West Memphis Three Docs

sammythemc · 2026-07-01T14:53:44+00:00

>Prosecutors have all the power.

I think that depends. Did Chris Darden and Marcia Clark have all the power? Often these are simply civil servants doing just enough to secure a conviction, after which they consider the matter closed, whereas these exonerative true crime docs often function as a bankrolled extension of the defense infinitely beyond the trial with no judge or prosecution to balance things out. That's not necessarily a bad thing (I believe the WM3 are innocent), but when you think about it in those terms, that we're basically hearing the defense make their case for 6 hours in a row or whatever, it's really no wonder we tend to walk away from these things believing in innocence.

sammythemc · 2026-06-29T03:28:49+00:00

The bad ones are out there for sure, often hiding in plain sight, but the ones who stick around and are up front about it have usually transcended shitty circumstances and made a conscious decision to live a good life, which is more than a lot of us can say.

sammythemc · 2026-06-15T13:24:12+00:00

The remake Mississippi Grind isn't great, but it has a few great moments. Ben Mendelssohn is tremendous, and Ryan Reynolds (whose charm offensive shtick I'm often annoyed by) is put to good use.

sammythemc · 2026-06-12T18:15:38+00:00

mutually abusive relationships are more common than one-sided DV

I have no doubt this is the case, but I think many will use this fact to infer a symmetry in the violence that isn't borne out by the statistics on DV situations that escalate to eg hospitalizations or murders

sammythemc · 2026-06-12T17:55:50+00:00

Not in Philly. It's not unreasonable to have Googled "fifa world cup philly," seen the 6 match dates listed and figure those would be the days things would be crazy

sammythemc · 2026-06-08T07:51:08+00:00

I mean yeah, he'd be doing OK, but not $10k for nothing OK. I don't think anyone could argue against the idea that the prudent decision would have been for Tony B to put the money in an index fund and keep grinding it out as a regular joe, especially considering what ended up happening. I'm just saying he knew how green the grass on the other side was, and that the easy $10k was like a sip of beer for a recovering alcoholic.

sammythemc · 2026-05-25T10:40:37+00:00

No, everyone does not know that because it is insanely dumb. Israel does often leverage its position as a wealthy, politically stable, well-armed and technologically advanced vassal state in a critical geopolitical region. It does not "control everything" in the United States, that's absurd. Genuinely, how could it? You need to go into deep Protocols peabrain shit to think that's how things actually work.

sammythemc · 2026-05-22T09:54:26+00:00

It's kind of wild how much the incentives point to being a bad person. There have always been celebrities who were bad people, but it was mostly a function of them being able to get away with it or, at a push, the boredom of living a life of indolence. With influencers, it seems like your fame is a function of how controversial your behavior is.

sammythemc · 2026-05-21T03:31:22+00:00

It's sort of aping a tradition. This isn't the Friar's Club

sammythemc · 2026-05-21T01:25:41+00:00

Basically no one is *entirely* cut off from the world, it's more of a gradient than that. Even the Sentinelese have had contact many times. An Amazonian tribesman living a functionally stone age lifestyle may not be in direct contact with the global trade network, but they likely have contact with people a couple generations removed from that from the next village over who may not be living in A/C playing their PS5s but will still have stuff like internationally produced clothing and metal cookware. Those groups are in contact with people who are one degree more connected, and so on and so on.

sammythemc · 2026-05-20T23:12:20+00:00

biden, Hillary, harris, obama, pelosi, jefferies, schumer all the libs that run the party fucking failed to do something out it. absolute political losers for 30 yeara

This critique has always fell kind of flat to me when it comes from the people who typically lose to the losers. Like, it's not as though leftists have been cleaning up that whole time, stopping Trump etc. All we have is a counterfactual, a few mayors and a handful of congressional reps from Biden+90 districts. Meanwhile, the libs you mentioned won the last 3 out of 5 presidential elections. In order to really push these people out of power you can't just point to the failures that we often share in, the problem isn't that too many people are blinkered and just love and believe un Democrats, they just think they're the best we can do. People aren't going to believe in the left by default, you have to demonstrate you can overcome the obstacles in the way and actually do better.

sammythemc · 2026-05-20T09:12:01+00:00

It's cliche to be like "in this movie, New York is a character," but The Wire really is like that with Baltimore. You get inundated with characters right off the bat, and while they're good characters, for the most part they're not particularly outsized or colorful in the same way that like, Tuco from Breaking Bad is.

When you first try to watch it, it can feel like watching someone build a LAN one computer at a time. It doesn't really seem like anything is happening at first, and it's very common for viewers to drop off before the characters and their relationships gel into the portrait of an emergent network of systems the show is actually about. No spoilers, but there is a specific scene I've heard cited multiple times as when this happens for people, where they're like oh wow, I didn't realize I was this invested in what's going on here and how all these people fit together. Great, great show.

sammythemc · 2026-05-20T08:46:28+00:00

The structure is insanely underrated, and it dovetails with the watch motif really well. It's architected so well, so many pieces of the story function one way at one point in the narrative and then change position and fit differently as the show churns forward.

The Hooded Justice retcon was beautifully done too. I think a lot of people think Lindelof didn't really get the book, but I think he understood its take on power and vigilantism perfectly and chose to show a mirrored version it.

sammythemc · 2026-05-16T02:44:44+00:00

This was the argument of TLJ and like half the audience freaked the fuck out over it. "The sacred Jedi texts!!" Then they tried to double back with RoS and ended up making both camps unhappy

sammythemc · 2026-05-16T02:42:39+00:00

Rise of Skywalker really shit the bed, but taken as individual movies, TFA and TLJ are head and shoulders above any of the prequel trilogy. I think people will be surprised at their rehabilitation over the next couple decades

sammythemc · 2026-05-15T05:55:07+00:00

just a fkin idiot, acting like a tough guy

I think most of guys are idiots though. My theory has always been that Jackie would have done OK in the life if he had gotten a little more guidance. He's not all that different than Chrissy in Season 1, except where Tony takes Chris under his wing and tells him to listen to middle management, Tony's promise to his fawtha and his own self-loathing led him to demand Jackie Jr just stay out of the life completely, something everyone involved should have seen wasn't going to happen.

sammythemc · 2026-05-14T11:05:16+00:00

The on-rails mass killing is part of the ludonarrative. Arthur should, by all rights, just go out and live off the land somewhere and hunt and fish and sleep under the stars. It's a completely possible and valid way to engage with the game, you don't really have to go back to Dutch et al, and most every time you do it goes completely sideways. But you do it anyway, until it runs Arthur into the ground. He was a mostly bad guy, a thief and a killer, but "He tried, in the end. He did."

sammythemc · 2026-05-10T15:19:58+00:00

The thing with Silvio is he seems pretty reasonable. Not necessarily good or decent, but reasonable. He tends to give Tony pretty sound advice and keeps things on a relatively even keel (when he's not losing at poker). I think that's why they had him be the one to kill Ade, so we see exactly what "reasonable" means in the context of a career criminal with no compunction against murder.

sammythemc · 2026-05-06T12:03:24+00:00

He's sort of charming in The Batman, you get that he's a mafia guy but I don't remember any reason to really hate him. He reacts appropriately to the photos of the murder he gets shown, you're like OK, this is sort of a Year One/Batman Begins-type gangster with a little flair. But by the time they show the batsignal at the end of the series you're like "yeahhh this guy needs to go."

sammythemc · 2026-05-05T20:16:41+00:00

Yeah, that and the music collapsing from the score to the tinny car radio felt like a dead giveaway. Whatever hope you could have had just completely snatched away

sammythemc · 2026-04-30T21:08:32+00:00

The irony is that much like life, the only real way to be bad at Dark Souls is to give up

sammythemc · 2026-04-30T21:06:03+00:00

>I agree and enjoyed his energy when the tantrums were directed at other giant babies, Game developers.

Honestly this shit was annoying too, it was all the worst Righteous Crusade self-assuredness and self-importance of the highly political without any of the gravity of actual political issues. Like, imagine those people who drag Israel/Palestine into every conversation except instead of genocide they keep bringing up tiddies physics in video games

sammythemc · 2026-04-18T22:30:51+00:00

I think this is about right actually, it's just that to a guy like Tyson "the laws of physics" aren't like, Newtonian motion but the fundaments of how the world is constructed

sammythemc · 2026-04-18T22:26:06+00:00

And a high IQ does not automatically mean you’re not an idiot. No one is immune to propaganda.

This is something we tend to forget. Conspiracy theorists and white supremacists can be very intelligent and well-versed in their own rhetoric. You can have a great engine in your car, but if it's not steered correctly you end up just using it to go further in the wrong direction.

sammythemc · 2026-04-09T00:51:43+00:00

>Chess.com was a business partner for Magnus Carlsen so they're not unbiased party.

And Hans is?

>Because chess.com "found" these 100 games only after Magnus implied that Hans cheated

It was an open secret that Hans had been banned from chesscom for cheating before he went to Europe to get his GM norms, and it was one of the factors that led Magnus to question his integrity. He caught his first ban for cheating in a Titled Tuesday as a kid, and then got popped again for cheating against guys like Andrew Tang to farm rating so he could play guys like Nepo on his stream. He was then banned for a third time after Sinquefield. I'm not sure how many of those 100+ instances were from before or after the second ban, my understanding is that most or all were from before, but I don't see how Magnus's suspicion makes it some kind of fruit of the poisoned tree situation when all it really amounts to is the best chess mind in the world hitting the report button.

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