I deplore robbery, but let's be reasonable: a bunch of bros? Dressed all Richy? Out at night? Are we sure they weren't asking for it?
You can't troll both ways, even if you outsource.
Am I right that this is all his mother's fault? That Lochte wasn't planning to report the "robbery" at all, but he had to after his mother told the press. I presume he made up the story for his mom because she could tell he was traumatized, but he didn't want her to know about his own misbehavior.
Mothers: the source of all problems.
That's what you get for lying to your mother.
I'very refined my theory about why he told this story to his mom -- he needed to have an explanation for why she should give him an advance on his allowance.
At least you didn't blame some Brazilian guy.
The only thing I want to hear about this story is the final outcome, and then never hear about it again. Lochte isn't worth more than minimal attention.
There is no final outcome yet, is there?
I think he won second most medals of anybody on the U.S. swim team named "Ryan".
Has Brazil released our bros yet? When does Obama give Brazil an ultimatum? And when does Trump make this a campaign issue?
Does anyone care about the non-Lochte bros? Lochte made it back to the US before the Brazilians noticed the discrepancies in his story, and the US surely won't extradite him.
They're making us pay $10,000 to get the last one back. It's sort of like that one movie where everybody was selling using drugs and the one guy would have been executed if the other guy hadn't come back and admitted he was there too. Except three of the four fled and none of them came back.
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It looks like Trump is finally pivoting (see latest on reversal over deportations) but not only is it too little too late but it seems likely to lose him some of that rabid white nationalist base. The gift that keeps on giving.
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"Return to Paradise." Took me a while to google it because I had the plot wrong.
17: After he explicitly said he wasn't going to pivot? Whatever gets him continued attention, I guess.
On the other hand, I'm not sure contradicting his earlier positions would even really count as pivoting for Trump. More like continued flailing but in a new direction.
12: I don't think so. I assume the world will make it known when there is. Until then, I guess there's this thread.
Until then, I guess there's this thread.
In which, as in the country as a whole, all other topics are being rapidly overshadowed by Trump.
Pivot = good, like a tech company!
Flip flop = bad, like a politician
a bros by any other name
how brosaic
Ambros Beerce
St. Ambros of Milan
speaking in bros
Politics and Bros
bros garden
now boarding bros one through ten
the name of the bros
16 Someone start a GoFundMe stat.
Brostarter.
Based on prior exposure to Roxane Gay's tweets, I think the intended message is less "Let's not be hard on him" and more "Like most men, Ryan Lochte is a horrible person".
To be fair, she's probably right about that.
And I don't think ogged was unaware of it when he wrote the OP.
Yet more evidence that Twitter is a great way of fractionating humanity and saving just the horrible bit.
I think the intended message is ... "Like most men, Ryan Lochte is a horrible person"
What? I'm pretty sure the intended message is, "Let's take something that is commonly said about women and rape and see how preposterous it sounds when applied to men and a different crime."
Ned just has an annoying fixation on internet feminists and their alleged misandry.
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Looking up information on camping stoves unexpectedly led me to prepper sites when I searched for information on storing partially used fuel canisters.
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The Broscial Origins of Dickishness and Mockery
The Eighteenth Bromaire of Ryan Lochte
Lochte, Stock and Two Smoking Bros
"Lochte, you gotta help me!"
"Take two bros and call my mom in the morning."
Aha, ethanol- a sad Lochte, meth, cold, a salon. Ah, tea- ha!
Forgive Lochte, he is but an immature 32 year old.
Degree of difficulty bonus for doing it on a phone that kept trying to autocorrect.
35: That stuff pops up all over. The prepper preserved food is much cheaper than what they sell for backpackers, but I've never bought it. I've always assume it must be so cheap because it tastes bad enough nobody will eat it if the world hasn't ended.
I'm thinking of getting a Kelly Kettle style thing because you don't need to worry about fuel canisters and it seems better for the environment I like playing with fire.
This incident shows Lochte has the right stuff to be a part of the Trump campaign. He can be Trump's expert on relations with Latin America.
He went to Latin America and couldn't even make the locals repair a toilet he broke, let alone build a wall.
What is the intended message of Roxanne Gay's tweet? Serious question. I feel like I can't piece out just where the irony goes.
Jms in 33:
I'm pretty sure the intended message is, "Let's take something that is commonly said about women and rape and see how preposterous it sounds when applied to men and a different crime."
I mean I would have guessed 33 but it seems weird in the context where these guys did falsely claim they were robbed.
Yeah, the tweet is slightly off. But I think she's going for that no one is extrapolating from one bad apple that all robberies are a lie, the way people extrapolate from the article about UVA or whatever.
67/9: what makes this trickier is that a lot of the boo-Lochte reaction was parallel to what shouldn't be said about rape: looking at changing details, judgments about the victim's reaction, and face-value acceptance of claims from the police.
69: The tweet does implicitly concede that some woman somewhere once lied about rape. Point being made is: One ought not take peculiar circumstances and generalize them.
So it's "although some men clearly do lie about being robbed we don't think all men are lying about it, therefore we should not think that all rape accusations are false although some are in fact false"? That doesn't seem like the most powerful/like her message. Are even MRA lunatics claiming that all rape accusations are false? I guess the answer is yes, they are.
Well, kinda. I mean, that fucked up UVA story last year? When it fell apart, a big part of the reaction (including a post by Ogged here) was that 'Jackie' and the author of the article had screwed over rape victims in a big way. One big rape story that turned out to be bullshit was going to be very damaging to the credibility of rape victims generally.
And of course, it sounds silly to say that Lochte having made up a bullshit story about being robbed is damaging to the credibility of theft victims generally. I think that's the tweet's point -- if it's a nutty reaction to have about theft, it should also be a nutty reaction to have about rape.
Or at least, more often than not.
But the Brazilian police here made a big deal about this specifically to discredit stories about being robbed/robbed by the police! Discrediting robbery stories that purportedly shamed Brazil was, like, the whole point of this incident. (To be clear, I 100% agree with the substantive point made in 74, this just seems like an ineffective and baffling rhetorical way to get there).
Sure, it's all about what level of generality you're thinking at.
It's not that any sane person thinks every rape report is false, it's that in any given case there's some set of people (often a lot of people) who are willing to believe it's false, no matter how damning the facts. (The intersection of all those sets is probably non-empty, and it's got some real scumbags in it.)
I thought the tweet was just making fun of the defenses of Lochte that claim "who hasn't gotten drunk and lied a little about what they did afterward?"
I mean, I also don't see much evidence that Lochte lied, as in, maliciously told falsehoods. He is a widely acknowledged idiot who was drunk. My guess is that he thought he was being robbed,* and he distorted the details both because it made him look better and also memory is fallible (especially if you're a drunken idiot.)*** He also told this story to his mom, not expecting it to become international news, and not expecting Brazil to make an example out of him.
I see multiple rape parallels here. A girl goes to a frat party, gets super drunk, takes her top off and dances on a table, consensually gives someone a blowjob, and then something non consensual happens. She feels upset about it and tells her roommate she was raped, leaving out the topless and the blowjob parts. The roommate reports it to campus services, and suddenly her drunken, confusing, traumatic experience is reported in the The Atlantic as part of a series on rapes on campus, she gets national scrutiny, and then it comes out that the whole event didn't go down exactly as she told her roommate and she suddenly gets demonized. That something non-consensual actually happened gets lost in the fact she's a lying slutty mcslutterson.
Anyways, neither Lochte nor the Brazilian authorities are coming off super well here, and I'm not seeing it as obvious that Lochte is coming off as worse.
*And honestly, it's not totally clear that he wasn't at least a bit extorted. The photographic evidence of damage makes $50 (or $400) not necessarily the fair price of replacement. The surveillance video is missing a 3 minute chunk in the middle and from what can be seen also doesn't disprove Lochte's story. Right now we have a he said/he said case, where every side has a motive to lie, and we're disbelieving the swimmers because they're douchey idiots.**
**I take apologies that are required to release someone from foreign custody with a grain of salt.
***Details like, they're lying liars who lie because they claimed they left a 4, but they really left at 5:50 are precisely like this. If you're shitfaced and you leave a club when the sun is coming up, you might remember it later as being leaving the club "around 4," because that seems like a crazy late time to leave a club.
Pretend I closed the tag on the hyperlink after "photographic evidence."
TL:DR Even if it's actually false and/or the events leading up to it were 100% his fault, Lochte very likely may have interpreted having a gun pulled on him by a guy shouting in Portugese and demanding all the money in his wallet as a robbery, which is getting lost in this "Lochte lied because he's a douche bro" narrative.
73: like so much current Internet comment, you're over-interpreting if you're trying to identify lexical meaning in it. The actual content is "Go team! Whooo! Get intae them!!" It's not a conversation, it's singing your heart out for the lads; politics as a continuation of football with the use of other means, to borrow Clausewitz for a moment. The point is just to cheer and yell for Team 1 vs Team 2. Meanwhile, no doubt, Team 2 is howling and yelling and carrying on in Team 1's @s.
Come to think of it, football hooliganism is pretty much the perfect analogy for Twitter. There's a small subset of users/fans of each club/personality/cause who actually enjoy and seek out violence for its own sake. There's a much bigger, although still minority, group who don't actually initiate trouble, but they more or less relish the excitement of it being a possibility and the cool of being part of a rebel subculture. And there are a lot of people who wear the colours, sing the songs, feel the feeling, but are only likely to be involved in any trouble if it comes to them and group 2 above appear as leaders in responding to it. Beyond that, group 4 are basically everyone else.
Groups 3 and 4 are horrified that they get tarred with the same brush as group 1, while group 2 are similarly horrified but in deep denial about how much they contribute to the total nuisance caused to others. Group 1 always starts the trouble, but there aren't enough of them to make a good riot on their own and, being crazies, they don't have much judgment.
Problematically, one of the best ways to enjoy the football/Twitter without getting punched or arrested is to hang out with a big and well-organised group of 3s shading into 2s, because numbers deter and cops are more of a problem on your own. But, if you do that, you're perilously close to creating a new gang of 2s.
And secretly, everyone kind of likes the provocation of it.
I think it's obvious that everyone would have believed Lochte if he had higher cheekbones.
A great swimmer can never have high cheekbones because they create drag.
On the contrary, their sharp edges are highly aerodynamic. Compare the nose of the Concorde, for instance.
A brief search to find out if fish have high cheekbones only turned up this. Who says quora isn't good for anything?
83 seems right. It's interesting to think about all the pre-internet outlets for the basic human desire to troll/watch the antics of trolls. Obviously the internet has created a space for unbridled consequence-free indulgence of the trolling instinct but the desire to be a "provocative" "bomb thrower" is clearly some kind of pre-existing impulse for a lot of people.
Bridges. The mountains of Thebes. It is a very old pastime. Mythological, almost.
88: I wouldn't want to confuse trolling with playing devil's advocate, though. The latter, of course, has a long and praiseworthy history; it doesn't count as provocative bomb-throwing. It's the Socratic method.
At any rate, trying to parse a tweet seems counter-productive to me: for one thing, those things are necessarily abbreviated to 140 characters. There's a longer thing comparing narratives regarding black crime to the Lochte story. It's an exercise any one of us could have written while half awake.
As an online discussion of trolling grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Socratic method or Socrates approaches 1.
92 is true. Moderators banned that fucker for a reason.
"Hemlockr is a community monitoring service that lets you take moderation to the next level."
Trolling is foundational to Western Civilization.
Famously, Aristotle disagreed:
"One might wonder whether there is an art of trolling and an excellence; and indeed some say that Socrates was a troll, and so that the good man also trolls. And this is in fact what the troll claims: that he is a gadfly and beneficial, and without him to 'stir up' the thread it would become dull and unintelligent. But this is incorrect. For Socrates was speaking frankly when he told the Athenians to care for their souls, rather than money and honors, and showed that they lacked knowledge. And this is not trolling but the contrary, exhortation and truth-telling-- even if the citizens get very annoyed. For annoyance results from many kinds of speech; and the peculiarity [idion] of the troll is not annoyance or controversy in general, but confusion and strife among a community who really agree."
Aristotle, "On Trolling".
I have to say this is a bit too quick. I'm not sure the old codger was playing it quite on the level when he recommended banishing the poets and such.
Looks like you can't link directly to the treatise, but you can download a PDF here:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?aid=10413837&fileId=S2053447716000099
88: The kind of behavior that Freud would have attributed to the death instinct we can now more accurately attribute to the trolling instinct.
94: Uber for hemlock delivery. Great business model. Feels unicorny. Let's get some facetime with Peter Thiel!
99 et al:
For when you experience The Unbearable Bro-ness of Being?
Abraham and Isaac: trolling your own blog.
That's actually a pretty good summary of the entire Old Testament.
Speaking of bros, the new Point Break has amazing stunts but otherwise is so boring I think my spleen just jumped out and ran away.
I'm only now truly appreciating the brilliance that is 105.
Brosopopoeia
Bronian motion (giddyup)
I'm in that insomnia-shy state of fearing my own pillow, and have been reading obsessively about the Vancouver housing crisis, which is morbidly fascinating because of unusual government meddling in the market. It appears.
It's not even that late where you are.
Right. Right! It's too early to worry that tonight will be like last night!
More Vancouver infodump: A doubtful academic thinks the BC government's current good intentions are paving a road to hell. I'm willing to believe the tax proposal will backfire, and other parts of the analysis seem depressingly reasonable; the "Bantustan" conceit is in poor taste, though. (Is there a cringing/wincing emoji?). However two years ago the same guy proposed chopping up medium-sized houses into multi-family micro-dwellings, which is possibly an improvement on inhabiting a shipping container. It gets pretty delirious by the end. ("It's true that squeezing three units out of a 3,200 square foot lot is a lot easier than squeezing five units out of the same sized lot. But it's not impossible. Good architects can do it. And the need seems desperate.")
I had no idea things were so much worse there than here. I just assumed Vancouver had a Bay Area-like (or at least Seattle-like) economy and shit, for reasons that seem unclear in hindsight.
I know nothing about the current state of housing in Vancouver, and have not read any of your links, but it does have a reputation for being more open to high-density development than other west coast cities, so I'm surprised to hear that they apparently also have a housing crisis.
Vancouver's been a housing nightmare for years now, at least for buying. I can't say the apartment rental market looked noticeably worse than NY, DC, or especially the Bay Area.
Probably worth a click through to the second link in 109. It's an unusual situation. Basically, every detached house (and many condos) costs at least C$1.5 million, average family income is in the C$60,000 range, and foreign investors have been allowed free rein. The condo towers have all been built; they're just uninhabited. Prices have shot up again in the last year and everyone is panicking.
It will take 23 years for a typical young person to save up a 20% down payment on a Metro Vancouver home -- so, just in time for kids to leave for college. If they leave.
I never really looked into why the housing market is so bad there, though. I think no Canadian admits that people want to move there for non-freezing weather so they blame foreign investment.
Wealthy Chinese investors have basically bought up a ton of Vancouver. The property is an investment /money storage device, so they don't live there and don't rent the properties either.
So would you all rather live in 1/5th of a bungalow, or a renovated shipping container? (Maybe we should say two shipping containers. Not sure of square footage.)
I am on track to defeat insomnia without venturing into online tariff and trade databases. Good night.
86: aerodynamic but not hydrodynamic. At low Reynolds numbers, viscosity effects dominate and you might be better off being rounded than pointy.
117: and if I remember a citizenship device too? If you invest more than a certain amount you get a Canadian passport?
re: 115
That is basically the London model, too, at the higher end.
120 was funnier before I went back to look at 86.
104: I was going to watch Point Break on the plane just now but chickened out because I was invited to a party (as a token young expat) with the cast in a swanky (read awful) Beijing nightclub while they were filming scenes in China and didn't go, and now don't want to find out that it was an unlikely instant classic or something. So that's reassuring.
I can probably watch it on my next flight. My flight was 12 hours late taking off and - since that was a pretty definite missed connection - I assumed that I'd get a night in a hotel and arrive 24 hours late on the equivalent connection the next day. But instead the airline found a way to get me to my destination only 20 hours late, but constantly on planes and with four hour layovers in deserted airports on the wrong side of the world. My mental state hasn't been helped by my decision to party with old friends and not really sleep for the two nights prior to the beginning of this ordeal. Currently I'm at hour 30/40 and starting to feel a bit hallucinatey. It's possible that I'm asleep on a plane or in a departure lounge at present and only dreaming writing this comment, in which case thank goodness because it's already way too long sorry
It once took me four days to fly from North Carolina to Ohio. It would have been painful, except that I was able to be at home for those days.
125 It's also possible you're in a J.G. Ballard story in which case get out while you can.
(I did enjoy both "Money Monster" and "Hail Caesar" though)
127: No charismatic yet dominant male antagonist has appeared to lecture me on the inevitable breakdown of civilization (so far). That said I am starting to feel like I might construct a lean to from airport furniture and make a home for myself in this deserted terminal, so there may be something in what you're suggesting
If you decide you want to return to the collective delusion of linear time, remember you can post on unfogged to ask us for help. Also, remember dogs are nutritious and tasty meat!
130: Thanks! And while I'm no longer 100% certain which airport this is, I think that I'm in a country where roasting an Alsation on one's balcony would be considered pretty old school, but not completely beyond the pale.
Maybe I should go and check out the restaurants?
American failed to get me from Minneapolis to Baltimore last week despite 2 days of trying. Fortunately they finally did get me to Philadelphia and the train from there only takes an hour. At least airports seem to be nicer than they used to be.
On the face of it everywhere has a housing crisis. The rich have squeezed so much money out of the world they can't find anywhere to put it but land.
They aren't making any more land. Except in Hawaii and Iceland.
And Holland, and Dubai. And the South China Sea.
But, more seriously, I doubt I know more than a handful of people with a house worth more than half a million and I must know several hundred people who own houses.
You will have a crisis as soon as the refugees start fleeing the rents/floods on the coasts. Not really joking.
136: Really? I'm pretty sure all my siblings' houses are worth more than that. And I would guess that every attorney that works here that owns a house, the house is worth more than a half a million.
My sister has a successful professional career and is marrying into a family with like four houses, an art collection, and an aerobatics team. Not feeling so great about my life choices.
I'd had to have to feed a whole aerobatics team. Plus changing the wood shavings would get old.
When did you have to have a whole aerobatics team fed?
I'm extrapolating my when our dog had puppies.
Yes. That's why I used the puppies and not the hamster.
A hamster flyby would likely be less than thrilling.
What does it even mean to have an aerobatics team? Like they're just around for whenever you're bored?
No, the paterfamilias runs it has a hobby-become-business. They have sponsors and stuff. Point is, they have two hangars full of planes.
They also used to have a brushware factory, which, I belatedly realized, manufactured pretty much every broom or brush I've used in my life.
150: Are you close to your sister? Sounds like this could be a good time for a career change to useless-but-well-compensated hanger-on.
Hate her like the plague. The feeling is at least partly mutual.
You need to seduce a similarly family-hating scion of big broom.
Also I resent the implication that my hanging-on would inevitably be useless.
Do you have your pilot's license? Can you join the aerobatics team? Maybe start small, like a wing walker or the like and work your way up.
155 - right, and the there's a mysterious and tragic "hangar fire," amirite, and then with a little forgery and seduction the broom factory is yours.
Sis and future hubby are working on theirs. Also hubby is actually a super-nice guy. I feel like I should warn him off, really, but that would just be asking for trouble.
154: No insult intended -- I just assumed since you wouldn't have to do any actual work, you'd prefer not to.
If you chop up the brooms, do the pieces turn into little brooms?
157: So is she marrying him for the money? Or for the aerobatics team?
No, Heebie, they don't. What would give you such an idea?
154 was a joke. I would totally take free money.
160: I don't know. Honestly I don't understand her at all, but there's no way she didn't notice.
The money, that is. The mutual incomprehension she definitely noticed.
161: Is it flooding? Do you have any buckets?
First, I worried for Heebie's neurological integrity, then for my own; finally, I recognized the reference, and despaired, for my memory was too poor for witty riposte.
The aerobatics team might be able to use a hanger-on.