Tonight, Thursday, March 7th, is the State of the Union Address so lets keep everything related to it (including the Republican response) confined to this thread.
This is probably one of the most important speeches Biden can give this year. He has to come across as “Present”, not just “President”.
This will set the tone for the campaign the rest of the year and will be second only to the Democratic Convention speech in August for visibility.
Watch it live here:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/state-of-the-union-2024/
Or through your favorite news source.
The Republican response will be delivered by Senator Katie Britt of Alabama:
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/07/1236338784/katie-britt-alabama-republican-biden-state-of-the-union
Very good speech!
Full transcript is here:
https://time.com/6898705/read-president-joe-bidens-2024-state-of-the-union-address-full-transcript/
Republican response from Katie Britt here:
I encourage you to watch the video and not just read the transcript. Reading it doesn’t carry just how breathless and borderline weepy her delivery is.
Maybe I am dumb but… I am genuinely starting to think many people are fundamentally incapable of imagining complex, abstract potential outcomes (like allowing Trump back in office).
I always assumed envisioning such things was easy, instant, and obvious for nearly everyone.
Several years ago I started noticing a couple of people make decisions that to me seemed insane and later they were surprised by the outcome that I saw coming a mile away.
And I started wondering, could this ability to imagine how things will turn out be much rarer than I ever imagined?
I genuinely don’t know for sure. Not like I have a ton of conversations with different people let alone ones about cognitive abilities lol.
Like, I didn’t even realize some people can’t see images in their heads or don’t have an inner monologue (think by “talking to themselves” using language) until fairly recently and I’m in my 50s.
Surely anyone can imagine some vague idea of what happens if they jump in front of a speeding bus. That’s simple. Surely you can at least conceptualize that you’ll be run into and injured or killed. Maybe even imagine it with some internal video of your body being run over by giant bus tires or being flung from the impact and landing in a crumbled bleeding mess. Nothing complicated there.
But is it actually impossible for some to imagine the many ways Trump and the Project 2025 people are going to fuck up everything?
That would certainly explain the bafflingly cavalier reactions to cybersecurity vulnerabilities I’ve seen over the years. Or the shrugging off of egregious privacy issues.
Yes - it is. As someone with ADHD and in my mid 30’s now, i have wondered the same thing quite often, because a lot of times solutions to complex problems seem extremely easy to me, where people around me are absolutely baffled by me calling a solution very simple and easy.
I started wondering the same thing a few years back and came to the conclusion: Most people don’t care. I’ve had quite a few very recent discussions about various issues about consumers needing to be more educated and able to make decisions on what they buy. Every time i bring this up, i realize that even these simple things are too much for most people.
Coincidentally, I too, have ADHD. Oftentimes, I can envision the general shape of somewhat complex solutions. And either they don’t see it as simple, don’t understand it, don’t understand the point, or can’t see it at all. Now sure, sometimes I come up with idiotic ideas that make no sense once I know more. But not always.
I have found it is easy for some of us to get spun up about the sorts of things you mention. Like “omg how can you use Windows 11 with all the ads and whatever”. The kind of stuff we rant about on Lemmy. And yeah I think people don’t care a lot.
Sometimes it is because they have other more pressing priorities. I’ve had to learn that well in my infosec career. It is easy for me to fixate on something important to me. But if a person is just trying to get through the day (I mean, let’s be honest, I am struggling to do that), raising a kid, paying the bills, and so forth, then they have better things to do than fret about an OS and try to find time to learn Linux or cough up the fortune required to buy a Mac or whatever.
Sometimes they can’t seem to forsee the potential consequences. Either they just are incapable–my original point above–or, in some cases, they don’t have any practice imagining what bad people could try if they wanted to. Maybe due to ADHD and anxiety I had a lot of practice imagining bad outcomes. (Maybe that’s an evolutionary advantage of ADHD lol). I suspect about half my team has ADHD and I think that’s common in the industry lol.
Nice to find someone with similar experiences! Helps to know I’m not crazy or at least not crazy alone 🤪
Ha! I know what you mean :D I do too^^
Yeah…there are lot’s of things i get spun up :D
Same lessons in Infrastructure (although, i have to admit i’m not trying to get through the day, i’ve had a lot of help throughout the years to get a grip on my ADHD except some occasional very heavy distractibility and chaotic thoughts)…but i still except some very basic 1+1…sometimes even that is too much asked. I mean, if you can click a damn start menu on Windows, i can expect you to click it on Linux as well, even if the Icon is a little different, it’s still only a damn menu! ;)
Personally, i think my Star Trek addiction helped me a lot in those terms, because i always try to imagine the best possible outcome first and then go down the rabbit hole and tell myself “Well, there’s still a chance!”. Which is also why i try to imagine that in most people, there’s still some good left (there are exceptions…Trump and his cronies being some) - but i agree with you, that most people have lost the ability to just “imagine”. Personally, i also think that’s why the overall state is not that great, because with loosing the ability to imagine things, people also lost the ability to dream. Problem solving, imagining and dreaming are all things that are heavily interconnected and interwoven. I also am of the firm believe, that one advantage of ADHD is that the ability to shape our imagining “as we go”, because “we” can flip between numerous possible outcomes pretty damn fast. And so on. Just a little tip: Try to imagine more “good” outcomes as well - just in case ;)
Same :) And no - you are not crazy and you are not crazy alone :D
Interesting about Star Trek as a way to deal with anxiety about bad outcomes :). My Trek love helps me too but more with giving me a nearly imperceptible glimmer of hope for humanity.
(I wasn’t sure if I was a true Trekkie but now that I’ve been catching up on all the post-Voyager shows I guess I must be because I love all of it… I mean I even found things to like about ST V, so… Lol). Anyway …
But yeah you may be onto something about people either losing the ability—or maybe the will—to dream of something better. Once you get discouraged enough, it is hard to bother dreaming.
If you spend enough time online steeped in endless doomerism, with no talk of action or organization or anything, learned helplessness inevitably sets in. Sort of by definition, you stop dreaming. Which is why my recent Trek binges have been so helpful.
I should add that meds and introspection have helped a lot with the anxiety and imagining the worst outcomes. Now I do it without getting twisted up in knots and it serves me vs the other way around. But I could still stand to imagine good outcomes more often.
Anyway I appreciate the dialog! You’re a good egg. :) Hope to run into you again in the Lemmyverse before long.
You bring up an interesting question, and it’s something I noticed in my own life, but for me I always related it to confidence/optimism.
I’m naturally very anxious, and I think ahead because I worry a lot and I need to have some control of my future or to at least feel like I do by having as much information as I can. Stability has always lacked in my life, and still does, so I know confidence and optimism are in very short supply for me.
I think more confident/optimistic people tend to be more relaxed about the future because of their natural tendency to believe they’ll be ok and therefore the things around them should be fine.
That’s an interesting insight. I, too, tend to be anxious about negative outcomes and I think that comes from bad experiences due to ADHD and maybe childhood stuff. Idk.
Normalcy bias certainly is a thing. So is paranoia. I tend toward the latter lol. But have come to see that outcomes almost always land somewhere between, “eh, it will be fine,” and, “omg we’re doomed.” And usually they wind up slightly more toward the “fine” side of things.