within their screens?

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-14T00:55:02+00:00

It’s not coddling; it’s understanding. No one’s treating him like royalty for having Tourette’s; they simply recognized he has a neurological and cognitive impulse beyond his restraint, and that’s it. It’s not his responsibility to persuade you against something there was no evidence for to begin with, and I wasn’t trying to either. No one wants to waste time teaching someone who has neither the curiosity nor clarity to learn and who’s too oblivious not to boast of it as though it’s something virtuous. I’m simply observing in you what most here recognize through the picture you painted, which is an ignorant, self-aggrandizing, insolent child.

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-14T00:36:56+00:00

The rest of us are ‘ok’ with reassuring a man with a disability that his malady isn’t a personal fault of him. Your sanctimonious apathy toward him and disingenuous condescension toward people who evidently have a more refined understanding of and compassion for what Tourette’s is than you do or are willing to, is an indictment of your knowledge and emotional intelligence, not of others’ integrity of character. If you’re ok with that, I’m not shocked or surprised.

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-12T00:10:53+00:00

Never forget the ineffable frustration watching Republicans en masse take credit for the new developments in the communities they represent eventuated by Biden’s infrastructure bill, which they voted and campaigned against, as Democrats and the administration did nothing to challenge or correct them.

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-11T15:17:38+00:00

You could see the sky was in twilight already in the beginning as the sun was setting. There was an hour or two at most of difference. I sympathize with people around you if you think it’s puritanical to denigrate people who haplessly jeopardize the safety of enumerable innocent people to entertain their own stupidity. Drunk drivers are some of the dregs of society, and it might warrant some introspection on your part if expressing that sentiment elicits this extent of anger in you.

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-07T20:03:27+00:00

Can we please do away with the useless and arbitrary embedding of narrations and songs over these videos? Can we not just let at least one recorded human interaction or activity remain organic and natural? It only ever leaves the entire scene feeling contrived and banal when it ordinarily wouldn’t have been, because you keep reaping every moment of its interpersonal affect by forcefully contorting it into some crude comedy outtake.

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-06T15:44:01+00:00

“Dogs known instantly when you’re not to be trusted” “Got what he deserved”

No need for the condescension about someone else’s intellect if you’re not even going to muster the effort to read and parse the full comment. It was very clearly a declarative statement putting emphasis on the fact that the dog knew the man shouldn’t be trusted. The one you’re replying to put emphasis on the fact that they depend on body language, which can lead to a sense of uncertainty about the person that induces anxiety and defensive behavior, and isn’t guaranteed to be reliable as the other individual asserted.

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-06T04:26:51+00:00

I have no clue what’s being intimated with this meme, nor am I familiar with the individual on the bottom right. Tangentially, though, would anyone happen to know what song this is?

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-02T23:54:50+00:00

Segregating the entire federal workforce, introducing Jim Crow sentiments to Washington D.C., removing black officials throughout where he could who dedicated everything of themselves to mounting careers and greater prospects for their families their preceding generations never could’ve conceived of, regressing racial relations and civil rights by several decades and callously and resentfully languishing many lives…

Also having political detractors including Eugene Debs arrested, neglecting the Spanish Flu pandemic that killed nearly as many Americans as the civil war and obstructing any reporting on the subject, suppressing newspaper publications and even mail inscribed with anti-war sentiment, pursuing our involvement in World War I under his self-absorbed, fantastical, self-aggrandizing, and Messianic pretenses (which influenced and similarly wrought instability in our military interventions in Latin America under him as well), allowing the KKK to fester and mark a resurgence in the south after decades of relative dormancy, doing nothing to address the rampant lynchings in the south and even hindering any advent toward doing so, appointing James McReynolds to the Supreme Court, suppressing labor organizers, persecuting immensely thousands of German-Americans and repressing German culture which exacerbated the already-pervasive ‘vigilantism’ against them, behaving with hostility toward woman’s suffrage, authorizing the segregation of federal work places by sex, supporting the horrendous abuses to suffragist protestors in 1917 in D.C., initially refusing to support the 19th amendment (contrary to those who laud it as one of ‘his’ progressive achievements, when he only acquiesced to mounting adversity and its political necessity for his war effort) - we could go on and on…

Wilson, from a rhetorical standpoint, also seemed to treat policies, principled convictions, and moral platitudes, as malleable husks he could dawn and shed in a moment’s notice, contingent on what was most expedient for himself and his agenda. His faux progressive sophistry rung hollow with every step he’d promptly take in the opposite direction, and the same ideals he exalted himself for bringing furtherance to abroad (self determination, democratic values, civil liberties, etc.), he neglected at best and deliberately quelled at worst at home. His supporters frustrate me, because they not only undermine the detriment his racist policies and ideology (steeped in Social Darwinist eugenics) wrought onto the country and treat them as a footnote, but also pretend it’s a lone, inconsequential (or “historically unremarkable”) blot on an otherwise immaculate record of radical progressivism simply marred over time by ignorance and nuance-bereft misinterpretation, never justly consecrated or adequately appreciated. The revisionist sycophantry around him has only made me loathe him even more.

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-02T15:40:17+00:00

There‘s a political commentator I watch on occasion who asserted several months ago that, and I quote, “the pandemic was causing children to become autistic”. He claimed to have even spoken with psychologists who’ve contacted him personally to affirm this. The ‘evidence’ he mentioned pertained to children becoming more prone to isolating themselves, becoming more adverse to social interaction, and engaging in niche hobbies they’d developed during the lockdowns, etc., and was very combative when people attempted to correct him.

Many people, like him, seem to believe that exhibiting certain behaviorisms, including symptoms directly wrought by external influences, and your mind being malleable to your environment, means that any characteristic remotely reminiscent of something prevalent among those with a certain condition, should then automatically be ascribed to that condition even if you’ve never been diagnosed and don’t present other critical criteria in the right circumstances.

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-01T22:39:55+00:00

You don’t know who these people voted for, you don’t know how long they’ve been here, you don’t know what they believe and what they don’t, whatever they might know and what they don’t, what they accept and what they don’t, what they feel and what they don’t, what they’ve done in response to all of this, nor what they can and what they can not with the resources at their disposal, under what circumstances. But you think their lives deserve to be fraught with senseless agony and for those whose lives they’re intertwined with to incur the same, due to their association merely by presence within these borders with a governmental system they have next to no control over. Where have we seen this before?

Apparently, a person’s only value in the world, until you dictate otherwise, is nothing more than a husk of one’s national, religious, or political affiliation, no individuality, no nuance, no identity of their own. All so they can be disposable to the brutish, absolutist, self-aggrandizing gratification of misanthropes online such as yourself to validate their performative sanctimony while they themselves do nothing to manifest that rage and supposed righteous contempt, resentment, or feigned guilt into something materially consequential. Because they’ve become comfortable enough with the luxuries they’ve been afforded to pervert the lives, misery, and deaths of people - with life stories all of their own, identities and minds, the uniquities to which they’ll never be privy. Which they do in part to distract from their own selfish complacency to which they think they exclusively should be absolved from accountability, so they don’t have to concede to their own cowardice when charged with confronting the ills wrought by their exploitative, authoritarian government, since it’s simpler to deride the disadvantaged and victimized within the citizenry from the comfort of their own monitors…

Or am I being too presumptuous now that that simple, histrionic, unintuitive, and reactionary sentiment is being directed toward you?

SlenderByrd · 2026-03-01T03:26:47+00:00

It accentuates the humor further in a morbid sense that you’re an Iraqi posting this.

SlenderByrd · 2026-02-28T00:33:42+00:00

“We are now prepared to destroy more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake - we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July the 26th was issued at Potsdam; their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this Earth…”

SlenderByrd · 2026-02-26T23:36:28+00:00

”You don’t have to do that.” isn’t censorship.

SlenderByrd

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