MudMan

It's not a problem of disinformation. Campaigns have been weaponizing image since TV entered the conversation, and have weaponized narratives since day one. None of the things Stewart or this article say are false.

Stewart chooses what to talk about. Focus is message. If you focus on Biden being old as opposed to, say, Trump being an actual rapist, you're choosing how the narratives are selected and framed. And if you think you're dodging that by also talking about Trump being old then you're either being naive or disingenuous.

He's not "speaking his mind", he's making an insanely hyped comeback to the limelight specifically targeted towards the liberals who became politicized watching him act as an arbiter of common sense on-screen during the 2000s.

And he went "but her emails".

I'm not worried about the people watching the Daily Show.

I'm worried about people reading the article above reminding them that even Stewart thinks Biden is too old.

Is that what he said? It doesn't matter, it's something you can say out loud now. And repeat endlessly in campaign rallies and propaganda disguised as news.

I think I may be more frustrated by this pretense of normality than by activism of any political sign. What are reasonable criticisms for? What goal could they possibly achieve? What action can the political class take to address them that is even remotely viable in the next eight months?

More to the point, what do people think is happening right now? Do they think this is business as usual, the populace making up their minds about the future of the country (planet!) based on policy proposals? We left that behind a while ago. At least the trumpist weirdos have a sense of urgency. This beige normcore approach to politics seems baffling to me, and I was disappointed to see Stewart jump right back into it with both feet after the sense of dejected futility he left behind during his last Daily Show run. At least John Oliver (and even Stewart's own Apple TV show) had the honestly of highlighting very specific things that need practical, attainable fixes urgently.

That's why she should have stepped down much sooner. Had she done it on the first year of Obama it wouldn't have been feasible to delay for that long. And yet you heard the mildest possible suggestion that this was the case before she died and barely anything at all after.

So why go so hard with Biden when the other guy isn't even four years younger and was already in a questionable mental state before he ran?

Because her emails.

You know what pisses me off the most? When all is said and done and democracy is a vague memory among the cave-dwellers, we'll all have to admit that the stupid combover and the orange spray actually worked. Dumb orangutan guy managed to hold the fiction that he's not decrepit by spray painting himself and shouting past his brainfarts, and it's actually gonna get him the election, with the cooperation of tons of well meaning "just asking valid questions".

Well, they can be concerned all they want, but ultimately things work how they work. So no, that scenario is complete fiction and there is no valid equivalence between a Supreme Court Justice and a President in terms of succession.

It's not about if, it's about when.

People had three years to convince Biden that he shouldn't run. They didn't. Now you get Biden, and until he's elected again criticism equals promoting the Trump campaign.

I mean, Stewart isn't a complete idiot, he did make a case for both candidates being too old, which is a smarter counter than most of the Democratic campaign, let alone the Dem left, is using to push back. You're not gonna successfully deny Biden is old, but you can convince people that Trump is also, maaaaybe.

But that doesn't change the fact that any statement right now is a campaign statement. People think they can ignore politics for years and then act all surprised when they're told to postpone "valid criticism". Nah. The one thing Stewart said that I agree with wholeheartedly is that this is life now. Forever. And in this life you don't mess with your candidate's campaign even a little bit until after the votes are counted.

Yeah, I'm confused about this take. RBG should have stepped down because by not doing it she created the opportunity for Trump to tilt the majorities in the Supreme Court. Notably, nobody had the balls to criticise her for it, even after she died and made that exact thing happen.

If Biden dies in office Trump doesn't get to pick the vice president. And somehow he still gets constant crap despite the other guy being just as old.

We're doing "but her emails" again. I thought we weren't gonna do "but her emails" again.

Yeah, well, welcome to why you don't talk shit about your candidate during a campaign. Your nuanced point is going to get flattened down to "even his allies are criticising him". Weirdly, this exact quote dismantles his entire monologue there.

The best joke in that entire thing was Klepper accusing him of bothsiderism and asking whether he had saved democracy yet. Because it was poignant. Lampshading it is funny, but it doesn't change the outcome.

Well, second best joke, the best was Ronnie Chieng going to town on potato skins, but that's neither here not there.

Man, I've had two separate devices fail to install updates the last week, leading to tons of weirdness and troubleshooting. I even had to chkdsk c: /F at one point like a neanderthal.

I have enough coomputers laying around that I'd move more of them to other OSs, Linux included if I hadn't tried that and found it as much or more of a hassle in those specific machines, be it compatibility issues or just fitness for the application. I'm not married to Windows at all, but there are definitely things that are much easier to handle there, which does justify sticking with it through the reinstalls and awkward weirdness on those.

Hi, yes, I'm here. The user. Of both, in fact.

Both Bluesky and Mastodon have their quirks and their different cultures. The feature sets of their protocols may also be different, but they sure aren't relevant to the experience at all, because federation is not a user-facing feature for the vast majority of the social media experience.

Stop cheerleading for social networks. Social networks are not your friends, including Mastodon or the rest of the "fediverse".

I'm not sure about the digital-only stuff, but the OP is specifically talking about yt-dlp as an alternative to ripping the BRs, and I have to agree that ripping the disks will be easier and yields better results.

Hardware availability is the trickiest part, especially for UHD, but if you have a drive that will deal with the disks you have I certainly wouldn't bother with the stream rip.

But hey, as a fallback, it's good to have the option.

Honestly, at this point I have a good enough TV that I'd rather spend that much on a 4KBR than on movie tickets and popcorn.

Granted, I live in an area where getting a really good cinema experience isn't trivial, that opinion didn't hold as much when I used to live within walking distance of an IMAX screen. But still.

I default to 4KBR on any movie I have a genuine interest in. I am also equipped to rip them (no thanks to the industry's increasingly absurd attempts at DRM), so streaming safe digital backups is an option, although it's still a bit heavy to do so without losing quality if you're not really well set up for it.

I could understand the format being dismissed when people were using 1080p SDR displays but man, since OLEDs got popular the quality improvement over streaming is so obvious, especially in older movies with a lot of grain and shoddy digital masters.

I can live with it becoming a cinephile option if I have to, but in the current environment of quality degradation for online services it's still how I'd recommend watching movies.