[Discussion] Discussions & Debates Videos

videos with subject matter more suited to d&d than everything else. to be discussed and / or debated, with offshot threads if discussion on a particular video or subject warrants it.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Probably the best vote for me ad I've ever seen.

Wow. Message and production quality are outstanding.

I am sure there is a bunch of Texas voters thinking the helicopter wouldn't have crashed if a man was the pilot. I agree this ad is excellent but at three and a half minutes the only people who will ever see it are people online who would vote for her anyway. There is no way this is breaking through the insulated republican bubble.

Yeah, great message and seemingly great candidate but a really slow burn. A better ad company would have tightened that the f' up.

That is outstanding! It's especially outstanding that the highest rated comments are telling off the trolls.

I was also pleased to see her mention that she really enjoyed some of these movies, reminding us once again that we can enjoy some media, even though parts of it may be problematic.

My hometown police showing their professionalism.

http://www.unionleader.com/mancheste...

I wonder what they're high fiving and bro slapping about? /rhetorical

Schneier talking about his new book about cyber security and policy issues.

Mixolyde wrote:

Schneier talking about his new book about cyber security and policy issues.

It's interesting to me that he promotes government regulation as the solution after he points out the fundamental problem: governments are terribly self-interested entities when it comes to technology. No one trusts the NSA to certify something as secure, because they have a vested interest in it not being secure. No one trusts Chinese-produced hardware because their government has been known to compromise it. Nothing is going to change that in the forseeable future, and thus government regulation of technology is untrustworthy in a way that far exceeds other fields. This has been repeatedly demonstrated over the last few years with Equifax, Facebook, Stuxnet, and numerous other incidents.

Further, adding more punitive regulation to this space hurts actual security, which relies on openness. Its been shown time and time again that closed-source corporations will hide vulnerabilities and refuse to disclose incidents to avoid embarassment, so imagine the lengths they will go to in order to avoid serious financial penalties. (And those lengths, of course, will still be far cheaper than actual security, in exactly the same way that lobbying is always cheaper than competing). For a perfect example, look at the current state of voting machines. We do not want all software development going down that road.

Further, he's wrong about what the market offers currently. The market doesn't just offer bottom-of-the-barrel insecure products. Instead, it offers an huge spectrum of products in a wild variety of forms and functions that address all different kinds of good-fast-cheap tradeoffs. It's absolutely possible to obtain and use software and products that are reasonably secure, but there are costs to that (and often not monetary ones). In fact, most of the actually secure software in the world is free software, developed in an open collaborative model.

And that's the way it should be. People should be able to make their own choices about their own security needs, and balance their own needs against the costs.

Because, as we all know, the market and corporations only ever operate in the best interests of their customers.

And the government is a singular body with only one purpose.

Lolwut

Edit: have Alex Jones and Kevin Spacey ever been seen in the same room together? I have my doubts.

The hell? That is so wild I thought it was a deep fake or something using House of Cards footage, especially in the wake of new charges coming to light today.

Apparently it’s a real thing. What a gross display trying to wheedle back into the public eye.

Certis wrote:

The hell? That is so wild I thought it was a deep fake or something using House of Cards footage, especially in the wake of new charges coming to light today.

Apparently it’s a real thing. What a gross display trying to wheedle back into the public eye.

Yeah, I thought it was a “viral” thing.

Well. That's super gross, and a creepy way to start my day after x-mas. Spacey back is not what i want in my stocking.

Wtf is that Spacey thing?

I had ignored it for awhile, but finally watched the dumb thing.

Man, the bubble of wealth and fame can really turn some people into weird motherf*ckers. They no longer understand the normal world.

I haven't seen Spacey since his appearance in Baby Driver. What happened to his voice? Is he in character? Is this an audition tape for something?

He's doing his character from House of Cards, Frank Underwood, who was killed off when it was revealed that he is a pretty disgusting dude.

Get it? Let me be Frank? Then he mentions that we didn't see him die, and he puts in wedding ring on?

ah House of Cards. Not a viewer & I suppose I don't ever need to start now.

Yeah, it's problematic, for sure. If you like political thrillers, it's a pretty great series. But I can't blame anyone for not wanting to watch it because of him, even though he is one of hundreds that made the show.

Boycotting can be kind of crappy for everyone else that was just doing their job, especially when he was dumped immediately when his scandal broke. But then, we all have more than we can possibly watch to choose from, so no harm is using this as a way to pare down the list.

^^^ this is a great insight. For an anecdote - my life is not in any way emptier since I stopped reading or recommending Orson Scott Card over a decade ago. Plus, donating his books to the local evangelical church (the only group who accommodates his worldview) made moving easier.

It's a good show, i really enjoyed watching it, that particular "promotion" by him is just really offputting, and kind of insulting to his audience and to the character of Frank Underwood he was playing.

Louis CK with his inevitable demo tape for membership in the “intellectual dark web”.

Real abhorrent stuff at 23:00 including transphobia, making fun of mentally challenged kids and jokes about the Parkland kids.

DSGamer wrote:

Louis CK with his inevitable demo tape for membership in the “intellectual dark web”.

Real abhorrent stuff at 23:00 including transphobia, making fun of mentally challenged kids and jokes about the Parkland kids.

That was painful. The same voice and style of the Louis CK I used to laugh at, but saying some truly horrific things. And the guy making the recording was laughing hysterically at every one of them.

I was an enormous Dennis Miller fan all the way up to his firing from MNF. I loved his enormous litany of arcane references and just genuinely found him funny. I was even lucky enough to get front row tickets to see him in 1995 while he was doing a small comedy club in rural Virginia. I kept the promotional poster from that show on my wall for years. As he leaned into his conservative voice it became clear that his style of funny only worked because he was was being honest. The contrived metaphors were just the schtick, the platform to make the jokes. Once his conservative agenda started dictating his act, he stopped being funny because even though the platform was the same, the honesty was gone.

This is only one show and when you work the edges of poor taste the way CK does it is entirely possible he was workshopping material he has no plans to ever make part of his act. That said, the Parkland stuff does not seem like the type of thing I would even have believed him capable of saying before his exile. Not because it is disgusting or crude or mean, he has been a king of all three, but because it was monstrously unfunny. I have never seen a "joke" of his not land as hard as that one did.

I am hopeful that Louis isn't going down the same road as Miller did because he feels like he has to grab onto any audience now that his meteoric ride is over.

The Parkland stuff (setting aside that it was mean and cruel) made no sense. His hypothesis is that because they're young and inexperienced in life they're not worth listening to even though they literally survived a gun massacre, many of them saying goodbye to their parents (or so they thought), saving lives of their friends, etc.

It's not only cruel and monstrous, but it's just really really dumb. The kids are interesting by dint of surviving something like that. If they want to talk I'll listen. The fact that they're also politically astute, active and give a sh*t about things makes them really interesting to me.

The "joke" is that because he's old and experienced he's more worth listening to. That because he managed, as a white male, to survive to 50, that he's inherently interesting.

That's so dumb I don't even think it's worth the words I've typed so far. And with that I'll stop talking about him. Just thought some might find the video enlightening, if only as a reminder that he doesn't deserve a second chance. Not so far.

Player Hater wrote:

I was an enormous Dennis Miller fan all the way up to his firing from MNF. I loved his enormous litany of arcane references and just genuinely found him funny. I was even lucky enough to get front row tickets to see him in 1995 while he was doing a small comedy club in rural Virginia. I kept the promotional poster from that show on my wall for years. As he leaned into his conservative voice it became clear that his style of funny only worked because he was was being honest. The contrived metaphors were just the schtick, the platform to make the jokes. Once his conservative agenda started dictating his act, he stopped being funny because even though the platform was the same, the honesty was gone.

So you're saying Dennis Miller is the Vichy France of comedy? "Hey, Adam Carolla is a collaborator, and he's doing OK."