Time Person of the Year Candidates by canttakesky

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Time Person of the Year Candidates

POSTED BY: CANTTAKESKY
UPDATED: Monday, December 6, 2010 19:49
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Monday, December 6, 2010 4:56 PM

Here is the full list of candidates.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,202873
4,00.html

Click on the names to vote.

Here is the poll from Time readers.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2028734_202
9036_2029037,00.html

Any thoughts?

--Can't Take (my gorram) Sky

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Monday, December 6, 2010 5:12 PM

DREAMTROVE

Julian Assange?

Okay, now looking at the list

# Julian Assange
Ah, they agree.

# Glenn Beck
Or they're stoned

# David Cameron
Hey, I like his a lot, but he hasn't yet changed the world

# The Chilean Miners
Them too, great story, they didn't change the world, except maybe a little

# Arne Duncan
Who?

# Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Okay, I'm ignorant

# Jonathan Franzen
Really ignorant

# Lady Gaga
Oh you have got to be kidding me.

# Robert Gates
Seriously, I mean it. You have got to be kidding me.

# Tony Hayward
Oh mother of... can we put Katy Perry up here instead?

# Hu Jintao
This is nonsensical. Hu Jintao changed the world, sure, but not this year, like years ago.

# LeBron James
OMFG. This belongs in the box with Lady Gaga. Do these people even know how much these suggestions discredit the list, or Time?

# Steve Jobs
Again, what, the iPad? I love my iPad, but it was a complete accident. There was no plan to it at all, in spite of what Apple claims: The reality, (IMHO, okay, but my pretty informed IMHO on this one, 'cause I have inside info) Jobs panicked when he saw kindle sales, and so he quickly ordered some tablet computers and upscaled the iPhone to tablet size by taking the iphone board and sticking it in a tablet. The result was great, so maybe that changes the world, by accident.

# Hamid Karzai
Oh, this is almost as bad as the Lady Gaga one.

# David and Charles Koch
If this were a top ten list maybe...

# Liu Xiaobo
Um, is China a democracy? If your answer is not yet, then I think we can wait on this one.

# Barack Obama
Oh, what a cheap shot. If screw-ups count, can I put him up their with Tony Hayward? Maybe they can share a Razzie.

# Sarah Palin
Oh Ph-lease.

# Nancy Pelosi
Oh, her and Sarah can go meet Lebron and Gaga

# Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf
And the Imam can join them

# Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
Again, maybe a couple years ago. Powerful men, might be on the wane. Late to the party again, Time?

# The Unemployed American
Oh this is moronic

# J. Craig Venter
My ignorance returns

# Elizabeth Warren, Mary Schapiro and Sheila Bair
Do we mean as financial reformers? I'm not a fan of the current reforms

# Mark Zuckerberg
Um, again, not this year, but maybe, not in a good way. I don't think this is his year though. Time is late to the party again.

Okay, now to see the poll results? Is this a democracy?

My money's still on Assange

And the votes are in

Who Will Be TIME's 2010 Person of the Year?
help This table lists the poll results as voted on by Time.com users. To sort the data, clicek on any of the column headers. refresh results
Rank Name Avg. Rating Total Votes
1 Julian Assange 90 233436
2 Recep Tayyip Erdogan 83 215216
3 Lady Gaga 73 133429
4 Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert 82 68976
5 Glenn Beck 31 75617
6 Barack Obama 60 22508
7 Steve Jobs 63 20251
8 The Chilean Miners 49 22458
9 The Unemployed American 67 16212
10 Sarah Palin 31 24676
11 Mark Zuckerberg 52 14066
12 Liu Xiaobo 67 9931
13 David Cameron 33 16415
14 Hu Jintao 50 9444
15 Robert Gates 41 10447
16 Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf 49 7779
17 Nancy Pelosi 37 10103
18 Craig Venter 56 6526
19 Arne Duncan 29 10886
20 Elizabeth Warren, Mary Schapiro and Sheila Bair 47 5911
21 David and Charles Koch 34 7318
22 LeBron James 22 11002
23 Jonathan Franzen 23 9635
24 Tony Hayward 22 9145
25 Hamid Karzai 29 6852

Too bad the voters have no credibility. Lady Gaga? Is this for real? Did she just overthrow North Korea or something? What'd I miss?

Now I have to go look up Recep Tayyip Erdogan

ETA: Okay filling in my ignorance:

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is prime minister of Turkey. I can only assume he's here because of the Flotilla raid, an operation I doubt he ordered, and certainly didn't captain. Who did? Can we credit random people who do things a little more than world leaders? Time irks me this way. (Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he *did* order it, does anyone here know?)

Jonathan Franzen, a socially conscious novelist. He called America "Almost a rogue state." Okay, does everyone know this guy? I'm in the dark here. If we can nominate novelists, how did Stieg Larsson miss this list? I don't think anyone has had three novels on the top ten best sellers list simultaneously before, let alone for a year. Maybe being dead disqualifies him.

J. Craig Venter. Sorry, I know who Craig Venter is. Yes, he changed the world with his Algae Biofuels thing, more than the human genome thing. I'm not sure it was this year though. Either the year of the discovery, or the year it becomes the reality that changes everything. But yes, it made the leap this year that even I noticed. A couple people here had been aware of it for some time though. If this were a top ten list he and zuck would be on it at least.

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Monday, December 6, 2010 5:27 PM

CANTTAKESKY

If you don't know who they are, just click on their names. There is a little write up on why they are candidates for the most influential people of the year.

Lady Gaga has 10 million Facebook fans. I guess that means she is pretty influential, to Time Magazine.

Stewart and Colbert were noted this year because of their huge rally attendance numbers.

Zuckerberg was noted this year because a movie was finally made about him and Facebook users now know who he is. LOL Seriously, I don't think people understood just how popular (and profitable) FB was until this year.

I don't know. Why limit the sphere of influence to only political ones?

My top picks were Assange, Venter, Stewart/Colbert, and Zuckerberg. I have very little doubt that Assange will be it.

--Can't Take (my gorram) Sky

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Monday, December 6, 2010 6:39 PM

DREAMTROVE

Quote:

If you don't know who they are, just click on their names. There is a little write up on why they are candidates for the most influential people of the year.

I could have googled them first too, but I thought it was fair to show my ignorance.

Quote:

Lady Gaga has 10 million Facebook fans. I guess that means she is pretty influential, to Time Magazine.

Only if she has something to say. She's a media creation, of course she has 10 million fans, they gave them to her. They can take them away again too, with one anti-semitic racist cocaine prostitution terrorist sympathizing lip-sync scandal.

Quote:

Stewart and Colbert were noted this year because of their huge rally attendance numbers.

Beck too I guess. This wasn't world changing. Hell, most of the people completely missed stewarts message. Jon Stewart did tell Geitner to reverse some fiscal policy, that's pretty powerful for a comedian.

Quote:
Zuckerberg was noted this year because a movie was finally made about him and Facebook users now know who he is. LOL Seriously, I don't think people understood just how popular (and profitable) FB was until this year.

Yes, and it's a game changer: The first social network that is actually intentionally pure evil, and yet successful. (Unless myspace counts)

Quote:
I don't know. Why limit the sphere of influence to only political ones?

Politics is the shiny thing we're supposed to watch.

Quote:
My top picks were Assange, Venter, Stewart/Colbert, and Zuckerberg. I have very little doubt that Assange will be it.

Well, a pretty face sells more magazines.

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Monday, December 6, 2010 6:44 PM

CANTTAKESKY

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Beck too I guess. This wasn't world changing. Hell, most of the people completely missed stewarts message. Jon Stewart did tell Geitner to reverse some fiscal policy, that's pretty powerful for a comedian.

I think those numbers gave a lot of people hope that Americans are still sane. At least, it gave me hope. That was important influence I needed at the time.

--Can't Take (my gorram) Sky

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Monday, December 6, 2010 7:49 PM

DREAMTROVE

Yes, but I suspect most of them thought they were sticking it to Beck, which wasn't the point. I'm afraid that Americans are not that sane.

Jon Stewart is solidly in the political middle. On the one hand, he's got his entertainment buddy influences, which make him left, on the other, he's from a hardcore financial sector family which makes him right, and he ends up in the middle. On the political spectrum, he's maybe 5% left. I disagree with him really on two issues: Globalism, and war with Iran, both of which he appears to support.

But his audience isn't in the center. You can tell on the applause that they're about 85%-90% on the left. Clearly not 100%, and sure, the ones who go to the studio tend to be maybe more than the to the left than the general viewership which might be more 70/30. So the rally goers were largely on the left, and saw this as a competition with the right, and these numbers were not balanced out by Arianna Huffington et al. Still, I noticed there were a couple of tea partiers there ;)

Americans still tend to see those who grew up with a different set of family values from them as the enemy, rather than seeing TPTB as their collective enemy, which IMHO, would be the only sane position.

My own "rightness" comes from having a lefty upbringing, with a family that is full of lefties with whom I'm still very close, but like my brother, I've come to see that world view as narrowed and flawed, and my further left university education which promoted a lot of bad ideas that I later saw as more brainwashing (maybe if I'd gone to public school I wouldn't have seen it this way.)

That, plus a couple other things: The world view I was given was wrong, and other correlations, given by our ideological opponents turned out to be right in many cases. The parallels we were given between nationalism and genocide turned out to lack any real statistical correlation, and the positive correlations of socialism with human rights were actually just wrong. The correlation of Democratic Presidents and Peace, looking back, was completely inaccurate.

Joining the Reform Party gave me a whole new perspective. These guys knew so much more about politics than I did, and they despised both parties. They saw them as one Federalist beast. They really gave me the perspective to put myself in the middle, and try see things as different faces of the same forces.

Ironically, the reason I joined the RPUSA in the first place was not at all that I was politically enlightened. In fact, I was a shallow partisan democrat. I'd just reached the perspective of strategic voting, and had noticed that two thirds of all elections were caused by a third party splitter. I joined to help Reform create a third party conservative split to help elect Democrats. I'm actually ashamed to say it now, because it was an incredibly naive and perhaps manipulative thing to do. I thought at the time it was a fair trade off: Reform really just wanted their 5% so they could get ballot access, and I wanted republicans to lose.

But what I wasn't expecting was to be converted to their strange neutral libertarian political perspective. I had a couple strange arguments with my family afterwords, in which they assumed that my new political positions were acting, doing what I had set out to do: Infiltrate and manipulate. Not that I had actually been won over by these arguments.

But really, it was my own research. They didn't really argue me into positions by peer pressure or persuasion, they just asked the questions that caused me to research to see things as the really were, or closer to how they really were.

As I did, I noticed a lot of things:

1. Other groups, like the Christian Right, were not a band of loons, they were people with a different background, and a lot of their ideas about society were pretty sound. Not converting, but certainly willing to listen.

2. Electing democrats does not lead to peace, equality or protection of the environment. It leads to the same thing as electing republicans.

3. At some point in the past, republicans were better than democrats, but then they got worse. This didn't make democrats better, they're pretty much what they used to be.

4. The whole two party system is a sham run by a small elite behind the scenes. Democracy is just a pretty face on dictatorship with the illusion of choice.

5. Sometimes countries attack themselves. All sorts of political advantages can be gotten.

6. We were not always on the right side of wars. Perhaps other sides have valid points, and the right people didn't always win, and not just examples that they told us, like the indians, etc.

7. Sometimes it's not necessary to know who is doing what if you know how they are doing it.

I've done a lot of digging since then, with a lot of nudging from some of the people here.

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