CatBus

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moviefreakedmind said:

CatBus said:

moviefreakedmind said:

FiveThirtyEight puts a Democratic majority in the House at an 83% chance with a median of a 36-seat gain.

They don’t take Russian interference into account at all, otherwise I’d be pretty close to agreeing.

I don’t see how Russian interference could be so widespread as to send dozens of individual seats all over the country into Republican control.

It seems like a smaller job than 2016 to me. They’d just need to target specific close congressional races, which is exactly what they already did in 2016 (the less-reported Russia story is it wasn’t just Trump they assisted, but dozens of downballot Republican Congressional candidates as well). So they just repeat 2016 without having to worry about the President this time. The overall national vote tally could be more-or-less unchanged, most districts could swing hard toward the Democrats, but close races could simply defy the national average and not swing enough. And the Russians have a freer hand to do things this time, with no federal coordination of cybersecurity anymore, more well-positioned Russian assets in government this time, etc. And maybe they don’t just play with Facebook and stealing e-mails anymore, but start corrupting voter databases to make voters in key districts ineligible (why bother changing votes when you can just make specific votes not count, right Mr. Kobach?). No need to assume they’d use the same tactics twice, although I think it’s pretty safe to assume they’d have the same objective.

Will any of this happen? Who knows? I’m saying it’s a risk that’s plausible enough to consider and take into account for predictions, since it already happened once before and the conditions are actually more favorable for them this time around. It’s also quite plausible that 2016 was a one-off and that the general public now has the benefit of knowing well in advance that the Russians plan to attempt to swing the election in favor of the Republicans (although, to be frank, everyone with an ounce of sense knew that going into 2016 as well) – it’s one of our “known unknowns” in Rumsfeld-speak.

moviefreakedmind said:

FiveThirtyEight puts a Democratic majority in the House at an 83% chance with a median of a 36-seat gain.

They don’t take Russian interference into account at all, otherwise I’d be pretty close to agreeing.

moviefreakedmind said:

I doubt that Democrats will fail to take a majority in the House. They won’t take the Senate, though.

Most analysts put the threshold at 8-9% (8-9% Democratic victory means coin flip for House control, due to gerrymandering). Most analysts do not even attempt to account for Russian interference. I added 3% for that, based on 2016, but that’s a big wildcard. It may be too much, it may not be enough. But if Democrats only win by 7%, everyone agrees they’re not taking the House.

The fact that I have Democrats only losing one seat in the Senate means I think they’re going to have a strong year. Gaining three though? Yeesh.

Incidentally, 7% was the margin Republicans won by in the “Republican Revolution” that swept them to power in 94. It just shows the power of the gerrymander: having a message that resonates with 7% more voters than the other party could mean either an unquestionable game-changing mandate, or narrow loss, depending on which party you belong to.

Just following up on some predictions from March, because circumstances change…

CatBus said:

If I were a betting man, I’d say Mueller’s investigation, before it’s shut down, will still lead to more evidence of arguably legal/arguably illegal collusion, but few if any charges filed on these issues. This in itself will be a fairly huge scandal for some and not for others. He will also file charges (and in fact, he already has) of obstruction/lying to investigators/witness tampering/destruction of evidence which are not about the collusion itself, but about the coverup. Again, I predict this will be a fairly huge scandal for some and not for others. Lastly, I predict a raft of charges of money laundering/tax fraud/bribery/corruption/RICO-type things (such as those charges already filed against Manafort), again not really about the collusion itself, but about illegal things uncovered during the course of the investigation.

Papadopoulos: Pleaded guilty to making false statements.
Patten: Pleaded guilty to failure to register as a foreign agent.
Manafort: Pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the US, various financial crimes including money laundering, and witness tampering.
Cohen: Pleaded guilty to fraud and campaign finance violations.
van der Zwaan: Pleaded guilty to making false statements.
Gates: Pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the US and making false statements.
Pinedo: Pleaded guilty to identity fraud.
Flynn: Pleaded guilty to making false statements.

At the end you’ll have a fairly unsatisfactory conclusion: the Trump campaign will be exposed to have colluded with Russian intelligence services in an arguably illegal manner, many staffers and high ranking officials will be charged with a broad range of crimes, from obstruction to money laundering. And Trump supporters will still say that collusion is not a crime and this was all a witch hunt by the liberal Comey/Mueller/Rosenstein cabal, a fishing expedition that merely netted a few dozen high-ranking or cabinet-level bad apples who were just low-level volunteers after all.

So far so good. No real corruption or RICO stuff yet, and the cabinet hasn’t quite been breached, but the show’s far from over and that all seems more likely than before IMO. Rudy’s even already telegraphed Team Trump’s new approach to formerly-decent-and-honest-witch-hunt-victim Manafort with his blatant Tweet revision: “the President did nothing wrong and Paul Manafort will tell the truth”, the party line changing 180 degrees in full public view like fine Soviet clockwork.

And, most importantly, I’m still predicting the Republicans will hold the House and Senate in 2018 (although I’m predicting Democrats will win a landslide in terms of votes cast), and that this is when the Mueller investigation will definitely be shut down if it hasn’t been already. So regardless of charges filed, impeachment will never be considered for any officials at any level, and I think Trump will have a strong chance of re-election in 2020. The House and Senate may, however, decide to launch an investigation into Mueller.

Haven’t changed my mind here either, but this is still prediction-land. I currently have Democrats nationally winning by a spectacular 11 point mega-landslide margin, but still narrowly failing to gain enough seats to take control of the House, and losing a seat in the Senate. When the Democratic advantage hits 12, things get interesting on both fronts, and that’s a possibility I wasn’t considering even remotely plausible back in March.

And here I thought Manafort wouldn’t even be offered a cooperation agreement because he was a big enough fish to be worth all the effort of the investigation to begin with (Trump’s insistence that his campaign manager was a low-level volunteer who mostly just got coffee notwithstanding). Turns out, not so much. There are bigger fish in Mueller’s sights after all. And there aren’t many fish bigger than Manafort who aren’t family.

What’s Manfort’s value in a cooperation deal? Aside from the obvious (Trump, Russian Oligarchs, Roger Stone, Russian Intelligence, GOP platform changes and other campaign work including other candidates), there’s this: aside from a few missteps around Flynn, Pence has done a pretty good job keeping an arm’s length between himself and the crime syndicate he works with, at least in public. His only other widely-known direct link, aside from Flynn, is Manafort.

Certain serious crimes cannot be prosecuted at all without a minimum of two witnesses.

Not sure. I think that churches and schools are historically problematic because of the high chance of unobserved time with an adult and a child, which make them attractive occupations for predators. It goes without saying that most abuse happens within families, where this is unavoidable. Both churches and schools are improving in this respect (the CCTV in my kid’s daycare was both impressive and vaguely Orwellian, but I know why it was there), but very slowly.

Part of the complication of this is the long reporting times, so the church that allowed this abuse may have implemented decades of reforms since. Not enough, certainly, but at the very least, the leadership has been replaced multiple times since then. Unfortunately, I think this is scandal is being abused by those who seek to reverse the current Pope’s (mild, minimal) overtures to the LGBT community, because there’s a long and ugly history of attacking the LGBT community using child abuse as an excuse (much as lynching was often given the moral cover of avenging alleged sexual assault).

ChainsawAsh said:

Ah, okay, that makes much more sense!

My hovercraft is full of eels.

Assuming everyone follows the rules, this site neither hosts nor links copyrighted content to any extent that exceeds typically defined fair use (screenshots, etc). All we do is talk about it.

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Basically it’s your argument of “famous people/corporations with an interest in maintaining popular appeal are too interested in avoiding even the appearance of endorsing something their fans may find reprehensible.” Which brings us back to the counter-example of Nike 😉

Oh no, Chinatown’s a personal favorite. I was just snarking for snark’s sake.

moviefreakedmind said:

I actually just admit that I give artists a pass for most things short of outright criminality. Too few talented people in this world.

As Roman Polanski’s personal lawyer, I agree with most of that sentiment.

dahmage said:

Ok, now I want to watch with the Tamil dub!

The English insults are in Empire, the weird dubbing of people that don’t need to be dubbed are in Jedi. The heavy breathing is, thankfully, everywhere. Sadly, though, I don’t believe there ever was a Tamil dub of Star Wars, and both the Empire and Jedi tracks are cobbled together from torrents that didn’t have the complete dub to begin with, so there’s English bits filling the gaps.

I’m probably the odd man out in that I like to listen to dubs in languages I don’t understand. So from a translation/accuracy point-of-view, I’ve got nothing to add. However, I have some opinions:

I like Soviet-style voiceovers, at least in principle. You get to hear the original performance exactly as it was, and also a translation in a more-or-less neutral voice. It is oddly similar to listening to a speech at the UN, though. It also helps that the Russian non-voiceover dub of Star Wars has such awful audio quality that it’s easy to prefer the voiceover dub in that case.

Leia and Threepio are apparently hard to capture, tone-wise, in a dub. Leia is a strong take-charge female lead, not a delicate love interest. I feel like the Thai dub completely misses Leia, while the Navajo dub gets it right. On the other hand, Threepio is basically a butler – someone who is polite to the point of obsequious, while at the same time just barely papering over the fact that he often feels he’s smarter than the people he serves. Lots of dubs fail here, just making Threepio Some Dude with vocal distortion, but IIRC Hindi does a very good job here.

Then there’s Tamil. I love that crazypants Tamil dub. Characters who are onscreen but not saying anything get a Tamil breathing track, sometimes every bit as noticeable as Vader or Admiral Ackbar’s breathing. Don’t speak English or have English subtitles for what you’re saying? Not a problem, you’re getting dubbed anyway. Even Ewoks get fresh new voices, but I honestly can’t tell you if it’s Tamil or not. And I’m pretty certain there’s English peppered into the Tamil*, so you can hear Luke tell R2 to shut up, or Han tell Luke “I hate you”. It actually works in context. I heart this dub.

* I’m not talking about bits where there’s a gap in the dub and we fall back to the English track, although there are those as well, but places where the Tamil voice actors use English phrases.

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chyron8472 said:

I’m of two minds about that. On the one hand, I think it’s similarly arrogant to blanketedly attack any and all dogmatic principles as ludicrous and worthy of scorn. One might say that to hold that no principles are incontrovertibly true is, itself, a principle one can hold to be incontrovertibly true, and is therefore hypocritical.

On the other hand, specific dogmatic principles are indeed harmful to the self, the culture, and to society. Also, being a devout Christian myself, I’m well aware of the dogma that Jesus personally railed against and turned on its head because they completely missed the point.

I suppose it comes down to an issue of who is challenging certain dogma, their motivation for doing so, and their approach at doing it.

Too nuanced for the Internet. Just tell me who I should hate.

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moviefreakedmind said:

Well, we definitely differ there. Ridiculing dogma is something I think everyone should do whenever they encounter it.

Well, I’m not saying it doesn’t make you feel better, but that’s not the same thing as being helpful.

Frankly I missed that in the flurry of temp bans and insults. The analogy works well both ways. I don’t think people consider that this protest was designed from the beginning to be respectful to the flag. It would have been just as much of a protest if he’d turned his back on the flag, or raised a fist at it, but unlike kneeling, those would be considered disrespectful. He chose a different way of showing respect as a means to demonstrate his protest. “A meal fit for Jehovah!” was meant as a compliment.

…but the larger point was very different. Knowing that the dogma exists as a firmly-rooted core belief every bit as sincere as religion, it seems pointless to minimize it, and unhelpful to ridicule it.

FWIW, I’ve found discussions of the flag and the anthem to be very much like discussions of religious artifacts. Around these items, for some groups, there is a reverence, and a rigidly-defined sanctioned method for handling them. To those who don’t share that same defined reverence, it’s just a symbolic object, and they might think things that seem appropriately respectful in other circumstances, such as kneeling, would apply here too.

So when group A objects to kneeling, group B can’t comprehend how kneeling, which is so clearly an even more respectful behavior than standing, could offend anyone – so they conclude it must be that group A supports police brutality. But seriously, kneeling isn’t on the list. That’s all there is to it. There’s a list of things you can do and kneeling isn’t on it. Yeah, it’s dogmatic but there it is. It’s another example of just talking past each other.

That’s what Poita does. He restores film, and he knows things.

If your starting point is boycotting reality, boycotting any specific tangible thing is actually a step in the right direction.

* For extraordinarily loose definitions of popular.

That will be fine, and if you see any problem areas, we can try retiming just those areas using some other standard. That said, there are a few areas where the dialogue is so thick I actually had to drop lines to make it readable in English, so nothing’s perfect (the Owen/C-3PO exchange is brutal).

I agree, it’s pretty good. I myself quite like Dorothy L. Sayers. Oh, wait, you said misery not mystery, nevermind.