mormont

7 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Obviously, that depends on how you define 'leader'.

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.

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If it's conjuring a vision of hope for a people badly let down by a political class utterly beholden to a foreign-owned, right wing media, then I'll take that leader any day of the week.

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.

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Corbyn had thousands of people turning up to hear him speak, wherever he went. When was the last time a politician could do that shit?

Donald Trump?

I make that point just to point out that attracting a crowd has little or nothing to do with leadership skills.

7 hours ago, Spockydog said:

He wasn't suited to the cut and thrust (i.e. the lies and general dishonour) of modern political life. That doesn't make him a terrible leader.

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.

I think there's still a chance for Twitter. If Musk were to sell up, a new owner could put it back together. None of the alternatives look like they have what it takes to replace Twitter: there's still value there. Appoint a competent board and invest, and you could make a lot of money.

Of course, that relies on Musk admitting defeat and selling up at a staggering loss, not a likely scenario. But possible.

12 minutes ago, Ran said:

I don't understand the pretense that drag shows is not in its origin and its history predominantly an adult entertainment. There's a reason they started up in bars and nightclubs, places where children were not permitted.

Yes, but that was more to do with them being shocking in terms of being socially transgressive then them being sexual in nature. Many non-sexual entertainments started in bars and nightclubs for that reason.

35 minutes ago, Ran said:

You've flipped things around for some reason. It does not in fact define drag performers as actually being entertainers that appeal only to prurient interests and their performances as adult cabaret. 

The law is defining  adult cabaret performances as requiring two elements: performances that are primarily of obscene or prurient nature, and performers of various types. As Peter Sherman, a professional drag queen notes, drag shows do not actually have to be prurient and can be all-ages, which near as I can tell would not run afoul of the law as presently constituted. 

No, it really does. That's the plain reading. I'm genuinely puzzled why you aren't reading it that way?

The first part of the two part test is not 'of obscene or prurient nature', it's 'harmful to juveniles or obscene'. The only reference to 'prurient' is after a list of examples including drag, where it says 'or other similar performers or entertainers who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest'. That is clearly characterising drag as appealing to 'a prurient interest'.

ETA - and even if we were to parse the words in some way that does not directly say drag is prurient, the bill includes drag on a list of activities that are otherwise exclusively sexual in nature. There's nothing unreasonable in reading that as suggesting that drag is also inherently sexual.

1 minute ago, IlyaP said:

I'm a Virgo might have been one of them and I am happy to watch it for you to report back on how bad (or not?) it might be.

I cannot recommend enough that everyone watch I'm A Virgo, but here's what the creator has to say about whether it's a superhero show:

8 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Btw you guys do realise that ultimately the studios will settle with SAG and the writers, everyone will get paid more and inevitably the real loser in all of this will be we the consumer, as all the extra costs will be passed down to us , in the form of both ads and higher subscription prices.The studios will never settle for taking in lesser profits, they’ll just pass down the higher costs to the consumer, that’s just how economics works. 

Are you under the impression that if the SAG and WGA did not strike, then these ads and higher prices would not happen?

Because that's not how economics works.

The bill classifies "performers or entertainers who exhibit a gender identity that is different from the performer's or entertainer's gender assigned at birth using clothing, makeup, prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts, or other physical markers" as being "entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest" and "adult cabaret performance". It then goes on to say that to "recklessly engage" in such performance other than in a specified location is a crime.

I can see why one might point to the 'performers or entertainers' part and say 'see, it's not about social transitioning'. But I can't see why one would say 'it doesn't say anything like that', because it is certainly capable of being read quite like that. Particularly as the bill doesn't seem to define the term 'performers or entertainers'.

ETA - I would also hope we can all agree that to see a bill legally define drag as inherently of prurient interest is naturally of some concern to people who are socially transitioning. One of the biggest issues in the US for trans people is that their whole existence is portrayed or perceived as being about sexual deviance - that they are trans for sexual thrills.

Can we either spin out the electric car discussion or end it, please?

Again, I'm going to remind folks that the death of superhero movies has been declared more often than the death of various superheroes within them, and yet fifteen years after the launch of the MCU, they still make hundreds of millions of dollars apiece, and pack out theatres. The occasional flop is to be expected, but three of the top ten grossing MCU films were released after Endgame. We're some distance from '90s comic book crash territory.

If you keep declaring the genre dead every six months, eventually you'll be right, I suppose.

13 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:

I think Derfel is on to something though when he says Lib Dems/Green voters might have been more motivated to kick out Boris if his name had been on the ballot.  It's not logical, for the reasons you give, but political outcomes rarely are.  

The Lib Dem vote already dropped from the heady heights of 6.3% to 1.7%. 526 votes. Not much room for growth there. Even the Greens had only 2.9%, 893 votes. You'd need 35% of those hardcore voters to defect. I'm not buying that, I'm afraid.

I just can't construct a credible scenario where Johnson resigning instead of being suspended makes a difference. Did any voter, in Johnson's own constituency, who actually cared, not understand that his 'resignation' was a case of jumping before he was inevitably pushed?

Three of my favourite characters portrayed by three talented actresses in a film that looks to be upbeat and exciting. What's not to like?

The answer to Spocky's question, unfortunately, is that Starmer failing to win Uxbridge probably means he will feel he has to keep hewing to the right.

A tumbrel, perhaps.

30 minutes ago, Rhom said:

I think you’re splitting hairs.  The rule was always one household per account, they added a new level of enforcement to it… but the rule was existing.

No, what they did was, they changed their definition of 'household'. They had previously been clear that this was not limited to one location. The new definition, as I've pointed out before, doesn't actually mean 'household', it means 'address'. 

It's not a 'crackdown'. That would imply enforcing an existing rule. What Netflix did was change the rules.

16 hours ago, IlyaP said:

I'm enjoying this read as it spares me from having to watch what looks like a wildly uneven show. (I also don't have spoons for shows at the moment.) In your opinion, does it seem like this show is about anything? Like, do you get the sense, when watching it, that it has something to say, even so much as an opinion? On something? ANYthing?

Occasionally it seems to be reaching for some kind of parallel between the Skrulls and black Americans, which is an idea you could do something with, but not one a Disney series will ever really commit to.

19 hours ago, sifth said:

This might be the first episode of this show I liked. Though Fury's excuse for not calling in his friends, is kind of lame.

Better than his wife's excuse for hanging around in the one place Gravik could find her.

1 hour ago, karaddin said:

Thats actually a pretty significant issue. Voters on the left want to feel inspired, and if the policies aren't doing it (which they aren't) then a charismatic leader can still carry that. In the absence of both it can leave them falling over the line with a barely workable majority.

Not just voters on the left. Many, many voters (particularly 'floating voters') don't have the strong ideological/policy bias we on the board tend to have when it comes to deciding who to vote for. They look for competence and personality. That's one of the reasons the Tories are in such dire straits: voters don't think they know what they're doing. Starmer isn't facing any significant competition in the competency or personality stakes, to be frank: Sunak is desperately clawing after both with no success.

7 hours ago, karaddin said:

If Corbyn was as terrible at selling his ideas as you all (spooky excluded) say, and I can only take your word for it that he was, then surely a large part of his electoral failures are due to his failings as a leader rather than a rejection of the left wing policies? Yeah he failed to sell them to the electorate, but Starmer advocating for right wing policies sure as shit isn't going to do a better job of selling people on left wing ones.

The problem is, Starmer seems to have taken the wrong lessons from Corbyn's failure. At some point he concluded, not entirely unreasonably, that he needed to appeal to Tory voters to win. At the moment he's aping Blair in opposition, trying to avoid any possible angle of attack from the right by refusing to have any 'uncosted' spending pledges.

One difference is Starmer does not have a Gordon Brown figure who can produce a substantial manifesto for him. (Say what you like about Brown and his policies, there's no denying he wrote a very substantial manifesto.) So what Starmer has instead is a few holdover policies like renationalising rail and not much else. No big ideas. That's disappointing. He needs someone with a concept beyond 'don't make any mistakes'.

I really don't get the complaint here. Successfully selling his ideas to the British press was the job Corbyn knowingly took on. The job he paid Seumas Milne handsomely to direct and appointed John McDonnell to assist him with.

They failed.

They didn't even seem to try very hard, to be blunt.

If you can tell me anything at all about what strategy any one of those three had to sell their ideas, I'll eat my hat. It's a nice black one with two pewter badges, so it'll be crunchy. But I feel pretty safe on this one.

17 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Pretty hard to sell your ideas effectively when the BBC's political editor is doctoring videos to misrepresent your views, while the Newsnight editor is photoshopping Russian hats onto your head. 

He never had a chance.

Yes, he did.

Being elected leader of a political party and complaining about how the media won't give you a chance is a bit like being a film producer and blaming the reviewers for why your films don't make money. Selling your ideas to a hostile press, as I said, is literally one of the two main components of the job - the other being managing the people in the party who disagree with you, which Corbyn also sucked at.

The complaints above are absolutely standard stuff  for the UK media. Corbyn had no plan to deal with it and just sulked when it happened. That's on him.