Chindie

Might be more accurate to the anime than I thought then... *trollface*

I'm sure anime fans will tear this to shreds, but given my exposure to Ghost in the Shell is a demo of the PS1 game (which seems to have less than nothing to do with what is in this trailer) about 20 years ago, all I can say is it looks pretty and Scarlett can do little wrong in my eyes.

Hes a decent fighter. He's not an elite level guy, and got the belt in a completely unexpected victory over Dos Anjos, which followed a couple of other unfancied victories where he was able to pressure fighters unused to it, take shots and swarm them. He ultimately couldn't do that to McGregor, and did look worse than he had done in his previous fights. Similar story to a load of Jon Jones fights - he makes very good fighters look poor by his size and ability to use it.

Also absolutely delighted to see that happen to Weidman. Even if it came from a drug test failure waiting happen, Weidman is exceptionally unlikable with the faux humble schtick that he can't even manage to maintain very well.

McGregor has very good standup and a natural size advantage over many, and anyone that can't neutralise that is in trouble. His flaw is his ground game, as it's always been, which makes him beatable. But he could take a leaf from Jon Jones's book and learn to never get taken down using his size advantage. I'd hoped Alvarez might do more as I like to see hype derailed, but fair play McGregor wasn't losing that fight. Nurmagedov might be an interesting fight, as he's pretty damn good at everything, and his record speaks for itself. Made Johnson look silly. I suspect it'll never happen though.

Got to give props to Black Mirror S3E4. I can appreciate a show that can write something compelling whilst also explicitly aiming for about every 'trigger' subject it could... Good stuff.

That video is hilarious. A billionaire, most well known for his hotels, is going to criticise others for benefiting from and using system of the world of finance and corporations, and is going to overturn that system, which has been decades in the making with fingers in global pies, and everything will be better for the have-nots. And he's going to whinge about a 'malacious' campaign of lies, while his team threw as many if not more. In the words of Gary Johnson, that is absolute horseshit.

Brexit was a rejection of getting over ourselves.

I'd bet decent money it is.

I don't know why footballers need to wear a poppy. Presumably the decades of football around the first weeks of November in the past century without poppies were populated by disrespectful words removed.

How many times has Gastelum missed weight now? It's unacceptable.

Worth bearing in mind that as interesting as the political compass is its famously genuinely hard to get a realistically right wing result on it unless you give absurdly right wing answers. I've only ever seen one that was allegedly genuine.

'Hard left' is full blown communist, hard right has elements of many things but is as extreme. Very few people actually would subscribe to either. 'Hard' is just a label to discredit the viewpoint with shorthand.

Old fashioned views might be a brilliant euphemism. The only good thing that comes of the Heil is the laughs it invariably raises in the Eye every fortnight.

I struggle to take engagement with politics as either a scant spinoff positive or major boon of the major political moments if this year. Partly because it's not really engagement with politics, and mostly because all the engagement in the world isn't going to matter when here we have a government and Parliament that simply isn't going to give a shit about dissent, and in the US in a while everyone will go back to their lives and in 4 years nobody will care again. Or worse in both cases a lot of people see how hopeless it is and give up entirely.

Without immigration the NHS would have collapsed donkeys years ago. I haven't seen a 'British' doctor in years. I live in an area with high white British makeup, and you can't get an appointment unless you are very lucky here either. My parents had to fight to get me into the school they wanted, that my family has a long connection to, and that was long before the Eastern European migration to the UK. The problem isn't immigrants. It's the system being badly run on not enough money.

Conspiracy nutjob thread is around here somewhere...

Unsurprisingly, that has Fifth Element vibes dripping out of it. Besson is very hit and miss so hard to draw much from that but the world seems great.

Gary Johnson is an absolute moron, and I say that as someone more inclined to like the Libertarian Party than many.

Interesting times. The hope has to be that Trump is a puppet and plays the frontman more than many might expect. Still I suspect that this will end up being one of those administrations that don't get looked back on fondly. It is astounding anyone voted for such an unpleasant and underqualified individual. But so. I'm more interested in what this says for western democracy though. The temptation is to say this is solely a rejection of the establishment but I think there might be more to see in this than that in time. Certainly there's a gap in the political world that the left should be clearing up in, but they aren't. Progressive politics needs a global disaster, a drastic rethink at engaging the common man, or it will be consigned to thought experiments. Sadly.

It started as the ECSC with the explicit aim of forcing France and Germany to trade with each other to make war economically unviable between them, with the upside also getting both back on their feet with natural resources.

I don't know about anyone else but were I to think a game was rigged, I probably wouldn't play it. Unless rigged in my favour of course.

I believe Trump's actual net with being far less than he claims is an open secret. His entire personal value is seemingly based on the impression of being successful so it's no surprise he wants to hide the exact details.

Kurdistan encompasses territory of 4 States IIRC. They're not going to get a country of their own. Noone is going to risk giving them some land as the obvious end result is that they'll want all their traditional lands back, and that's not going to be allowed to happen, so it'll turn hotter than it already is and given they've got generations of being treated as less than second class citizens I daresay they wouldn't care too much about upsetting those standing in their way. And internationally they won't have any support because the last thing the Middle East needs is another player pulling another rope. They absolutely should have their country back though. I always thought that it was bizarre that the people of one of the greatest men in Islamic history, Saladin, are given such short shrift by everyone.

Interestingly I understand quite a few other high level well known politicians have done exactly the same thing as Clinton. But they got away with it.