Good news, everyone! The good folks on the RedditorOfTheDay subreddit picked our friend AnnArchist to be Redditor of the Day yesterday. He filled out a little questionnaire for the RedditorOfTheDay folks listing all sorts of fun facts about himself.
In addition to moderating the Men’s Rights subreddit and posting hilarious videos of women getting beaten up to the beatingwomen subreddit, AnnArchist (who is a dude, despite the name) also enjoys: Skyrim, bass fishing, sports talk radio, chicken tacos, and football!
His biggest pet peeve:
People who want to interfere with other people’s happiness.
His biggest worry about Reddit?
I just hope the community doesn’t grow so quickly that we lose the quality debate and discussion that has kept many of the users around reddit for a long time.
Over on ShitRedditSays, fxexular has helpfully catalogued some of AnnArchist’s contribution to the “quality debate and discussion.” Like his considered opinion on one female judge:
I hope someone kills her.
And his opinion of an alleged false rape accuser:
I hope she was harassed. Fuck I hope her house was firebombed. Lets be clear, I really will applaud anyone who does anything to her, be it slash her tires or slash her throat.
You can find even more of these charming nuggets in my post about him here.
In his answers to the RedditorOfTheDay questionnaire, AnnArchist reveals himself to be a truly sensitive soul. Here, he shares a painful moment from his past:
When I was a senior in HS and when my friend and I saw … the plane fly into the twin towers our first reaction was laughter rather than OMG thats a tragedy. Yea, we’re fucked up. I TPed my High School that night. I’m a horrible person.
Oh, and did I mention that he’s the creator, sole moderator, and basically the only contributor to the NSFW4 subreddit, devoted to posting pictures and videos too horrific and offensive to post anywhere else on Reddit?
Godspeed, AnnArchist! Thank you for making the world a better place!
NOTE: This post is almost entirely made up of sarcasm.
@Quackers: Your rose tinted glasses are kinda annoying me. Sturgeon’s Law doesn’t just hold true in the modern era, and entertainment has always been a vast pile of suck we were better off forgetting except for a few key things (Many of which is itself lowbrow; again, Shakespeare. Dude can indeed write, and he used his talent ot produce more dick jokes than most people get the chance to hear). Oh, and to drive the point further, the most common entertainment of that era was executions and simple acrobatics, as well as animal torture. People aren’t dumber or more base now, this is just the only era you’re familiar with the life of people in.
This is why I hate classics worship.
And lord do I hate Classics worship. The only philosopher who’s work I still care about is Rawls, of the people who’s names I remember. I freely admit to plagiarizing from at least one other modern philosopher in arguments on abortion and choice, but for hte life of me, I can’t remember her name.
I’d love to see you get the Veil of Ignorance past an IRB! But in seriousness, a lot of knowledge on how people think that we could theoretically get is going to be unethical to get.
I am way late to the party, but did MRAL also stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night?
Okay, not to completely give away how crappy the American school system is… but I got almost all of my knowledge of WWI from the really extensive wiki article about it, and links from that. Literally the process was: 1) I watched Hetalia, 2) I watched the Anne of Green Gables movie that happens during WWI, 3) I mentioned to my dad that I realized I knew fuckall about the whole thing, and 4) we spent several hours wiki-ing it and now I have a much better grasp of “why the shooting happened, what movements and social pressures made it seem a good idea, how the web of alliances that underlay WWI came into existence” because Wikipedia actually has all that described really thoroughly and with quite good sourcing to boot.
I’m not saying that’s the ideal learning process or anything, but without silly anime + silly movie + the internet I still wouldn’t have the faintest idea WTF that war was all about or even who all was in it and when they showed up. Did you guys know Canada fought in it? I hadn’t! My high school teacher didn’t mention that, I think. *dies* XD
“Even if you look at what passes as entertainment these days, movies and TV lack depth or really gripping story lines. Very few movies seem to do this well and many are recycled from other movies (see Avatar for example)”
I forget where I saw this, but I actually read that primetime dramas at least tend to be much more complex than they used to be, though this may be less because of a raise in intelligence per se and more because modern TV shows have more incentive to hook fans who will get really into them (and buy DVD sets), and because it’s so much easier now to find an episode you’ve missed, or a summary, and thus keep up with a more complicated story.
…and if you watch them on DVD or other controllable media, you can skip the commercials, thus aiding concentration even more.
This is undoubtedly a by-product of me growing up with the BBC, but I was genuinely horrified when I saw not just how many commercial breaks there are on US TV, but how invasive they were too. It certainly explained the difference in approach to writing half-hour sitcom episodes – the US ones generally feature a far more upfront use of one-line gags, because they need to grab the attention, whereas British ones tended to be much more slow-burning. (This is of course a massive generalization).
Ok, Shakespeare was not lowbrow, that’s fucking hilarious.
@Bagelsan:
Lol, yes. It was a pretty important step on our journey to independence. I would of course not expect a US history or social studies class to emphasize my particular country nearly as much as my own classes did, but a lot of what I’ve heard about US history education is that it tends to be a little myopic. A lot of the global context seems to get ignored. But then, I’ve neither taken a history class in the states, nor read a textbook 😉 so I can’t make pronouncements about it like I have direct knowledge.
I read somewhere (great citation, Viscaria!) that the reason many of the most successful Hollywood movies are mindless things turn into things and then there are HELICOPTERS and people are shooting other people yay!!1!1 Michael Bay creations is that deeply thoughtful movies with a great deal of dialogue are harder to adapt to foreign-language markets. Which is not to say they wouldn’t be appreciated in foreign markets, just that translating them is a trickier process and a lot can be lost. A visual of an explosion can be understood just as well no matter what language you speak.
I haven’t read a US history textbook. I’ve read, you know, textbooks. >_>
Well, in your defence Canada was fighting under the red ensign at the time… the current maple leaf flag wasn’t adopted until 1969 iirc, so on any of the maps for WWI and WWII most non-Canadian/non-Brits would read the flag as vaguely brittish (it had the union jack in the corner, and the shield of Canada on a red background).
Canada was involved in both world wars from day one and took one of the five beaches at Normundy… (/stops long geeking out Canadian history ramble)
Maybe I’m doing my history classes a disservice here, but the gist I got from WWI was “Europe had some crazy shit going on, like they do, and at some point the US helped out and then everyone was happy except for Germany.”
And WWII was along the lines of “Europe had some crazy shit going on, like they do, and at some point t–OH HOLY FUCK JAPAN YOU DOUCHE! ATTAAAAAAAAACK!!! And then America single-handedly saved everybody (except for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that was legit super mean of us) and then everyone was happy even Germany, sort of. Those assholes. The end!”
(It’s ridiculously that we Americans don’t at least learn more about Canada’s contributions, frankly. If German troops were apparently so honest-to-god scared of y’all throughout multiple freaking wars, I feel like we who share a giant undefended border with Canada should maybe keep that in mind. :D)
Canada never loses wars and doesn’t afraid of anything. And they have universal healthcare. What I’m saying is that Canadians are basically unkillable.
Compare The Wire to any of the most popular television series in the sixties and get back to me. It’s a major pet peeve of mine to hear people claim that there are “no good television series anymore.” Every decade of television you can name has a plethora of complete garbage and a few gems. This is what popular culture is. This is what popular culture always has been. And you know what? It’s okay to throw away some of your free time on mindless drivel. It doesn’t automatically make you stupid. Everyone needs to blow off steam.
If memory serves, it was French director Claude Lelouch who said something like “American films tell small stories on a big scale. French films tell big stories on a small scale”.
Which is the kind of aphorism that shrivels under too much scrutiny (the French make their own crappy action films and vapid romantic comedies too: it’s just that they don’t often get distribution in English-speaking countries), but I can see what he’s getting at.
Absolutely.
We Americans firmly believe that explosions are a universal language. They translate impeccably! So we’re not sure why everyone is so pissed off at us that we’ve opened dialogues with so many countries like Iraq and Afghanistan… XD
@Rutee: I was being facetious, to a point. That was the Big Revolution and most everything after was just cleaning up. I consider post-modernism to at its best just being the little voice that whispers in our ears “I know you’re shooting for objectivity, but you can’t ever get it 100% so son’t be a jackass”. At its worst it’s a reactionary creed that people use to beat on the head of lefties, scientists and social progress folks “you can’t know anything! so my baseless prejudices are worth as much as your deliberate theorics and your history/experience”.
>>Canada never loses wars
We use that little known strategy of “don’t fight wars you can’t win” that you Americans might want to learn about. 😉
(We did ‘lose’ a few humanitarian interventions, though, plus our clusterfuck in Afghanistan isn’t exactly going well either.)
@Bagelsan, hahaha. “Now class, can you give me examples of something that’s considered a universal language?” “Math!” “Music!” “Stuff blowing up!!” “Sigh. Thank you Jimmy.”
I totally get it when people from other countries don’t know a ton about what my particular country did; especially since a lot of times I don’t know the specifics of their contributions either. But I do get frustrated when USians (obviously not all!) say “you guys are lucky we came in and won the wars.” It totally ignores the fighting and dying that had been taking place before the states entered either conflict. It’s kind of like when you have 7 people voting, and there’s a tie from the first 6 people, and the 7th is perceived to make the decision all on zir own, when really their vote is no more necessary than the 3 votes they’re agreeing with, it’s just last.
That metaphor might suck; I’m not at the top of my intellectual game today.
Hey, once we manage to decide what our actual goals in the region are, and what a “win” would even look like in Iraq, I’m sure we’ll totally be able to accomplish it!! *giant thumbs up, American flag waves in background*
Yeah, when you come in and “win” a war that the other parties have been exhausting their every resource on for years before you show up that’s kind of bogus. Not that the contribution of the US to WWII wasn’t important or that US soldiers didn’t suffer tremendously, but not going through years of bombings and invasions beforehand (and not sharing borders with our opponents) gave us a bit of a leg up. And for the actual final victory against Germany I get the idea that maybe Russia gets to claim that one anyways.
>>But I do get frustrated when USians (obviously not all!) say “you guys are lucky we came in and won the wars.”
It’s kind of like you have two gangs fighting, four men on each side. The two sides are more or less evenly matched. A fifth man comes late to the fight on one side and tips the fight over to that side, then he starts bragging about how they’d never have won without him. *Technically* true, I guess. But you have to be kind of a giant ass to take all the credit to yourself.
@fatman
totally disagree. i like murakami, but he’s not someone i’d call top tier. his plotting always comes off to me as… insubstantial is a good word for it, i think, if that makes sense.
Oh yes, I don’t want to devalue the efforts or the casualties from the US forces. You’ve pretty much hit my objection on the head. And it doesn’t even come up in discussions of history all that much; it’s Internet Tough Guys shutting down other conversations about international relations with “if it weren’t for us, you’d all be speaking German right now!”
In other news, “metaphor” is the new word for “simile”.
I’m agreeing with everyone who’s saying that culture, intellect, and general progress is still moving ahead nicely, despite what one might think from reading the comments section on any article on Yahoo! But I’m gonna take a step back and disagree with whoever it was who said that people today are smarter than Aristotle because we know more now. Knowing stuff =/= being smart.
It’s kind of like you have two gangs fighting, four men on each side. The two sides are more or less evenly matched. A fifth man comes late to the fight on one side and tips the fight over to that side, then he starts bragging about how they’d never have won without him. *Technically* true, I guess. But you have to be kind of a giant ass to take all the credit to yourself.
as much as us accomplishments in wwii are exaggerated, this isnt really fair either. germany and the ussr may have been evenly matched, but gb and germany definitely werent, and i don’t think gb could have liberated france without us assistance. the post-war map of europe would have been radically different without us.
and there’s still the pacific theater.