F•R•I•E•N•D•S, The One with George Stephanopoulos (S01E04)

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F•R•I•E•N•D•S, The One with George Stephanopoulos (S01E04)
I love how when you watch the Doctor Odyssey trailer they make you THINK like it’s just this garden variety steamy heterosexual medical drama where Avery and Max and Tristan and Vivian are the main couples and the only unique thing is it’s on a cruise ship and then you watch the show and you realize….
ALMOST EVERYONE ON THE SHIP IS QUEER AND THE MAIN PLOT IS WHEN WILL TRISTAN,AVERY AND MAX BECOME A THROUPLE.
And medicine is like. Also happening occasionally.
I love this show so much.
Dudes shouldn't have to prove themselves by having spartan greyscale homes with dollar store rubber shower curtains and a mattress on the floor. Do you know what life is like with linen
Being a dude raised with a certain level of socially enforced traditional femininity has imbued my ass with great wisdom and powers
Sleeping naked is fine but pajamas protect your sheets better from your body's natural sweat and oil and dead skin and junk so if you wear clean jimjams to bed your skin won't break out as bad and your sheets will stay cleaner longer
On the topic of sheets, dirty bedsheets don't ventilate as well as clean bedsheets so washing them regularly (once every 1-2 weeks) will keep you warmer in the cold season and cooler in the hot season
If you can get your hands on linen sheets- new, second-hand, pass-down, whatever- they're incredibly sturdy, get softer and softer over time, and will last longer than your lifetime. They also wick sweat so you don't wake up wet if you're a night-sweat guy and are, again, pretty great for your skin
Getting a proper bedframe extends the life of your mattress, will keep you warm in the winter and cool in the summer, offers additional storage space, and is easier on your back.
A boxspring under your mattress will make it softer, too
You can get mattress protectors that zip over your mattress to keep it clean and bedbug-resistant, too
Your entire house will feel bougie and cozier if it smells good. Consider a reed infuser, or a plug-in wax melt. Trust me on this it turns a shitty studio apartment into a 4/5 hotel
Stick some plants around. If you can't sustain them, get fake ones. New ones are kind of expensive at home decor places but dollar stores and thrift shops have some pretty decent options usually. The human brain responds well to seeing plants around, you get depressed without plants. Stick one in your bathroom for that ritzy feel
I know you're tempted to go all black but dark colours will make your spaces feel smaller and bleak. Again, try thrifting a shower curtain in an interesting pattern, it brightens shit up
Wash your face. You don't have to do anything crazy you can just scrub some water on with your hands if you want but it feels really really good.
Keep DIFFERENT SHOWER SCRUBERS for your FACE and your ASS this one is NOT OPTIONAL I will fucking find you
Three in one shampoos are fine but it's just shampoo mixed with conditioner. Having shampoo and conditioner separate lets your hair get moisturized before the final rinse and your hair will feel silkier. Scrub your scalp a lil too bro you get sweaty during the day. Shampoo for the whole head, when conditioning focus on the ends and let it sit a sec.
You don't HAVE to do a bunch of fashion research but in general sticking to clothes you Like The look Of, not just "whatever was on sale at target", and spending some time planning out your appearance will make you feel better about yourself.
What haircuts look best for your face shape? What glasses make your cheekbones stand out, or make your head look taller, or whatever? What are your options for facial hair? What's your body shape, and how do you estimate flatter it? You don't gotta, but it's fun. It can be so so fun
If you can see your veins, green means warmer skin tones and blue means cooler skin tones. This can help determine what colours look best on you. Your skin may also come off as cooler or warmer-toned in neutral light, too, if you can't shortcut
Stop buying white light bulbs for your house. It feels cold and depressing and washes you out so when you look in the mirror you feel sick. Stop it. Get warm-tone or yellow lights and feel warm and cozy. I want this for you
There's nothing illegal about using a lil concealer if you wanna cover up discolored spots.
Skin products with salicylic acid kill off zits and junk. Like not 100% but definitely a game changer
Nobody in the world has naturally bleach-white teeth, that's a marketing lie, but you DO still have to brush regularly and toothpaste comes in a bunch of flavors now not just nasty mint. I personally am fond of strawberry
This was a post for dudes but it's actually for everybody now so if you weren't raised with girl rules have at er
21. Hang things on your walls. Fastest way to make a place feel yours and like home is to conquer all that blank white space. Photos, art, figurine shelves, dangly things, decorative mirrors. You can get so creative with the arrangements and it can help to "separate" areas of the same room if you want. It's also very fun and liberating to just go to town with a hammer and nails (or command strip hangers, whatever).
22. Get some rugs. They can be cheap. You can put rugs on carpet. You can layer them on top of each other. If you go for entirely cloth rugs without the bath mat backing, you can just throw them in the washer/dryer to clean and never have to worry about that mat backing shredding over time. They help to keep the dirt down on wood floors, and do the same thing for your floors that pictures do for your walls. There are non-slip backings you can get to keep cloth rugs from slipping on smooth floors.
Its past their bedtime
asked my cat if he wanted dinner or the slop that kills him and my twin was like "he can hear you, you know?" and when I looked down at my cat he was like this
Day 15
I think i dreamt about the goat getting destroyed or something, but yeah nah its still up
I’m just going to leave this here
crisp glass of water moodboard
One time my rabbi told us, “imagine you had a box with a little bit of god in it. What would you do with the box?”
So we were like ?? “We’d protect it and keep it nice and clean and polished” and he was like “your body’s that box. Stop eating markers”
Every time I come across this post the last sentence smacks me in the face
As a side note… I am really annoyed by one thing about Star Trek.
“Replicated food is not as good as real food.”
That’s ridiculous. In Star Trek, replicator technology is part of the same tech tree as transporters. Replicated food would be identical to the food it was based on, down to the subatomic level.
Proposal for a Watsonian explanation:
In a blind taste test, nobody, but nobody, can tell the actual difference between replicated food and “real” food. (Think back to our youth and the New Coke vs. Pepsi taste tests, only worse.) BUT, humans being What We Are, the human Starfleet members insist that “real” food is better than replicated food for reasons including, but certainly not limited to:
1. Hipsters have survived even into the 24th century. “No, you just can’t make good curry from a replicator! You gotta toast the spices yourself right before you cook it or it’s not the same, maaaaaan”
2. All military and para-military members everywhere always grouse and bitch about the food and sigh over What We Get Back Home. It could literally be the same replicator recipe you use at home when someone has to work late or just doesn’t feel like making the effort to cook, but people are people everywhere so they’re going to complain about it.
3. Humans tend to think we’re smarter than we actually are and we can totally tell when something is going on; as a result, human crew members insist they can “taste the difference” because their minds are making shit up, as our brains do.
4. One could presume that, generally speaking, a replicator recipe programmed into a starship or base replicator database would come out the same every time. This is perhaps the 24th century equivalent of mass catering. (I won’t try to account for the nuances of replicator tech that might allow for variances, and leave aside for the moment the fact that some people probably tinker with the standard “recipes” to suit their own taste.) The single thing that would be different in this case about “real” food is the variation, since of course the “real” dish will have slight variances every time due to the whims of the cook, the oven temperature fluctuation, freshness of ingredients, etc.. And since we are an easily bored species who really, really hates boredom, I bet people would jump all over that to lament the lack of “real” food when they’re out exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations and whatnot. (This is the only reason I can think of that might hold up to scrutiny.)
The Vulcans in Starfleet (and Data), of course, remain baffled by this human insistence that “replicator food isn’t as good as ‘real’ food”, as it defies all known forms of logic.
Hmm. This is a fair point. It occurs to me that I once met a Texan who commented that the chili in a restaurant I worked at was not as good as what they made in Texas, and when I pointed out that the cook was a Texan and the chili was his personal recipe, for which he had won awards in Texas, just said “Doesn’t matter. Wasn’t made in Texas.”
I gotta be honest, Replicator technology is one of the things I am SUPREMELY jealous of, and I’m… okay, I’m not a great cook, but I can cook and there are several dishes I do very well. I think if I had access to the technology I would cook a lot less, though, and I would for sure use replicated ingredients.
1. It is not just hipsters that act like this about food. All the grandmothers I know feel this way too, and I don’t see that ever changing.
The missing ingredient is love, obviously. You can’t get that from a replicator.
Right, for that you need the holodeck.
Okay so, we’ve missed a few things that I think are relevant here:
The replicator or replicator + holodeck combo can’t recreate the experience of cooking, nor can it recreate the experience of being cooked for. And that experience makes food taste better.
Cooking is what makes us human. No other species on this wet rock cooks its food–only us.
First: if you’re making lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat, you spend hours puttering around the house doing chores in a cozy sweater, periodically petting the cats and playing with the kids, waiting an anticipating the hour in which you get to eat the soup. All the while: your house smells like lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat.
You get a tamale from the replicator: it’s pretty good. You wish it came with a green olive with the pit still in like the kind your abuela puts in her tamales.
You get a tamale from the tamale lady on the way to work on a clear, crisp fall morning. It’s so hot from her steamer that it nearly burns your fingerprints off and it smells divine; you use all of your Spanish to tell her how good it is and how grateful you are that you pass her every day. On a whim, you buy 30 more tamales to share with the office; they’re still warm at lunch and they taste like friendship.
You get a tamale from your abuela. It’s Christmas Eve, your entire family has spent the last seven hours making them, your tio Juan just busted out his tuba and it is definitely too hot outside for the fake snow your baby cousins have started throwing at each other in between begging to open just one present and if you don’t hurry up you’re all going to be late for mass.
The tamale tastes like home.
You get a tamale from the replicator. Its neural network reviewed your order against every known tamale recipe and variety and decided that your addition of “green olive, pickled, pit in” was a mistake, and omitted it.
Your tamale tastes like homesickness. You ball-up the corn husk and
Second: The replicator is probably not accounting for regional variations in ingredients for its base foods.
The ingredient library may have jalapeno, red; jalapeno, green, jalapeno, (color slider), (heat slider). It probably does not have: jalapeno, Hatch new mexico, USA, earth, sol system; or jalapeno north face Olympus Mons Mars, sol system. Replicator Parmesan is very likely a scan of a Parmesan and doesn’t duplicate regional variations between, say, a Parmesan from Mantua vs a Parmesan from Parma.
Did your grandmother use san marzano tomatoes that were actually grown in san marzano in her red sauce (, canned, peeled, whole in juice)? Sucks to be you, the replicator scanned a hydroponically grown plum-type tomato which environment was carefully controlled for optimal nutritional value and “pretty good” taste.
Is the replicator cilantro a kind bred or genetically engineered for maximum palatability across the broadest spectrum of individuals? Is it missing the gene that makes some people taste soap when they eat it? Is that gene the one that makes it taste good to you, so that the replicator chimichurri is always missing something, some particular specific type of freshness, a unique vegetal taste that you can’t put your finger on, and it’s not important enough to track down when you just like the chimichurri you make at home, from cilantro your grew yourself, much better?
Third: The recipe database is probably sourced from hundreds of thousands of recipes written over centuries’ time – and then averaged using a combination of median and modal averaging to come up with something that’s Pretty OK to most people, but which is going to leave others wanting–no matter how much they tweak it.
And then you have many, many people in a state of, “yes but I like my/mom’s/spouse’s/grandparent’s/aunt’s/uncle’s/best friends better”. And that’s OK.
I mean, really. Think about this for a minute.
Fourth:
You go to get a cup of tea from the replicator, because everything is terrible. You know in the darkest depths of your soul that everything will still be terrible with a good cuppa in your hands, but it will be terrible and you’ll have tea, which is a marked improvement.
The replicator gives you a glass of brewed, iced sweet tea.
It takes you three more tries to get a cup of hot earl grey. You decide you’ve finished pressing your luck with this positively infernal machine today and don’t even bother asking for a lemon wedge.
If that doesn’t indicate that the replicators were programmed by an American, I don’t know what does.
holy shit boo this is fucking AMAZEBALLS and I miss the tamale ladies at Stone on the way to the Target so much right now but also you *hugs you tight*
Also, regional recipes are calibrated to work with the local tap water. That’s why pizza from New York and sourdough from San Francisco taste better–the micro-organisms in the water enhance the flavor. The chili that wasn’t made in Texas probably did taste subtly different than it would’ve back home.
There are lots of things that would change with replicators because they take out the human factor.
Maybe you really wanted that one meal from that one restaurant except the restaurant doesn’t release their recipe so it’s slightly off and always will be.
You programmed the replicator with your mum’s favourite mac and cheese recipe, but you didn’t know that your mum always added a little more salt and a little less mustard than the recipe called for, so it’s just not the same and it’s not as good.
Pretty much this. Also I think we cannot overstate the degree to which “the food always comes out exactly the same” would end up bothering people over time.
Important point is that these are “military grade” food replicators and military food is never really great. Hence the difficulty with the tea. Food replicators in private homes and restaurants are more controllable and may have programming for varieties of chilies or tomatoes or even carrots. There are 4 basic kinds of carrots but only one is available commercially, the others need to be grown at home. With a programmable home replicator one can have chantenay carrots… all the infinite varieties of foodstuff ingredients will be available with the right programming and therefore civilians in the 24th century in star trek will have perfectly customisable food. My mind is boggled now…
For a real-world example, but in the other direction:
When I was a child, my mother used to make chili using “Carroll Shelby’s Texas Chili Mix.” It made… okay chili.
When I was in college I found a book called “Chili Madness” at a local used bookstore, that had the winning recipes from the National Chili Cookoff for the last 30 years. It included Carroll Shelby’s actual recipe. So I made it. (Had to get one of my apartment mates to source beer for me, as I was not of age to purchase it yet.)
Wow. What a difference. Adding the spices at different times rather than as a blob of “spice mix”. Beer instead of water. No masa. So good!
So the bagged mix would be the replicator mix in this scenario.
@subbyp you said what about the tap water?
It has microscopic crustaceans in it.
The microorganisms are different, if not missing.
The process of creating it is removed, along with all that entails: this spice left to simmer for the entire cooking time, that fresh leafy thing added in just at the end, a tiny bit heat-wilted.
The quality, not in terms of “is it good” but “what characteristics does it have,” the difference between grass-fed beef and corn-fed, mast-raised pork and commercial feed, how much sunshine did the animal get, what breed is it, how much exercise did it get.
What soil microbes mingled with the roots of that plant and what was planted next to it and how many rainy days did it get and how much sun? You have wine connoisseurs talking about how this or that year was “a good year” because of how the patterns of temperature and sun and rain hit the vines, and everybody has a memory of getting a really good batch of blueberries from the store ONCE and wishing they could all be like that.
When I was a kid we picked strawberries at you-pick fields that don’t seem to be around anymore, and they tasted so much better than anything I’ve ever gotten from a store.
One of the things that screws up my suspension of disbelief in Star Trek is how weirdly specific and intuitive the computers both are and aren’t, at the same time. Picard always has to say “Tea, Earl Grey, hot!” at the replicator so there’s obviously no means of personalization where the replicator knows if it’s Picard asking for tea, he wants it Earl Grey and you can just jump to that unless he specifies otherwise, but also that one time he was able to pull up the musical recording of HMS Pinafore on the working screen of a shuttle by pressing just two buttons, and there weren’t a whole lot of buttons on either screens, so what the fuck?
Anyway there’s probably a shitload of data storage in a Federation starship, but are they really going to fill it up with enough molecular data to store
every extant cultivar
of every food plant
at every stage of edible ripeness
prepared every way it’s commonly prepared
in combination with every other ingredient whose presence or absence affects its taste?
Plus every cut of every food animal
with all the variables of how it might have been raised, and then
with every variable of preparation?
If you bake bread it will taste differently based on how you let it rise, at what temperature, if you put it in the fridge overnight and then let it rise, if you use a starter or a pre-ferment, as well as what yeast you use and how you knead it and what flour and what water and the temperature and shape of the oven and the atmospheric pressure and humidity of the day and the altitude you’re doing your baking at and
that’s
ONE
type
of
food
and you can’t just reduce all that into “bread, artisan, sliced” or whatever
don’t get me started on the butter
or the absolute multitude of things that you could mean when you say you want “chili”
and even if you go into the Settings menu the first time you take a Starfleet posting and spend hours on end going into detail about what varieties of peppers should go into each of your favorite Mexican dishes and how much crispiness is The Correct Amount Of Crispiness in your bacon (and how thick it should be and how it should be smoked and seasoned) and how big and numerous you want the holes in your sandwich bread to be
you’re still gonna find yourself missing the taco truck and the tamale lady and that one bakery and the sort of fried rice you get when you throw six days’ worth of leftovers in plus whatever spices feel right at the time.
i always figured they’d have a gourmet chef produce a dish, scan the pattern, store the pattern in a database, and there you go. same dish every time, until the end of time. just have a masterclass chef who had this one dish they’re passionate about and have them make it.
but then you’ll run into the problem of ‘it’s a great dish but it ain’t what pappy used to make’. and that’s that.
look, you can get a gourmet chef to make you some artisanal mac n’ cheese, and it’d be great mac n’ cheese, stellar even. and the computer will even reproduce it indistinguishable from the masterclass chef’s creation- but sometimes the palette of the common folk don’t want the 12 layers of flavor in a masterclass chef’s fancy mac n’ cheese, you just want mac n’ cheese.
sometimes we do be wanting that uncultured stuff.
look, with all the minecraft builders of today, i highly doubt there isn’t some dedicated ensign or other, mucking around in the ship’s library, trying to reproduce a taste of home.
and they’ll probably frankenstein a pretty good approximation that they’ll be so proud of, they’ll have it served at their funeral.
forget that one time i saved a planet’s civilization from radiation poisoning, i finally got the mac n’ cheese right. and it’s just the generic box store mac n’ cheese with butter and cheddar.
fuck the gourmet chef’s 12 layers of flavor, some butter and cheddar? that’s where it’s at.
I don’t know shit about Star Trek but I can tell you:
As a child I loved the hard, crumbly, springy, salty feta cheese that was sold at the deli in Market Basket. (Tell me you’re from NE without telling me-) The deli clerk would pick up these great blocks of feta and put them in a plastic container full of brine. In the UK i was startled to learn that this is not Greek feta cheese, and that feta cheese is actually soft and sweet and sour and smeary, and I don’t like it at all. The closest thing to the experience, “my” “feta” cheese, is Apetina (sold as salad cheese - it isn’t legally feta) when cubed and sold in brine. And it isn’t it. I read pages trying to understand what Apetina is, and it isn’t Feta because it comes from Denmark, not a specific area of Greece, but that doesn’t explain why Market Basket feta and Apetina are both tasty and brittle and dry and briny, and Actual Real Feta is like failed chèvre. “The terrain on which the animals graze (in Greece) is very different from that of Denmark,” one website offered hopelessly. I don’t think a work cafeteria is prepared to deal with this, I really don’t.
Annie’s macaroni with white cheddar, in the purple box with the bunny on it. Smartfood popcorn. Smartfood popcorn! I crossed an ocean not realising I wouldn’t eat it again. People have, with the best of intentions, have heard my grief about this tried to tell me how to make Mac and cheese from scratch as if I don’t fucking know. This is not a bechamel, sir, this is not a roux-based sauce, this is white cheddar powder and if you don’t know then you don’t know. Operating under wild cravings, I bought a packet of UK-produced cheddar powder from apparently the only company in Europe that makes it - apparently as a protein supplement - and cannot explain what is wrong with it to my own family, let alone a computer. Let alone a catering company. Let alone a work canteen run by a catering company’s computer. “White cheddar popcorn,” you say, and it gives you popcorn covered in cold grated cheese. We can’t even reconcile this between friends on a planet let alone the vastness of all spacetime.
Those Maruchan creamy chicken ramen noodle packets - did you know they stopped existing? They never will again. Do you remember them enough to teach a computer?
When my husband moved to the US he just could not get sausage. He was astonished by American sausage: sweet breakfast sausage, fennel sausage, hot sausage - but could not get back bacon (“Canadian bacon?” “No, back bacon”) or sausages for a fry up. He found an English butcher in the USA that would ship the right kind on ice, and had a fry up and was happy. Now I think suddenly of hot sausage, Market Basket again with those twelve-packs of weirdly red sausage. If we can’t argue these distinctions with people then what can we do?
Did you know that Old El Paso spice mixes, those cheap “Mexican” ones, have the same names and packaging but the ingredients vary by country? Just like Coca-Cola, thought to be the universal American import, actually being made from the cheapest sugar source in the country of manufacture.
I don’t know anything about Star Trek. I am absolutely starving.
The Sheboygan bratwurst my dad would drive from Chicago to get when I was a tiny child just don’t exist where I live now, and it is regional variations that would be keeping restaurants like Joseph Sisko’s going in Star Trek.
Click on it twice. These are your two super powers.
everyone else always seems to fucking get cool shit and i always get like “gel manipulation” and “using dust along w/ your fighting style”
My first one was “poison smoke manipulation” which is acceptable then my second one is “Family Creation” which gives Princess Bubblegum’s candy kingdom as an example, so, I guess I’m making everything I’ve ever drawn into a real thing and if anyone doesn’t like it I’m going to asphyxiate them with gas.
Or asphyxiate your citizens like princess bubblegum! Thats also an option
Oh no, they’d be allowed to do anything they want, who am I to impose rules or morals on them??
I got “gravity arts” and “omnipotence” so, I guess I’m god now. please fill out request forms in lieu of thoughts and prayers, and the smiting forms are that other pile on your left.
Cartoon logic and Omni blast. Which I'm not super familiar with but idk how that would work in this context. All cartoon logic at once? Idk
i think someone should make a restaurant with like. all the hype and pretension of a Traditional™️ italian restaurant but they make authentic food from Ancient Rome.
there's a bottle of garum at every table, and new world ingredients are nowhere to be found
immaculate tags
#if you attempt to bring a tomato onto the premises you will be shot immediately by a sniper in roman legionaire's armor
We'll need to drag max miller into this thang I assume
I would like to eat my weight in bread dipped in various olive oils and fish sauces please
The only two replies on this tho
You know you've fucked up when you go to a doctor and the thing you have wrong with you has been named after an occupation that isn't a thing anymore. Like imagine a doctor looking at you and going "yeah you've got ox-drawn ploughman's disease. We don't even test for that anymore. Yeah the reason you've never heard of it is because the last known case was in 1927 and happened to some guy who was like 98 years old and didn't believe in modern medicine of the time. What the fuck have you been up to."
Me when I remember that scurvy exists because of a lack of vitamin C. How the fuck have you avoided the love of a lemon this long man?
The fact that a sufficient source of vitamin C is also in potato skins, fresh meat, strawberries and brussel sprouts. You practically have to TRY and get scurvy to get scurvy nowadays.
Getting work done on my house and the contractor was like “I saw ur sign….. r u yknow in the community or an …ally?” And I was like doing the major side eye and was hesitantly like “……in the community…” and the guy whips out his phone and goes “cool let me show you a picture of my daughter and her 4 kids and her wife and did u know the baby is theirs biologically which is very cool and” then I got to listen to him tell me all about being an ally and how much he loves the queer community and also he thinks it’s despicable all the friends they lost when his daughter came out and they haven’t won the best yard since they put a pride flag out and how it’s about making sure people have safe spaces and know they aren’t alone- to my complete astonishment I really did get the full essay from him
NYT has been discouraging reporters from sharing photos of luigi mangione - not due to concerns for his safety but to dissuade sympathy - and refuses to post his alleged manifesto in full. and today, they published an opinion by bret stephens about how brian thompson is the "real working class hero" of this story.
reddit deleted luigi's account, which was completely innocuous and consisted mostly of him giving out advice in health subreddits. they're also deleting any post that includes his alleged manifesto and banning users for sharing it.
luigi yelled that this was "an insult to the intelligence of the american people" while he was being dragged by police and news pundits are framing it as a deranged and violent outburst. news media are picking apart details of his life to paint him as a cold-blooded and mentally ill individual. even something as innocent as playing "among us" with friends is being framed as some insidious look into an assassin's disturbed psyche, ffs.
news media are also capitalizing on luigi's supposed "bizarre and impossible to understand" politics as an obvious way to paint him as a scary individual when the guy is... a centrist, at most. whose views are similar to those of your average college-educated white guy.
multiple news media also keep harping on about how luigi comes from a rich family. an obvious attempt to break the class solidarity that's been formed around this case by continuously trying to tell us "oh he's not like you guys" while ignoring the now pretty well-documented accounts of his multiple health struggles throughout the years.
and all this, and he hasn't even been found guilty of the crime he's allegedly committed. luigi is, as of right now, still innocent until proven guilty. and the news are trying to tear him apart because they obviously fear the symbol he's becoming for low and middle class america.