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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.
https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393866667
Suffice to say they were a bit disappointed when expectations met reality
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.
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.
I wonder if Peter Thiel took umbrage at how South Park portrayed him recently [0] and is lurking in the shadows planning Gawker v2 [1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfSOC6-G044
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdrange/2016/06/21/peter-thi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell
tl;dr:
> Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988), is a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court held that parodies of public figures, even those intending to cause emotional distress, are protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
[0] - We can go back as far as, I don't think it has been established that Barbara Streisand can in fact turn into a robot...
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.
*Outside the US, it looks like the Ferengi are mocking American capitalist culture.
> In America, people ask "Do the Ferengi represent Jews?" In England, they ask "Do the Ferengi represent the Irish?" In Australia, they ask if the Ferengi represent the Chinese ... The Ferengi represent the outcast ... it's the person who lives among us that we don't fully understand.[30]
TNG did still resort to 'caricatures as a default', If we are to be a tiny bit bold and look closer at DS9 and how, if you look at a lot of the other stuff outside 'Far Beyond The Stars'.
What you find is that DS9 is very much about people facing pressure from their culture or background and over time learning there's a better way to do things. So many major and minor characters change over the course and part of it is seeing how hard it is and what it takes for each of them to change. I do think they 'over-used' the Ferengi for this but I get they were trying to target a general level of audience.
IMO it really was a hopeful attempt to recognize cultural versus racial problems. You can't just do a single speech and never visit the hat planet again; you are next to one of the hat planets and instead get a deeper look into their world.
.....
DS9 did over-emphasize the Ferengi change arcs, and while the end fits with other 'themes' (i.e. Bell Riots) it like most other hat changes didn't have huge implications till after what we the viewer would see.
But also I kinda get that whole thing. At the end of the day the Ferengi (whether originally intended or not) became something meant to symbolize extreme laissez-faire capitalism with perhaps a pinch of twisted reversal of other cultures/religions[1] because yeah I'm gonna blame that bit on whoever was in charge or TNG at the time (Was it Rick Berman?)
[0] - To be clear I mean for the sake of this topic; those episodes themselves with the original ending to DS9 frankly capture a lot of the 'hope' that was trying to be conveyed in the face of all the strife...
[1] - The most easy way to lampshade 'required clothing' is to instead do 'required non-clothing'
What's funny is that Leonard Nimoy (Jewish) based his portrayal of Spock on the idea that the Vulcans were the space Jews. This idea kind of comes to a head in the 2009 movie, in which a guy named after a Roman emperor destroys Vulcan, causing a Vulcan diaspora...
I imagine "small hands" would similarly work poorly as a defense against a defamation suit from Trump: he doesn't have to claim he has small hands, only that he is often depicted as having them.
Then again Armin Shimmerman, who played Quark and is Jewish himself, has said that people in different countries see different stereotypes in the Ferengi - such as the Chinese or the Irish - so it probably depends on one's own own cultural indoctrination.
I think a better case could be made for the Klingons being racist caricatures, since in TOS their look was intentionally based on Asiatic and Mongol people in order to make them seem more frightening and villainous.
In my head-canon TOS Klingons are Russia and Romulans are China.
Reasons for this;
- Star Trek 6 (The whole thing is an allegory for the end of the cold war, right down to Praxis being a stand-in for Chernobyl)
- That fight scene in 'The Trouble with Tribbles' that strikes me as 'feels like a rehashed tale about a barfight between Allied and Soviet soldiers in pre-split post WW2 Germany'
- Romulans being more 'secluded' and more about political and legal intrigue than violence (If we consider Klingon direct violence a stand-in for USSR/Russian 'maybe put in house arrest before we assasinate' vs China's 'throw the rigid legal book at them')
But it can be a good social-engineering strategy: the "rule" is based on the hope that the person on the other end of it won't bring legal action in the first place, for fear of socially confirming their association with a small-penis'd character.
> 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...
The defendant fears that the news coverage of his case means that no woman would ever be interested in him again. Once the judgement and the payout is announced he finds himself being constantly approached by gorgeous women.
That’s international dynastic money over a penis.
But it’s not meant to be taken literally, like those are magic words. You say “he failed upwards, funded by family wealth and connections, despite everyone thinking he was an idiot who could barely string a sentence together”
The point is to emphasize, even exaggerate, low-status negative qualities.
Or, to cite other potentially preemptive design, add enough other absurdity where someone can just say something like "It is obvious nobody would think the real would %person% impregnated Satan".
Also, are men this easily manipulated?
Yes.
While I say “not easy”, others might say “hard”. Both are fine - for all we know the problem might be both hard and not easy to see.
/s