Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • I wonder if the Catch Me if You Can guy counts. He apparently lied about a lot of his adventures as a scam artist, making him more of a fabulist.

    However, if anyone taken in by his stories were to complain publicly (say, a book publisher or something), they'd be admitting not only to being a rube, but a rube to a liar who had already claimed publicly to be a scam artist. Even worse, that scam would be real and count as a success, restoring the scam artist's tarnished reputation from fabulist back to bona fide scam artist.

    by jancsika
  • A Jewish comedian made a joke about how jews (only in the US*) were offended that Ferengi in Star Trek were based on them - "why would we assume these ugly greedy people are _us_?"

    *Outside the US, it looks like the Ferengi are mocking American capitalist culture.

    by rsstack
  • I'm sure South Park had no idea about any of this
    by conartist6
  • Then again, money.

    > A jury in New Mexico awarded $412 million to a man who sued over what he said were unnecessary erectile dysfunction shots that decimated his penis

    On the one hand, now you're famous for having a dick that doesn't work, on the other hand, $412 million.

    https://amp.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article296...

    by fragmede
  • > For a fictional portrait to be actionable, it must be so accurate that a reader of the book would have no problem linking the two

    Sorry this argument makes no sense. If I (or any average reader) read a passage dissing a public figure (not me), which describes them with a small penis, I wouldn't consider the description as not fitting - I have no way of telling how big their penis is.

    If the public person in question came forward, and read the passage, he could successfully argue, that readers of the book would have no information about the size of his package, and thus that would be irrelevant to the argument. So him suing the author based on this would not mean he admits his dong is small.

    by torginus
  • A related concept in Chinese is 對號入座:

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B0%8D%E8%99%9F%E5%85%A5%E...

    An example might be some person A saying "only an idiot with this set of very specific negative attributes would do this thing". And then person B came out in the public saying they had been slandered by person A, thus indirectly admitting to having those very specific negative attirbutes.

    Basically if person A invokes something like the small penis rule, it's often better for person B to stay quiet to avoid 對號入座.

    by omoikane
  • I'm always fascinated by these tricks of game theory.

    e.g. in business school, the dean of the undergraduate school had this story:

    "When I was a practicing lawyer working on wills and estates, people would often ask me to cut someone completely out of their will.

    I would always say that a better option was to write something like 'To my daughter Susan, I leave $1,000. She always said that she wanted to be financially independent from me so this is an amount to show her I lover her.'

    Clients would always think this would send the wrong message and I would replay:

    'No, no. If Susan fights the will and says she should have gotten more, the judge will say: but she clearly left you something and pointed out that she loved you AND took your wishes into account' "

    I wish there was a book or collection of these types of tricks to study.

    by alexpotato

Explore Birbla archives