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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2376 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 17, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The less obvious implication (and I have no idea whether the historical record would bear this out) is that one reason Bunting and his gang evaded capture for so long is not because they managed to intimidate anyone aware of their crimes into silence, but because they managed to persuade them that all of their murders were really vigilantism, meting out "justice" to those deserving.

If you read through the wikipedia article on the murders, their entire social environment seems to have been extremely dysfunctional. Drug abuse, several mentally disabled individuals AND several schizophrenics, even the non-illegal relationships involve frequent partner switching and large age differentials (including with the mentally disabled and schizophrenics!), even the people with no directly mentioned issues somehow collect pensions for unclear reasons ... The article also directly acknowledges at least some of Bunting's victims actually being sexual abusers. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the authorities just didn't want to get involved because, as the old saying goes, "just put all of them in a sack and randomly swing a bat at it, you'll always hit the right one". Not to mean that they all really did what was alleged, but that the extreme level of dysfunction in the general community made the accusations so plausible that most just didn't want to get involved in the mess.

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the authorities just didn't want to get involved because, as the old saying goes, "just put all of them in a sack and randomly swing a bat at it, you'll always hit the right one". Not to mean that they all really did what was alleged, but that the extreme level of dysfunction in the general community made the accusations so plausible that most just didn't want to get involved in the mess.

When writing Chinatown, Robert Towne said he was partly inspired by a conversation he'd had with a Hungarian vice cop, who claimed that there were so many competing ethnic groups and dialects in Chinatown that the police had no way of knowing whether their interventions were helping or hurting the exploited — so their policy was to do "as little as possible".

Interestingly in real life, the trans woman who was murdered (in the film exclusively referred to by their "deadname" Barry) had previously been in a sexual relationship with one of their killers. They shot a scene for the film making this explicit, but it was cut.

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