Tanista
3hr ago
Eh, there is a certain level of jumping where one can fear for their lives.
In any case, these people are like defense attorneys: they have the client they have. The lies told - he was jumped, he knew them as bullies - were the best fig leaves they had. Surely it would have been better if they could claim Metcalf and his friends inflicted some grievous injury but, well, we saw his mugshot.
To me the rapidity and totality of the lying happened precisely because the case as it stood was just indefensible and incredibly stereotypical (it seems demented but the mindset of a tribalist seems to be "we need to get there with our own story first", similar to the Digwa case* even though it shouldn't make any difference in the long run). In the Rick Chow situation people could at least try to argue that he should never have chased the kid or that Chow was lying as a way to say it was still an injustice. Here, you have to make shit up.
* Though there are reports that the police tried to downplay the Nowak situation so maybe it's more rational than I give it credit for.
I simply cannot conceive of a situation where I'd consider Karmelo's behavior legitimate.
I think the specific lies that people online were spreading in the immediate aftermath - e.g. that Austin Metcalf and other players jumped Karmelo - are a pretty clear sign of a guilty mind. Even with the massive, obvious in-group bias it seems a lot of people understand that you need something like that.
Some people are just stupid/antisocial enough to believe that "touch me and see what happens" constitutes a legal/moral defense for murder but it's telling that wasn't the line at the start.
I see no reason why streaming antisocial behavior like Johnny Somali didn't shouldn't count as an aggravating factor that gets you more time. Antisociality is contagious, mainstreaming it (potentially to kids) shouldn't be treated as the same act without the exhibitionist element. Just tack on a 20% bonus.
Moral of story seems to be: don't bother doing the wifely bit, enhance your assets with surgery, find a rich sucker going through a midlife crisis, get him to dump the wife and kids, and reap the benefit of all that massive profitability without having to be there for the rough patches and backing him and his dreams.
This is a bad lesson to take, but I wouldn't be surprised if people are ruining their lives this way. This was basically the seething resentment at the heart of FemaleDatingStrategy. There's no point since men can cheat so let's be hyper-transactional and demanding upfront. There's no consideration they have the leverage to behave this way (or what they lose when they do)
First of all, the system worked: Mackenzie Scott supported her husband, made a family and when that family broke down for reasons not of her own choosing, the state rewarded her with her share of the community property. It's a better deal than many people get in breakups.
And if you don't break up (like Zuckerberg hasn't) then you just won.
Also: this is pretty arrogant. Who said you're beating the Lauren Sanchezes of the world in a head-to-head matchup if your man really wants a sycophant-sexpot? Charisma is a skill. You can watch some videos of a younger Sanchez and see that she's put her reps in in the gym and she has the right career to put her in contact with these men. Not everyone is so practiced, not everyone has a talent for ball and some people even find the whole thing unpalatable.
And she still got lucky.
It's pretty strange to argue that Aella has a sample with a certain bias and then assume that all other research is deliberately "massaged" as opposed to them not having that particular problem.
(Not to mention that some research, e.g. evopsych-inspired research, is offensive to the orthodoxy as well yet still gets done)
Bezos' wife was paid because she wasn't a whore or a lover. She was a real partner. If anyone "deserves" to get such a large share of their spouse's earnings it's probably her.
It really is the best case scenario for the feminist divorce laws at this level of wealth. It wasn't like he married a model who counted the hours until she could get the biggest payoff.
Tanista
1d ago
Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!
I imagine this sort of life would become markedly less cute in your old age compared to being a wageslave and taking the contribution match for a couple of decades.
Tanista
2d ago
I remember when she actually used to be the token good one, until she gave it away and became even better.
Then she had to open her mouth.
Tanista
2d ago
I mean I don't think it's possible to be an ethical billionaire in the same it's not possible to be ethical in general - someone is always going to be upset
This is precisely why the focus is on billionaires. The left-wing claim that "there is no just consumption under capitalism" does too much: it breeds either neuroticism or Hasan Piker-style hypocrisy where you justify buying $10,000 watch as if it's the same thing as needing to buy a house or consuming unethically sourced products from some company with monopoly power.
I take it more as scapegoating than anything.
Tanista
2d ago
I know JK Rowling has taken steps to force Warner's to source ethical products for their Harry Potter theme parks so she at least made an effort, and I'm inclined to think an artist selling books is likely pretty low on the totem pole of evil moneymakers in the first place.
The first historical pagan reference to Christianity is from ~112 CE by Pliny the Younger, governor of northern Turkey, asking the Emperor his advice on dealing with recalcitrant Christians.
Notice in this story that he didn't already know what to do and, iirc, was basically told by Trajan to not go looking for problems just handle them when they came up.
But you're right. I was thinking that the systematic persecutions came much later under Diocletian which long postdates the Gospel's likely dates (and that at the time of their writing the Romans were just hostile towards Jews in general and had no reason to pick apart their endless ideological debates*), which is true. But forgot about Nero's opportunistic behavior. That shows they were at least known and/or distrusted by pagans as well.
* Which explains some of their conciliatory gestures.
Tanista
2d ago
In the time of Christ and the early Church, the key neighbors in question were the Romans who tried and failed across the next >350 years to torture, rape and murder Christianity out of existence. It wasn't be nice to your immediate neighbors, everybody does that, it was show love to the men leading you to the pyre. If purely for reasons of history and epistemic hygiene, should your primary understanding of Christianity have come from American Scripturalists and the modern atheism they spawned, you are lacking 1800 years of empirical record.
There are verses that call for cooperation with and forgiveness of state authorities, though they may be oppressive.
But, in the time of Jesus or at least the writing of the Gospels, it's just as if not more likely that it meant Jews, actual neighbors who persecuted Christians who tried to stay in the same communities. Paul admits he tried to destroy the Church and he likely wasn't the only one. It's dubious if the Romans recognized it as anything other than a cult led by a rabble rouser.
Tanista
2d ago
God is a Yankee?
But yes, @Thoroughlygranted has the right of it: The writers were part of the WGA regardless of their nationality and so there was no one around to write the script.
Big movies tend to be unionized. I remember it was a big issue with From Dusk Till Dawn - covered in Full Tilt Boogie if you really care - where they faced strikes and shut downs for making a movie for $15 million (which I guess passed whatever indie cutoff they were willing to tolerate)
Craig/the production could have tried to find some anonymous scab but do you want them writing for Bond? And even people who aren't in that guild are in another one, so it'd be pretty awkward for them.
Tanista
2d ago
I think Quantum of Solace can be blamed on the writer's strike. Skyfall wasn't bad. The Christoph Waltz movies were ruined by spending too much time caught up in the canon of Bond, much like Tom Cruise climbed up his own ass in the last couple of Mission films trying to weld it into a coherent arc that no one asked for.
Which I think is just a general industry trend now.
If you don't bite the bullet and become sex-negative (many do) you can make the same argument left-wingers make for decriminalizing drugs: sex work being work doesn't make it unpleasant (plenty of work is), it just means it should be brought out of the shadows to better protect those very vulnerable women and given the protections of any hazardous job since those women are gonna do it anyway (apply the left wing skepticism, arguably selective, of prohibition here)
Millionaire actresses don't have to strip every four minutes on Euphoria unless perv "visionary" directors like Sam Levinson want to make a point.
Tanista
4d ago
It disappeared faster than Kony 2012 once people started criticizing.
It was more that I was skeptical that the mindset is actually new. I think people just have way more channels to spread this stuff outside of respectable media.
And whether it'll stick this time. The left didn't win on Horton at the time, but they attempted to frame all such measures (including Clinton's crime bill) as modern racism and they succeeded well enough to get themselves a repeat experiment in coddling criminals for a couple of years.
"He's from a moderately competent community" seems less relevant than "He seems like a wannabe violent asshole".
It's interesting how much of the discourse is centered around Sikhs-as-good-'uns.
Some implications for how people see other cases in their heart of hearts.
Tanista
6d ago
Take the murder of Iryna Zarutska. She was stabbed by a career criminal who had been let out of jail before. If this is just a tragedy, there is not much to do except arrest the perpetrator and try to put him in jail. But if this is an injustice, it's an indictment of the entire judicial system that the criminal was not already in jail. The murder isn't just something that happens but is something that was "allowed" to happen.
This is just a reversion to the - at the time successful - Willie Horton strategy.
Tanista
8d ago
Agreed, but then we end up having to watch said canon crash and burn when someone without any love for the IP grabs hold of it and inserts their own vision, and then mocks the people who are suddenly alienated because har har I peed all over your stuff now I own it. A fandom should, in such cases, be able to organize and just pay some other person to continue from where things left off and go on their merry way. This could happen in the current era, but in practice, coordination problems mean you can't outbid Corporations for the rights.
Hey, at least fans can fight over whether Sony's version of the canon is better than Microsoft's. We lost something when the console wars died down.
Tanista
8d ago
If they have $100 million, they can create their own brand with slightly different details, so it steals ideas from the existing brand without violating its copyright, and succeed off marketing even if their brand is worse.
Then why did they pay Lucas $4 billion?
I don't deny that this has happened but the examples - e.g. 50 Shades of Grey which was transformed even if the core point of "dark triad alpha loves me" was kept, that Anne Hathaway movie - say something and the fact that studios still pay or overpay for IP does too.
In both cases, the original creator probably ends up with more sales and attention than they would've otherwise, by being credited with inspiring the heavily-marketed release.
I think Lucas prefers the billions he made before Disney could just copy him + the billions he made selling it to them to the honor of being the John Carter to whatever successful series Disney made off his ideas.
Certainly, one could argue that Lucas introduced people to Flash Gordon and Japanese cinema but how many? I was a pretty big SW fan and I don't think I ever watched anything because I was told it inspired SW.
Tanista
8d ago
A central example of a xenophobe would be someone who dislikes another culture he knows very little about. "I don't understand their language, their food smells strange, their customs are weird, they are probably up to no good and I want them gone."
I don't know that I'd consider an Israeli or Turkish imperialist who hated and feared his neighbors but wasn't ignorant about them a fringe example of a xenophobe.
You can't stop anyone from writing a story, especially nowadays. In practice, copyright has a chilling effect.
If there's no money in it you've driven away a lot of people (cynically: the most talented people who would offend writers the most). In a pre-internet world your reach is also going to be functionally miniscule so, except for the love of the game, why do it?
This is true even in fanfiction where Anne McCaffrey's antipathy towards fanfiction blocked it from FFN for years (despite the pro forma disclaimers writers would make). Back in the day you could scare fans trying to write novels in your world off the major sites purely through copyright law (I think Ao3 feels it's on sturdier ground now and has Dragonriders of Pern fics)
Antiracism is probably positively correlated with IQ, and lower class people are likely less antiracist in part because they're less likely to go to college.
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