"It might be a sign that Susan does not have a fully trusted team around her ..." => It might be a sign that team around her is afraid to tell her how ridiculous this is... Maybe they made good proposals in the past and where turned down and they now don't want to make good suggestions again...
I'm currently tickling my brain with the hypothesis that this is a next-level move by her team, to get her to publicly "emphasize the importance of free speech and the role that YouTube plays in protecting it", so that it will become more inconvenient for her (or for the rest of Youtube) to do more things that interfere with free speech.
Analogize this to publicly praising a corrupt general for doing or planning something good that he hasn't actually been doing. It's difficult for him to turn down the praise ("No, I seriously haven't done anything to deserve this"), and meanwhile it focuses eyes on him and pressures him to actually do the thing. I read about the tactic in a fictional book once, I'm sure it works. :-)
Well that won't work... former President Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace prize but he went on to involve the United States in additional foreign wars and went ham with drone strikes.
I saw an article recently where some school was being renamed for the sort of reasons people call "cancel culture" these days and they explicitly rejected renaming it after Obama, because he was an "oppressor" due to the (allegedly very vigorous) deportation of undocumented immigrants during his terms.
For me, he's the greatest President because of the ACA.
Precisely this! Not having any insurance in my late 20s, I voted for him thinking ACA was for the good of people. Then I got married, had 2 kids, business flourished, and purchased a house only to realize that ACA accounts for half of my mortgage. Currently paying $1k per month with all healthy members and without any pre-existing conditions!
I think that all people have a right to their opinion. But the minute your opinion becomes an order and starts scratching my turf, I got a problem with that!
If you meant to respond to me, I'm not sure what you are trying to say. What are you comparing?
It's not a matter of opinion that you have to pay property taxes. It is a matter of opinion that you should have health insurance - as you may recall there isn't even a nominal financial penalty for not doing so any more.
But based on your comments so far, you see the situation as the opposite? I don't understand what you think you are being ordered to do.
Obama sucked at his job. Like, nearly Carter-level blindness to political reality, but with more personal arrogance. Obama was better than Shrub. Shrub was a war criminal, so you'd have to hope Obama was better.
The ACA was emblematic of Obama's unwillingness to lift a finger to help build the Democratic grassroots. The Democrats in Congress allowed the ACA to be loaded with poison pills due to Obama's insistence on a bipartisan vote. The result: no votes from the Gops, but it did cause the Democrats to lose the House since -- due to the Gop amendments -- the good parts didn't kick in until well after the midterm elections and the bad parts started immediately.
So popular was the ACA, in the end, that it only survived the Trump years because McCain lost his temper on the day of the Senate vote to repeal it.
I don't compare him to FDR, because I have no real perspective on presidents way before I was born. I don't know if he was better than Millard Fillmore either. I do know many people hated FDR with a passion and probably still do to the extent they are still alive.
It's easy to be evil when you have a benevolent press on your side. Still people think Obama's biggest scandals were wearing a tan suit and ordering Dijon mustard.
That's more the fault of the Nobel committee. You can't hamstring a leader by giving them an award for no reason and hoping that affects their decision making in the future.
Bush started wars in two countries, Obama started wars in another five. The fact they didn't rescind the prize is disgusting, and shows you what a joke the committee is, as well as the award itself.
What's most disgusting is that it was a political ploy based on the fact that President Obama was America's first black president. There's no other logical conclusion that any thinking person could arrive at, because at the time he received it, he had done, quite literally, almost nothing of substance.
As I said - it was a rebuke of Bush. The United States was at a very low point in world public opinion, thanks to his efforts at the time.
None of this excuses the imperial adventures that followed. Libya's still in a civil war, by the way. (Although to be fair to Obama, Europe was chomping at the bit to go to war with it.)
> "...so that it will become more inconvenient for her (or for the rest of Youtube) to do more things that interfere with free speech."
This is a good theory, I don't think it reflects the situation though. She used her 'acceptance speech' for this absurd accolade to emphasise the importance of censorship in ensuring freedom, that war is peace, freedom is slavery, so on so on. If this was the aim, it clearly didn't work.
Given her speech, the irony is either totally lost on her, or she legitimately thinks that YouTube is such a monolithic entity that the truth is whatever she says it is.
