[LEFT]In mid-December, as Obama settles into one of the Oval Office’s reupholstered chairs — brown leather instead of Bush’s blue and gold candy stripes — the validation of Election Day still hovers around him, suggesting that his second four years in office may turn out to be quite different from his first. Beyond the Oval Office, overwhelming challenges remain: deadlocked fiscal-cliff talks; a Federal Reserve that predicts years of high unemployment; and more unrest in places like Athens, Cairo and Damascus. But the President seems unbound and gives inklings of an ambition he has kept in check ever since he arrived at the White House to find a nation in crisis. He leans back, tea at his side, legs crossed, to explain what he thinks just happened. “It was easy to think that maybe 2008 was the anomaly,” he says. “And I think 2012 was an indication that, no, this is not an anomaly. We’ve gone through a very difficult time. The American people have rightly been frustrated at the pace of change, and the economy is still struggling, and this President we elected is imperfect. And yet despite all that, this is who we want to be.” He smiles. “That’s a good thing.”
[/LEFT]
The 2012 Time Reader’s Person of the Year? Kim Jong Un. Because 4chan flooded the votes.
I think Time ran out of imagination in this category ages ago. Now they just go with “popular”. Not diminishing Obama’s achievements/presidency. I voted for him. It’s just that choosing a world leader is a pretty obvious and lazy choice.
The initials of the top 14 spell out “KJU Gas Chambers” which refers to Camp 22, a concentration camp near the border of Russia and China where prisoners are believed to be killed in gas chambers. 4chan don’t do things by halves.
You mean to tell me that Time Magazine played it safe by choosing an American respected by the unimaginatively middlebrow readers of Time Magazine? Election year = pick whoever gets to be president; it’s been the same since 2000 and with only rare exceptions after 1972. So what else is new?
The last entirely non-American “person of the year” (if we exclude the wonderful cop-outs that were “You”, “The Protester” and that sort of thing), was Putin in 2007, and before that, the pope in 1994. The United States, not even “The West”, won the Cold War, and Time Magazine will never, ever, ever allow anyone to forget it. Giuliani instead of Bin Laden in 2001 (compare that to when Time chose Hitler and Stalin back to back).
But Time’s person of the year is meant to be the person (or group, or idea) who “has done the most to influence the events of the year.” I don’t see anything about its being American by default. It’s not meant to be an honour, which is why Hitler and Stalin (the Stalin of 1939, not that of 1942) were chosen. I also want to point to the two times the American military was chosen, in 1950 and 2003, as though they were the only military in Korea and Iraq; whatever happened to your so-called “coalition of the willing”? Time likes to suck up to power, and it shows. With the exception of Putin in 2007, Time always goes for the trendy, the safe, the respectable from the usual white middle-class demographic that reads Time.
I’m afraid not. I relish puncturing the complacently insular American conception of the world that throws its weight around, especially when it pretends to be enlightened. Telling me to shut up isn’t going to help it at all.
Dude, if you managed to get banned by Lum from the almost anything goes frontiers of BF (and you did, with the note “Warned repeatedly to stop trolling”), you’re not “puncturing complacency” at all. You’re just a simple-minded jerk lacking the self-awareness God gave a doorknob.
Broken Forum was a toxic environment, none of my own doing, which I despised for months before I was banned. Also, I will correct what Lum has written: I have never “trolled”; I believe every word I have ever typed there or here. And if that makes me a worse person in your eyes, I can live with it.
saw you had a thread on Canadian politics (which naturally that other forum doesn’t have, limited as it is to Americans talking about American things I couldn’t care less about, especially since they all seem to think alike)
That is because now I can see that the Canadian thread hasn’t been posted in for a few months, and that in the meantime the American contingent can’t stop talking about itself. The American election was a month ago, but it’s still always about Americans talking about American things. I’d like to read some discussions about what goes on in the rest of the world - Europe, Australia, whatever - but I can find nothing here. And in the meantime you ponder the selection of Obama as person of the year, as though it meant anything for or against Obama.
And what I’ve been saying is yeah, it means something: it means Americans playing it safe again and inflating their sense of self-importance in world affairs. I could not let that pass.
