TheAgitator.com
Watch Me on Bullshit!
Tuesday, October 5th, 2010Looks like my episode of Bullshit! is now available on YouTube, at least for the time being. My appearances begin in part two, but I’d encourage you to watch the whole thing. It’s really a fantastic episode all-around.
Plus, gratuitous nudity!
Congratulations! Glad you’re getting some exposure; Penn & Teller have done a lot of good for the skeptical community as well!
Sorry, but Penn and Teller are comedians, and their Bullshit! episodes show it. The shows are so full of misrepresentations that they can’t be trusted on anything – mostly they just serve corporate interests. You only hurt your credibility by being associated with them.
Its funny how “libertarians” will denigrate hollywood types who make political statements, but then turn around and slobber all over those of them that agree with you.
mostly they just serve corporate interests.
You clearly have no idea what the hell you’re talking about. Browse the episode topics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Penn_%26_Teller:_Bullshit!_episodes
At first blush, I see episodes attacking the predatory nature of the funeral industry, the plastic surgery industry, conspicuous consumption, and multi-level marketing firms. They’re skeptics. Agree or disagree with them. But to say they “mostly serve corporate interests” is ignorant.
You only hurt your credibility by being associated with them.
And you embarrass yourself by attacking my credibility when you obviously haven’t seen the show.
damn it! they fuzzed over the gratuitous nudity! Great show otherwise. If there was any justice that prosecutor would be taken out and hanged.
Let’s just be clear: we’re not going to see gratuitous Radley nudity, are we?
Good episode, three gripes:
1. Balko should have been mentioned at the start with everybody else.
2. Their gratuitous use of vulgar language means that the people who most need to see the show won’t.
3. I’m not sure why they didn’t interview Nifong, the prosecutor in the Paey case, etc. They didn’t even name Paey’s prosecutor. These guys need to be named and shamed.
@Michael Chaney: I bet because Nifong wouldn’t get close to a camera (and I believe he is presently in a lawsuit, so he wouldn’t want to talk publicly anyway).
Michael Chaney
“2. Their gratuitous use of vulgar language means that the people who most need to see the show won’t.”
This is exactly right! If Penn and Teller came off looking and sounding like members of Jerry Falwell’s church they would actually do a lot to change people’s minds.
it always blows my mind how easily the law and order advocates can shrug their shoulders about people wrongfully or zealously convicted. We’re supposed to err on the side of innocence…
Good job, Radley!
Marty, like that douchebag Wendy what’s her name that Radley was on with not too long ago. She said “Just a small percentage get wrongfully convicted.” Like that makes it ok. I wanted to say yea Wendy but what if it was your son that got wrongfully convicted. The lack of ability to empathize with anyone outside the lawyer/cop class of society fuels that kind of mentality.
LOVED the 1 = 1 equation.
I was hoping for Balko nudity. Alas, and I should have known, it would be boobies.
Those stats in Video 1 are circumspect. “We’re incarcerating at a rate that’s out of control…but, hey, look– crimes are down.” Sorry, aint buying it.
Surprised they locked up a guy in a wheelchair for that.
In 2008, in “Come on vacation, leave on Probation” FLA I found myself in the cage awaiting extradition on BS charges noticed the County Jail inmates were generally thin and fit and the guards were these big fat dopey guys. Weird. I figured it was too much of a liability
to lock up the obese or handicapped.
They kind of screwed you on time there Lex Luthor …. but at least your main subject of focus is getting atttention.
I was quite unimpressed. This read more like a propaganda piece (albeit for the right side) than a reasoned presentation. Too many bald assertions and not enough actual research.
By the way, it’s out of character for HBO to post its shown on youtube for free. What’s special about this one?
Penn & Teller are on Showtime, not HBO. Showtime has its own YouTube channel.
It makes me sick that there are jurors out there that would convict a man for taking his perscibed meds. You expect the pigs to do what they did. I hope these jurors get pulled over from a traffic violation some time and get beaten and tazed by the very buzz cut retards whose side the took.
It’s a comedy show with a political slant (see: The Daily Show or The Colbert Report), not investigative journalism.
I meant that in response to the whiners saying it’s not in-depth enough.
It was a 30 minute show with wide coverage of a lot of different criminal justice topics. Any one of the topics – drug war zealousness a la Paey, wrongful convictions, corrupt prosecutors, fraudulent forensics, etc. – could be turned into a 10 hour documentary. Hopefully a small sampling like this will get people interested in finding out more.
There’s way too much material for a thirty minute show. I wish they could have done an hour long special. Then they might have deconstructed the misleading, simplistic chart seen at the beginning of the show, included more examples, and of course, given Radley more time.
As for the target audience, it was spot on. The younger, more tolerant typical audience of their show was far more likely to find some new and helpful information in this episode, and they don’t mind a little language (or boobage.)
The typical far right conservative authoritarian has already been hopelessly brainwashed by swaggering “tough on crime” professional politicians. There may be better ways to reach them than bullshit, but a lot of them are a lost cause.
Time well spent. My only truck is with Penn’s incredibly naive view that most people are good, especially most people in positions of power. It’s as if he disregarded the previous 24 minute of the presentation. Weird.
Oh, one other thing.
Just because the wrong person was convicted of a crime, that does not mean that the right person is not in jail somewhere else on some other charge. In fact, given recidivist tendencies, I would wager that those that get away with a crime in which the wrong person is convicted are probably convicted of some other crime somewhere in the neighborhood of 1%-10% of the time.
That does not mean the perfection should not be the goal or that convicting the wrong person is not abhorrent. Just that it’s not the easy 1:1 correlation that Penn asserts. More like 10:9 or thereabouts.
“That does not mean the perfection should not be the goal or that convicting the wrong person is not abhorrent. Just that it’s not the easy 1:1 correlation that Penn asserts. More like 10:9 or thereabouts.”
Of course assuming that you’d then have the more troubling chart:
1 innocent in jail = Many extra victims
Yes Mike, and often that unprosecuted perpetrator is free to commit more crime because of State protection. I’m confident most lynchings, fatal or otherwise, are coverups.
In most of the cases that I’ve read about where the actual criminal was caught, he was already in jail on an unrelated charge. Many of the criminals will continue to commit crimes until caught, so it’s not a surprise. I’m familiar with one case where it’s known that the real perpetrator committed another murder while the prosecutor was getting a conviction against a known-innocent (known to the prosecutor, at least).
“Its funny how “libertarians” will denigrate hollywood types who make political statements, but then turn around and slobber all over those of them that agree with you.”
———–
Obvious troll is so obvious.
Very good, but as others have said, there is a massive lack of attention to this subject matter.
Dagnabbit! Here I was hoping to see some serious boobage and instead I got that damned pixelated Bullshit!
Aside from that, very good, if brief introduction to the subject you’ve been getting on about for at least as many years as I’ve been reading you, Radley.
Donald wrote, “It makes me sick that there are jurors out there that would convict a man for taking his perscibed meds. You expect the pigs to do what they did. I hope these jurors get pulled over from a traffic violation some time and get beaten and tazed by the very buzz cut retards whose side the took.”
I understand Donald’s frustration with the jurors, and as members of the public and the supposed peers of the accused, they should bring with them a healthy measure of doubt and skepticism. But they’ve been brainwashed for generations with shows from Dragnet to COPS that the police get the right guy first and always behave with noble intent. That impression will last until it is beaten out of them with a policeman’s baton.
I am a defense attorney and one of the investigators I use repeatedly says, “Don’t post my bail.” He says this because after 35+ years of working as an investigator for a variety of defense lawyers – state, federal, public defender, private practice – he has no intention of hanging around for his trial. He says, somewhat jokingly, that if he’s ever charged with a crime, the instant he’s out he’s gone because he does not trust juries.
I wish I could say I completely disagreed with him, but there’s a fair amount of truth to his cynicism. Juries that convict people like Paey and Bain (sp? not quite clear from the episode) are prime examples of that truth.
The solution to brainwashed Jurors is the same as self serving Prosecutors:
Equal resources to both Prosecution and Defense. Make the State pay for both.
Will that make Jurors smarter or more cynical? No. But it will withhold ill gotten evidence. Defense that knows what the hell it’s doing can stop a lot of this crap evidence from even seeing the inside of a courtroom.
Sure, the Right wing Punishment Mongers will cry foul… claiming “They got him off on a technicality” But the light of day… and the repeated reports from competent council… will reveal that that ‘technicality’ was a shitty search warrant or racial profiling.
If the State can afford to pay for finding the suspect, charging the suspect, prosecuting the suspect, providing the court for that to take place, then incarcerating the prisoner for a term that could be as long as life….
Then the state can SURE AS FUCK afford to defend that suspect as well.
Costs will go down as a result because LESS crappy cases will come to trial, FEWER people will be incarcerated, and the Police will actually have to learn to properly investigate crimes.
Pretty good stuff, except for the crack about “pot-smoking losers.” I guess Penn doesn’t know any pot smokers. Or it never occured to him that getting popped for pot does NOT automatically make you a loser.
The Paey case was a little more complicated than presented. But, it still suggests misconduct. From what I remeber, doctor claimed he did not write Mr Paey’s prescriptions. The problem with that is that the doctor, would have, himself, been charged if he admitted to writing the prescriptions. The reasons being, he was out of state, there was DEA involvement, and there is law about “prescribing to an addict” for beginners. It was far easier for him to state the scripts were forgeries than admit to writing the legal scripts.
But isn’t that why doctors go to school so long? So they can write prescriptions, even, of, controlled substances?! The first mistake the police made was assuming they had enough training to suggest that Mr Paey was given “too much” medication!? They know nothing of tolerance and titration to effect!
I watch my mother go through constant pain because her doctors are unable to properly use the medication to control it. The $10,000+ implanted dorsal column stimulator actually makes the pain worse, when it is turned on! And, seeing her every three months does not contribute to good pain management, either. That only works if your patient is well treated and stable. In her case, her pain is unstable and not controlled.
Maybe, I should contact Penn and Teller. I could clean it up, so, even, the Religious right would even listen! There are plenty of acceptable words to replace the ones, they, so aptly, used, in their descriptions of this craziness!