No, Romanian Cops Did Not Find Andrew Tate Because of a Pizza Box
calmdownben.com
calmdownben.com
He got caught because he's the most arrogant public figure on the internet and thinks of himself as a demigod immune to the vicissitudes of things like human trafficking laws.
I think it's worth reading it, although I am skeptical of her conclusions. However, he did Tweet from a Prague airport on December 26th so if the Gândul article is correct about Romanian authorities confirming his location via social media posts, it's reasonable to think that the pizza box might be one of those.
Also, Dreyfuss is missing information -- the castle photo he references isn't a castle, it's a hotel in Italy.
However, I don't have any strong reason to think that Gândul was correct or that the translation isn't missing a nuance.
My fairly uninformed stance here is "maybe, maybe not, no way to be sure."
The problem is, trolls like him thrive off publicity, presumably ad impression revenue-sharing from Youtube et al is how he managed to get the expensive cars he was bragging to Greta Thunberg (although pimping is also highly profitable, so who knows?).
The correct response is ostracism and damnatio memoriae. Don't get upset about him, let the law deal with him if he's committed actual crimes, but just ignore him and starve him of the oxygen of publicity.
I'm lucky that I mediate the news and everything through my own RSS feed reader that has extensive filtering capabilities, so anything that mentions the Kardashians, football, the Olympics, unfunny April Fool's pranks and other topics of utter uninterestingness is automatically deleted and doesn't waste a nanosecond of my time. I just added him to the list.
That sounds like a fantastic setup. As a suggestion: I've found that blocking all images on the news works wonders as well not to get sucked into clickbait.
People should ask WHY he is so popular. People prefer to try to shut someone down and then are shocked, shocked I tell you when a huge number of people retaliate. See the Trump election as an example of demonizing a large percentage of people and trying to make it politically incorrect to defend anyone who isn’t a minority.
2. I think it's broadly understood why he and the like are popular. You artificially divide population into groups, then persuade one that the other group is somehow at fault for your ills. It's a phenomenally successful strategy - as much as it is abhorrent. It particularly prays on the various kinds of downtrodden, angry, frustrated, unlucky or poor,because it distracts with easy and oversimplified answers.
The hard part is not understanding why it's successful. The hard part is learning how to save humanity by fighting it, because that movement / strategy only leads to distraction and ignorance.
(This is not saying we shouldn't work hard to understand that strategy, on the contrary. I strongly feel you cannot fight something if you don't understand it.)
Fwiw, I've oscillated significantly re trump election and voters over last 6 years and still do :
On one hand, it is important to show empathy, engage in conversation, focus on common points, and truly try to understand someone's circumstances, thoughts, reasons, and goals. We are all humans and we have needs and there's probably more that we have alike. Isolation and shunning and snooty patronizing are not productive. There are reasons 46mil people voted and would still vote for him and those reasons, to your point, should not be ignored or dismissed. Everybody should be heard, thoughts should not be silenced. I believe in marketplace of ideas and don't like censorship so I agree that we are trying too hard to supress discussion with offense and Twitter outrage.
On the other hand, at some point one has to hold adults accountable for their own opinions, decisions, actions and world frameworks; and someone voting for trump has framework completely different then mine and, I feel, completely counter productive and destructive (this is not a "conservative" framework. Trump is not a conservative. Trump is a narcissistic Bully which overrides any ideology).
I recognize that 46 million of people felt exactly the same ("he is the devil") about Obama. However, one telling difference is that they have to make up increasingly incredulous stuff about Obama eating babies with his Jewish owners etc to support their opinion, whereas I need only point to Trumps actual documented and proudly owned words and actions to support my disagreement.
Basically, 20 year old me wanted to change the world and engage with everybody and be profoundly philosophical. The 45 year old me with kids and job and mortgage has no patience to go through same tired self contradictory, self defeating internally inconsistent crap with people who think putting "fuck Biden" and "fuck Trudeau" signs on their car, house and faceboom are meaningful ways to engage in political discourse.
Trump is a sociopath who quite successfully exploited the anxieties of millions of people... but their grievances do matter - it's in all of our interest to lift everyone up, not dismiss or even humiliate half of the country. However, we should also recognize that Trump is not the way to accomplish that, he does not offer any solutions, he just mirrors and magnifies the worst parts of the human condition.
He says what many young men want to believe and find pleasant to hear.
May all our encounters with influencer douchebags be so brief and yet satisfying.
Seems the publicity thing was working. The arrests maybe less so.
At a certain point there's a real lack of political power in the US-- specifically, I am thinking of Mark Fisher's understanding of Capitalist Realism.
In that system, it feels as if nothing material will ever change, and so all that is left is the aesthetic and apolitical hatred of other groups of people.
My dad was a substitute teacher who mostly took care of the kids and went to church on Sundays and played trombone with a bunch of Shriners. He was never politically plugged in, he just was raised in a house that operated very much like the setting of Leave it to Beaver.
So for him, watching cultural changes and being outraged over them were pretty much the only surface on which he felt connection to politics, as far as I can tell. From my standpoint, those cultural markers are pretty much the main differentiation between liberal Democrats and the GOP. They are both centrist capitalist parties that need to maintain US hegemony through foreign wars and who are both owned by the folks who own the business of the US.
It's a shit substitute for action, but for a lot of folks falling into the tribalism of that culture war is the only possibility they see for political action.
And while I find his political aesthetic to be both self-contradictory and profoundly alienating I have enough awareness to see how people who aren't evil in their intent can take up one side of culture war instead of the other.
And as someone who finds the anonymously penned "Desert" to be a plausible understanding of the current ecological/economical/political climate, I am not sure that short of a wholesale rejection of the politics of the spectacle there is a lot to be gained from these aesthetics... even if I know where I fall and who I support in that game and whose defeats I will happily cheer.
But like I said, I think that's more a product of a shitty situation rather than some evil spot in someones' soul.
He later apologized.
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-rush-limbaugh-mock-a...
In my experience, this combination of things are quite common. Their (Episcopal) church started doing a different communion process simply because it was revealed that the organist was out and parishioners did not want to share a common cup with him.
There are a lot of ways of describing why that doesn't seem cruel to those folks. To me, "culture war and political powerlessness" could be short hand for a number of things, ranging from neurosis to Žižek-ian "Ideology" to the contradictions of capitalism or the unworkability of philosophical idealism at the core of liberal practices.
It's a fact that these seemingly incompatible positions have gone together, though. So I suppose you could just say folks are "evil" but, that feels like it misses some nuance.
(Again, to be sure - not talking about your dad specifically since I am just a stranger on the Internet.)
I am hinting at depression of a kind a person experiences late in their life when all hope for change and personal growth starts to fade away. But I also don't want to limit the discussion to this observation only, there are other emotional and intellectual hardships involved: resentment, unhappiness, feeling of injustice, etc.
A daily dose of bias confirmation and drama, no matter what the politics, no matter how devoid of truth the monologue is, soothes the soul of humans everywhere.
It doesn't really matter time, nor place, nor politics. It's part of the human condition. My tribe is superior to your tribe, and if we have to piss on the graves of the other side to make ourselves feel good, By God, we'll do it.
edit: I just remembered the deaths of both Scalia and RGB. Right or left, both tribes celebrated, in PARTICULARLY DISGUSTING WAYS, the passing of SCOTUS justices of the opposing tribe. This is just what we, as humans, do.
However, my, perhaps incomplete, recollection of famous provocateurs of the past was centered around acts like Salvador Dali walking around with his anteater, rather than a misogynist kickboxer ranting about “weak men”.
In this case a rivalry was shaping up between 2 such characters:
Thumberg and Tate
The former representing the perma-concern and the latter representing the perma-carefree persona
I'll give him one thing, he is a pretty entertaining showman, I just would like to remind people that a ton of what he says probably would make a lawyer balk. He has a whole section about doing shit that makes you money first and caring about legal later which is especially insane.
Oh yeah and then there's that video of him hitting a girl with a belt. Yeah, don't do shit like that.
the author does a convincing job of indicating there is no authoritative evidence that the pizza box played any role. the author does not convince me that the pizza box did not play any role.
In the end flag whatever you want and move on.
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
IMO one could justifiably say that it doesn't meet the "gratifies [hacker]'s intellectual curiosity" bar to be on-topic and runs afoul of the "crime" example in the off-topic guideline but ultimately the decision as to whether the story is sufficiently off topic to merit a flag is up to readers' personal judgement.
Agree this post is a gray area.
The link itself is a good write-up analysis. It is more in-depth than a soundbite.
Answer : a few months.
I don't know who he is, but Wikipedia say it's an American-Brit. Is there any reason to assume that he didn't just fly there? In which case of course they knew he was there. He used his passport to get in after all. Also what's the cost of a police patrol checking out a house? I've seen people get harassed at home for not paying a 20 Euro ticket in Germany, surely the Romanian authorities can do the same.
How is this even a story? Completely absurd.
There has been a LOT of noise about this story recently on the internet.
This blog post is about the rather narrow issue of how the American media mishandled a specific detail of the story, relating to whether he did a self-own by posting a pizza box on Twitter so authorities could see it.
> Is there any reason to assume that he didn't just fly there? In which case of course they knew he was there.
Yes, this blog post mentions that. It basically says that the pizza box self-own doesn't pass the smell test because Romanian authorities have lots of other ways to know the guy was in the country. (And because the original Romanian news article doesn't even mention it, so the pizza box self-own is apparently based entirely on speculation.)
> How is this even a story? Completely absurd.
The story as a whole is a story because it went viral and this guy is hated by many.
The blog post is a story because it's a journalist commenting on bad journalism and how journalists participate in spreading unsubstantiated nonsense.
As of today, the tweet about Tate is the fifth most 'liked' tweet _ever_. Only one of the others above it in the list is a joke. So, er, some might disagree.
Andrew Tate said something like "bring me pizza and don't recycle the boxes" (paraphrasing)
After he was arrested she replied "this is what happens when you don’t recycle your pizza boxes"
Her remark is because of what he said and later getting arrested. I can't see how it's because of the supposed use of the pizza box to locate him.
Beating a woman is certainly more visually shocking than stealing a rape victim's medical records but in a legal context I'd be hard-pressed to declare one "worse" than the other; and a vocal portion of HN defended the latter person and company during and for years after.
What? Guess you haven’t seen her responses to Donald Trumps attacks on her then.
Maybe the author meant to say she's not known to laugh things off but rather tends to go in for the kill (maybe using humor in the process).
TL;DR - They didn’t use the pizza box to find his location in Romania, they used it to confirm that he was currently in the country to detain him.
Edit: As called out below, this is also just speculation.
Even that is pure speculation
Backstory: Supposedly He's previously been arrested (in aug 2022?) when a woman needed a cover story for why she was cheating on her boyfriend with him. The facts corroborated his side of the story and its claimed he was even apologized to by authorities. The investigation showed her to be a liar and there on her own volition and free to leave etc...d
I cannot find a good source for this besides dubious Reddit and YouTubes, so I guess we'll see what the actual truth is this time.
Why is it acceptable to say "small dick energy" in the age of body-shaming awareness?
You aren't, there’s been considerable discourse on Twitter, on both this and “big dick energy”, most recently in response to the Thunberg tweet involved in this incident.
> When did it become acceptable to shame men for the size of their penis?
Its not new to do that, at all, but “small dick energy” doesn't do that, just as “big dick energy” doesn't praise for the opposite but instead references a different trait stereotypically associated with it (which “small dick energy” plays on by referencing a corresponding and opposing stereotype. (Which may be problematic on its own, but is different from shaming the target for their penis size.)
It’s like the hitler has only one ball thing
BTW small dick energy dies say anything about the real size, it just has the same kind of energy
No, and it's not really relevant to what I'm saying.
> BTW small dick energy dies say anything about the real size, it just has the same kind of energy
These are the arguments I hear. "It doesn't actually mean you have a small dick, just that you're petty and unimportant, like the people who have small dicks".
Small dick is a metaphor for a small ego, because those people think that women are only interested in well hung, successful, rich, powerful tall man.
For instance, if someone calls you a dick it does matter if you called him something similar before.