mormont

Again, the captain is overconfident, so he dismisses the unlikely in favour of 'calling their bluff'. It's not really a critical point, and it's exactly the sort of 'plot hole' that slides by if you're OK with the episode and only seems like a problem if you're looking for reasons why you didn't like it. From a narrative point of view, it works very well. Skoll using an old Jedi code instead of the more complex solution you suggest (that needs a lot more exposition) plants the idea of his origins early with the audience. It's also not a stretch of the imagination to supppose that if it hadn't worked, Skoll had backup plans.

The captain is over confident and played as such. But it makes some sense. He pretends to have bought the 'Jedi' thing so he can find out what's going on, but is prepared for trouble. The ship isn't large enough to be carrying a force capable of overcoming his crew in combat. A suicide bomb is unlikely - that would kill the prisoner, which could possibly be the goal but a rescue attempt has to be the major concern. The only reason the captain's actions seem unwise is that they worked out badly. Such as?

Various reasons. In a lot of cases the suitable spaces for metro lines are already occupied by heavy rail or other infrastructure - including that devoted to cars, unfortunately. The cost of construction is high due to the age of the cities (which means complicated street layouts and lots of historically significant buildings) and high property prices. Some of the major cities without a metro are unsuitable for underground tunneling for geological reasons. Trams are generally the best bet for UK cities - they mostly used to have them. But the funding issue means they need central government support to build, and that has not been forthcoming.

Metros and trams are unsuitable for many UK cities, to be fair. But at the same time, public transport in most UK cities undoubtedly sucks and it is a significant drain on the UK economy. We built the new Queensferry Bridge on (slightly under) budget and only a few months late because of weather delays. That was a huge infrastructure project. It can be done. How nice it is to be discussing an actually important political issue in a civil way.

They don't and won't matter. Trump has 'lost' every debate he participated in and it didn't hurt him one bit. His supporters don't care. There's no reason to believe Trump will bother, no reason to pay attention to the Republican debates that occur without him, and no reason to think there will even be a general election debate. I appreciate I sound like Kal here, but on this one I agree.

Re: the debates, a reminder that it doesn't matter whether Trump takes part or not (he won't) because the debates don't matter. There is scant evidence that they affect the election at all.

In general the fight choreography hasn't been the best. I am making allowances for the fact that some of those involved are apprentices, so maybe that's on purpose? but even so.

I was going to say that Ray Stevenson is by far the MVP of this series to date, but he has serious competition from Ray Stevenson's Beard. The two of them in combination have as much screen presence as any other five actors on the cast. Magnificent. You don't know how intelligence classification works in the New Republic, though. (I'll brace myself for an explanation of how it *must* work, nothing else makes sense, etc. ;)) Anyway my interpretation of that scene was that Syndulla is pushing Weaver with a bluff because she suspects the 'classification' is a bullshit excuse. And it is!

I can see how one might read it that way, but the issue is this: If we assume that the hospital board were worried about reputational damage, something so obvious as to barely need stating, then that inclines them to not want to believe that they have a killer nurse on the ward, of course. But they still need to decide whether to believe the nurse's denials. That second decision is the one that is undoubtedly influenced by Letby's presentation, and as I noted earlier, that presentation includes her race. I'm not going to defend the exact wording of the Tweet for the obvious reason that I didn't write it. But equally, I wouldn't expect anyone to throw out race as a factor because there was another motivating factor for the Board not to want to admit the problem. Most of us understand that there can be more than one influence acting at a time. if the author of the tweet words things such as to suggest she thinks there was only one, well, again, I'm not going to answer for her. But saying that doesn't mean that it is, in fact, an either/or, does it?

It's not an either/or.

But Trump has already said he'd run from prison if necessary, and he legally could. His voters wouldn't desert him if he did, not in the numbers required to make any of the other Republican candidates a viable option. So I'm not sure his legal troubles make last night's debate any less of a sideshow.

As well as everyone else actually mentioned above.

I've never heard of her before now. She undoubtedly has a PhD though, so the scare quotes there are a choice.

The quoted tweet is a reasonable, pertinent and obvious observation. We know that Letby got the benefit of the doubt in part because people thought she was 'nice' and found it hard to credit her as a killer. Part of that was her appearance, and part of that was that she was white. White women, particularly young, able-bodied white women, are very much the avatars of innocence in our culture. I would have to say that if there's an agenda being pushed here, it is the idea that Letby's whiteness didn't matter.

Right, but that defence doesn't work, is my point. It doesn't matter what Trump believed or what his motive was in committing crimes. And in any case if his motive did matter, it has to be things that he knew at the time. It can't be something he only found out about later! But that's what he's saying now, that he's only just discovered this proof. I know it's all chaff, flailing around as is Trump's normal M.O., and that logic and reason don't matter to him or his supporters as much as vague feelings and warm bullshit. But still.

Obviously he has no evidence of fraud, but does he realise that even if he did, that wouldn't exonerate him of the charges against him? Two wrongs don't make a right. Even if the result was fraudulent, corrupt attempts to overturn it would still be a crime.

Musk was always a libertarian. Like many libertarians, he has made the journey to being a right-wing reactionary. Not a huge surprise. He did used to disagree with the right on some issues, but he has either changed his mind or doesn't discuss those issues at all any more. Again, this happens to a lot of 'libertarians'.

With this and a couple of pounds, you can buy a coffee. Seriously, identifying 'the general internet consensus' on anything is a pointless exercise. It's almost impossible to objectively identify what it is, and it tells you nothing of real value even if you can. Like fishing for used boots.

Many if not most of those starving kids she's so concerned about are on benefits, and if they were well fed, Platell would be whinging about that because their parents are lazy scroungers. It's so transparently 'why don't you all fight over scraps?' it's barely worth bothering with.

I could write a lengthy answer about how Ben embodies the best of Lee and Kirby in terms of their character tropes, but the shorter response is: as we all know, the whole reason the Avengers were the basis of the MCU was that Marvel had sold off the really popular properties' film rights. X-Men, Spider-Man, and yes, the Fantastic Four. The Avengers were the remnants that nobody wanted. They're now the leading IP, but for decades they were behind the FF in popularity (and the FF in turn were behind the X-Men and Spidey). It wasn't Iron Man on all the lunch boxes and duvet covers in those days: it was Bashful Ben Grimm. Along with Spidey and the Hulk, he was the face of Marvel for years.

Saying the FF are boring is just not true at all. Ben Grimm is easily one of Marvel's best characters, just on his own. He held down a team-up title twice, something only Spider-Man has been given otherwise. Sue is a fantastic character when written well: very few superheroes get to be mothers and almost none get to be one and not be defined by it. Written properly, she's literally the heart of the team. Reed is often, lazily, written as a sort of uncaring monster (or worse, the secret villain which is a boring, edgelord idea, typical of Ellis, who is overrated IMO) but written well is a keystone of the Marvel universe, the inverse of Doom, the man Doom wants to be but never can be. Even Johnny, Valeria and Franklin can be and have been written well. And the team, as a concept, has been very adaptable, switching out membership and working well despite it. Ryan North's run right now is getting rave reviews. The FF are absolutely a great team, better with Doom, sure, but a keystone of the Marvel line even without him.

I'm in the 'rather enjoyed this' camp. I liked the Ciri solo episode, the battle, and Cavill's last fight at the end. I tend to enjoy fight scenes in fantasy for what they are: few of them make any real sense if you know anything about medieval combat so the best way to view them is as entertaining choreography, rather like a dance but with more fake blood. Anyway, I was entertained.

Not really. On any definition, Corbyn was a massive failure. If we start with the most basic, like 'is anyone following you?', Corbyn certainly started out with goodwill and support but he squandered it. By the end he had very low support within and outwith the party. If nobody's following you, by definition you're not a leader. He was a poor communicator and had no ability to form alliances or persuade those who disagreed with him: he seemed unable to even understand different points of view and unwilling to try. He showed personal bias and favouritism, and spent large chunks of political capital on trying to rescue personal friends from (deserved) disciplinary action. We didn't get that from Corbyn. If he had a coherent vision, I don't know what it was, and I'm a political junkie. Free broadband, nationalising a couple of industries, but these are policies, not a vision. What was even in his 2017 manifesto, that you admire so much? I can't remember. As for hope... I'd guess that's not the emotion eight out of ten voters associate with Corbyn. He was certainly unable to communicate that emotion to voters. Donald Trump? I make that point just to point out that attracting a crowd has little or nothing to do with leadership skills. It really does. Being unsuited to the job of leader makes you a terrible leader, by definition.

The one thing Corbyn definitively was not, was a leader. He utterly failed at that.

I'm just going to repeat: I'm a 51 year old white cishet male and if Marvel had sat me down and asked me 'what if we made a film specifically for you? what would that look like?' my answer would have been 'Monica Rambeau, Carol Danvers and Kamala Khan teaming up, please'. Maybe adding Blue Marvel, who yet might appear. I'll be lining up to see it, and as we discussed earlier in the thread, so will a lot of folks in my demographic. What the lead actress - and she is undoubtedly the lead actress, she will in this movie have her name precede the credits, something that only Robert Downey Jr and a handful of others have had in Marvel movies - said years ago about another film is not in my mind at all. If you're trying to make an issue of it at this point, you need to have a talk with yourself.