mormont

Apparently he’s musing about charging for missed GP appointments again too. Just flailing at this point.

Again, tech companies (like all companies) make moral judgements all the time and we mostly applaud or don't care. Asking companies not to make moral judgements at all isn't practical or desirable. Their relative level of power is only an issue to the extent that they aren't accountable, and that's a whole different problem. YouTube suspended Brand's monetisation because he did break the terms of service for creators. And I hate to say this, but your employer, your university (if you're a student), your suppliers, any company you associate with are entitled to reach conclusions about whether they want to associate with you in the absence of a court decision about your guilt: and they'll usually do so on a lower standard of proof than a court would, and considering things that aren't relevant in court. This is all perfectly legal and normal. it happens every day, in fact.

All true, except: - Dinenage did not tell anyone to do anything. She noted that YouTube had demonetised Brand and asked other streaming platforms if they would be doing the same, fair enough with an implication that they should, but it was not 'telling' them to. - due process doesn't actually have to be served first. That's a legal process, and entirely separate. - it's not really a moral judgement, it's a PR and financial decision. - tech companies are perfectly entitled to take moral judgements anyway and indeed we often exhort them to when it suits us. I think it was a bit of bandwagon jumping and Dinenage shouldn't have done it, but it's a silly, inconsequential side story to this affair and not a harbinger of sinister things to come. I would regard the characterisation of the allegations about Brand as 'antics' as being the more worrying part of that clip tbqh. It's not great when we downplay this sort of behaviour as if he'd been popping balloons behind someone. ETA - 'more worrying' probably sounds stronger than I mean. But the point is, if you're a person who's been sexually assaulted, seeing it described in those terms is not going to be pleasant.

[mod] Folks, personal messages are for the personal messaging system. Don't clog up discussion threads with them. Thanks. [/mod]

Yeah, but against all that, there’s a minuscule chance Sunak might get to be Prime Minister for a bit longer. So really you have to consider both sides. there literally is nobody and nothing Rishi won’t chuck under a bus, including the economy and the planet.

Don't make me repeat myself, folks.

I think there are a number of factors that explain why the Wootton stuff hasn't had the same traction in the media. For a start, the media are markedly reluctant to go after one of their own, even if that person is odious and disliked by his colleagues. For another thing, Wootton is, no doubt about it, less famous than Brand. For a third, yes, he may have blackmail material. For a fourth, the allegations involve misuse of News International resources and that will be embarrassing for NI so that will naturally make NI outlets want to minimise the story. For a fifth, the sheer scale of what Wootton was doing is hard to wrap your head around. For a sixth, a story where the victims are teenage girls elicits more sympathy and interest from the public than one where the victims are adult men. Arguing about which singular reason explains this is the sort of pointless waste of time that personally, makes me just skip entire pages at a time. ETA - please take the personal argument about who does/doesn't use Twitter to a personal message where it belongs.

And the BBC, the Guardian, the Independent, Sky News, Evening Standard, etc. The story certainly hasn't had the blanket coverage the Brand affair is getting, and hasn't had the coverage it deserves, but 'literally nobody' is literally incorrect.

No, I'm sorry. I'm not convinced that a British comedian being accused of offences in Britain by a British newspaper has become a US Politics issue because he comments on US political issues. Keep the Brand stuff out of the thread.

That's a large part of the current scandal, actually. On the one hand, Brand seems to have made liberal use of lawyers after these previous stories to threaten consequences if the individual allegations were repeated. On the other, various media folks seem to have been very willing to overlook the allegations. Nothing ever went to court, so Brand sailed along for quite a while. At some point there seems to have been less of a willingness to overlook the rumours, possibly coinciding with a general fall in his popularity, at which time (coincidentally or not) Brand started spouting right wing talking points, somewhat at odds with his former professed politics. And that brings us to now, more or less.

Brand's 'true nature' was 'revealed' in 2006 and on several occasions since when allegations about his behaviour were published in various newspapers.

Little bit of a reach to get from what I said to this: I've been very critical of, for example, the Obi-Wan series, the Rise of Skywalker, the prequels, etc. so it's not as if being happy to have a lot of new SW content means I uncritically love it all. I do understand that some folks like the stuff I don't and that no franchise exists where every single thing released is going to be brilliant, though.

Look, there's a strike on. Disney have to have something they can label as 'new content'.

I can just about see the relevance of the Brand accusations to UK Politics, if I squint a bit, but US Politics?

Also, Putin is not the only person in Russia capable of ordering a hit on Kadyrov.

That's dog racism, that is! ETA - the 'dog racism' hashtag is the funniest thing on Twitter for weeks.

'Suddenly deteriorated'.

We've been banning various breeds of dog since 1991. It's not been a notably successful approach to the issue. In this case, it seems it's necessary to first define what is, and is not, a dog of that particular breed. I'm guessing few owners would have bought one if we hadn't banned other similar breeds. The response to banning this breed will be to buy similar dogs of other breeds. Because the root problem is that some folks just want to own this type of dog. It's like trying to get rid of boy racers by banning particular makes and models of car.

Complaining that there's too much SW content is not an emotion I can feel. Sorry, not sorry. The Lando movie, I imagine, is a situation where Donald Glover got fed up with it being in development hell and persuaded Disney to let him do it himself. He has the chops: he was the showrunner and producer on four seasons of an award winning TV show, after all. I'm not convinced it won't be a theatre release: Disney have taken bigger gambles.

Yeah, been saying this for a long time. The issue is that capitalism rewards success, but that becomes cyclical, because the best way to win is to have a head start, so being successful leads to more success. Unregulated capitalism will therefore inevitably become unsustainable. What people like the guy in the clip forget is that capitalism not an unmutable law of how the universe works, it's only a social construct, a set of rules we all agree to use. If those rules aren't benefiting enough people, they will refuse to play by those rules. Changing the rules has enormous costs and is very difficult by design - but it's not impossible. History has shown us that economic and political systems can and do change.

I'm sort of raising an eyebrow at the stereotyping and inverse snobbery, tbqh. 'Elderly well off toffs'? Is that who we imagine is in the LNotP audience? 'Middle aged middle class types' perhaps.

Thing is, it's not about whether Russia could conquer Poland or any other NATO country tomorrow. It's about the fact that there seems to be a genuine mindset among the senior echelons in Russia that this is a desirable goal. Victory in Ukraine cements that mindset and those people in power. If they achieve that, they will start to believe they can do more. And even the attempt would be catastrophic. We, meaning NATO countries, would directly be at war with Russia. Every drawback of the current conflict to us, every economic and political impact, would scale up massively. If this is genuinely what the Kremlin wants to do, it's absolutely vital to NATO countries that Ukraine wins, and wins definitively.

The alternative is that despite this being one of the biggest media properties in the world, one that internationally renowned creatives line up to work on, nobody has had a single idea inspired by characters that are extremely popular among younger fans. That's just silly. If there's no published material in a SW time period, it's because the publishers don't want to publish material in that period. There are indeed such stories. Comics, novels, games, everything. I think so, yeah.

[mod] Just to bring a side argument to an end: Rape analogies are rarely if ever necessary or justified. Avoid them if it is at all possible to do so, and 99.999% of the time it will be. If you use one and someone says it was offensive, apologise rather than trying to justify a poor choice. That's just good board etiquette. Thanks. [/mod]

I'm not sure there's any solid evidence for either part of this assertion. I think also that the difference between a good writer and a great one is the ability to recognise the dross, either yourself or when an editor or collaborator points it out. Lucas struggled with that.