Article about how celebrity endorsements of politicians are effective on those unengaged in politics but actually backfire on people who are more politically aware.
Edit: this pretty much sums up how trump got elected.
Not that I know anything because of this, but I had a great uncle who was close friends with Mickey Cohen, Bugsy Siegals’ right hand man. Another great uncle had a bar that my dad worked at as a kid and regular clients were cops, professional wrestlers, and Jewish mobsters. My grandpa got busted for running booze. (After prohibition, but to Utah, which was dry at the time.) The bar owning great uncle was a bare knuckles boxing champ. My grandpa boxed too, but with gloves, professionally.
You’ve got it backwards, the whole reason Blizzard is sucking up to China is because the second they don’t China bans Blizzard games and Chinese knockoffs take their place, and Blizzard doesn’t want to lose out on all that sweet sweet yuan.
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But, all the stories about gangsters, special forces, the wild west, etc are full of lies and liars.
Then I guess maybe live without Hearthstone.
I’ve got similar people in my family background… and I can say that I firmly believe that most of their lies are in the ‘we weren’t that bad’ type of lies. Narcissists and sociopaths usually like to coat their recollections in a thick layer of candy. If they say they did X you can rest assured that they did 10X worse for quite a bit less reward than they claim to have gotten. Look at how Chapo has presented himself in public. Those guys weren’t actually any different than him, they just had a different set of circumstances. This is extra extra true for the ones who actually did really bad stuff. They want to be the heroes of their own stories and will go way way out of their way to portray themselves that way. Interacting with people with personality disorders as a kid literally conditioned me to never ever portray myself ‘as the good guy’ because for me at least it’s a huge tell.
They find the stories that make themselves look good basically. Benjamin Siegel for instance was a vicious sociopath who killed an awful lot of people, many of them relatively innocent. He didn’t get all that power and notoriety by being a nice guy who you had nothing to worry about.
To be clear I think that most of them made less money than they claim to have made (except Meyer Lansky who made way more but legit lost most of it in Cuba), hurt way more normal people, sold way more drugs, and generally were terrible evil human beings.
So the other day I was out to dinner with some people I play poker with, and one of them happens to be a right wing conspiracy nutter… You name it, he’s on it. The Jews are out to get us and rule the world, climate change is fake, the socialists are going to ruin America for all of us and turn it into Venezuela, etc…
So we’re all drinking quite a bit and he mentions that Hillary is going to be the Democratic nominee in 2020 based on some conspiracy. I laugh at him and tell him he’s crazy, and he says he’ll bet me on it and asks me to give him 2 to 1 on $1,000. I snap call, of course, and we specify the details. He has HRC as the Democratic nominee out of the convention, I have everyone else and I’m laying 2K against his 1K.
The next day he texts me that, being sober, he doesn’t really want the bet but he knows he made it so he’ll honor it if I still want it. I tell him that I want it, but I’m willing to let him out on account of drunkenness, with a small penalty: $100 and he has to wear a Warren t-shirt for a poker session.
His reply: “No fucking chance.”
LOL
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My sorta connected family weren’t sociopaths at all. The friend of Mickey Cohen was just a professional gambler. The bar owner died before I was born, but was like super well regarded as a very nice generous person and not like mafia Don “generous”. My grandpa was the greatest guy in the world.
But yeah, Bugsy Seigal was a psycho and probably killed 10 or 20 people.
conspiracy nutters are the worst. I have one of them in the home game I play in. But what really bugs me about it is that other folks in the group pretend to be serious when they ask him about stuff like how the Christchurch shooter’s video was faked, or how the twin towers really fell, etc. They act like they’re serious, and they really want to know. Just egging this guy on.
They’re trolling him, but he thinks they’re serious, which of course feeds his delusion.
It was a huge business and not everyone associated with it was a monster. But the people who controlled it and enforced its rules were. The way these things get structured most of the really bad stuff gets done by a small core group of true sociopaths so that all the more normal guys get to go home and night and sleep well. They can tell themselves that if everyone followed the rules nothing bad would ever happen, and can treat whatever awful things are getting done on their behalf the way you and I treat the meat industry… by not really thinking about it too hard. The reason why these body counts got so big is because it was a HUGE industry with hundreds of thousands of people at the level of engagement your family members were at.
The drug cartels operate the same way by the way. They have cells of sicarios with astronomical body counts that do almost all the really ugly stuff so that everyone else can live a sort of normal life. Of course in war time headless corpses are getting hung from overpasses, but the people who traffic drugs across the border can cross themselves, think of it like a natural disaster, and pray that that won’t ever happen to them. Which makes sense because the whole point of those kinds of displays is to scare the normies. The sociopaths are pretty unmoved by the prospect of someone getting tortured to death because they did that twice last week and are totally numb to it.
The members of your family who were connected probably went way out of their way to not be on a first name basis with the Murder Inc guys for instance, and probably would have gotten pretty angry if anyone brought them up. That doesn’t make them bad people. It just makes them people.
My dad had a cousin who was like a brother growing up and I knew him. His real father was the professional gambler who was friends with Mickey Cohen, but he was raised by the bar owner, bare knuckles fighter (who beat up the two Italian brothers who ran the mafia in Denver I think over killing someone and he had to hide out for a while because of it). Anyway, my dad’s cousin wrote a book and it was insanely full of shit making it all look much more violent than it was. He even wrote himself in as working for Mossad.
Yeah the rule of thumb is the people saying it’s mega violent never did anything and the people saying all was quiet are serial murderers lol. Your read that they are all lying is 100% on point.
It’s the same with special operations by the way. Actual special operators are like 2500-5000 actual people IRL who were ever in those units during the war on terror and they never talk about anything. Meanwhile there are at least 100x as many people claiming to have been on Seal Team 6 when they got Bin Laden. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have people committing their 300th war crime off the books in Afghanistan right now. You just won’t be hearing from them about anything.
The real life Tony Soprano is 1000% serious when he says he’s a waste management consultant in other words. He’s not talking about any of it ever to anyone except maybe the guys where were actually there with him… and if he ever gets the impression that they might be talking to anyone who wasn’t there he’s going to be dumping them in the ocean next.
Verbal response is a bit excessive for the first time.
Second try, I do.
https://mobile.twitter.com/theplayerthefan/status/1181634706183471105
https://mobile.twitter.com/Phogusher/status/1181650744673525760
YES thnx
I have to give up classic WoW 
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Sure hope I’m not the only person who finds the Ellen “explanation” for hanging out with W sickening and awful.
You’re gay and you don’t face any struggles for it because you’re rich and white and powerful. And you socialize with a guy who got re-elected by getting anti gay marriage initiatives on the ballot in bigot heavy swing states.
Could not be more out on “let’s just talk to people who believe different stuff.” It’s a god damn war out there for regular people, fuck right off celebs preaching tolerance for the intolerant.
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You’re not.
I was actually planning on downloading it overnight sometime this week.
not anymore. fuck those guys for ruining my enjoyment of any of their games.