So it’s official: the Emma You Are Next web site, which was threatening to release nude pictures of Harry Potter actress Emma Watson, is a hoax. The site now redirects traffic to the home page of something called Rantic, a mysterious supposed “social media marketing enterprise” with a reputation for hoaxes.
Rantic is now claiming that the real agenda behind its website was a noble one: to expose the evils of leaked celebrity nudes – and, by painting 4channers as the evil hackers behind it all, to get 4chan itself taken down.
And somehow, to do this, they had to threaten to release nude pics of Emma Watson? It’s like fighting death threats against women – by sending death threats to women. The idea that this is a feminist “false flag” — an idea already being floated in Men’s Rightsy circles — is plainly ridiculous. Rantic’s actions are about as unfeminist as its possible to get.
Indeed, it seems pretty clear that Rantic’s new site is as much of a hoax as its last one.
Rantic’s own, er, “explanation” for the Emma Watson site is a masterpiece of concentrated bullshit:
We have been hired by celebrity publicists to bring this disgusting issue to attention. The recent 4chan celebrity nude leaks in past 2 months have been an invasion of privacy and is also clear indication that the internet NEEDS to be censored. Every Facebook like, share & Twitter mention will count as a social signature — and will be step closer to shutting down www.4chan.org.
Nothing about this makes any sense whatsoever. How do you protect celebrities from threats by threatening a celebrity? How do you use the Emma You Are Next hoax to get 4chan taken down … when everyone now knows that you, not anyone on 4chan, was behind the hoax?
Add to this a call for censorship that seems calculated to enrage the internet masses, and it’s hard not to conclude that Rantic is still playing the internet like a fiddle. For what aim I don’t know. Maybe, like some Men’s Rightsers we could mention, they figure that bad publicity – scratch that, catastrophic publicity – is better than none.
That’s more or less what Business Insider has concluded. In a piece published this morning, BI’s James Cook writes
Rantic Marketing doesn’t exist. This wasn’t a marketing stunt at all, but a social experiment run by the most notorious gang of pranksters on the internet. …
Rantic Marketing is a fake company run by a gang of prolific internet spammers used to quickly capitalize on internet trends for page views. The group go by a variety of different names. Collectively, they’re known as SocialVEVO … The only known video footage of the group is a rap song about pickles that they used dubious spam techniques to make incredibly popular. The song used to have over 8 million views on YouTube.
As for that supposed plan to shut down 4chan? It’s only served to rally 4chan’s defenders.
In any case, the best way to fight celebrity leaks isn’t to shutter 4chan. It’s to find and prosecute those who’ve hacked celebrity nudes (including photos of several young women who were underage when the photos were taken) – and those who’ve knowingly spread them around the internet.
It may be hard to find the original hackers, but it’s certainly not hard to find those who distributed the nudes. Hint: Look at Reddit. Hundreds of thousands of Redditors were involved in what became known as TheFappening, and Reddit itself apparently profited handsomely from the attention and traffic.
Though the original TheFappening subreddit was belatedly shut down, leaked celebrity nudes are still being distributed openly on Reddit. This is criminal activity. Enforce the laws.
And Rantic, whatever your game is — just. fucking. stop.
Yeah, seconding Buttercup and LBT on the allergy thing: Let’s not confuse being more aware and accommodating of kids with different needs with overbearing parents inventing problems.
Fun fact: Jean-Paul Marat (of The Death of Marat fame) had a skin rash so severe he had to stay in his bathtub all the time, and doctors now think he may have been gluten intolerant. Could have been spared all that pain and discomfort if he’d just stopped eating bread.
But imagine telling that to a Frenchman.
WWTH: Do kids have a right to have sugary treats in the classroom, though? That’s debatable.
Just goes to show you that Malcolm Johnston can’t read articles. Or comment sections. Or understand a word he’s just read.
RE: katz
doctors now think he may have been gluten intolerant.
Yuuuuup. Poor fucker.
One of my roommates had gluten issues, plus was disabled in a fashion that meant she couldn’t cook, plus she had a lot of weird texture issues. On a fixed income, she had a very rough go of it. I don’t know how the hell she managed. (Thankfully, the only food allergy I might have is raw broccoli, which is easy enough to avoid.)
RE: WWTH
I still don’t get why that means other kids can’t have treats.
Nobody said they couldn’t have treats. Just not homemade ones. Storebought have the ingredients listed, so they can check to make sure there’s no allergens in them. Problem solved! Everyone gets sweets!
The problem is that homemade goods, there’s no way to know what’s in them unless the maker is around to answer questions.
@littlekatze
I guess once they reach a certain age, they all start their final migration… to Las Vegas.
Thus Spake Zaralittlekatze:
When an Alpha grows too old to ride the Cock Carousel any longer, when his Game grows weak and he can no longer cause tingles in the bitches’ ginas, he wanders off to die in a mysterious and secret place: The Alphas’ Graveyard. Few have seen an Alphas’ Graveyard, and fewer still would recognize the identifying marks of such a place: Discarded tubs of creatine powder, abandoned Fight Club DVDs, and here and there, a lonely, decrepit fuzzy velvet hat, tumbling in the wind.
As someone with more-or-less minor allergies, most people are TERRIBLE at remembering particular ingredients when they’re not pressed to be constantly aware of them. I can’t tell you how many times I hear “No there’s no dairy in these” *five minutes later* “Oh wait I DID put milk/butter/cheese in them.”
Even one time been told there’s no dairy in some cookies *as they were dumping a whole stick of butter into the mixing bowl*
@WWTH
While the list of terrible, awful shit my parents did when I was a child is long and horrifying, being helicopter parents isn’t on it. That didn’t stop me from developing a life-threatening allergy to apples.
Yes, allergy rates are increasing in the US. Others have already mentioned possible reasons, but I want to re-stress that it is NOT because of helicopter parents.
I have no idea if my case is typical or not, but not being able to eat most of the food brought in by other students wasn’t just a disappointment issue, it was an open invitation for the other students to harass me about it. This included, on more than one occasion, other students TRYING TO FORCE ME TO EAT THINGS THAT COULD KILL ME.
For added fun, way too many people lie about what goes into their food. Just because they say it doesn’t have apple in it doesn’t mean it won’t affect me because an absurd number of foods have apple in them. So many people assume that I must be lying about having an apple allergy because, I shit you not, “they haven’t heard of that before”…so people have told me it’s safe to eat in an attempt to prove that I’m “lying” about my allergy. And that doesn’t even get into the issue of cross-contamination; if some apple-smoked bacon touches some mashed potatoes then I can’t eat any of the mashed potatoes. It doesn’t take much to make a food unsafe for me to eat, and most people are pretty careless about cross-contamination, like using the same serving spoon for multiple different dishes.
So, sorry, but I figure the rights of kids with allergies to not end up in the ER or worse trumps the rights of kids without them to not be deprived of “good food”.
For a while I had a persistent allergy to cane sugar. It still bothers me some but I can ignore it with medications . . . yet back when it was at its worst I had a TERRIBLE time convincing people it was a real thing even though it was tested for in a real allergy panel. Apparently food allergies only applies to milk and nuts and everything else is just wanting attention.
And even when people understood that, they only seemed to register it as just “sugar” and threw out corn syrup even though I COULD have that.
LOL! What imagery!
Somehow, I don’t think they’d go that quietly, though. More likely they morph into MGTOWs of a particularly bitter and toxic stripe, often stinkingly drunk and incoherent. Or they become that obnoxious dude at the party, the one who’s way too old to be dressed like that, and acting like a chronic fratboy to boot…
Re: allergies: My kids’ school has a pretty gerrymandered district so that if’s about half quite affluent and half poor/working class.
The problem with only allowing store bought cupcakes, etc, is that can quickly get quite expensive for someone on food stamps and WIC and some of the parents just can’t swing it.
The school didn’t want to ban birthday celebrations (in order to make it not-obvious that only the poor kids weren’t getting birthdays) because – hey, they’re fun – so they shuffled all of the kids with severe allergies into one class per grade making one class with 1/4-1/2 food-allergic kids and restrictions on snacks and the other 3 or so without restrictions.
It kind of sucks for the kids in those classes without allergies, but it (1) loosens up the food restrictions on the other classrooms thereby allowing homemade cupcakes and cookies to flow and (2) helps those kids with strict food controls to not feel like the odd-kids-out.
RE: It’s a Furret
I can’t tell you how many times I hear “No there’s no dairy in these” *five minutes later* “Oh wait I DID put milk/butter/cheese in them.”
YUP. And then you have shit like gluten, which a lot of people know nothing about, or corn, which is in FUCKING EVERYTHING. Woe betide on the poor fucker who’s allergic to corn in my country. Plus you get the annoying self-righteous assholes who’re like, “Lolz, they aren’t REALLY allergic, I don’t NEED to tell them, it was just a LITTLE…”
Those people are assholes.
May I offer a minor correction?
Those people aren’t assholes. Those people are dangerous. Friend of mine has incredibly debilitating allergy to nuts.
As in joking about the fact that, hey, should she ever wish to kill herself, any grocery store offers salted, honeyed, barbecued, crushed or candied tools to do so.
So when someone goes “Oh, don’t worry, there’s no nuts in this, I didn’t put any in” and then smugly quips, after someone takes a bite, that “Oh. I guess there’s a little – see, you’re just faking the allergy stuff why are you choking what’s going on? Stop being such a drama queen” that’s not merely being inconsiderate of someone’s needs. That’s being three bad seconds away from involuntary manslaughter, the pompous fucks.
Actually, the explanation I was given about no home-cooked treats (in the 90s and early 2000s) was not about allergies at all–it was health department regs about food-born illnesses.
I’ll give them that, considering I’m home from work with a stomach bug today. I was wondering if I was sick enough to leave, even after I threw up, but the first thing I did after getting home was throw up. And then clean up kitty vomit. Which didn’t help.
And I’ll stand up for play dates–when my family moved from Montana to Oregon, I moved from a neighborhood with many children around my age to one with only one, and none around my sister’s age. (Lots of retired couples in the neighborhood.) And then I started avoiding her because she tried to convert my sister and me, and it was awkward and I was socially awkward and SHE TOLD MY BABY SISTER ABOUT CRUCIFIXION and I was pissed. So in that case, if I wanted to have more than one friend who sometimes invited me over to her house to proselytize, I needed to be driven somewhere.
Actually, even in Montana, Mom would take me over to see some of my friends, but mostly because she was friends with their parents, and I don’t remember being particularly well-supervised during the visits.
This is seriously kind of depressing, but I also heard that we have better emergency treatment for life-threatening allergies now, so we have more students with, say, life-threatening peanut allergies because they survived finding out that they had a life-threatening allergy.
RE: Fibinachi
Those people aren’t assholes. Those people are dangerous.
I concur and stand corrected.
RE: wordsp1nner
Actually, the explanation I was given about no home-cooked treats (in the 90s and early 2000s) was not about allergies at all–it was health department regs about food-born illnesses.
Oop, yeah, that makes sense too. No way to be sure how clean a kitchen was when the homebaked treats were made…
Also, though the term ‘play date’ was never used, due to our hometown being extremely car-based, we were often driven to friends’ houses. That was the only way to get to most of them; to go on foot would require crossing at least one major freeway with no sidewalks or walk signals. Sure, we played with neighbor kids too, but I never thought it that strange that parents would drive you to a friends’ house.
Fib: Those people aren’t assholes. Those people are dangerous. Friend of mine has incredibly debilitating allergy to nuts.
I will point out here that the explosive growth in food allergies means that you’re dealing with an older generation that had little or no experience of them growing up, and tends to regard a claim of “food allergies” as a sort of hypochondria, a simpering claim to be “holier than you” in food matters. Before I looked into it, I had much the same attitude myself.
However, I’m not an authoritarian; my attitude changed as I learned more. Be wary of those people who are sure that they know what they know and no-one can tell them differently – even as times change.
I saw this lovely rant from one wingnut idiot in his 60s recently:
“Your Editor grew up in a poor family: there were many times that the only food my mother could provide was Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and peanut butter and crackers. But my mother, who never went to school one day beyond high school, worked hard at her entry level job, and was able to get another one, which paid better, and then got raises and promotions because she was hard-working and diligent. She didn’t tell me how to get ahead in life; she provided a living example. And if my mother could do it, if I could do it, there is no reason at all that any healthy person can’t do it.”
Except, of course, that times have changed. And wingnuts – authoritarian followers – are too rigid to take account of that change. Applies to food allergies as well as economics.
@Fibinachi
I don’t see why being assholes and being dangerous are mutually exclusive in a lot of cases.
I don’t think allergies were rare until recently. Indeed, I just found a book about hay fever from 1866 (on Google Books) that says “In connection with the meagre records of hay-fever, and, in fact, with the almost complete non-recognition of it until the last thirty or forty years, arises the question, Is hay-fever a disorder of recent origin, or did the older physicians know of it without thinking it worthy of special notice?” Apparently this is the kind of speculation that arises over and over again in the literature.
I had a relative born in 1918 who was severely allergic to eggs until sometime in his 20s. My 1946 copy of The Joy of Cooking includes a recipe for “Mystery Cake,” with the headnote “This curious combination of ingredients makes a good cake. It would not occur to me to bake it for my own purposes, as I have many others to choose from that are better, but it is ideally suited to the needs of numerous allergic friends, as it calls for neither eggs, milk nor butter. The following Economy Spice Cake comes under the same category.” (Later editions phrased this more tactfully. The mystery ingredient was a can of tomato soup — otherwise it’s basically a nut/raisin spice cake. Apparently she didn’t have any nut-allergic friends.)
My little sister has celiac’s, so we’ve been getting an education in that sort of food issue. Fortunately, her husband being a professional chef has made life a little easier on that side of things. (I seem to recall hearing that much of the modern understanding of Celiac’s dates to WWII, and the Blitz, with a large number of children who had been eating cheap bread suddenly being sent out into the countryside and completely changing their diets, which made a whole lot of people suddenly shift health levels.)
I also knew someone in University who had to lie down and breathe carefully because some of the substitute whipped topping on the supposedly clean store-bought pie may have had traces of peanut oil in it.
One of the big radio announcers back in Victoria, B.C. had a somewhat public egg allergy. When he was doing the City Desk show, he’d often ask for recipes, and he even published a few collections of anecdotes and recipes that included a lot of egg-free ones. (Joe Easingwood, who died last year, if you’re curious.)
One of the Brownies my mother used to oversee had problems with lactose, gluten, and albumen. So no milk, bread, or eggs. Needless to say, she generally packed her own meals, even to the Brownie camp. It apparently took a while before her parents found out exactly why their ‘colicky’ baby was having so many problems. Allergies are bad enough when the child is old enough to tell you something’s wrong…
At least some of the increase in allergies and other food problems is almost certainly just down to better detection, better education, and the fact that people are more likely to survive to adulthood even with such problems due to better medical treatment and the broader selection of food to choose from.
Of course, as Fibinachi’s comment above notes, there are always people who refuse to be educated, even on matters of life or death.
It has never occurred to me, at any point in my life, to doubt someone’s food allergy. I don’t even get that. One of my closest friends is allergic to chocolate. I’d never heard of such a thing but I didn’t call her out on it, I just adapted. It took a little while for that info to stick ,is all.
Not saying people should believe just whatever comes out of someone’s mouth, but what is this thing where someone tells a person something deeply personal, that didn’t necessarily need to be told, and that person assumes it’s a lie? Is is an ego thing?
Oh, one of the most annoying things about having a non-standard allergy is going to restaurants. A lot of places have no idea what’s actually in their food or any information about it beyond the common allergy warnings. As an example, I can’t eat bacon or other meats smoked with applewood, but hickory or cherry is just fine. Places like Burger Kind or McDonald’s have absolutely no idea what kind of smoke is used for their bacon, or even if their bacon is smoked at all. Whenever I ask, most of the time I get a confused look and a reply of, “…the box just says ‘bacon’ on it”. One of the worst times was at a Dunkin’ Donuts…apparently they sweeten their tuna with apple juice as I discovered one day on the freeway (fortunately my partner was driving).
One of my friend’s has a daughter who is allergic to a protein found in milk (not lactose, but I can’t remember which one) has an even worse time of it, because companies will make “dairy free” products with that protein to make it creamier. They don’t even have to say if a product was made with milk if it doesn’t contain lactose.
And if someone is lying to avoid eating something, how is this any of your business?
Chucking in my 2 cents on the allergy stuff. One of my dearest friends has 2 children who are anaphylactic for peanuts. This means that if someone has peanut butter on their fingers and smears it on a door knob or drinks from a water fountain and my friend’s kids come into contact,they can go into anaphylactic shock and die. We had to get evidence from the specialist allergy unit from a big Sydney hospital during a 2 year campaign to have the school ban nut products from lunch boxes. I got so sick of parents complaining that their kids liked PB sandwiches and what was the big deal and what about if some other kid was allergic to bananas, would we ban them too? How many times did we point out that their kids might be sad to not get their favourite sandwich, but my friend’s kids could possibly die? Aaaaargh.
Also my friend’s kids were diagnosed shortly after birth. Also she lets them run around unsupervised, they have always been outdoor kids. She is so far from being a helicopter parent.