So, apparently there’s a thing going on where you can ask the President questions on YouTube, and I guess at some point he will choose some and answer them. I’m not sure exactly how it works. I didn’t get that far.
Anyway, I typed in my question and got a message back that I needed to register. Well, I’m pretty sure I’ve already got a YouTube account, but I don’t use it much, have never actually uploaded a video, so I went ahead and re-registered.
Then, I typed in my question, which I think is an important one. Why don’t you prosecute the Bushies for all of the evil things they have done? I phrased it a little bit better than that. I got back a message that there were already similar questions, and would I like to vote on them.
I felt a tingle of hope. Glad to know other people are thinking along the same lines. The hope was quickly dashed. The other questions had to do with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The computer had picked up on the key phrase “crimes against humanity.”
There are two lessons to be learned. One is that computers haven’t really passed the Turing test yet. They are getting better. I am frequently amazed that my computer can correct me when I say their instead of there, fail to capitalize the word ‘I,’ of misspell ‘occur.” Computers are amazing, but they are still no substitute for a human moderator, even though they are a jillion times faster.
The other lesson is that prosecution of the many crimes commited by Bush and co. is probably never going to happen. It has moved out of the main stream of political discourse so completely that nobody is even bringing it up. That happens, when an issue is ignored for long enough.
I remember one time when Arianna Huffington had an interview scheduled with Nancy Pelosi, and she threw the question out to her readers: What should I ask her? Well, the answer was clear and unambiguous. Thousands upon thousands of comments, and at least 2/3rds were on the subject of impeachment.
Arianna ignored the results completely. Just because they say they want to hear the public’s opinion, doesn’t mean they really do.
So, I hung around the thread for awhile, voting for every questioner that asked about the legalization of marijuana and flagging as abusive anybody that sounded like a teabagger, but my heart wasn’t really in it. If they don’t care what I think, why should I care about them.
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