I seem to understand the guy has been live streaming on his private thing that subscribers pay for or whatever and has clearly been in Romania based on a bunch of clues such as the women who he had around him speaking the language between each other. You can see clips of that in this youtube rip of his final streaming days on "tate confidential" here, which is probably what got him busted. [1] Still insanely funny that this happened right in the midst of getting in a hugely ratio'd spate with Greta.
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."
I wish I could say the same. A few months ago, my daughter's girl school used his as the poster boy for misogyny in their anti-bullying training program, so I looked him up. Distinctly unpleasant person, and according to Wikipedia he claims to have converted to Islam, so now he is also tarring my religion by association.
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.
> 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
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.
I find it telling that he is branded a troll or worse, yet the mirror image of his message, where women are propped up is spread far and wide.
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.
1. Mirror message of "propping women up" is empathically not "encouraging violence against women".
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.
These "oscillations" are compatible in my view. Empathy does not equal enablement - a maxim that is at the core of a lot of confusion in the modern-day culture war. Hearing the opposing view, communicating in a kind and responsive way isn't supposed to lead to an implementation of false ideas.
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 is popular because he is a populist like Trump. He offers simple solutions to complex problems. Solutions that don’t work but empower people unwilling or incapable of committing to more complex solutions.
Hear hear! I had heard the name but had no idea why until he was murdered on Twitter and shortly after busted for being casually criminal in a predictably misogynistic way, as a mere facet of his total worthlessness.
May all our encounters with influencer douchebags be so brief and yet satisfying.
I literally only heard of him because Greta's burn was big enough to trend across my screen. He's apparently a big enough loser to make her look cool by comparison.
>... “students” are told that attracting “comments and controversy” is the key to success: “What you ideally want is a mix of 60-70% fans and 40-30% haters. You want arguments, you want war.” [Guardian]
Seems the publicity thing was working. The arrests maybe less so.
Are these contrarian/scandalous/unapologetically insulting figures a new phenomenon or have they always been a part of pop culture? Seems like Tate-like or Yiannopoulos-like personas are attracting a lot of media coverage.
No it goes way back to the 80s and 90s when radio consolidated. You had guys like Limbaugh reading off lists of men who died of AIDS and laughing at them. Same grift, different generation.
Oh Limbaugh! He was popular before my time, and the more I learn about him the more I am puzzled by who would enjoy listening to something like what you describe.
I wouldn't say that my dad has darkness at the center of his being.
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.
I don’t know enough about your situation so not talking about your dad specifically… but there must be something else involved here than just culture war and political powerlessness. Eg going to church and laughing at people who die from AIDS are not easily compatible (or at least _should not_ be easily compatible) parts of one’s life.
Well, I can't disagree that there is not some deep hypocrisy in being both a christian and mocking dying people.
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.
Thanks for your analysis. To clarify my earlier remark: there must be something _personal_ that is at play here. While political, social, cultural dissonances are all often very visible and clearly externalized, personal grievances and deep confusion can be left unseen.
(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.
Same reason people today listen to Maddow, Carlson, or Olbermann. Same reason people gossip about what that bitch Becky or that asshole Brent did the other day in your friend group.
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.
I might be wrong but I like to believe that there is a critical difference between gossiping about Becky and laughing at people dying from AIDS. Saying that… maybe I just don’t know - I don’t like either and in my head there is a clear distinction.
I recall several left-leaning commentators celebrating the (unvaccinated, COVID) deaths of Phil Valentine and Marc Bernier. Is it on the same level as AIDS? No, but the broader point is that all ingroups have their cheerleaders, and those cheerleaders can get incomprehensively nasty.
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.
Good point! I must admit I am not immune to that. While I wasn’t celebrating Covid deaths I certainly wasn’t mourning anyone who died because of what I considered was their own “fault” (Eg not following quarantine guidelines). Which is still quite un-empathetic.
Historically, I think they've been called provocateurs – colloquially known as assholes. They've always attracted media coverage, but now every site & app has the power to deliver media coverage to you, so you see a lot more about them.
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”.
I think that's just a part of society changing. What used to be weird or outrageous might be considered tame now. I'd probably raise an eyebrow at someone walking their anteaters, but I'd probably shrug it off after a second and continue on my way.
Everybody wants to be a spokesperson or a politician because essentially it’s a job where you get paid to say stuff or today you don’t even have to say anything, just tweet.
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
Yeah punk is fighting for liberation, Tate and his acolytes are fighting for the ability to oppress, abuse, and (if the allegations are true) literally enslave people.
That sounds like the right distinction. I wonder if in someone else’s eyes Tate is fighting for men’s liberation from the oppressive (in their view) constraints that the society forced on them?..
This reads like you think women are below men though. I assume you don't mean that, but it's hard to think up an alternate explanation. Power dynamics maybe? I dunno, I could list thousands of women more powerful than a youtuber or whatever he is.
Have you listened to Tate in a more than 15 sec clip? I don’t agree with everything he says but he does speak the otherwise unspoken truth on many topics.
His attention is justified.
I watched a bunch of his "Hustler's University" thing on youtube. It was a really entertaining mix of alright business advice mixed in with what sounded like incitement to commit fraud (And I'm not a lawyer so don't quote me on this). It's mostly bereft of making any misogynistic comments or anything like that which he's known for otherwise.
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 most important section is a quote of a romanian newspaper:
"After seeing, including on social networks, that they were together in Romania, the DIICOT prosecutors mobilized the special troops of the Gendarmerie and descended, by force, on their villa in Pipera, but also on other addresses."
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.
So I am tempted to flag this submission because I don't really think HN is the place but I want to make sure I am using the flag feature correctly. Can any more experienced HN user weigh in? Is flagging for articles you don't want to see on HN or is it more reserved for spam/ inaccuracies?
I flag everything that is pure drama, nothing substance. Like this post. Twitter stuff (for example everything Elon related which took over HN for months), everything that I saw on the reddit front page earlier which means it's already at the lowest of low quality and it has no place in mind on HN.
"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.
Thanks for these guidelines. I think the "intellectual curiosity" criteria hits the nail on the head of what I was looking for to describe what I like to see on HN.
One could make the argument that it is on-topic because the drama is on twitter which is currently caught up in a whirlpool of techno-politics owing to the recent ownership change.
The link itself is a good write-up analysis. It is more in-depth than a soundbite.
Lol how long can you publicly brag about being a gangster, not paying taxes, going to romania because rape charges dont exist, having multiple passports to avoid law and dealing all the time with the mafia, including "taking care" of someone who tried to kill you, and then be arrested.
I was trying to skim this article, but it's a very hard read.
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.
> I was trying to skim this article, but it's a very hard read.
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.
I was very confused as to why people had believed that passport control and property registrar records had less weight in an investigation compared to a pizza box.
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.
These guys are a pretty big portion of grindset/hustle culture, which overlaps heavily with startup culture.
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.
Yeah, I didn't get that either. The article says she's not known for her sense of humor, then links to a tweet of hers that (I thought) was pretty funny.
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).
Given past experience this could just be a repeat false claim. So let's put our pwnies away until we see something stick.
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.
Off-topic, but it feels like I'm the only person who thinks phrases like "small dick energy" are bad. When did it become acceptable to shame men for the size of their penis? Whenever I've mentioned it, people have defended its usage with arguments that didn't sound convincing to me.
Why is it acceptable to say "small dick energy" in the age of body-shaming awareness?
> Off-topic, but it feels like I'm the only person who thinks phrases like "small dick energy" are bad.
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.)
My issue is not that it shames the target, it's that it implies that "small dick = bad" and "big dick = good", and perpetuates the idea that men with small penises are inferior. It would be the same if the phrase were "short person energy", we don't need people feeling bad about their height.
Acceptable, no, understandable, yes, a petty remark to insult a man who has prioritized his identity around a shallow and abusive perception of masculinity
Only when you pose next to a supercar you probably borrowed as a prop. He is being shamed for being a colossal anus over a long enough period of time to leave no doubt.
> You've read Tate's tweet? What goes around comes around.
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".
It's more that people who think they have a small dick try to compensate that with extremely "manly" behavior. They are the ones who reduce men to site of their dick as their main quality.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58Lc4cew7OE