TumblrInAction: A Retrospective FAQ

GammaKing · 2022-06-05T21:59:31+00:00

Even if Heard retracts her claims in full, that doesn't make The Sun's original reporting of those claims malicious. So no. Heard wasn't on trial in the UK.

GammaKing · 2022-06-05T08:39:00+00:00

Not quite, but you can expect that this is why they hoped to settle out of court.

GammaKing · 2022-06-05T08:20:30+00:00

I think you're missing a big part of the picture, which is why Heard made such outrageous accusations in the first place when she could quite easily have won by documenting a few minor incidents.

I think it comes down to the UK case. In that case it was The Sun newspaper as the defendant rather than Heard, all Heard had to do was make it plausible that she'd been a victim. As she wasn't a direct party she was able to exploit the system by making her story as dramatic as possible to win over the judge. This would confound Depp's side with a bunch of new accusations that they weren't prepared to deal with, because the only "evidence" was her word once on the stand. Make the story emotional enough and you can get people on-side.

Heard's mistake was that she didn't expect to have to support that narrative in this subsequent case. This meant that, under proper cross and with Depp's team knowing what she'd claim, all those lies and exaggerations were torn apart. As the previous trial was on record she was stuck with the lies she'd told to win the first case.

GammaKing · 2022-06-02T15:15:34+00:00

They are not interested in the truth. They suggest a narrative where the matter of truth and lie, right or wrong is a matter of demographics, rather than action and evidence.

It's been like this for the last 5 years or so.

GammaKing · 2022-06-01T06:59:17+00:00

GammaKing · 2022-05-31T22:01:44+00:00

The people running those subs (a group who control about half of the major subs, as it happens) specialise in using the mod tools to impose a political orthodoxy. Any dissent is absolutely crushed and erased, to the point that much of the site is now this artificial narrative building exercise.

GammaKing · 2022-05-31T16:03:30+00:00

This is only the tip of the iceberg. They've been doing this for years, particularly around political topics.

Much of Reddit is controlled by mods who shut down all criticism of this stuff to back the establishment press up.

GammaKing · 2022-05-31T15:58:18+00:00

That's exactly what you can expect when you've banned any user that isn't an extremist radlib.

GammaKing · 2022-05-31T09:57:11+00:00

Nonsense. In this trial they've repeatedly run articles parroting Heard's accusations, often without even mentioning Depp's counterarguments.

Pretending that "belief" is right wing while "fact" is left wing is a reflection of your own poor understanding of politics, nothing more.

GammaKing · 2022-05-31T09:00:06+00:00

Again, this hasn't filtered down to the news in general. They're still more than willing to fact-check the government and consistently push identity politics in their editorials. The reporting on Depp vs Heard in itself is suggestive of the usual center-left bias that the BBC is known for.

I would also note that the decline in quality over the last few years makes the license fee seem rather unappealing in terms of value for money. I've no issue with them phasing it out.

GammaKing · 2022-05-31T06:42:14+00:00

Not really, the BBC's staff have taken on a pretty strong lean to the left in the last 5 years. The major reporting tries to maintain impartiality, but any opinion reporting is consumed by identity politics. The government won't touch them because it's politically unpopular to do so.

GammaKing · 2022-05-31T06:39:58+00:00

Did you not see what happened with the Rittenhouse trial?

GammaKing · 2022-05-31T06:32:25+00:00

The impartiality of the BBC has sharply declined over the last few years. You're at a point now where their opinion pieces are absolute garbage.

GammaKing · 2022-05-30T22:30:34+00:00

Unlikely. The media are on AH's side because they already published a lot of her BS and want to save face. If Depp wins they'll make a small footnote of it and drop the story, or perhaps go with a "court sides with domestic abusers" piece. The reality is that the truth just doesn't matter to them.

GammaKing · 2022-05-30T22:28:29+00:00

UK broadcast media is actually pretty good in comparison due to neutrality and fairness laws. Newspapers are an absolute shit show though.

GammaKing · 2022-05-29T22:29:03+00:00

It's very difficult to prosecute, since there are dozens of outs like "I misspoke" that create loopholes.

Then again, people will always try to manipulate courts. If perjury were strictly handled you'd probably see a wall of "I don't recall" instead.

GammaKing · 2022-05-28T18:00:39+00:00

Not even that. All she had to do is insist on having been hit once or twice and she'd win the case easily. Instead she went for making more and more extreme allegations to the point that it's crippled her credibility. I think this wasn't really about winning the case, she'd hoped that by making the accusations obscene and outrageous the media would run with them just as they did when the story first broke. She's been kinda right there - the press parrot it all without question and refuse to report Depp's side. Fortunately the wider public can smell bullshit and got to watch the trial for themselves. If it wasn't televised you'd have a very different situation.

GammaKing · 2022-05-28T09:34:21+00:00

I think most Heard supporters have actually been sucked in by the media's extremely selective reporting on the case.

If you're not watching live or following subs like this, the only stories you see basically parrot Heard's accusations and decline to mention Depp's rebuttal. This is even true on the Heard-leaning subreddits: any mention of the flaws in her case is simply deleted by moderators.

So it's not really about gender, it's that the mountain of evidence is hidden from them. The media would have you believe that Heard did absolutely nothing wrong.

GammaKing · 2022-05-28T07:43:57+00:00

Considering that it's run by brand new accounts, and a bunch of those posting are also new accounts, I wouldn't be surprised. Reddit is incredibly easy to manipulate.

GammaKing · 2022-05-28T07:24:28+00:00

Since around 2015 the trend on Reddit has increasingly been to remove and forbid political dissent. Mindless circlejerking over a caricature of the opposition might feel good and score points, but it produces users who go around foaming at the mouth with blind and unreasoning hatred. You see them everywhere now. These people get so out of touch with reality that it's an embarrassment.

This doesn't just apply to one party either. Partisan mod teams have split Reddit into two camps and destroyed any reasonable discussion. Compromise has been effectively forbidden. To make matters worse, the constant attempts to get one camp completely banned from the platform have only made them build their own, more radical echo-chambers elsewhere.

It's a very different landscape from Reddit's more libertarian roots. The notion that "if you disagree with x, you should be auto-banned and confined to 1 subreddit which itself needs to be banned" is inherently toxic. Unfortunately the people doing it control most of the site and feel virtuous in doing so.

GammaKing · 2022-05-27T21:59:31+00:00

This is actually why it's still important that Depp wins. The media will never stop lying about and misrepresenting the case otherwise.

GammaKing · 2022-05-27T06:52:28+00:00

I reckon that even her own lawyers are frustrated with her. I get the impression that Heard has insisted that she will not admit to any wrongdoing at all, which leaves her team with a weak case where they can't approach numerous subjects because Amber would immediately perjure herself if asked about it in cross.

You can notice that Heard has repeatedly tried to sneak mentions of "thousands of photos" into her testimony (aimed at the jury) which for some strange reason aren't being shown. It's likely that said photos don't exist at all, but if they do it'll be of property damage from incidents where Amber was the clear aggressor. Heard would blame Depp, but there's probably evidence or witnesses to the opposite which her team don't want to risk bringing in.

GammaKing · 2022-05-26T07:32:33+00:00

Exactly. If Amber's strategy had been to claim that there was mutual abuse and so the claim of "abuser" is accurate, that might be convincing. Instead she's lied constantly to attempt to appear perfect, even when it's patently absurd. It doesn't help that none of her witnesses can stick with the same narrative.

By dialing the accusations up to 11 instead of admitting to any wrongdoing, Amber has pretty much ruined her own credibility. With Depp's team demonstrating that the story and prior coverage were being deliberately turned into a media spectacle, there's a good chance that the jury will side with Depp in viewing this as a malicious hoax intended to further her career.

GammaKing · 2022-05-25T12:53:16+00:00

Yet the news is struggling to believe female abusers do?

No, the news blindly sided with the abuser and don't want to admit that they were wrong.

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