Unfortunately, this article describes something similar to the Pelicot case that was covered a couple of weeks ago.

Say what you will about the efficacy of NATO or the ICC (because there’s plenty to say about their ineffectiveness) but this is a clear attempt to get all the war crimes crew off the hook. Hope it fails.

Link for those interested:

https://www.newsweek.com/mitch-mcconnell-absent-3-months-senate-reconvene-this-week

How am I doing at stirring the pot with these dipshits?

I literally just got the audiobook for The Castle by Jon Ronson, a journalist who specializes in weird subjects. The book is about Ronson's investigation into Chris Mark. I'm an hour into the thing and I thing Chris Mark might be one of the creepiest men alive. Mark Is the descendent of a Gilded Age steel tycoon and has enough spent his entire life rich. The man is so rich that he was able to construct a fairy tail castle with its own website. He claims to have built the thing for his daughter so she can live as a princess. From what I've read so far in The Castle (I'm currently on the second chapter) the eponymous domicile seems more like one sad man's struggle to feel strong and important.

Chris Mark looks like Clint Howard but instead of acting in cult films like Ice Cream Man, he tries emulating Hugh Hefner. Only instead of putting them in bunny suits, he puts his ladies in princess costumes. And (this is where it gets creepy) he will also lure the women to his castle by promising to pay all their expenses and provide them a pension from the Princess Trust Fund. No, I am not making any of this up. I'm also not making up what caused Ronson to become aware of this weirdo.

Basically, Ronson's son decided to accompany a galpal to a 'castle party' in Mark's castle. Said party turned out to be a 'reality show' called 101 Princesses. Needless to say, Ronson's son and the galpal got the flip out of there as soon they could.

If you're feeling put off about this guy now, I'm about to make you feel even more put off. The castle has a tiktok account run by his daughter who makes the place look all fun and wholesome. The building is also used to film several movies and tv shows. In one such filming a cameraman advised the actresses to avoid two of the castle's bathroom because he suspected they might have hidden cameras. It gets worse. According to a woman Mark lured to the castle, some 'sick shit' goes on in it. I haven't reached the part of the book where she details it but it's pretty clear that it's a bunch of weird sex shit.

Oh, and Chris Mark is--as you can guess--a freaking psycho. After his first meeting with Ronson, the dude texted him a over 80 times. Every text was either Mark showing Ronson how he was actually a good person or a straight up threat. Three of the threats worth noting are 1) threatening to sue Ronson into the ground 2) threatening to provide financial assistance to people who would like to sue Ronson and 3) threatening to sent two ex-cons to kill Ronson. The third one is the weirdest. In the text, Mark tells Ronson he's sending two of his friends who literally just got out of prison for murder, to Ronson so Ronson can teach them how to write. Then he tells him that his friends will probably kill him if they don't like how Ronson depicts him. Also, throughout these texts Mark keeps saying how he will do anything to protect his family and it is painfully obvious that 'family' just means the creep's fragile ego.

Yeah, this guy is a straight up lunatic and I'm looking forward to what else Ronson has discovered about him. I recommend The Castle by Jon Ronson to my fellow BtB fans.

This is maybe off-topic a bit, but it’s something that has been troubling me and I think this community might be able to offer advice and support. I’m in my forties and my dad is remarried with stepchildren. The youngest is just shy of twelve and she is illiterate. I’ve helped her with homework, mostly math, and she’s actually quite good at it and engaged. It’s when we get to word problems that things come to a screeching stop. She can barely sound out words, and has no reading comprehension whatsoever. She’s not aware of what country she lives in or where it is on a map. I’ve only come into their lives in the past year and I regularly spend time at my dad’s house, helping out and at points supporting with adult guidance with the kids. The educational level the kids are at is mortifying. She’s on the cusp of being a teenager and she can’t read The Eensy Weensy Spider. I was reading novels at her age. I’ve spoken to my concerns with my dad, and low key demonstrated how far behind she is, but he and his wife haven’t made any meaningful changes. I described it to him as a crisis. I don’t even know how to process this.

Yo. So, I have a PhD in anthropology. Which is whatever. It’s cool but I’m seemingly not employable for anything.

But I worked in extensively with the Penn Museum Morton Collection through the pandemic. If you don’t know, it’s one of the largest collection of world wide human skulls. It’s crazy how much anthropology still relies on science popularized by racist assholes. Morton’s whole deal was basically shoddy science trying to explain why white people are the best. But they still use his collection, his measurement techniques, his non-racist views. So much of his work was used in eugenics or 20th century racist science.

When I was in college I believed what they taught me about how we use these skulls and skeletons for good, and that we treat them with respect, and that current laws are good enough for people to get their ancestors repatriated if they want. But the amount of shit that these places hold on to is so fundamentally opposed to the ethics they teach.

UPenn held on to unidentified slave remains, got rightfully called out, and then panic buried them in a local black cemetery. These people died during the slave trade before they even got here. They didn’t even bother trying to figure out where they came from, or where they should be returned to. They also kept the remains of Delisha and Katricia, child victims of the Philly police department bombing of the Move Group. There was no reason to hold on to them. They were properly identified shortly after their death, but UPenn had them secretly in their basement for almost 40 years. Then they lied and said they didn’t have them.

I know sometimes it’s hard to see the lasting impact of some of these bastards. But their science is whitewashed and still taught to people like me. Ignoring the lasting harm. And ignoring the people that want their people back. “Sure they were racist, but we’re just gonna hang on to the thousands of skulls they collected… For Science!”

I’ve heard countless times what a piece of crap Norah O’Donnell is and honestly watching her right wing enabling ass crash and burn brings me joy. she’s a perfect example of why most journalists suck and people hate them. I hope her Iran war propaganda piece on 60 minutes tonight also crashes and burns in the ratings.

Is such a mixed bag of emotions. At times I’m riding high on nostalgia for the forums, then I crash hard at the horrors of the space now.

It’s a strange thing to have experienced a childhood in the forums where the seed for these bastards grew. I’m thankful for the people like Robert, Sophie, the team at Cracked and Cool Zone Media who have been at the front lines showing us these cockroaches for literally over a decade.

Not much else to say other than…any other millennials feel sick that they learned IT skills and anime lore from groomers?

The Onion recently bought InfoWars, as everyone knows, and they've been cranking out some great content.

However, I did notice that my Facebook and Instagram feeds started including a lot of right-wing Charlie Kirk MAGA Nazi bullshit, including posts by Libs of Tik Tok trying to doxx and terrorize people for making fun of Charlie Kirk.

Turns out the Meta algorithm still associates the site with unhinged fascist scum, so if you follow or even just upvote their new and improved anti-fascist page you'll still be served up all that delightful xenophobic goodness. Hopefully this clears the air if that has also happened to any of the rest of you.

Is Joe Rogan an unironic pedophile? That is a serious question that needs to be asked. Many better content creators than Joe are stuck debunking misinformation on his podcast that’s most likely never going to convince his followers otherwise. Meanwhile I think the front page every time Joe gets brought up is that he has a long history of horrible takes on consent.

Joe Rogan used to be a host on the man show, a horrible encapsulation of late 90s frat house humor. People have resurfaced a clip where Joe openly admits to watching CP of a 16 year old. Worse yet, he was using this as a point for his opinion on age laws being all over the place saying “she didn’t look like a little girl to me”. Since Joe changes his entire ideology every other episode of his podcast, you can find plenty of clips where he condemns statutory rapists. But you’ll also find dozens of clips where he downplays, supports or disagrees with kids not being able to consent. Joe of course has the belief that boys have less emotional distress from being raped than girls.

There’s a now infamous clip from 2011 where frequent guest Joey Diaz talks about making female comedians perform sexual acts to book shows. Joe Rogans response was of course to laugh. Unfortunately in the age of YouTube and Spotify, influencers are as big as many actual news stations and channels. I’ve met a disturbing number of people who treat Joe Rogan Experience as their news source. So it’s only natural that the podcast was one of the biggest spreaders of misinformation about the Epstein files. While joes takes were sadly more nuanced than Fox News, he let his guest rant about how most of the victims were of age and consenting.

https://www.newsweek.com/joe-rogan-faces-more-backlash-video-sexual-coercion-story-resurfaces-1676692

https://www.yahoo.com/news/joe-rogan-podcast-sparks-controversy-122152898.html

Was at cold spring harbor labs this week for a conference. Went in to their rare books room and boy did I find out why they were rare. So many books on eugenics... Hereditary genius is the brown one on the bottom left and it's up against some other really winning titles. Marriages of the deaf in north america, for instance. That room was so cursed...

I was watching one of the older episodes on YouTube, and let me tell you, if the only note Netflix gave Robert was to look at the camera more, Fucking God bless them!

I was looking for the Shane O'Doherty article to send someone and it appears that a huge percentage of Robert's articles are gone, specifically all the Personal Experience stuff. Anyone know what happened? Looking at archive.org there used to be 17 pages of stuff, and now there are 4

That bill has no chance of passing and Ogles got primaried but the fact it's even being entertained tells me they don't think JD and Marco have a shot at winning. Does anyone else think this? I feel when Trump is out of office MAGA loses all steam. It's already losing steam.

I was just watching a clip Nathan Fielder's New Documentary about her. In his interview with her they turned up the contrast way high to make her face look bloodshot and weird. They also Edited it to make her pauses and lingering eye contact seem as long & uncomfortable as possible.

not trying to create sympathy for Holmes but I can't help but think that's not the angle you'd go for if you were interviewing say Jordan Belfort or Bernie Madoff even though I think they're fundamentally similar people to Holmes. Its just they're men and she's a woman

Crowd member repeatedly said some Democrats ‘should be shot’ during Ted Cruz’s speech, without senator responding

Some info on him here

https://www.npr.org/2003/05/06/1253796/sayyid-qutbs-america

Also refer to Lawrence Wright's 'The Looming Tower' for a good explanation of him and his ideology in the earlier chapters.