CatBus

ChainsawAsh said:

Just a PSA, guys - you’re more likely to get a response if you send a PM to the creator asking for a link than you will posting in the thread asking for a PM.

Yeah, I think I’m the only one who can be expected to manage a project like that 😉 Send him the PM or risk getting ignored.

After more consideration, I have to add that this restoration is not just good, it’s great. 44rh1n didn’t miss a thing as far as I’m concerned. Technically he may have used some inferior sources (TE instead of Netflix) but damn if I can tell.

So, since digital restorations of regrades are so easy, when are you going to do O Brother Where Art Thou? Inquiring minds want to know.

IrishLuck1980 said:

poita said:

I’m in the middle of moving house, so will be offline for about two weeks while I get moved, and try and get unpacked and internet etc. connected.

I hope it’s in a safer spot. 😉

Not sure those exist in Australia, but it’s a nice thought!

God, so sorry Brazil. I forgot that’s where you were from. Stay safe.

Other than that, Dude, how was your bath?

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

My college puts out a Faculty reference guide every year, so that community and media can find an expert from the University on whatever timely topic they want to report on and need an expert opinion. Apparently she was listed in a similar reference at her university, as being specifically a native american minority. It sounds like I would have as much claim to this as she (as would probably half of us on this forum), and I’d be embarrassed if I were listed as such.

Yes, I agree and expounded probably a bit too much in an earlier discussion with Mrebo (last page or so) that while all of her specific factual claims about her family history appear to be supported by the test, that it was either misguided or wrong of her to ever imply that the tiny fractional ancestry was particularly relevant. But again, that’s a different (and better) argument than “she made it all up”.

Warbler said:

Warren conflated those concepts and should not have, and in doing so stepped over the line of tribal sovereignty. The Cherokee Nation is rightly aggrieved. Warren’s Native American ancestor may have spoken Cherokee, but she was not Cherokee. Needless generalizations help no one.

I don’t understand, how do we know Warren’s Native American ancestor wasn’t Cherokee? We don’t know anything about her. If she spoke Cherokee, isn’t that a good indication that she came from the Cherokee tribe?

I only know enough about tribal politics to know it’s convoluted. At the most basic level, tribes keep records, and the Cherokee Nation in particular has very extensive records. They track all the things other sovereign nations track. They have birth, death, and marriage records, and they have a vested interest in knowing precisely who’s a member and who’s not. There’s also one hell of a lot of politics going on behind the scenes, for those who care to look, but the superficial view may be adequate.

Not all Europeans who speak German natively are German. Similarly, not all Native Americans who speak Cherokee natively are Cherokee. If the Cherokee Nation has no records supporting that her Native American ancestor was Cherokee, then that’s that. Warren said her Native American ancestor was named O.C. Sarah Smith and we have an approximate timeframe for when she lived. So either O.C. Sarah Smith was in their records or not, that part is pretty simple.

Also, I’m only assuming the designation of Cherokee came from the language she spoke. It could very well be from an even less-informed place, such as “she was Native American and most of the other Native Americans living nearby were Cherokee, ergo…” But language was frequently used by outsiders as the way to distinguish tribes, so that’s what seemed most likely.

TV’s Frink said:

Let’s not also forget if Trump ever pays up (hahahaha) it’s going to a Native American Woman’s charity.

If she hasn’t already I’d like to see Warren make a donation to it herself, either way.

I suspect she will (yay), but I suspect she’s timing it for better political/media impact (boo).

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

Back to politics… A Cherokee Nation official says Sen. Elizabeth Warren “is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.” While I still consider her actions bizarrely disingenuous, I also have to admit that the right’s actions obstructing native American vote is substantively worse.

I very much agree with this statement – the concept of tribal membership has a fraught history. A Cherokee chief (Wilma Mankiller) once said: “An Indian is an Indian regardless of the degree of Indian blood or which little government card they do or do not possess.” There’s a long history of non-Native people telling Native Americans that they’re not real Indians (Sharice Davids, for a current example) because they don’t fit whatever image they had in their head. There are entire tribes still fighting today for formal recognition as “legitimate Indians”. Issues of tribal membership are and should be very much the exclusive purview of the tribes. So on issues of tribal membership, I defer to the tribes. A genetic test cannot support claims of specific tribal membership, only Native ancestry in a general sense.

While clearly Warren’s family history was largely correct, and she never claimed more than the tiny fractional ancestry that she recently found evidence to support, I think her family was far enough removed from tribal politics that they didn’t recognize the implications of naming a specific tribe. It’s likely that her Native American ancestor did speak Cherokee, which is why she was identified as such by Warren’s family, but that’s not the same thing at all as being a member of the Cherokee Nation. Warren conflated those concepts and should not have, and in doing so stepped over the line of tribal sovereignty. The Cherokee Nation is rightly aggrieved. Warren’s Native American ancestor may have spoken Cherokee, but she was not Cherokee. Needless generalizations help no one.

Mrebo said:

Problem for your claim of accuracy is you don’t know if any particular g-g-g gma had NA ancestry. You don’t know which ancestor.

Sure, her family story could have been wrong in part. It could have been her great-great-great grandfather, but the evidence does support the claim she made, down to the ethnicity and approximate number of generations back she specified, which lends the entire family story some credibility. But yes, which g-g-g grandparent may have been off, that is true.

I’m giving “substantial” a meaning of “sufficiently high enough to claim identity as a member of that minority.” I’m not sure what that amount is, but if you have to go 6-10 generations back to maybe find one ancestor, I don’t buy it.

See, that’s actually a point of agreement hiding in here, and why I like arguing with you. We actually do agree about stuff from time to time and it feels like a revelation every time it happens. We’re pretty polar opposite but we don’t just go to our respective corners and throw spitballs.

When you’re filling out a form and there’s checkboxes that say “check all that apply”, and you know for certain that you have approx 1/32nd ancestry from one of the listed groups, I can understand that you might want to check the corresponding box. Because you were instructed to “check all that apply” and it does apply. And the most charitable interpretation of checking that box under those circumstances is that you were being a little too literal with your instructions, without taking into account the larger context of why the boxes are there in the first place. If you recognized that there was a limit to the statistical value of particular parts of your ancestry, you would (and should) leave those boxes unchecked. You are not disavowing your ancestors, you are providing more useful data. Swallow the guilt and leave them out. Otherwise everyone would mark African because that’s where humanity started and we all have ancestors from there, right? Where that limit should be is up for some debate, and possibly a bit dependent on the purpose for which the data is being gathered, but I’d certainly place the bar higher than a single individual five generations back in almost all cases.

The less charitable interpretation involves embracing the exotic as a means to make your life’s story more interesting than it really is.

Those who write the questions probably don’t consider that anyone will answer for any percentage less than 1/8th. It’s unusual for people to go around knowing that they’re 1/32nd Native American. But with genetic testing becoming more commonplace, it’s increasingly normal. I’d suggest that people who write those questions suggest what a “significant portion” is, rather than leaving it as an exercise for the reader.

Similarly, it’s far too easy outside the checkbox scenario for people to throw around tiny fractional ancestries as if they mean something.

Nevertheless, she didn’t make it up. She and her family may be guilty of romanticizing or exoticizing, overstating the relevance of the native ancestry, but there is no indication that they were mistaken about, or lied about, or even exaggerated, the basic facts of their ancestry. This is what she was accused of, and she just shut down that line of criticism with evidence supporting her family story, exactly as it was told to her. Which is why the criticism is now moving on to other angles. And some of those new criticisms may very well be valid, and perhaps they are the criticisms that should have been made all along, but that’s another argument.

Mrebo said:

CatBus, your descriptions of facts can be so off-center I don’t know what to make of it. You say “Scott Brown found somewhere where she wrote it down” as if she scribbled it on the margin of a notebook one time. She was listed as a minority/Native American in academic publications and openly represented herself as part Native American.

What I meant was: She ran for US Senate and she didn’t bring it up in any public context until asked specifically about it – but neither was it a hidden family secret she kept locked away and never spoke of. She believed the family story was as true as it ultimately turned out to be. Her fault was that she believed it based solely on the word of her family, instead of seeking a second opinion, for too long.

That’s separate from whether it was dishonest or boosted her career or is terribly serious. I mainatain it was most likely an honest mistake (believing she had substantial Native ancestry) and probably only had marginally helped her career if at all.

On the subject of descriptions of facts:

You say “mistake”, I say “unsubstantiated at the time, and would have been understandable as a mistake, if it weren’t later supported by the evidence”. Both could be considered true, but mine’s more accurate.

You say “believing she had substantial Native ancestry”, I say “believing her great, great, great grandmother was at least partially Native American”. Both could be considered true, but mine’s more accurate.

And conflating that with security mismanagement at a diplomatic outpost or security mismanagement of government documents and email…not good.

You left out birth certificates. Maybe that comparison seemed a better match in your mind?

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

Although I’m a very liberal democrat who generally supports Warren’s views, I find her ongoing claim of having Native American heritage to be an embarrassment at best, and outright fraud at worst. Six-to-ten generations back? Give me a break! Nearly everyone who has ancestors in North America can make that claim WITH substantiation from Ancestry.com. It sounds like she has LESS N.A. blood than the average American. She needs to drop it and apologize. Efforts towards equal opportunity are severely damaged when people - especially those for whom they were not intended - lie and abuse them.

The fact that she is digging in her heels over this has caused her to lose my vote. And seeing left-leaning media outlets still defending her on this is equally disturbing. Actual native Americans must be rolling their eyes.

I guess I’m not seeing this. She spends her whole life until 2012 AFAICT barely mentioning her family history – it’s unclear to me if she mentioned it in public at all. Then Scott Brown found somewhere where she wrote it down, calls her a liar about it, and suddenly she’s answering for it in public. Then Trump calls her a liar about it, and she’s still answering for it in public. Over, and over, and over.

It seems that faulting Warren for fixating on her relatively inconsequential Native American family history is a lot like faulting Hillary for fixating on her e-mails and Benghazi, or Obama’s weird fixation on his birth certificate. I agree with DominicCobb it’s a strategic failing to let your opponents decide what you’re talking about. She had a 1/32 or less Native American genetic makeup, and she told the truth about that, and then she was called a liar about it, and now she just proved it. Now the subject is changing to 1/32 not being enough, so why’d she make such a big stink about it? But the thing is, she didn’t bring it up in the first place.

IMO there’s a lot of “I know that, I just want to hear him deny it.” in this story.

But I REALLY don’t understand certain media outlets heralding that these latest DNA results prove that she was right, because they most certainly do not. Quite the contrary.

Her claim was that her great, great, great grandmother was at least part Native American. The highest genetic percentage she could possibly ever have been talking about this entire time was 1/32, but it also could have been less. So I think the latest DNA results support her claim very clearly. How does it not? Maybe the media oversimplified the issue so much that people thought she was talking about a larger percentage than she really was?

Mrebo said:

Parsing Trump’s words to deny payment is more straightforward than that.

If Warren took a DNA test and the results showed Native American then Trump would pay. If the results came back with 0.0% (as I wager occurred) he would not.

Let’s not deal with hypotheticals. Here’s what the actual DNA test showed:

A pure Native American ancestor appears in her family tree in the range of 6-10 generations ago.

Warren went to an expert to conduct a separate test on the raw data, which Trump could reasonably object is a step beyond and highly questionable. His words you quote are, “if you take the test and it shows…”

So going out of the way to get a high quality test was questionable. But getting some quick and cheap genetic test would have been beyond reproach? I’m not buying it. How many quick and cheap tests even attempt to reach conclusions about percentages as small as Warren was claiming?

If the expert’s analysis is accurate, it doesn’t comport with representing herself as Native American.

Certainly not full-blooded, but that’s not what she’s claimed. Specifically, what she claimed was that her great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, was at least partially Native American. The expert analysis is consistent with Warren’s claim.

As I’ve said before, I think it was an honest mistake on her part based on family stories.

I also believed it could have been an honest mistake. But every now and then family stories are true. This appears to be what happened here.

The bend-over-backwards efforts to defend her mistake are about as silly as criticism of it.

Without evidence, any claims are suspect. Now we’re past that point.

Ultimately this doesn’t matter at all. It merely proves that an old family story (which are often untrue) turns out to be supported by evidence in this particular case. Or at least as much as it can be with today’s genetics testing. And not a cheap 23andme genetics-mill test either, but a genuine blind test by an expert at Stanford.

But it is interesting in this context:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/07/05/trump_offers_1_million_for_pocahontas_elizabeth_warren_to_take_dna_test.html

Trump’s response? “I didn’t say that. You better read it again.”

Here’s what he literally said: “I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian.” And here’s how you can parse those words to avoid payment – the test merely proved that the genetic evidence is consistent with everything Warren’s parents told her. But it does not prove she’s genetically 100% from the geographic area currently comprised of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh – to the contrary, there’s no evidence of East Indian background at all. So there, he doesn’t have to pay, nyaa nyaa and so on. That’s some expert-level reneging there.

But maybe he’ll sent a crack team of investigators to Hawaii, because I hear that’s an effective way to counter this sort of thing. Oh, and I’m absolutely certain people will continue to make fun of her heritage, because it was always about her politics and making fun of Native Americans and was never really about the truth of the story her parents told her.

Other than that, Sundance, how was Bolivia?

DominicCobb said:

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

“Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play” implies there was something about the situation that one otherwise might enjoy. Thus, the only ones here that make sense are Fredo’s fishing (lol!) and Barb’s party. So good work CatBus!

If you want to get real pedantic, I’m not sure those work either - the question is posed to Mrs. Lincoln, not Abraham himself.

Not sure it’s that pedantic, since the reason you’re asking Mrs. Lincoln is because she’s alive to ask, making the question at least theoretically plausible. I actually considered asking someone other than Barb for that very reason, but it just wasn’t as funny.

And there were only two people in Fredo’s boat, and one of them thought the fishing trip went exactly as planned, so asking him would have been boring, so I ask the dead guy again.

Other than that, Fredo, how was the fishing?

Other than that, Barb, how was the party at Steve’s?

Mrebo said:

CatBus said:

Mrebo said:

After being here for several years, it continues to feel that way. There are a few bright spots, mostly the museums.

In terms of self-obsessed naked careerism, I’ve heard DC described as LA for ugly people.

Maybe true. At any gathering of political types, the constant first question is “what do you do?” And either they think you can do something for them or they keep a smile frozen on their face until they can get away to ask it of someone else. As one might expect the low level Hill staffers are among the worst offenders. Little room is made for sincerity or sympathy, though I have known people of generous spirit, you just can’t trust how far it will go.

On the nose.

I dunno. I’m usually a Luddite, the last on the block, etc. I’ve got no cell phone, got DSL via the landline, and so on.

But the crazy display specs coming down the pipe don’t sound so ridiculous to me. Here’s my logic on that: as consumer tech improves, at some point the technology level will be reached where the quality is SO good that there’s simply no room for improvement. And this is a good thing. It then becomes entirely about content and convenience.

I feel like audio storage hit that point with the CD. The problem of storing stereo sound was solved outright, nothing more was needed. Now, there was an attempt to do multichannel via DVD-A and that was technically a remaining problem that CD’s did not address, but the market simply did not care. It then became about content and convenience. The SACD market was an attempt to sell better-mastered content, but was slathered in audiophile snake oil. Better mastering was largely a market bust as well, although it did help fuel the niche vinyl resurgence. Convenience was tackled via digital downloads, streaming, etc, and here we are today, and CD-quality is still the reference quality decades later, even if the format itself is in decline.

Displays are another matter. There are multiple defined market purposes: media playback, static display, gaming, and they each have their own requirements. 8K means pixels disappear even with your eyeball pressed against a ginormous display. Completely unnecessary for media playback and gaming, but still could have some value for static displays IMO. 120Hz and variable refresh rates work for gaming but not much else. Wider color gamut helps everywhere, if only a bit. So, yeah, these are corner cases to be sure, but they do actually address certain markets. HDMI 2.1 will probably mark the point where transmitting video information hits that same point CD audio hit. Then it’s about content and convenience. Oh, and there will surely be another stab at 3D some years down the line, and the market will continue to not care. See? Luddite.

That’s not to say there won’t continue to be tech improvements, they’ll just be elsewhere. On the playback side, speaker tech continues to evolve, and so will displays. But in both cases it’d be about better reproducing the signal they receive, not about processing an entirely new kind of signal. I know I don’t want to buy any new displays until that motion blur problem is well and truly solved, or at least significantly better than it is on today’s OLEDs. Yeah, I’m one of those. Off my lawn!

Mrebo said:

After being here for several years, it continues to feel that way. There are a few bright spots, mostly the museums.

In terms of self-obsessed naked careerism, I’ve heard DC described as LA for ugly people.

moviefreakedmind said:

Jay said:

Besides, it’s my experience that most people overestimate their own intelligence and don’t realize a minimum IQ would exclude them. They take an “IQ test” they found on Facebook and it tells them they’re a genius, after which they like and share a post made by a Russian bot about Hillary and pizzerias or Trump and Nazis.

That’s a false equivalence. Trump’s emboldening of neoNazis is not just as ludicrous as Pizzagate conspiracies. Nice false equivalence. You almost got away with it, but alas, nope.

I believe he’s talking hypothetically. I don’t think Russian bots actually pushed the Pizzagate theory – that was Cernovich saying that. Similarly, Russian bots haven’t been comparing the Trump administration to the early days of the Nazis – that was Holocaust survivors saying that. But Russian bots theoretically could post on either topic.

pleasehello said:

moviefreakedmind said:

and probably put in place some kind of IQ test requirement for people running for president so that someone as stupid as Trump can’t run again.

What about an IQ test requirement to allow people to vote? I don’t think that’s the worst idea either.

Not being able to vote means not a full citizen. Where exactly do you want to draw the line, and are you sure those who implemented such a thing wouldn’t come up with a different line?

After all, this country has already experimented with intelligence tests for voting – white voters were asked to count how many fingers someone is holding up, and black voters were asked to count the bubbles on a bar of soap, thus limiting voting only to those who can count… and other factors.

moviefreakedmind said:

I’m hoping that if the Democrats fail to get the House in the midterms, then they’ll finally wake up and run on progressive principles.

That depends on how they lose. If they lose the House because they got fewer votes, they will convince themselves that the only way to win is to adopt even more Republican policies than they already have (like the 2014 election). If, however, they lose the House in terms of seats but actually get a larger share of the popular vote, they will instead convince themselves that the only way to win is to adopt even more Republican policies than they already have (like the 2012 election). It’s like a ratchet. The pivot only goes one direction.

Luckily for progressives, if the Democrats win outright, they will demonstrate their magnanimity by reaching across the aisle and adopting even more Republican policies than they already have, although Republicans will quickly disavow those policies (like the 2008 election).

Being corporate centrists doesn’t appeal to anybody and they’re too stupid to see that being the lesser of two evils is nothing to brag about.

Being corporate centrists appeals to lots of people. Or, to be more specific, it appeals to lots of legal persons: the aforementioned corporations. They may not vote, but they more than make up for that in money. It’s nice to believe anyone even tries to appeal to mere voters at all.

Or even worse… it’s tinnitus!

FWIW, the parents of pre-pubescent trans kids that I know haven’t even considered blockers, even though they’re aware puberty is likely to be rough. They mostly just try to be emotionally supportive and to validate their child’s identity as they grow and mature.