Zoraptor

No, it wouldn't be just vindictive. She only got off because Obola ordered his corrupt Justice Department to subvert the investigation. There was never a chance they would indict her. This miscarriage of justice must be corrected. Chris Hagen ‏@chrishagentb The Clinton Foundation has issued a brief statement: No Refunds. #election2016 #WheresHillary Yeah, I don't get this line of thinking. If the Clinton Foundation is the corrupt geopolitical front that it's believed to be, then just "leaving her alone" is by far, the worst option. Her run as Sec of State has affected the lives of millions, but just leave it alone now because she suffered a crushing defeat to her ego? If only ordinary citizens were given this luxury. But obviously the implications are far too reaching, despite the FBI's efforts, too many powerful people will want to keep the American image as squeaky clean as possible. I'd tend to agree on the Clinton Foundation with some reservations as below. I was referring to the emails primarily and Trump's threat of a special prosecutor. There Comey has looked and said there's nothing, that should be the end of it. Only reservations I have when it comes to the CF is that it's unlikely to actually be pay-for-play, now, and it's an inherently difficult task to prove there's collusion- especially when you'd expect most of the quid pro quo to have come in a Hillary presidency that never happened.

Nearly 12 million less people voting overall than in 2008. Fewer black voters (that one is understandable) and also fewer hispanics voted for Hillary than Obama. More white women voted for Trump. Those were all meant to be Hillary's strengths and the reason they didn't pick Bernie. Barely scraped home in Virginia despite Kaine being from there. Poor- albeit improved just not enough- results in the House/ Senate elections. There really aren't much in the way of positives to be found for the dems at all. They even spent around 2/3 more for each delegate won than Trump did- supposedly stripping funds from down ticket candidates to do so too. It's interesting going through the democratic primary results. In retrospect Bernie winning Michigan and Wisconsin looks like an ignored warning, while Hillary winning in the south looks irrelevant. With any luck it will be the death of Correct The Record and similar. Nothing quite like making sure the enthusiastic supporters you did have got tarred with the brush of your very obvious- and frequently obnoxious- astroturfing campaign. Somehow I doubt it though, the lesson learned will probably see the next democratic candidate having a green frog mascot and heaps of forced memes.

Decent if belated concession speech by Hillary. It still sounded at times like a bunch of computer generated catch phrases strung together by focus groups but at others she sounded pretty genuine. She also looked more genuine than she managed at any point on the campaign trail. Hopefully she'll just be left in quiet, there's nothing to be gained from anything further and any legal attacks would just be vindictive. Overall I think there's only a handful of people who have come out of this election with reputations enhanced. Trump won so he pretty much has to be on the list though I doubt it will last. Otherwise, the head of the RNC who did his job properly, perhaps best (if rather against convention) evidenced by me not being able to remember his name. Had to deal with far more internal party division at the organisational level than the Dems who as an institution near universally backed Hillary, and was a net asset to Trump rather than the counter productive spectacles DWS and Brazile made of themselves. Also Colin Powell who came out of his email leaks with reputation actually enhanced and absolutely nailed Hillary's fundamental problem (~the trouble with Hillary is her hubris) as a bonus. Lastly, Bernie Sanders. He'll be the candidate who could and should; and he's made it very difficult for the DNC to blame him for the loss, though no doubt some will try. His supporters will get some inevitable flak for not being enthusiastic/ enthusiastic enough about someone they didn't want in the first place but in the end he probably has gained more by supporting a losing candidate than he would have supporting a winning one. OTOH the list of people to have their reputation trashed is too long to list.

Well, an interesting day to say the least. It kind of sums things up that Hillary didn't even go and see her supporters but sent Podesta instead. So what if you're upset, it shouldn't be all about you- though that's been part of the problem from the get go. Possibly the most ignominious political end since Nixon. Will the Democrats have a good look at themselves and wonder why they lost? Probably not, it will be racists and idiots fault- or Nader's- instead of their poor choices which means they've a good chance of repeating all the same mistakes. Not labelling people who aren't voting for you as racists and idiots would be a good start, that isn't going to change people's minds. I have some limited sympathy for Hillary and little desire to stick the knife in but really, she was always her own worst enemy, without Trump's ability to mobilise and inspire and her ending seems utterly gutless. I have more sympathy for Obama, a decent guy if largely ineffectual leader whose legacy is now going to be practically non existent. I do, however, have absolutely no sympathy for the Brazile's, Podesta's and Wasserman-Schultz's of the world who are about as responsible as Hillary for the loss but will likely weasel out of the consequences. Would be interesting if DWS were being challenged now instead of six months ago... As for Trump, he ran a deeply unconventional campaign that went against all orthodoxies and it worked. Almost certainly single term president as he will inevitably disappoint those who voted for him thinking that he'll move the world and the US back 30 years and they'll have jobs for life. He won't be as bad as the doomsayers say, but he'll be bad enough. Hopefully he'll shake up stuff that desperately needs shaking up at least. Will be interesting to see if they try and get TPPA through in the lame duck session now. I'd have bet money on it if Clinton were elected. Polls were abject rubbish. Time for some better weightings guys. Media was abject rubbish. Both were in a bubble of self reinforcing opinions and bereft of ability to deal with Trumps' unorthodoxy properly. Pretty much everything about the electoral process except from election day itself was deeply unedifying and a poor advert for democracy representative republicanism. Best part is watching obnoxious self proclaimed 'true' 'liberals' spontaneously combust all over the internet.

Works fine without GA, you just have to allow the grauniad scripts. On Firefox at least. Just kind of weird that they'd go to the trouble of making a nice interactive high info map and leave out something as critical as how much each state is worth. The BBC map is far simpler and more basic but includes the number of delegates so is actually more useful.

Is it my imagination or does that map lack the most critical information for the presidential race, ie how many electoral votes each state has? Otherwise it's very nice indeed.

Coincidence, probably, aggregate rates just vary for no real reason sometimes. Some years just have higher crime or more traffic accidents or more twins born and there isn't really an underlying cause for it.

Id be interested in seeing your work if you are willing to share. I'll send a picture of it as a PM when it is finished. See? Only the most powerful forum members get access to this. It's all rigged so the top 1% of forum members benefit. Is Gfted1 running a clandestine private messaging service to escape public scrutiny? Certainly seems so, and we only know about it because he's commissioning artworks from Meshugger and Meshugger happened to mention them casually- and it's probably going to be paid for by the 'Gfted 1. Moderator' charity, too, I suspect. We need an investigation by James Comey (or, I dunno, Oby/ LoF?) to get to the truth of the matter/ cover things up; depending on what their conclusion is and whether I agree with it. I also hear that Obsidian has been doing some sort of 'pay-for-play' deals where you pay some money to get stuff and gain additional benefits and even some direct input if you pay more. Of course they have claimed it was entirely innocent and is finished now, but I think questions have to be asked! Perhaps these so called 'PMs' will be scheduled for release by Obsidian on November 31st after public outcry, and other moderators clandestine dealing will be exposed by Wikileaks in the interim. We can have accusations that they've been hacked and released by RPGCodex while Tigranes' forum account is found shot dead after a 'robbery' deleted by a freak database error and we can then try and see who else has suffered such 'accidents'; then learn that Pidesco and Rosbjerg meet up for some 'Spirit Eating' every Friday, and it's facilitated by Obsidian (and Atari too??? Is there no end to the depth of this conspiracy?). Oh and you know those rumours about what really took down that nice alternative, Troika? They really did a number there, they've even got Tim and Leonard campaigning for them now. And at the end of the day we'll probably all still vote Obsidian because Bioware/ Bethesda is worse and everyone else is just too small and unknown. Sad (hmm, probably low energy too) really, Larian had a chance as a real alternative until their infamous "What's a Baldur's Gate?" interview gaffe...

Political Compass is based on US politics primarily, so it skews left and libertarian worldwide (and on the internet). Not going to do it again but every time I have I've been more wildly left-libertarian.

Won't be related. Britain (and Australia, relative to somewhere like the US) had a low gun ownership rate anyway, and no/ limited open or concealed carry rules so there was little deterrence from legit guns anyway. Most of the people you'd expect to have them, eg farmers, still do have them. Knife crime increase is more relevant but when it comes right down to it most people would prefer to be stabbed than shot, and you have a far better chance to outrun a knife than a bullet. Knives are just fundamentally more available than guns and always have been.

It really isn't. You can cherrypick from any set of data, you don't need a big set. All you really need is an agenda, some information that supports your agenda and a basic knowledge of propaganda techniques. A small set of data makes it more difficult to convince informed people as it is easy to check, yes, but such techniques are not really aimed at informed people anyway as it gets progressively more difficult to convince people the more informed they are. It also has a flip side though, more data means it's easier to show cherrypickjing is happening, indeed that is one reason why there's a lot of distrust of media. I think it is fair to point out, it'd be impossible to prove the emails were fake. It would be impossible to convince everyone, but you could do a pretty good job of it if they were fake as it's impossible to do large volumes of made up information accurately. You could easily show that you were in place X when you were meant to be in place Y, that you only met person Z later or they were somewhere else, that person V wasn't at that job yet, etc etc. There's too much detail to get it right, and the instant response to fake emails is to say they're fake as that is both a complete defence and discredits WL. Meh, interview is rubbish. Basically just wank saying what people want to be true, plenty of the usual self contradictory stuff as well- Russia's economy is crap, but simultaneously upper-high; they have nothing to fear from the west, except the west is ruining their economy; Putin needs constant confrontation (examples from his first two terms? No?) while the west presumably doesn't despite having far more wars over the past 20 years than Russia. It's that sort of crap that gives Russia ammunition and is part of the problem. [late edit: the thing I disliked most was using 'isolationism' to describe Russia not liking the west, which is overt occidentcentrism and pure narrative pandering. Isolationism is something like DPRK where nobody likes them and few tolerate them or Eritrea where the country is locked down as entirely as they can make it; Russia's relations with most of the world are absolutely fine. There are even still discussion of a FTA with us, as we're not part of the sanctions regime. There's no fundamental desire to disengage with the west that isolationism implies, just a deep- imo justified- scepticism about their motives] Plus of course it doesn't mention that even if there were Russian hacking it wouldn't matter if there wasn't bad stuff to hide. If the worst was Huma and John's Spirit Cooking there simply wouldn't be a story.

The problem there isn't specifically too much information though, it's people cherry picking only information that fits their preconceived positions or not being equipped to filter it. Either can and does happen even when there isn't huge amounts of information. People who lack time or critical faculties can always go to a news site to get a filtered appraisal anyway, doesn't mean that that should be the only option for any complicated subject. And you have to ask what the alternative is. I'd far rather have too much information than too little, and the idea of having someone deciding the Goldilocks Zone of information for me does not appeal. I don't really want Fox News or CNN deciding which emails are relevant or whether climate change exists because I know perfectly well what their positions will be irrespective of what reality actually is.

Nah. This ain't 'The Practice' or 'The Good Wife', it isn't even 'Boston Legal'- though I'd suspect Trump would like to be played by James Spader Bill Shatner would be far more accurate- it's stuff released on the internet. So instead of maybe a dozen people having to pore through hundreds of pages of documents while tense music plays and time counts down there's millions of people using search terms on a search engine with as much time as they want to spend. Document dumping is also an obviously negative tactic in legal terms, designed to obfuscate. Here it's just WL's modus operandi; and if they did editorial control you can bet every cent in Bill Gates' bank that that would be the point of attack instead, ie that they were selectively releasing stuff. More generally, information overload can be used as a negative for any subject. Climate Change or any complex science, international crises/ relations, economics or whatever, there's frequently more information available than any reasonable person could either assimilate or validate alone. That usually isn't seen as an actual negative though, just an inevitability, unless someone is trying to do a quick and dirty job of discrediting someone ("oh, you haven't read every study written on Climate Change? Your view is therefore invalid") That works both ways though. The information will be seen as automatically salacious by some because it is 'leaked' information rather than being 'legitimately' released; but others will automatically dismiss it because it has been leaked rather than officially released. Realistically which is which does largely depend on the person's predetermined views. Sending agents provocateur to opposition rallies is not a good look, and it isn't the first time it's happened from the Dem side albeit the other time was more overtly provocative. Sending observers is fine of course; but that's the equivalent of Glasgow Celtic Football Club 'proving' Rangers are a bunch of violent thugs by sending someone into the home stand at Ibrox wearing a Celtic jersey. Technically any violence would still be the fault of the Rangers fans, but they'd have to know they'd get that response and most of the point was to get it too.

Wikileaks doesn't have agents. It just acts as a dead/ drop box for other people's info. Which may or may not have been obtained illegally. That's the problem for the US, much as they'd love to go after WL overtly they cannot since they definitely don't do any hacking or similar directly illegal stuff; they just distribute information that is leaked to them. eg Manning didn't illegally obtain the info he gave to wikileaks, he illegally distributed information he had legitimate access too- similarly Snowden (albeit not WL related) didn't hack the NSA, he had legit access to information he then distributed. If Mark Rich gave WL the DNC leaks- as Assange has repeatedly hinted at- then it wasn't hacked either, since he had legit access to it. The only election relevant stuff that was likely hacked is the Podesta emails where he fairly clearly got phished. Yep, and that's the crux of the matter. They're real documents and emails, and there's never been a serious effort to discredit WL information as being false or altered, all the effort has gone into obfuscation rather than denial. If they were false that would be the defence, and it would be a complete one that would discredit WL far more than any amount of neo Red Scare McCarthyism and claims of bias could.

If the Parliament already decided that they only need a referendum to leave, wouldn't that override whatever the court says as the Parliament is supreme in Britain? Or am I misunderstanding the British legal system? They didn't/ couldn't specify that only the referendum was needed to leave, that's the problem. Probably didn't, and probably deliberately, since we have the same (general) system and our binding referenda can automatically apply legislation, eg electoral reform here did not require a new parliamentary vote. They tried pretty hard to get the 'correct' result of the status quo/ fptp rather than proportional representation, but once the vote was held they had no option and no vote was required. But in any case unless they make the referendum properly binding at the time its legislation is passed it's open to challenge. There shouldn't really be an issue since the legitimacy of the referendum is not in doubt and it therefore should be passed by acclamation anyway- unless there are a lot of paternalistic euroweenie bad losers who want to overrule a popular vote in the Brit parliament, of course.

Yep. Pres-->VP-->Secretaries-->Kiefer Sutherland------------>Gfted1. You guys better pray that the guano never hits the fan for I will blot out the sun with drones. You missed out 'Speaker' between VP and secretaries. Significant because he's fairly likely to be of the opposing party, eg if Obama and Biden bought it you'd have had a real life President Ryan.

The ruling was that since it took an Act of Parliament to go into the EU you cannot use Royal Prerogative to leave since only Parliament can alter laws generated by Parliament; while RP can be used to make/ break treaties which is what HM'sG position is. I don't think they really thought through what would happen legislatively if 'leave' won as basically no one except Mark Carney seemed to have planned anything for that contingency and it was meant to be a rubber stamp.

I found Gizmo's post of 5.40am NZST 5/11/2016 to be an interesting take on the 'serious post' oeuvre. It started, as most such serious posts do, with setting out the opinion of the poster, in this case that the 'The Witcher' series of computer role playing games has declined in quality after the first one. Since this is a controversial view I was glad to see the use of the acronym and qualifier 'IMO' (In My Opinion) to reduce the confrontation inherent in such a radical interpretation. He/ She/ [pronoun] then moved on to setting out the reasons for his opinion- a sensible and some would say obligatory step in any analysis that is sadly often neglected in these times of brief twitter posts and single line sarcastic or inflammatory drive bys on forums. While I may have appreciated a little more detail in some areas the point was conveyed effectively and with brevity; which is, after all, the soul of wit. Perhaps my only criticism of the post is that there was no commentary on 'The Witcher 3' and whether it was an improvement or not over 'The Witcher 2'. My presumption is that Gizmo did not in fact play 'The Witcher 3', perhaps after disliking 'The Witcher 2', however, some clarification would have been appreciated. Having said that I have to end with a final positive observation and appreciation for the presence of a short statement of summary and conclusion at post end; another facet of forum posting that is in sad decline. Overall I liked the post and rate it a perfect 7/9, though due to the review policy of this august institution I did not of course officially like the post.

Boo's favourite Youtube video- she laughs at Gaddafi getting raped to death with a bayonet. Why does Mrs Clinton find sexual violence so amusing etc etc? Unfortunately the worst enemies of traditional information sources with regards to 'truthiness' is themselves. Some people will always gravitate towards sources that reinforce their own view and always will; but it's clear that even those who don't do that regard traditional media with scepticism nowadays. People don't expect Breitbart to be 'honest', they do- did- expect that from CNN, WP, NYT, BBC etc. Every time they do thinly disguised puff pieces, thinly disguised hit pieces or give incorrect facts they lose the trust of a few more people. Unlike ye olden times it's now very easy to find out when they are doing so as well and there is an endless supply of alternatives to pick from. It's not for no reason, and the correct point of comparison for Reagan should really be 1980 candidate Reagan not 1989 Reagan, and 2000 candidate GWB, not 2009 GWB. We're looking at candidate HRClinton, not President HRClinton after all. There are multiple reasons for why she's viewed so poorly in comparison, each of which might be small by itself but they all add up. (1) Neither Reagan or GWB had any significant scandal associated with them prior to being elected. Hillary does, multiple ones, and some aren't that minor. Any single one would not be significant but it's the sum that is significant. (2) There wasn't a tiredness for political dynasties then; that there is now is largely thanks to GWB but there wasn't prior to his election. (3) Elements of Bill's presidency genuinely stank and Hillary gets tarred by association. Pardoning Mark Rich; and while Kenneth Starr was a puritanical git Bill should never have got involved with a subordinate/ intern as that's just inherently- and obviously- dodgy. (4) Neither Reagan nor Bush had been in federal government prior to being elected. (5) Hillary has, effectively, been running for president for more than 8 years. Related to (4), some people have just got sick of her and relate to the newspaper article she's had tons of time and opportunity to get people to distrust her. (6) Reagan and Bush had a folksy likeability that made them appear genuine. I don't think even Hilalry's greatest supporters would say she has a 'folksy likeability'. (7) Media propagation. Internet, media 2.0 etc is far more prevalent than when Bush was elected, let alone Reagan, so things aren't seen through the prism of mainstream media. The US system is almost uniquely (well, outside of quasi 'democratic' processes like in Syria/ Iran where you have 'genuine' democracy, just with hand picked candidates picked by one entity instead of two) set up to make sure that either a red or blue ratbastard is up for election each time, in this case they've just managed to get two unlikeable ratbastards.

Not where the EU is concerned. France and the Netherlands rejected the EU Constitution and they end ran those results. Technically the Constitution was goneburger, practically the Treaty of Lisbon was the same thing, just made in such a way that it could be done as amendments instead of new laws and avoid those pesky referenda (France and Dutchies didn't have plebiscites this time). It then got rejected by Ireland who had to have a referendum by law. Who then held a second referendum to make sure the 'right' result was reached. They didn't turn out though. I wouldn't have wanted to rely on them for a stay vote anyway, the highly motivated sjw/ yuppy types that benefit most from the EU already voted to stay. The ones who didn't vote were the disaffected with poor prospects and little engagement in politics. They'd be far more likely to vote leave than the 30% who actually voted, if they had to vote.

That is the thing, really, a game like CK2 would have been a far better choice. Even something like Stardew Valley would have been better, though not as good as CK2. There's nothing wrong with examining the way relationships work in games; they are game systems so analysis of them is essentially the same as examining the combat system or resource economy. The choice made was an utterly gutless one though, and -imo at least- an actively capricious one too. It's a single dev game, in alpha, with bugs and is thus both 'safe' to attack and has systems that are very obviously subject to frequent, substantial changes and also frequent, substantial deviation from what is intended. Do the same article on CK2 and it's a look at a mature game with mature systems, from a decent sized studio, well(ish) known etc. But of course do it in the same style and you're far more likely to get a negative response from Paradox that might have actual repercussions. The whole article assumes a... malice, for want of a better word, on behalf of the developer that cannot be justified. Malice on behalf of the article writer, otoh, can be suspected with a fair bit of evidence- the disclaimer about the dev wanting 'editorial control' of the interview is distinctly misleading as he wanted a lack of editing from anyone, not without justification given the end result. Overall; the analysis is the worst sort of trivial because it's of an early access/ alpha game, the target is picked to maximise clicks not to provide meaningful analysis, it appears to be at best accidentally malicious (frankly, I think it's deliberately so) and it could have very serious consequences for that single developer by whipping up a righteousness storm. I'd object to it less if there weren't potentially an interesting article there.

Grr, yes, brain though Prey 2, hands wrote Dishonoured 2. Dishonoured 2 is well past the point at which you'd expect Chris to be involved, plus it's the wrong Arkane studio working on it.

Archive link. Don't usually do them, but honestly, it's a dreadful clickbait hatchet job. Now, off to check if Rimworld is on GOG (it isn't).

DivOS 2/ Larian (finished, I think), System Shock/ Night Dive (pending, nothing actually done yet), Dishonoured 2/ Arkane (current, non kickstarter; Beth game of course which explains why he's reticent to criticise them even indirectly). I think he's done some 'consultancy' for others as well, without actually doing any writing/ designing. And of course lots of interviews/ panels/ conference presentations and the like.

TBH this is the main reason why I can't fathom why he went to Bethesda while complaining about Obsidian's management. That's a somewhat different issue to my mind. Bethesda can be good to work for as owner of a subsidiary developer or developers at that subsidiary; and it could be good for management since Raf is still head of Arkane after selling up while also being potentially very bad to work for as an independent. My major objection is basically that Chris is simply wrong in the conclusions he has drawn, ie Bethesda don't buy studios they like working with unless they only liked working with one studio that happened to be Crossing into bankrupcy before Beth got involved. Indeed, it is kind of ironic that Chris implies that Bethesda didn't like working with Obsidian when he would almost certainly have contributed significantly to that with the metacritic bonus issue leak and Obsidian is the only recent external studio to work on a core Beth IP, albeit Fallout wasn't so core at the time. (I actually have a certain amount of agreement with Avellone's implied criticisms of Obsidian management as there has been a lack of repeat custom from publishers until recently which suggests poor results even if there weren't rumours/ evidence about development problems on almost all projects up to DS3. But I do wish he'd either come out and just say everything or no comment it, the current approach is just kind of passive aggressive jilted lover/ bad divorce. Plus I'm always mindful that if he really ended up with one friend at Obsidian then it's pretty unlikely to be everybody else's fault)