RichVR
4540
So… still better than Trump?
Well, smarter, anyway, but that bar is so low it’s under the basement.
Menzo
4543
I will dispute that. I worked for him at 38 Studios, and while he is a nice guy, he is very Trump-like in that he always thought the power of his personality was all it would take to succeed. He thinks he’s the smartest person in the room about every topic, and would frequently walk around to the different dev teams and give them suggestions on the fly. It became so much of a problem that the team leads had to watch out for him and intercept him if they saw him coming.
He did the same thing with the marketing department. When we were launching Reckoning, he came down every day with some new hairbrained scheme, and every day we had to figure out a new way to tell him no. I’m sure he thought were were all idiots and had we done it his way the game would have been a blockbuster.
Curt Schilling is an idiot with a good arm. And while he didn’t talk politics at all during my time at 38 Studios, he has turned into a whackjob.
It’s quite hard to believe that someone who says the things he says can be a nice guy. He’s famously a wing nut.
E.g. He said that Parkland and Sandy Hook were hoaxes.
Menzo
4545
Yeah, that’s the hard thing to reconcile. At 38 Studios Curt was extremely nice, and he cared deeply about the studio and the company. He wanted it to be the best place in the world to work and we got some silly perks for being a startup that didn’t have enough money to actually finish the MMO we were working on.
He never once talked politics. I knew that he was a Republican, famously because he had previously talked negatively about government handouts and then took $70 million from Rhode Island, but he never ever brought up anything related to his current wingnuttery.
This was in the 2011-ish timeframe, and I only worked there for nine months before the place imploded, so maybe he talked more freely with the long-timers who had been with him from the start.
Well, even serial killers can be friendly to people when it suits them, I guess.
Sharpe
4547
There is a distinction to be made between people who are nice to your face versus people who are overall “nice people” when all aspects of their attitude and behavior is looked at. Schilling may well have been perfectly polite in terms of direct face to face interactions but I would not personally consider him a “nice person” given his expressed attitudes and behavior on a number of issues.
magnet
4548
It’s not easy to guess someone’s political leanings solely by their demeanor. Both left and right seem to think that their opponents must be cranky or unpleasant even when they aren’t discussing politics. But there are gracious and friendly people on both sides of the aisle, even if they don’t necessarily qualify as “nice”.
I’ll take your word for it. All I really meant is that at least Schilling has read books, and he took the time to learn something like Advanced Squad Leader. You could give DJT 10 lifetimes and he’d never learn ASL, or probably even read a book.
That’s not fair. I figure in work environment you can use the BCG system, to classified people into the Smart or Stupid and Nice and Asshole. Shilling sounds like the Nice but Stupid quadrant. Which was compounded by the fact that he was the CEO, and had a large dose of arrogance to add to his stupidity.
Before Trump, Political Schilling struck me very much as traditional chamber of commerce. Just because you disagree with his politics and think they make life hard for others doesn’t make the person who holds the beliefs evil or bad, just wrong.
I don’t know how far he’s drunk the Trump Kool-Aid. If he has full endorsed it, then ya at some point he has crossed the line and become irredeemable.
Was he any good at it? Cuz, that’s harder to believe.
To repeat: He said that Sandy Hook and Parkland were hoaxes. He collects Nazi memorabilia. He supports QAnon conspiracy theories.
If given the chance now, I’m pretty sure Curt would eagerly blame video games for mass shootings because the Right can’t be wrong in his idiot mind.
Matt_W
4553
My workplace is very mixed politically. There are cranks and assholes and really nice helpful people on both sides of the political spectrum. Political affiliation has almost no bearing on personal interaction. But, you know, some of us don’t vote for people who put children in cages.
I never realized this, but I think I might be a single issue voter. That issue is putting kids in cages. I refuse to vote for anyone that does that or encourages that behavior.
After that, there is a sliding scale of things that are important to me. Healthcare, environment, income equality, immigration, education. But first and fore most, where does the candidate stand on putting kids in cages.
NPR’s been doing interviews with a bunch of the Democratic presidential candidates. Latest one is Warren, thought it was pretty good.
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/12/750625967/elizabeth-warren-gets-personal-on-the-trail
Little disappointed that her “structural change” doesn’t include the structure of how the voting process works, but I suppose that’s not an issue that gets enough energy in a primary.
Yeah, that was my initial reason for liking Buttigieg and for giving a longer listen to Bullock than most. They emphasize meta issues involving the way our republic is set up. Our representative form of government is, by design, not all that representative. (Recent book If We Can Keep It goes into this quite clearly.)
The trouble is that these meta issues appeal to the highly educated wing of the Democratic Party (and the country as a whole) a lot more than the other two thirds of the party. Most voters are MUCH more motivated by particular human enemies and concrete immediate problems. Hard to spread compelling visual images to fire people up about the voting process.
It’s discouraging.
Hopefully will file for senate soon thereafter.
Well, yeah.
Those problems for many voters in the Democratic party are of an immediate existential concern.
They’re saying that’s what he’s gonna do.
