faceh
57m ago
If he said yes, then afroman's statement was truthful which is a complete defense to the claim of defamation.
Technically all he had to do was say "no, not to my knowledge".
Its funny to think he had enough of an inkling of doubt as to the truth and thus didn't want to lie on the stand.
In trying to game out the Deputies' plan here, I can only assume they just thought they'd found a target with potentially deep pockets and who would just settle with them for a high six figures or something.
But they found a guy disgreeable enough to stick it out and who was a very sympathetic figure in the whole thing. And as noted, didn't burn goodwill by trying to turn it into a racial animosity moment. Which would have been a believable narrative here.
"Corrupt Cops against the First Amendment and the American Spirit" is a VASTLY more appealing framing than "racist white cops vs. downtrodden black rapper."
And showing up for the trial in American flag suit and sunglasses combo (with a perfectly coiffed afro on top) is a serious masterstroke.
I'm actually somewhat surprised the Judge let that fly, but then, the First Amendment ALSO protects the right to wear such things in court.
And the thing is, the cops in question actually had the makings of a valid case. Afroman made very specific, defamatory claims using the clear real names and likenesses of the parties he targetted. He did so intending, very specifically, to cause them reputational harm. If they were true claims, then he's very much in the clear. But surely some of those claims were just blatantly false. That's how rap beefs work, you make certain claims and boasts that are exaggerated or false but provocative to diminish the opponent's status.
It wasn't a frivolous lawsuit, just a stupid one.
I don't know how large the reputational harms could have been in money terms. Its just not a good look to get on the stand and play some goofy-looking music video by a dude whose house you did in fact raid, and pretend you're the one with the emotional trauma from this situation.
CLEVER. I laughed.
Of course, MLK is one of those lefty heroes who might have been okay with rape I was thinking of. The proof is not dispositive there.
faceh
20hr ago
Seems like the difference between the guy for whom its a 9-5 and he's just carrying out his job working at the atrocity factory, vs. the guy who is doing his war crimes during his personal time.
faceh
22hr ago
I mean, I'm just asking it to be provocative. "If saving six million Jews meant 12 million women get raped, is it a net good?"
Can your utilitarianism save you now, rationalist?
faceh
23hr ago
I mean, I'm not looking for redeeming qualities. Right wingers have their goddamn share of atrocities to their names, even if those who were impeccably gracious in their personal lives.
Just making some observations about comparative evils.
Was defeating Hitler worth the huge amount of rapes committed by the Red Army? I think the lefties would say so. I wouldn't want to ask for an exchange rate, though. "How many rapes is worth one holocaust victim's life" is a horrendously taboo question.
faceh
23hr ago
That wiki is a horrifying read:
Acts committed by Dirlewanger include burning the genitals of women he abused with a petrol lighter, whipping them naked, and injecting strychnine into Jewish girls and then watching their death agonies in the officers' mess. Dirlewanger would often rape children, whether boy or girl, and then shoot them afterwards, with many of his victims being from the Lublin ghetto.
Jesus. CHRIST.
Morgen requested Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, the Higher SS and Police Leader for the General Government, for an arrest warrant against Dirlewanger, but Krüger was blocked by Berger.
Sort of gets to the point, though, he would have gotten punished more quickly, if he hadn't apparently had a powerful protector.
faceh
23hr ago
Literally my thought.
I doubt he was having trouble finding consensual partners.
faceh
23hr ago
The fact that a long-serving GOP Speaker was a pedophile has been largely consigned to the memoryhole
How many statues to Dennis Hastert are out there? I genuinely don't know. I assume zero.
How many streets are named after disgraced Catholic priests?
faceh
1d ago
I'd make the connection between libertarians being open and tolerant (and leery of strict authoritarian rulemakers) and their susceptibility to letting questionable characters into their midst. They could stand to be about twice as judgmental as they actually are.
And lefties in general having that same tendency. They like to reject rigid rules and prefer more relativistic morals, and thus the are able to get to a position where "restricting children from having sex is oppression!" is a viable stance for many of them.
faceh
1d ago
Yep. "Positions of power will attract power-hungry sociopaths" is for all pursuits and purposes, a truism.
But it is notable that the ideology that claims to be about liberation, smashing of oppression and coercion, removal of hiearchies, etc. etc. has such poor antibodies against abusers achieving power.
To the point where they will actively coordinate to protect the reputation of the abusers in many cases, for the good of their movement.
And of course the libertarian movement, both right AND left, has a bit of a reputation for being pedo-tolerant to a fault, which points to the issue NOT just being about exercise of power.
I'm going to say something I can't truly back up but I'm noticing the belief forming so I'll throw it out there
It turned out that "Moses of his people" routinely raped underage girls including another famous activist Dolores Huerta.
This is bad. Imagine if it came out that MLK raped Rosa Parks. That bad.
It says something about the psychology of this particular ideology that so many prominent lefty leaders turn out to be rapists and/or pedophiles. It genuinely now seems like there are fewer such leaders, political or otherwise, in the last 100 years that DON'T have such credible allegations than those that do, now.
Likewise, look at the most credibly implicated parties on the alleged Epstein list, and note their overall political bent (Looking dead straight at you, CHOMSKY.)
Like, here's the most absurd way I can characterize it:
Even the Boogeyman of their entire political movement, Adolf Hitler himself, did not rape anybody.
I don't think Vladimir Putin has been credibly accused of rape either.
Trump has of course been accused of rape and other forms of sex assault (and yes, "grab 'em by the pussy" counts in its own way) but I am genuinely pretty sure he has never forcibly penetrated anyone in his life, I read him as his ego requiring him to believe he successfully seduced someone.
And how many male feminist types have been outed as sex pests in the last 10 years alone?
And no, I'm absolutely, positively not saying "right wingers are less likely to commit rape or practice pedophilia."
I think I'm gesturing off in the direction of "right wingers tend not to elevate rapists and pedos as leaders, and are certainly NOT prone to censoring or rewriting history to cover up such traits in their leaders." And perhaps a side of "Right wing leaders tend not to use their power to indulge that particular cruelty, despite the various other atrocities they will impose."
Happy to accept some correction on this point, but Googling (in an incognito window) terms like "Did Pinochet/Franco/Napoleon/Bolsonaro rape anyone" usually turns up results related to torture tactics used by their regime and not acts they themselves were known for.
Well, there are allegations against a dude named Franco but he's yet another of those male feminists.
And I DID turn up some credible claims about Mussolini. We could probably argue for a few hours about whether he's truly right wing, but I will not push that button.
faceh
1d ago
I think its somewhat less about being easy and more about being legible.
Redpill guys make the art of attracting a woman legible.
Looksmaxxers make the status game being played legible.
Bodybuilders make the process of slapping on absurd amounts of muscle very, VERY legible.
Science as a whole makes the basic biological/evolutionary/psychological underpinnings of our otherwise inscrutable traditions and social rules more legible.
If there's no legible rules, if the game being played changes on a dime or on the whim of some fickle women, or because political parties change, it becomes completely impossible to play this game in a 'rational' way.
And then people's fates are decided entirely by luck and a few factors they may or may not be able to control.
faceh
1d ago
Yep.
Cue my Skin in the Game rant.
We are TEN FUCKING YEARS into Trump's political career and they STILL DO NOT GET why he is genuinely popular, and why he keeps 'winning' even as they characterize him as a buffoon.
People that are THIS wrong for THIS long ought to be filtered out of the court of public opinion, should not have positions of political authority. But no, they persist on the power of mass delusion (which, ironically, is what enables Trump to be successful too).
This is why one of the most genuinely useful rationalist skills to learn is "notice when you are confused" and "make beliefs pay rent."
If I'm constantly surprised by certain outcomes, clearly there's a knowledge or logic gap I need to address, rather than just stepping on the same rake over and over again.
Needing to be rewarded for doing/knowing/being good at things is the behavior of a child or a dog. Part of being a man is cutting your own path in the world for yourself, not because other told you to, rewarded you for doing so, told you: "you were are a good little boy", etc.
Cutting a path TOWARDS what?
There are some things that have to be terminal values or objective, or close to it, for people to keep charging on. Call if 'purpose,' or call it will to power, call it whatever, but there's some world-state, some emotional state, some actual place on the map that one is striving towards. What is the long-term payoff in this life?
Existential self-satisfaction and discovery
I have engaged in a lot of 'discovery' over the past 10 years. Introspection, outrospection, research, experimentation, trying things, failing, and sometimes succeeding.
And it turns out that the factors that gives me the highest amount of existential contentment and self-satisfaction are having an attractive partner that loves me and having a genetic legacy in the world that I can expect will outlast me.
Bar none. I've had the experience, and I can say with zero doubt the happiest days of my life were having a woman that I expected to marry at my side. I am not guessing, I've been there, I know how it feels, I know how motivating it was, I can remember how happy it made me.
Likewise, turns out one of the most important things in my life is my little 18 month old niece. I can only imagine how important a child who is my direct genetic lineage would feel.
Amazingly, I also noticed that these are the exact things that the modern world has made much, much harder to achieve, for completely structural/economic/political reasons that are beyond any individual man's control.
I suspect I'm not the only one who has come to this sort or realization. Far from it.
Idk, figure it out,
Yeah sure. 10 years training Krav Maga 5 of those years teaching it. I can probably physically dominate on the order of 95% of the male population. If mating rights with local females came down to a contest of physical violence, I'm likely winning a whole harem for myself. But no, society is not (currently) arranged that way. How is it arranged?
Acquiring that skill was a hard thing. Maybe someday I'll have to us that skill. I'd love to never have to physically harm someone, but the capacity to do so is good.
But... why spend time building such skills. I point towards my earlier self-discovery. If I can't find a loving partner, if I can't pass on my genes and raise and protect children of my own, what in all that is good and holy do I do with these skills? If I'm destined to be alone for my whole life then I'm missing something that I am PAINFULLY AWARE would make me happier and more content.
And if developing further skills isn't appreciably increase my chances of getting this, then the motivation to put in the effort is simply not there.
Incentives exist, incentives drive behavior no matter your philosophy on the matter. If there's some reward for a behavior, you get more of it. Full stop.
And the current incentives are lacking for going out and doing 'great things' for a world that isn't going to let you achieve the favorable outcome that most people are biologically wired to desire.
Like, dude I don't, and most guys don't need someone holding their hand every step of the way. But support, positive reinforcement, and constructive criticism are sort of necessary. Rome wasn't built by a bunch of individual dudes self-maxxing. It was cooperation, coordination, building through team efforts (and some slavery), working TOGETHER rather than just saying "I dunno, you go figure out what you want to do." In short, men helping men figure out a unified purpose, and driving in unison towards that purpose for decades on end.
And when they didn't have enough women to go around, they banded together and guess what they did. And presumably your philosophy would approve of such path-carving. It shows gumption.
But it'd really help to make the whole process easier if we can at least agree that the social baseline is in fact slanted against men, and the factors that enabled and encouraged men to succeed not even 50 years ago have been knocked out from under them. AT LEAST BE HONEST ABOUT THE MAGNITUDE OF THE TASK, and then we can maybe acknowledge that solving it/overcoming it will require some serious cooperation between men, not just a bunch of individual guys wandering around 'figuring things out' ad hoc, with most of them failing, individually.
So, how can you cooperate/coordinate with other men to improve things?
faceh
1d ago
In terms of the larger genetic fitness level, many many women are successfully filtering themselves out too.
But this would lead us to the aside of how young ladies being on hormonal birth control probably screws up their actual desires and has them filtering for factors that aren't great for long term reproductive success.
That's only a problem if you believe that men in general or on average deserve a fair chance at accomplishing things like romantic partnership, sex, children, family, general life satisfaction.
What can I say?
I'm a man, I would like a 'fair shot' at every one of those things. I think the world that is ordered to enable the majority of men to achieve this outcome if they can follow a few relatively simple guidelines, and become 'worthy' of raising kids, will produce a LOT more human happiness and long term thriving on net than the trajectory we're on now.
If women themselves are less happy by any reasonable measure then clearly this whole experiment has failed to produce good results!
The world was never fair. But it is likely that it has become substantially less fair in this regard than most men were ever taught to expect.
So as a very basic level of fairness, if the actual 'rules' are thus:
They're concerned with finding the highest quality partner for themselves, and the highest quality partner is heavily determined by the partner's genes, and so the point of the test is purely to discriminate, not to be a system that men can learn from in order to pass it. The entire point is that they should be able to pass it without any help, despite the, again, bizarre, contradictory, nonsensical nature of the test, which also has a horrendous feedback mechanism.
THEN WE SHOULD BE HONEST AND ACTUALLY TEACH THIS AS TRUTH.
I will grant it as true for purposes of discussion.
If the entire social system does not teach men that this is how things work, and inculcates them with rules like "be yourself," "treat her with respect," "believe women," and "you have male privilege"... and these men find that adhering to these rules is not effective for achieving their goals...
This is what creates the opportunity for Red Pill Influencers to step in. The whole reason it is called "red pill" is the metaphor for 'waking up from the program' and breaking the conditioning of how men are socially expected to act... and accept the biological reality of what actually produces romantic, sexual, and genetic success!
The only reason they can claim to be providing special/secret knowledge is that society and culture have in fact been hiding this information. Hence why I said:
Its like we have a culturally-enforced Women are Wonderful Effect. It doesn't matter if they're performing objectively anti-social, destructive behavior for all to see. Women can do no wrong therefore if women are doing it, it isn't wrong. If you say its wrong and level a critique, YOU are in fact the bad person.
So in short, even if the world can't be made more fair in outcomes, we could at least teach men the reality of how the game is played.
And what we appear to be observing with Clavicular Et al. a huge generational cohort of men who have been exposed to and accept that reality, and they are trying to optimize as best they can, and (unsurprisingly) the social institutions that want to maintain the status quo revile this. But they can't refute them.
faceh
1d ago
Neither of these require any external input, western society does not deter or hobble you from doing them.
Well that's two, then.
Of course, what's the incentive for doing them if the reward isn't there.
Men ARE in fact deterred from traditional paths that would lead to knowledge. A properly motivated guy can learn all he wants through self-driven research and reading and discussion... like we have here. He just won't get the official 'certificate' that signifies he is intelligent and knowledgeable.
But he will not earn much respect merely for his intelligence and knowledge unless he can convert that into money, which is also made very difficult these days.
And becoming skilled at 'hard things' ultimately depends on what barriers exist to acquiring the skills. And what, precisely, do we consider 'hard things' in terms of skill?
Yeah, but the feedback mechanisms are all screwed up.
Mistakes men make are probably overcorrected, i.e. punished too quickly and harshly for them to learn the proper lesson. Related to my point that women aren't good at gracefully rejecting guys (or accepting rejection) who approach them.
Attempts by men to coordinate into groups designed to advance their mutual interests and provide mutual support and advice tend to get disrupted and infiltrated if they gain any success.
Taking the correct action usually doesn't offer immediate rewards, and progress can be hard to perceive. Hell, you can even be PUNISHED for taking the 'correct' path, and the rewards only manifest if you push through that and have faith it will pay off.
A guy is going to take a LOT of lumps before he happens on the 'working' strategy, and he can't even be completely sure if the working strategy will be enough to win until he's followed it past the point of probable no return.
So its "figure it out on your own" but you dropped men into the wilderness with a mislabeled map, barely any supplies, and not even a walkie talkie, much less an expert guide to keep them from stepping off a cliff. So they can set off walking in a given direction and hope it works out, but without the actual resources to tell if they're walking to their doom or not.
And when the comparison point is VIDEO GAMES, which have very tight feedback loops, visible rewards and progression, and satisfying 'gameplay,' the real world seems intolerable by comparison.
faceh
1d ago
There are some RedPill guys who were around since the early days who have maintained a sheen of respectability, and they aren't spotlight-seeking anymore, so they might interpret an interview invite as an unnecessary risk.
A man is a provider. A man is skilled at hard things. A man has a beautiful woman. A man is knowledgeable and intelligent. A man has a family. A man is powerful. A man is wealthy. A man has convictions. A man fights for a cause. A man appears effortlessly cool or funny. A man has a strong healthy body. A man is a good father.
Lets just take a quick audit, though.
Which of those things does western society actively deter and hobble young men from achieving these days? I'd argue almost all of them except the strong-healthy-body part, which is why so many men are now gym-maxxing, its the only unrestricted avenue left.
How much of the advice we do provide young men is actually outdated/useless under modern constraints? i.e. actively unhelpful and arguably setting them up for failure?
What if a prospective man surveys his potential paths to manhood, and concludes that the current structure of society is his primary obstacle to achieving it? What if he's correct?
What course of action does that man likely arrive at, assuming he doesn't give up and become a NEET on the spot.
And the whole problem with "the rewards are totally worth it" is that the big reward: wife, family, kids... those are objectively becoming less likely outcomes. Everywhere. So how do you convince these guys to get up and keep plugging away when they can observe with their own two eyes that it is increasingly unlikely that they'll get their preferred outcome unless something drastic changes?
faceh
1d ago
You can say it's selectively edited to make them look bad but if you watch it, it's hard to say it does anything than show conversations with them play out in real time and leave it to the viewer to make their own judgements (which will surely be negative, because the interview subjects are objectively absolute bell-ends).
I'm not throwing any particular accusation out.
But Documentaries are always going to be 'tainted' by the choice of interviewees, the topics they actually ask about, and selective, if not deceptive editing.
I think the types who agreed to interview are also somewhat more likely to be bad examples since they are the attention-seeking types, rather than the more grounded, intelligent ones who could in theory steelman their own positions.
But hey, if Louis' sole intent is to expose a grift and undermine the status of the grifters, I can overall approve. But again, its not examining why this grift is successful.
Albeit adorkable fearless modern day Socrates may not be an ideal your average teenage boy is going to gravitate towards (although I actually did as a teen).
Dorks need role models too.
And I guess he can at least attest to being married with kids.
From the CCTV videos, he has a decent amount of assets to seize to satisfy a judgment.
Agreed on the lack of reputational damage if he settled, though. And he was obviously savvy enough to see that he could raise his profile if he played this one to the hilt.
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