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.
I’d just like to point out that there exists an algebraic structure where division by 0 is entirely reasonable.
Admittedly it’s the set {0} with multiplication defined as 0x0=0, giving us 0/0=0, but my point stands.
“Maybe some attack on the law of identity?”
The Law of Identity is axiomatic. Duh.
Has anyone else noticed a passing resemblence between this dude and Paul Elam?
Oh yeah!
No. What kind of patterns does Paul Elam have?
ViolentAcrez and Paul Elam look fairly similar, admittedly it’s mainly because they’re around the same age, wear similar glasses and have broadly the same facial hair. There’s probably enough men in North America that look like that to fill a football stadium, but it is a bit striking.
So if you’re an intelligent person, with a well-rounded personality, and physically fit, the US military won’t enlist you because you have one older, awful – possibly criminal – relative?
I don’t think a relative’s criminal history is usually enough to get you barred from service, but in this case it was established from the very first article that the son knew what was going on, and was at the very least amused by it, if he didn’t actually participate. It may be his own words on reddit combined with his father’s airing of the dirty laundry that would hurt him. It’s possible the Marines would look askance at someone who probably knew that child porn was happening in his own house and did nothing to stop it. God knows what’s in that ‘Ask me Anything’ thread he did, that now the whole world knows about, and which he’ll certainly have to answer for every last flippant word of.
The Marines are picky to begin with, they really don’t need a guy who at best has been surrounded by so much creepy he’s lost touch with what is and is not acceptable, much less legally culpable, off of the internet.
So long as one has no criminal record, of one’s own, there is no bar to enlistment. Unless one is trying to get a contract protected MOS; which requires a clearance, no one is going to do a check on relative and known associates.
In other words (speaking from the experience of one who has done/been subjected to Special Background Investigations, as well as worked with recruiters), you are wrong.
If a national agency check doesn’t pop a felony, you are acceptable. When the Marines are being picky (which they aren’t so much as people like to think) a misdemeanor might flag you, but the recruiting station has to be well over quota for that to happen; because the station commander has a quota to make too.