FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
14d ago
a narrative developed among the prosecution team and others that Cochran was trying to convince the jury that acquitting Simpson would somehow be tit for tat payback for the acquittal of the Rodney King defendants.
Including members of the jury themselves: "In the documentary O.J.: Made in America, juror Carrie Bess said she believed '90% of the jury actually decided to acquit Simpson as payback for Rodney King'." One of the jurors gave OJ a black power salute after the verdict had been rendered.
police were able to extract less than a drop of blood from the Bronco and no blood from the inside of the house
They found Nicole and Ron's blood on one of OJ's socks in his bedroom.
FtttG
14d ago
106k words on my NaNoWriMo project. If I can maintain the pace I've been writing at for the past two weeks, I'll have a first draft by May 21st.
As I mentioned the other week, my girlfriend and I recently watched the miniseries American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson. On Friday night we sat down to watch episode 7, and found it so absorbing that we wound up staying up til 4 a.m. to finish the remaining three episodes.
I was particularly intrigued by how the series presents one of Simpson's defense attorneys, the (in)famous Johnnie Cochran. The portrayal is nuanced: the series doesn't shy away from acknowledging his philandering and accusations of domestic abuse, nor depicting the various underhanded techniques he employed in trying to secure an acquittal for Simpson (redecorating Simpson's house to mislead the jury into thinking Simpson is a pillar of the black community; during cross-examination, speculating on the basis of nothing at all that Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman may have been murdered by cartel members); but also depicts him as a tireless advocate for black civil rights, who takes on OJ's case specifically to call attention to police racism and misconduct within the LAPD and within American society more broadly. It doesn't hurt that Courtney B. Vance gives probably the best performance in the show, effortlessly capturing Cochran's black-preacher charm and flair for the theatrical.
All the same, I couldn't help but think this portrayal was sort of - white-washed? From what I've read of the real Cochran, he strikes me as every negative stereotype about cynical, dishonest lawyers rolled into one, who took on OJ's case first and foremost to enrich himself (both directly in his fees from OJ, and indirectly in the trial's publicity making him into a household name) and secondly owing to what we now euphemistically call "in-group preference" i.e. racism. I don't think (as the show seems to imply) that the real Johnnie Cochran thinks that black men who have actually commited heinous crimes ought to be punished, but that the American justice system is so riddled with racism and white supremacy that it is impossible for us to have any real confidence that the evidence mounted in their prosecution was not compromised, planted or coerced. That, at least, is a defensible position, and arguably more defensible in 1995 than today. But I don't think that's what the real Johnnie Cochran thinks, or thought at the time: I think he thinks that OJ is black, therefore he should not be sent to prison (certainly not for murdering two white people; maybe he'd think otherwise if OJ had murdered someone close to Cochran) and any methods are justified in trying to accomplish that goal, no matter how dishonest or underhanded. I think the show was essentially sanewashing the real Cochran.
Am I being unfair to Cochran? People who know more about the real man than I do, do you think that's a reasonably accurate characterisation of his worldview?
FtttG
15d ago
Such a system is capable of coordinating like an astonishingly huge conspiracy so long as everyone's goals are aligned, but it cannot switch gears just because some clever people somewhere in the blob have realized it would be in their long-term interest.
Pretty much everything about the response to Covid in the West seems to directly contradict this.
FtttG
16d ago
The film is the only one of the Daniel Craig Bond movies I've seen. I rewatched it in January and found it held up quite well (Mads Mikkelsen, in particular, is magnificent). Curious how it compares to the source material.
FtttG
16d ago
I bought my girlfriend Mina's Matchbox by Yōko Ogawa for Christmas, which she loved and urged me to read. About a third of the way through and I don't know where the story is going yet. Pretty cool that one of the main characters has her own pet Moo Deng which she rides to school every day.
FtttG
17d ago
There was an anti-immigration protest in Dublin today, with the turnout in the thousands. There was also a counter-protest attended by the Revolutionary Communists of Ireland (lol) and the People Before Profit political party (whose seats in the Dáil fell from 5 to 3 in the last election) - Palestine flags, pride flags and keffiyehs as far as the eye can see. I had heard that this was going to be a big one, possibly as big as the one in November 2023 which led to rioting, looting and public transport set alight. The police were out in the streets in force and a police helicopter was circling overhead. My girlfriend, herself a recent immigrant, felt a little nervous about going outside.
In the end, nothing came of it - so far as I'm aware, not even minor street scuffles. Is it weird that I feel a little bit disappointed?
FtttG
18d ago
(This is a very tasteless joke. If it's too tasteless - mods, feel free to delete.)
The girlfriend and I are currently watching The People vs. OJ Simpson which, after a slightly shaky and didactic start, really hits its stride around the third or fourth episode. There's a scene in which Marcia Clark and Chris Darden have had a few drinks and are happily slow-dancing together, but then a sad, worried expression passes across her face. I joked that at that moment she was thinking "I'm currently prosecuting the case of a white woman who married a black man who went on to beat and murder her - perhaps I'd better not pursue this". And then I realised that the victim is literally named Nicole Brown. It couldn't have been more on the nose if a gang of 4chan trolls had written it collaboratively.
Or if there's a wheelchair user, teach about wheelchairs, etc... It makes sense (is also why people put random wheelchair users into stories, for example).
Such a large proportion of people will require the use of a wheelchair for some period of time at some point during their life that it makes sense for schools to proactively teach children about wheelchairs, even if none of the pupils in the school are wheelchair-bound. This is also what I was getting at with the myopia example. Mass-release children's books in which the characters are a Five-Token Band wherein one child is shortsighted, one is wheelchair-bound, one is autistic etc.? Given the statistical frequency of these conditions, completely unobjectionable and even commendable. Now, mass-release children's books in which one character is trans, one character has CAH, one character has Huntington's etc.? That I find a lot more difficult to get onboard with.
And there's even some evidence that those assumptions are false. People often really want those assumptions to be true, I think because it'd make life / "doing the right thing" simpler for them.
There's also an obvious celebration parallax effect, in which activists will deny up and down that social contagion plays any role in trans identification, and yet are fully aware that teaching children about the concept of transgenderism (particularly when it's defined using an extremely broad constellation of "symptoms" which just about everyone might experience from time to time) is a surefire way to guarantee that at least some of them come out as trans. But of course they'll rationalise this away by claiming (unfalsifiably) that the children in question were already trans, but simply lacked the language to describe their experiences until they were educated about it.
The double standard/isolated demand for rigour is also on full display: any adult who's interacted with a child for more than five minutes knows perfectly well how impressionable how children are. If you teach a class full of children about X (where X is a medical condition, mental illness etc.), by the end of the class half of them will be convinced they suffer from it. (Never mind small children - how many first-year psychology undergrads have become convinced they suffer from schizophrenia after a single introductory lecture thereon?) But these same adults will turn around and insist that transgender identification is governed by a completely different set of psychological dynamics, wherein false positives simply do not exist under any circumstances.
FtttG
19d ago
Being intersex is a minor, harmless anatomical deviation from the norm.
A large proportion of intersex people are congenitally infertile. As noted by @vorpa-glavo, "people with Turner syndrome have physical differences (low set ears, short stature, lymphodema of the hands and feet), they don't normally undergo puberty, often have issues with spatial visualization and mathematics, and are prone to certain diseases (heart defects, Type II diabetes, hypothyroidism, and conductive hearing loss)". People with Klinefelter syndrome tend to have issues with reduced strength, cognitive impairment and mood disorders. People with Trisomy X tend to have IQs a standard deviation or more below average, among other cognitive impairments. And so on and so forth.
"Intersex flag" I would, however, strongly defend. Being intersex is an anatomical trait, not a sexual behavior. Four-year-olds can very well be intersex themselves. Teaching them to be at peace with it, and teaching their classmates that it would be wrong to bully people for being intersex, seems perfectly defensible. Indeed, viewed in this context, the intersex flag is just about the only pride flag which could apply to a four-year-old.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the likelihood of any individual child being intersex or knowing an intersex child is vanishingly small (e.g. Klinefelter syndrome only affects 223 out of every 100,000 male babies, and often isn't even obvious until the subject starts puberty). This isn't like myopia, which affects nearly a quarter of the population. Even if I received credible assurance that the four-year-olds in question would only be taught about intersex conditions in a strictly medical context and would not receive any education about queer theory, gender ideology or pseudoscientific nonsense about "sex assigned at birth" - I would still question the utility of teaching four-year-olds about extremely rare medical conditions which affect such a tiny proportion of the population. Of course no hypothetical child suffering from motor neurone disease should be ashamed of themselves or face bullying because of their condition, but teach a class of four-year-olds about motor neurone disease, and no matter how many caveats you include about how rare it is (never mind statistics, these children don't understand addition yet), we both know what would happen: the dumber half of the class wouldn't know what you were talking about, while the smarter half would go home in floods of tears and have nightmares for weeks afterwards about being paralysed and dying young.
I suspect know that the only reason that children are being taught about intersex conditions at all is the same reason these conditions have been brought up 99% of the time they've been raised by anyone since the turn of the century: as a means of smuggling in gender ideology by the back door.
FtttG
21d ago
98k words on my NaNoWriMo project. First draft now projected to run to 120k. I'm hoping it will take me fewer than 22 days to get there.
After the chore that was Magda Szabó's The Door, I needed some light reading, so I picked up The Disaster Artist, Greg Sestero's account of his relationship with Tommy Wiseau and the making of The Room. It's a very entertaining and easy read. Someone named Dormin posted a review on the Slate Star Codex subreddit in which they compared and contrasted this book with its film adaptation (directed by and starring James Franco as Wiseau, and his brother Dave as Greg), arguing that the film had completely missed the point of the book. While Wiseau in the film adaptation of The Disaster Artist is weird, tactless, continually baffled by concepts which come naturally to most people and completely incompetent when it comes to the craft of filmmaking, he is essentially portrayed as a harmless nutcase. In the book, by contrast, Sestero presents him in a much darker light: rude and unpleasant for no good reason, paranoid, jealous, controlling, conniving, manipulative and indeed emotionally abusive. Given that Wiseau was involved in the production of the film adaptation, Dormin speculated that some softening of his portrayal was necessary to get him onboard. Highly recommended so far.
FtttG
23d ago
Are you just apathetic to those sorts of tasks compared with verbal skills?
Of course not - I wish these tasks came naturally to me the way they do to so many others.
Did you excel at, say, english and history classes in school and do worse in other subjects?
When I did my Leaving Cert (Irish university entrance exam), I got a B in both English and maths. But I do think that, in general, I didn't have to work half as hard at English as I did at maths.
FtttG
23d ago
Full scale: 111
Memory: 101
Verbal: 140
Spatial: 107
Not even a little surprised that I'm a wordcel rather than a shape rotator. In future, if you see one of my posts and think it's badly argued, feel free to discount my reasoning accordingly based on the results posted above.
Someone on substack recently pointed out to me that Wikipedia invariably describes people who write for National Review and similar as "conservative journalists", whereas people who write for Vox or HuffPo will simply be described as "journalists".
FtttG
26d ago
Tracing Woodgrains's writeup on a specific Wikipedia editor is a must-read if you haven't done so already.
Inspired by some user whose post I saw the other day, I'm attempting a digital detox for the month of May. No Facebook, YouTube, or logging in to my personal Instagram. Because of my new year's resolution (to read at least 26 books this year), I'm reading a great deal of books, which is having the entirely desired result that my appetite for short-form video content, clickbait political hot takes, brainrot, algorithmic slop and even using this forum has decreased considerably. I don't expect I'll find this purge terribly difficult. I also want to exercise at least three times a week, which I expect will present the greater challenge.
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