It’s always pretty hard to forget “satansmaggotycumfart”. I don’t really remember much of what they post but the name is always a trip.
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I come from a country using the more traditional form of the “Westminster” system of government that the US’ system is also based upon but which from the outset made significant departures from. Because your use of the term “opposition leader” I’m going to hazard a guess you might be from another Westminster Style parliamentary democracy nation as well. If that’s the case I think what’s happening here is that you’re expecting a “leader of the opposition”, a singular individual officially holding that specific title, like we have in Westminster style Parliamentary systems. The US works a bit differently, and no such role exists. Likely the reason you remembered a person occupying this role in the past is because you were probably seeing press coverage of the opposition party’s official presidential candidate, which would look like a leader of the opposition to us but there’s a big difference because they do a different job.
In the US system the elected representatives of both chambers of their bicameral system, which over there is referred to as “congress” rather than “parliament” as in many Commonwealth countries, are voted in by local electoral processes like in Westminster systems, however unlike in the Westminster system, the ‘executive branch’ which is the branch of government that is headed by the office of, ‘president’ is voted in by an entirely separate process and the president themselves aren’t a member of the congress; they’re not in the House of Representatives or the Senate and they also don’t have to face question time by them either. When the president loses an election or serves out their maximum term limits, they tend to fade from media attention because they don’t have any real job anymore in the party. In a Westminster system, a Prime Minister has a double job, they got their seat in parliament and thus eligibility for their Prime Minister role by winning an election to be the elected representative of a small local area within the nation they govern at the same time as their party’s officially chosen leader which the party gave them through internal decision making. This means when their party is in power their job is to be both a local representative and a prime minister and when their party is out of government, their job is to continue to be that local representative (unless that local area got sick of them and also voted them out) AND the official leader of the “shadow” cabinet. In that role as leader of the opposition they have to represent the party in front of the media and respond to the actions of the government of the day and criticise and challenge them. They’re a constant face as they try to either lead the party BACK in to power they lost or until the party has a vote internally and decides that the public probably won’t vote for them while they continue to have their current leader and they decide to pick a different one.
In the US system parties have leaders in each of their two chambers of congress, one for the Senate and one for the House of Representatives so that’s why if you ask your question as you’ve phrased it, some people might answer you with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries who are the opposition or “Minority” leaders in both the Senate and House of Representatives respectively right now, both of them from the Democratic party which does not currently hold majority in either chamber hence “minority” leaders. This can get pretty confusing if you’re used to the Westminster system because in the US, the election of their president and the election of members of their congress (which would be our parliament) are entirely separate elections and the process by which one becomes a one of two leaders in Congress on behalf of a party or by which one becomes a party’s official presidential nominee are different and so you have no opposition leader or 3 depending on what you decide the equivalent of the opposition leader is.
So finally, the bit that hopefully explains why it seemed like before you had a more known face as a leader of the opposition. When they pick candidates for Presidential elections, as opposed to Congress, major parties in the US have since the 70s done this via a process of lots of separate local elections around the country known as the ‘primaries’ run by the parties themselves (which are private organisations) with votes cast by members of the public who’ve chosen to register with the party. It’s a very long winded process but eventually this leads to an additional voting contest where the people voting are party insiders that are theoretically bound to vote in a way that lines up with the results of those earlier contests. This happens on the year of a presidential election so until then they don’t officially have a nominee. Likely in the past there would have been a lot of coverage of a nominee once they became an official nominee so those could well be the people you were thinking of as opposition leaders before. There’s usually also pretty strong favourites before someone is officially announced as a nominee including former presidential race losers sometimes as happened with Trump and so there’s usually some faces that kinda looks like they’re probably likely to be the next presidential nominee for their party before this process and also during the long months of primaries before the official final vote that picks a winner. If your question was why isn’t anyone seemingly strongly emergent from your perspective this time around well as an outsider I’m less well placed to know the answer but I would suspect that the way things shook out last time with them having to dump Biden at the last minute and inserting Harris outside of the whole primaries process and then her losing has left them in a bit of a shambles and that messy loss combined with a lot of ill will over what seemed to be a concerted effort by party insiders back in 2016 to rig the process of selecting their nominee and the fact that they’re in minority in both chambers of congress might have made the party a more fractured entity of late with less candidates that have strong public support and the blessing of the powerful party insiders, that are clearly raising their heads just yet. But this last bit I’m really much less informed about, I’m mostly just focusing on the US electoral mechanics because they seem so weird when you’re used to the Westminster system.
I should probably learn how you link all this stuff up, probably not doing myself a lot of favours ignoring it.
Is the AI vision local?
This could come in pretty handy for me. What’s he edit on that does this?
Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.mlto
Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is the most overrated video game of all time?
101·2 months agoAnd not even the final one
Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.mlto
Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is the most overrated video game of all time?
5·2 months agoOh yeh that looked cool I was pretty pumped about that. Is it not so good after all?
He was, undoubtedly. But in my memory and my conception of the two characters, their interactions were always like this . With Miss Piggy the angry diva or upset girlfriend to Kermit having a chuckle. It might actually have been that that happened maybe a couple of times ever but as a little kid you don’t have the best grasp of nuance so that’s the impression it formed. I also had obviously a lot less appreciation for characters having roles and functions so even though that exchange was actually really funny and very memorable since I still remember it even today, as a child I only take it on a very literal level, so Miss Piggy isn’t a diva character that creates funny situations by being quick to anger and not tolerating anything she considers beneath her, instead she’s “mean” or “fussy” you know? Obviously different as a grown up, but it made me not like the character as a kiddo.
As a kid I always hated Miss Piggie since she as sort of the humourless foil to Kermit but I think I can appreciate porcine Yoda a bit more now if only for the voice.
Yeh he always seemed rock and roll!
Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.mlto
Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•How can I remain professional toward this female colleague I feel wants something romantic with me when I don't?
2·4 months agoDo you think they can be trusted not to take some sort of action that might take the whole situation and process out of OP’s control have a lot of unintended consequences? I feel like one’s plea that they not act upon it has a lot of risk of being overruled, or ‘act’ having some multitude of interpretations. Your suggestion makes some sense in terms of trying to get ahead of thing in case they spiral out of control for some other reason but it could result in these 3rd parties making things so much worse for everyone even if he has no ill will from the outset.
Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.mlto
Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•What are firefighters doing when there's no fire?
1·4 months agoIt’s also clever that they called that shift “blue watch” lol
Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.mlto
Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•I may be getting drunk/high with a friend in the near future, what are some things to consider and watch out for?
2·5 months agoThanks mate haha glad my veteran underage drinking shenanigans were good for something other than misspent youth. Hope OP saw it before they decided that another drink will probably be fine. 🥳🥴🤢🤮😪
Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.mlto
Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•I may be getting drunk/high with a friend in the near future, what are some things to consider and watch out for?
11·5 months agoIt’s really easy to feel like so far, everything has been feeling great and you’re not even really that drunk yet so why not have another drink? It’s also easy, each time you have a drink to be less good at deciding if having another one is a good idea until you’re quite suddenly really quite drunk and now you can’t do anything about it and also the effect continues so my best advice is, if it’s feeling ‘pretty great, I could take more’, that’s the perfect time to stop because you’ve probably got away with the buzz you wanted but not all the consequences of getting way drunker than you meant to.
Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.mlto
Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•Is it a red flag that your boss asks you to explain yourself in front of other coworkers?
1·5 months agoI think the problem op had with this situation and boss’ approach was that it definitely had shades of admonishment, or at least potentially so, hence wanting to know op’s the thought process. I don’t manage people professionally and never have so I’m not speaking from knowledge of best practice, but I do know that in general this isn’t going to be conducive to good outcomes. Necessary or otherwise, if admonishment or at least finding of fault with the behaviour of the person is on the cards doing so publicly is embarrassing and unlikely to foster the goodwill required for that person to think or behave differently since it moves the whole situation out of the framing of learning a lesson about how to do your job in future and in to something adversarial, with the boss now a malign influence to be resented or feared or both and the humiliation in front of peers now also means that person is more likely to feel isolated from them too with their peers are now to be viewed with apprehension as well as the boss. It’s hard to work well and to avoid making mistakes with such factors at play. One such occasion alone, probably not, but if it’s something boss wants to do a lot as a general management strategy, it’s hard to see that going well for anyone involved.
I’ve always felt KFC is just rated. Obviously the ads by KFC for KFC will claim it to be the best food ever invented but in terms of how people seem to perceive it and how I perceive it, the experience tastes and feels like what it is. It’s mostly enjoyable, fatty salty meat and it’s deep fried which is kinda the fast food signature taste and texture. It’s got a lot going for it, in the way that fried chicken generally as a food does, but it’s also extremely poor quality fried chicken and rarely very fresh but that all balances out to something that pretty much works for what you want out of it and it doesn’t seem to me like anyone expects much more of it.
Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.mlto
Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is the technical hill you are willing to die on in your industry?
1·6 months agoAre people calling desktop backgrounds screensavers now?
But it’s not really the same kind of calculation as the car accident though. It’d be impossible to know if anyone using it ever had died from doing so, so impossible to compare the statistics and the concern is about whether the act of being teleported constitutes dying so depending on the answer to that the odds are either 100% or 0 (unless they have some kind of safety issue with more traditional, visible death or injury that bumps that up to something above 0% but below 100).