Blackbeard
This is just a shitty, chopped up rehost of the original WaPo story with zero added analysis. Here are some actual interview responses:
Some said they wanted to beat traffic or had work the next day. Others complained about sound quality. One man wanted to go home to his French bulldog. Another needed to get home to his daughter. A third had a Yorkie with him that started acting out. A fourth man said his phone died.
In Las Vegas, some attendees grew frustrated with Trump’s tardiness and said they had trouble hearing him. A reporter standing by the door counted more than 200 people leaving in the first 20 minutes. One attendee said they still loved Trump but said the former president would have said “You’re fired” if anyone else had been as late as he was.
Chaboya said he arrived about 8:30 a.m. and, like Prescott, was among the last to be let into the venue. He said he was leaving because his daughter, who is home-schooled, called him and said the internet wasn’t working.
This is pure, uncut confirmation bias aimed at salivating Harris voters. The only person who said they left because they were voting for Harris is the only person mentioned by RawStory. The rest had other, less clickbait-y reasons.
The shows, however, have mostly skewed to the worse side of things. Not quite so stilted as the PT, but there is a serious lack of charisma and humanity emanating from them, and it just makes things less fun, and when your dialogue mostly exists to deliver exposition, it leaves us more willing to nitpick details. Andor has a grimmer tone, but there is charisma there. The performances were compelling and I had to watch. You cannot and should not make all Star Wars like Andor, but you could make it all as well-conceived as Andor.
I recently watched a video that went deeply into exactly that criticism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL4IfoQzSSE
The gist is that most of the current content forgets to focus on making characters feel human, and that’s because they’re so relentlessly focused on forcing exposition that needs to get the plot from point A to point B that they forget to focus on the organic way that a character might interact with and react to a situation. Every character turns into a cardboard cutout because they’re archetypes designed to fill a role in a plotline, as opposed to living, breathing individuals with their own priorities, intentions, and often times inner turmoil. Andor and Rogue One are the only two projects that allowed characters to be flawed and emotional, and therefore authentic and relatable. And that’s why we care so much more about those stories, because we can feel what the character is going through. The rest is just hitting us on the head with exposition so that we can follow along, as if we’re all thumb-sucking idiots who can’t think for ourselves.
Who gives a shit?
Indeed. It articulated a lot of what I’ve seen since I graduated high school about 20 years ago, and it helps explain the hypnotic allure of toxic shitheads like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. It also helped me understand a little more about Trumpism and why it’s so weirdly intoxicating to people like my father in law and uncles, who really are just sad, old, ugly, many-times-divorced white men with limited education and very little to offer to the rest of society. They’re fucking angry, and it was hard to figure out what they were so mad about until I started reading stuff like this. They’re completely unmoored and irrelevant, and they’re lashing out in what’s really a cry for help, even if it’s too deep within their subconscious to be actionable.
Anyone curious about this trend should read this:
