mustang19 posted:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/apr/28/girl-forced-pregnant-donor-semenA mother forced her 14-year-old adopted daughter to inseminate herself with donor sperm to provide a baby for her after she was prevented from adopting any more children, it can be revealed.

The daughter, a virgin, is believed to have miscarried at 14, but went on to have a baby at 16 after regularly inseminating herself with sperm bought over the internet by her "domineering" mother because she was too scared to refuse.

Details of the shocking case have emerged in a previously secret court judgment, which can be reported today for the first time and which raises serious questions over loopholes in international adoptions and the regulation of the global traffic in gametes.

This is called "rape by rape".

Yeah, I spotted that over at r/MensRights too.

Because the mother wanted a girl, she forced her daughter to use painful acidic douches containing vinegar or lemon and lime juice, and eat a special diet, in the belief it could affect gender.

lol human beings are the worst/best

e: seriously, that article is one of the best loads of misery porn ever written.

Edited by Cycloneboy (April 29, 2013 07:26:01)

deadken posted:

lmao cycloneboy runs his own lf spinoff how had i not seen that before

Wow, how did you miss the rhizzone's long dark age, a time of open collusion between a hostile forum moderator and an intentionally neglectful IFAP warden? The goal of the regiment instituted by these twin powers was the erasure of male rape. Cycloneboy was censored for speaking out, isolated and gagged, and had no choice but to open that forum, even if it was only as a symbolic alternative.

ilmdge posted:

deadken posted:
lmao cycloneboy runs his own lf spinoff how had i not seen that before
Wow, how did you miss the rhizzone's long dark age, a time of open collusion between a hostile forum moderator and an intentionally neglectful IFAP warden? The goal of the regiment instituted by these twin powers was the erasure of male rape. Cycloneboy was censored for speaking out, isolated and gagged, and had no choice but to open that forum, even if it was only as a symbolic alternative.

14 Hairless Cats That Look Like Vladimir Putin
I Can Has Vladimir?

BY ELIZABETH F. RALPH | APRIL 29, 2013
In the spirit of Ben Smith's "11 BuzzFeed Lists That Explain the World" for the May/June 2013 issue of Foreign Policy, the FP staff decided to look at the world through BuzzFeed's eyes for a day. For more, check out 7 Things North Korea Is Really Good At, 9 Disturbingly Good Jihadi Raps, 36 Mustaches That Explain Why There's No Peace in the Middle East, and 1 Pentagon Weapons System That Was on Time and Under Budget.

marimite posted:

http://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/books/butler1.html

this is the same way the internet erodes human culture and knowledge, by opening these things up to sampling instead of intellectual/spiritual immersion exclusively. in other words "makes you stupid"

deadken posted:

Makeshift_Swahili posted:
deadken posted:
lf used to have thousands of readers & posts a day, now look at this shit, lmao
75% of them were only just to the left of democrats and posted regularly in the political cartoon megathread. and as slow as the rhizzone is, i don't have to scroll past 15 emptyquotes or people saying "this is why we can't have nice things!" or whatever.


oh yeah olde lf was awful it's just funny to see how many stupid lil things are claiming its lineage

Nydwracu asked me to write a post about the politics of Something Awful because apparently it has suddenly became relevant to him. I think it’s a good week for this sort of thing, and similar insights must be occurring to people everywhere — earlier today, to my surprise, I discovered that God had not yet delivered His planned lesson on Chechnya to Amerika in His usual magisterial way. I asked somebody in Boston if this were really the case, and he replied “No, we’ve all seen Goldeneye“. Now I’m not sure there even *are* any Chechnyans in Goldeneye and if there were, then he agreed that this would only be like the sort of lesson our [fat, Scottish, nerdy ] teacher gave by saying “I’m supposed to be teaching you about Robert the Bruce today but fuck it, we’re watching Braveheart.” — Nobody really pays attention and if it’s on the final exam it needs to be taught again.

I got the movie version of Something Awful politics, and writing this feels enough like a final exam to worry me a little, so I should begin by listing caveats: I never really posted there, but found it an interesting enough diversion during University that I followed it somewhat during its most politically relevant time, which is to say between the 2008 election and halfway through my degree, so I suppose between 2007 and 2010.

The other big caveat is that like our host, I don’t like politics and consider it a character flaw that I am interested in what little politics does interest me. I don’t like the people who get involved in politics, I don’t like how they think and I break out in fists at the thought of having to work with them. I don’t like much that I see. In the fashionable neo-theosophical language of the Orthosphere, I am a Thal and everyone in this story has melopepocephalic ancestry or tendencies. This is Internet extremist politics, and if you read this blog you probably have some first-hand experience of what that entails — all the worst parts of activism, academia and 4chan combined. It is about *personalities* and their flaws and the stakes are negligible, resulting in a kind of primate politics that can’t even be called that by means of implying it is in some way healthy, or natural — at least, I hope not. I only paid attention to it in an impressionistic sort of way and indeed my natural inclination is to see the world in terms of demons and angels, us and them, and I wander around it with uncorrected myopia, living in a Monet picture. This is wise for anyone with an overgrown sensitivity lobe in postindustrial England, and so it is on the Internet. There will be few ugly characters in this narrative, though in consensus reality that is pretty much all there was.

Everyone has their own stratigraphy of the Internet which reflects their own history with it. I myself regard the Internet before 1997 as a Paleozoic world full of creatures endowed with an Edenic elegance and an unfinished roughness, containing most of the basic, molecular diversity necessary for the later flowering, but not fully realised. I admire this age very much, and contemplating the remains of their beautiful, austere web-pages, where the headshots of academics were hidden behind a hyperlink to give you time to brace yourself, and where there were news items with dates as far back as the 1980s fills me with the same meditative calm of studying paleontology. We enter the Mesozoic when proles like your author found out about the Internet and the Cenozoic began in 2005 along with Youtube.

Something Awful is fundamentally a Mesozoic website (founded in 1999), which survives into the Cenozoic, and I suppose the politics in this essay could fairly be characterised as “transitional”. Something Awful is mostly famous for producing many Internet memes, back when they were still called “image macros” and is organised on the phpBB + auxilliary IRC Bauplan which flourished in the Mesozoic. It was more or less politically indistinguishable from the rest of the Internet until the lead up to the 2008 election, when the Internet fell in love with Ron Paul, and various kinds of Paulist clogged up their politics forum “Debate and Discussion”. This pissed off the administrators of SA and they set up a subforum “Laissez’s Faire” to concentrate them together. SA’s moderators are famously authoritarian, and everyone agreed that this was a good thing and not at all unusual.

If this were an Adam Curtis documentary, I’d cut to talk about Moldbug who posted his Formalist Manifesto and started Unqualified Reservations during this time, but I only became aware of him well afterwards, so I don’t know if there were any connections, or anybody noticing him, but through him I learnt about Conquest’s Second Law, which describes the fate of LF very well. Libertarians are both very a) wrong and b) on the Internet and so people swarmed to attack them, which they did with valour. To give them their due, these Paultards were the hardy pioneers they imagine themselves to be in their fantasies and their rotting bodies provided sustenance for the successor species, which were ugly in their own way. I didn’t pay much attention at this part, although it did inspire me to read Atlas Shrugged and *almost* inspired me to enter the official Ayn Rand Institute essay contest .

So after them came the Left proper, who quickly formed a climax community rich in niches. Such a prodigious supply of carrion attracts more and bigger crocodiles and when you consider that SA is officially a “humor” website, this can only lead to crocodile humour. Which it did — SA had another forum called “Helldump”, a sort of School of the Internets where Internet skinheads learnt to identify, mock and dox their enemies in a supportive environment. It was ugly, and I couldn’t bear to read it, but many LF posters did, and some took part. In some ways, I suspect this is the most lasting political legacy of LF: political because they tended to call themselves Maoists, and displayed most of the pathologies which you find in western Maoists who do not have to worry about things like “how to run farms” and “party discipline” and “where do we get the guns from” and so they could *really* get down to the basis of revolutionary praxis: identifying class enemies and humiliating them by calling them neckbeard faggots; Lasting, because they still exist, and are up to their old tricks. This is an ugly business, and I paid little attention to it. I am sure there was a lot more attention paid, but Nydwracu can find somebody else for that. It can only be uglier now.

But there were decent people there too. I say this as somebody who, at the time, was a Communist and is presently a Fascist, but still think this. There was a reading group who read Deleuze and Guattari together, producing strange diagrams reminiscent of plant organelles, claiming to illustrate rhizomaticity. One fellow was an Amerikan soldier, who told LF how he broke down in tears when he arrived back home from a tour of duty. It seems he found himself in a supermarket, in the toothpaste aisle, and felt himself overcome by the sheer *diversity* of dentifrices available there. I’ve often felt something similar coming into overlit 24-hr supermarkets after a long nighttime walk. There was one clique of depressives, calling themselves “sadbrains” who told stories familiar to anybody of melancholic temperament, or worse, in this degenerate late capitalist age. They somehow got a counterpart to “Helldump” set up called “Lovedump” and it didn’t really seem cloying at all. I hope they all have cliques surviving as well as the crocodiles, but I doubt it. I don’t think they could hate well enough and relied too much on love. But it wasn’t like tumblr — there were some tumblrish elements to it but at the same time, there were enough real Leftists there to recognise that Social Justice people are ridiculous no matter whether or not you prefer Lenin to Mussolini.

The most remarkable character was “TobleroneTriangular” who persisted for months in writing long, rambling posts in a Paultardian style — walls of insanity about natural rights and basing money on “purestrain gold”. Purestrain gold, apparently, is a kind of gold created during the Big Bang, rather than in later nucleosynthesis, and so possesses a certain property rendering it especially beneficial for currency. This diagram was his: http://i.somethingawful.com/u/docevil/ff/00100107/helldump1.gif Eventually he became part of the background noise until one day he admitted that he was trolling and that for months he had been writing this nonsense all as part of a character. I think he turned out to be a mild-mannered left-liberal. He is the greatest troll that I know of.

It didn’t last. There were informants, and I really think it was at one point one of the biggest forums of genuine revolutionary thought on the Internet . Somebody, one of the crocodiles, made a post about plotting to kill Obama, which was either noticed by Secret Service agents watching the website or given to them by some informant. The Secret Service are autistic about this sort of thing, in any case, and so they send messages to Lowtax warning him that This Shit is Unacceptble. I think Lowtax is more or less apolitical, but with some Right-Liberal leanings, and it pissed him off that he was getting in official trouble for a corner of his forum that he cared little for, a corner which, furthermore, saw great fun in trying to piss off regulars of other subfora, especially those about the military and guns. The moderation went from being authoritarian to being farcical and talk turned to how much further LF would last. In the event, it wasn’t much longer. After a couple of months of tension, LF was taken off the main list of forums, and then locked shut. With LF taking all the Leftists out of the main Debate and Discussion forum, it had become more rigidly autistic and debate-clubby and loathsome and liberal, and LF refugees found no friends there. There were some successor forums, but I don’t really know what became of them. I know of two: One of them, WDDP, became a hub for crocodilism, and one of them, the Rhizzone, is, I think, filled with the more sensitive sorts, but I have stopped paying attention.

The IRC component lasted longer, and for all I know still exists. I think it was always a vital part of LF, but I paid no attention to it until things started to fall apart. There I found Maximum Crocodile — middle class University Maoists on a full ride from Daddy, playing at Internet Antifa and other Melonhead political games of creating an ever-changing political context where what was safe one day was an excuse for an arseraping the next day. At one point, somebody discussing the “exploitation” of natural resources was met with shrieks of hilarity that somebody could be so concerned about the plight of the poor oil reserves and their oppression. That was enough.

I wish I could close this post by putting these events into some properly Cenozoic context, but I can’t. I’ve moved too far away from Leftism to give a fuck, and when the dam broke, what value that was made visible by virtue of being stored in a major Mesozoic reservoir ran away into the Internet-in-general. Perhaps those streams can be traced to see if they just ran away into rocky wasteland and thence to some sunless subterranean sea, or if they got trapped in aquifers where they are enriching — or poisoning — things quietly. If this essay illuminates anything latent in Cenozoic institutions like /pol/, or tumblr, or I don’t know what, that a reader was not aware of before, then I suppose this will not have been written in vain.