“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
xerophobous
adjective
unable to survive drought
intolerant of dry conditions
Shown in a picture
Used in a sentence
Xerophobous plants which require wet soil or even standing water, such as some species of the Japanese iris, are sometimes described as water-loving, but are perhaps better described as water-needful.
MUSIC!
Enjoy some real piano music!
The tank-top is the perfect touch!
THE STUFF
While we’re here, some kudos to Musk for inspiring us all.
Video from a different vantage point shows Starship Booster never came even close to hitting the tower.
As far as I can tell, this was as perfect of a Mechazilla catch as SpaceX could have hoped for. pic.twitter.com/TagzygAQgG
This is a fun piece of an interview with aging scientist Roger Penrose, a highly respected astrophysicist and theoretician. Don’t sweat it if you don’t understand the details. Soak up the controversy, still rumbling a century after the 1920s, when general relativity and quantum mechanics were just arriving.
This is, and was, what science was supposed to be like. Great minds feuding and governments staying the F out of the arguments.
HINT – “collapse of the wavefunction” means that “the tumbling dice of many possibilities settle down to something specific.” Penrose is saying that the idea our minds do this is bullshit. He believes that something in physics makes the dice settle on a value, but he doesn’t guess as to what it might be.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
ischiorrhogic
adjective
of an iambic line, having spondees in the second, fourth or sixth place
in ancient prosody, noting a variety of iambic trimeter which has not only a spondee or trochee for an iambus in the sixth or last place, as in the choliamb, but a spondee in the fifth place also
Wolf’s easy alternative explanation
A kind of irregularity in old Greek poetry, which jazzes things up, but too much so, in the opinions of some.
When the variation on the sixth foot of the trimeter coexists with a spondee in the fifth place, the verse becomes still more irregular, and can, in fact, hardly be considered an Iambic verse, but is rather a combination of an iambic diameter with a trochaic monometer. Such lines are called by the grammarians Ischiorrhogic (broken-backed) : they are very rarely used by Hipponax. LINK
In which the social justice “hoax retelling” of the Matthew Shepard gay/drug acquaintance murder fits into an even bigger social justice artistic story-born movement looking for a political event to boost it.
Introduction:
I did not expect to write this article. But after being sucked into a rabbithole of research, I simply had to do it.
I do not, unfortunately, have an exact answer to my original question:
What was the relationship of the Matthew Shepard murder to the movie Brokeback Mountain?
As you will see, the relationship is very strong. But just like the truth of the Shepard murder itself was originally hidden underneath calculated social justice hoaxing, so too the history of the related / unrelated movie which followed is obscured by the larger, softer, “DVD extra”, PBS “stay tuned” feature, more diffuse, more professional, and easier almost-truths of the New-York-to-Hollywood-by-way-of-Flyover-and-Writeover-Country-and-Western “artistic axis”.
There is no smoking gun. But there is smoke everywhere. One might say it’s the way that “wishful conspiracies” work.
Discovery:
Start here.
I knew there was some question about the Matthew Shepard murder, and that it was “also drug-related”, but I did not know just how much of a euphemism “it might have a drug angle” was.
In honor of Gay Pride month, have a red pill about Matthew Shepard.
Matthew Shepard’s murder is a vintage case of fake news. The truth is that he was a drug dealer who was murdered by people who were trying to steal his large supply of crystal meth. Of course, the fake news media blew this up as the “gay hate crime of the century,” the Democrats tried for years to use it as an excuse to push hate crime legislation, and Americans were scolded about it for years for being “big bad violent homophobes.” Even though America is probably the safest country in the world for the LGBT community, you wouldn’t know it from the way they continue to point to Matthew Shepard as proof of persecution (they can’t bring up Pulse nightclub because that would involve blaming Muslims).
So there you go. Next time someone starts whinging to you about Matthew Shepard, kindly point out the real circumstances behind his murder.
This is a great article, covering the essential investigatory book, and it actually prompted THIS investigation.
I wanted to know – did this obviously “social justice re-narratived” murder – frequently mentioned in the context of the movie “Brokeback Mountain” – actually have any deeper relationship? Was it the IMPETUS for the movie? Did a HOAX create a PROPAGANDA MOVIE?
What I found haunted me. But I set it aside, never finished the post, and got distracted. Until Sadie reminded me.
Matthew Shepard was a drug dealer who was killed in a bad drug deal by people he knew. There’s even an entire book written by a gay journalist about what really happened and how the media misled everyone on it. Despite this, the DNC and media continue to perpetuate the hate hoax 20+ years later.
The parents of Matthew Shepard cast Wyoming’s votes for Joe Biden for president. Matthew Shepard was left to die on a fence in Laramie, WY after being brutally attacked & tied to that fence on Oct. 7, 1998. It was a gay hate crime. Matthew died at age 21. https://t.co/YIFzYhs6kN
— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) August 19, 2020
[Amazon link below]
Liked by you and 4 other people
You will see from that Twitter post, that the social justice hoax is still going strong:
Here is the investigatory book:
When I read the Guardian article after Sadie’s FIRST comment, I figured that the story of Matthew Shepard (who was murdered in October of 1998) was likely the starter idea from which BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005) was generated.
Actually this is WRONG – it’s the REVERSE – but I didn’t know it until I dug into the chronology.
Reality:
The Matthew Shepard hoax story LOOKS like the origin of the movie Brokeback Mountain in “normie political news-viewer world”. It appears like the murder “brought to light” the “gay cowboy phenomenon” which had always been there – we just didn’t know about it. Granted, there ARE gays in the redneck and cowboy worlds, but it’s not nearly as big a deal as the leftist fake news wants it to be. The TRUTH is that in liberal artistic world, the Matthew Shepard murder was a VICTIM-SYMPATHY BOOSTER (just barely) for a liberal-beloved fictional story INTO a movie.
Stated another way, a DRUG REALITY was re-told into conformance with a PRE-EXISTING BUT RELATIVELY UNKNOWN LIBERAL FICTION, which not only yielded POLITICAL ACTION, but TIPPED THE BALANCE for ARTISTIC LEVELING-UP.
The reality is not nice. A BOTTOM GAY GUY was killed by two TOP GAY GUYS in the very dangerous “meth + gay sex” world. Death is a common problem in that world – see Ed Buck. The difference here is that literature-savvy gay activists were among the first to react, possibly as “witness distancing”, and quickly turned a “bad for gays” drug story into an anti-gay “hate crime”, and the fake news media lapped it up like mother’s milk.
From the article – this is CRITICAL….
But when Matthew’s friends Walt Boulden and Alex Trout heard of the attack they rushed to the hospital. They contacted the Associated Press and a number of local gay organisations that same day. Boulden, a 46-year-old college instructor who says he was the last person to talk to Matthew before he met McKinney and Henderson, linked the attack to Wyoming legislature’s failure to pass a hate-crimes bill. Boulden later said the assault was identified as a hate crime by a policeman.
But that’s not all.
Place this in political context.
All this stuff was happening during the SECOND TERM of the Clintons. I believe that for both Clinton and Obama, the SECOND TERM was designed to be the one where radical propaganda events would be undertaken. So the media minons and leftist pols were HOT TO TROT for “progress”, and this story, bogus as it was, was simply unstoppable.
NOW – let’s TIMELINE all this “gay cowboy” stuff. You will see that it shows the TRUE NARRATIVE DEVELOPMENT.
While you’re looking at this, consider MIMETIC THEORY as a bit of an explainer here. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard for a description of the basic theory, which is not immediately obvious, but which is extremely useful in looking at communist victim-substitution psychology and TACTICS.
HERE WE GO….. (includes some quotes – references listed at the end)
1992 – old-and-famous Larry McMurtry begins writing collaboration with young hottie Diana Ossana
1993 – Annie Proulx gets Guggenheim fellowship
1994 – Annie Proulx moves to Wyoming
spring 1997 – Annie Proulx is inspired to write story by a bar scene (ranchy-type guy scoping out guys)
1997 – Annie Proulx writes story
10/13/1997 – Annie Proulx short story “Brokeback Mountain” officially appears in New Yorker
fall 1997 – story is immediately seen by Ossana and optioned by Ossana and McMurtry at Ossana’s initiation
(Note that the way magazines are released early, this could have been in September.)
“That evening, I asked Larry how he would feel if any staunch Lonesome Dove fans turned against him for being involved with a film that subverts the myth of the American West and its iconic heroes. He replied that he’d never given it a thought. I told him good, I figured as much, I just needed to hear you say the words. That was the only time we ever spoke about any political implications to making a film of “Brokeback Mountain.”
fall 1997 – screenplay is produced by McMurtry and Ossana in three months
“We had a finished screenplay in three months, and sent it off to Wyoming. In a few days Annie phoned, and we spoke for over two hours. She had points she wanted to clarify, and a few corrections, but on the whole she seemed genuinely pleased with our work. I felt fortunate to have her input, because these people were born in her imagination. She and I spoke about Ennis and his stoicism, his background, his homophobic worldview, his inability to access his emotions. She talked a lot about Wyoming, its landscape, its people and their hardscrabble lives.
What she said to me in those two hours I mentally filed away. I referred back to it for the next eight years.
We sent the script to our representatives, who in turn sent it out into the world. Our Brokeback Mountain screenplay had been in existence for a year when young Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered in Laramie, Wyoming. It was horrifying. It felt like an eerie mirroring of Annie’s story and our screenplay My daughter, Sara, was attending the University of Wyoming in Laramie on a basketball scholarship when they found Matthew’s body tied to a fence not five minutes from her apartment. I flew to Wyoming to be with her. While I was there, we went to visit Annie at her home in Centennial. We spent the day together, and she took us on a picnic up near the Medicine Bow. Annie was warm and welcoming, a strong, solid presence, and it was reassuring to Sara (and to me) to know she would be close by.”
10/6/1998 – Matthew Shepard killed and STORY CHANGED by last witness college instructor Walt Bouden
Remember: (“Boulden, a 46-year-old college instructor who says he was the last person to talk to Matthew before he met McKinney and Henderson, linked the attack to Wyoming legislature’s failure to pass a hate-crimes bill. Boulden later said the assault was identified as a hate crime by a policeman.”)
1999-2002 – film under discussion but it never comes together
2003 – deal to make film is reached
spring 2004 – production begins (Ang Lee director, Ossana producer)
9/2/2005 – film festival releases begin in Europe
12/11/2005 – limited [Christmas!] release in US
1/13/2006 – US general release
1/22/2008 – Heath Ledger dies of drug overdose
7/18/2008 – Dark Knight released (Ledger plays Joker)
I don’t think Matthew Shepard was killed to make a movie, but I think he WAS killed for drugs, and then fit to a “nicer for gays” story that people ALREADY wanted to believe. The fact that his re-told death meant MONEY for the Democrat-media-entertainment-arts-propaganda complex only insured that the re-telling would STICK.
Conspiracy theories involving individuals are often wrong, but they are useful, in that they provide a skeletal road-map to a larger reality of social conspiracies. And those conspiracies ARE promoted by people with long and patient plans.
Although it may look like Matthew Shepard was conveniently murdered for leftist propaganda, IMO it’s more likely that his murder for drugs – knowledge of the abuse likely touching his “witness friends” – was conveniently RE-PURPOSED to fit a desired narrative, and KILL the real one, of gays, sex and methamphetamine.
Many people WANTING something to be true, and all of them white-lying, wishful-thinking, exaggerating, distorting, re-telling, re-casting, or even re-remembering things – but ONLY a little bit for most of them, and with malicious intent by only a few of them – allows ONE HUGE LIE to be hidden among a large number of people.
THAT is my diagnosis of what happened here.
Liberals BROUGHT THEIR CULTURE with them to Wyoming and IMPOSED IT on the alien cowboy culture there – in thought, then in STORY, and finally in FAKE NEWS AS STORY.
Communist social justice hoaxing followed “artistes” and gays to Wyoming, as sure as communist corruption followed the Clintons to already-corrupt Arkansas.
It was only a matter of time until they would speak a new reality into existence.
