BREAKING: Sometimes Famous People Die

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

[The Man]

Charles Manson dead at 83 - TMZ

Good riddance.

[JoeP]

Jana Novotna: Former Wimbledon champion dies at age of 49 - BBC Sport

Cancer.

[BrotherMan]

Country singer-songwriter Mel Tillis also passed this weekend.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Della Reese, 'Touched By An Angel' Star And Singer, Dies At 86 : The Two-Way : NPR

[curses]

David Cassidy, 'Partridge Family' Teen Idol, Dead at 67 - Rolling Stone

[Nullifidian]

Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Silver-Maned Baritone From Siberia, Dies at 55 - The New York Times

Hvorostovsky Ja vas lyublyu Queen of Spades ...

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Jim Nabors, 87, TV's Gomer Pyle, Is Dead - The New York Times

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Manitoba Cree elder Sarah Harper dies at 111 - Manitoba - CBC News

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Don Hogan Charles - Wikipedia

[The Man]

R.I.P. seminal mystery novelist Sue Grafton, best known for the Kinsey Milhone "alphabet series", age 77. Unfortunately, it looks like there won't be a Z novel.

Mystery writer Sue Grafton dies at 77 in Santa Barbara - LA Times

[BrotherMan]

Oh shit. I've been tearing through the series as of late. Currently on L.

Well shit.

[The Man]

Activist Erica Garner, age 27, has died of complications from a heart attack. Simon Balto at LGM has a good tribute.

Erica Garner Was a Victim of State Violence. May She Rest in Power. - Lawyers, Guns & Money

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

John Young (astronaut - Wikipedia)

[Basset Hound]

Jerry van Dyke has died.

Actor Jerry Van Dyke dies at 86 - CNN

[BrotherMan]

It was always a treat when he showed up on the DVD show.

[The Man]

I suppose most people who speak English and have access to the Internet have already seen Oprah's Golden Globes/Cecil B. de Mille Award speech, but for those of you living under a rock, I'm posting it below this paragraph. (I'd post a link to a transcript, too, but it wouldn't have the same effect. This is one speech you have to watch.) I'm posting it in this thread because of her discussion of Recy Taylor, a previously little-known African-American civil rights activist who died in late December at the age of 97. She would've gone in Mick's thread for not-so-famous people who should've been better known before the Golden Globes, but now she's been given a posthumous mention by Oprah, and that immediately qualifies her for this one.

Oprah Cecil B. de Mille Award speech

If I'd been in a better mental state, I probably would've actually posted about Taylor's death shortly after it happened. LGM (trigger warning: sexual violence) also has a nice write-up. If you can't watch the video and, for some reason, don't feel like seeking out a transcript or reading the LGM piece, she was kidnapped and sexually assaulted by six men, who threatened to kill her if she disclosed the assault. Instead, she went to the NAACP, where she caught the attention of a young investigator you may have heard of named Rosa Parks. Unfortunately, her assaulters never faced justice, but Taylor didn't give up and seems to have become a tireless activist, and I believe she outlived all of them. (Eleven years later there was an incident with Parks on a bus that attracted a certain amount of attention.)

---

A lot of people have been saying "Oprah 2020" after this speech, probably because it's just such a contrast to... what we have now. It is worth noting that Oprah is, in fact, pretty much everything the president* pretends to be and is not: she actually is self-made, she actually is charitable, she actually does give a shit about common people, she actually is intelligent, she actually is well-read, she actually is a billionaire. Beyond that, she's also a perfect foil to the president* because she's black, a woman, and so on - basically everything the president* hates, which would definitely introduce a delicious irony to having her replace him as president.

I have mixed feelings, though. Oprah's politics are mostly impeccable, but she's been instrumental in promoting some very dodgy shit, including anti-vax nonsense, Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, The Secret, and so on. She's also said atheists are incapable of awe, which is just... nonsense. She'd almost certainly be superior to any Republican currently in office, but that's a low bar.

The second thing is I'm not particularly enthused about fighting a celebrity president* with another celebrity nominee. The celebrity I find myself most capable of imagining as an actually competent president is George Clooney, who already has an extensive history of political activism and has a solid range of knowledge. I don't really want another white dude, though. I mean, I'll certainly vote for one if he has a (D) after his name (insert "yellow dog" quip here), but white dudes have been fucking up the planet for so long that I feel we need another perspective. There are a few other celebrities who could probably make credible nominees, but I'm certainly leaning more towards established Democratic officeholders who've already made their bones as fighters - Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Adam Schiff, and so on. I could be persuaded to support Warren as well, but at this point I'm getting pretty tired of Boomers, even if I like their politics overall. I lean towards a certain degree of youth. (The other old person I could be persuaded to support is John Lewis, who is probably the closest living candidate in national politics for sainthood apart from maybe Jimmy Carter, but I'm almost certain he wouldn't want the office.)

More importantly, though, even if Oprah does have ambitions for the presidency, that wasn't the fucking point of her speech. Her point was that we should be running for office and engaging in activism. Which I completely agree with (except I'm not going to run myself because I'm, as an introverted, anarchist-leaning, non-gender-binary atheist-agnostic with several mental disorders and a long history of making opinionated comments on the Internet, probably unelectable). It's difficult to think of a more fitting message for our times.

Really, though, watch the speech if you haven't yet (and maybe even if you already have, you should watch it again). Even if she shouldn't actually be president, there's something Obama-like or even almost MLK-like about it, and it's the sort of thing that makes you feel like things might actually turn out OK. We need some of that these days. OK, a lot of it.

(Really, my preference is to vote Oprah for America's Mom, and probably Tom Hanks for America's Dad. In related news, please don't let there be unsavoury details about Tom Hanks.)

[lisarea]

I agree on Oprah. She's inspiring, her speech was great, and she's not qualified to be president. If she ended up as the Democratic nominee, I'd vote for her without question, though, because she's far more qualified than Trump and/or Pence. But I don't want that to happen.

The presidency is a job, and it's one that requires a lot of skills to be done properly. She'd do better than Trump, of course, because she's a lot smarter than he is, and because she has a better grasp on what she doesn't know than he does. But so does almost everyone else.

I want a president who has experience, who understands the job and is capable of doing it. And that's why I totally disagree with your anti-old person stance. The only thing that relative youth guarantees is a relative lack of experience. I don't want that.

There's a deeply conservative. authoritarian tendency* I've seen a lot of among people who strongly identify as progressive, and a common feature of it is unapologetic, explicit ageism. All based on this notion that "Baby Boomers" were the products of an entire generation that benefited from a host of unfair advantages. But there are two sides to unfair advantages, and there were a whole lot of people in the same age cohort who weren't on the advantaged side.

Imagine being a member of one or more marginalized groups, living through times when the marginalization was far stricter and more explicit than it is today, spending your life fighting it, both for yourself and for future generations, only to end up being summarily dismissed and lumped right in with that system you fought.

Beyond that, even, the dismissals are based on this notion that people are inextricably a product of their times, like you absorb the norms and mores of the time you came of age in, and you will be mired in it forever. Are you just looking for someone stuck in some fresher mud? Just a reflection of the general zeitgeist of a specific age cohort?

I'd rather elect officials with knowledge and experience, and who have sincere beliefs and well thought out ideas, and who are adaptable enough to change and refine those ideas based on new information.

* True story: I used to read this "social justice" internet forum that regularly referred to a certain type of person they disliked as "sperglords" and at least one other synonym I can't remember. Periodically, some new user would object, and they would be summarily banned under the forum's 'safe space' policy. Then, a long-time, respected member's kid (I think) was diagnosed as autistic, so they took newfound offense to the term, and everyone listened to that person--not that IDEA, and not even the person being insulted, but an authoritarian member of their community speaking on their behalf--and did a complete 180 on that policy, and now those terms were banned. There was even a denouement where someone had been away for a little while, came back, called someone a sperglord, and got raked over the coals by the 'woke for a week' forum members.

[Dingfod]

Originally Posted by Kamilah Hauptmann

Don Hogan Charles - Wikipedia

Awesome photog.

Originally Posted by Basset Hound

Jerry van Dyke has died.

Actor Jerry Van Dyke dies at 86 - CNN

Originally Posted by BrotherMan

It was always a treat when he showed up on the DVD show.

No joke. I loved him on Coach.

[Dingfod]

Originally Posted by lisarea

I agree on Oprah. ...

...She'd do better than Trump, of course, because she's a lot smarter than he is, and because she has a better grasp on what she doesn't know than he does. But so does almost everyone else.
...

You might not believe this, but I would make a better President than Trump.

[The Man]

(Apologies if this rambles a bit - I don't think I have the patience to edit too heavily for concision or clarity right now. Also, I now must point out that this is a response to Mr pea, because sneaky in-between poster Dingfod is a sneaky in-between poster.)

I don't entirely disagree, and to be honest I think I was mentally using age as a metonymy for a couple of factors that I think may be fairly correlated with age, but don't always entirely match up. The first of these is an unshakable conviction that one's perception of reality is accurate - or, maybe more importantly, an inability to entertain and weigh the possibility of alternative viewpoints. I may actually be imagining this to some extent, but my perception seems to be that there are certain age ranges in which self-doubt is a lot more common than they are in others. Teenagers are pretty infamous for thinking they know everything, and that's probably true of a lot of them, although to be honest, my recollection of my teenage years is that I still had a lot of self-doubt about a lot of aspects of my existence. I probably was overconfident in some respects - I definitely was overconfident about my academic ability, as I quickly learned when I attended college.

But then, I'm a lot more introspective than the average person and - to be blunt - a lot more intelligent. I'm not saying this as a way of bragging or anything - I consider intelligence to be frequently overrated. I've probably gone into this before, but a lot of people use "stupid" and similar words as insults when they really mean "ignorant and unwilling to learn". I'm guilty of doing this myself all the time, because it's so ingrained in our colloquialisms that it often just slips out reflexively. I try to stop myself when I can, but it's becoming increasingly difficult in the era of Trump because there are so many other worries that seem more urgent. And let's be honest: Trump probably is pretty stupid these days - he may have been reasonably intelligent at one point, but a recent analysis of his speech as president indicated that he speaks at a fourth-grade reading level. (I don't have a link; sorry.) This is probably dementia rather than subpar intelligence, to be fair, but either way, it's resulted in a diminished mental capacity.

Anyway, one of the counselors at school told me my IQ score when I was 17 and I'm not exaggerating when I say I have a difficult time thinking of a worse thing anyone could've done for me. If I had unwarranted confidence in myself, that was a large part of the source of it, because it led me to believe I could get through just about any class with little to no effort. And TBH, at that school I really hadn't been putting all that much effort into several of my classes, even though it was a gifted school. (On the other hand, I'd also had quite a few support systems propping me up which were completely absent at college.)

I'm not going to list my actual score (from a Stanford-Binet test that had been administered to me several years before I learned the score); I'll just say that it's not drastically far from 200. Again, I'm not saying this because I think it qualifies me as having any great deal of expertise, except that perhaps it makes it easier for me to recognise patterns, to absorb new information, and to notice connections others might miss. (Also, I consider IQ overrated as a measure of intelligence to begin with - it doesn't measure all forms of intelligence, and the scoring is at least partially based in cultural assumptions with dubious scientific backing.) But it hasn't resulted in my having any great degree of personal success, and I've long suspected it's also a large source of my aforementioned self-doubt. I'm trying to put this into words, and I don't know if the explanation will actually make sense to anyone else, but I feel that my ability to notice connections brings with it self-doubt, because I am often able to see the case for several reasonable interpretations of facts, and that leads me to second-guess my conclusions incessantly. It's comparable to a form of sensory overload, almost. Because I notice an abnormally large number of possibilities, I have an abnormally large decision tree to evaluate, which means that I find it incredibly hard to make decisions. If I were somewhat less intelligent, in other words, I suspect I would be more decisive. (I'm not saying that my life circumstances or experiences would be better if this were the case, to be clear, but they would certainly be different.)

The point of this seeming digression is that my teenage experiences probably aren't typical; I can well believe many teenagers do think they know everything about everything. I spoke in my opening paragraph about the ability to entertain and weigh the possibility of alternative viewpoints. Teenagers often seem to have little of this ability; the other age group that often appears to have reduced capacities in this regard is... well, bluntly put, old people.

My observations of the world suggest that there is often a trade-off between experience and what I would bluntly term arrogance. Bernie Sanders is quite an experienced politician. He also comes across as increasingly arrogant. His proclamations on issues like women's rights are often increasingly nonsensical and out-of-touch with reality, and yet at the same time he also seems to have an increasing conviction that they are correct. This could, to some extent, be related to what I would call "Experts' Dunning-Kruger", that is, the conviction many people have that expertise in one field makes them experts in others. is of course a poster child for this.

I'm not saying that every old person is like Bernie or . (I'm also not entirely sure whether Bernie really qualifies as an expert, but I'll be charitable here because he does at least have a solid understanding of several problems with our economy.) There are certainly plenty of exceptions - Jimmy Carter retains the same level of humility as he had twenty years ago, from what I can tell. And John Lewis is probably as close as any living human being gets to having no discernible flaws, especially now that Fred Rogers is dead. There's some correlation, but it's not 100%.

At the same time, though, there is an age beyond which people on the whole just seem to... lose their facilities. I could live with a president who's in the 50-70 range. Above 70, I'm going to start to get sceptical. Above 75, I'm going to get incredulous. The presidency is an incredibly demanding, stress-inducing job, apparently even if you just spend your time watching Fox News, golfing, and eating cheeseburgers. Ideally I would like the person who occupies the office to be smarter and better-informed than me. The former, for reasons discussed above, isn't actually all that likely, but I'd at least like them to be able to respond to crisis situations with full mental coherence.

So... I want experience. I want the president to have enough experience that she knows what the fuck she's doing. (I'm using she here because, again, I'm tired of white dudes.) But at the same time, there's a certain level of experience that brings with it the danger of causing someone to think she knows everything. I don't want that. I want a president who still knows that she doesn't know everything and is capable of recognising the limitations of her knowledge and abilities.

There's a second issue with experience here, which is the distinction between an ideal occupant of the office and the ideal candidate for the office, and unfortunately, if we want to win, we're going to have to weigh and balance this. I don't want a candidate to have an empty résumé, but I see a reasonable argument that the longer a candidate's political résumé gets, the more avenues of attack there are against her. One factor that seems to have been underestimated in analyses of 2016 is that Trump's lack of a political history made him into a blank slate for many voters. He has largely governed (insofar as he can be said to have governed, and outside of his incessant and probably kompromat-induced Kremlin knob-polishing) as an orthodox right-wing Republican, and anyone who had actually, honestly paid attention to his campaign shouldn't have been surprised that he's governed that way, but a lot of voters didn't pay such attention, and voters less consistently ranked him right-wing than they had most of the recent Republican candidates for the presidency. There was a good piece about this on 538 within the last few days; an inexplicably large number of people during the election perceived him as a moderate or even a liberal. By now this number is decreasing with some 60% of voters perceiving him as "conservative" (what most Republicans refer to as conservatism has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the word, but such is colloquial usage in this country). While Obama-to-Trump voters are often overstated in their impact on the election, I suspect an awful lot of these voters had been suckered into believing that he wouldn't actually govern as an orthodox Republican.

By contrast, Clinton's experience arguably wound up being a major weakness for her on the campaign trail. Witness how her successful term as Secretary of State, during which she had 70% approval, was turned into a line of attack because of her anodyne usage of a private email server - which may have even improved national security because there's no evidence that the data integrity of Clinton's server, in contrast with the State Department's, was ever compromised. This was (along with the DNC email leaks and various other stories that were conflated with it) turned into the defining scandal of the campaign. Its coverage outweighed not only coverage of Trump's confessed serial sexual assault, his advocacy of lynching black teenagers for a crime of which they had been exonerated, his attacks on military families, and dozens of other stories people have probably have forgotten by now (slanderously implying that Alicia Machado had a sex tape, for example) - its coverage outweighed that of literally every Trump scandal combined, and it outweighed that of literally every policy story of the entire campaign.

And it doesn't stop there, of course - the Clinton Foundation, a charity that did uncountable good for others, was also turned into a liability as people alleged quid pro quo despite the fact that neither Clinton nor her husband actually personally benefited from its operation and it had one of the highest ratings of any charity on record. And I could probably go on for dozens more paragraphs, but I've already got an essay on my hands.

My point overall is that experience may actually, beyond a certain point, be a liability on the campaign trail. None of this is intended as a slight on Clinton - rather contrary to conventional wisdom, I tend to think she ran a largely blameless campaign with at least no more missteps than either of Barack Obama's (people these days seem to forget his "bitter" remarks or his disastrous first debate against Romney, for example). As much as people point to Wisconsin, I tend to counter with Pennsylvania, which she visited incessantly and still lost. And again, I could go on, but again, this post is already really long.

But I think we may have to consider the possibility that the presidential candidate most likely to win an election might not actually be super-experienced. At the same time I'm going to shy away from thinking nominees with no experience at all have a realistic shot of winning, unless we're talking someone like Oprah or Beyoncé where millions of people figuratively worship the ground they walk on. (Neither of them as far as I can tell actually are qualified for the presidency, to be clear - again, if any celebrity who has yet to occupy political office is qualified for the presidency, it's probably George Clooney.) There's a reasonable chance that Trump may disincline people to vote for any other presidential candidates with no political experience for the foreseeable future.

The actual ideal may be some sort of happy medium. Maybe about Obama's level of experience when he was elected; maybe slightly more. But if you've got twenty or thirty years in politics, you've got twenty or thirty years' worth of votes that can be scrutinised, or if you were governor, then executive actions or whatever else. And that's more ammo for attack ads.

It's an incredibly unfortunate aspect of our politics. If I were going to name the person I'd consider an ideal executive right now, it'd probably be... Hillary Clinton, actually. I don't agree with all of her political positions, but she's more qualified for the office than anyone else I can think of in politics who could constitutionally occupy it (though I am 100% in favour of repealing the 22nd amendment, and really all term limits for every politician except perhaps governors), and probably has better temperament and judgement than any other potential occupant. But unfortunately, that exact fact of her long record in service means there are angles of attack against her that simply couldn't exist against - to pick a somewhat likely nominee's name out of a hat - Kamala Harris.

It's a rather unfortunate condemnation of our society's politics that experience might actually be a negative when it comes to our most powerful political office, and I'm not entirely sure what can be done to rectify it. But when it comes to politics, I'm pretty big on pragmatism. You can't actually change things for the better without power, and power in government is clearly one of the most effective ways to do this. I'm not in favour of pursuing this by all means necessary - sacrificing principles to the pursuit of power could conceivably turn you into Cthulhu or, worse, a Republican or something. But at the same time, we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

So, yeah. In my view, a nominee has to be experienced enough to know what the fuck they're doing, but not so experienced that they think they know everything or that they're open to too many lines of scurrilous attack from Republican ratfuckers. This isn't 100% correlated with age, but older people in politics are more likely to have the level of experience where they either think they know everything or where they are open to too many scurrilous attacks. It's pretty absurd that Obama's level of experience in politics (or slightly above it) might actually be ideal for a U.S. presidential candidate, but I'm leaning towards thinking that's correct.

ETA:

Originally Posted by Dingfod

You might not believe this, but I would make a better President than Trump.

I believe it. I'd believe it of anyone here except Jerome, peacegirl, and maybe AML, and even then I'm not sure any of them could conceivably do any worse.

(I'm only listing as exceptions people who've posted in the past few months, mind you.)

ETA also, too: Oh, something in pea's post I didn't get to - I've definitely seen the authoritarian tendency you've mentioned in various internet communities. I do think some people may grow out of it a bit, though - I'm pretty sure I demonstrated some authoritarian impulses in my past forum management that wouldn't be at all evident these days. Most of the time I'm pretty laid back about Internet stuff unless someone's a complete dick, in which case they get the boot. (I had to kickban someone from an IRC channel the other day after he spent a couple of hours crapflooding it with personal attacks and various other nonsense while I was AFK bowling. I think that's the last time I've exercised power at an Internet community in any meaningful fashion in like three years.)

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by The Man

ETA:

I believe it. I'd believe it of anyone here except Jerome, peacegirl, and maybe AML, and even then I'm not sure any of them could conceivably do any worse.

(I'm only listing as exceptions people who've posted in the past few months, mind you.)

I can think of a less-recent poster who would probably do a worse job than Trumpster.

[erimir]

:chemofist:

[Stephen Maturin]

[JoeP]

Cranberries singer Dolores O'Riordan dies aged 46 | World news | The Guardian

Bloody hell. One of my favourite bands.

No more details yet, other than "died suddenly in London, her publicist says".