When someone says "He's an unbelievable genius," I now understand that the person speaking is either a con artist or a gullible idiot. Unbelievable geniuses don't exist, there's just specialists, people who get lucky, people who work hard. So if you're saying someone is such a genius, either you have no metric by which to measure genius, or you're selling something.

“I think Cullen made the Satoshi accusation for marketing. He needed a way to get attention for his film.”

Cullen is absolutely selling something: he's selling his documentary.

The various denials and deflections from Todd, [Cullen] claims, are part of a grand and layered misdirection.

Smells 100% like bullshit. I had no take on this documentary one way or the other before, but now I'm very skeptical.

I'd say 80% of this is traceable to having a comfortable amount of money his entire life and decent, non-abusive parents. A lot of anxiety and mental illness most people experience is traceable to trauma due to scarcity or trauma due to family. Ditto sleep disorders and reactability.

It doesn't explain everything, of course. No allergies is just a lucky die roll (and may not be true forever; allergies sometimes develop over time, or appear because you finally tried something new). And plenty of mental illnesses can still develop no matter who you are.

"I shot a guy in the head, but then a different guy moved into the house where he lived, so it wasn't that bad?"

I mean, that's probably not gonna get the girl, but I think you taught her dad a little humility

Watermelon and chicken were two of the ways that black people started supporting themselves after being freed from slavery. They were agricultural products they could raise with very little investment and start building wealth from essentially nothing. Racists, not wanting them to prosper, mocked them for their preference for these things, but it's important to note that the mockery didn't stop them from supporting themselves with the foods they were able to produce. To this day black people enjoy these foods, and there's nothing wrong with them enjoying the foods. If you're with your black family, and you want to celebrate your own heritage, this isn't actually a bad way to do it.

However.

When a corporation, particularly a corporation run and staffed by white people, makes a choice to celebrate a significant black cultural date by presenting people with foods that white people used to mock black people, it reads as mockery. (This is especially true in North Carolina, a place where racism is rampant and open.) At best, this is tone deaf; someone along the way should have said "hey, do you think any black people will feel like you're doing this as a racist attack?" And if any one of them had answered "yes" to that question, they wouldn't have done it. It made it through the pipeline to being something they actually did because nobody in the decision chain cares about the racist overtones of what they were doing.

If you're going to do anything to celebrate black history or black culture, failing to ask any black people what they think about it is racism. Cultural sensitivity would have meant getting some input from a few black folks about how they think it should be celebrated--and, had they done that, they would have avoided this mess.

And, just in case anyone was wondering, the VP in charge of this situation is white.

Apart from the confederate flag itself, this show was pretty much anarchist. They spent every episode humiliating the cops and breaking any unrighteous law they could. The show treated the flag as set dressing.

They also came from a family that canonically resisted the Union during the civil war. And there's very few black people in the show whatsoever. So.

I know the hate symbol has always been a hate symbol, but if there's any show where you could say "it was a product of its time" (the 70's, btw) I think it's this one.

It's true, the fact that we never drew and quartered this guy does seem like a failure of our responsibilities

“Whoever did this does not understand that stealing newspapers doesn’t stop a story,” she told readers in her email.

This story was already lowkey national news but now it's going to go nuclear. Whoever stole the papers, what a complete moron.

This argument did not go well

You can't convince people to do their job with logic when they just don't want to do their job. After minorities, the thing cops hate most is doing their job.

I don't know whether valve has violated anti-trust law or not, and I certainly don't think gaben deserves any more protection from covid than the general public but;

this is a stupid ruling. Why on earth can't he appear remotely, as he requested? They can't "adequately assess his credibility"? Are they gonna have an FBI body language expert on hand? Check his forehead for sweat droplets? There's nothing they can ask him in person that they can't ask him over a camera.

Feels like the plaintiffs are doing some kind of lowkey spite thing here, and I'm surprised the judge played along.

> she continues talking to him anyway because she really only cared that he's white

He finally figured out how to exit