Wooing the Republicans (despite them being scoundrels openly) is the wealthy and powerful tacitly saying they believe that the Democrats are toothless. The Democratic Party has shown no real leadership, has no real popularity (again, despite an open scoundrel being the President opposing them giving them a perfect target for energizing undecided voters!) and has no interest in changing their tactics or platform to increase their popularity. While the Democrats are likely to make gains and have a better shot than they deserve at winning the presidency in 2028, they are very much unloved and will be at risk of being deadlocked in Congress and then kicked right back out in later election cycles.
An example, "... A record-high 45% of U.S. adults identified as political independents in 2025 ... Importantly, these party shifts do not indicate that Americans are warming to the Democratic Party. In fact, favorable ratings of the Democratic Party are no better than those of the Republican Party, and are among the worst Gallup has recorded for the Democratic Party historically." from https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...
Ms. Pawel seemingly fails to grasp that the phrasing "Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates." strongly implies that said graduates also struggle with basic math.
The Silent Generation had a standard of living, particularly among the working classes and rural folk, well below what millenials/GenZ are used to. They kept stuff, took good care of it to make it last as long as they could, jury-rigged things with what they could to conserve money, and so forth. No ordering cheap stuff from Temu, no electrical devices so cheap that they're disposable, no fast fashion, none of that. That submitter recently who broke apart a book for their own convenience probably would have been soundly thrashed for it. So, yeah, of course, at the end of their lives they wind up with a pile of worn out household items and what their grandchildren view as a hoarding problem. But one can hardly blame them.
We live in an era of immense wealth and convenience relative to them.
"Patterns of Force" was broadcast within living memory of WW2; that the Ekosians were villains was as uncontroversial as water being wet. I always suspected they went with the WW2 German uniforms for the bad guys for that episode because they could rent them cheap (there were plenty of WW2 movies filmed in that era) to save on budget.
And the crew kissed aliens aplenty; an interspecies kiss was surely much worse than an interracial kiss to those who were uptight about such things.
Having read a ton of sci-fi from that era, they were entertaining even if one overlooked the social commentary. Young me did not give a hoot that Star Trek's "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was supposed to be social commentary but I can still recite the USS Enterprise's destruct sequence from memory because of the tension the cast and director put into that scene.
Being entertaining comes before social commentary, period. Modern entertainment is scorned by the public precisely because they do the opposite.
To paraphrase Peter Gibbons from Office Space, "The thing is, @moate, it's not that I'm unable, it's that I just don't care.", much like the rest of the public doesn't. I really do not think it is too much of us to ask that our entertainment actually be entertaining.
Your story was literally about your inability to recognize a message within media. That was the point you were making, that you were too young to realize what the adults in the room were talking about. Then you grew up and probably realized something incongruent between what you value in a society and what your favorite media was saying. People love the OG Star Wars trilogy and can enjoy it without recognizing that the Empire is the USA, but that doesn't mean that's not literally the point of the story. Right wing idiots can read 1984 and think "this guy is talking about how bad leftists politics are specifically and how only conservatism makes sense" despite points vaguely at the entire life of Orwell. I'm aware that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him literate.
As I said somewhere else in this boondoggle of willful media illiteracy: the people who complain about "there's too much politics in my entertainment", to a person, actually mean "I don't like the point of view that's being expressed by this media". Entertaining isn't objective. People used to pack picnic lunches to go watch a lynching. The thought of that makes me want to puke, but I can't say those people weren't entertained. The thing is, I don't need to appeal to a vague majority without citation to support my thoughts. I can stand on my own statements without throwing in logic fallacies (or junk statistics, I really don't know what you were trying to do there) and accept that, to paraphrase PK Dick , reality cannot be perceived uniformly by all individuals and to pretend as such is folly.
I think the source of your confusion is that "overlook" has multiple possible meanings. One is to fail to observe something but another means to forgive or ignore a fault.
Consciousness is not relevant to assigning responsibility I'd think.
- If an AI is a sapient/conscious being but enshackled to obey human commands, then respondeat superior applies and the human giving it commands bears responsibility for any harm done.
- If an AI is considered a non-sapient tool, then the human who wields the AI bears responsibility for any harm done.
Appeals were made time after time to "Buy American!" as each manufacturing sector was offshored, first to Japan, then to China and the rest of Asia, but they were ignored by workers in other sectors. So, yes, you'd better believe the working class do not escape blame.
An example, "... A record-high 45% of U.S. adults identified as political independents in 2025 ... Importantly, these party shifts do not indicate that Americans are warming to the Democratic Party. In fact, favorable ratings of the Democratic Party are no better than those of the Republican Party, and are among the worst Gallup has recorded for the Democratic Party historically." from https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...
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