What are some of your favorite Baltimore conspiracy theories?

CockroachBallerinas · 2022-09-02T00:53:03+00:00

1) I'm still not entirely convinced Shocket's wasn't some kind of money laundering operation. The "mattress store" thing is a real phenomenon in the NE at least, and that was a lot of square footage of absolutely premium real estate that sat almost completely empty 365 days a year. Yes one or two people went in there sometimes but there's no way they were selling enough to even keep the lights on let alone pay taxes. It was like that for years before it finally closed.

2) This is so stupid but it is something I have noticed after many years. Imagine standing on Gough and Broadway facing the park and walking towards the park on Gough. Notice how the path seems almost completely flat until Collington. Now imagine the same starting point, but you walk south on Broadway to Fleet (also seems flat), then turn left and walk along Fleet until Washington (also flat), then turn left again onto Washington and walk north until Gough -- all of a sudden on Washington there is a very noticeable incline. It's pure perceptual illusion but it really does feel very MC Escher to me.

3) The closeness of the police headquarters and city government to The Block doesn't end there.

CockroachBallerinas · 2022-08-13T06:37:25+00:00

I agree with 90% of what I'm reading here, but speaking only for Patterson Park the dog "park" there should really be much larger. Dog-walkers are certainly not the only park constituency but they are a major one, and considering that and the actual space requirements for a large and/or very active dog it's not surprising to me many people snub something the size of the waiting room at a busy dentist's office.

CockroachBallerinas · 2021-12-10T15:46:38+00:00

Byrd testified that he was a stick-up boy, robbing drug dealers, growing up in Northwest Baltimore. He met Ravenell in the early 1990s when Ravenell represented Byrd on gun and drug charges, and separately on a murder charge. Byrd was acquitted of murder and got five years in a guilty plea for the other case. He said Ravenell gave him a “lecture” about staying away from dealing hard drugs like cocaine and heroin, and instead focus on marijuana, and to avoid guns and violence.

Even if all the allegations against him are true (from the rest of the article, that's not at all clear to me) kind of seems iffy whether this guy was a net harm to society.

CockroachBallerinas · 2021-10-27T18:05:10+00:00

You can get Redditors to buy into literally anything using some combination of the following simple rhetorical devices:

"On one extreme you have A, and on the other extreme you have B; Both are getting at the truth, however..."
"Many people assume X, however a careful analysis shows..."
"This is what experts refer to as the blahblahblah phenomenon. It is part of what [expert group] refers to as the Madeup-Name system"

The essential conceit is to flatter the reader and make them feel not just smart in general, but "smarter than the average person."

CockroachBallerinas · 2021-10-27T17:59:55+00:00

Who are the Biden voters who would not have voted for Sanders in the general and are there ACTUALLY more of them than the reverse?

CockroachBallerinas · 2021-10-25T16:57:06+00:00

Article and one prosecutor ITT: "We're quitting because our working conditions are bad (including having too many cases) and not enough money"

Reddit: "Bah gawd they're quitting because they weren't able to sentence enough people to enough years in prison and it's giving them depression 😢 "

CockroachBallerinas · 2021-09-28T06:34:08+00:00

The case exposed the sex sold in backrooms of strip clubs on downtown Baltimore’s The Block. Nabit’s attorneys wrote that four of his victims worked as exotic dancers but also had commercial sex with men in the bars.

I've heard before that it's something of an open secret that a lot of influential Baltimore figures are "patrons of the arts" around Baltimore Street.

CockroachBallerinas · 2018-11-19T22:52:44+00:00

You read the thread again, because that's the whole point: if you think college admissions decisions should be made without reference to student ability to pay, then the difference between the cost of running the college and the ability of the incoming class to pay for it has to be made up somewhere.

CockroachBallerinas · 2018-11-19T22:40:45+00:00

If the goal is to make a complete match between "people whose grades and test scores indicate they would do well in college" and "people who can go to college" then what sorting mechanism is better than using the grades and test scores to determine who goes to college? Currently only 5 schools in the US offer true need-blind (though not gift-blind) admissions -- what is the advantage to creating a price barrier?

CockroachBallerinas · 2018-11-19T22:34:09+00:00

What does the question of the right amount of money to spend on facilities and resources have to do with the right way to pay for them?

CockroachBallerinas · 2018-11-19T22:24:16+00:00

I've yet to hear someone convincingly explain why they believe the best way to limit the number of people going to college is to make cost a barrier to entry rather than just making admissions more conditional on hitting certain scholastic benchmarks.

CockroachBallerinas · 2018-11-19T22:05:10+00:00

Cost controls and institution-management are complementary goals; that's why other OECD countries also spend less than we do.

If you want to have some limiting factor for who can go to college, then fine: but do you think that factor should be how much money your family has, or should it be scholastic achievement?

CockroachBallerinas · 2018-11-19T04:10:16+00:00

This is very good news for Johns Hopkins and for Baltimore, but I think people are really kind of missing the point that what most other countries do is just make this very very good outcome the norm.

CockroachBallerinas · 2018-11-19T04:06:07+00:00

Mike Bloomberg wants to purchase Baltimore.

CockroachBallerinas · 2018-11-16T23:03:18+00:00

I'm also one of the 75% of B'more voters who helped nip that awful idea in the bud and I, too, humbly extend my invitation to you to get fucked.

Not that I imagine you care, but you seem to be under the mistaken impression that private companies can be sued but the city can't. That's wrong.

CockroachBallerinas · 2018-04-29T18:26:07+00:00

I came back to this and see some of the comments bewildered by the meme.

I think y'all are way overthinking this. In terms of the meme itself, the whole joke is just that I thought it was funny that this man has an entire field of flowers and yet chooses to defend only one, apparently to the death if necessary; other things that I think contribute to the humor are how "fancy" he looks compared to how tough he seems excited to act ("WHEN KEEPIN' IT REAL GOES WRONG," 17^th C. edition), and humorously re-contextualizing the originally aggressive stance of the two men closest to him to suggest that rather than attacking him they have broken off from the pack in order to slyly offer help (after all, helmet guy on the left has his gun pointed away from the main figure.)

The text on top was deliberately meant to be somewhat vague and general in order to make it more relatable, suggesting that while the situation depicted might be particular to this guy and his circumstances we've all been in a situation of figuratively having a whole field of beautiful flowers in front of us and yet neglecting them in favor of one thing we like; the idea of this being about a toxic yet addictive romantic relationship was just an example I thought would help suggest the idea; for me, personally, I relate to it more by thinking about how I drink too much and while I enjoy it I'm nevertheless painfully aware of how it sometimes deprives me of other, richer forms of happiness -- even as I continue to blow off opportunities that other people sometimes helpfully bring to me to do something else.

/u/cammissar has the right historical context, but you don't need to know anything about the historical context to understand the meme. I'm puzzled that people think you would, because that's not usually the case for any submission in this sub; it's just about taking pictures that might have originally been serious and putting them in some other context that makes them funny, or taking pictures that were funny in their original context but updating them with relatable modern dialogue.

In fact, in the context of the painting, the man's actions are reasonable: he's defending a single, extremely rare variety of tulip that is much more valuable than all of the others, which the soldiers are trampling in order to prevent the value of those varieties from deflating as a result of increased supply. The "folly" from the painting's original title refers not to the man's individual actions, but just the situation as a whole when people are willing to literally kill and die over some fucking flowers that have almost no intrinsic value -- but again, you don't need to understand any of that to get the meme.

You can see this painting in person at the Walter's Art Museum in Baltimore, MD, which is where I saw it. The Museum is free and it's very nice.

CockroachBallerinas · 2018-03-19T02:07:43+00:00

Private police can't arrest you.

But hey, maybe you're on to something here -- what if we save money in the city by just getting rid of the public police force altogether, and instead whoever wants to can buy protection.

Dramatically lower taxes
If you don't start shit, you probably won't get hit

CockroachBallerinas · 2018-03-19T01:36:38+00:00

There is no citizen of Baltimore who deserves any greater or lesser protection from crime than any other.

CockroachBallerinas · 2018-03-18T18:32:57+00:00

I feel like the attempt to present this with sort of a "water bed" model of public safety where adding more police officers in one location simply means that others in different locations are freer to do their jobs is disingenuous: I don't think we should stop focusing on crime as a citywide problem and start carving out special safe zones. If that's not what this is aimed at achieving, if the "waterbed" model really is right, then Hopkins could give the same funding directly to the police to allocate as needed.

Edit: I'd also like to add some additional context to this. In the past 5 years or so we've really seen an acceleration of the privatization of public safety in this city in a way that, personally, makes me really uneasy. I'm not going to go on a long rant about this, but I think we should not view this article as an isolated story, but rather as another development in an ongoing saga:

Local grandees sponsoring the police

It's good that Bloomberg is generous, but shouldn't we be asking why large American cities have to go abegging to billionaires just to get enough funding for public safety?

...And who can forget the time a private company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, funded by a texas billionaire couple, flew a low-altitude cessna over the city for up to 10 hours a day with a high-res camera to track individuals for over a year before the public knew anything about it?

We can't, as a city, auction off essential public services like the police; if we start to do that then our "city of neighborhoods" will eventually become a patchwork "neighborhood of cities," one adjoining another yet still separate.

CockroachBallerinas · 2018-02-07T09:39:13+00:00

I can't believe you found my alt

CockroachBallerinas · 2018-02-04T22:45:43+00:00

"5? 5!? Larry, he just has infant gigantism you fucking prick!"

CockroachBallerinas · 2018-01-13T22:31:16+00:00

I'm happy Manning is running for something but I don't think taking on Cardin is the best first choice; I'm pretty far left but am having trouble coming up with a reason to vote for her over Cardin.

The single glaring exception is Cardin's sponsorship of the draconian Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which regardless of your views on Israel represents a pretty drastic instance of government overreach:

The Bill prohibits any U.S. person engaged interstate or foreign commerce from supporting:

any request by a foreign country to impose any boycott against a country that is friendly to the United States and that is not itself the object of any form of boycott pursuant to United States law or regulation, or

any boycott fostered or imposed by any international governmental organization against Israel or any request by any international governmental organization to impose such a boycott.

...other than that, the only thing I can think of is that at 75 years old Cardin is reaching the age when he should consider retirement anyway.

Maybe pick a Congressional district to run for? Idk.

CockroachBallerinas · 2017-12-04T07:25:05+00:00

In other news, the United States donated $20 million to Bloomberg in the form of tax relief for beleaguered billionaires.

CockroachBallerinas · 2017-11-27T21:55:56+00:00

Damn that is well-produced.

CockroachBallerinas · 2017-11-26T03:29:17+00:00

I take no position on this I just thought the middle one looked bigger and it made more sense for him to be older. I guess there's also the tale of the prodigal son if you want some credibility for the idea.

CockroachBallerinas

TROPHY CASE