Yeah, I saw the OP but junked it because I didn’t know who he was, but then I read this response this morning and read the article with the charmingly fuck-you Web 1.0 ugly Angelfire clashing tile background (someone has figured out the definitive order of English adjectives to sound correct – it gets very intricate, and the thing is, it’s right. Apparently English is unusually developed in this area, as with words for groups of animals, but I’m not fluent enough in any other language to have taken particular note of how they handle numerous adjectives. Burks would know Mandarin at least.)

It struck me that entire paragraphs of this could have been lifted wholesale from an incel/particularly radical manosphere forum:

It’s common knowledge that when women are given power, they become every bit as corrupt as any dick-bearing despot-more so, because they lack nature’s clearest emblem of a divine scepter, the penis. Without natural benediction, women thrash about in tyrannical frustration, never quite getting it right. Ever work for a female boss? Then you’ll know what I mean. The first chance these skanks get, they rush in and imitate their “oppressors” in every way imaginable. They’re even less tolerable, because they smear a moralistic donut glaze atop their naked drive for power. Their violence is righteous because it’s committed in the holy name of REVENGE!

or

Women are on the RECEIVING end, and we all know ‘tis better to give. Females are egg-bearing brine shrimp. Sex objects. Men are the nouns. Fucking is the verb. Women are the direct OBJECTS. Two-dimensional. Why kid around? Women are defined by those cunts and nothing else. They were fashioned by nature as achingly beautiful mannequins, dead girls in store windows. Victims. See all the dead lilies in the trash can behind the flower shop. Fragile blossoms. Used. Decaying. Women. Weak. Very pretty in their weakness. Ugly otherwise. Don’t give her power-she doesn’t know how to handle it. Women are intriguing little house pets, but they need to be tamed. Keep her chained down. Break the chain, and watch her walk all over you. And you’d deserve it, because you gave away your power for free. Women say they’re looking for nice guys, but they don’t respect passive pussy-men. Women want their lovers to be killers. Give them what they want.

Did he actually believe this stuff, or is it satirical? How notorious was he in the general consciousness in his day? Was he like Andrew Dice Clay, where you get the sense he secretly believed it but dressed it up in “ironic” clothes to have license to be transgressive?

Right on regarding how boring and strident today’s twentysomething radical artsy types are. Do all these musicians have a social conscience? Well only in their front rooms:

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Coherent MES is much better than cryptic MES (and critical reputation agrees). Anyway, my one complaint is that it’s run incredibly spic-and-span. benjamin’s monocle would have popped out if he had been here around 2007 – like 4chan, but chummy and familiar instead of performing for the matrix, with the caveat that if your old posts were leaked by a George Starostin-Oleg Sobolev-and-Alex-Zaitsev (come back!)-linked Russian influence operation in revenge for the demise of the Soviet Union giving Sergei Starostin heart trouble, it might end a political campaign. Didn’t hurt David Weigel and Jeff Blehar, but they were basically gone by the mafia-wars period that alas I’ve only heard of secondhand. I’m not saying to turn the clock back to the mid 2000s, but this place used to have life and a distinct imprint of its members. Run like a properly moderated forum it’s lost something. Very antiseptic. Just one elder millennial’s opinion, maybe just a forum midlife crisis – I think Twitter and the spectre of your unguarded and immature words being thrown in your face 10 years down the line made people much more aware of what they said, led them to self-censor, and killed the anything-goes spirit of the 2000s Internet to a more anodyne corporate model.

These kids are doing their maturing in public where our sophomoric years were on a music discussion board affiliated with a WRC review site to an audience of a few dozen people at the board’s all-time busiest. Now those social media kids are old enough to run for office, promotion, or compete in a beauty pageant, and whenever their past postings come to light and cause a scandal and I see what innocent posts they were, I (and Dominic Jugdish) just think, “there but for the grace of God…”

benjamin was 16 at some point in the mid to late 2010s, making him a woke Zoomer. His house, his rules, but it’s lost something of the Babble liveliness. Maybe we’re all just getting old and boring.

Remember, mentioning and discussing something isn’t the same as endorsing it. I think a lot of what Elmo is trying to recreate in X with the removal of guardrails was the old 2000s forum culture, but at-scale, searchable, open to every idiot, a haven for legit neo-Nazi memelords (we just have MDISF), and the permanent nature of social media so of course it’s a dumpster fire. But of course – ironically, as a legit visionary whatever his other manifold sins and wickedness – Apartheid Clyde has never been known for obvious foresight.