#is straight up inaccurate and deluded

[jewishsuperfam]

i think more of the people woobifying the rat grinders and defending their point of view need to rewatch freshman year and remember that the bad kids literally spent all of their spring semester of freshman year in jail

[thebutchtheory]

i feel like a lot of people, when discussing concepts of transandrophobia, get so caught up in discussing and thinking about "theory" of privilege and who has it worse that they forget about the actual experiences of real life trans and GNC people. you get caught up in believing this black and white idea that transmascs are seen as victims and trans women are seen as predators, and in a broad sense that is frequently true, but not always.

i consider it wildly inaccurate to say that people who are perceived as masculine women, be them butch/stud or transmasc, especially if they are older, doubly so if they're nonwhite, are not considered 'threatening' to conservatives. anyone who says that has never spoken to butches or studs about their experiences.

anyone who says that seems to have forgotten extremely pervasive stereotypes about butches and studs and (perceived) masculine women as predators on straight and feminine women. these are people who get kicked out of the women's restrooms not inherently because they're mistaken for trans women (though they are, don't get me wrong), but because they're masculine and therefore seen as predatory to straight, cisgender, feminine women.

i consider it highly arguable that it is not transitioned and passing trans men, clocky transmascs in the middle of transitioning, butches & studs, and people perceived as masculine women who are considered "victims" of the transgender movement, it's young white transmascs who have not yet transitioned who are seen as deluded victims.

older transitioned/transitioning transmascs and butches/studs/GNC women are absolutely seen as threats to conservatives. it is completely ahistorical and outright incorrect to say otherwise. in an abstract sense, transmascs might be viewed by conservatives as sad victims, but when they're thinking of these 'sad victims', they're not thinking about the older black transgender man with a full beard and a phalloplasty. they think that because he has fully transitioned, he is a predator to young white trans/GNC people.

transphobic people will talk all day about young autistic girls being indoctrinated into the transgender cult, but at the end of the day, they're only ever thinking about and truly talking about young white people.

[crychan]

Serizawa’s own wiki page contains a lot of un-cited information, specifically in the history section. I'm hoping to write an accurate character analysis on Serizawa, and I'm finding it difficult to when his own wiki page seems so different from the canon I read. So let’s go through his wiki, line by line, and then compare it to the actual events of Chapter 89 and Episode 12 of MP100 II, where his history can be found.

The history section of the wiki used to say:

“At age 12, Serizawa became so overwhelmed by fear of his own psychic powers that he refused to leave his bedroom for fear of hurting others.”

A nice sentiment, but it's just straight up not true. While Serizawa is a kind and empathetic person who could reasonably choose to lock himself up to protect others, his decision ultimately stemmed from being extensively bullied, outcast, and punished for the problems that his powers caused. 

It’s pretty well insinuated that he did it out of shame.

It’s only briefly mentioned that he cares about not hurting people. 

Him being bullied and ashamed is the main topic that Suzuki talks about in his backstory. While it is Suzuki saying this and not Serizawa, I don’t believe ONE intended for Suzuki to be wrong in his assessment, so I consider it true, even if it didn’t come from Serizawa himself. Furthermore, while Serizawa does argue with Suzuki in these scenes, we know that Serizawa says these kinds of things when he’s confronted with harsh truths about himself. It’s the same reaction he gives Mob when confronted with the truth of his relationship with Claw and Suzuki:

This is because he can't continue to delude himself or ignore the obvious issues in his life that he has been unable to solve.

“Lacking guidance and companionship, and not helped by the counselors his mother had hired, Serizawa remained in his bedroom for 15 years.” 

Kind of true. Doesn’t mention that the counselors often thought he was delusional, which I think was a major problem that reinforced his seclusion. He was constantly told that there was something wrong with him. What's worse, the doctors even disagree with him on what is wrong. No, the problem is not that you have powers, it's that you think you have powers, you're delusional. Nobody listens to him, nobody understands him.

What’s key here is that he desperately wanted to be understood and accepted. Specifically, he seeks companionship without judgement or shame, which he accepts in the form of other espers, i.e. people who can understand him, his powers, and his problems, at least better than normal people can. He has grown up being misunderstood and rejected by normal people.

“His self-imposed confinement lasted until he met Toichiro, who coaxed him to leave by offering him an umbrella and encouraging him to view it as an extension of his room.” 

This omits important information. [Toichiro] Suzuki initially offered to teach Serizawa how to use his powers. Serizawa, however, was still scared to leave his room, so Suzuki tried to help him further by offering the umbrella.

“Serizawa followed him, hoping to learn to control his powers and rejoin society.”

Pretty much true given what I previously said. Bad wording and the wrong order of sentences leaves this inaccurate.

“Instead, Suzuki exploited Serizawa's power to further the aims of Claw, leaving him and his well-being utterly dependent on both himself and the umbrella.”

Again, bad wording that omits/obfuscates vital info.

Serizawa has no self confidence due to his past, and Suzuki exploits that by giving him an environment free of judgement or rejection in exchange for compliance. Suzuki nurtures and encourages Serizawa and his abilities like good people should have done, for an evil goal. Serizawa is desperate to leave his room and rejoin society, and Suzuki convinces him that it's possible through him and Claw.

Serizawa might feel conflicted about serving Claw, but his desperation for love, acceptance, and companionship are what motivate him suppress his morality and join Suzuki. Serizawa becomes dependent on Suzuki because he gives him everything that he wants, as long as he follows his orders. He works for Claw and follows Suzuki's orders (despite any guilt he may feel) because he is convinced he can’t rejoin society, control his powers, or be happy without what Claw and Suzuki provide him.

“Serizawa convinced himself that Claw was a company, that Suzuki was its president, and that he himself was an employee.” 

Weird wording, because Claw is an organization/company, Suzuki is the president/boss, and he does work for him as an employee, so there is no convincing needed. It’s not a delusion to see it this way. Serizawa simply refers to this structure for his own sake and understanding. It feels more normal for him than considering himself a terrorist.

He is aware of his actions and crimes, as well as Claw’s true purpose, but is able to delude himself of guilt with Suzuki’s encouragement and his own desperation for normalcy/companionship. He tells himself "the President trusts me," and always falls back on the President's words when he feels conflicted:

All in all, Serizawa exists in an environment where love is contingent on following others, even to the betrayal of his own morals. Despite providing him the love and acceptance he desired, it required suppressing his true feelings and agency. It gave him something new to be insecure about.

Okay, this essay is great and all, but why don’t you just… edit the wiki?

As of jan 17th: I DID!!! :D

As well, I also wanted to write this for a long time, because he is my favourite character and I wanted to understand him better, so doing this was fun for me and hopefully shares a better understanding of his character with others.

Final Comments on Serizawa’s Character:

Being raised from a young age feeling like something is wrong with you, and doing things that go against your wishes, these are the two powerful forces in Serizawa’s life. They have a large impact on his character.

As a result of his upbringing and life, Serizawa is incredibly insecure about himself. This can manifest in numerous ways, like feelings of self-doubt, a fear of rejection or failure, or a need for external validation. In my opinion, Serizawa likely feels all of these things. The idea of speaking up for himself, or even being himself, are likely both frightening to him. Insecurity can result in people pleasing and social withdrawal, both of which Serizawa does, to mitigate chances of rejection.

Reigen’s support for Serizawa’s independence/agency is the entire point of the OVA, and I could write a whole second essay on it. But essentially, Reigen has become a good force in helping Serizawa overcome these difficult aspects of himself as he enters a safe, accepting environment where it is no longer necessary to be obedient to survive. Furthermore, he is now in an environment that encourages his independence in whatever capacity he is comfortable with, such as night school, making new friends, and taking initiative on the job. Serizawa is noted to deeply admire Reigen for being a person who does not judge him or make him feel ashamed of himself, and constantly encourages him to chase what he wants. This is how he differs from Suzuki. With Reigen, love and acceptance are now unconditional, and he will always be welcome at Spirits and Such. In turn, Serizawa wants to stay at Spirits and Such for as long as Reigen will have him, because it provides him with love and acceptance without betraying his freedom.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk! :)

[warsofasoiaf]

Not sure if there's enough information on this New Vegas character for an analysis, but you did ask for Honest Hearts stuff that touches on redemption, family, and growing up! Any chance you can do a character analysis of Randall Clark?-TBH

So this is actually going to be an analysis of Honest Hearts in general, touching on the themes of childhood and growing up, and Randall Clark is a great element of that, so here we go.

The primary theme of Honest Hearts is innocence, and the loss of it upon growing up, and the feeling of loss in general. All of the main characters of Honest Hearts exist in a state of innocence and must confront painful realities about themselves and the world in order to grow up. Each must contend with the illusions that they’ve placed before themselves and the painful feeling that comes with stripping them away. Zion itself is an idyllic place full of wide-eyed, innocent tribals, but it is untouched by the corruption of the wider struggle until those who intrude upon it. The Courier travels along with an innocent caravan expedition (it’s even called Happy Trails for Pete’s sake!) for a wholesome adventure and a decent paycheck, not an intense tribal struggle and a battle for Joshua Graham’s own soul.

The Sorrows and the Dead Horses are perhaps the most explicit use of this theme. Neither understood much about the ways of warfare until Joshua Graham came along to teach them, even the savage raiding White Legs weren’t much of a threat until Ulysses taught them how to use their “storm drums” which is clearly a Thompson M1A1. This is an altogether common trope of the “Noble Savage,” a frequently inaccurate and often patronizing device used in media depicting tribal peoples. That these tribes do not engage in the practices of warfare suggests an innocence, an ideal quality untouched and untainted. Similarly, their speech patterns and language are used to suggest a child-like quality, the incomplete words like “grenah” for grenades or calling the tribals who throw firebombs (Molotov cocktails) “light bringers.” Since the Sorrows were originally descended from orphaned children refugees, this sets them up for their very own coming of age novel. Despite their innocence, they are threatened by the outside world via the form of the White Legs. The White Legs themselves are children, albeit in a somewhat more negative fashion; these are people who lack even the most basic skills needed to care for themselves. Resolving the Sorrow’s quest means that they have to grow up in one fashion or another. Running away means coming to terms with the painful loss of Zion, a literal interpretation of that old saying: “you can’t go home again.” Staying and fighting means learning the ways of war that Daniel had been avoiding, becoming adults and losing the innocence of their previous existence. The Sorrows still can’t go home again; because the Sorrows themselves have changed. Like children, they learn from the adults in their lives, and so depending on the resolution, the Courier can shape the Sorrows the way a parent shapes a child. Showing cruelty leads to the children learning cruelty, the cycle of violence continuing onward. Not all parenting is positive, and including that lesson was critical for selling the theme of childhood growing into adulthood in the interactive format of video games.

The two tribal followers you have in the game both have quests that revolve around maturity and growing up. Follows-Chalk is the most basic of these, played completely straight. He begins the game as a junior scout, not trusted to scout on his own but to follow his seniors as he grows into his tribal role. His youthful curiosity leads him to want to see more of the world, just like any teenager hoping to explore the world and find adventure. Through the Courier, who provides guidance in the way of adults teaching children, Follows-Chalk will either embrace the wanderlust and see the world, or stay at home, get married, and settle into domestic life as a scout, husband, and father. Notably, Follows-Chalk is simply “never seen again” if he leaves, but that’s it as far as what you learn. Did he die five seconds after he left? Five days? Five years? Five decades? Did he see the casinos that he wanted to see? Did he find out about what deathclaws were? You don’t know, and that too is part of life. Children grow up and leave, and best friends forever might lose touch and never know what happened to their long childhood chum after the parting. That’s life though, sometimes you lose touch and never find out what happened to someone, even those you care about a great deal.

Waking Cloud is also a child, which should at first glance not work because far from being a child, she is a wife and mother of three. Yet even though she is an established adult, Waking Cloud deals with one of the biggest experiences that children must go through to become adults; the experience of losing someone you care about and confronting difficult, sad situations as they are. Difficult subjects are often masked over with comforting lies for the sake of children who either cannot comprehend a situation or if the parents wish to spare severe emotional wrangling. Waking Cloud’s husband dies before the game starts, and Daniel keeps the knowledge from Cloud because he believes it would be too painful, that the work evacuating Zion was too important. Like any father, Daniel takes it upon himself to control what his ‘child’ knows, parenting out of the belief that he knows what’s best. These lies do impair the development of the ‘child’ Waking Cloud to an adult, as if she learns that Daniel lied to her, she learns distrust and sows it against Daniel as retribution. Yet if the Courier treats Waking Cloud as an adult, Waking Cloud acts like one in return; she is angry with Daniel for what he did but ultimately forgives the transgression. She handles the situation with maturity and moves past it healthily. 

Daniel is less about childhood than he is about being a parent. He’s unsure of what exactly to do with the Sorrows, he expresses metaphorically a lot of the uncertainty that new parents feel. He wants to do what is best for the Sorrows but doesn’t know what that is, yet he has to make a choice because they’re counting on him. The Sorrows go along with the plan because they trust Daniel and look to him as their father, but Daniel ultimately is making his plans out of his best interests, not that of the Sorrows. He wants to preserve the innocence that the Sorrows possess; in that sense he is the father that wishes his kids could stay young forever. He wants them to play in Zion as Neverland and when that can’t happen, he retreats to the Grand Staircase because the hardship is worth the innocence, in his mind. Notably, Daniel always loses something in the endings. If the Sorrows fight, he feels grief as he loses his ‘children’ to adulthood, and if they flee, Daniel loses Zion itself. Either way, something magical and special, something innocent is gone forever, and Daniel suffers for it.

Joshua Graham is not a child, but he has a child’s delusions, that he has made amends from his fiery descent into the Colorado and emerged as a new man whose sins were burned away with his skin. The forgiveness of the New Caananites taught him both right and wrong lessons about redemption. The human capacity for forgiveness can be truly transformational, this is undoubtedly true, but part of the transformation has to come from within. Joshua falls back into his old habits, the White Legs are the new Blackfoots (theme naming again, sometimes things aren’t subtle) and he embraces the savagery he indulged in as the Malpais Legate. The Courier is the real adult in the room when he forces Joshua to admit that Graham was always looking for excuses to justify his behavior to hide from the fact that it was always him that did those things and he is still that man. Joshua deluded himself into thinking that he was making progress when in truth, he was simply treading water until he had the strength to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. This too is a critical part of learning to be an adult, in taking responsibility for your own actions and realizing that if there is something that you don’t like about yourself, it’s you that has to change it and that it takes both recognition of the fault and serious effort to fix it. There’s a reason that 12-step programs frequently have admission as the first step, it’s an honest and painful thing to experience but it’s one that has to be done if there’s any hope of self-improvement. 

Randall Dean Clark is a great journey that explores these themes, essentially, the Survivalist is Honest Hearts if everything was past tense. The Survivalist also acts as a synthesis of Joshua and Daniel, the two ‘adults’ of Honest Hearts before the Courier came around. Clark had a sort of innocence about him at start, always running out to Zion. A father himself, Clark lost his wife and children in the nuclear firestorm that killed so many, and was left without a purpose in life. He found it in shepherding others, looking out for them out of paternal instinct. First was the group of Mexican survivors, who he aided covertly in a traditional sense out of paternal regard and human decency. The Vault 22 survivors brought that dream to an end, however, when they killed and ate the Mexican survivors. Like the conflict the Courier finds, the idyllic splendor and peaceful living of Zion was shattered by an outside group manipulated by a corrupt, cruel entity, in this case Vault-Tec itself whose twisted social experiments form some of the most nightmarish things in the Fallout universe. Clark kills the Vault 22 survivors until they finally flee, echoing the journey of Joshua. His revulsion at his work, grim resignation that “they deserved every damn bit of it” is what Joshua believes his crusade against the White Legs is. Yet there are telling differences, Clark does not desecrate the corpses as a warning nor does he lead others into battle. He still remembers his humanity when he encounters Sylvie, despite her also coming from Vault 22. Sure enough, he bonds with her, and then tragedy strikes again, when Sylvie and her baby Michael die. He becomes depressed and suicidal, but can’t bring himself to kill himself. Yet later, he discovers more children with who would eventually become the Sorrows, and begins again like he did with the Mexican survivors so many years ago. Again like Joshua, he goes back to old habits, yet these are habits of compassion rather than cruelty. Like Daniel, Clark attempts to preserve the innocence of these children, guiding them but also ensuring that they never see him. Thus, Clark achieves a sort of divine apotheosis as “The Father in the Caves” again mirroring the Mexican survivors who attributed Clark’s helpful actions in secret to divine intervention. But like Daniel, Clark also refused to let the Sorrows grow up, and this stunted them. Their fear of caves and traps left them unprepared to defend themselves against the White Legs, even to use as defensive works against the encroaching enemy. 

These are powerful themes, one that most if not all people end up having to deal with at some point in their life, which is why using these themes right can be quite powerful. Honest Hearts stumbles at times, but the concepts were sound.

Thanks for the question, TBH.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[engl2593fall2021]

Violence against transgender and gender-queer individuals.

The novel Nevada by Imogen Binnie provides the audience with an personal point of view on what it’s like to live under the social stigmas placed on transgender individuals. The author herself is a transgender individual who uses the character of Maria to convey her own experiences. Western culture, especially American culture, have many ill-conceived prejudices about transgender individuals that do not align with the lived realities of these people. Factor in the Western assumption that all transgender individuals will abide by heterosexual norms once they have transitioned, and you create a very restrictive and oppressive culture for gender-queer people. The main character of the novel Nevada is Maria, a lesbian transgender woman living in NYC. Maria often laments about how she is misrepresented by the media and culture, and the misconceptions that come from this misrepresentation have real consequences for her and other transgender individuals. Maria tells us “It’s always impossible to know what anyone’s assumptions are. People tend to assume that trans women are either drag queens and loads of trashy fun, or else sad, pathetic and deluded pervy straight men, at least, until they save up they money and get their Sex Change Operations, at which point they become just like every other woman,” (Binnie 15). Maria goes on to say “That’s what it’s like to be a trans woman: never being sure who knows you’re trans or what that knowledge would even mean to them,” (Binnie 16). Maria’s anxiety about the reaction she receives from other people is not an unwarranted anxiety. Transgender individuals have increasing rates of violence and murder against them based solely on their gender expression; coming out as transgender can cause them to be disowned by friends and family. Transgender and gender-queer individuals also have a much higher rate of suicide than heteronormative individuals, due to the social stigma and lack of support they receive. From statistics released by the FBI in 2020, the overall incidence of hate crimes increases; 20.5% of these were due to bias against sexual orientation, and 2.5% of them were due to bias against gender identity (The Advocate). This means that almost a quarter of all hate crimes committed in 2020 were because of bias against sexual orientation or gender identity. However, the bulk of hate crimes in 2020 were also racially motivated; many hate crimes were motivated by multiple biases (The Advocate). Considering these factors, the intersection of gender identity, sexual orientation, and race play a critical role in determining the manner in which an individual is received by their community. Black transgender or queer individuals face an unprecedented rate of violence and abuse as well as having a lack of economical or legal support to remove themselves from toxic households/lifestyles. The saddest part is that the FBI’s report on hate crimes committed in 2020 is inaccurate, as the true number is probably much higher (The Advocate). Many hate crimes and abuses against members of the LGBTQ+ community go underreported due to fear of being disbelieved or retaliation by the offended; the offender is often also a family member or close friend, creating more incentive to not report these crimes. My hope is that going forward into 2022, we will begin to support members of the LGBTQ+ community by working for more legislation and financial support to protect the rights and lives of our fellow humans.

sources: 

Binnie, Imogen. Nevada. Topside Press, 2013.

Cooper, Alex. “FBI Report Finds Increase in Hate Crimes against Transgender People.” ADVOCATE, The Advocate, 1 Sept. 2021, www.advocate.com/crime/2021/9/01/fbi-report-finds-increase-hate-crimes-against-transgender-people.

[larkawolfgirl]

Discovering my romantic/sexual orientation

Alright, I hope this came out okay even though it’s pretty long. Though there’s probably still too much personal information in here, I tried to keep it to a minimum. Just a head’s up that I do mention porn (so kinda nsfw?). I’m pretty nervous about posting this, so please don’t send me hate for this for whatever reason. I know I’m putting myself out there by posting it, but I wanted to contribute something for Pride month.

I never considered myself straight but never really considered myself not straight either. Actually, until quite recently I never believed anyone was really straight (or gay for that matter). To me, people just fell in love with who they fell in love with, end of story. I still believe this in an idealistic way, but social interactions are not nearly this simple. And even if this is true for romantic attraction, it is not the case for sexual attraction. My upbringing was helpful in that I was made aware of sex and sexual orientation at a very young age. I even learned that asexuality was a thing (even though the definition my mom told me was inaccurate and I quickly forgot about it until reading about it on tumblr). Because of this, I always questioned myself. I somehow just knew I was sexually attracted to men but I often asked myself if I was attracted to women. My answer was always “I think I could learn to be.” This sounds a bit odd, but my thought was that if I fell in love with a girl I could learn to be attracted to her. It was that simple. The problem was that I couldn’t help wondering if I already was and just didn’t realize it. I always found women aesthetically pleasing to look at, but so does my straight sister so I figured it might just be the same for everyone. Not to mention that I didn’t like anyone or have anyone asking me out anyway, so it didn’t seem like a big deal whether I was or not.

But then I was forced to wonder about myself when one of my best friends talked me into watching porn with her (both straight and lesbian). I found it oddly fascinating more than anything, and though I did become addicted for a time, I was never aroused like my friend was. I began to wonder if something was wrong with me, but I decided to blame it on the fact that I needed to be in a situation with a real person I liked to be aroused. It wasn’t that I didn’t think about sex or find it appealing (because I thought about it a lot). Honestly, my thinking was strange back then because I literally thought I had a sleeping slut inside me which makes me double over in hysterical laughter now. But something I noticed more and more over time was that I thought about other people having sex, especially fictional characters having sex.

Let’s backtrack a bit. I’ve only had a number of “crushes.” Half of which were not real crushes but me deluding myself into thinking I had one out of a need to feel normal. First, I liked my neighbor because another neighbor liked him. (Fun fact: he’s gay). Next, I liked a different neighbor because the friend that got me to watch porn liked him. (This case was so imaginarily bad I fell into a depression after he moved.) Then I started actually liking another one of my best friends. The thing was that with the other two crushes it was more of a snap decision to like them than the slow realization that this was. Part of it was that my friend and sister kept suggesting that we would make a cute couple, and the more I thought about it, he was the closest thing to a perfect boyfriend that I knew in real life. He is also cute. I still remember the day I opened the door and saw him in a completely different light. I wasn’t looking at him in a sexual light, but he looked so nice to me all of a sudden, and I instantly knew that that was what a crush was. (Fun fact: he’s also gay.)

Okay, so there I was with a crush on my gay friend still kind of wondering if I liked girls and why I was not aroused by porn. So, I started to go inward more. I notice how often I looked at girls’ legs and chests and things but was still confused since the idea of having sex with a girl still seemed weird.

Then one of my high school friends told me she was pansexual which I had never heard of before. I forget the exact definition she gave me, but what I took from it was “you fall in love with whoever you fall in love with.” Something inside me soared from hearing the word alone and connecting my belief with an accepted orientation was weight off my shoulders. So, I dubbed myself pansexual and didn’t think too much more about it until much later.

This was a girl I talked to nearly every day for at least an hour on skype. Months into this friendship, I suddenly had this bursting light feeling in my chest and had to actually pause to take it in because it was so unexpected. I had never felt anything like it and it took me whole minutes to finally realize it was because I was actually starting to fall for her. I never told her since she lived half way across the world and was already in multiple relationships during our friendships. Though my real epiphany came later, I was relieved to realize I could develop real romantic feelings.

Sometime after I stopped talking to her, this guy asked me out and I somewhat cruelly strung him along. The thing was that I always told myself I would give anyone a chance but I also didn’t want to agree to date him only to break up with him. We had “kind of” dates but I just wasn’t feeling anything one way or another. When I finally told him I didn’t want to date him, I couldn’t even really explain why. It was only months later, after deep thought, that I pieced together my two previous crushes and my lack of feelings for him. I am demiromantic which means any romantic feelings I may have for someone only develop slowly through an emotional connection.  

The question of my sexuality remained, however, since I had no experience to go on. For reasons I’ll spare you, I figured out I am definitely somewhere on the ace spectrum. Honestly, I don’t think I will know for sure until I’m in a sexual situation whether or not I am demisexual, graysexual, or just asexual. But because of my strange fixation on sex, I’m sticking with grayace for right now.

So, to conclude this overly long story, I can develop romantic feelings for anyone but only once I get to know them well. I am more romantically attracted to women but more sexually attracted to men (even though I find women more aesthetically appealing). The idea of going on a date with a stranger terrifies me (because I would be uncomfortable and feel pressured to return their feelings). Excluding other personal details you probably don’t care about.

[toomanysinks]

Theranos documentary review: The Inventor’s horrifying optimism

A blood-splattered Theranos machine nearly pricks an employee struggling to fix it. This gruesome graphical rendering is what you’ll walk away from HBO’s “The Inventor” with. It finally gives a visual to the startup’s laboratory fraud detailed in words by John Carreyrou’s book “Bad Blood”.

The documentary that premiered tonight at Sundance Film Festival explores how the move fast and break things ethos of Silicon Valley is “really dangerous when people’s lives are in the balance” as former employee and whistleblower Tyler Shultz says in the film. Theranos promised a medical testing device that made a single drop of blood from your finger more precise than a painful old-school syringe in your vein. What patients ended up using was so inaccurate it put their health in jeopardy.

But perhaps even more frightening is the willingness of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes to delude herself and everyone around her in service of a seemingly benevolent mission. The documentary captures how good ideas can make people do bad things.

“The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley” juxtaposes truthful interviews with the employees who eventually rebelled against Holmes with footage and media appearances of her blatantly lying to the world. It manages to stick to the emotion of the story rather than getting lost in the scientific discrepancies of Theranos’ deception.

The film opens and closes with close-ups of Holmes, demonstrating how the facts change her same gleaming smile and big blue eyes from the face of innovative potential to that of a sociopathic criminal. “I don’t have many secrets” she tells the camera at the start.

Though the film mentions early that her $9 billion-plus valuation company would wind up worth less than zero, it does a keen job of building empathy for her that it can tear down later. You see her tell sob stories of death in the family and repeat her line about building an end to having to say goodbye to loved ones too soon. You hear how she’s terrified of needles and how growing up, “my best friends were books.”

But then cracks start to emerge as old powerful men from professors to former cabinet members faun over Holmes and become enthralled in her cult of personality as validation snowballs. Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney has a knack for creeping dread from his experience making “Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room” and “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.” He portrays Holmes’ delusions of grandeur with shots of her portrait beside those of Archimedes, Beethoven, and her idol Steve Jobs.

The first red flag comes when Holmes names her initial device Edison after the historic inventor the film assures you was quite a fraud himself. Soon, sources from inside the company relay how the Edison and subsequent Theranos hardware never worked right but that demos were faked for customers and investors. Instead of sticking to a firm timeline, Gibney bounces around to hammer home the emotional arcs of employees from excited to dubious, and of Holmes from confidence to paranoia.

Carreyrou’s “Bad Blood” meticulously chronicled every tiny warning sign that worried Theranos’ staff in order to build a case. But the author’s Wall Street Journal day job bled through, sapping the book of emotion and preventing it from seizing the grandeur of the tale’s climactic moments.

Gibney fills in the blanks with cringe-inducing scenes of Theranos’ faulty hardware. A ‘nanotainer’ of blood rolls off a table and fractures, a biohazard awaiting whoever tries to pick it up. The depiction of working in Theranos’ unregulated laboratory scored the biggest gasps from the Sundance audience. Former employees describe how Theranos recruited drifters they suspected of hepatitis as guinea pigs. Their stale blood evaporates into the air surrounding machines dripping with inky red, covered in broken test tubes. Gibney nails the graphics, zooming in on a needle spraying droplets as a robotic arm sputters through malfunctions. I almost had to look away as the film renders a hand reaching into the machine and only just dodging an erratic syringe.

A still from The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley by Alex Gibney, an official selection of the Documentary Premieres program at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Drew Kelly.

At times, Gibney goes a bit too melodramatic. The toy music box twinkling foreshadows a dream becoming a nightmare, but it gets maddening after an hour straight. The pacing feels uneven, sometimes bogged down in Holmes’ personal relationships when later it seems to speed through the company’s collapse.

Though elsewhere, the director harnesses the nervous laughter coping mechanism of the former employees to inject humor into the grim tale. With accuracy so low, Shultz jokes that “if people are testing themselves for syphilis with Theranos, there’s going to be a lot more syphilis in the world.” Visual dramatizations of journalists’ audio recordings of Holmes and the eventual legal disputes bring this evidence to life.

Alex Gibney, director of The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley, an official selection of the Documentary Premieres program at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

The most touching scene sees Fortune’s Roger Parloff on the brink of implosion as he grapples with giving Holmes her first magazine cover story — momentum she used to eventually get Theranos’ useless hardware in front of real patients who depended on its results.

The Inventor succeeds at instilling the lesson without getting too preachy. It’s fine to be hopeful, but don’t ignore your concerns no matter how much you want something to be real. It takes an incredibly complex sequence of events and makes it at once gripping and informative. If you haven’t read “Bad Blood” or found it drab, “The Inventor” conveys the gravity of the debacle with a little more flare.

Yet the documentary also gives Holmes a bit too much benefit of the doubt, suggesting that hey, at least she was trying to do good in the world. In the after-film panel, Gibney said “She had a noble vision . . . I think that was part of why she was able to convince so many people and convince herself that what she was doing was great, which allowed her to lie so effectively.” Carreyrou followed up that “she was not intending to perpetrate a long con.”

Yet that’s easier to say for both the director and the author when neither of their works truly investigated the downstream health impacts of Theranos’ false positives and false negatives. If they’d tracked down people who delayed critical treatment or had their lives upended by the fear of a disease they didn’t have, I doubt Holmes would be cut so much slack.

Some degree of ‘Fake it ’til you make it’ might be essential to build hard technology startups. You must make people believe Inc something that doesn’t exist if you’re to pull in the funding and talent necessary to make it a reality. But it’s not just medical, hardware, or “atoms not bits” startups that must be allegiant to the truth. As Facebook and WhatsApps’ role in spreading misinformation that led to mob killings in India and Myanmar proved, having a grand mission doesn’t make you incapable of doing harm. A line must be drawn between optimism and dishonesty before it leads to drawing chalk outlines on the ground.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/24/theranos-the-inventor-review/

[fmservers]

Theranos documentary review: The Inventor’s horrifying optimism

A blood-splattered Theranos machine nearly pricks an employee struggling to fix it. This gruesome graphical rendering is what you’ll walk away from HBO’s “The Inventor” with. It finally gives a visual to the startup’s laboratory fraud documented in words by John Carreyrou’s book “Bad Blood”.

The documentary that premiered tonight at Sundance Film Festival explores how the move fast and break things ethos of Silicon Valley is “really dangerous when people’s lives are in the balance” as former employee and whistleblower Tyler Schultz says in the film. Theranos promised a medical testing device that made a single drop of blood from your finger more precise than a painful old-school syringe in your vein. What patients ended up using was so inaccurate it put their health in jeopardy.

But perhaps even more frightening is the willingness of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes to delude herself and everyone around her in service of a seemingly benevolent mission. The documentary captures how good ideas can make people do bad things.

The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley juxtaposes truthful interviews with the employees who eventually rebelled against Holmes with footage and media appearances of her blatantly lying to the world. It manages to stick to the emotion of the story rather than getting lost in the scientific discrepancies of Theranos’ deception.

The film opens and closes with close ups of Holmes, demonstrating how the facts change her same gleaming smile and big blue eyes from the face of innovative potential to that of a sociopathic criminal. “I don’t have many secrets” she tells the camera at the start.

Though the film mentions her $9 billion-plus valuation company would wind up worth less than zero, it does a keen job of building empathy for her that it can tear down later. You see her tell sob stories of death in the family and repeat her line about building an end to having to say goodbye to loved ones too soon. You hear how she’s terrified of needles and how growing up, “my best friends were books.

”

But then cracks start to emerge as old powerful men from professors to former cabinet members faun over Holes and become enthralled in her cult of personality as validation snowballs. Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney has a knack for creeping dread from his experience making “Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room” and “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.” He portrays Holmes’ delusions of grandeur with shots of her portrait beside those of Archimedes, Beethoven, and her idol Steve Jobs.

The first red flag comes when Holmes names her initial device Edison after the historic inventor the film assures you was quite a fraud himself. Soon, sources from inside the company relay how the Edison and subsequent Theranos hardware never worked right but that demos were faked for customers and investors.Instead of sticking to a firm timeline, Gibney bounces around to hammer home the emotional arcs of employees from excited to dubious, and of Holmes from confidence to paranoia.

Carreyrou’s “Bad Blood” meticulously chronicled every tiny warning sign that worried Theranos’ staff to build a case. But the author’s Wall Street Journal day job bled through, sapping the book of emotion and failing to seize the grandeur of the tale’s climactic moments.

Gibney fills in the blanks with cringe-inducing scenes of Theranos’ faulty hardware. A ‘nanotainer’ of blood rolls off a table and fractures, a biohazard awaiting whoever tries to pick it up. The depiction of working in Theranos’ unregulated laboratory scored the biggest gasps from the Sundance audience. Former employees describe how Theranos recruited drifters they suspected of hepatitis as guinea pigs. Their stale blood evaporates into the air surrounding machines dripping with inky red are covered in broken test tubes. Gibney nails the graphics, zooming in on a needle spraying droplets as a robotic arm sputters through malfunctions. I almost had to look away as the film renders a hand reaching into the machine and only just dodging an erratic syringe.

A still from The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley by Alex Gibney, an official selection of the Documentary Premieres program at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Drew Kelly.

At times, Gibney goes a bit too melodramatic. The toy music box twinkling foreshadows a dream becoming a nightmare, but it gets maddening after an hour straight. The pacing feels uneven, sometimes bogged down in Holmes’ personal relationships when later it seems to speed through the company’s collapse.

Though elsewhere, the director harnesses the nervous laughter coping mechanism of the former employees to inject humor into the grim tale. With accuracy so low, Tyler Schultz jokes that “if people are testing themselves for syphilis with Theranos, there’s going to be a lot more syphilis in the world. Visual dramatizations of journalists’ audio recordings of Holmes and the eventual legal disputes bring this evidence to life.

Alex Gibney, director of The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley, an official selection of the Documentary Premieres program at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

The most touching scene sees Fortune’s Roger Parloff on the brink of implosion as he grapples with giving Holmes her first magazine cover story — momentum she used to eventually get Theranos’ useless hardware in front of real patients who depended on its results.

The Inventor succeeds at instilling the lesson without getting too preachy. It’s fine to be hopeful, but don’t ignore your concerns no matter how much you want something to be real. It takes an incredibly complex sequence of events and makes it at once gripping and informative.

Yet the documentary also gives Holmes a bit too much benefit of the doubt, suggesting that hey, at least she was trying to do good in the world. In the after-film panel, Gibney said “She had a noble vision . . . I think that was part of why she was able to convince so many people and convince herself that what she was doing was great, which allowed her to lie so effectively.” Carreyrou followed up that “she was not intending to perpetrate a long con.”

Yet that’s easier to say for both the director and the author when neither of their works truly investigated the downstream health impacts of Theranos’ false positives and false negatives. If they’d tracked down people who delayed critical treatment or had their lives upended by the fear of a disease they didn’t have, I doubt Holmes would be cut so much slack.

Some degree of ‘Fake it ’til you make it’ might be essential to build hard technology startups. You must make people believe if you’re to pull in the funding and talent necessary to make something a reality. But it’s not just medical, hardware, or “atoms not bits” startups that must be allegiant to the truth. As Facebook and WhatsApps’ role in spreading misinformation that led to mob killings in India and Myanmar make clear, having a grand mission doesn’t make you incapable of doing harm. A line must be drawn between optimism and dishonesty before it leads to drawing chalk outlines on the ground.

Via Josh Constine https://techcrunch.com

[keithgrosme]

Everybody Lies: FBI Edition

Everybody Lies: FBI Edition

You, dear readers, know my advice about talking to the FBI: don't. If the FBI — or any law enforcement agency — asks to talk to you, say "No, I want to talk to my lawyer, I don't want to talk to you," and repeat as necessary. Do not talk to them "just to see what they want." Do not try to "set the facts straight." Do not try to outwit them. Do not explain that you have "nothing to hide."

Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.

This advice is on my mind of late what with two former Trump folks — George Popadopouluos and Michael Flynn — pleading guilty to the federal crime of lying to the FBI.

Plenty of people agree with me. Sometimes, though, I hear different advice. Sometimes I hear this:

No. Or more accurately: no, unless you have first prepared exhaustively with an attorney.

This is not a casual conversation about who took a bite out of the roll of cookie dough in the fridge. This is serious complicated stuff, and your whole life hangs in the balance. Platitudes aside, going into a law enforcement interview armed only with the attitude "I'll just tell the truth" is poor strategy.

Here's why.

No offense, but you may be a sociopath. If the FBI wants to interview you, it's possible you're some kind of Big Deal — a politician or a general or a mover and shaker of some description. If you're kind of a big deal, there's a significant possibility you're a sociopath. You really don't know how to tell the truth, except by coincidence. You understand what people mean when they say "tell the truth" but to you it's like someone saying you should smile during the interview. Really? Well, I'll try, I guess, if I remember. You've gotten to be a big deal by doing whatever is necessary and rather routinely lying. It may be difficult for you to focus and remember when you are lying because lying feels the same as telling the truth. If someone shoved me onto a stage and said to me, "look, just hit the high C cleanly during the solo," I could take a real sincere shot at it, but I wouldn't really know what I was doing. If you think you can go into an FBI interview and "just tell the truth," when it's not something you're used to doing, you're deluding yourself. You're not going to learn how in the next five minutes.

You're almost certainly human. There's a commandment about not bearing false witness. But rules don't become commandments because they're really easy to follow. They become commandments because we — we bunch of broken hooting apes — are prone to break them. Everybody lies. Humans lie more under pressure. FBI agents are trained in two dozen ways to ratchet up the pressure on you without getting out of their chair — verbal, nonverbal, tone, expression, pacing, subject changing, every trick that any cop ever used in the box. You're only human. Unprepared, you will likely lie. Smart people, dumb people, ditchdiggers and neurosurgeons, lawyers and accountants, the good and the bad, they all lie. Usually they lie about really stupid things that are easily disproved. I'm not making a normative judgment here; surely it would be nice if we didn't lie. I'm making a descriptive statement: humans lie. Saying "I'll just go in and tell the truth" is like saying "I'll just start being a good person." Well, good luck. Look, you admit to being fallible in other respects, right? You admit sometimes you're unkind when you're tired, or sometimes you drink or eat more than you know you should, or sometimes you procrastinate, or sometimes you have lust in your heart? What makes you think you're infallible about telling the truth?

Dumbass, you don't even know if you're lying or not. When an FBI agent is interviewing you, assume that that agent is exquisitely prepared. They probably already have proof about the answer of half the questions they're going to ask you. They have the receipts. They've listened to the tapes. They've read the emails. Recently. You, on the other hand, haven't thought about Oh Yeah That Thing for months or years, and you routinely forget birthdays and names and whether you had a doctor's appointment today and so forth. So, if you go in with "I'll just tell the truth," you're going to start answering questions based on your cold-memory unrefreshed holistic general concept of the subject, like an impressionistic painting by a dim third-grader. Will you say "I really don't remember" or "I would have to look at the emails" or "I'm not sure"? That would be smart. But we've established you're not smart, because you've set out to tell the truth to the FBI. You're dumb. So you're going to answer questions incorrectly, through bad memory. Sometimes you're going to go off on long detours and frolics based on entirely incorrect memories. You're going to be incorrect about things you wouldn't lie about if you remembered them. If you realize you got something wrong or that you may not be remembering right, you're going to get flustered, because it's the FBI, and remember even worse. But the FBI would never prosecute you for a false statement that was the result of a failed memory, right? Oh, my sweet country mouse. If you had talked to a lawyer first, that lawyer would have grilled you mercilessly for hours, helped you search for every potentially relevant document, reviewed every communication, inquired into every scenario, and dragged reliable memory kicking and screaming out the quicksand of your psyche.

You have no idea what you're telling the truth about. Look, you think that you can prepare to tell the truth. But at best you can prepare to tell the truth about something you know about and expect and understand. So let's say I know I'm going to be asked about whether I'm an ass on Twitter. I'm ready to come clean. I am definitely an ass on Twitter. But I get in there and the agent is all, "Mr. White, isn't it true that in October 1989 you accidentally hit on a major news anchor when you saw her from behind at the copy machine and thought she was another intern at CBS and so you sidled up for a full-on 'how YOU doin" and then she turned around and you saw who it was and you stammered something and spent several hours in the stairwell?" See, I was not mentally and emotionally prepared to tell the truth1 about that. So we're off to the races. I went in with the best of intentions, I got sandbagged with something completely unexpected, I panicked like the grubby little human that I am, and I lied.

You can't even talk properly. If you're an attorney and you need to prepare someone for testimony, you know: we're a bunch of vague, meandering, imprecise assholes. We talk like a water balloon fight, sort of splashing the general vicinity of the answer. We don't correct questions with inaccurate premises that don't matter, we generalize and oversimplify and summarize and excerpt and use shorthand that only exists in our heads, and we do this all day every day in casual conversation. A huge amount of conversation goes on between the words and by implication. If I'm walking past your office and ask "did you eat?" I don't need to vocalize that I mean did you eat lunch and if not would you like to go to lunch. You can respond "I have a meeting" and I will understand that you mean you understand and acknowledge that I'm asking you to lunch but you are unable to go. Huge parts of our conversations are like that. Usually it doesn't matter. But if you can get charged with a federal crime if something you say is, taken literally, not true, it matters like crazy. It takes training and an act of will to testify — to listen to the question, to ask ourselves if we know what the question means, to ask ourselves if we know the answer to that question and not some other question it makes us think of, and to give a precise answer that directly answers the question. So not only do you have to go into that FBI interview and tell the truth — you have to be prepared for a level of precision and focus that you almost never use in your day-to-day communications.

You don't know if you're in trouble. You say "I'll just go and tell the truth." Well, if you mean "I'll just go confess to anything I've done wrong and take the consequences," that's one thing. But if you mean "I'll just tell the truth because I've done nothing wrong and I have nothing to hide," you're full of shit. You don't know if you've done something wrong yet. Do you know every federal criminal law? Have you applied every federal criminal law to every communication and meeting and enterprise you've engaged in for the last five years? "But . . . but . . . the FBI said they just wanted to talk about that meeting and there was nothing wrong with that meeting." Dumbass, you've got incomplete information. Not only do you not know if there was anything wrong about that meeting, you don't know if that's what they'll ask about. If you're saying "I'll talk to them because I have nothing to hide," you are not making an informed choice.

Everybody lies. Especially the FBI. Look, mate: the FBI gets to lie to you in interviews. They can lie to you about what other people said about you. The can lie to you about what they've seen in your emails. They can lie to you about what they can prove. They can lie to you about what they know. Authority figures barking lies at you can be confusing and upsetting and stressful. Our brain says "I didn't do that thing but they say they have emails so maybe did I do that thing or sort of that thing?" Many people react by blurting out more or less random shit or by panicking and lying. Do you have what it takes not to do that? Better be sure.

Remember: the FBI wins nearly any way. Confess to a crime? They got your confession. Lie? They almost certainly know you lied, and already have proof that your statement is a lie, and now they've used the investigation to create the crime.

The answer is to shut up and lawyer up. A qualified lawyer will grill you mercilessly and help you make an informed rational choice about whether to talk. Then, if you decide to talk, the lawyer will prepare you exhaustively for the interview so you can spot the pressure tactics and interrogation-room tricks, and so you will have refreshed your memory about what the truth is.

Your best intentions to tell the truth are a thin shield.

Copyright 2017 by the named Popehat author. https://www.popehat.com/2017/12/04/everybody-lies-fbi-edition/ via Blogger http://keithgros.blogspot.com/2017/12/everybody-lies-fbi-edition.html

[nancydhooper]

Everybody Lies: FBI Edition

You, dear readers, know my advice about talking to the FBI: don't. If the FBI — or any law enforcement agency — asks to talk to you, say "No, I want to talk to my lawyer, I don't want to talk to you," and repeat as necessary. Do not talk to them "just to see what they want." Do not try to "set the facts straight." Do not try to outwit them. Do not explain that you have "nothing to hide."

Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.

This advice is on my mind of late what with two former Trump folks — George Popadopouluos and Michael Flynn — pleading guilty to the federal crime of lying to the FBI.

Plenty of people agree with me. Sometimes, though, I hear different advice. Sometimes I hear this:

No. Or more accurately: no, unless you have first prepared exhaustively with an attorney.

This is not a casual conversation about who took a bite out of the roll of cookie dough in the fridge. This is serious complicated stuff, and your whole life hangs in the balance. Platitudes aside, going into a law enforcement interview armed only with the attitude "I'll just tell the truth" is poor strategy.

Here's why.

No offense, but you may be a sociopath. If the FBI wants to interview you, it's possible you're some kind of Big Deal — a politician or a general or a mover and shaker of some description. If you're kind of a big deal, there's a significant possibility you're a sociopath. You really don't know how to tell the truth, except by coincidence. You understand what people mean when they say "tell the truth" but to you it's like someone saying you should smile during the interview. Really? Well, I'll try, I guess, if I remember. You've gotten to be a big deal by doing whatever is necessary and rather routinely lying. It may be difficult for you to focus and remember when you are lying because lying feels the same as telling the truth. If someone shoved me onto a stage and said to me, "look, just hit the high C cleanly during the solo," I could take a real sincere shot at it, but I wouldn't really know what I was doing. If you think you can go into an FBI interview and "just tell the truth," when it's not something you're used to doing, you're deluding yourself. You're not going to learn how in the next five minutes.

You're almost certainly human. There's a commandment about not bearing false witness. But rules don't become commandments because they're really easy to follow. They become commandments because we — we bunch of broken hooting apes — are prone to break them. Everybody lies. Humans lie more under pressure. FBI agents are trained in two dozen ways to ratchet up the pressure on you without getting out of their chair — verbal, nonverbal, tone, expression, pacing, subject changing, every trick that any cop ever used in the box. You're only human. Unprepared, you will likely lie. Smart people, dumb people, ditchdiggers and neurosurgeons, lawyers and accountants, the good and the bad, they all lie. Usually they lie about really stupid things that are easily disproved. I'm not making a normative judgment here; surely it would be nice if we didn't lie. I'm making a descriptive statement: humans lie. Saying "I'll just go in and tell the truth" is like saying "I'll just start being a good person." Well, good luck. Look, you admit to being fallible in other respects, right? You admit sometimes you're unkind when you're tired, or sometimes you drink or eat more than you know you should, or sometimes you procrastinate, or sometimes you have lust in your heart? What makes you think you're infallible about telling the truth?

Dumbass, you don't even know if you're lying or not. When an FBI agent is interviewing you, assume that that agent is exquisitely prepared. They probably already have proof about the answer of half the questions they're going to ask you. They have the receipts. They've listened to the tapes. They've read the emails. Recently. You, on the other hand, haven't thought about Oh Yeah That Thing for months or years, and you routinely forget birthdays and names and whether you had a doctor's appointment today and so forth. So, if you go in with "I'll just tell the truth," you're going to start answering questions based on your cold-memory unrefreshed holistic general concept of the subject, like an impressionistic painting by a dim third-grader. Will you say "I really don't remember" or "I would have to look at the emails" or "I'm not sure"? That would be smart. But we've established you're not smart, because you've set out to tell the truth to the FBI. You're dumb. So you're going to answer questions incorrectly, through bad memory. Sometimes you're going to go off on long detours and frolics based on entirely incorrect memories. You're going to be incorrect about things you wouldn't lie about if you remembered them. If you realize you got something wrong or that you may not be remembering right, you're going to get flustered, because it's the FBI, and remember even worse. But the FBI would never prosecute you for a false statement that was the result of a failed memory, right? Oh, my sweet country mouse. If you had talked to a lawyer first, that lawyer would have grilled you mercilessly for hours, helped you search for every potentially relevant document, reviewed every communication, inquired into every scenario, and dragged reliable memory kicking and screaming out the quicksand of your psyche.

You have no idea what you're telling the truth about. Look, you think that you can prepare to tell the truth. But at best you can prepare to tell the truth about something you know about and expect and understand. So let's say I know I'm going to be asked about whether I'm an ass on Twitter. I'm ready to come clean. I am definitely an ass on Twitter. But I get in there and the agent is all, "Mr. White, isn't it true that in October 1989 you accidentally hit on a major news anchor when you saw her from behind at the copy machine and thought she was another intern at CBS and so you sidled up for a full-on 'how YOU doin" and then she turned around and you saw who it was and you stammered something and spent several hours in the stairwell?" See, I was not mentally and emotionally prepared to tell the truth1 about that. So we're off to the races. I went in with the best of intentions, I got sandbagged with something completely unexpected, I panicked like the grubby little human that I am, and I lied.

You can't even talk properly. If you're an attorney and you need to prepare someone for testimony, you know: we're a bunch of vague, meandering, imprecise assholes. We talk like a water balloon fight, sort of splashing the general vicinity of the answer. We don't correct questions with inaccurate premises that don't matter, we generalize and oversimplify and summarize and excerpt and use shorthand that only exists in our heads, and we do this all day every day in casual conversation. A huge amount of conversation goes on between the words and by implication. If I'm walking past your office and ask "did you eat?" I don't need to vocalize that I mean did you eat lunch and if not would you like to go to lunch. You can respond "I have a meeting" and I will understand that you mean you understand and acknowledge that I'm asking you to lunch but you are unable to go. Huge parts of our conversations are like that. Usually it doesn't matter. But if you can get charged with a federal crime if something you say is, taken literally, not true, it matters like crazy. It takes training and an act of will to testify — to listen to the question, to ask ourselves if we know what the question means, to ask ourselves if we know the answer to that question and not some other question it makes us think of, and to give a precise answer that directly answers the question. So not only do you have to go into that FBI interview and tell the truth — you have to be prepared for a level of precision and focus that you almost never use in your day-to-day communications.

You don't know if you're in trouble. You say "I'll just go and tell the truth." Well, if you mean "I'll just go confess to anything I've done wrong and take the consequences," that's one thing. But if you mean "I'll just tell the truth because I've done nothing wrong and I have nothing to hide," you're full of shit. You don't know if you've done something wrong yet. Do you know every federal criminal law? Have you applied every federal criminal law to every communication and meeting and enterprise you've engaged in for the last five years? "But . . . but . . . the FBI said they just wanted to talk about that meeting and there was nothing wrong with that meeting." Dumbass, you've got incomplete information. Not only do you not know if there was anything wrong about that meeting, you don't know if that's what they'll ask about. If you're saying "I'll talk to them because I have nothing to hide," you are not making an informed choice.

Everybody lies. Especially the FBI. Look, mate: the FBI gets to lie to you in interviews. They can lie to you about what other people said about you. The can lie to you about what they've seen in your emails. They can lie to you about what they can prove. They can lie to you about what they know. Authority figures barking lies at you can be confusing and upsetting and stressful. Our brain says "I didn't do that thing but they say they have emails so maybe did I do that thing or sort of that thing?" Many people react by blurting out more or less random shit or by panicking and lying. Do you have what it takes not to do that? Better be sure.

Remember: the FBI wins nearly any way. Confess to a crime? They got your confession. Lie? They almost certainly know you lied, and already have proof that your statement is a lie, and now they've used the investigation to create the crime.

The answer is to shut up and lawyer up. A qualified lawyer will grill you mercilessly and help you make an informed rational choice about whether to talk. Then, if you decide to talk, the lawyer will prepare you exhaustively for the interview so you can spot the pressure tactics and interrogation-room tricks, and so you will have refreshed your memory about what the truth is.

Your best intentions to tell the truth are a thin shield.

Copyright 2017 by the named Popehat author. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.popehat.com/2017/12/04/everybody-lies-fbi-edition/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[kennethmullins]

Everybody Lies: FBI Edition

You, dear readers, know my advice about talking to the FBI: don't. If the FBI — or any law enforcement agency — asks to talk to you, say "No, I want to talk to my lawyer, I don't want to talk to you," and repeat as necessary. Do not talk to them "just to see what they want." Do not try to "set the facts straight." Do not try to outwit them. Do not explain that you have "nothing to hide."

Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.

This advice is on my mind of late what with two former Trump folks — George Popadopouluos and Michael Flynn — pleading guilty to the federal crime of lying to the FBI.

Plenty of people agree with me. Sometimes, though, I hear different advice. Sometimes I hear this:

No. Or more accurately: no, unless you have first prepared exhaustively with an attorney.

This is not a casual conversation about who took a bite out of the roll of cookie dough in the fridge. This is serious complicated stuff, and your whole life hangs in the balance. Platitudes aside, going into a law enforcement interview armed only with the attitude "I'll just tell the truth" is poor strategy.

Here's why.

No offense, but you may be a sociopath. If the FBI wants to interview you, it's possible you're some kind of Big Deal — a politician or a general or a mover and shaker of some description. If you're kind of a big deal, there's a significant possibility you're a sociopath. You really don't know how to tell the truth, except by coincidence. You understand what people mean when they say "tell the truth" but to you it's like someone saying you should smile during the interview. Really? Well, I'll try, I guess, if I remember. You've gotten to be a big deal by doing whatever is necessary and rather routinely lying. It may be difficult for you to focus and remember when you are lying because lying feels the same as telling the truth. If someone shoved me onto a stage and said to me, "look, just hit the high C cleanly during the solo," I could take a real sincere shot at it, but I wouldn't really know what I was doing. If you think you can go into an FBI interview and "just tell the truth," when it's not something you're used to doing, you're deluding yourself. You're not going to learn how in the next five minutes.

You're almost certainly human. There's a commandment about not bearing false witness. But rules don't become commandments because they're really easy to follow. They become commandments because we — we bunch of broken hooting apes — are prone to break them. Everybody lies. Humans lie more under pressure. FBI agents are trained in two dozen ways to ratchet up the pressure on you without getting out of their chair — verbal, nonverbal, tone, expression, pacing, subject changing, every trick that any cop ever used in the box. You're only human. Unprepared, you will likely lie. Smart people, dumb people, ditchdiggers and neurosurgeons, lawyers and accountants, the good and the bad, they all lie. Usually they lie about really stupid things that are easily disproved. I'm not making a normative judgment here; surely it would be nice if we didn't lie. I'm making a descriptive statement: humans lie. Saying "I'll just go in and tell the truth" is like saying "I'll just start being a good person." Well, good luck. Look, you admit to being fallible in other respects, right? You admit sometimes you're unkind when you're tired, or sometimes you drink or eat more than you know you should, or sometimes you procrastinate, or sometimes you have lust in your heart? What makes you think you're infallible about telling the truth?

Dumbass, you don't even know if you're lying or not. When an FBI agent is interviewing you, assume that that agent is exquisitely prepared. They probably already have proof about the answer of half the questions they're going to ask you. They have the receipts. They've listened to the tapes. They've read the emails. Recently. You, on the other hand, haven't thought about Oh Yeah That Thing for months or years, and you routinely forget birthdays and names and whether you had a doctor's appointment today and so forth. So, if you go in with "I'll just tell the truth," you're going to start answering questions based on your cold-memory unrefreshed holistic general concept of the subject, like an impressionistic painting by a dim third-grader. Will you say "I really don't remember" or "I would have to look at the emails" or "I'm not sure"? That would be smart. But we've established you're not smart, because you've set out to tell the truth to the FBI. You're dumb. So you're going to answer questions incorrectly, through bad memory. Sometimes you're going to go off on long detours and frolics based on entirely incorrect memories. You're going to be incorrect about things you wouldn't lie about if you remembered them. If you realize you got something wrong or that you may not be remembering right, you're going to get flustered, because it's the FBI, and remember even worse. But the FBI would never prosecute you for a false statement that was the result of a failed memory, right? Oh, my sweet country mouse. If you had talked to a lawyer first, that lawyer would have grilled you mercilessly for hours, helped you search for every potentially relevant document, reviewed every communication, inquired into every scenario, and dragged reliable memory kicking and screaming out the quicksand of your psyche.

You have no idea what you're telling the truth about. Look, you think that you can prepare to tell the truth. But at best you can prepare to tell the truth about something you know about and expect and understand. So let's say I know I'm going to be asked about whether I'm an ass on Twitter. I'm ready to come clean. I am definitely an ass on Twitter. But I get in there and the agent is all, "Mr. White, isn't it true that in October 1989 you accidentally hit on a major news anchor when you saw her from behind at the copy machine and thought she was another intern at CBS and so you sidled up for a full-on 'how YOU doin" and then she turned around and you saw who it was and you stammered something and spent several hours in the stairwell?" See, I was not mentally and emotionally prepared to tell the truth1 about that. So we're off to the races. I went in with the best of intentions, I got sandbagged with something completely unexpected, I panicked like the grubby little human that I am, and I lied.

You can't even talk properly. If you're an attorney and you need to prepare someone for testimony, you know: we're a bunch of vague, meandering, imprecise assholes. We talk like a water balloon fight, sort of splashing the general vicinity of the answer. We don't correct questions with inaccurate premises that don't matter, we generalize and oversimplify and summarize and excerpt and use shorthand that only exists in our heads, and we do this all day every day in casual conversation. A huge amount of conversation goes on between the words and by implication. If I'm walking past your office and ask "did you eat?" I don't need to vocalize that I mean did you eat lunch and if not would you like to go to lunch. You can respond "I have a meeting" and I will understand that you mean you understand and acknowledge that I'm asking you to lunch but you are unable to go. Huge parts of our conversations are like that. Usually it doesn't matter. But if you can get charged with a federal crime if something you say is, taken literally, not true, it matters like crazy. It takes training and an act of will to testify — to listen to the question, to ask ourselves if we know what the question means, to ask ourselves if we know the answer to that question and not some other question it makes us think of, and to give a precise answer that directly answers the question. So not only do you have to go into that FBI interview and tell the truth — you have to be prepared for a level of precision and focus that you almost never use in your day-to-day communications.

You don't know if you're in trouble. You say "I'll just go and tell the truth." Well, if you mean "I'll just go confess to anything I've done wrong and take the consequences," that's one thing. But if you mean "I'll just tell the truth because I've done nothing wrong and I have nothing to hide," you're full of shit. You don't know if you've done something wrong yet. Do you know every federal criminal law? Have you applied every federal criminal law to every communication and meeting and enterprise you've engaged in for the last five years? "But . . . but . . . the FBI said they just wanted to talk about that meeting and there was nothing wrong with that meeting." Dumbass, you've got incomplete information. Not only do you not know if there was anything wrong about that meeting, you don't know if that's what they'll ask about. If you're saying "I'll talk to them because I have nothing to hide," you are not making an informed choice.

Everybody lies. Especially the FBI. Look, mate: the FBI gets to lie to you in interviews. They can lie to you about what other people said about you. The can lie to you about what they've seen in your emails. They can lie to you about what they can prove. They can lie to you about what they know. Authority figures barking lies at you can be confusing and upsetting and stressful. Our brain says "I didn't do that thing but they say they have emails so maybe did I do that thing or sort of that thing?" Many people react by blurting out more or less random shit or by panicking and lying. Do you have what it takes not to do that? Better be sure.

Remember: the FBI wins nearly any way. Confess to a crime? They got your confession. Lie? They almost certainly know you lied, and already have proof that your statement is a lie, and now they've used the investigation to create the crime.

The answer is to shut up and lawyer up. A qualified lawyer will grill you mercilessly and help you make an informed rational choice about whether to talk. Then, if you decide to talk, the lawyer will prepare you exhaustively for the interview so you can spot the pressure tactics and interrogation-room tricks, and so you will have refreshed your memory about what the truth is.

Your best intentions to tell the truth are a thin shield.

Copyright 2017 by the named Popehat author.