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No, Romanian Cops Did Not Find Andrew Tate Because of a Pizza Box
- dreadlordbone 4y agoWhenever the person/website/news org saying something REALLY wants it to be true I am very skeptical.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bongoman37 4y agoMost people know that, but the narrative is just too good that he got pwned because he tried to pwn Greta. People want to believe it.
- maerF0x0 4y agoGiven past experience this could just be a repeat false claim. So let's put our pwnies away until we see something stick. Backstory: Supposedly He's previously been arrested (in aug 2022?) when a woman needed a cover story for why she was cheating on her boyfriend with him. The facts corroborated his side of the story and its claimed he was even apologized to by authorities. The investigation showed her to be a liar and there on her own volition and free to leave etc...d I cannot find a good source for this besides dubious Reddit and YouTubes, so I guess we'll see what the actual truth is this time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- foreverCarlos 4y agoAre these contrarian/scandalous/unapologetically insulting figures a new phenomenon or have they always been a part of pop culture? Seems like Tate-like or Yiannopoulos-like personas are attracting a lot of media coverage.
- synu 4y agoThere’s a good new podcast called The New Gurus from the BBC which explores this.
- croes 4y agoAttention is the currency of the digital age.
- nxm 4y agoHave you listened to Tate in a more than 15 sec clip? I don’t agree with everything he says but he does speak the otherwise unspoken truth on many topics. His attention is justified.
- gattilorenz 4y agoCare to provide examples of such topics and truths?
- jamal-kumar 4y agoI watched a bunch of his "Hustler's University" thing on youtube. It was a really entertaining mix of alright business advice mixed in with what sounded like incitement to commit fraud (And I'm not a lawyer so don't quote me on this). It's mostly bereft of making any misogynistic comments or anything like that which he's known for otherwise. I'll give him one thing, he is a pretty entertaining showman, I just would like to remind people that a ton of what he says probably would make a lawyer balk. He has a whole section about doing shit that makes you money first and caring about legal later which is especially insane. Oh yeah and then there's that video of him hitting a girl with a belt. Yeah, don't do shit like that.
- themitigating 4y agoYou're attributing equal value to all his views.
- foreverCarlos 4y agoI have not. I prefer finding these unspoken trusts in other sources, personas like Tate are too mind-polluting for me.
- bigmattystyles 4y agoI’m just happy I had no idea who this person was. Turning into my dad has been a blessing…
- Zigurd 4y agoHear hear! I had heard the name but had no idea why until he was murdered on Twitter and shortly after busted for being casually criminal in a predictably misogynistic way, as a mere facet of his total worthlessness. May all our encounters with influencer douchebags be so brief and yet satisfying.
- fmajid 4y agoI wish I could say the same. A few months ago, my daughter's girl school used his as the poster boy for misogyny in their anti-bullying training program, so I looked him up. Distinctly unpleasant person, and according to Wikipedia he claims to have converted to Islam, so now he is also tarring my religion by association. The problem is, trolls like him thrive off publicity, presumably ad impression revenue-sharing from Youtube et al is how he managed to get the expensive cars he was bragging to Greta Thunberg (although pimping is also highly profitable, so who knows?). The correct response is ostracism and damnatio memoriae. Don't get upset about him, let the law deal with him if he's committed actual crimes, but just ignore him and starve him of the oxygen of publicity. I'm lucky that I mediate the news and everything through my own RSS feed reader that has extensive filtering capabilities, so anything that mentions the Kardashians, football, the Olympics, unfunny April Fool's pranks and other topics of utter uninterestingness is automatically deleted and doesn't waste a nanosecond of my time. I just added him to the list.
- david38 4y agoI find it telling that he is branded a troll or worse, yet the mirror image of his message, where women are propped up is spread far and wide. People should ask WHY he is so popular. People prefer to try to shut someone down and then are shocked, shocked I tell you when a huge number of people retaliate. See the Trump election as an example of demonizing a large percentage of people and trying to make it politically incorrect to defend anyone who isn’t a minority.
- coltonweaver 4y agoI understand the clarification of this article but it seemed far too long. TL;DR - They didn’t use the pizza box to find his location in Romania, they used it to confirm that he was currently in the country to detain him. Edit: As called out below, this is also just speculation.
- croes 4y ago>they used it to confirm that he was currently in the country to detain him. Even that is pure speculation
- coltonweaver 4y agoYes, good call out. Important to note here.
- themitigating 4y agoThe connection to Greta Thunberg isn't accurate really. Andrew Tate said something like "bring me pizza and don't recycle the boxes" (paraphrasing) After he was arrested she replied "this is what happens when you don’t recycle your pizza boxes" Her remark is because of what he said and later getting arrested. I can't see how it's because of the supposed use of the pizza box to locate him.
- detritus 4y agoBut what was the video containing the pizza boxes a response to?
- themitigating 4y agoI don't know if it was a response to anything. I only saw the small section where he asks for the pizza.
- detritus 4y agoOk, so there you go. The video response was to Greta, after his initial unwarranted 'attack' upon her.
- stavros 4y agoOff-topic, but it feels like I'm the only person who thinks phrases like "small dick energy" are bad. When did it become acceptable to shame men for the size of their penis? Whenever I've mentioned it, people have defended its usage with arguments that didn't sound convincing to me. Why is it acceptable to say "small dick energy" in the age of body-shaming awareness?
- croes 4y agoYou've read Tate's tweet? What goes around comes around. BTW small dick energy dies say anything about the real size, it just has the same kind of energy
- stavros 4y ago> You've read Tate's tweet? What goes around comes around. No, and it's not really relevant to what I'm saying. > BTW small dick energy dies say anything about the real size, it just has the same kind of energy These are the arguments I hear. "It doesn't actually mean you have a small dick, just that you're petty and unimportant, like the people who have small dicks".
- croes 4y agoIt's more that people who think they have a small dick try to compensate that with extremely "manly" behavior. They are the ones who reduce men to site of their dick as their main quality. Small dick is a metaphor for a small ego, because those people think that women are only interested in well hung, successful, rich, powerful tall man.
- croes 4y agoBTW context is always important in communication. For instance, if someone calls you a dick it does matter if you called him something similar before.
- where-group-by 4y ago"petty persona energy" doesn't have the ring to it.
- superchroma 4y agoit suits law enforcement to have people thinking that they did, rather than having people being aware of the nature of surveillance.
- konha 4y ago> Thunberg is not known for her sense of humor What? Guess you haven’t seen her responses to Donald Trumps attacks on her then.
- adrianmonk 4y agoYeah, I didn't get that either. The article says she's not known for her sense of humor, then links to a tweet of hers that (I thought) was pretty funny. Maybe the author meant to say she's not known to laugh things off but rather tends to go in for the kill (maybe using humor in the process).
- jamal-kumar 4y agoI seem to understand the guy has been live streaming on his private thing that subscribers pay for or whatever and has clearly been in Romania based on a bunch of clues such as the women who he had around him speaking the language between each other. You can see clips of that in this youtube rip of his final streaming days on "tate confidential" here, which is probably what got him busted. [1] Still insanely funny that this happened right in the midst of getting in a hugely ratio'd spate with Greta. He got caught because he's the most arrogant public figure on the internet and thinks of himself as a demigod immune to the vicissitudes of things like human trafficking laws. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58Lc4cew7OE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58Lc4cew7OE
- BryantD 4y agoAlejandra Caraballo's tweet thread about her reasoning is here: https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1608709173684105217 https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1608709173684105217 I think it's worth reading it, although I am skeptical of her conclusions. However, he did Tweet from a Prague airport on December 26th so if the Gândul article is correct about Romanian authorities confirming his location via social media posts, it's reasonable to think that the pizza box might be one of those. Also, Dreyfuss is missing information -- the castle photo he references isn't a castle, it's a hotel in Italy. However, I don't have any strong reason to think that Gândul was correct or that the translation isn't missing a nuance. My fairly uninformed stance here is "maybe, maybe not, no way to be sure."
- kaptainscarlet 4y agoI came to hackernews to run away from that staged noise to keep twitter engagement high but it has spilled over to this platform as well.
- eddsh1994 4y agoYeah I was surprised to see him mentioned on a site dedicated, IMO, to startups & tech & interesting discussions.
- Ekaros 4y agoMaybe some people find this interesting. Unlike lot of discussion here?
- haunter 4y agoThat's why reddit or Twitter exist
- kaptainscarlet 4y agoI wish it could be flagged as "off-topic" as I don't see how this post is hackernews-worthy.
- morelisp 4y agoThese guys are a pretty big portion of grindset/hustle culture, which overlaps heavily with startup culture. Beating a woman is certainly more visually shocking than stealing a rape victim's medical records but in a legal context I'd be hard-pressed to declare one "worse" than the other; and a vocal portion of HN defended the latter person and company during and for years after.
- eddsh1994 4y agoIf you aren't working on drop shipping 23 hours a day how will you be able to pay for Hustler University Premium Plus?! /s
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- readonlybarbie 4y agoI was very confused as to why people had believed that passport control and property registrar records had less weight in an investigation compared to a pizza box.
- rjzzleep 4y agoI was trying to skim this article, but it's a very hard read. I don't know who he is, but Wikipedia say it's an American-Brit. Is there any reason to assume that he didn't just fly there? In which case of course they knew he was there. He used his passport to get in after all. Also what's the cost of a police patrol checking out a house? I've seen people get harassed at home for not paying a 20 Euro ticket in Germany, surely the Romanian authorities can do the same. How is this even a story? Completely absurd.
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- adrianmonk 4y ago> I was trying to skim this article, but it's a very hard read. There has been a LOT of noise about this story recently on the internet. This blog post is about the rather narrow issue of how the American media mishandled a specific detail of the story, relating to whether he did a self-own by posting a pizza box on Twitter so authorities could see it. > Is there any reason to assume that he didn't just fly there? In which case of course they knew he was there. Yes, this blog post mentions that. It basically says that the pizza box self-own doesn't pass the smell test because Romanian authorities have lots of other ways to know the guy was in the country. (And because the original Romanian news article doesn't even mention it, so the pizza box self-own is apparently based entirely on speculation.) > How is this even a story? Completely absurd. The story as a whole is a story because it went viral and this guy is hated by many. The blog post is a story because it's a journalist commenting on bad journalism and how journalists participate in spreading unsubstantiated nonsense.
- denlekke 4y agothe most important section is a quote of a romanian newspaper: "After seeing, including on social networks, that they were together in Romania, the DIICOT prosecutors mobilized the special troops of the Gendarmerie and descended, by force, on their villa in Pipera, but also on other addresses." the author does a convincing job of indicating there is no authoritative evidence that the pizza box played any role. the author does not convince me that the pizza box did not play any role.
- agolio 4y agoSo I am tempted to flag this submission because I don't really think HN is the place but I want to make sure I am using the flag feature correctly. Can any more experienced HN user weigh in? Is flagging for articles you don't want to see on HN or is it more reserved for spam/ inaccuracies?
- haunter 4y agoI flag everything that is pure drama, nothing substance. Like this post. Twitter stuff (for example everything Elon related which took over HN for months), everything that I saw on the reddit front page earlier which means it's already at the lowest of low quality and it has no place in mind on HN. In the end flag whatever you want and move on.
- d23 4y agoThe Twitter posts are as relevant as posts could possibly be for a SV tech-oriented discussion forum.
- SauciestGNU 4y agoI personally enjoy them and following the drama, but they do reduce to flamewar more often than not.
- ThrowawayR2 4y agoThe HN guidelines say: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." IMO one could justifiably say that it doesn't meet the "gratifies [hacker]'s intellectual curiosity" bar to be on-topic and runs afoul of the "crime" example in the off-topic guideline but ultimately the decision as to whether the story is sufficiently off topic to merit a flag is up to readers' personal judgement.
- spamizbad 4y agoWhy is a pizza box a bigger story than, say, a likely sex trafficker given a major platform on social media (Tiktok and Twitter)?
- davidguetta 4y agoLol how long can you publicly brag about being a gangster, not paying taxes, going to romania because rape charges dont exist, having multiple passports to avoid law and dealing all the time with the mafia, including "taking care" of someone who tried to kill you, and then be arrested. Answer : a few months.
- rsynnott 4y ago> Thunberg is not known for her sense of humor As of today, the tweet about Tate is the fifth most 'liked' tweet _ever_. Only one of the others above it in the list is a joke. So, er, some might disagree.