Obama’s Charlottesville Response Most-Liked Tweet Ever | Hacker News Reader

Obama’s Charlottesville Response Most-Liked Tweet Ever

nytimes.com

61 pointsjustin6647 comments

In times of conflict it's easy to lose sight of the fundamental goodness and decency of people, goodness and decency that will flourish if given the opportunity. Great leaders remind us of this when anger and hate pull us apart.

This type of tweets or ideas are not useful, and they are just too easy to produce.

We all know people can have nice words and hearts. That does not prevent them being indifferent to what they did to other peoples or their country did to other countries.

I do not want politicians to use tweeter so much. Neither to say kind words or hateful words. Tweets are not for serious work of solving society problems.

This is missing the forest for the chirping birds. Of course a message can be useful: in times of fear, people want reassurance. That's probably why (as another top-level comment mentions) the top reactions ever on Twitter are after terror incidents.

As for how Twitter should be used, it's a communication medium. People can use it however they seem fit. Would it seem more important if the message came via telegraph, telegram, telephone? History adapted to all of those as well. "Sighted ship, sunk same", "WAR", the Zimmerman Telegram, etc.

But they do influence, and influence can make a difference. If not through twitter, how else would/should politicians connect with people?

edit: I say this as someone who doesn't use twitter; it still seems like it has value, albeit small or insignificant at times

Tweets are also making a connection where President can reach citizen without the help of Fox or CNN, and we don't have the retrospection yet to know how this will evolve; it's too early to kill this kind of communication in the crib.

But thanks to the internet and platforms like Twitter, it may now be possible for a politician to reach millions of people without paying the Fox and CNN tax.

I miss when social media was about sending messages to a cute girl you seen in class, or finding out where the party was this weekend. I really couldn't care less about Twitter, or who responds to the President's tweet with the best comeback. I thought Obama tweeting was undignified, and then Trump just took it to another level.

This seems as good a place as any:

I find it very interesting how strongly the reputation/actions of the successor president effect the previous one.

A great many people disliked Bush. It seems like that really helped Clinton.

Bush's reputation doesn't seem to have been helped by having Obama follow him (in general). If he was followed by Romney or McCain I get the feeling he wouldn't be remembered as harshly.

If Clinton has succeeded Obama would his reputation be as high as it is now? This is still a 'work in progress' but I feel like the strong contrast is only pushing him higher on the scale (and may have happened to a lesser degree Bush or Perry or Kasich (etc) had won).

> A great many people disliked Bush. It seems like that really helped Clinton.

It helped Obama as well. I don't think it's disparaging towards Obama at all to point out that he basically won a Nobel Peace Price ten months into his presidency because he was not Bush.

That's true, is forgotten about that.

I'll bet that pisses off Trump to no end.

The only way Trump will find this out is if it is reported on Fox news. That seems to be how he gets all his information.

I searched the web site and it doesn't appear to be there.

Well he only follows 45 people on Twitter. Roughly a third are Trump entities, another third work in the white house, and the rest work at Fox News.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/following

President Trump may also search his own handle on Twitter to find sympathetic messages to retweet.

The disturbing trend is records are being set based on reactions to terrorist attacks.

Ariana Grande used to be number 1 based on the Manchester concert terror attack.

Obama's response is so level headed. He doesn't blame the people, just the process, that of teaching hate and bigotry.

He is a humanist at heart. No matter his politics.

And one can only imagine how careful he would have had to be in his speeches, actions and approach to issues.

He represents the true spirit of the Idea of America.

I find myself weighing whether it's better to get the unemotional, unadulterated statement from a President or the focus-grouped, feel-good, superficial statement. I can see why someone would prefer either side, but I find both wanting.

So you think Obama hired a focus group to test if quoting Nelson Mandela would work?

And to call Trump's statement unemotional and unadulterated seems weird, because the teleprompter driven statement was delivered in a way that seemed so forced and inauthentic, it rang as false.

Sometimes emotion is needed to convey gravity and authenticity of a statement. I'm pretty sure if Obama was still President, he could have given a morally strong statement on the recent events. Did you see his press conference after Sandy Hook? That's what the nation needed when 2 dozen children are murdered, not a lifeless set of talking points written by your communication director.

This is not deification as another poster commented, it's the fact that other leaders, including Bush Jr, were far more effective at delivering moral clarity at times of national crisis or sadness. Remember Reagan's address after the Challenger explosion?

I'm still wondering at what point, Trump dead-enders will see something that finally makes them realize his extreme flaws as a leader and a person make him pretty unsuitable for the job he's been handed. It's not the left wing media, it's not the establishment, it's not fake news. He's doing it to himself.

Every Obama picture seems so staged, and you must be kidding yourself if you think he doesn't have a social media team making sure his public image is always on point.

I don't even know what teleprompter statement your talking about, as I haven't been paying that much attention to this Charlottesville situation. I'm just talking about his tweets in general, which are embarrassingly unthought-out. For better or worse, we all know what's really going on in his mind. He's not going to pose for a cute picture the same day he's ordering another drone strike.

Personally, I don't need emotional statements, but I see how people do. Like I said, I don't care for either. It's just an interesting dichotomy.

That baby photo was taken at a daycare in Bethesda next to his daughter's school. It's not hard to get a photo of babies at a daycare, nor is it hard to find one with more than one race in it, given that area is diverse. Nor would it be hard to find at least one photo of children of different races together after 8 years. Obama's photographer Pete Souza is very good at his job at capturing moments of Obama interacting with people at a large variety of locations, a lot of it shot documentary street photography style.

Obama wanted to tweet a message of unity, the same message Dr King gave in his I Have a Dream Speech, and the best way to do that, to get that point across, is with photos of children.

I don't know that Obama has an image team, maybe he does, but he seems to be intelligent enough over his long career, to have curated his own image, well before he became the President. He is very self aware. But one thing is for certain: Trump not only needs a social media team, he needs the self awareness to listen to them.

Obama did a better job communicating with emotion through a tweet, than Trump did with a live press conference.

Oh I think Trump does a great job of displaying his emotions through live press conferences. It's just that a lot of people feel quite differently about these issues from the way he does.

Trump seems to be able to display only two emotions: Anger and Frustration, that's an insufficient set for what is needed.

Insufficient set for what is required to be a normal human being.

And the deification continues.

He basically continued all of Bush's bad policies, but hey, he's black and speaks well so he's cool.

Did you read some other article just now?

actually, circa 1949:

'racism is "not born in you! It happens after you’re born..."' [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ve_Got_to_Be_Carefully_T...

> One legislator said that "a song justifying interracial marriage was implicitly a threat to the American way of life."

I wonder if we will look back on the events of this week the same way as we see these from the 1940s.

The Tweet: "No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion."

Okay, but infants don't have the capacity to judge religion, or a person's background, but full points for the warm and fuzzy good will.

Feel good tweets aside, what bothers me is when a child is "born a Muslim" or "born a Christian, or other religion". It's my opinion that forcing children into a religion from age zero, weaving the religion into the very fabric of the child's upbringing and family life; dressing them differently so they're divided from their non-religious peers, is unreasonable parenting. At worst, psychological manipulation.

Perhaps it's popular because it's not true. But it should be true, and everyone wishes it was true.

The evolutionary basis of xenophobia is well-understood. A quick search turns up, for example:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...

Babies of about the same age as the ones shown in Obama's tweet already display instinctive xenophobia:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/are-babies-bigo...

Specifically looking at the Smithsonian article, they don't even mention xenophobia until the last sentence.

What they're talking about is instinctive preference for other creatures which the baby identifies with, and in the research the article cites there isn't any direct correlation to race. They talk about food preference — something superficial. There was no research cited to indicate whether the behavior extends to racial distinction, so your using this research to back up your claim that "babies of about the same age as the ones shown in Obama's tweet already display instinctive xenophobia" is intellectually dishonest at best.

And I ignored the Independent article because they're known to be poor at in-depth reporting.

Alt-righters will occasionally shitpost stuff like this to derail any real discussion. I've seen dumps of dozens of misleading links to support points like the above. Forcing the thread to disprove each one is an effective method of hijacking the thread.

My fault -- you can find much better links if you search for 15 seconds instead of 5:

https://www.utoronto.ca/news/racial-bias-may-begin-babies-si...

Trash analysis from a throwaway account.

Independent.co.uk link discusses proposed evolutionary/biological origins of xenophobia, and specifically points at groupthink, not individual bias, as a possible explanation.

Smithsonian link describes a study where babies show a preference for non-racialized puppets who displayed similar food preferences. Nothing to do with race or bigotry.

Here's a better link:

https://www.utoronto.ca/news/racial-bias-may-begin-babies-si...

Points to lack of exposure to other races as a likely cause.

Far from babies being born racist.

Right. The reason my house is brown is: lack of exposure to blue paint.

No one is saying you can't convince babies, or anyone, not to be racist. Actually, if history proves anything, it's that you can convince anyone of anything if you get to them early enough.

But your claim seems to be that they're racist by default. I grew up in a poor ethnically homogenous country at a time when there was only one TV channel. I didn't meet or even see anyone of a different ethnicity until my early teens. Why didn't I have any negative feelings towards them despite my complete lack of exposure?

Yeah, I see this sentiment flowing around very often and I agree with you on this.

I prefer to think of it this way: The ability to rise above this type of thing is a part of what makes us human. Learning to not be bigot is something you have to do. You have to work at it always, it's not free.

Certainly.

The point is just that the statement is literally false. That doesn't mean it can't be poetically true.

The first article from 2004 has two anthropologists say they "believe" evolutionary psychology can explain exclusionary behavior, while the second has the line "While extrapolating this to mean that the babies are racist or bigoted is probably a step too far...it does raise interesting questions". I wish that's all I needed to firmly hold something as fact, it must feel nice.

But xenophobia is most certainly a spectrum of emotion, and that which occurs in babies can be taught quite easily out of them.

Once friendships occur, specifically, it tends to fade away pretty quickly.

So I'm not sure if baby-sourced studies like the one you show "prove" that "it's not true."

Not saying that the studies are wrong; just that we all have many biological traits that we overcome easily through nurture.

In-group out-group markers are flexible, but can most easily be based on physical characteristics, so it is maintained. The best chance to remove it is to counteract those markers with in-group markers pertaining to class, dress, language, and values.

EDITED for typos and clarity.

Instinctive xenophobia is different from indoctrinated bigotry.

>Perhaps it's popular because it's not true

Why would something being untrue make it popular?

Have you watched the news and any kind of social media lately?

That's not hate though.

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