Kalbear

Ticket splitting happened very frequently in the 2020 election. It might be rare, but it's occurring right now. If what you said was true you would expect that the 2020 election would have a massive democratic house advantage - certainly similar to 2018. Instead it was one of the most narrow majorities in recent history. So...turnout in general doesn't actually matter? So yes, if you ignore the numbers that don't fit your narrative they tend to do better. Because it was important that dems turned out their voters, not dems turned out ALL voters. The above would be a good example because in that case it went over 200k beyond the baseline - that's 200k more dem voters. Not voters in general. And you can see WHERE those voters turned out - they didn't turn out in heavily rural counties nearly as much as they did in urban areas and minority-heavy areas. A general turnout increase would have seen proportionate turnout across the board, which would likely not have helped.

And on that note - a good study across projects indicates that carbon offsets are not remotely useful enough for the most part and either don't do what they say or severely overstate their effect: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/08/study-carbon-offsets-arent-doing-their-job-overstate-impact/ This shouldn't be that surprising; having an offset of forests when we are having record-setting wildfires is an obvious problem. But it goes more than that.

They don't, however. They do so in specific places and counties. The voting lines in Georgia are fine in the suburbs and in rural areas; they suck in cities. Same is true in Texas, where they specifically went after Houston and left most of the other counties alone. They also target specific populations with certain types of voting restrictions. Polling times, polling places, ID laws - all of these are more likely to disadvantage minority and poorer urban populations. There's a reason that you can use your NRA membership as valid ID but not a library card.

No, that's not how it works at all. When you're talking about the presidency that's still a reasonable thing. And yes, it still very much matters where you get the turnout - AND, more importantly, it matters in turning out YOUR voters. For a long time there was this idea that simply increasing turnout overall would help Democrats, and that is just not accurate. Furthermore upthread (and why I brought this up) there was this idea that increasing turnout in primaries would actually moderate said primary candidates. None of that is true. There was less Republican voter turnout as a percentage of the vote than there was in 2016. More accurately there were fewer people who voted pure Republican across the ticket than there were in 2016 compared to the overall amount of voters. This is why we got a number of split-ticket victories in those states. Republicans turned out more voters than they did in 2016 - that's entirely accurate. And more importantly Trump got a higher percentage of the vote than he did in 2016. How you can use those values while also saying how it favors democrats is a very odd statement. Here's another weird thing - 2016 also had high turnout compared to many other elections; who won? Did it favor Democrats? I'm pretty sure the answer is no. Another way to put it is this: 2020 had a Democrat winning the POTUS election by roughly 30k votes across three states. That really isn't that much. And that was not because of a generally higher overall turnout, especially in places like Georgia.

Because most of Bidens extra vote was in places that didn't matter. Because the president doesn't get elected by popular vote. What mattered specifically was a combination of increasing DEMOCRATIC voters in Arizona, Georgia, and the upper Midwest while also suppressing republican voter turnout in those areas. That didn't happen because of general voter turnout, however.

I don't see how. Increasing turnout in general wasn't why Trump lost.

I mean the "old code but it checks out" ie clearly a reference to rotj and is how things work in star wars. It served to have them show they were jedi previously, though later events show that to be redundant info (we get that from the Droid lightsaber analysis). Though that would have been interesting as a beat - if we find out at the same time as ahsoka that these aren't Sith- they're ex-jedi. Instead it isn't that surprising.

That isn't what anyone said. You guys who can't read forums should probably spend more time actually reading the words people say instead of what you think they said.

Okay, these are reasonable points. So change a very small thing: have Skoll mind trick the captain. Heck, have him do it from afar. Have it play out basically exactly the same way except have his stupidity explained because Skoll made him do it. Have his crew bothered by this but completely unaware that mind tricking is a potential weapon against them and have them follow his orders anyway. Basically the difference is that one has the captain be cartoonishly naive and overconfident and the other has the captain be the victim of power greater than him.

Nah, they kill folks all the time in variously horrible ways. You don't see, like, blood flying or whatever but the violence on the show is almost perfectly inline with the violence in TCW and Rebels.

Because the acting was better, the sets were more interesting and it was telling something very new. Also, all sides were actually smart and clever and not completely shit at their jobs. And honestly while the first two eps are slow the third one hits the ground running. Then you get into the heist which was another sweet look into things, and THEN we get the prison which was just a fucking amazing piece of Sci-Fi regardless of Star Wars setting. Did I mention that the acting (and the associated directing) was awesome?

Sure! But the point was that there's a general common adage that increasing voter turnout will help democrats/progressives/moderates/whatever, and we have evidence that this is not the case. The turnout for the last election was the highest as a percentage that it's been in what, 100 years or something absurd like that? And Trump got a larger percentage of the vote. Furthermore, he increased his % with African Americans and Latinos. The corollary to the primary issue should be obvious - there is absolutely zero evidence and plenty of counterevidence that increasing the amount of people who vote increases the moderation of those candidates. As I said above, the problem is that you have a popularity contest combined with a population that considers racism, misogyny, bigotry and cruelty to be entertaining and popular. The solution is not to make it more at the behest of the random voter! The solution is to make the parties have greater control over their candidates. And yes, elite-driven disapproval didn't stop Trump because the Republican party had basically no effective power (and still largely doesn't). Their winner-take-all systems in the primary combined with weak political control combined with strong economic control meant that the only people who might stop Trump would be the Murdochs and the Kochs. They absolutely can, and many times they've done a fairly good job of it. A very good example of this is...well, last election, where Biden came back and proceeded to stomp, followed by the party swiftly coalescing onto him and making deals. But again, having more people show up and vote wasn't going to solve any of that for Republicans. There's a whole lot of evidence to indicate that the more that people vote, the more people actually would have voted for Trump - one of the only name-brand people on the ballot. Yes, tell me about the less radical South Carolina candidates, please. So...it didn't do any good at all. Not really. You see all sorts of shitty shenanigans. You see Dems voting for the most extreme candidate possible because they believe in the general that they'll have the best chance of winning. You'll see other people voting for whoever they randomly like, or who has a particular issue they care about. Once again, the aggregate of this country is not 'moderate'. Especially now. Moderate voters (or more accurately swing voters, since they are not particularly middle of the road) are important to get for general elections but they are still a very small percentage; the vast majority of the voting populace identifies with a party strongly in their voting patterns, and that has only gone up. Bingo I'm becoming more and more convinced that parliamentary democracies where there is no elected Executive is a significantly better way to run things for a variety of reasons, and one of the biggest ones is that it gives the party significantly more power and a popularity contest significantly less. Smoke-filled rooms have their own problems, mind you - elites choosing who you vote for can miss significant trends and tend to be more reactionary and conservative as a rule. But really we're at a point where the combination of hyperpartisanship, media isolation, personal isolation and dysfunction are more likely than not going to cause the US to become a failed democracy, with the two states being either autocracy or complete malfunction and not a whole lot in between. And none of that is going to be fixed by making the primaries open to anyone to vote in.

Yall didn't learn shit about turnout in the last 7 years, did you? You know who voted for Trump? It wasn't the random base as much - it was people who normally don't vote at all. You know why Trump got more of the vote as a percentage in 2020? Because more people turned out, and a whole lot of them like him. The problem is not that people are as a whole moderate but they don't vote - it is that a whole lot of US citizens are racist, sexist hateful asshats. You don't fix that by giving them MORE power. You fix that by making sure parties have better control over their candidates and people vote for parties, not personalities. And even that only goes so far. But otherwise you shouldn't be very shocked when you have a personality contest to decide who runs the nation get decided by the person people find funny or entertaining and not the person who is actually good at running thjngs.

It's entirely reasonable to call it out. Caine is absolutely a product of his environment, which means he's certainly casually misogynistic just like virtually every male in the 80s in the US was. If that's a dealbreaker for you by all means, let it be broken. That's fine. But it isn't a particularly good indicator that the rest of the book is going to be him being particularly misogynistic. Note if that is the sort of thing that bothers you the villains in the story are VERY bad in that way, and that is a very reasonable callout to make.

The dialogue is pretty much the same cadence and emotion as in Rebels and Clone Wars. The difference is that the live-action characters aren't gesticulating wildly like they do in the cartoon. Same thing was true in a number of places in Mandalorian, especially Season 3.

Stover is remarkably good at writing evil characters and making them incredibly compelling. Probably the main reason that his Revenge of the Sith novelization and his other Star Wars books (particularly Traitor) worked so incredibly well. My personal view is that he does an exemplary job of showing the person's motivations, having them do unspeakable things, and also having you understand it completely. It reminds me a lot of Nabokov and is compelling to me for similar reasons. Star Wars is awesome because you get to finally have Sith that aren't mwahahaha villains. He also writes shit-hot action sequences that are very cinematic and over the top. And yeah, I don't think Caine is particularly misogynistic; using 'pussy' in a negative context is misogynistic, but it isn't especially or deliberately so.

If he doesn't win then I don't think it matters other than satisfaction if he is tried and convicted. If he does win AND he gets convicted we have a massive constitutional crisis. (but probably he'll be able to delay that trial via appeal, so it won't matter in that case).

Removing her would effectively end the trial for a lot of reasons - but the big one is running out the clock. Trying Trump when he's a private citizen is a very different beast than trying Trump while he is POTUS.

I don't see how that fits your goal, then. Open primaries get similar numbers to closed primaries as far as voting go, and for the most part there is no indicator that allowing non-party members to vote gives you more moderate candidates or a better representation standard. The overwhelming majority of folks who vote in primaries - open or closed - are very extreme people that are the red meat base of their parties. As an example, Ohio has open primaries and there is absolutely no indication that this helped with their candidate quality or extremism. Now, I have a big beef with caucuses - which are significantly more exclusionary and even more limiting to the super-base - but primaries being open or closed ain't gonna solve shit.

It doesn't, actually. It often supports more radical candidates depending on the area that is voting.

Is your suggestion mandatory voting then?

He added quite a bit that was new - quite a bit of how much asskissing the US has to do to Musk to get him to do anything vaguely human, how worried Musk is about his stuff being used for military purposes, how much actual control Musk has about major parts of the US infrastructure and tech capacity that is...not ideal.

So your first priority should be to get a Lucario. Lucario with Power-Up Punch is an absolute beast when it comes to any of the Rocket leads or Giovanni due to the mechanic that any time you use a charged move or switch pokemon you get a 2-3 second window where they do nothing at all. Because PUP is so fast and boosts your attack you can spam it while only being hit once or twice, effectively stunlocking most pokemon - even ones that it isn't very effective against. Doing the Mega Rayquaza raids this weekend should also be really helpful.

I will say that while I understand them setting up the New Republic as ineffective, idiotic buffoons makes...some sense? Maybe? for the ST and what followed there, it's deeply unsatisfying to me in the same way that I imagine seeing what Luke became in TLJ is deeply unsatisfying for others. Okay, Han is a flake, and Lando is a con man, but Leia was a fucking political machine and got shit done. And she's letting all of this turn into this total trash? She's okay getting rid of the entire fucking fleet? From what I gather of the ST that wasn't the case - and that's why she founded the resistance - but THAT is the story I want to see too. Also, as a rule it's far more interesting to have villains doing well because they're actually competent and talented (like Thrawn from the Zahn stories) than having evil succeed because good is very, very stupid. The New Republic is the political equivalent of every stupid teenager running from the guy with the machete...very slowly, badly, and making stupid decisions at every turn.

Cool, so if we don't agree with the overall rating from critics then we are probably wrong, right? Wonder how Andor rated