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I've met 18-21 year olds that could barely function as human beings. Now they are commanders and deputy commisioners. It's not that 18 year old can't do a better job than grown ups, it's that the best grown up is better than the best 18 year old by a factor of 10. Idealism is great, but it doesn't get shit done.

He's not that old. Anyway, its not so much his contract as this last game. His contract was just the cherry on top.

Probably. But the sort of 18 year old who wants to sit on a local council is the sort I encounter, not the sort BFG encounters. That said, in an ideal world, we'd see 18-25 year olds from all sorts of backgrounds standing for election. It's never going to happen, but it would be a good thing if it did.

I still watch Maher if only because I used to sneak downstairs after bedtime to watch Politically Incorrect in the 90s. Hard to stop when it’s been a habit that long.

If Daenerys brings a sizable army and a bunch of refugees as some people expect, then yes, she will be at considerable disadvantage in comparison to Aegon. Especially so if her army includes a significant number of Dothraki. Both Aegon and Daenerys will have "take food from the people" problem, but a) Aegon's foreign sellswords will take far less food than Daenerys' foreign barbarians and b) Aegon's foreigners are far less foreign. So that is not going to help her any. In which case it is not going to matter either way. Renly did it during summer. Summer is time during which you build up stores for winter, and if needed, these can be redirected. But again, Golden Company will eat far less food than any force Daenerys can bring that would be able to match it in effectiveness. Especially so if they lose their elephants. She will need at least an initial army in order to gain support in Westeros, just as Aegon has to win at least some battles to get lords to declare for him. Name alone is not enough. Food ships are, as I said, unlikely. Just look at how Golden Company landing went, and that was autumn, not winter. And monarch sitting the Iron Throne will not be a dragonrider, unless Aegon somehow gets a dragon... which is not unlikely. That being said, it is true that scale of warfare will likely be very limited. Which is good for Daenerys because otherwise, between limited number and quality of troops she will be bringing to Westeros, she would have to either rely on local support or else give up. Narrow Sea is only narrow relatively speaking. It is 300 miles at the narrowest point, which is distance from Scotland to Norway, or else the average width of eastern Mediterranean. And food first has to reach ports on the Narrow Sea, and then be shipped to wherever it is needed. So unless you are looking at feeding only King's Landing and leaving everybody else to starve, it will still be extremely difficult to nearly impossible logistical undertaking. Welcome to literally every army in the book. Except the Golden Company are actually disciplined, not something you can say for anybody in Daenerys' army except for the Unsullied. Actually, starvation is precisely what usually does lead to rebellion. Well, depending on what / who is causing starvation. And Riverlands are in fact unique, because the area was not exposed to, as you imply, merely normal foraging. Tywin intentionally burnt down as much of the riverlands as he could have as a form of irregular warfare campaign. So no, they do not "exemplify the problems of the people right now reasonably well". No other area in Westeros will be facing the problems Riverlands are facing, unless Daenerys and Aegon (and Euron) burn down half the Westeros in their wars.

I think the definition of a goodbrother is the brother of your wife or the husband of your sister. We know that Jon Hollard was Denys's goodbrother, but I don't think a cousin of Jon would referred to as a goodbrother, as well. Calling the brother of your goodbrother a goodbrother, too, already seems to defer from the definition, but calling a cousin of your goodbrother a goodbrother would render the word totally random. I would agree if Symon hadn't already been introduced by the maester some sentences earlier, so he is well connected to the story. If Robin wasn't Jon's son, his introduction would feel really random to me.

I could be wrong, but you two probably encounter two vastly different breeds of 18-year-olds in your respective lines of work. Pretty much the opposite ends of the same bell curve.

That is not remotely your bias showing through and is strong empiric evidence. I'm utterly convinced.

Fuck the "groomer" bullshit, BTW. Disgusting.

I'll dig through Twitter later if I can get into my old acct, but yeah, I believe it was around that time and on Twitter that I saw that. The tweet I'm thinking of specifically mentioned that using the preferred pronouns was abuse.

Naive is the one thing I am not, when it comes to 18 year olds and politics. I've run student elections for almost all my adult life. My student officers walk into committees full of middle aged professionals: lecturers, lawyers, accountants, doctors. And they make their case, and often as not, they do a better job of it than those professionals. They improve the university. They have the ability and the desire to effect meaningful change in their community - not just the student community, but the wider community. Not to be too sappy, but it's actually inspiring. Do some of them fuck it up? Sure. But on the whole, I rate my student officers higher than my local councillors. And that's not naivete, that's the voice of experience.

It seems to me pretty apparent in the USA with regard to the Israel-Palestine conflict that there are strong elements in the media within both political groups that are attempting to depict the "other side" as only after mindless bloodshed. The liberals are antisemites who are fine seeing Jews die, and the conservatives are indifferent to genocide and think six year old Palestinians getting bombed have it coming. It has to be one or the other; there is no room for nuance. I personally find it such a tired and simplistic trope to generalize all those on the "other side" as cackling villains.

Not a single person has said any of this. What's happening is that you are staking a pretty maximalist position on the issue of trans rights and when you find people want at least some nuance about the facts of the matter, such as that there are many varieties of trans individuals -- without a single person in this thread, near as I can tell, actually questioning this reality, nor that the vast majority of trans-identified people are genuinely trans -- and that this has an effect on how people try to figure out policy, you launch this jeremiad against what you essentially take to be heresy. You don't know what's in the hearts of anyone but your own, and if you think excoriating and haranguing people for failing to accept every detail of your framing and views and use of language makes you a good person, maybe you don't actually know your own heart, either. The absurdity in all this is that there's another site I post on where over the years the main author and many of his commentators have over the years turned into Bill Mahr-style anti-woke scolds and I'm among the few arguing with them about how they've lost the plot on various topics, including spending way too much time trying to convince one of the cranks to understand Judith Butler on gender as culturally constructed and performative. (Why am I still there? I've been reading the main author of the site since I was a teenager, when he was a cool west coast reporter with a bunch of anecdotes and stories about people and things I was interested in, and sometimes he still writes the sort of things that I appreciated back then; all too often he's just grumping about political stuff these days, alas, which is no doubt part of why his readership has dwindled and changed into a weird collection of cranks, trolls, and long-time fans wincing on occasion about why he's wasting his time on culture war grumbling) Such is life.

Yes, and in English, the word "cleansing" literally means to make something clean. Who could be against making something clean, eh? Literal meanings are pointless when applied to social actions. We all know exactly what these words really mean.

I keep doing that. I cannot stop. My brain is absolutely ruined this week which doesn't help.

Yeah, Davis Bertans is due $33 million over the next two years, and he is bad at basically every basketball skill except shooting (and he's not an elite shooter). He is barely even a rotation player for $17 mil a year.

Plumm! That reminds me, since in disguise... Lars Mikkelsen could do it, resemblance and all. As for the youth, any lean Skarsgard brother left (phew how they've all bulked up).

May the Fourth be with ya'll!

Not sure it matters much who plays Bloodraven as a faithful adaptation of the stories would put him on screen for, perhaps, ten minutes. Ser Maynard Plumm would be another matter, though. Even if they were to expand things a bit, the show should focus almost exclusively on events around Dunk & Egg which means all I could see for Bloodraven doing something more would be for them to have some scenes in KL covering the Great Spring Sickness and the deaths of Valarr and Daeron II followed by the ascension of Aerys I. If they did Eustace's tale of the Redgrass Field as a long and detailed flashback sequence we could have more Bloodraven, but since the man would be a youth back then he should be played by a different actor.

You gave them the benefit of the doubt, and they answered, so can we stop pretending now that there are no transphobes in this thread? People here are sooo worried about being called transphobe " not me!" They say, while actually discussing if trans women are real women, like are you fucking with me? Reminds me of the oh so well meajing liberals, more outraged of being called racists than actuañly question their racists belives and actions. How can you call yourself not a transphobe and spend this entire threads ( and others) defending transphobe talking points, dehumanizing transpeople, some of whom participate and read these threads, questioning there very sense of being. You guys are cowards, just get on with it, say what you want to say up front. Cuz You really dont give a fuck about transpeople, you want them to know they could never ever be "real" women, cuz the you would not spend the last 4 or something pages discussing fucking gametes or some shit like that. What was the possitive thing about the nhs policy again? Some of you are transphobic and misoginysts and need to deal with that asap.

It is possible. Personally, I think the way the maester phrases the tale about Jon, Robin and also Symon (Ser Symon Hollard was slain by Ser Barristan during the king’s escape) implies that their stories are separated, with Jon's son and Robin as different characters. Maybe were they cousins?

Yeah the issue with Harris is that he just got old in the last year or two of his contract, which, ya know, if often how contracts play out. His contract was always an overpay, tbc, but there are plenty of other examples that are at least just as egregious.

We have no clue how many men Dany is going to bring across the Narrow Sea. To take KL she hardly needs 50,000 men if she also happens to have dragons. But even if she did, people will die in battle and then the food of the Kingslanders will pass from whoever held it before into Dany's hands. Keep in mind that Dany also has no huge problems feeding thousands and thousands of people (about 8,000 Unsullied plus many more freedmen following her) during her marches. Obviously people can live off the land to a degree somehow in Slaver's Bay. The comparison I made is valid, though, as the assumption is that Aegon will magically be popular despite the fact that his foreigner sellswords will take food from the people (and likely also castles, titles, wealth, and lands from current nobility) while Dany is somehow imagined to be at a disadvantage there. Sure enough - if we imagine Dany or any pretender marching with hundreds of thousands of people from one end of the continent to the other it should affect the people to a very large degree. But that isn't the issue. Dany will come from the east by ship, like Aegon, and she will land close to the capital and take it. That is her campaign, like it is Aegon's. Also notice that Renly could feast and party with 100,000 men during his progress-march in the Reach without so much as denting the Reach's ability to feed itself or others. These people do have gigantic amounts of surplus food, apparently. Or they don't give a fig about the winter provisions of their peasants and don't face any bad consequences because of that. Punitive expeditions which may or may not follow thereafter would be done by lords and knights bending the knee to Aegon/Dany, not necessarily by their foreign troops. That would only be the case if nobody in Westeros where to declare for them which is silly. Dany won't unleash all the Dothraki against, say, Dorne or the Westerlands, just as Aegon won't throw the entire Golden Company against the Vale, say. We could expect some Dothraki to join a contingent of knights, just as Aegon might send some Golden Company men with whatever Dornish or Reach levies might declare for him ... but the idea that a Targaryen pretender would ever have to drown Westeros with foreign soldiers to take the Iron Throne is silly. It is also kind of weird to assume that a monarch sitting the Iron Throne will or has to march out into the country to wage a war (much less one who is a dragonrider). Rebels wanting to overthrow him or her would have to march against them, and good luck with that in winter. You read the books, you know how this goes. Joff and Tommen didn't march to war, only Robb and Renly and Stannis did, because they wanted to be king/avenge themselves. And Balon sent out his generals to do his fighting. In winter we can expect that pretty much nobody far away from KL would give a fig about the pretender taking the city from another pretender ... aside from the die-hard followers of the losing pretender or the losing pretender themselves if they were able to flee. Even if you had personal quarrels with the new pretender, reason would dictate you bide your time and wait for spring. We can imagine silly scenarios where Aegon or Dany turn into Robb and Stannis who are effectively in the field all the time. But it is not likely that either is going to want to do that in winter. And especially a dragonrider can fly around a lot, dissuading potential rebels before they march into the field and striking deals with potential allies and friends to raise an army in their name without actually having to call on them with a strong host of their own. This will also come in handy if there is a food crisis. Somebody can fly to Pentos or Myr to ensure more food ships are coming. Ditto with Gulltown. We are talking about a very narrow sea called the Narrow Sea and a very developed infrastructure of naval trade. I mean, it has been firmly established that the Vale is cut off from mainland Westeros already due to climate, weather, and geography. Yet it has also been established that the Vale is immensely fertile, one of the bread baskets of Westeros, and the place from which Jon Snow expects to buy food for the NW in the immediate future. This is not a plot line that will disappear from the books because it is logistically impossible or very hard to ship huge amounts of food from Gulltown to Eastwatch or White Harbor. In fact, Jon wouldn't have thought about looking for food in Braavos and the Vale if it were impossible. And it would be even easier to ship food from Pentos or Myr to KL, or from Volantis, Lys, or Tyrosh to Oldtown and/or up the Mander. The Golden Company are scattered, but they are still thieves. They occupy a number of castles and stole food from the garrisons as well as the local population. Bottom line is - this is not a plot line George is very interested in. Yes, in relation to winter he has to deliver, but not in relation to the weird 'the smallfolk are starving and therefore the guys in charge will face trouble' idea. Starvation usually doesn't lead to rebellion, so it is in fact the case that if Aegon or Dany or anyone else wants to seize and keep power they better keep the starving people starving while securing sufficient food for themselves and their followers. They would have to make concessions to city folk, especially in the capital and wherever they intend to live during winter, but not to the population at large. The Riverlands exemplify the problems the people right now reasonably well. There are many refugees and outlaws there because the region is war-torn. Soldiers foraged food again and again and again while also destroying homes and houses of the people living there. They had to leave if they wanted to survive. But they wouldn't have left by the droves if merely their winter provisions had run out. That is a much slower process and one these people are apparently accustomed to. If Daenerys were, say, Stannis and had to burn all of Westeros between the Wall and KL to get to the Iron Throne she might be the most hated monarch of all time once she gets there ... but she will land on the shore, at a place of her choosing. Her way to the Iron Throne should be very short, possibly even shorter than Aegon's. Which means the idea that not exactly many people are likely to blame her for the current food shortage on the continent in winter and after a long civil war.

This which just came out

Mads Mikkelsen would be great for BR, saw a fan casting with Benedict Cumberbatch, that pic looked apt but seen as a whole doesn't quite work for me.