dasfoo
1yr ago
People like Pelosis can afford and procure services of higher quality providers than crazy hobos.
So can Hugh Grant and Eddie Murphy, and yet they were famously caught with Hollywood Boulevard hookers. There is a precedent for "slumming" for sex among the rich and famous. Probably moreso for San Francisco gays as the Castro District culture and history there is rich. I wouldn't be surprised if it was somewhat similar to how upper-or-middle-class Black celebrities will affect street dialect: faking authenticity is big in some subcultures.
The basis of the escort theory is, essentially: How did he get into the house? How does a house owned by one of the richest couples in America in one the most crime-ridden cities in America, not have a security system that can defend against a lone crazy person making a semi-spontaneous attack? And how is a lone crazy person disordered enough to think this crime is a worthwhile endeavor and yet ordered enough to find his way through the Pelosis' security apparatus?
dasfoo
1yr ago
e. DEPAPE stated that they went downstairs to the front door. The police arrived
and knocked on the door, and Pelosi ran over and opened it. Pelosi grabbed onto
DEPAPE’s hammer, which was in DEPAPE’s hand.
Does this course of action sound like something that happened in the real world? Pelosi is far enough away from Depape that he can run to the door to open it for the police. AFTER opening the door -- at which point police are inside the house with Pelosi and Depape -- Pelosi re-engages with Depape to grab the hammer (very spry for an 80+ year old, why not let the police take it?), and Depape pulls the hammer away and hits Pelosi (even though the Police must be literally on top of them at this moment).
dasfoo
1yr ago
Look, I'll propose something much simpler: DePape ringed the bell, someone (maybe even mister Pelosi) answered the door, and DePape said something that was misinterpreted, resulting in the person letting him in, thinking that he was expected.
Sure, but if it happened in the way you speculate, it's what would be reported. However, I doubt anyone can simply walk up and ring the Pelolsi's doorbell (in the middle of the night). Unless the Pelosi's themselves don't take seriously all of her public hand-wringing about right-wing violence, they surely have active measures in place to protect themselves from it, right?
dasfoo
1yr ago
The reaction of right wing populists, elected officials, intellectuals, and media regarding our lovable insane maga hammerbro doing a little trolling are making me wig out. People I thought were wrong but serious passing around clear bullshit about gay escorts, pretending the dude wasn't Q radicalized, and laughing it off. It's one thing for the lunatic fringe to do that shit, it's another entirely when the largest single conservative news network and most popular intellectuals are doing it.
Speculating about the motive and practical execution of the attack is not the same as endorsing it. I think hammer attacks are bad. I hope that no Democrats are attacked with hammers. I feel bad for Paul Pelosi. Even if he and his wife have been getting rich via insider trading during her decades in Congress, it's not OK to attack either of them with hammers. Or even break into their house to tape them up and talk to them. It's bad. Don't do it.
Now, whether Depape is a right-wing crazy person (with BLM and Rainbow signs in his yard), or a random crazy person, or a crazy gay hustler, is a completely separate question.
There used to be a sense on the Left that rich people indulged in a lot of exploitative and perverse shit and got away with it thanks to their influence on media and law enforcement. Now that the Left have become rich and powerful with heavy influence on the media and law enforcement in their deep blue cities, they strangely don't seem concerned with the misbehaviors of the rich or telling the truth about what happens when they are involved in some kind of suspicious event. I guess that's the job of the Right now. I'd rather the Left and Right cooperate on holding the powerful accountable.
dasfoo
1yr ago
That paragraph completes a collection of 3 paragraphs all follow the form "Republicans do , but Democrats aren't any better". That is to say, I'm pretty close to certain OP is saying "Roe v Wade, anyone" as a dig at Democrats
It read to me like the first hint of a tipping point, but it was vague.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Most standard issue home security systems will ring an alarm and some will even call 9-11 if a window is breached. You’d think if Pelosi was serious about the threats of political violence, she would at least have something like that in place. My guess is that they have something far more advanced.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I’m not arguing about what would be the best home security system, but that it seems unbelievable that the Pelosis didn’t even have the least home security system. A plebe like me can go to Home Depot and come home with something more effective than “don’t notice when someone breaks your window and then eventually run into the bathroom to call police.”
dasfoo
1yr ago
Which sucks for FL voters who don't get a meaningful say in their government.
I literally don't understand this, even reading your clarifications below. Does no voter get a meaningful say unless an election is close?
I live in Oregon, which is (usually) heavily weighted against my interests, and it does usually seem to not matter whether or not I vote. But that doesn't mean that the majority of progressives who win almost everything here didn't get a meaningful say, it just means I'm in the minority (hopefully not this time).
dasfoo
1yr ago
The only people civic minded enough to turn out to run our elections are also 70-90 years old.
So it becomes a problem to have them do counting of ballots given their cognitive decline.
IME, 70-90 years olds in cognitive decline are typically challenged by computer-like machines. Why do we think that they are worse at manual counting than at everything involving the custody and machine tabulation of votes?
dasfoo
1yr ago
Would it be reasonable to be suspicious when two thousand cell phones have a pattern of pings along paths from nonprofits to three or four different dropboxes at 2am?
If the movie showed that actually happening, yes. But they only speculate that it's happening and fail to follow-up that speculation with confirming evidence, which should've been trivially easy given the amount of video footage they boasted of having.
dasfoo
1yr ago
They don’t “speculate” in the sense of disclosing uncertainty, they outright state they have the data. The book actually lays out that data.
They speculate that their data reflects a conspiracy of vote fraud. What they never show is a single actual person going to multiple ballot dropoffs. Not just in one night, but ever. Their "4 million minutes" or whatever of video either fails to corroborate their claim or they decided not to show that it does, which is very weird.
I didn't know that there was a book, too. I doubt that it proves anything more than the movie did, beyond possibly doubling their profits on their uncorroborated speculation.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Apparently, the book intended to "name names" and then was recalled under threat of lawsuits: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/25/1131077739/heres-what-changed-in-dinesh-dsouzas-2-000-mules-book-after-it-was-recalled
Now, D'Souza and Regnery have officially released the 2,000 Mules book, and changed that section.
D'Souza had previously described left-wing nonprofits as "doing vote trafficking."
The newly-released book tones down that phrase to "potentially storing ballots."
And the names of specific nonprofits that D'Souza accused of election fraud have all been removed.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Conclusion B: Therefore, we must be all-inclusive with respect to immutable characteristics in friendship and dating.
Isn't the whole idea of the new gender paradigm that gender is mutable? Are they feigning that gender is immutable in order to smuggle in the notion that one shouldn't discriminate against those for whom gender is mutable?
dasfoo
1yr ago
Would people really trust blockchain, a technology few can understand?
The current lack of trust, as I see it, stems from a lack of transparency and a more complicated chain of custody between a person and the vote that gets cast in their name. Introducing a concept few people can really grasp is going to make it seem more hackable to the normie rather than less hackable.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Are we looking at more unfounded assertions that an election was stolen if Masto wins?
There's nothing in that article that suggests assertions of fraud. It's normal for elections with a very slim margin of victory to do a recount. Some places even have an automatic recount trigger if the margin is lower than a chosen threshold.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Can you briefly expand upon why? I only vaguely know who he is. I've seen him in TV a few times as a talking head but that's it.
If you want the self-serving Hollywood version of Dershowitz, there's a pretty good movie of one of his books, Reversal of Fortune, in which Dershowitz (played very well by Ron Silver) defends Claus Von Bulow (Jeremy Irons, who won an Oscar for it), an aristocrat charged with attempted murder.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Some friends of mine created a formal group for this exact purpose around when COVID began (coincidentally), and I was one of the earliest invitees. Its original intent was to create a network of locals with similar values who could depend on each other for business and other needs — like emergencies. Within a year we had about 75 members who would meet monthly. We had a newsletter and a website, and were starting a local business directory. But it is now falling apart for exactly the same reasons that you state: the contingent who just wants to complain about politics (focusing on stolen elections; all-in on the Trump cult-of-personality) has taken over and driven away almost everyone who was there for a sense of fellowship or building a supportive freedom-minded community. Once a core of political activists formed and began asking for a spotlight, growth immediately halted and now we're lucky to get 20 people at a meeting.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Alex Jones said that it was unfair that Ye had been compared to Nazis/Hitler, and Ye replied that N/H weren’t all bad. When Jones eventually felt like he had to start isolating himself from Ye by saying, “I don’t like Hitler.” Ye replied, “I like Hitler.”
dasfoo
1yr ago
Speculation on the North Carolina subreddit is that it was motivated by outrage about a drag show scheduled to be performed in Southern Pines last night.
This is hilarious. Why not just cut the power to the drag show venue rather than disable several substations? This is a preposterous theory that assumes the perp would risk getting caught at several more severe activities that required greater planning than the one simple no-fuss activity needed to directly fulfill their goal.
dasfoo
1yr ago
And Taibbi confirmed that the federal government, FBI, CIA, etc., did at no time, for any purpose, contact Twitter directly regarding the laptop story, or tell them what to do about it?
That's not accurate. He said he did not see anything like this in this subset of emails. He has no way of knowing anything that happened outside of these emails. This is like saying, "He confirmed God doesn't exist and has never existed," because there is no mention of God in these emails.
dasfoo
1yr ago
This muddy language is then used to support her argument where she says that the hysteria ginned up about Trump was largely correct because January 6 happened.
Not to absolve Trump of anything -- I'm not a fan, and it seems like most of his problems are self-inflicted -- but I would also suggest that January 6 would be far less likely to happen if the media had been less hysterical about Trump from the outset. Trump and the oppositional media were like one of those dysfunctional abusive couples who thrive on fighting and then hate-fucking each other. And if you remove Trump from January 6 and look at the hectoring attitude of mainstream media toward Trump's supporters, there's an even more clear cause-and-effect feedback loop of distrust and antagonism from which the media cannot claim its part as an innocent dispassionate chronicler.
dasfoo
1yr ago
The original thread contained the following exchange:
And Taibbi confirmed that the federal government, FBI, CIA, etc., did at no time, for any purpose, contact Twitter directly regarding the laptop story, or tell them what to do about it?
That's not accurate. He said he did not see anything like this in this subset of emails. He has no way of knowing anything that happened outside of these emails. This is like saying, "He confirmed God doesn't exist and has never existed," because there is no mention of God in these emails.
That was my reply you quoted. I'm concerned with people turning inconclusive evidence into conclusive statements (especially in news reporting), which happens everywhere across the political/culture war spectrum. IMO, there's a major difference between saying, "There has been no direct evidence that supports claims of election fraud" and "No, there was absolutely no fraud in the most perfect election ever." One statement is attempting to relay the best information that the writer has, the other statement is trying to convince the reader of something not actually in evidence. A little epistemic humility would go a long way to mitigating the lack of trust at the core of our social corrosion. It's OK to say, "No one knows for sure, and may never know."
dasfoo
1yr ago
A little epistemic humility would go a long way to mitigating the lack of trust at the core of our social corrosion. It's OK to say, "No one knows for sure, and may never know.
This also ties into the Prager thread today: If Prager had said, "Holocaust Deniers like to question the total number of Jews killed by Nazi Germany, so I did my own investigation and came up with 4.5 Million. Yes, that's less than the commonly used number of 6 million. Is that significant? In the sense of the evil of the Holocaust, no. However, it's important to try to be accurate with information, or else it might foster subcultures who are convinced they are being lied to. We Jews need to do better on this." Vs. "You bad Holocaust Denier, don't question the narrative!" I doubt the OP of that thread would've had any problem with it. How we frame things matters, especially if we start fudging to press a narrative.
There was a great Iranian movie last year titled "A Hero" (it was included with Amazon Prime, last I looked) that examines just how a little fudging around the edges can completely undermine a generally positive idea and turn the shepherds of its narrative into liars.
Last month one of the big controversies in online movie discussions was the box office failure of the film BROS:
https://deadline.com/2022/10/bros-billy-eichner-reacts-disappointing-box-office-results-proud-movie-1235133197/
The movie, which was which was promoted as a pioneering mainstream romantic comedy about gay men, earned $11.6 against a $22 million budget.
A lot of coverage lamented that romcoms of all varieties are simply dead as far as theatrical excursions are considered:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/bros-disappointing-box-office-debut-142922789.html
This may not be true if the romcom features major Hollywood stars -- the new Julia Roberts/Geroge Clooney movie has already broken the $100 million barrier -- but the cast of BROS is niche, to say the least, if Eichner (a Youtube celeb and bit player in later Parks & Rec seasons) is the most recognizable face in its cast.
Some questioned whether marketing the movie as an important milestone in gay cinema made it less enticing than marketing it as a funny comedy. Apparently, the narrative of the movie gives some prominence to the discussion of gay history, making it feel even more like a "lesson movie;" I don't know -- like everyone else, I did not go to see the movie, and I watch considerably more movies than most people.
Co-writer/star Billy Eichner blamed "homophobic weirdo[s]" for his movie's failure:
https://dailycaller.com/2022/10/03/gay-rom-com-bombs-box-office-billy-eichner-blames-audience-bros/
The movie podcasts I listen to couldn't find their way into discussing this elephant in the room beyond shallow references to Eichner's comment: Is it actually "weirdo" to be "homophobic" by Eichner's standard? Or is homophobia normative and homophilia is the "weirdo" position? 'Not homophobic' in this context, one assumes, means something like Ibram X. Kendi's "anti-racist:" that is, it's not enough to merely not be homophobic, one must be actively affirming of homosexuality (to the point of buying one or more tickets for BROS) to display one's lack of homophobia. However, if homophobia is to be measured by the reaction to BROS, it suggests that so few people are not homophobic that "not homophobic" is a position on the outer fringes of positions.
What I suspect is that maybe even most "allies" who support homosexuality politically with rainbow avatars, buttons, and bumper stickers, aren't going to go out of their way and spend their $30+ for a night out to watch gay men love each other, including an allegedly strong sex scene. Allyship's appeal as a virtue maybe doesn't easily translate into casual "date night" entertainment. For all of the battling over culture war insertions into big franchises mostly owned by Disney, those are still properties that appeal mostly to normies, who are the biggest box office spenders. If you take away all of the normie appeal -- the movie stars, the special effects -- and just leave the important socio-political content, the audience almost completely vanishes, as should be expected.
It also probably didn't help the box office of BROS that its target market --- young urban progressives -- is the same one most hawkishly cautious about COVID and the least likely to return to movie theaters out of what now could be ascribed to superstitious fears of deadly illness.
I had another thought about this movie today that I'm almost sure didn't occur to anyone who is 100% in on the Ally train, and which suggests a systemic blindspot within the pro-homosexual community: the title. "Bros" may be a term that has entered popular lexicon as a synonym for "Buddies," but etymologically it derives from "Brothers." Its meaning is an intentional blurring of the two: "Buddies" who are so close they are like "Brothers." The poster, https://nerdzone-cinemanerdz.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/bros-poster.jpg, which over the title shows the backs of two men each with a hand on the other's blue-jeaned ass, has an inescapable connotation of incest in this context.
If for many normies who have internalized decades of calls for tolerance and are no longer actively anti-gay, gay men still seem, when considered closely, pretty gross, adding an incest connotation multiplies that potential nausea exponentially. Can you imagine a movie poster just like that of BROS, but with a hetero couple, for a movie titled, "Like Brother and Sister?" It's almost inconceivable that this would happen outside of some edgy indie fare. (The only comparison that came to mind is Spanking the Monkey (1994) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanking_the_Monkey, a dark comedy about a fraught and erotic mother-son relationship, which grossed less than $2 million but launched the career of Oscar-nominated director David O. Russell.)
I suspect that, if homosexuality is still, in the broad scope of sexuality, a fringe deviation from the norm, the act of promoting homosexuality as "normal" has made its proponents tone-deaf to the general public's overall aversion to other sexual transgressions, like incest. That suggesting an extreme taboo like incest in the title either was not noticed as an obstacle or was noticed and dismissed is noteworthy because movie studio marketing departments are notorious for micromanaging every detail to an obnoxious degree to be the most blandly appealing to the widest audience.
Even if you don't think the title BROS connotes incest, the far lesser taboo it suggests has been treated as a consequential obstacle by romcoms for several decades. To take the title BROS at its most benign: How many romcoms are about the earthshaking repercussions of crossing the line from platonic hetero friendship to a sexual relationship? It's a staple of the genre and is often the primary conflict for an entire narrative. My guess is that, IRL, the friends-to-lovers pathway is a far more common transgression than vanilla homosexuality, and yet BROS wants to steal the less common transgression as a given and expects a wide audience to accept it without a blink. It doesn't seem a shock that ignorance of one taboo is joined hand-in-ass with willful ignorance of another taboo within the same broad category, increasing the reasons why a normie audience member could be put off from going to see this. The problem is, as I see it, not only that lines are being crossed that the general audience is not ready to cross, but that the censorious nature of public discourse about homosexuality has made its proponents unaware of the lines that are being crossed.
Also, one more line is being crossed: This is an unusually sexually bold poster for any mainstream comedy, let alone a gay one, right? I can't think of any others that depict fondling, except for some low-grade 1980s sex comedies, and even those are mostly leering rather than active groping. If BROS is supposed to be the gay equivalent of middlebrow comedies like NO STRINGS ATTACHED (2011) (https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTg2MDQ1NTEzNl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwOTgxNTMyNA@@.V1.jpg) or FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS (2011) (https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/417b9424-88ce-47b9-affe-58804b299ea0_1.09201acca0a0b0759d602d050606699d.jpeg) those posters don't show touching at all, surprisingly. I also looked through the posters for several other Judd Apatow-produced comedies from the last 20 years, and the only ones that show actual physical contact are STEP BROTHERS (2008) and BRIDESMAIDS (2011), and the contact in those is non-romantic. This is not a prudish criticism of BROS as much as it is to point out how out-of-step it is with mainstream Hollywood, which does have prudish marketing for comedies, and even for comedies mostly about sex. If the intent of BROS is to push envelopes, fine; but it shouldn't then expect mainstream success. If its makers want mainstream success, they need better self-awareness and management of their envelope-pushing.
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