So Michael Brutsch – recently outed as notorious Reddit creep Violentacrez – appeared on CNN last night to discuss the fallout from his outing. It was not a wise choice on his part. He hasn’t been making a lot of wise choices lately.
Brutsch spent much of the cringe-worthy interview in self-pity mode, talking about the horrible consequences he and his family had suffered as a result of his behavior, the most notable being the loss of his job. He seemed only barely aware that others might have suffered from his actions over the years running subreddits devoted to the exploitation of underage girls. Like, for example, the girls themselves.
He offered this not-quite apology for his actions:
I am to some degree apologizing for what I did. I was playing to an audience of college kids. Two years ago when all of this was at its height, the audience was appreciative and supportive of the sort of gallows humor that I put out there.
He also blames Reddit and the Reddit community for, essentially, not putting an end to his career as “Reddit pimp” sooner.
Oh, and he brought along the GOLD PLATED REDDIT ALIEN BOBBLEHEAD the Reddit admins once sent him for the fine work he did curating r/jailbait.
I don’t think that CNN did a great job presenting the issues around Violentacrez’ less-than-brilliant career, or really getting across what a thoroughly repulsive person he was, but the interview is worth watching in any case, if only to see Brutsch’s futile attempts to sort-of-apologize for, but also to minimize and deny what he did as Violentacrez and shift the blame on to others.
Here’s the interview itself:
Here’s a giant Reddit thread on the interview. Brutsch makes occasional appearances, posting as mbrutsch. Generally speaking, the more he posts, the less sympathy he gets from the crowd.
Here’s a thread in the For Hire subreddit, in which Brutsch puts himself forward as a Senior Perl Programmer with “5 years experience building and maintaining adult communities,” looking for work in the online porn biz. (So, yes, he is on the one hand sort-of apologizing for r/jailbait and the rest, while also touting his experience with r/jailbait as something an Adult Content business might for some reason want in a programmer.) One commenter informs him that “adult content companies don’t want anything to do with people associated with underage materials. I know because I work in the business end of the industry and have for 6 years.”
Here’s a thread on the interview in ShitRedditSays
Here’s Gawker’s Adrien Chen on the interview.
Here’s a smart piece in the New Yorker that ties together the stories of Amanda Todd and Brutsch.
See, that’s the sort of detail that makes me think you’re the real deal. RubyHypatia, take note.
<3 and all the internet hugs you want forever, lowquacks.
That was a byline thing, should’ve added a line break
…I’ve never fucked up a blockquote, guess this is my penance.
I thought telling everyone my vagina sunk Atlantis made me the real deal 🙁
@whataboutthemoonz
<3.
Every time I want to make a brief comment, the thought “say that and you’ll sound like Ruby Obvious” makes me hesitate …
… and I bet these blockquotes will come out looking like a dog’s dinner.
I don’t mind calling Ruby out on the horrible things she’s said in each and every thread. MRAs already love crowing about how all feminists are evil based on one thing an asshole who happens to be a feminist – like Ruby – said. Her views are fucked up and she shouldn’t be allowed to fly under the radar with her drive by posting style.
Since we’re talking about holding feminists accountable for one asshole, is Valerie Solanas actually a feminist? Every time I ask someone about her feminist work, people just point to the SCUM Manifesto, but it doesn’t seem like she’s done anything outside of that.
inurashii: I thought that, and then she made some comments and I went all “Wait whoa whoa holy fuck that is not an acceptable thing to say” and she continued pulling the whole ‘pretend that discussion never happened’ routine, which I dislike.
(The comments in question were the “prison rape is karmic justice” stuff.)
@whataboutthemoonz
Solanas never really wrote anything other than SCUM, which was a work of satire. So I’m not going to say she wasn’t a feminist, because I really don’t know, but she certainly wasn’t an influence on feminist theory.
So you interpret people’s statements in the context of their prior statements. That might indicate you have a belief that people might have consistent personality(ies). What is the advantage of this instead of just going context-free?
JAQ..
If I touch something that’s just come out of a hot oven and it burns me, why should I think anything different would happen if I do it again?
Fucking learning from experience, how does it work?
And of course people have consistent personalities you twit, my partner and I don’t wake up every morning and have to reintroduce ourselves to each other and see if we like each other again. If a person’s actively resisted accepting reason and evidence that contradicts their opinion, why would we assume they’ve changed that opinion?
“If I touch something that’s just come out of a hot oven and it burns me, why should I think anything different would happen if I do it again?” Can you be sure? Why not repeat a mistake?
“And of course people have consistent personalities you twit, my partner and I don’t wake up every morning and have to reintroduce ourselves to each other and see if we like each other again” So there is the consistent personality approach to the human mind. Have you considered a more stochastic model, with less dependence on prior states and time continuity, working towards a model where it’s not meaningful to say that personalities exists and to say “to have changed your mind” is meaningless, because it presupposes that they had a mind to begin with.?
JAQ.-
Talacaris, trolls always hope we go context-free, but no such luck.
P.S.–stop trying to dress up your questions in unnecessary verbosity. It’s not making you look smarter.
OK, someone just wants to JAQ off all over the thread. IGNORE.
Sure, I’m willing to consider the idea that talacris and our other regular trolls don’t have minds. Not good minds, anyway.
” I’m willing to consider the idea that talacris and our other regular trolls don’t have minds”
You are beginning to get it.!!!11! If you see the statements as random output from a sentence creating machine with no or very little memory so there is very little dependence on prior states. Also the input information processing might be limited.
Short form: Like a spambot.
Funnily enough, after Talacris barfed his purple prose all over the page I looked up his previous comments and deduced he was a troll. Because I am a sentient human being with an understanding of the concept of history.
Come on, @talacaris, I just need “Shroedinger” for pseudo-mathematician bingo!
Troll recognition= the new Turing test??
No I won’t give you Schrödinger. I don’t like the partial derivatives.
And that’s house!
Ya have a copy somewhere o that bingo. Want to see it!
I was pretty sure some “speculative ideas” about division with zero should be there too.
Christ Talacaris, this is even more boring than Pell’s ‘overload them with Dusty Springfield’ gambit. You won’t be troll of the year if you don’t up your game, and nominations are soon.
So what do you want then? Maybe some attack on the law of identity?? Or dou more like the conspiracy things. Like: women use make-up to hide their real identities as Illuminati operatives and take orders from their alien reptile overlords. But what is most boring of all is people who complain of boring trolling without making any new ideas themselves.