DradisPing
No bio...
User ID: 1102
DradisPing
1d ago
Not just he jury. Usually they operate in areas where the prosecutor and judges are friendly.
If something like this happened in Portland only the shooter would have been charged and they would have found an excuse to let him plead down.
DradisPing
3d ago
The instructions are "choose the passage you like best" not choose the one you think is AI.
It's not really surprising that an isolated passage with no context isn't as people pleasing as it could be.
Also you're over-estimating the NYT readers. It's an extremely mainstream publication. Probably 99% of their readers didn't go to an Ivy.
DradisPing
3d ago
25A isn't likely. It's actually a lot harder than impeachment, by design. You can do the initial removal quickly but the President just has to send a letter to congress stating he's not disabled to return to power. The VP & cabinet have 4 days to dispute that and if they do then congress needs a 2/3 vote in both houses within 48 hours to make the removal permanent.
DradisPing
3d ago
My feeling is that the organizers fully understand that but the average protester does not.
Their lived experience is protests with a friendly city government where the police will get in trouble for actually trying to control the situation. They've been fed falsehoods about how ICE agents aren't real federal agents.
DradisPing
4d ago
My view is that there's no depth behind that. Canadians don't know much about him, have seen negative stories about him lately, and so report a negative opinion on polls.
Carney has been staying popular by keeping the focus on anti-Americanism and avoiding launching new bold social experiments.
His problem is that's not sustainable. His base has been distracted by Trump but they are going to be expecting some bold new social program soon. Meanwhile Carney is going to be hit by consequences of Trudeaus policies hard over the next couple of years and it will be extremely hard for him to navigate.
Poilievre's big problem previously was that he was running a front runner campaign. His people didn't want him doing podcasts / youtube because it would upset national reporters in Canada. He's been making some changes with that.
Poilievre's Triggernometry interview from 7 days ago is at 675k views. Those views are likely mostly from people outside Canada, but that's a lot for a Canadian politician. Especially for one who's only in opposition.
Contrast that with Carney's Monocole interview from 2 days ago which currently has 139k views. Keep in mind that he's the actual PM.
"very, very, unpopular with the broader public" implies that there's some deep dislike, and I don't see any evidence of that. Opinion can turn on a dime if Carney gets into trouble and isn't seen as viable.
Poilievre just needs to keep going on podcasts to get his message out and wait for Carney to be hit with a crisis that divides his base.
DradisPing
5d ago
If you look at 2022 - 2026 numbers then it's clear that the real story is the collapse of the NDP. They've lost half of their typical support.
Look at past elections: https://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/1867-present.html
If this holds up then we're looking at a realignment following the death of the NDP as a national party. They basically committed suicide to stop the Conservatives in the last election, and it's not clear that they can come back if they do it again.
There's a long tradition in Canada of blaming the Conservative leader for not being in government. Surely if they oust him then the messiah will appear.
The reality is that there are multiple institutions in Canada who consider shitting on the right wing opposition leader to be a de-facto part of their mandate. By contrast it's relatively easy for Carney to look Prime Ministerial, what with him actually being the PM.
There's a baseball stats term called "Wins Above Replacement" where to evaluate players they compare their stats to a typical replacement level player. We can't quantify political leaders like that but I am suggesting he's better than any likely replacement.
As for the polls, there were polls showing them as tied back in December and January. It'd be silly to oust a leader over something so transient.
There seems to be a big campaign right now from the left to get the Conservatives to dump Pierre. That's not what you'd expect if he was truly weak.
DradisPing
6d ago
Predator
The problem with Predator is that they want to expand the lore but went with the "planet of hats" trope where they are a race of hunters.
So when they try to show anything more than the Predator hunting it comes off as lazy and unsatisfying writing.
It'd be better if they started dropping hints that the ones we see are aristocratic safari hunters engaged in illegal poaching. "Dutch the Human" actually has a big fandom on their homeworld for killing one.
Make a movie where a group of Predators comes to earth, then mid movie the authorities show up to try to arrest them, and then the humans are stuck in the middle of the unexplained chaos.
The Terminator series has a similar problem. You can keep going with humanity vs Skynet, but the terminators start feeling shoehorned in. Skynet should have more than one trick.
In general action movies suffered from competition with video games. As the home gaming experience got better movies couldn't compete with the over the top action experience.
This was exacerbated by a push to strictly enforce R ratings and limit the marketing of R films. The fun gunplay and boobs films stopped being made. They became serious adult films or nerfed PG-13 adventures.
The other problem is that in the CGI age filmmakers became convinced that everything had to be frame perfect. But no one who is enjoying a movie is actually going to care about minor visual problems you can see in slow motion. Schwarzenegger movies are a great example of this. In Commando stuntmen are launched into the air when he throws grenades and you can see the catapults launching them if you look closely. In T2 you can clearly tell stunt doubles are doing the bike scenes if you look closely. No one cared.
Hollywood was always the king of big budget action spectacles and they are easy to dub into a new language. Other countries couldn't really compete directly so they went with things with more local flavour. Hong Kong does good action scenes but there are usually some plot points that are harder to understand as a westerner. China has been making some patriotic action movies lately that with some over the top depictions of Americans that end up being hilarious.
I'm curious about Starship Trooopers and Showgirls
Lindsay Ellis did a great review of Showgirls.
Starship Troopers is actually very interesting from a CW standpoint. Verhoven grew up in Nazi occupied Netherlands. He always had a guilty soft spot for the Nazi propaganda aesthetic. After Showgirls bombed he went to the studio to pitch an idea about fascist humans fighting communist bugs. The studio thought it sounded like Starship Troopers and got the rights to Starship Troopers. Verhoven tried to read the book, didn't like it or finish it, and let his screenwriter work on adapting it.
As a result there's a big split where the left thinks that the humans are clearly supposed to be fascist. But the actual movie depicts a functional society with suffrage limited to those who complete military service.
It's interesting because getting wealthy from oil happened at the same time as "wahhabism" was spreading. Although apparently there's some dispute if that is actually the correct term.
In the 70s the idea was running spreading that any music other than singing over drums was un-Islamic. Similarly there were strict views about women's clothing. So even though the Ottomans certainly had music and women's fashion there was domestic pressure against promoting it. Cat Stevens famously converted to Islam in 1977 and felt he had to give up his music career.
Also gulf donors took over funding far left groups in the West after the Soviet Union fell, and they managed to make Palestine one of the premiere causes on all campuses. That's actually a pretty incredible achievement of foreign policy.
More options
Context Copy link