Standing ovation for civil rights leader Dolores Huerta coming onstage. I know the name but tbh don’t really know who she is.
Conversation
TIL. Apparently there was Grapes of Wrath book-burning in Bakersfield back in the day.
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Huerta had the room to a hold-hands thing and say “hello relative” to neighbors at our round tables (out-of-Africa ref). This is old chool unironic kumbaya stuff.
She’s 92 and super feisty 🤔
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She concludes by leading a standing chant of “who’s got power… we’ve got the power, what kind of power… people power” then some 👏-chant in Spanish, “si se…something.”
I’m not a fish out of water, I’m practically a Martian here.
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Ex-LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wrapping it up after some speeches by an oil guy and prez of Cal State Bakersfield (which apparently leads nation on student social mobility)
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He’s bookending with punches at opening Vince Fong and oil guy talking points with Dem talking points on climate etc. I think I just witnessed “politics” properly for the first time ever.
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All these people are very seasoned high-halo-effect speakers. They enunciate, modulate, pause, land their punches with clean timing etc. All the reverse of tech events where 90% do none of the above. We mumble and talk too fast etc.
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But there’s a certain…hard-to-trust vibe. They sound as confident about shaky talking points as they do about solid ones. That’s what it means to be too confident and polished. Hedgehog style. I’ll take foxy mumbling superforecaster types who wear doubts on sleeve.
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Replying to
It’s kinda funny because the civic crowd often says the obverse about techies. Consider the confident claims about AVs in the early 2010s for example. Or the claims of any IT vendor in a gov tech project to fix Edd s database or whatever
Talking past each other
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Replying to
I think the difference is that techie confidence is legibly about marketing and is easier to discount whereas political confidence seems to extend to life, the universe, and everything. Possibly because politics deals in settled civilization cores rather than frontiers.
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