If it does turn out that there was a 'conspiracy' of discord trans folx egging each other on, what does this mean for NSA dragnet surveillance?
- End to end encryption works?
- There is too much fedposting to sort the signal from the noise?
Nassim Taleb (of all people) was always in the camp that the mass data schlurping that NSA/Five Eyes did on civilian populations was basically useless due to the inability of computers to actually work out what is useful information. Large language models change this.
Would ChatGPT have known that Robinson Meant Business?
- The Three-Letter Agencies are entirely oriented to prosecuting "election deniers" and "white supremacists". They have no time or interest for actual murder conspiracies, especially one coming from a "protected class".
It took the terrible 7/7 bombings for Britain's MI5 to reorder themselves away from looking at Irish terrorism and threats from abroad, to looking at Islamic terror threats within.
Would the NSA folks necessarily care/be inclined to alert law enforcement? I seem to recall several employees were canned for using work resources to discuss their bizarre sexual fantasies or something. I think there was a tranny angle, too.
Trump already had a large number of things to use against Democrats and the left over the next three years: Russiagate, the 2020 steal, Biden corruption, mortgage fraud, ActBlue, USAID corruption, and a score of other scandals. The trantifa conspiracy to kill Kirk adds another.
Ha, just came on to post that. If this was all written by some right wing TV writer, it'd get kicked back by the producer as "maybe this is all a bit too on nose".
"It’s time for the prestige press to undergo an agonizing reappraisal of its transgender ideology and the mainstream media’s role in pounding this malign faith into the heads of young people".
>"It’s time for the prestige press to undergo an agonizing reappraisal of its transgender ideology and the mainstream media’s role in pounding this malign faith into the heads of young people."
I'll take "Two Things the Prestige Press Will Never Do" for $400, Alex!
Robinson was a game player. They spend their time in games that involve shooting people right and left. One of the shocking things we have learned is his seeming casualness about the whole affair, as if he were only playing a game. The idea that he would easily get away with his crime was utterly unrealistic, again, as if it were in a game.
This is the most boomer comment I've ever seen on substack. DOOM was released in 1993 and any young man alive between 1993 and now has played an FPS at some point.
Of course all men of his age are game players. All my nephews and nieces in their 20's and 30's are game players too but they know the difference between life and a game. It wasn't just game playing that clouded his mind.
Every time the authorities reveal evidence, they taint their own court case and give the defendant grounds for appeal. They should try their suspect in the courtroom, not in the media.
That can be a thing, but the text messages Steve quoted are from a courtroom document, so the authorities are indeed trying their suspect in the courtroom.
Techno Fog had a listing of the charges against Robinson which in addition to the actual murder include witness tampering based on his requests/instructions in the text thread to lie to the cops. IANAL but suspect the prosecution had to supply the judge with some basis for each of the charges.
Even IYWAL (if you were a lawyer), you would still also have to know Utah criminal court procedure to know whether the prosecutors were revealing too much. So yeah, it looks like they're doing the standard thing of putting just enough substantive information in the document to get the court to accept their charges.
Waiting for the Frontlash coverage, and the Poe's Law manifestation of a variation of Norm McDonald's famous deadpan satire, " ... because then, the blowback against innocent trantifa, would be absolutely terrible."
We're at this point in the collapse of our civilization due in large part to the media's enthusiastic complicity in said collapse. Asking them to tone it down now is surely...not going to work.
How does the current state of transmania fit into Moldbug's old story about witch-hunting? I remember that he was making an argument about who actually has power, and it was along these lines: if there are a bunch of witch-hunters and they are encouraged and applauded by the powers-that-be, then we can be sure that there aren't any witches (or, at least, that witches have no power). On the other hand, if witch-hunters are persecuted and exiled from polite society, then we can tell that the witches are in charge. During the Biden administration, it seemed that it was fine for the witch-hunters to attack 'white supremacists' with impunity, suggesting that there weren't any powerful actual examples running about. On the other hand, witch-hunters criticizing trannies were regularly kicked to the curb. It now seems, however, that, at least with the trannies, the witch-hunters and the witches might be undergoing a significant power shift.
I never understood his analogy. People didn't think witches were in control of society or even were powerful. They thought they were spoiling cows milk, giving middle aged men impotence and causing bad weather.
Sometimes what looks like the hypersensitive "narcissism of small difference" turns out to have a point. The pro-trans crowd has always tried to argue that their case is a mere logical extension of the one for pluralistic anti-discriminatory acceptance of gays, who at an earlier time made a similar argument about their own acceptance being an extension of the argument for the earlier acceptance of those of other races and creeds and so forth. And from the 30,000 foot distant perspective of a core normie marinated from birth in woke indoctrination, this argument seems at least somewhat plausible.
But from close up, it's clearer that there is something really different going on, and WWT is NOT like WWG, and for all the talk of intetsectional alliance of all the various flavors of sexuality deviation, adding in the T's was more like trying to integrate the sharks into all the other mutually friendly fish groups in Finding Nemo. "Fish are friends! NOT! FOOD!" It can't last; sharks gonna shark. Normies can be convinced that most gays are mostly otherwise normal except for the being gay part and the peculiarities of the gay community subculture, that "baby i was born this way" seems plausible for many of them, and the personal exposures and experiences of normies with gays are not too inconsistent with this social model. But this doesn't hold for transgenderism, where there are MUCH stronger and more prevalent vibes of social contagion, fanatical cultist ideologies, and a high proportion of individuals with clear mental and personality aberrations wholly distinct from matters solely related to sexuality. My guess is that WWT is going to remain a bridge too far, and that to the extent there may arise a resurgence of wokeism, it will tend to deemphasize the issue for some time and converge on a different WW front to pursue.
Very astute observations. Unfortunate that all this wasn't foreseen before turning the world upside-down to accommodate this squarest of pegs. Women are a very poor choice to act as society's gatekeepers. Not their fault, but still...
The social contagion part isn't necessarily intrinsic to trans. There was social contagion for gluten sensitivity for many years but celiac sprue remains a genuine disease. My current thinking is there are some genuine trans people, a lot of loud autogynephiliacs giving them a bad name, and a bunch of people with other mental problems who adopt the trendy dx of the day.
I think trans rights are mostly fine. I object to the part where they demand I believe there is no difference between a trans woman and a real woman and reason forward from there.
A "genuine" trans person is presumably someone who believes in the literal sense that they are the other gender (a subjective, and ultimately unprovable mental state). Because otherwise there is zero evidence or indication that a female/male mind can end up mistakenly deposited in a male/female body.
Otherwise, what we have are people with androgen uptake issues who might need some corrective surgery or hormones, and far more performative psychopaths who vary in their infliction of social harm.
Homosexuals can demonstrate their same-sex attraction. But there is no way to confirm the hypothesis that Lia Thomas is a female mind inside a male body. So far as I know, nobody in the industry has ever put forward a theory to explain how such a phenomenon could happen.
There are men with Klinefelter's syndrome, and women with a translocated SRY gene that shows up on the X chromosome and can spur growth of ambiguous external genitalia. There are plenty of men and women with androgen uptake issues. But you don't hear anything about these types because their conditions don't support the narrative.
Nope. You assume they are attracted to the same sex because they have sex with them just like we assume they feel like ladies if they say so, dress like ladies and act like ladies. I'll grant you that the demonstration is more convincing with homosexuality but your assumption that ALL the trans genders in the world cannot be trusted to report their internal feelings is what, silly? Arrogant? Neither of us can read minds so your default position is that a million people came up with the same lie?
There not being a theory is in no way an argument against the idea. Data and evidence always precede theory. I believe little boys naturally like GI Joe and little girls naturally like baby dolls. There is no theory to explain that either.
Steve wrote an essay years ago called Why Aren’t Lesbians More Gay, where he notices straight men and lesbians both seem to like sports where you hit a ball w a stick or stick-like implement..
I don't know one way or the other for sure because unlike The Anti-Gnostic, I can only read minds one at a time. But it seems to me that if the desire to throw a ball and nail a broad can manifest in a person with the wrong sex chromosomes so could the desire to wear pretty dresses, be a princess and feel like a girl. I don;t understand the instinct to assume they all, every last one of them, suffer from some other mental illness and are claiming to be transgender because it's trendy. There were a handful of them in the past long before it was trendy.
My favorite Redford anecdote was when he was trying to convince Mike Nichols to give him a role and the latter demurred as he felt the former couldn't believably play a loser. To drive home the point, Nichols said he couldn't picture Redford ever striking out with a woman and Redford seemed unclear on the whole concept!
Thanks. Most of the Redford anecdotes I know are slightly rude about him. I think my bias goes back to "Butch Cassidy" screenwriter William Goldman's famous memoir. Goldman liked Paul Newman more than Redford, and so I've tended to collect anti-Redford anecdotes. But that's unfair to Redford -- OK, he wasn't as great of a guy as Paul Newman, but not many people are.
So if you know any pro-Redford anecdotes suitable for an obituary, let me know.
I'm not sure I've ever heard one either, although I appreciate the tip about Goldman's memoir. Is it the one called Adventures in the Screen Trade? I find it ironic that Goldman felt this way considering both of his Oscars have come from writing movies in which Redford starred.
I will say that the first time Redford directed, not only did he win an Oscar for Best Director, but the movie also won Best Picture, but this doesn't necessarily translate into heartwarming anecdotes. I will say I enjoyed Quiz Show but I haven't seen it in years
He also produced "The Conspirator" a few years ago which was pretty good about the only woman hanged for Lincoln's assassination. She was the mom of one of John Wilkes Booth's gang and owned the house where they lived, and supposedly she overheard them plotting and didn’t tell the authorities
Also Goldman's follow up, "Which Lie Did I Tell"? Both books are great. Goldman wrote way more than his share of fine movies. Meanwhile, another well-known book on screenwriting, "Save the Cat!", was written by Blake Snyder, who only had two movies produced, "Stop or My Mom Will Shoot" and "Blank Check," both stinkers.
That's another unkind anecdote my brain has filed away about Redford. In the early 1980s, a friend worked in the ER at a Santa Monica hospital. He came over one day to report that Robert Redford had been brought in after sustaining a cut while filming a movie. "The nurses all swarmed around him and you couldn't see him anymore because he's shorter than they are!"
By any objective standard, Redford was a high achiever in multiple (if related) fields. But my brain has unfairly stocked itself with mildly derisive memories about him.
> he wasn't as great of a guy as Paul Newman, but not many people are
When you are as good looking as Robert Redford you can get away with being less-than-friendly, but you can argue that Paul Newman was just as good looking and he was considered to be a great person. Redford came up with the concept of The American President and hired Aaron Sorkin to write the screenplay but ultimately bowed out when he lost a power struggle with director Rob Reiner.
I was thinking about The Candidate (Ritchie, 1972); the movie doesn't work if Peter Boyle was the candidate and Redford was the consultant
> So if you know any pro-Redford anecdotes suitable for an obituary, let me know
I don't know if the following counts as an anecdote per se but here is a tribute from perhaps the most bankable actress in Hollywood today...
Bob Redford cast me in ‘The Horse Whisperer’ when I was 11 years old. Every day before each scene, he would take the time to sit with me and walk me through all of the beats that led my character up until that particular point in the story. Bob taught me what acting could be, and it was from his generosity and patience that I was inspired to pursue the possibilities of the craft.
Redford supported domestic terrorists and helped them go into hiding. You've got to be kidding me, talking about him here. See the power of the media to fool you? Newman supported releasing Mumia abu Jamal. He signed a petition of powerful people published in the NYT. These people abetted cop killers and bombers, ffs.
That reminds me of George Clooney who, for whatever reason, believes he was born to depict these solitary, angsty characters instead of the glib, extroverted Southron hustler he played in O Brother Where Art Thou.
Although the killer wasn't trans, this was Trans Terrorism.
Similarly, many revolutionary 1960s-70s Marxist terrorists, such as Bill Ayers, Carlos the Jackal, & Baader-Meinhoff, were not proletarians but true-blue bourgeoisie. That doesn't mean they weren't Marxist terrorists.
They were even wealthier and better connected than being bourgeoise, and there's a lesson here. Ayers' father was one of the heads of the Chicago stock market and proud of him. Dohrn's parents were ashamed of her, but she was a charismatic rock star, attracting the admiration of the NYT early in her adulthood and famous supporters like Dr. Spock and Robert Redford and PBS. PBS Teachers even distributed a class curriculum in which Ayers and Dohrn revisited the places they hid and joked about the violence they committed, making it sound like an adventure. Angela Davis was trotted out as a superstar in Soviet bloc nations and in the USSR. They all went into academia.
Their powerful admirers shielded them from criminal justice consequences and ensured that they kept gaining power among young people. It's been proven by the principled, socialist historian David Garrow that the Obamas dined with Ayers and Dohrn several times a week for nearly eight years, including during 9/11. They literally kept Michelle quiet and kept her at Obama's side when she wanted no more of politics. They groomed both of them. And scores of the most influential journalists and professors and politicians knew this -- it was a salon -- and these people lied to us in 2008 and are still lying. Scott Turow was there: why has he been permitted to keep silent? Why isn't Michelle Obama being called out on her lies? The time for that is ripe.
This time needs to be different. We need to look hard at the supporters of the trans ideology and supporters of other totalitarian and violent leftist movements: where they work and who supports this movement financially. This time there needs to be consequences and prison time for every single rioter, every direct funder of riots, every street criminal. The Democrats and leftists supporting leftist violence need to have their beliefs and pro-criminal laws discussed as the cancer they are. The pushers need to be voted off school boards. That's doable, a start. Very young people need to see our laws enforced and see consequences for violence and for liars in the media and their classrooms. PBS Teachers needs to be exposed next. That's where their big money is anyway.
>"It’s time for the prestige press to undergo an agonizing reappraisal of its transgender ideology and the mainstream media’s role in pounding this malign faith into the heads of young people."
The time has come and they're doing the exact opposite:
It puts me in mind of the Mad Magazine spoof of "The Rifleman". He insists he's a man of peace and his son asks him then why does he kill so many people.
Meanwhile more mainstream leftie normies are struggling for the correct reason that it's okay for them to be kind of happy that Kirk was murdered. The top contenders are that school children also get murdered and some state legislators got murdered in Minnesota and people on the right didn't make as big a deal out of it.
If it does turn out that there was a 'conspiracy' of discord trans folx egging each other on, what does this mean for NSA dragnet surveillance?
- End to end encryption works?
- There is too much fedposting to sort the signal from the noise?
Nassim Taleb (of all people) was always in the camp that the mass data schlurping that NSA/Five Eyes did on civilian populations was basically useless due to the inability of computers to actually work out what is useful information. Large language models change this.
Would ChatGPT have known that Robinson Meant Business?
- The Three-Letter Agencies are entirely oriented to prosecuting "election deniers" and "white supremacists". They have no time or interest for actual murder conspiracies, especially one coming from a "protected class".
It took the terrible 7/7 bombings for Britain's MI5 to reorder themselves away from looking at Irish terrorism and threats from abroad, to looking at Islamic terror threats within.
If the UK's security services are looking at Islamic terror threats within, it is to protect Islamic rape gangs from the native English.
They are looking at Islamic terror threats? Since when?
Boom!
Not to worry, we know the perpetrators. They've been on our radar for some time...
That always makes me wonder, how many people are "on their radar" anyway?
Would the NSA folks necessarily care/be inclined to alert law enforcement? I seem to recall several employees were canned for using work resources to discuss their bizarre sexual fantasies or something. I think there was a tranny angle, too.
Here’s the article https://www.city-journal.org/article/national-security-agency-internal-chatroom-transgender-surgeries-polyamory There are lots of eye-opening quotes from NSA group chats.
It is time to prosecute, arrest, and seize assets of all involved in enabling this terrorist ideology. A true crime against America.
Trump already had a large number of things to use against Democrats and the left over the next three years: Russiagate, the 2020 steal, Biden corruption, mortgage fraud, ActBlue, USAID corruption, and a score of other scandals. The trantifa conspiracy to kill Kirk adds another.
The crazy old dude had child porn on his phone. Not slim college girls, 5 year olds being abused.
Ha, just came on to post that. If this was all written by some right wing TV writer, it'd get kicked back by the producer as "maybe this is all a bit too on nose".
"It’s time for the prestige press to undergo an agonizing reappraisal of its transgender ideology and the mainstream media’s role in pounding this malign faith into the heads of young people".
Sure. Right after Hell freezes over.
Ya beat me to it by a few seconds
Yeah, right after they reassess their support of leftist policies! 😍
>"It’s time for the prestige press to undergo an agonizing reappraisal of its transgender ideology and the mainstream media’s role in pounding this malign faith into the heads of young people."
I'll take "Two Things the Prestige Press Will Never Do" for $400, Alex!
Robinson was a game player. They spend their time in games that involve shooting people right and left. One of the shocking things we have learned is his seeming casualness about the whole affair, as if he were only playing a game. The idea that he would easily get away with his crime was utterly unrealistic, again, as if it were in a game.
This is the most boomer comment I've ever seen on substack. DOOM was released in 1993 and any young man alive between 1993 and now has played an FPS at some point.
Any young man born after DOOM was as dumbass as this guy thinking he could just retrieve his gun and go home Scot free?
Of course all men of his age are game players. All my nephews and nieces in their 20's and 30's are game players too but they know the difference between life and a game. It wasn't just game playing that clouded his mind.
Every time the authorities reveal evidence, they taint their own court case and give the defendant grounds for appeal. They should try their suspect in the courtroom, not in the media.
That can be a thing, but the text messages Steve quoted are from a courtroom document, so the authorities are indeed trying their suspect in the courtroom.
Techno Fog had a listing of the charges against Robinson which in addition to the actual murder include witness tampering based on his requests/instructions in the text thread to lie to the cops. IANAL but suspect the prosecution had to supply the judge with some basis for each of the charges.
Even IYWAL (if you were a lawyer), you would still also have to know Utah criminal court procedure to know whether the prosecutors were revealing too much. So yeah, it looks like they're doing the standard thing of putting just enough substantive information in the document to get the court to accept their charges.
Waiting for the Frontlash coverage, and the Poe's Law manifestation of a variation of Norm McDonald's famous deadpan satire, " ... because then, the blowback against innocent trantifa, would be absolutely terrible."
The LA Times is on the case!
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-09-16/charlie-kirk-railed-against-transgender-rights-his-killing-has-further-fueled-the-fight
We're at this point in the collapse of our civilization due in large part to the media's enthusiastic complicity in said collapse. Asking them to tone it down now is surely...not going to work.
How does the current state of transmania fit into Moldbug's old story about witch-hunting? I remember that he was making an argument about who actually has power, and it was along these lines: if there are a bunch of witch-hunters and they are encouraged and applauded by the powers-that-be, then we can be sure that there aren't any witches (or, at least, that witches have no power). On the other hand, if witch-hunters are persecuted and exiled from polite society, then we can tell that the witches are in charge. During the Biden administration, it seemed that it was fine for the witch-hunters to attack 'white supremacists' with impunity, suggesting that there weren't any powerful actual examples running about. On the other hand, witch-hunters criticizing trannies were regularly kicked to the curb. It now seems, however, that, at least with the trannies, the witch-hunters and the witches might be undergoing a significant power shift.
I never understood his analogy. People didn't think witches were in control of society or even were powerful. They thought they were spoiling cows milk, giving middle aged men impotence and causing bad weather.
Well, his favorite rhetorical tool was and is hyperbole, so that should explain something.
Critical witch theory was endorsed by the King of England himself, James I, which may have had some knock-on effect on New England Puritans.
Sometimes what looks like the hypersensitive "narcissism of small difference" turns out to have a point. The pro-trans crowd has always tried to argue that their case is a mere logical extension of the one for pluralistic anti-discriminatory acceptance of gays, who at an earlier time made a similar argument about their own acceptance being an extension of the argument for the earlier acceptance of those of other races and creeds and so forth. And from the 30,000 foot distant perspective of a core normie marinated from birth in woke indoctrination, this argument seems at least somewhat plausible.
But from close up, it's clearer that there is something really different going on, and WWT is NOT like WWG, and for all the talk of intetsectional alliance of all the various flavors of sexuality deviation, adding in the T's was more like trying to integrate the sharks into all the other mutually friendly fish groups in Finding Nemo. "Fish are friends! NOT! FOOD!" It can't last; sharks gonna shark. Normies can be convinced that most gays are mostly otherwise normal except for the being gay part and the peculiarities of the gay community subculture, that "baby i was born this way" seems plausible for many of them, and the personal exposures and experiences of normies with gays are not too inconsistent with this social model. But this doesn't hold for transgenderism, where there are MUCH stronger and more prevalent vibes of social contagion, fanatical cultist ideologies, and a high proportion of individuals with clear mental and personality aberrations wholly distinct from matters solely related to sexuality. My guess is that WWT is going to remain a bridge too far, and that to the extent there may arise a resurgence of wokeism, it will tend to deemphasize the issue for some time and converge on a different WW front to pursue.
Very astute observations. Unfortunate that all this wasn't foreseen before turning the world upside-down to accommodate this squarest of pegs. Women are a very poor choice to act as society's gatekeepers. Not their fault, but still...
The social contagion part isn't necessarily intrinsic to trans. There was social contagion for gluten sensitivity for many years but celiac sprue remains a genuine disease. My current thinking is there are some genuine trans people, a lot of loud autogynephiliacs giving them a bad name, and a bunch of people with other mental problems who adopt the trendy dx of the day.
I think trans rights are mostly fine. I object to the part where they demand I believe there is no difference between a trans woman and a real woman and reason forward from there.
A "genuine" trans person is presumably someone who believes in the literal sense that they are the other gender (a subjective, and ultimately unprovable mental state). Because otherwise there is zero evidence or indication that a female/male mind can end up mistakenly deposited in a male/female body.
Otherwise, what we have are people with androgen uptake issues who might need some corrective surgery or hormones, and far more performative psychopaths who vary in their infliction of social harm.
your first paragraph could apply to homosexuals.
Homosexuals can demonstrate their same-sex attraction. But there is no way to confirm the hypothesis that Lia Thomas is a female mind inside a male body. So far as I know, nobody in the industry has ever put forward a theory to explain how such a phenomenon could happen.
There are men with Klinefelter's syndrome, and women with a translocated SRY gene that shows up on the X chromosome and can spur growth of ambiguous external genitalia. There are plenty of men and women with androgen uptake issues. But you don't hear anything about these types because their conditions don't support the narrative.
Nope. You assume they are attracted to the same sex because they have sex with them just like we assume they feel like ladies if they say so, dress like ladies and act like ladies. I'll grant you that the demonstration is more convincing with homosexuality but your assumption that ALL the trans genders in the world cannot be trusted to report their internal feelings is what, silly? Arrogant? Neither of us can read minds so your default position is that a million people came up with the same lie?
There not being a theory is in no way an argument against the idea. Data and evidence always precede theory. I believe little boys naturally like GI Joe and little girls naturally like baby dolls. There is no theory to explain that either.
Steve wrote an essay years ago called Why Aren’t Lesbians More Gay, where he notices straight men and lesbians both seem to like sports where you hit a ball w a stick or stick-like implement..
I don't know one way or the other for sure because unlike The Anti-Gnostic, I can only read minds one at a time. But it seems to me that if the desire to throw a ball and nail a broad can manifest in a person with the wrong sex chromosomes so could the desire to wear pretty dresses, be a princess and feel like a girl. I don;t understand the instinct to assume they all, every last one of them, suffer from some other mental illness and are claiming to be transgender because it's trendy. There were a handful of them in the past long before it was trendy.
O/T
Nothing on the death of Robert Redford? 🤔
My favorite Redford anecdote was when he was trying to convince Mike Nichols to give him a role and the latter demurred as he felt the former couldn't believably play a loser. To drive home the point, Nichols said he couldn't picture Redford ever striking out with a woman and Redford seemed unclear on the whole concept!
Thanks. Most of the Redford anecdotes I know are slightly rude about him. I think my bias goes back to "Butch Cassidy" screenwriter William Goldman's famous memoir. Goldman liked Paul Newman more than Redford, and so I've tended to collect anti-Redford anecdotes. But that's unfair to Redford -- OK, he wasn't as great of a guy as Paul Newman, but not many people are.
So if you know any pro-Redford anecdotes suitable for an obituary, let me know.
I'm not sure I've ever heard one either, although I appreciate the tip about Goldman's memoir. Is it the one called Adventures in the Screen Trade? I find it ironic that Goldman felt this way considering both of his Oscars have come from writing movies in which Redford starred.
I will say that the first time Redford directed, not only did he win an Oscar for Best Director, but the movie also won Best Picture, but this doesn't necessarily translate into heartwarming anecdotes. I will say I enjoyed Quiz Show but I haven't seen it in years
Right, Quiz Show, Ordinary People, and A River Runs Through It are fine movies.
“Dark Winds,” which Redford produced, is outstanding!
Agree, while watching the show (not having paid attention to the credits), there is Robert Redford play in chess in jail!
He also produced "The Conspirator" a few years ago which was pretty good about the only woman hanged for Lincoln's assassination. She was the mom of one of John Wilkes Booth's gang and owned the house where they lived, and supposedly she overheard them plotting and didn’t tell the authorities
Adventures in the Screen Trade is a really good read.
Also Goldman's follow up, "Which Lie Did I Tell"? Both books are great. Goldman wrote way more than his share of fine movies. Meanwhile, another well-known book on screenwriting, "Save the Cat!", was written by Blake Snyder, who only had two movies produced, "Stop or My Mom Will Shoot" and "Blank Check," both stinkers.
"Story" by Robert McKee is a really good how-to book for screenwriters, but McKee didn't have much success in getting scripts filmed.
It's a hard field.
he was surprisingly short, 5'8" tops
That's another unkind anecdote my brain has filed away about Redford. In the early 1980s, a friend worked in the ER at a Santa Monica hospital. He came over one day to report that Robert Redford had been brought in after sustaining a cut while filming a movie. "The nurses all swarmed around him and you couldn't see him anymore because he's shorter than they are!"
By any objective standard, Redford was a high achiever in multiple (if related) fields. But my brain has unfairly stocked itself with mildly derisive memories about him.
Tall actors make filming difficult because of the difference with actresses. They can always add height, like De Niro in his 3" platform shoes.
HA! So I've got ONE thing up on Robert Redford (loser).
2 things: he's dead and you're alive. ;)
LOL
> he wasn't as great of a guy as Paul Newman, but not many people are
When you are as good looking as Robert Redford you can get away with being less-than-friendly, but you can argue that Paul Newman was just as good looking and he was considered to be a great person. Redford came up with the concept of The American President and hired Aaron Sorkin to write the screenplay but ultimately bowed out when he lost a power struggle with director Rob Reiner.
I was thinking about The Candidate (Ritchie, 1972); the movie doesn't work if Peter Boyle was the candidate and Redford was the consultant
> So if you know any pro-Redford anecdotes suitable for an obituary, let me know
I don't know if the following counts as an anecdote per se but here is a tribute from perhaps the most bankable actress in Hollywood today...
Bob Redford cast me in ‘The Horse Whisperer’ when I was 11 years old. Every day before each scene, he would take the time to sit with me and walk me through all of the beats that led my character up until that particular point in the story. Bob taught me what acting could be, and it was from his generosity and patience that I was inspired to pursue the possibilities of the craft.
--Scarlett Johansson ( https://x.com/FilmUpdates/status/1968308458773721111 )
Redford supported domestic terrorists and helped them go into hiding. You've got to be kidding me, talking about him here. See the power of the media to fool you? Newman supported releasing Mumia abu Jamal. He signed a petition of powerful people published in the NYT. These people abetted cop killers and bombers, ffs.
That reminds me of George Clooney who, for whatever reason, believes he was born to depict these solitary, angsty characters instead of the glib, extroverted Southron hustler he played in O Brother Where Art Thou.
Although the killer wasn't trans, this was Trans Terrorism.
Similarly, many revolutionary 1960s-70s Marxist terrorists, such as Bill Ayers, Carlos the Jackal, & Baader-Meinhoff, were not proletarians but true-blue bourgeoisie. That doesn't mean they weren't Marxist terrorists.
Antifascist terror too, no?: https://blog.portfolioarmor.com/p/the-end-of-antifascism
They were even wealthier and better connected than being bourgeoise, and there's a lesson here. Ayers' father was one of the heads of the Chicago stock market and proud of him. Dohrn's parents were ashamed of her, but she was a charismatic rock star, attracting the admiration of the NYT early in her adulthood and famous supporters like Dr. Spock and Robert Redford and PBS. PBS Teachers even distributed a class curriculum in which Ayers and Dohrn revisited the places they hid and joked about the violence they committed, making it sound like an adventure. Angela Davis was trotted out as a superstar in Soviet bloc nations and in the USSR. They all went into academia.
Their powerful admirers shielded them from criminal justice consequences and ensured that they kept gaining power among young people. It's been proven by the principled, socialist historian David Garrow that the Obamas dined with Ayers and Dohrn several times a week for nearly eight years, including during 9/11. They literally kept Michelle quiet and kept her at Obama's side when she wanted no more of politics. They groomed both of them. And scores of the most influential journalists and professors and politicians knew this -- it was a salon -- and these people lied to us in 2008 and are still lying. Scott Turow was there: why has he been permitted to keep silent? Why isn't Michelle Obama being called out on her lies? The time for that is ripe.
This time needs to be different. We need to look hard at the supporters of the trans ideology and supporters of other totalitarian and violent leftist movements: where they work and who supports this movement financially. This time there needs to be consequences and prison time for every single rioter, every direct funder of riots, every street criminal. The Democrats and leftists supporting leftist violence need to have their beliefs and pro-criminal laws discussed as the cancer they are. The pushers need to be voted off school boards. That's doable, a start. Very young people need to see our laws enforced and see consequences for violence and for liars in the media and their classrooms. PBS Teachers needs to be exposed next. That's where their big money is anyway.
>"It’s time for the prestige press to undergo an agonizing reappraisal of its transgender ideology and the mainstream media’s role in pounding this malign faith into the heads of young people."
The time has come and they're doing the exact opposite:
https://x.com/wesyang/status/1968044291978125561
Epic comment:
"It's a modern day Homeo and NotJulieYet story. 😂"
https://x.com/Dr41n1t/status/1968112829036368325
It puts me in mind of the Mad Magazine spoof of "The Rifleman". He insists he's a man of peace and his son asks him then why does he kill so many people.
"There's nothing as peaceful as a dead man"
Meanwhile more mainstream leftie normies are struggling for the correct reason that it's okay for them to be kind of happy that Kirk was murdered. The top contenders are that school children also get murdered and some state legislators got murdered in Minnesota and people on the right didn't make as big a deal out of it.