This isn't a joke; I had actually scheduled a lunch with Lowtax for this Saturday. Despite a (let's call it) checkered past, I was extremely excited to meet him, since he's been a huge influence to my sense of humor and Something Awful was really important to me as a teenager.
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I had found him on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, and simply sent a message explaining that I'm a fan, would love a chance to buy him lunch and chat about Something Awful and Gaming Garbage. To my surprise, he responded back with "sure, I'd be up for it".
I responded back with "How does early December sound to you? something on the order of December 11?"
His response was "shit I dont even know if I'll still be alive then". This response was a little weird, but this isn't exactly "off brand" humor for Lowtax, so I ignored it.
I then say something to the effect of "how about something along the lines of November 13?", which he said was better. He then said "and you have my permission to stab me". Again, not off brand for Lowtax.
I bought a plane ticket to Kansas City, was ready to fly out this friday. But I had this deep feeling in my stomach that what he was saying wasn't just a joke. It's pretty well documented that he's been depressed, and I dunno, upon re-reading his messages a hundred times I got a dark feeling that these might be kind of bad omens. What exactly do I do with this? I discussed it with my wife and a friend, who weren't sure what the best solution was, and I ultimately decided not to say anything. I figured I'm just some dork who stalked him on LinkedIn, and I was afraid that if I said anything he would think I'm weird and cancel our lunch date.
And now this shit happened. He finally did it, and now the thought keeps playing in my brain of "what if I had said something a few weeks ago?" I know I don't owe him anything, but I can't help but have this repeated feeling of "I valued an opportunity to meet my man-crush more than I valued someone showing suicidal tendencies," and it makes me feel downright rotten. That's not the kind of person I want to be, and it makes me feel legitimately sick that that's how my brain decided to work.
At some logical level I know none of this is my fault really; realistically even if I had said something, I doubt much would have changed, and I doubt I had enough there to get him committed or anything, but there's a difference between logically knowing something and feeling something.
As it stands, I think there's a reasonably good chance that I will feel partly responsible for this for the rest of my life. This sucks.
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RIP Rich. I know you had a rough last couple years, you were the definition of a "complicated person", and despite everything you will be missed.
I've unfortunately witnessed suicides and attempts close enough to tell you that it is unlikely you could have done anything as a non-related person far away.
Taking him to lunch and treating him as a human being would probably been a super nice thing to do for him.
I know you feel that the part where you think "man I should have said something different" makes you feel bad, but people do much, much more regrettable gaffes they realize only after the fact. Like, for instance, a spouse who considers maybe to lock away the firearms, but not doing it (an unfortunate example from real life, not mine luckily).
Luckily most people are not experts in suicide. Even though if you had concrete intuition that something was off, having no experience of this before, you probably could not tell if the intuition was pointing at something actionable, or imagined.
Persons who are under treatment, with their family, still end up performing a suicide.
I know it feels bad for you, having interacted with him briefly before his passing away, but you should not feel guilt (even though its a natural human reaction you do).
It is important for you to know that his suicide was most likely a direct reaction to an unfavorable court ruling that he was not at all expecting to turn out this way.
Without going into detail, rest assured that this has nothing to do with you, and there is nothing you could have done to change this.
It would be incredibly sad if you feel partly responsible for this, even if it is understandable. In this case, however, your interactions with him may have helped him somewhat. His actions on this day, however, were nothing you could have influenced either way.
Please do yourself a big favor and don't take any of this on yourself.
Yeah, I've been reading up on the details, and I feel a bit better today than I did yesterday. It's easy to feel guilty over stuff that really has nothing to do with you sometimes. I suspect tomorrow I'll feel a little better and that'll continue for a few more days.
Despite his many, many faults, I did genuinely like Lowtax. The few short conversations I had with him before were very funny and pleasant, and I'll miss his strange humor on YouTube. He was a complicated dude, and his fall over the last few years shows how someone can go from "king of the internet" to laughingstock in a relatively short time, and serves as a cautionary tale. The rest of the SA community very justifiably turned on him, and I don't blame them for that at all, but I dunno, I guess I liked him enough to cut him a bit more slack than he deserved.
I’ve never shared this story publicly, but this comment made my hope that others can glean some insight from it, however small it may be.
One of my best friends committed suicide whilst I was in college. My friends and I figured it out from a FB post and ended up finding him before he had passed, but early enough to believe we could have saved him.
After years of therapy and discussion with my friends that were there with me. My friend made a decision extremely privately to take his own life.
There was no way that any of us could have ever done anything substantive to have altered the course of his life. I wish he had spoken to any of us and told us what he was experiencing. But he didn’t.
For years, I felt like I had done something wrong. I _must_ have forgotten to include his PoV or consider his pain.
But now, I realize, he made his decision without us. He wanted to die, and he wanted to spare us the pain of finding him in the half dead state we did.
You didn’t ever do anything wrong. And I hope you can convince yourself that you didn’t have any role to play in this tragedy.
Please DM me if you have any concerns. I will always be available to talk about this with anyone struggling on this topic. <3 No matter how far in the future you find this message.
If you'd met him in person, maybe you, as a fan, could have had some positive effect on him, without necessarily needing to saying anything, much more likely I think than just sending him a message as a stranger which I can't imagine helping. In that way, it's reasonable to not want to scare him off. You were taking the trouble to take a plane to see him, and he did agree to it, so he expected it would be positive too. Sad to hear.
Yeah, I definitely think you're right about this on every single rational level. That said, I think guilt is often an irrational feeling.
I barely knew the guy, and there's a large part of me that knows I did basically everything I could possibly do to help. I wasn't a family member, I wasn't his spouse, I wasn't a childhood friend, I was a dude who had an SA account as a teenager and subscribed to his YouTube channel and found his LinkedIn.
....That said, and I will acknowledge that this isn't the most rational thought that I have ever had, but I do wonder if him saying that to me was a cry for help, like he was reaching out to anyone to show some sort of interest in his well-being.
It's silly, and of course that logic will never end; I'm sure could convince myself that I'm responsible for 9/11 if I tried hard enough.
As I said in a sister thread, I do have an appointment with a shrink in a few days. I am reasonably sure they will either be able to help me or at least will be able to refer me to someone who can.
Don’t let that take hold. You had nothing to do with it and deep down, you know it. If anything, you helped as best you could as some dork who stalked him on LinkedIn.
The good news is, since it's a feeling, it will fade naturally if you don't actively hang onto it and keep bringing it back to consciousness in order to punish yourself. If you believe the right thing to do was to intervene more decisively than you did, just resolve to take more decisive action the next time you hear something like that. Decide that learning that, was the purpose of the experience. Before learning that, you obviously didn't know it yet, and you did the best you could with what you did know at the time.
It’s not your fault and you should adjust your perspective. The joke is on you! Off brand awful humor that makes light of the worst.
It actually seems fitting!
He leaves behind a complicated legacy. It's important to note that credible allegations of domestic abuse lead him to sell SA in the past year, and this can't be set aside.
At the same time, SA's influence on the modern internet can't be understated. The 'image macro' of early SA (maybe created by Lowtax himself, from what Fragmaster says in his video in the link) is the direct ancestor of today's common meme image--impact font text over a silly image, easily accessible to anyone who wants to post it.
Many of today's well-known internet comedians and writers grew up with the site. And it's hard to estimate how big the impact (positive or negative) of things like ADTRW leading to 4chan have been, not to mention things like the rise of Let's Play videos, or the creation and eventual shutdown of BitTorrent Barnyard (and its ensuing spinoffs).
The site itself still remains one of the last vestiges of the old internet--one of the few sites that both survived and managed not sell out and go headlong into monetization--and as a result, is one of the last sites on the modern internet that (maybe ironically) is not entirely awful.
"I have been sitting for hours debating whether or not to disclose this, and I feel like it's something I do need to get off of my chest.
Frankly, I'm tried of being quiet. I've mostly had to stay quiet for years about things happening behind the scenes. I've held things inside so long and so hard my chest physically hurt the same way it is now.
I considered not sharing this out of respect for Rich's parents and sister, but after thinking on the incredibly vitriolic wall of text Rich's Mother sent to me this morning, saying upon many other things, that his blood is on my hands, I need to share it to regain some sense of control over what's taken place in the past 48 hours.
Yesterday I recieved a divorce ruling that would help me and my daughter stay in our home in Canada and allow me to provide a good life for her as well as pay back numerous debts that had accrued during the past two years when I was receiving $350 a month in child support.
In the divorce ruling the judge found that Rich had willfully spent down the martial fund, confirmed his treatment of me was Domestic Violence and put together a plan to pay for the attorney fees etc. He would still retain custody settled on previously in mediation. He was due to get our daughter for Christmas.
An hour later I was contacted by my attorney who informed me that Rich had shot himself earlier in the morning.
So. There it is.
His other ex and I got to tell our children that their father died without saying goodbye to them, or that he loved them, or to my knowledge, left a note for them.
If you've made it this far thank you for giving me space to let this go so I know longer have to hold onto it. "
Don't say "your father died without saying goodbye" and don't say "your father died and said goodby". Just say "your father died". No need for manipulation.
No need? I disagree, just based on my experiences of raising my children who have a mentally unwell absentee mother. I also disagree it's manipulation, as that implies lying to them to achieve a selfish goal of your own, whereas a white lie is intended to be for their benefit.
My younger children still need to hear from time to time that she loves them, even if the obvious reality (to me, and my older children) is that her behaviour demonstrates quite clearly that she doesn't.
But, to ease their young minds, and help them sleep when the doubts come, I tell them that she does love them, and always will so, but she's working on some challenges that make it hard for her to tell them in person.
To quote Thackeray's Vanity Fair - "Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children."
(She has supervised access, but won't use it because "she did nothing wrong", and using it appears to her, as an implicit acknowledgement that she did something wrong)
I dislike lying to them, and I'll admit I feel angry when I do so - they love her because she's Mom, but she doesn't deserve their love - but it safeguards their mental wellbeing until they're old enough to face the unvarnished truth.
I also think of the day my father died, twelve days before I was born. He died smiling (I'm told) despite the intense pain, because of a white lie.
He was dying of cancer, and they desperately trying to induce me so he could meet me before he died, but no dice. And they'd been unable to discern my gender via ultrasound. He was desperate to have a son. (this was the 80s, so you know, patriarchy was the norm, etc. etc.)
In his last hour, he asked the nurse if his child had been born, and she lied magnificently - yes, you have a beautiful baby boy, he's eight pounds five, congratulations. (Which was not a bad guess, I was eight pounds 10).
While they're wildly disparate circumstances, they share a commonality - the unvarnished truth isn't always the best option in some circumstances.
This is probably a heavy-handed way to enter the conversation, but I was rather surprised when I found out how many countries until only recently updated laws on DV and rape to apply to married couples in the same way as unmarried couples. Society seems to have felt decidedly different levels of outrage about doing bad things to unmarried persons (usually women) vs. married ones, and persons in marriage could get away with doing some awful things to their partners.
This is the extreme view, there's of course many other forms of DV and laws across the spectrum are no less fascinating. Note also that there's a difference between legal frameworks and enforcement - I understand, for example, that Japan recently updated the laws to criminalize spousal rape, but it doesn't mean a court will rule on it.
So this is one way in which the definition of DV has broadened. To me it doesn't meet the implied negative connotations of "creep", however.
The parent is referring to a part of the broader notion that some people feel that some other people have over-extended the use of accusatory terms. It's a segment of the SJW/wokeness/cancel-culture/left-vs-right thing. E.g. the word "violence" was used by somebody (I forget the case, but it was not a legal usage of the term) to refer to something non-physical. "Words can be violence", or something like that. I think "poverty is a form of violence" is also something I've heard. I've seen this criticism made for over-usage of the term "hate speech" too, but only in a sarcastic, theoretical way. I've haven't seen the actual instances of the term's misuse. Similarly, I haven't seen cases where the specific term "domestic violence" was over-extended in any popular or legal context (though they may exist).
It is an interpretation, not a conclusion, based on the premise that one would have known before the ruling whether or not the allegations described an instance of DV, if the term had been interpreted according to its traditional meaning.
>one would have known before the ruling whether or not the allegations described an instance of DV
I'm not defending/attacking any person here, since I haven't read further details, but if one goes to court to have something "obvious" decided upon, and then one writes for strangers about it, many (I think even most) people would absolutely use the same wording she used. "The judge confirmed X." I think you're looking too hard for a case that may support some conception you have, instead of accepting that that sentence doesn't have anything insidious in it. Whatever the situation is in reality is coincidental to that sentence.
That would be another possible interpretation of the phrase, but I think it is the less plausible one due to other contextual cues in the above text. In fact, the following quote appears on p. 128 of the same thread, posted by the same account:
>with me, Rich did not get physical.
Which, in my view, definitively settles the issue in the favor of my previous comments. The imputed "suggestion" was, in fact, the case. I also don't see why a bad-faith "flag" could be an appropriate response to the content of that post, which merely makes a reasonable point.
"There was one instance where he rushed me and I put my arms out to stop him, another where he pinned me down on the bed, but from what I can recall right now the rest was emotional, financial, verbal and lots of intimidation like punching holes in the wall, throwing and breaking things, screaming in my face."
Rushing, pinning, punching, and throwing are physical and violent. And I don't know how you ruled out threats.
I would not so quick to judge the circumstances surround their divorce. There are quite serious allegations of physical and financial abuse lasting for years.
"Seems" to, but does he? He goes on about how "never been convicted or found guilty of doing shit", points out (correctly) that anyone can allege anything on the internet -- but I don't see him actually deny any of the accusations?
Never heard of this guy or SA until this post but I think it's depressing that we feel guilty celebrating this guy's accomplishments without being like "oh but it has to be mentioned he treated people in his life terribly and might have been an objectively awful person".
Maybe there is a subconscious belief that only "good" people deserve success and praise? I just find this so naive because if you've lived long enough and gotten to know yourself and other people you realize how complicated and flawed each and every one of us are.
Much of today's internet culture is directly on indirectly influenced by SA to some degree. Beyond this, however, SA remains a unique community, perhaps even more so today. It is quite large compared to specialist boards, but it is insular, exclusive and high trust: It is not monetized and overrun by fakes compared the reddits, chans or imgurs of today.
So sure, Lowtax has had significant positive influence on many people.
This is why people on SA are so outspoken and disappointed. Lowtax is an "eminent figure" of the internet. He has had a personal impact on many people throughout their formative years, inasmuch as he impacted internet culture as such.
Lowtax had a place of high status and influence that betrayed how deeply flawed he was as a person. People literally grew up with him as a central player in internet culture. When he (and SA) went and mocked some "crazy person" or fought against a perceived evil, then this was part of valiant, stupid, maybe wrong but nonetheless memorable childhoods and teenage years for many people.
When Richard posted that he was seriously ill, the outpouring of support was far and wide.
When we then learned that not only was all this fake, but Richard was privately a person hardly deserving of the immense respect he had, people got unreasonably angry.
Today, I think people are mourning. On the one hand, the real person who died, on the other hand, many people are mourning the loss of a childhood hero - a hero who metaphorically (and now literally) died, because he was never a hero to begin with.
> Maybe there is a subconscious belief that only "good" people deserve success and praise? I just find this so naive because if you've lived long enough and gotten to know yourself and other people you realize how complicated and flawed each and every one of us are.
We see this a lot in posts here and elsewhere: Some historical figure or someone with a lifetime of achievements and impact gets mentioned. Then, inevitably, a poster comes out of the woodwork to remind everyone: "Buuuuuut he was sexist" or "Buuuuuut he sometimes beat his kids" or "Buuuuuut he once cheated on his wife" as if that one fact nullifies everything else the person did.
I'm glad OP acknowledged that the person in question was "complicated". We all are complicated. People should not be reduced to a single dimension or a single bad thing they did. I hope when I finally pass away, my epitaph talks about the major things I did, rather than that one worst thing I ever did, that someone found by analyzing 40 years of comment history.
There's a reason human nature is to criticize and focus on flaws - that's how progress is made.
Great achievements speak for themselves. In most cases, people readily adopt proven new practices or inventions, flock to groundbreaking ideas, and celebrate those who produce them.
Meanwhile, they will happily stay silent about uncomfortable truths. Who dares pipe up about the charismatic but incompetent colleague? The successful boss who skims a little off the top? The beloved politician who touches female staff? Etc. Mistakes and wrongdoing have a way of hiding in plain sight.
Yes, people are complicated. It's better when folks point out the complexity, instead of sticking to the sanitized version.
I feel like we’re in a period of overcorrection where we’re not simply acknowledging flaws with accomplishments, we’re now letting the flaw become the lead narrative about a person when it may be one of the objectively smaller details about them in the scope of their accomplishments.
But in the case of Lowtax, the flaws- not only his abusive personal life but his petty webmaster dictatorship, his incompetent inability to monetize, his misanthropic persona- is part and parcel of his public profile. It’s how he’s always been regarded by the goons. Because Something Awful has always been a place to embrace misanthropy, antisocial ridicule, and looking at the crappy side of things.
If anything, to remember his flaws is to engage in the same spirit of mockery that he pioneered. It’s completely apt in this case, and to do otherwise and to whitewash would be to completely miss the point of this man’s life and accomplishments.
> There's a reason human nature is to criticize and focus on flaws - that's how progress is made.
This may lead to progress, but I don’t believe this is WHY we do this. People are moralizing creatures. Much like we are “programmed” to recognize faces, (even when they’re not there) so too are we programmed to see issues in moral terms. Once you start paying attention to what people say, this conclusion is almost unavoidable: often discussion will never get into the details of things, but simply focus on the question of whether something is “good” or “bad.” (Other times it will focus on who is to “blame,” and who is the “victim.”)
Hopefully my tone hasn’t come off too harsh, since evaluating moral claims is one of the most fundamental things which make us human. Like all those other traits though, sometimes we focus on it too much, or else can’t see past the moral part of the argument.
By your logic, funerals should be more like agile retrospectives where we examine every mistake a person made or person they hurt so people at the funeral don't repeat the same mistakes.
The reason people commit violence is not because of a lack of social pressure or not understanding the difference betweeen right and wrong. They have something broken inside.
Interesting points. It's too common now to lump a person's strengths and weaknesses into one big package. Right or wrong, that is the common way of judging people it seems.
I enjoyed SA at first, until it became quite clear the moderation was heavily skewed to Lowtax and his friends, Photoshop Fridays were largely rigged, accounts would be locked for no apparent reason and good luck getting a response from that cancer guy that never checked email. And fine - that's his site, his rules, and opted (since phpBB was free and had "access" to university servers) to set up something just for me and my friends. Apparently I wasn't the only one because the user base slowly declined with some hardcore hangers-on sticking around to form the shell of a community it is now. Lowtax was always an asshole, but he did build something that greatly influenced internet culture (again, for better or worse is left up to the reader).
"Complicated and flawed" sure is a different thing than "serial wifebeater." We're supposed to let that get overshadowed by the fact that he happened to start a web forum where funny people posted? I don't think that there's anything subconscious about the desire to frankly evaluate someone's life. Even before his passing, for decades he was known as someone who would reliably make bad decisions at every opportunity. The web forum he started eventually banned him.
As others have said, SA was successful despite him, not because of him.
I don't think SA is something to be celebrated. The abuse and the manner he chose his exit seems relevant. Its a bit disturbing that so many people wax lyrical about SA even after giving it a decade of space, even while they acknowledge the way that the misanthropy led to punching down and bullying behavior.
It's true, his forums had a huge indirect influence on modern US online culture, giving rise to so many projects and careers.
Ironically, he failed to capitalise on his influential position unlike so many of his peers who sold off their online properties and disappeared from the public eye. If he'd taken a different approach, he'd probably now be sitting on media properties (or a fortune) worth tens of millions, and minting millions more in cryptocurrency/NFTs. And also possibly have a very different family life.
An example of someone with huge opportunities but not the inclination/mindset or skillset to grasp them.
(Also, I never understood the absurdist humour of Doom/Mood House back in the day. Weird stuff.)
I'm unfamiliar with BitTorrent Barnyard, despite knowing of both SA and BitTorrent for nearly twenty years, and a search just gives me torrents for a 2006 movie. Someone mind telling me what it was? Guessing a tracker?
When the forums went paid and semi private, a few boards were created for sharing music, porn, and torrents. AFAIK you could never see they existed without a paid account. The last time I logged in with a paid account was more than 15 years ago though so I can't say how it evolved.
The mods/admins shut them down after year or two, before there were any real legal consequences. As a result of that, there were a number of private spin-off sites dedicated solely to piracy, some of which continue today.
I think a lot more happened there than just piracy. Just based on what I heard, I certainly never had an account on any of the sites... . Perhaps over time, more will be known publically. SA lead to 4chan and 8chan, many conspiracies started on these sites as memes. Look at 8kun for example. Behind the scenes of sites like SA existed a large collection of questionable groups. Just imagine the bandwidth needed and the kinds of political connections required to keep it off of the radar. Also consider how the whole Warez scene operates in general. Experienced programmers writing cracks, leaked movies and tv shows, drugs, etc.
Kind of like the silk road before the darkweb.
Hopefully more will be known over time because there are some crazy stories.
These proto-memes were probably independently "invented" on a lot of different forums. There was a much bigger emphasis on making content yourself back before content aggregators, which meant there was a lot of innovation going on in a lot of places. They'd sort of trickle through the internet through some sort of weird back-channel osmosis and merge and intermingle to create new formats.
I think almost anyone who spent a decent amount of time in forums aimed toward adolescents around 2000 will have had some small impact on the emerging meme format.
I mean while we're talking about the legacy of Tribes and SA and "old internet" culture we need to shout out a certain dancing gherkin wearing a pink inventory as a hat.
Hey guys. Don't just reminisce about Starsiege: Tribes, pick it up again (if you ever stopped playing). The community master servers and a couple dozen servers are still up. It's active with pick-up games on Fri+weekends. Join us!
A lot of the humor that made Something Awful extremely popular in early internet history was either direct from Lowtax or indirectly curated by Lowtax. The front page for many of those early years was almost nothing but Lowtax posts with few other direct contributors to the front page. Even in curating "the best of what the forums did", his voice was often in (meta-)commentary between and among the curated items.
Eventually you weren't 18 anymore and that "edge lord" persona that Lowtax brought to everything wore thin, or other "edge lords" started to get more attention, and also then eventually we all found out that Lowtax wasn't an act and actually lived his life that way too. But I know for me the era of Something Awful I most paid attention to SA, most of that was for Lowtax's sense of humor and the young naive kid both I and the internet itself was at the time.
I disagree with this. As someone who started visiting the main site when I was a teenager, Lowtax's comedic writing was what drew me in. AFAIK he retired from writing for the site a long time ago, but in his prime he was cranking out hilarious essays, absurdist listicles, and entire parody web sites pretty frequently.
Hard disagree; early Something Awful was hilarious and it was mostly becuase Lowtax was more involved with front page posts.; I'm still chuckling just remembering some of those posts.
As you know my patreon has declined from like $9k to under $1k because of the fucking idiots who embrace the ideology of, "If You Read It On the Internet, It Must Be True!" Ironically, this was the original slogan for the site, before I changed it to "The Internet Makes You Stupid." Both apply equally in this case.
Nobody seems aware that anybody can allege anything. Nobody seems to give a shit that I built and maintained this community for 22 years; one single allegation destroyed all that good will. One single allegetion destroyed my entire career, site, job, and creation. And don't even try to say "BUT LOWTAX WHUT ABOUT THESE OTHER THINGS IN YUR PAST HURRRRRR" because I've never been convicted or found guilty of doing shit. Ever. Period.
A bunch of kiwifarms people easily whipped those gullible idiots into a frenzy of self righteous outrage, and nobody from SA even gave it a second thought. I've always been honest and open with everybody my entire life, which is also why I get easily manipulated. I cannot speak in further length about certain things, so I'm trying to be as vague as possible. Look at the background of both parties involved, look at their history, look at what they've literally and legally done. Not been ACCUSED of doing, but actually DONE.
We have a court of law to determine if allegations are valid. Rushing to judgement by simply acting on an allegation, something that has, by nature, not been proven at all, is pure idiot toilet fuck shit.
This event really shows who my true allies and friends are, and who are the people that don't give a shit about the things I've actually DONE and CREATED in the past 22 years are. I'm going to capitalize the word done here one more time. DONE.
An ALLEGATION. For fuck's sake, at least wait for me to be found legally guilty of SOMETHING. Innocent until proven guilty, except on the internet where it's guilty and then still guilty and always guilty because people make up their minds once and can never change them ever no matter what. Outrage is the currency of the internet, and by god nobody will ever be wrong!
Anyway I'm making a plea for logic, if there is any logic remaining on the internet. Thank you to the six remaining patreon members left, and a huge fuck off to the SA outrage culture reactionists that were apparently just waiting for any excuse or reason, no matter how idiotic, to turn on me. Congrats, you're betting on the wrong horse.
And yes, I'm aware that by writing this I'm just going to lose more donors but whatever, I'm not and never have done anything just for cash. I just wanted to point out how the site I used to run is now populated by the hand wringing, outrage culture warriors we used to once make fun of.
> I truly wish that allegations of any and every sort were considered not credible by the general public.
If someone steals my phone at the bar and everyone at the table sees them do it, then tells you exactly what happened with the same story - would you say "no, this is _not credible_. It is not something I am able to believe could happen and it is not plausible". Surely not. It would be a credible allegation.
> This isn't against women. How many of us, given such an arbitrary and powerful weapon, would have the character not to use it, especially against someone we hate for personal reasons?
Given the ability to you would falsely accuse someone and ruin their lives? Have you considered that you may be projecting that onto others?
> Accusation is not guilt,
Which is why we have different words to help explain the differences.
> and we need to stop assuming that every accusation is credible.
We don't. That's why it is reasonable to mark some of them as credible.
> If someone steals my phone at the bar and everyone at the table sees them do it, then tells you exactly what happened with the same story - would you say "no, this is _not credible_. It is not something I am able to believe could happen and it is not plausible". Surely not. It would be a credible allegation.
This is a pretty good scenario for explaining why accounts like this can be not credible.
A is at the table and "sees" B steal his phone. A accuses B of stealing his phone in front of C, D and E. Cop receives testimony from A, C, D and E that is all the same story.
Eye witness testimony is not that valuable when people have conferred with each other.
Five matching witness testimonies can be both incorrect and credible. To say that they are not believable is, frankly, bizarre to me. The example is bereft of detail so you can obviously make up a situation which matches it and it is not believable but that would ignore the point here.
A simple rephrasing is that you can make credible false allegations.
> You present strawman (seeing it makes it credible)
Multiple eye witnesses help make the allegation credible, yes. Which would go against the idea of no allegations being considered credible by the general public. That was your opening statement.
> But I'd suggest stepping back and considering the overall point you're trying to make.
It's very simple. Some allegations are credible, and it is entirely reasonable for the general public to thing some allegations are credible and others not.
> You might start with a scenario which is, by construction unfair: a couple fights, she takes the kids, he shouts, she calls the police and claims abuse, he is beaten and arrested; during the divorce she uses the arrest as evidence of the abuse, and frames the beating as evidence of her husbands violent tendencies; the court accepts this argument and he loses the children, getting supervised visitation only 90 minutes once a week.
> Does that sound right, or fair to you?
It sounds like it has nothing to do with whether any allegation can be considered credible. It could be an argument against all allegations being considered credible and it can be an argument against people mixing up someone _alleging_ another is guilty and that person being _found_ to be guilty.
> all in seeming defense of the principle: we can and should considered guilty until proven innocent.
Perhaps try reading my comment again, and if after that and this extra explanation you still think I am claiming somehow that all allegations should lead to convictions or that all allegations are credible or that guilt should be assumed, then I have no way of reaching a consensus with you as to what point I'm even trying to make.
> You might start with a scenario which is, by construction unfair...
So... you're countering one strawman with another?
>I can't understand how or why anyone would want this to be how things work
It's a hypothetical scenario, a strawman, so of course not.
Is this actually how things work? Do you have any stats about wrongful accusations to back up your ideas? My personal experience from speaking to women who have actually suffered abuse at the hands of men is that the problem is very much the other way around - nobody believes them and brushes it off exactly as you are doing.
>So... you're countering one strawman with another?
A strawman is when you misrepresent another person's argument. What I've done is present a hypothetical situation, apply the GP's prescribed view to it, and asked if it's fair. It is basically a kind of "proof by contradiction" where you assume the opposite of what you want to prove, apply it to a situation and show a contradiction, and so it must be false. I think it's a pretty strong, argument, actually.
>You present strawman (seeing it makes it credible)
Seeing something happen does make an allegation more credible; this is the whole point of, say, witness testimony. Why we are more likely to believe things which are attested to by others. Credibility is also an element of character and relation to the victim. If I told my parents I was mugged in an underpass on my way home, which explains why I don't have my cell phone, I'd be a little weirded out if they simply replied with "your allegations are not credible, that's a strawman."
>we can and should considered guilty until proven innocent.
Guilt and innocence in which epistemic context? Consider that there are both very well known cases of public opinion being wrong (and overturned by a court or other method), or the findings of courts being wrong (and overturned by public investigation and revelations). Guilt in one arena does not necessarily equal guilt in another[0], and I think that's part of the point GP was trying to make.
>a couple fights, she takes the kids, he shouts, she calls the police and claims abuse, he is beaten and arrested; during the divorce she uses the arrest as evidence of the abuse, and frames the beating as evidence of her husbands violent tendencies
You can't seriously accuse GP of setting up a straw-man, then relay an idealized (for your point) situation which is, to my knowledge, not backed up by any statistical power.
>Because this is what I'm arguing against, and I can't understand how or why anyone would want this to be how things work.
You're arguing from a view-from-nowhere, that is, you have already relayed the facts of an unfair situation and the legal consequences of that situation, without taking into account that the situation you relayed is a failure of the justice system, not only of the allegation. Your depiction of how a single allegation snowballs like that isn't impossible - but you haven't done anything to show that this is the result of most (or even a significant number of) allegations of domestic abuse.
[0] "In at least a wide variety of cases, our orientation toward testimony is a non-skeptical one: when someone tells us that P, we end up justified in believing
that P. And ordinarily, if the speaker knows that P and tells us that P, we end up ourselves knowing that P. That testimonial knowledge is common is both commonsense and philosophical orthodoxy.
But we do not always take this kind of stance. Sometimes we interrogate testimony; sometimes we explain it away or demand proof. As much recent literature in both social psychology and epistemic injustice has shown, social and cultural factors influence the degree to which testimony is considered credible."
>You can't seriously accuse GP of setting up a straw-man, then relay an idealized (for your point) situation which is, to my knowledge, not backed up by any statistical power.
I can because mine was not a strawman, it was a variant of proof-by-contradiction: assume ~P, produce a contradiction, QED: P. I suspect you know this is a logically valid argument because you segue quickly to "statistical power".
It makes sense to question the frequency of things when talking practicality. I agree. I assert that most people have no idea what goes on in "family court", or the accoutrements surrounding it (like the police, or visitation centers, etc). The people who know are family law attorneys, judges, and those who've been through it. Maybe some others know: therapists, police officers, doctors.
But let me tell you, it's a cynical, brutal game of posturing that starts out giving the father every-other-weekend with the children. And it only can get worse from there. The wife's attorney's will generate any and all accusations to build leverage to take the children away; this gives them leverage for a settlement, because a trial can take years and 100's of thousands of dollars. The father must decide: take the deal, or not see your kids?
This is standard operating procedure in divorces in the united states, although I'm guessing you didn't know that. I'm just saying that my own experience has changed my perspective significantly - when I hear an accusation of DV during a divorce, there is a strong likelihood that we are seeing the mechanization of the attorneys. And they know, more than anyone, the power of an accusation regardless of it's truth value.
I have 2nd-hand experience of the UK system and it kinda works the same - with the additional note that consequences for the mother withholding access to the kids despite court orders seem to be basically non-existant.
Some of the MRA movements are odious and/or ridiculous at times, but the problem is real.
This looks to me like you admonished GP for creating a hypothetical situation and drawing a conclusion from it one paragraph before you do the same. Both scenarios add to the conversation in different ways.
This comes off as naive. I saw the domestic abuse allegations again him and decided to read up.
He had multiple allegations from both exes. He lightly joked about rape, domestic abuse etc. Yeah, they're jokes, but when I stopped being a child that stopped being funny, you can still see him making these jokes int interviews about his situation.
You've got people on HN today that believe that metoo is just made up. Those victims were mocked and denied justice for years because a lot of socially awkward dudes make the mistake of assuming that cause they're nice other guys are, too.
I know nothing bout him other than the public forum that he himself put in. There's no other way to judge him. I think it's telling that you've flipped this around into tropes about gender and being scorned.
The problem with metoo is that the solution it envisioned for the problem, was to attempt to undermine the justice portion of the justice system as much as it could, and to create as many avenues for extrajudicial punishment as it possibly could. The entirely inevitable outcome of this is that these new systems were put to use by people to enact personal agendas, in any venue where interpersonal politics was relevant. Which is why we have a growing cohort of people who now reactivity think that any accusation is more likely to be false than true.
Sure, these accusations can be very hard to prove. But an accusation of a false accusation is even harder to prove. Yet most people will be inclined to reactively put their faith in one of those accusations, but not the other. The idea we’ve come up with to resolve this tension is the presumption of innocence, and that accusations must be proven for justice to be carried out. This is one of the foundational moral and legal principles of all liberal democracies. While people might end up frustrated by the unavoidable outcome that sometimes, some conflicts can’t be satisfactorily resolved, throwing out the core principles of justice seems like a bad solution to some people.
#metoo was literally about bringing the attention to the scale of the problem and raising awareness, and normalize talking about abuse, so that it wouldn't continue in silence.
The court of public opinion has existed before and after #metoo. Let's not pretend that #metoo invented it. If twenty people were to go public and say that Justin Bieber beat each of them with a crowbar, Justin Bieber would have some 'splainin to do, whether or not there's a court case.
If twenty people gave interviews and said that Martha Stewart personally fed them poisoned pies for shits and giggles, Martha would be affected by that, whether these people decide to sue or not.
But the society made an exception for sexual abuse. Rape and drugging in particular. #metoo simply made it count just as much.
Yes, and that's why we have libel laws: to stop these kinds of things from being "judged" in the court of public opinion. Raising awareness and providing support are all fine and very necessary, but the extrajudicial punishments is where the movement lost my support. Still, extrajudicial punishment is what we're left with if the judicial system fails to do justice.
You're kidding, right? You think that all of the things listed below are instances of "I have a right to tell people what happened to me without shame and harrasment", and none are instances of virtual stake burning? Note: this is the result of just five minutes of keyword searches, I have no opinion on the actual merits of these cases, just disproving your claim that there is no extrajudicial punishment associated with the movement:
Women are still often told that sexual harassment is their own fault for dressing the way they do, or get told "boys will be boys". It used to be expected that women would have to put up with it in the workplace.
Rape victims get told that if they really didn't want it to happen they could have fought harder.
There are still judges in the US giving lighter sentences or no jail time at all and citing this sort of reasoning.
So yes, society has certainly made an exception for sexual abuse of all forms for many years and those excuses are still being made. Are things improving? Yes. Are those improvements good enough? Not by a long shot.
> There are still judges in the US giving lighter sentences or no jail time at all and citing this sort of reasoning.
Name one case in the last 5 years where the judge uses the victims clothes as a reason for a light sentence in USA, and where the judge wasn't punished for it. It should be possible to find one right? If you can't even find one for a whole 5 years I wouldn't say that this is a problem we need to care about, once per 5 years in a population of 300 million is basically never.
The judges don't give reasons for their sentences like that (i.e., the judge is under no obligation to say "I was going to give this person X years, but I'm giving them X-Y because the victim was wearing a mini skirt").
The question you should be asking is: is victim's clothing an admissible evidence in rape cases? That's to say, is it something that the defense uses in their arguments?
And the answer is that, historically, yes, victim's clothing has been extensively used by the defense in rape cases.[1]
The issue was serious enough that states started to adopt laws that banned using clothing as indication of consent in rape cases. By 1994, NY introduced such a law - being the second state in the nation to do so[2].
However, no matter what the law is regarding admissible evidence, the judges will most likely know what the victim was wearing because that, in itself, is collected for evidence. To argue that this does not factor into sentencing would be improbable given the prevalent attitudes in our society, and studies like[5] confirm that.
Which brings us to the main problem: that even without taking clothing as an excuse, sexual assault perpetrators are often left unpunished or given a slap on the wrist, like in the infamous case of the rapist Brock Turner[7].
This is, of course, tangential to the point that a significant part of the population believes that clothing can be an indicator of consent [3][4], which results in the dismal proportion of cases being reported to begin with, and then a small percentage of those brought to prosecution.
In the end, the judges simple don't give prison time to rapists. The judges give light sentences citing anything as a reason, without consequence.
You can see plenty of cases in the survey[8], many of them quite recent.
The analysis of the extent to which victim-blaming has been a factor in each of those cases is left as an exercise to the reader.
> The judges don't give reasons for their sentences like that
The post I responded to says they did, note the "citing this sort of reasoning", citing means they said it straight out and you should be able to find a court document where they explicitly used that reasoning:
> > There are still judges in the US giving lighter sentences or no jail time at all and citing this sort of reasoning.
It is a very different thing from judges being open about these things and it getting pushed underground. I asked about evidence of the former since that was what the person said still happened today. I just wanted to confront that lie, people often lie about these things to make their case seem stronger.
Sure. I can't prove to you that US judges today still openly admit that clothing was a factor in sentencing.
A cursory Google search turned up an example in Canada[1] and Ireland[2]; followed by California passing a law banning use of clothing as evidence of consent last month[3]. Such laws and guidelines are still non-existent in states like Indiana[4].
I have no idea how to find court documents (I'm not a lawyer!), but given the above, I'd find it highly unlikely that the US is faring that much better than Canada and Ireland.
In particular, given that the vast majority of sexual assault and rape cases don't go to trial at all, I don't know at which stage clothing is used as evidence of consent. And as long as it's presented in court, it's a factor in the jury deciding whether to declare the defendant guilty.
But if you want to die on that hill, sure, let's assume that that particular sentence is false.
I.e. that it only used to be the case in the US, it's still the case around the world, and states like California are passing this kind of legislation in 2021 just for shits and giggles.
That doesn't affect any other point made in this conversation, but I hope you enjoy confronting this "lie" =)
Which is a justification for the objective metoo set out to achieve, and it seems one a lot of people agree with.
However those objective are very clearly to undermine the foundational principles of justice. Perhaps you find the arguments for this to be very compelling, but it’s simply a fact that metoo set out to promote a presumption of guilt, in all areas of society that it was able to influence. Most metoo advocates entirely avoid addressing this fact, and a lot of people reasonably disagree with metoo because of it.
The principle that the standard of evidence for the state to deprive somebody of their liberty should be high /= it being epistemically sound to assume the person issuing denials is the most likely person to be telling the truth.
And as far as concrete responses go, I would think it extremely unjust to lock up somebody purely based on anecdotes about creepy behaviour towards kids. But I also wouldn't hire him as a babysitter or a television presenter.
Oh, I agree with that (and likewise not being believed can severely affect a person whose accusations are true, and often also involves ostracism). Ultimately I think society improves when the crime is genuinely rare, which has the side effect of innocent people being less likely to be accused, but there isn't an easy answer to that either.
> This comes off as naive. I saw the domestic abuse allegations again him and decided to read up.
Indeed, reading allegations and treating that as research does come off as naive.
> Yeah, they're jokes, but when I stopped being a child that stopped being funny, you can still see him making these jokes int interviews about his situation.
It’s cool that your sense of humor about that changed during adolescence. That’s not true for many people around the world, especially people who are now in their 40s+. Mainstream standup comedians were joking about domestic abuse in the 2000s still. People joke about dark and inappropriate shit all of the time. Real life isn’t like the workplace or campuses where everything is politically correct.
Society is really confused about right and wrong. Wendy Williams (a talk show host) asked her audience if one of her guests, who wanted a baby, should trick her boyfriend into fathering a child. The audience laughed and said yes -- Wendy laughed too, and agreed.
This is called paternity fraud, because once pregnant the father will have no say in the disposition of the child, AND will be on the hook for child support. That's 18 years of free money for the mom! To quote Lynch's Dune, "And for the father, nothing."
At this point in the thread, it seems clear you're talking about personal issues and not about anything to do with Richard Kyanka or the detailed allegations, police reports, etc.
The guy killed himself and posters are mentioning "credible DV allegations" to imply "good, glad he's dead, he (probably) deserved it." This is the concrete outcome of a much broader consequence of exempting women from ordinary standards of evidence around DV allegations. It's a big problem, worth pointing out, and I strongly suspect that Kyanka would appreciate the discussion.
I don't think anybody has said he (probably) deserved it. They've suggested he was a complicated character whose suicide appears to be the culmination of an unfortunate pattern of self-destructive behaviour, not a hero or victim.
And I'm not sure what you consider to be "ordinary standards of evidence", but you started this subthread by insisting that we should automatically assume allegations were not credible, even in a case where multiple people have independently testified to the same pattern of behaviour and a court has ruled them to be credible, and then went off on an entirely irrelevant tangent about how a half-jokey comment some trashy talk show host made about how to have a second baby with a partner who changed his mind about more kids could, in theory, lead to "18 years free money for the mom". I'm struggling to understand any connection at all between the points you're bringing up other than the repeated insinuation that women are inherently untrustworthy...
How to put this. Not all suicides are created equal. I think some have more of a point than others. It is a final, powerful shout of hopelessness, an expression of resistance against a society that has thoroughly abandoned you. And, in the case of a parent forcibly separated from their children, a statement that if you're going to have your children taken away, you might as well be dead.
But of course we attack the victim here. Because he's a man. Because he's been accused of DV. Because he's a wimp and couldn't take it. Because he's selfish, self-destructive, and abandoned his kids. Right?
Well, if I had my way I'd investigate each and every suicide that was a result of a justice system action. I would take a microscope the proceedings and to the allegations. This man spent his life to say something, to warn us, and I think we could at least take his last, most serious complaint, seriously. (And by implication, don't use the act of despair to further heap blame and abuse on the man.)
And make no mistake, it IS a warning, to the ~10% of marriages that will end in a high conflict divorce, and our concept of right and wrong, just and unjust, is not reflected in the family court system. It is arbitrary, personal and extraordinarily biased for the mother. For those women willing to take it, the high-conflict divorce DV allegation is a super-weapon that you can use to utterly destroy your opponent - not just win, but take all his tools away for fighting, and take all public support for him and his rights. It's extraordinary.
I make the worst joke and I hope you wouldn't consider me a domestic abuser.
Given how our judicial system works, if I had an public known history for jokes about rape, it would be even easier to mount a case of domestic abuse on me.
If a divorce will grant me unique custody of my children or money and get rid of my ex, I would be ready to lie my way out.
Unless there is proof, these are just allegations.
And if I were to lose my children due to the court system being biased, I'd be pretty devastated as well.
It's not my fault my kids don't like me; their mom keeps poisoning them against me with lies and my visitation schedule makes it impossible for me to be in their lives.
No one ever believes me, they all just want to think I'm the bad guy.
You don't need to construct hypotheticals here because we're talking about a specific person. He pretty much sounded like what I just wrote. How many years can you listen to someone give the same excuses over and over - it's never their fault, it's because X, Y or Z - before you figure out that they're not the unluckiest person in the world but just an asshole?
Sometimes participants in a discussion can't get a particular scenario out of their head to the point they literally can't accept even a hypothetical scenario that differs.
You seem stuck on the scenario where, by construction, an actually guilty person is accused, and then claims the allegations are false.
But you haven't really engaged, it seems to me, with another scenario where, by construction, an actually innocent person is falsely accused, and then claims the allegations are false. Is your position that this just never happens, and never could happen? Or it happens so infrequently it can be ignored?
My dad says all of those things, but he never abused anyone. My mother told people a lot of lies about him, said he abused us etc. He was just naive, socially unaware and had money, and that somehow attracts horrible women like a lantern attracts flies.
Now I wouldn't say that my dad was a good dad, but he wasn't an abuser.
> It's not my fault my kids don't like me; their mom keeps poisoning them against me with lies and my visitation schedule makes it impossible for me to be in their lives.
I wouldn't doubt that. This is called parental alienation and it happens extremely often if my lawyer friends are to be believed.
Happened in my extended family as well. The woman and her mother took the kid away and I never saw them again. I was told it took court officials and police for the father to be able to see his son.
At work, a female colleague described similar situation. A family member had a child with her husband, divorced him and took the child to the United States so they'd be out of his reach. Apparently it's easier to illegally enter the country if you have a child with you. Now she sends my colleague and her family threatening messages using fake instagram accounts, taunting them with the fact they will never be able to "ruin her life" now that she's in the USA. She's supposed to be arrested for kidnapping and lose custody of the child if she ever steps foot in my country again.
> Yeah, they're jokes, but when I stopped being a child that stopped being funny
Autists often don't pick up on that and continues to make unfunny or cringe jokes year after year. That makes them prime targets for false accusations, since the world is full of people like you who will assume they are guilty just because they are socially unaware.
Lack of social awareness isn't an excuse for rape and abuse jokes. You don't need any social awareness to figure out that you shouldn't do that. The concept of "jokes at someone else's expense = bad" isn't hard to grasp for an analytical mind.
Autism is not stupidity. You are not doing "autists" any favor by trying to excuse this behavior.
(Also, for some reason, autistic women aren't seen joking about rape and domestic abuse. Perhaps autism isn't the reason why someone may feel comfortable making these jokes, huh.)
What definition are you using? The idea that autistics don't empathize is, put it simply, false.
And difficulty reading social cues doesn't apply in cases where many, many, many people openly and directly explain why jokes at someone else's expense are bad (and correlate with the people being the butt of the joke being mistreated).
I have deconstructed the rape joke in another comment. Maybe to you immediately feel why it's not an OK thing to say. I go through the analysis. We both arrive at the same destination by different means.
The first definition that came up in Google seems to apply: “social awareness: The ability to take the perspective of and empathize with others.”
If you have literally* not any of that, you might need to have a procedural/analytical rule to tell you “Jokes at someone else’s expense = bad”
Then, having the necessity to apply that rule, you would need to be able to evaluate “is this contemplated joke going to be at someone’s expense?”
I can’t see how you could correctly evaluate such a predicate if you had literally not any “ability to take the perspective of [nor] empathize with others”. Evaluating that correctly requires at least a shred of social awareness.
>The first definition that came up in Google seems to apply: “social awareness: The ability to take the perspective of and empathize with others.”
Yeah, that's not what autism assessments mean by "social awareness". When it comes to autism, social awareness is more narrowly defined to be literally that: ability to be aware of what's going on in social settings. This would be things like "reading social cues", "reading emotions", etc. (See [1]). However, let's proceed with your definition.
>If you have literally* not any of that, you might need to have a procedural/analytical rule to tell you “Jokes at someone else’s expense = bad”
First, as I said, autistic people can take perspective of others and empathize with others. What's lacking is the ability to do that through indirect communication, aka "getting the hint".
Second, I do have a rule, and that procedural rule is known as "learning from history", or "taking 5 seconds to google the link between hateful jokes and violence".
The full version of the rule is " Jokes at someone else's expense = bad whenever the people joked about are defined by a characteristic not resulting from their choice".
There are many examples in history how racist / sexist humor being normalized correlated with hate and violence; how "just joking" is used as an excuse to push an agenda[2][3].
You can analyze what makes a joke funny. Take the joke that got a juror dismissed from the Rittenhouse hearings ("Why did the cop shoot Jacob Blake seven times? Because he ran out of bullets"). Its punchline is, effectively, "Because you don't need a reason to murder a black person".
Now, if a black person makes this joke, it can be seen as gallows humor - a commentary on the grim situation they find themselves in while interacting with the police - the reality that they don't get to choose. A black person saying "our lives are worth nothing" is calling your attention to a serious problem.
A white person making that joke would be making fun at Jacob Blake's expense (as well as other people killed by police). A white person saying "black people's lives are worth nothing" - well, given the history of racial violence, the premise that this is the person's actual belief may not be excluded; and telling this joke without additional context is harmful, because it would simply reinforce this idea, and put black people in more danger.
There are very good reasons why we should avoid laughing at characteristics that people don't get to choose. I can go on, however - does the above satisfy your inference criteria?
Perhaps it does require * a shred * of social awareness, but to say that autistic people don't have that much would be simply false.
Look, autistic people don’t get a pass for being socially awkward, nor are we entitled to one. The internet autism communities (particularly the edgelordy ones) often enable this nonsense because “fuck you I don’t want to change”.
Social skills therapy exists and you can learn these things. Poor social awareness does not make up for contributing to a hostile work environment, full stop. Autism means you have to work on yourself and understand your emotional triggers to a degree non-autistic people just don’t. That’s just our lot in life.
Right, we shouldn't exempt autistic people who make bad jokes. But you shouldn't assume that those people are rapists or domestic abusers just because they make those jokes.
I’m sorry, but a cavalier attitude around rape and domestic abuse absolutely contribute to a hostile work environment which both from a legal and simple fairness perspective is a problem. Sexual assault and domestic abuse are unfortunately quite common — when you make that joke, there’s a very real chance that someone within earshot has been raped or abused. And it’s not just women who are the victims, so they’re not ok around “just the boys” either.
Autistic people aren’t dumb. We do understand when actions have consequences. The reasons why may seem arbitrary to us, but again, it doesn’t mean the consequences aren’t real or that we can violate the psychological safety of others with impunity. Yeah, that may mean getting fired for telling edgy jokes to understand you don’t make edgy jokes at work. I’m 100% ok with that as an autistic person.
>But you shouldn't assume that those people are rapists or domestic abusers just because they make those jokes.
No such assumption is made. However, rape jokes are a signal that gives some credibility to such accusations.
Just like the knowledge of someone making constantly jokes about murdering a particular person (say, Jensson) would be very much on the radar as a suspect in case Jensson accuses that person of attempted murder.
Rape jokes normalize sexual violence, and create an intimidating atmosphere for anyone who may potentially be a victim, or may unfortunately have already suffered. To me, they are also a clear marker of someone who never matured enough to express their sexuality in a healthy fashion.
SA may have had a lot of that shit back in the day (and may still in some corners, I’ve never spent much time in FYAD), but it shouldn’t take long at all for anyone to notice that the community there has evolved well past that kind of exclusionary behavior.
And it's still claimed that violent video games normalised violence, despite research suggesting otherwise. So is the above claim something that is researched fact, or your opinion?
It's a very well researched fact. Evidently, you didn't try Googling "rape jokes link to violence" before asking this, or you would find many studies, like [1].
Exhibit 1: A bad-faith question: something that is very eaisly answered with a single Google search, but instead asked in a conversation to cast doubt on what the other person just said.
Google isn't research. Search results only have to look right, they don't need to be right. That aside, it's not my claim to provide evidence for, that burden is on the claimant.
Attacking my character with an ad-hom, and suggesting I'm acting in bad-faith doesn't impress me either - notice how I say "the burden of proof is yours" without calling you lazy, or implying you have an agenda.
wrt "Sexist Humor and Sexual Aggression Against Women" - do you have a link to the original study and/or methodology (e.g. the paywalled pdf)?
The claim being explored here is "Rape jokes normalize sexual violence" - how that is to be interpreted is open to question, but:
- The study appears to focus on sexist and/or "control-primed" men specifically, so not a representative sample of men in general. The original link even specifies "sexist men" - again, I'd like to know how this is defined.
"[men in the study] scores in hostile sexism reported a higher rape proclivity when exposed to sexist (vs. neutral) humor"
- How is "rape proclivity" gauged/determined? Incidentally, I'm suspicious of "self reported" anything unless it is explicitly confirmed as "self validated" as well - that game has already played out in studies describing "self reported victims of sexual assault" who didn't incidentally agree with that label, but who'd descriptions where matched against a pre-determined definition of assault, whether the subject agreed with that definition or not.
- what timescale does this represent? I consider the original claim to be one of long-term, or persistent effect per the term "normalize"; not a short-term suggestive one.
> So to me your post just shows that you lack the social awareness to understand these things
Your first comment used autistic people as an example to advance your argument. When an autistic person used personal experience to counter your argument, you defended your argument by accusing the autistic person of lacking the social awareness needed to understand the point they just made.
My point was that people who make rape jokes as young adults stops with it when they realize that other people gets disturbed by them. An autistic person who never made rape jokes isn't a counter example for anything, and that autistic person saying that other autistic people should just naturally understand that rape jokes are bad doesn't prove anything either.
Seems like you're referring to me here, and again, are making unsubstantiated assumptions. Is that a hobby of yours?
I've told this particular joke, and didn't find it problematic in the past. I learned.
See, it doesn't have to do with social aweareness. After thinking about it, I figured it's bad to think that way (as explained above).
>other autistic people should just naturally understand that rape jokes are bad
Never said that. Please don't lie.
>doesn't prove anything either.
Your claim that autistic people are more likely to make that joke because of their autism is
1) incorrect, as proven at least by this counterexample, plus the analysis above, and observation that autistic women aren't seen telling rape jokes at the same rate as all men;
2) offensive to autistic people, by implying that figuring this out is a-priori beyond their reach;
3) not a claim you are qualified to make.
Please stop.
Autism doesn't make people douchebags, making rape jokes does.
What an idiotic comment. Not liking and making rape jokes = "lacking social awareness"?
The fact that somebody would act different if they grew up in a different environment isn't an argument for anything. If I grew up in Jim Crow era America, my likelihood of being a segregationist is increased which proves nothing about the virtue of that belief.
Also, "baby burning jokes" are exclusively funny to 14 year olds and the perpetually adolescent mind. They're not considered the height of comedy in any mainstream circle.
Whoa, I think there's a major misunderstanding here.
First, I agree: rape is a bad choice for humor. For a number of reasons.
Second, sexual assault is a huge problem and it has affected my own life in various ways. People I love have been sexually assaulted. I've seen the damage and I'm sure that the damage runs deeper than I can truly know.
However...
What mind finds deliberately hurting another
human being an enjoyable pastime?
As somebody who used to employ/enjoy that sort of humor (long ago) I assure you that's rarely what anybody is thinking when they tell that sort of joke.
It's gallows humor, more or less. The idea is that you're laughing because you know that rape/murder/whatever is wrong. The jokes generally make no sense otherwise. For many it's even sort of a coping mechanism. It's not entirely dissimilar to the appeal of horror/slasher movies - folks generally aren't watching them because they think murder and torture are "enjoyable pastimes" in a literal sense.
Or when somebody says, "I'm gonna kill the next telemarketer who tries to sell me an extended car warranty!" We understand that they are using hyperbole: murder (a thing we acknowledge is wrong) would clearly be an unethical and disproportionate response. Therein lies the humor.
Again, please let me restate that I agree with you: rape is a very poor choice for humor. But your posts lead me to believe there is a deeper misunderstanding at work.
> I assure you that's rarely what anybody is thinking when they tell that sort of joke.
I know, and that's a problem. I was in that number, too.
To be clear, I didn't say that this is what people who tell the joke think. I was explaining why, as you said, rape is a bad choice of humor to the parent commentor, who didn't see it as such.
>It's gallows humor, more or less.
Gallows humor would be me saying, to another Jewish person, that we'll going to be debating whether a particular act was antisemitic or not all the way to the concentration camp.
A sexual assault survivor telling that rape joke would be gallows humor, too.
> When somebody says, "I'm gonna kill the next telemarketer who tries to sell me an extended car warranty!" do you think they are literally glorifying murder???
No, but that has to do with the reality that telemarketers aren't being actually murdered en masse (whereas, as #metoo showed, women are raped en masse).
But if somebody said "I'm gonna kill the next n----- that touches my driveway", I wouldn't feel easy - because shit like that does happen [1].
> The idea is that you're laughing because you know that rape/murder/whatever is wrong
Hate to be Captain Obvious again, but if the idea of rape was, indeed, as outlandish as murdering a telemarketer, every other woman wouldn't have a sexual assault story to tell.
Also, "rape is wrong" alone doesn't make the joke funny.
Here's another joke to consider:
Why did the Kenosha police shoot Jacob Blake seven times? Because they ran out of bullets.
This won't be seen as "gallows humor". Particularly, when it was told by a (removed) juror in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. The judge didn't think it was at all funny, and - go figure! - didn't think it was a coping mechanism either.
Instead, the judge judged the person making the joke as too biased to be on the jury.
The ability to judge people by the kind of jokes they make, when, and to whom is what we're talking about here.
>You don't have to make it more horrifying than it already is by assuming that everybody who jokes about a disturbing topic is actually endorsing it in a literal way.
The assumption is not there :) In the sense that perpetuating a stupid joke like that does not mean the person is endorsing it consciously.
But the net effect amounts to the same.
Going back to rape, we'd live in a better society if men were taught by the culture that sexual intercourse with an unwilling participant is inherently unenjoyable.
Just imagine that, for a second. Would that joke be a single bit funny?
P.S.: You seem to have assumed that the question I asked ("What mind finds deliberately hurting another human being an enjoyable pastime?") was rhetorical, with an obvious answer. It's not. It's a question to think about.
My personal answer is: "a mind that I don't want my mind to be". What's yours?
You list some really good reasons why joking about rape is a bad idea. I agree with them.
However...
Hate to be Captain Obvious again
Any chance Captain Logical Consistency is around? I feel like your heart is in the right place, but your logic is alllllll over the place.
[unlike a rape joke, the joke about murdering telemarketers
is okay because of] the reality that telemarketers aren't
being actually murdered en masse (whereas, as #metoo showed,
women are raped en masse)
Sure, I agree.
Gallows humor would be me saying, to another Jewish person,
that we'll going to be debating whether a particular act was
antisemitic or not all the way to the concentration camp.
Agreed.
A sexual assault survivor telling that rape joke would be
gallows humor, too.
OK, so let me get this straight. Only actual, literal sexual assault survivors can joke about it and have their jokes justified as gallows humor?
However, you can joke about concentration camps, and that's gallows humor, despite not having actually been sent to one? As one of Jewish descent, I do not dispute that the reality of the holocaust has affected you in myriad direct and indirect ways that I can not fully understand.[1] But the same could be said of sexual assault. The statistics are stark: essentially, literally everybody has been affected by it directly or indirectly. I haven't been raped, but loved ones have.
And how does this relate to the telemarketers example? You say it's okay to joke about killing them, because telemarketer murder is not really a thing and therefore we recognize it as a joke, however, you can joke about Nazis when Nazis (and their ideological cousins/descendants) are still very much a thing?
In the sense that perpetuating a stupid joke like that
does not mean the person is endorsing it consciously.
But the net effect amounts to the same.
Right, I think that's part of the problem with rape jokes - rape is (incorrectly) seen as a gray area by many, so I would generally say that joking about it is a poor choice. It is also understandably upsetting for some survivors to hear as it dredges up memories of the worst moments of their lives.
But I think you're overlooking some key things here. When examining humor it's crucial to understand not only the topic being joked about, but the target or butt of the joke.
If I say, "so-and-so is a shitty person; he probably rapes gerbils in his spare time" then that is a pretty bad choice. I wouldn't say that. But it also is pretty impossible to frame that as even an implicit or unconscious endorsement of rape. While a poor choice, it can't be compared to a "joke" like "9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape" or whatever.
Going back to rape, we'd live in a better society if men
were taught by the culture that sexual intercourse with
an unwilling participant is inherently unenjoyable.
Unless I'm completely out of touch consensus is that forcible rape is about power. The rapists aren't under the illusion that what they're doing is enjoyable. The unenjoyability is the point.
Other forms of rape are probably more about a lack of empathy and/or communication. Partner 1 understands that unwilling sex is bad, but has deluded themselves into thinking that sex is really what Partner 2 wants.
---
[1] However, my grandfather (Jew) nearly died in a Nazi labor camp, so I'm not entirely disconnected from that reality either... at least we can hate Nazis together.
>OK, so let me get this straight. Only actual, literal sexual assault survivors can joke about it and have their jokes justified as gallows humor?
I never said only, did I? I said that in this context, it would be gallows humor.
By definition, gallows humor is joking about a grim situation that the person making the joke finds themselves in. A rape victim joking about rape in that way would be an example of gallows humor.
>However, you can joke about concentration camps, and that's gallows humor, despite not having actually been sent to one?
Yes, because I am Jewish, if that was not clear from the context, and the possibility of being killed for being Jewish isn't a remote fantasy, as you know full well. 2 of my great-grandparents died fighting, grandpa on father's side went to Berlin and back. That doesn't matter for my argument, though; what matters more is that the Pittsburgh shooting happened here and now.
Joking possibility of being killed for being Jewish is an example of gallows humor when you are a Jew and that possibility exists for you.
>you can joke about Nazis when Nazis are still very much a thing?
You can always joke about the Nazis. This doesn't have to do with them being a thing or not. It has to do with who is the butt of the joke.
The fine print to "jokes at someone's expense = bad" is "...when someone is defined by characteristics they didn't choose". Rape victims didn't choose to be raped. Jews didn't choose to be Jewish. People don't choose who they are attracted to, or what color their skin is.
But being a Nazi is a choice. Joke away.
Whether something is a thing or not a thing has to do with whether what you say will be perceived as a figure of speech or an actual concern, that doesn't really factor in here.
>But I think you're overlooking some key things here. When examining humor it's crucial to understand not only the topic being joked about, but the target or butt of the joke.
To the contrary, that was exactly my point from the very beginning :)
>If I say, "so-and-so is a shitty person; he probably rapes gerbils in his spare time" then that is a pretty bad choice. I wouldn't say that. But it also is pretty impossible to frame that as even an implicit or unconscious endorsement of rape.
Well of course, because gerbils being raped is not a concern. We're on the same page here.
>The rapists aren't under the illusion that what they're doing is enjoyable.
They enjoy the power. They aren't raping out of obligation, after all.
>Other forms of rape are probably more about a lack of empathy and/or communication. Partner 1 understands that unwilling sex is bad, but has deluded themselves into thinking that sex is really what Partner 2 wants.
Potato potato, and it's incredibly common.
And if they clearly don't want it, then the rapist thinks they should, so it doesn't matter.
I know at least two women who's been raped by their spouses over extended periods of time off the top of my head. Many more who were raped / sexually assaulted at some point.
Rapist Brock Turner's father complained that his son getting justice is a "steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action". That's how these people see it - it's "just some action" to them.
Jokes like "9 out of 10 people" help perpetuate this view.
Do we still need the help of Captain Logical Consistency? :)
Well, sorry if my exposition is unclear. If you point out self-contradictions and what you perceive as willful misreadings, I'd really appreciate that (I assure you none were willful!).
I mean, I'm not here to "win" a discussion, just hoping to present my point of view. And it looks to me like we agree on everything, so I'm surprised to leave you with this impression.
It does. There are also a lot of jokes about burning babies etc. Just because you don't understand that sort of humour doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
Below, I'll explain using this particular joke.
--------
Context is key here: are you laughing about our world being so so fucked up that the million deaths actually happened (the good), about it being funny that a million Jewish kids actually perished (the bad), or are just shoehorning a taboo topic/horrific event into a pun for pure shock value (the ugly)?
- The good is gallows humor, which is what someone would perceive once you identify as having Jewish heritage. It's making laughter out of tears, and it's an old, and good tradition. This particular joke would be a big stretch, but can be pulled off.
- The bad is Neo-Nazi land. The goal is to not make people laugh, but to trivialize mass murder. Jews were dehumanized, described as vermin that needs to ne exterminated prior to Holocaust — and it has heen an effective strategy to normalize the genocide. You can see the same kind of "jokes" used to send a message about South American refugees today. This is
- The ugly is juvenile idiocy of a child who just learned a bad word, and enjoys the shock it causes. The harm on such ugly jokes is that after evey edgelord makes them a million times, not only is the shock value completely gone, but people get used for the Holocaust being that-thing-people-joke-about-that-Jews-whine-about, without ever trying to understand it. They've seen it enough times that familiarity starts to feel like understanding ("I did Nazi that one coming! That's gonna holo-cost you!”). That's the loss, for the sake of a rather stupid gain.
Depending on what context you make the joke in, it can be either.
Perhaps it wouldn't be wise to tell it to someone crying at a Holocaust memorial mourning the loss of their family.
But at a Chabad dinner, when the topic of conversation is how Jews have always used humor to get through the difficult times — not the worst way to make yourself a schlimazel :)
Thank you for your responses. As a woman who grew up on the Internet (and is on the spectrum) I really appreciate you articulating the problems with jokes like that, because having argued with people online, I've learned that my reasoning was never well-constructed and convincing enough to change minds, and the often (usual?) aggressive backlash would just add to the growing pile of uneasiness. One learns it is safer to stay quiet.
There's (famously) a spectrum for autism, and individual differences in any case. You can't speak for the whole spectrum just for placing somewhere on it.
Oh, but the parent comment gets to speak for the whole spectrum by saying that autistic people wouldn't know that they shouldn't make rape jokes in public because they are autistic? Without citing any sources, or having any qualifications to do so, or even claiming to speak from personal experience?
I don't see any claim that they speak for the spectrum, i.e. no appeal to authority/identity. Sure, it means they don't provide a basis for their claims, but in this case I am attacking what I see as an invalid basis.
Also:
> by saying that autistic people wouldn't know that..
They said "Autists often don't.." i.e they aren't speaking about all/any/every, but some. They are talking about some subset of the population.
> Perhaps you should direct your comment to them.
What I feel is worth spending time criticising is my business. Given the hedge of talking about some autistic people it's almost certainly true without qualification.
> or even claiming to speak from personal experience
OP didn't talk from PE of other autistic people, but purely from their own behaviour, i.e. an n=1 generalisation.
Look, the OP implied that autism maybe be a likely reason why someone could be observed regularly making denigrating jokes like "9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape", because we lack "social awareness" to tell otherwise.
As an autistic person, who knows other autistic people, and is a part of online community of autistic people, I'll go out on limb and say that the OP is talking out of their ass, and I can comfortably speak on the behalf of the community on this topic. Other people who identified as being on the spectrum in this thread agreed.
OP never said they were autistic. It's just what they think autistic people would do.
It's an n=√-1 generalization: purely imaginary, and on top of it, insulting, because figuring out why a joke like "9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape" is bad doesn't take that much.
Particularly because so much has been written about it. Go ahead and read [1], it's an excellent article. Or my comments elsewhere.
TL;DR: portraying the condition of "being a jerk" as an autistic trait is a jerk move.
>What I feel is worth spending time criticising is my business.
Then perhaps you should spend less time criticizing, and more time getting a clue — though again, I'm sure you have different plans regarding that too.
Not at all, people misread my tone so often that I might as well assume it's off all the time.
It works both ways though; sometimes I'm trying to tell someone to go fuck themselves in a polite way, and for some reason it takes them forever to get the hint.
They say that the history of making such jokes makes the accusations more weight, which is a reasonable thing to say. We are not putting someone behind the bars for making a joke.
Welcome to the world of Bayesian priors, and our star witness, the OJ Simpson murder trial.
There was a comment which didn't get enough attention during that trial: the defense claimed that fewer then 1 in 1000 women who suffer domestic abuse are killed by their domestic partners and therefore allegations of spousal abuse by OJ Simpson did not constitute supporting evidence.
But: this is wrong. Because once a woman has been killed, if her domestic partner was an abuser then almost 80% of the time the abuser did it (given reasonable other factual assumptions - i.e. pretty obviously if they weren't in the same state at the time then we can exclude it etc..)
The key part of the issue is that once an event has occurred, the Bayesian prior has changed: we are no longer evaluating the same initial probability.
Domestic abuse is a real problem, but false allegation of domestic abuse is a real problem
There are significantly fewer false allegations than real ones. I'd be amazed if more than 1% were proven to be false, and it's likely far less than that.
To assume that the alleged victim is lying would be incredibly harmful; many more people would refuse to make an accusation if they weren't going to be believed.
I would agree if I didn’t have this happen to me personally. It happens far more often than you could imagine, and the judicial system setup around it makes an automatic assumption the male is the aggressor.
In my case I was stabbed by her and still charged as if I was the aggressor. The state of California refused to drop the charges even with this evidence and I couldn’t afford a lawyer to fight it. I plead to a misdemeanor and now I cannot own a firearm for the rest of my life.
I don’t even like talking about it since the stigma around it is so large and I know people think I’m a liar because why would a woman lie about that?
> To assume that the alleged victim is lying would be incredibly harmful
> many more people would refuse to make an accusation if they weren't going to be believed
Of course. That's the point. Why should people be able to accuse others of serious crimes without one shred of evidence?
Are people innocent or guilty by default? That's what this boils down to.
> There are significantly fewer false allegations than real ones.
Does it matter how many false allegations are made? If there's a chance that it could be false, you must assume it is until proven otherwise.
Fundamentally, this is an issue of false positives and false negatives. Most societies are founded on the principle that false negatives are better than false positives: better to let a criminal go free than convict an innocent. It seems at some point western societies experienced an inversion of values: now it's better to convict innocents than let a criminal go free.
This is dangerous. The potential for abuse is obvious.
When it comes to investigating a crime, it's neither. It's not up to the police (or the public) to determine guilt; that's a job for the court. The job of the police is to investigate what happened. When a crime is reported to the police they must believe what the victim is saying until they have a damn good reason not to. If they started with a presumption of the victim making a false allegation very few domestic abuse crimes would ever get investigated, let alone prosecuted.
The potential for abuse is obvious.
Domestic abusers already claim they're being accused falsely. If the police and public assumed they were telling the truth they would get away with it much more, and they already get away with it a lot. That's the abuse that people should be much more concerned about.
> When a crime is reported to the police they must believe what the victim is saying until they have a damn good reason not to.
> If they started with a presumption of the victim making a false allegation very few domestic abuse crimes would ever get investigated, let alone prosecuted.
I agree that these crimes must be investigated thoroughly. Is it really okay that men can be arrested based on allegations though? I don't think that should ever happen unless guilt is proven.
> Domestic abusers already claim they're being accused falsely.
I don't deny that. The guilty will lie to protect themselves, this is a fact. However, claiming false accusations does not imply guilt. It could be true. The possibility cannot be dismissed.
> If the police and public assumed they were telling the truth they would get away with it much more, and they already get away with it a lot.
Are you prepared to sacrifice innocents to make sure all these slippery abusers are punished? Stopping an abuser or making sure the innocent are not wrongfully punished, what's more important?
> That's the abuse that people should be much more concerned about.
Does the suffering of innocent men not matter? It certainly doesn't seem to bother the people I've talked to. I've always thought this was pretty interesting.
Humans in general get angry, lie, are violent. Power corrupts humans. Corruption is more likely if you're angry. These things hold true for all humans: men, women, adults, children, young, old, rich, poor, black, white, etc.
Yet women, as a group, have been exempted from these truths by the state and society on any matter relating to domestic violence. This is an unearned and unjust exemption that must end.
This is not against women because I make the same objection to any other [group, subject] exemptions. The "hell hath no fury" quote is merely to remind people that women are people who feel people things, who rage, have ambition, can be cruel, and so on.
It is on the basis of this exemption that society has given every woman a gun aimed at the head of every man she's ever met, trigger pulled with a tweet.
(It occurs to me that this exemption is ironically dehumanizing to women. It puts them on a pedestal of purity, and in so doing separates them from humanity by ignoring the reality of their human foibles. Women are gross poopy stinky hateful angry greedy clever loving fearing homo-sapiens, just like everyone else.)
> Yet women, as a group, have been exempted from these truths by the state and society on any matter relating to domestic violence. This is an unearned and unjust exemption that must end.
This is a wild claim you’ve been repeating without a shred of evidence. It’s offensively untrue to anyone who’s seen how hard it is for a victim of abuse to get it taken seriously, and I really think you need to produce hard evidence backing it up. Your comment history sounds like you’ve spent time in a bar listening to bitter guys complain about their ex-wives and treated it as a research paper.
I generally agree with the point you're trying to make, but:
>to even doubt a woman's allegation is to condone violence against women
I'd go so far as to say it's naive to consider that the problem of believing women too easily when they accuse men is significant _compared to_ the problem of not believing women who accuse men. Unfortunately those are always in comparison, since more of one means less of the other.
>here we are, giving scorned women the literal power of life and death over the object of their rage
A client killing themselves over legal consequences is a tragedy that might speak to those legal consequences, but it's unrealistic and unfair to say the other client was given power over life and death.
> Domestic abuse is a real problem, but false allegation of domestic abuse is a real problem, too.
200% correct! There are a lot of conniving folks out there who use the system to falsely claim victim hood of domestic abuse. This typically leads to more undesired outcomes than originally anticipated.
What the hell are you talking about? It was multiple women, independently, over decades, that all gave similar allegations of abuse. At one point, one of the unpaid site administrators flew across the country so she could take one of these women to a shelter. How far would you have had the people who used his site and paid for his lifestyle go to cover their eyes and ignore his behavior?
Also buried in that massive thread is a post by one of the women he abused. An actual court of law, not just a web 1.0 forum, found him guilty of squandering marital assets and domestic abuse. By all accounts, he killed himself to avoid taking responsibility.
Lowtax's was a relentless downward story, where he squandered everything he had with no redemption arc. It's very sad, but it's not the bizarre strawman scenario you've concocted.
> Accusing your spouse for domestic abuse to prevent them from seeing their kids is like toxic divorce 101.
Certainly seems thay way. In my country, there is a female criminal psychologist who confirmed this based on her own experience. In the context of divorce and child custody, she said most accusations are likely to be false. It immediately became a media scandal.
This is really misinformed comment. Aside from the specific case here, in the UK at least, on average two women a week are killed by a current or former partner[1]. Women are at far greater chance experiencing domestic violence than men[2]. In 2018 there were 1.32 million domestic abuse-related incidents and crimes reported to police of women, of which 746,219 were considered by the police to be criminal acts under uk law. There were only 78,624 prosecutions and 60,160 convictions for domestic-abuse related crimes. In other words, only around 6% of domestic violence reports end in a prosecution, and of those only 4% end in a conviction. The stats are probably similar for different countries.
If you want to push the idea that a significant number of these cases are bogus, you really have to provide some evidence for that. Domestic violence (against both women and men) is real, and people (usually women) often die as a result of it. Spouting off sexist tropes that women are just going it because they're 'scorned' really isn't acceptable.
> in the UK at least, on average two women a week are killed by a current or former partner
And a hundred men kill themselves every week in UK. Suicide is often associated with relationship abuse, if an abusive woman makes her spouse commit suicide then that is also murder, but it wont go into the statistics. It is important to realize that women can also abuse men, and that this can be just as damaging even if the bruises aren't always visible, the psychological damage can still be enough to make them kill themselves. And false allegations is one way for women to abuse men, it is extremely powerful since it will ruin many of his friendships making him lonely and more likely to kill himself. The more people she can take away from his life the more likely he is to kill himself.
Note I'm not saying that we shouldn't protect women, just that we should also work to protect men.
I used to visit SA regularly. A lot of the humor was tasteless, but nowhere near the level of the chans. I avoided the forums, and only read the front page stuff.
What kept me coming, was that they were amazing writers (it wasn’t just him -or he wrote under several nom de plumes).
His essays, done in the style of famous writers, and deadpan humor, where a story seemed serious, up until the point that you suddenly realize you’re being punked, were masterful.
But it sounds like his personal life was a disaster. I have known a number of folks like that. In most cases, I always hoped that, one day, they would “come out of the cesspool,” and start to realize their potential (I have also known a number of folks that did that, too). In my experience, these people were absolutely miserable, and difficult to be around. I only ever saw his creative output, so had no other stake in his personal life.
I wish his exes and children the best. It sounds like they may need it.
oh man, Zack Parsons' series "the insidious beast" and "instructions for a thing" were the best series i've ever read on the web. He kind of lost me a bit later on.
There seems to be some kind of weird cult thing that goes on in nerd spaces that always involves a person with major personal problems that manages to assemble a cult of personality around themself and that cult becomes the primary means by which they support themselves. Eventually the members rebel in a coup like fashion after one of the chief henchmen who has built their own coalition see their opportunity, and either splinter off with loyalists vs rebels becoming a new fashion, or the coup attempt being successful and the space being taken over. (with new management basically acting the same as old management)
You see this play out in things as pedestrian as comic book shops. The comic book shop owner doesnt display anything resembling good business sense, but they have a coterie of people who support their business out of a sense of community and do stuff to help keep the business afloat where it would otherwise fail. Eventually someone (usually someone they know fairly well) takes a chunk of his cult and opens a new comic book shop while exposing all the horrible social abuses the old owner used to heap on people on the community space they owned.
This pattern repeats over and over in these kind of social spaces.
Maybe this happens in all social spaces that are owned by a specific person (like churches, comedy clubs, concert venues) too and I just dont see that part of the world.
Ironic, Paul Graham alluded to schools being like prison, in which they devolve into a popularity contest. But I'm not sure if he considered this angle.
Not a comic book shop but a games shop, but same style of community I bet. The owner dedicated half of the building to an area where people could play MtG and Warhammer and Pokémon or whatever. Us geeks would hang out there for hours after school, sometimes during. For some it was basically a second home.
At some point people started to get a little too familiar and he started to remind people to be respectful of the regular customers who he said we're still responsible for the majority of the stores income.
I still wonder if it was actually true, MtG and Warhammer have insane profit margins and very loyal customers spending all of their disposable income on them. Then again just supplying every single family in the country with Settlers of Catan must be big business as well.
Among the many "innovations", there was a feature where he would link to a website that he thought was worthy of ridicule. Often mentioning directly that it had a guest book to sign in.
So a horde of bullies would descend on that website, fill the book and any forums with goatse porn and email the same. Some of the victims shut down their websites, their complaints posted to SA so people could laugh at them.
Brigading and "cancelling"... Yes, some of the humor was funny, but the site was a cesspool that festered into the chans. Let's Play is good, but the worst of the Internet was fostered here as well.
The best part was when he was tricked into a boxing match with Uwe Boll, which didn't work out well for him.
Agreed. I ran across SomethingAwful when I was quite young (maybe 12-14?) and it was rather upsetting. I kept seeing calls to action that sounded like "Hey guys, let's go be mean to _____ for entertainment! Bonus points if we make them cry!" The whole culture seemed to be like that, so I closed the site and never went back. I never understood what others saw in it.
I think it is important to remember that while SA has become normalized as a community over time, more Reddit than 4chan, at its heart it was not simply a nerd community but a community for nerds to mock other nerds. Trolling and aggression was honed at SA. In many ways it was a bigger and broader successor to alt.tasteless and other shock sites. It definitely amplified the culture of snark and misanthropy in nerd culture.
Brigading those ugly guestbooks was relatively harmless fun. The owners were usually enraged and nonplussed but didn’t feel anything of value was touched. This was before death threats and harassing employers and roping traditional news in to amplify the attack, and all that.
The Uwe Boll fight was very funny.
I think, though, my favorite lowtax moment was a recorded talk he gave at a university, in which he expounded on the “greater parrot-in-ass theory” about how much worse the world becomes when people with extremely niche and unacceptable interests are able to find each other online and convince each other that they’re normal and healthy. Prescient.
I'm old so I remember when SomethingAwful was like 4chan and reddit combined for its time. I never actually registered an account on the forums, I was busy on other sites. My biggest issue with the SA forums is how they abused their users("Goons").
Basically. Imagine having to pay $10 to register a 4chan or reddit account and being banned for silly and ridiculous rule infractions but then being allowed back on if you registered another account("10bux").
I knew a guy who was huge into SA and contributed a lot of their photoshop Friday threads. One time there was a thread about a new movie, most people liked it but he simply said "I just left the theater a few hours ago, I didn't really dig it" he was immediately banned for "trolling" simply for sharing his opinion. He was the biggest SA user I knew at the time.
I think the last thing SA contributed to internet culture was Slenderman.
> Imagine having to pay $10 to register a 4chan or reddit account and being banned for silly and ridiculous rule infractions but then being allowed back on if you registered another account("10bux").
IMHO, that's one of the best features of the forums. I first joined in 2003, didn't read the rules, posted garbage, and got banned. I ended up making a new account avoid having the embarrassment of being banned. Later on they ended up loosing the rules a bit and came out with probations.
Also, that $10 went towards the costs of running the website/forums. When SA came out there was no AWS, they had to lease cabinet space in a colo facility and buy real servers. The website/forums was actually down for while when Hurricane Katrina hit, (their colo was in downtown New Orleans at the time).
> Basically. Imagine having to pay $10 to register a 4chan or reddit account and being banned for silly and ridiculous rule infractions but then being allowed back on if you registered another account("10bux").
Flip side, the paid account system means that banned trolls coming back under a different username doesn't happen nearly as often as it would on other platforms. It still does for sure, there are a couple of people who apparently have no problem throwing cash at the forums to be able to post their nonsense, but it's not really a big thing. The vast majority of users pay their 10 bucks once, maybe buy a few upgrades, and then never pay a cent more.
I've been on the forums since the early 2000s and have honestly never seen frivolous bans as a thing. 6 hour probations are sometimes thrown around like candy, but they're mostly meaningless unless you do something stupid in response.
In the end, the ban list is public so the system has a lot of transparency. If you know what your friend's username was you can see the exact post that earned it, as well as their history of infractions, and what mods/admins were involved. https://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php
> I knew a guy who was huge into SA and contributed a lot of their photoshop Friday threads. One time there was a thread about a new movie, most people liked it but he simply said "I just left the theater a few hours ago, I didn't really dig it" he was immediately banned for "trolling" simply for sharing his opinion. He was the biggest SA user I knew at the time.
I certainly can't say it didn't happen, there were definitely some less stable mods and of course the subject of this thread was the top admin for most of the forums' life, but my experience tells me that your friend was likely not entirely honest with you about why they got banned.
>I certainly can't say it didn't happen, there were definitely some less stable mods and of course the subject of this thread was the top admin for most of the forums' life, but my experience tells me that your friend was likely not entirely honest with you about why they got banned.
Keep in mind I am talking about something that happened back in 2003. I long ago lost touch with this person. He was SA's biggest cheerleader and he couldn't believe I didn't have an SA forums account since I am a huge computer nerd that spent countless hours on multiple forums in those days and SA was the "place to be" back then.
He actually did show me a screenshot of the post that got him banned and I couldn't believe he got banned over that. No profanity, calling people names, nothing that got you banned from most forums. He was just calmly explaining why he thought a movie he had just seen that day wasn't very good in his opinion. He did register another account since his whole online life was based on SA at the time. By the time I thought about maybe registering an SA account it was already on the way out as being the center of internet culture.
One thing I could never figure out back in the day was SA's burning hatred of FARK.com. I used to go there just to skim the news and check out the comments. Apparently admitting liking FARK on SA was a big no no and would get you relentlessly mocked.
Again this is all ancient 15+ year old drama at this point.
I've been a forums member since 2006. The SA forums are my home on the Internet. It's definitely had its ups-and-downs, as you describe. But the forums have taken me through all of my major hobbies and interests, from video games and Internet culture, to cars, to music, to guitar. I've even made real-life friendships there. I think over the past few years, and especially since the ownership transition last year, the forums have been in a bit of a golden age. Even if you've been turned off by historical decisions, I'd really strongly suggest joining and tuning in to some of the subforums that are related to your interests. It's a really great set of communities, and overall is actually a really welcoming and progressive community, especially compared to the lowest-common-denominator free-for-all that current ad-based social media promotes.
I might check it out since it is under new ownership. The era of SA I knew of was 1999-2003. I haven't thought very much about SA in a long time. I started using 4chan in like 2008 and didn't even know it was made by a former SA user till I bothered to look into the history of 4chan.
> One time there was a thread about a new movie, most people liked it but he simply said "I just left the theater a few hours ago, I didn't really dig it" he was immediately banned for "trolling" simply for sharing his opinion.
One of the best things about the moderation culture at SA was that they came down hard on facile, thoughtless half-posts like the one you describe. It tended to result in vibrant threads full of people who actually had something to say.
Since banning ended up being a big part of their revenue model, I think an interesting approach they could have took was to allow you to re-instate your existing account if you were banned for $10, instead of having to register a completely new account. That would have avoided the chaos of losing users that had reputation while still kind of working for their odd moderation and revenue system. They could have also, of course, just made the $10 an annual thing and solved it that way too, but that just seems clinical to the madness that made the forum entertaining, and the banning kind of played into the humor.
I'll out here that my work is very strongly influenced by Something Awful and I had an account there a very long time ago. I was banned by Zack Parsons for I don't even remember what post (nothing any reasonable person would think deserved a ban), and that was the end of my participation in the SA forums, I didn't want to have to re-build an identity from scratch there and I decided to move on, for better or worse.
That was the way normal bans worked. Pay :tenbux: and get your account reactivated. Permabans, which generally required really toxic* behavior were "we never want to see you on this site again." and you weren't supposed to re-register an account at all.
*Over the years Rich was running the site it seemed like "criticism of the mods" more frequently became a perma-bannable offense.
> I think an interesting approach they could have took was to allow you to re-instate your existing account if you were banned for $10, instead of having to register a completely new account
SA in the early 00's was really special.
It was like someone dumped a whole chemical supply closet into a pot and brought it to a boil. Equal parts trash and alchemy.
Gold was inexplicably made there, and as long as you had your kitty litter scoop it was easy to find.
Goons screwing around with Poser was probably peak gold or close to it. The large-scale projects like Goon City and Goon Tower stick with me as inspirational with respect to what spontaneous groups of idiots can accomplish pushing in the same direction.
Failed goon projects, too, like the "amazing innovative RPG that does away with all the cliches", which was inevitably completed cliched and gave us johnny.jpg
Also the Goon Island idea that came up all the time: if every goon contributed $10, we could buy an island and it would be a paradise.
Surprisingly, Johnny Fiveaces shows up as a playable character in the excellent isometric "top-down" mech shooter, Brigador. [0] Unsurprisingly, he's terrible.
I am so fascinated by all of this. The impact on internet history and culture. The challenges of creating and growing communities. The lifestyles and faults of leaders and the controversial realities we live in.
I know about SA, but was never an active participant. Likewise I know about 4chan and other communities.
From reading the first page of this thread, it seems very critical of the creator of the community. Even at a glance I can tell that is because of the personal flaws of that person, the mistakes they've made in their life, and how they hurt other people. I feel like it is such a shame for this to be your legacy to your community. I feel like we lost a pioneer, but it's now on us to learn from their mistakes and continue to build communities that we want to be in.
I think what these stories reveal is just how much people underestimate how common domestic abuse is and it doesn't appear to discriminate based on status, fame, career choice, etc.
As far as building healthier communities and what we can learn, I think it's definitely healthy to maintain and continue to improve the focus on helping victims and prevent potential victims from becoming a target of abuse. Everyone should be able to be part of a safe community without fear of harm.
I think there's another dimension that is significantly less popular, which is about enabling people who may have abusive tendencies to get the help they need. Society generally wants to dismiss and discard these people but that just pushes the problem into the shadows, as it's social suicide basically to come forward and say "I need help, I can't control my behaviour / keep hurting people / etc." Especially if you have any degree of publicity around your life and career.
Cancel culture was like a spark that started a fire that shone a light into these dark spaces, and some people are trash that need to be called out and exposed, especially people who get their rocks off on abuse, but there's shades of grey in between "victim" and "abuser" that don't fit the conventional good guy vs bad guy stereotypes, and it's in that realm I think there's a lot of progress yet to be made in identifying, preventing, and responding to abusive behaviours as a society.
I don't really have solutions but it's a multifaceted issue that needs solutions from all angles.
His relationship to the community was also complicated.
I stopped visiting SA 10 years ago, but even back then he'd do something unpopular like ban someone for something petty, then when people called him out on it he'd rage-quit the forums saying they were a cesspit, and focus on the front page articles for a while.
Famously his rules regarding moderation of anime content caused the creation of 4chan(!).
I don't know what's happened in the intervening 10 years but reading some of the comments in the linked thread it seems like everything he did every time he returned was unpopular with the community, like deleting one of the most popular subforums, and justifying it with a blatant lie.
So it's not too odd for the community he created to turn on him this violently if you add in how he treated the community in addition the problems in his personal life.
Basically every ex-SA user I know of describes it as simply as "He's treated like a piece of dirt, because that's what he is." In their words SA largely became successful in spite of Lowtax, not because of him, and this is very easy to miss to anyone who wasn't there from what I can tell.
> In their words SA largely became successful in spite of Lowtax, not because of him, and this is very easy to miss to anyone who wasn't there from what I can tell.
And I think this is still wrong. Having been there from the beginning, SA certainly became successful because of his posts and sense of humor. He is directly responsible for some of the earliest viral content and memes.
_Staying_ successful, on the other hand, is CERTAINLY in spite of him.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the domestic abuse allegations. The Something Awful forums almost completely melted down because of that, and it’s certainly left me with a very negative final impression of the man who’s sense of humor I once idolized.
> An hour later I was contacted by my attorney who informed me that Rich had shot himself earlier in the morning.
> So. There it is.
His other ex and I got to tell our children that their father died without saying goodbye to them, or that he loved them, or to my knowledge, left a note for them.
This rubs me the wrong way. Also the countless posts dissing someone who committed suicide.
divorce court absolutely can make the determination that there was domestic violence in their ruling. it simply doesn't have criminal implications.
there is very frequently different outcome in civil suits vs criminal suits. where you're found guilty of something in a civil court but innocent in criminal.
>Who wouldn't disown 4chan if it was created from their actions?
Coincidentally, the current owner of 4chan[0] happens to be the original owner of futaba channel (2ch), so the answer to that question is one Hiroyuki Nishimura. Also, I am sure that a significant portion of imageboard users feel satisfied by the chaos they have sown; they aren't disgusted by it, they really lust for it, and that is how they have always been.
> Also, I am sure that a significant portion of imageboard users feel satisfied by the chaos they have sown; they aren't disgusted by it, they really lust for it, and that is how they have always been.
Very interesting how according to 4chan critics the website sown chaos and ignorance when they do exactly that.
hiroyuki was never associated in any way to Futaba Channel.
There was a lot of well-founded animosity towards SomethingAwful in the early days of 4chan. How could you respect anybody who paid money to talk to people online? It was so contrary to the spirit of the internet.
SA's brand of snarky balding catfather humour lives on in so many facets of culture, and they all suck hard. Most of Twitter and Reddit were colonised by it. Almost all garbage American comedy seems tinged by it too. Looking past the hysterical headlines about 4chan, SA may have ultimately been the bigger setback to online culture.
The unfunny "redditor" snark based humor comes from The Oatmeal or Joss Whedon or something. SA had epic bigpeeler story threads back in the day, but it wasn't really the same thing. You need upvotes to create the real high levels of cringe posting.
And Qanon isn't even /pol/ at its most politically active, given how they rode the memetic wave into the 2016 elections.
While there might not be a direct material connection between 4chan and r/wallstreetbets, the latter's culture was certainly shaped by the same posting style as 4chan- so perhaps a good deal of meme stock activity in the past two year is also distantly descended from Lowtax's decisions.
QAnon isn't even really a 4chan meme, at least not for a while and not at the Jan. 6 peak of its fervor. The "official home" of QAnon has been 8chan/8kun for years, since shortly after the meme's first appearance [0]. Several jouranlists believe the 8chan owner and his son to be the main users of the QAnon account [1][2][3]. There's a contingent of regular QAnon posters on /pol/, but they're regularly mocked as mentally-ill "boomers" who need to "take their meds."
True, but would there be an 8chan if there wasn't a /pol/?
I forgot to mention that on the other end of the spectrum, a good amount of (extremely online) American leftist culture ("the Dirtbag Left") is also linked to Something Awful, the Chapo Trap House three were either from SA or from the Weird Twitter subculture descended from SA's FYAD subforum.
Certainly there wouldn't be an 8chan/8kun without 4chan /pol/. Simlpy pointing out that it's another newer branch on the SA family tree, one with its own distinct culture and character. As an object of study, I find it interesting as the embodiment of "stuff that's too much for /pol/" in the same way that /pol/ was "stuff that's too much for the rest of 4chan," and 4chan was "stuff that's too much for SA."
Not just left and right, but establishment, too. Eliot Higgins was an SA mod, who got into analysing images out of the Arab spring uprisings after learning that some of his fellow goons had gone there to volunteer for one side or another. He got picked up by the US/UK FP/MIL/INT establishment after his excellent documentation of modified volcano rockets in the Syrian civil war.
I think that wasn't just for his journalism though, but from worry that he might become another headache like Wikileaks, should be start focusing on other conflicts. They groomed him to be a bulwark against less friendly OSINT journalism.
The influence of CTH on contemporary American politics is similar in scope to that of a fly farting into a hurricane. A few people around the fringe breathe it, a portion of the left is sympathetic to it, but it has not managed to perform an insane coup on one of the two mainstream political parties, or have its ideas overtake an entire category of mass media (AM radio).
The democratic machine is proving rather resistant to those forms of attacks.
I wonder how much of the Bernie Sanders phenomenon was bolstered by Chapo and extremely online figures inspired by Chapo. Obviously, that's not to say that the Squad nor the post-2016 DSA surge owe anything to them, but they likely contributed towards the popularizing of the left to a certain younger extremely online audience.
> but it has not managed to perform an insane coup on one of the two mainstream political parties
That's also overstating 4chan's influence in the 2016 election.
I'm not talking about 2016, I'm talking about the crazy shit that has happened since then - most specifically in the tail end of 2020, where instead of dropping Trump like the bad acid trip that he was, much of the Republican party doubled down on qanonsense.
As for Sanders, he didn't win, he hasn't taken over half the Democratic party, and the people in charge aren't even paying lip service to his platform.
Without getting too off-topic, I’d argue that the GOP has always been more flexible towards embracing ideological extremism than the Democratic Party has, and this trend has existed since Barry Goldwater at least.
But back to SA culture and its innumerable offshoots and bastards: even if Chapo has comparatively less actual political influence than say Q did (someone posting on a 4chan offshoot), the dirtbag left subculture the podcast spawned is still of internet historical value, in the same way Anonynous (a 4chan hacker collective) is historically significant despite Anon having been dismantled by the security state since the mid-2010s.
Oh, and on that note- perhaps that means 4chan had some influence on the Occupy movement, not as a prime mover but certainly one of the groups participating in it. And while Occupy is long gone, it had its important moment, once.
On the flipside, later on 4chan was one of the major staging grounds for Gamergate.
At some point 4chan’s actions are its members’ own with no connection to SA, but without SA, there would be no 4chan, and the people who acted within it would’ve been redistributed elsewhere.
The hand of Lowtax moves through history like a dumb idiot god, but it does move.
I believe crypto came out of the pink sheets / Stocktwits culture, which after the crash in 2017 went back into stocks and rose WSB and meme stocks. It was like stocks -> crypto -> back to stocks in the influence cycle.
- qanon thing originated on another chan and it didn't have a cult following on /pol/, where people generally lost interest in trump pretty early into his presidency and largely denounced him by the end of it, although for very different reasons than everyone else
I'm going to go with: turning my direct family into bizarrely aggressive cultists for five hundred Alex.
Edit: I'm aware its anecdotal, but getting to sit through hours of people explaining how Kamala Harris was going to put all the white boys in re-education camps was rather affecting.
I started reading and posting on SA religiously starting around 2003, when I was only 14 years old. It really shaped me a lot (probably not for the better) in my teenage years. I probably still hold a lot of that shaping because I still spend way too much time on reddit. I never really liked Lowtax much or thought he did much that was funny, but I did appreciate the community he built because it did feel like friends for me when I was pretty lonely. Anyway, rest in peace Rich, sorry you had such a hard life. I know the struggle. I sent a final tenbux to your kids.
For anyone intrigued by the term, maybe this would help: http://www.hearye.org/1999/05/whats-an-en-site/ – bear in mind 1999 predates the popular use of the term "blog" (which appeared only in that same year) but e/n sites were, more often than not, what we'd call blogs now.
I became a goon in 2008. For better or for worse, it shaped my life on the internet. This is a jarring headline to see, and I hope he rest in peace, and that anyone he harmed also finds peace.
It's mostly an internet forum that had a lot of subforums for different topics (TV, anime, drugs, etc.). Lowtax was the guy that started the forums. The forums also splintered into other projects made by other people, most famously 4chan
Well dang, that sucks. Something Awful circa 2003 really shaped my sense of humor as a teen. Photoshop Phriday was something I and all my friends waited for each week.
By all accounts, the good things about Something Awful were in spite of Kyanka rather than because of him. He neglected the site for many years before selling it.
He was also a terrible person who serially abused his wives and girlfriends.
His site was very influential (in good and bad ways), but that doesn't mean he is someone we should canonize or mourn.
>He was also a terrible person who serially abused his wives and girlfriends.
>His site was very influential (in good and bad ways), but that doesn't mean he is someone we should canonize or mourn.
"You know what they say, speak ill of the dead!" - Norm MacDonald.
A person need not be wholesome or kind to warrant mourning their death.
Even if you despise the person, their death has caused real human suffering and pain among those around and associated to them.
fwiw I think it's incredibly tacky to go into a what is in essence a memorial thread to post a list of grievances against a dead person that has no means of explanation or defense.
I don't know about Lowtax's personal life -- this isn't a comment on that; it's a comment about those that feel the compulsion to post vitriol on memorials.
If you feel the need to shine light on the despicable , make a thread and let's discuss it there -- that way we at least stand the chance of sparing the bereaved.
This is not a memorial thread. And the fact that he shot himself a day after being judged a domestic abuser adds a lot of relevant context that readers on this forum deserve to know.
In case anyone is surprised to read this, it isn’t speculation. It’s deep in the thread but it’s indisputably there from someone who would know.
The circumstances surrounding this incident in the last 24 hours sound absolutely fucking abhorrent. I’m honestly shocked reading the firsthand accounts in that thread. Just wow.
So you think it's possible this guy married three different women who all said he abused them, and at least one of them also tricked a judge into agreeing?
Which scenario do you think is more likely:
A) A man whose entire career and public persona was dedicated to being an asshole happened to be an actual asshole
B) At least three women loved this guy enough to marry him and then decided to make up stories about how he abused them, convincingly enough that a court of law agreed
Keep in mind that in both scenarios, we know that he did spend all of his most recent wife's money and had a substance abuse problem.
> A person need not be wholesome or kind to warrant mourning their death.
I didn't know the guy. He hadn't done anything that I would miss in a long time. I have no reason or obligation to mourn him.
> fwiw I think it's incredibly tacky to go into a what is in essence a memorial thread to post a list of grievances against a dead person that has no means of explanation or defense
I didn't list grievances. I was pushing back on the idea that HN should have a black bar to honor him. He wasn't honorable and doesn't deserve our posthumous reverence. If a thread had been started about him a week ago, almost no one would have anything nice to say.
Also the truly, hilariously ironic thing about writing "tacky" comments about people who can't defend themselves... this is exactly what Kyanka and his site were about. They had absolutely no respect for what other people considered tacky. If it was genuinely funny, it was OK to post it.
> that way we at least stand the chance of sparing the bereaved
What bereaved person is going to read this? He left behind wives and girlfriends who will likely be happy he's gone. They'll certainly be in a lot less danger.
So maybe he has children who would be sad, but even that isn't a guarantee.
Regardless, I don't care if I offend these incredibly small number of bereaved people who have a near-zero chance of reading this. Kyanka lived a life that didn't earn him glowing reviews. Would we be having this conversation if OJ Simpson died, someone proposed honoring him, and I pushed back on it?
If Kyanka wanted people to say nice things about him after he died, he should have said more nice things on the internet while he was alive, and he should have terrorized fewer vulnerable loved ones.
>Even if you despise the person, their death has caused real human suffering and pain among those around and associated to them.
Generally the victims of a serial abuser are usually experienced the suffering and the pain while the abuser was alive and their death is a relief. (firsthand experience)
I really don't understand of this speak ill if the dead thing, where is the limit, am I allowed to speak ill of Stalin or Hitler or the other mass murderer assholes. If you were an abuser and you die, we should not mention that you were making life miserable people around you or what?
Most humans are imperfect. Some guy once said something about casting the first stone. A more recent guy pointed out that analogies with Stalin and Hitler are usually not illuminating.
"Imperfect" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I don't know what the reference to a character in a book is doing there. Godwin of Godwin's Law fame said you could compare people to Hitler.
> By all accounts, the good things about Something Awful were in spite of Kyanka rather than because of him. He neglected the site for many years before selling it.
I think the one clever thing that Lowtax did was require the membership fee to post. I think this worked as a really good filter away from people who are just going to post spam and random crap all over the place.
Honestly, the thing I most remember Lowtax specifically for is his Gaming Garbage YouTube channel, particularly the first two years of his collaboration with Schmorky. Those were extremely funny videos that lacked all pretense, and sadly once it was determined that Schmorky was horrible and Lowtax seemed to have increasing trouble finding collaborators, the channel got pretty unwatchable. Still, the old videos from 2013-2014 are classic, and they're worth checking out.
I don't think we'll be seeing a black banner on HN for this one, even though his controversial history is probably highly relevant to the growth of Internet society and culture.
Is there specific criteria for who gets a black banner and who doesn't?
When someone gets killed or kills himself we don't usually say he's "died". The verb "died" in some way has a sense of having been an accident or simply passing because one is too old.
Actually, no, saying somebody "died of suicide" is preferred language[1].
It's important when reporting on suicide deaths not to glorify suicide. Copy cat suicides are a real risk. Words like "successful" have a harmful effect. In fact, the media often doesn't state the cause of death, to prevent copy cats.
On the other hand, you don't want to dæmonize depressed people living with suicidal thoughts. "Committed" would imply people with suicidal thoughts are considering sinning or acting like a criminal, which isn't the case. Suicidal thoughts are serious, but people with them aren't evil, and should reach out for help and support.
I feel devastated hearing this. Whatever was happening in his personal life, its none of my business, but he was a true innovator.
Also reading the message from his ex really angers me. A man was so broken he took his own life, and she's concerned about the 350 dollars a month hes not giving her. It's gross.
Like seriously a man she once loved killed himself and her reaction is like "he should've payed up"
I doubt he felt good about that. A person died lets respect that. And also as a human being genuinely fuck you. That was a person. Jesus. Im not going to pretend I new everything about his life but he had a family, a life, and thats now gone. So seriously go fuck yourself. I will never regret this comment because where the fuck are you coming from?
Do you know anything about Something Awful at all? Lowtax made worse mockeries in his life, callousness and crudeness was the goon way. He would not have shown you this courtesy you’re so desperate to virtue signal. Don’t try to pontificate on cultures and people you know nothing about.
I followed that site since its inception. It wasn't perfect but jesus don't beat a man to death in his death. What are you even trying to accomplish? The guy built one of the most influential sites ever, and he died in a horrible way, why make this worse. You are a fucking monster
Btw what really bothers me? Wtf do you know? You pose the question to me but Im guessing you never met him. So im the weirdo for grieving the death of a man that brought a lot of joy into my life and youre like "let me shit on his legacy". So again fuck off.
And by the way Im NEVER going to celebrate the suicide of a person. Because I have fucking empathy. Do you?
You’re clearly experiencing a lot of deep emotions of mourning over the loss of someone you’ve known long before. I apologize for accusing you of not knowing the goons, though I would expect someone so familiar with the site would have known the times that Lowtax mocked a woman who experienced multiple miscarriages, or of other similar instances. You’re responding disproportionately to my comment that he leaves behind his children, which is a tragedy. I make no moral judgments here, nor do I have any relish towards his death. I am simply observing the tragedy.
But yes, it is not in my place to judge what someone might do in the depths of utmost irrational personal pain. It would be engaging in the same callousness that goons are infamous for. Perhaps the most appropriate response to this situation is neither demonize nor lionize this man, but to simply recognize him for what he was- a flawed man who nonetheless changed the world and the very internet itself.
I now understand that you have truly been deeply affected by this loss. I wish you may find peace in this difficult time, as he has. Go with God.
What’s that site? Definitely not humorous. Soft bullying forum? A place to lodge whims and cerebral flatulation?
I created an account and figured it could go two ways - abandon it, or try to invent the most effective mental faeces filter human kind has seen. It’s been years.
-------
I had found him on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, and simply sent a message explaining that I'm a fan, would love a chance to buy him lunch and chat about Something Awful and Gaming Garbage. To my surprise, he responded back with "sure, I'd be up for it".
I responded back with "How does early December sound to you? something on the order of December 11?"
His response was "shit I dont even know if I'll still be alive then". This response was a little weird, but this isn't exactly "off brand" humor for Lowtax, so I ignored it.
I then say something to the effect of "how about something along the lines of November 13?", which he said was better. He then said "and you have my permission to stab me". Again, not off brand for Lowtax.
I bought a plane ticket to Kansas City, was ready to fly out this friday. But I had this deep feeling in my stomach that what he was saying wasn't just a joke. It's pretty well documented that he's been depressed, and I dunno, upon re-reading his messages a hundred times I got a dark feeling that these might be kind of bad omens. What exactly do I do with this? I discussed it with my wife and a friend, who weren't sure what the best solution was, and I ultimately decided not to say anything. I figured I'm just some dork who stalked him on LinkedIn, and I was afraid that if I said anything he would think I'm weird and cancel our lunch date.
And now this shit happened. He finally did it, and now the thought keeps playing in my brain of "what if I had said something a few weeks ago?" I know I don't owe him anything, but I can't help but have this repeated feeling of "I valued an opportunity to meet my man-crush more than I valued someone showing suicidal tendencies," and it makes me feel downright rotten. That's not the kind of person I want to be, and it makes me feel legitimately sick that that's how my brain decided to work.
At some logical level I know none of this is my fault really; realistically even if I had said something, I doubt much would have changed, and I doubt I had enough there to get him committed or anything, but there's a difference between logically knowing something and feeling something.
As it stands, I think there's a reasonably good chance that I will feel partly responsible for this for the rest of my life. This sucks.
--------
RIP Rich. I know you had a rough last couple years, you were the definition of a "complicated person", and despite everything you will be missed.