I started reading and posting on SA religiously starting around 2003, when I was only 14 years old. It really shaped me a lot (probably not for the better) in my teenage years. I probably still hold a lot of that shaping because I still spend way too much time on reddit. I never really liked Lowtax much or thought he did much that was funny, but I did appreciate the community he built because it did feel like friends for me when I was pretty lonely. Anyway, rest in peace Rich, sorry you had such a hard life. I know the struggle. I sent a final tenbux to your kids.
Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
301–310 of 370 posts
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#302Can someone please explain who this is and what this site is about? I poked around a bit but couldn’t make sense of it
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#303Can someone please explain who this is and what this site is about? I poked around a bit but couldn’t make sense of it
It's mostly an internet forum that had a lot of subforums for different topics (TV, anime, drugs, etc.). Lowtax was the guy that started the forums. The forums also splintered into other projects made by other people, most famously 4chan
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Rape jokes normalize sexual violence And it's still claimed that violent video games normalised violence, despite research suggesting otherwise. So is the above claim something that is researched fact, or your opinion?
It's a very well researched fact. Evidently, you didn't try Googling "rape jokes link to violence" before asking this, or you would find many studies, like [1]. Exhibit 1: A bad-faith question : something that is very eaisly answered with a single Google search, but instead asked in a conversation to cast doubt on what the other person just said. [1] https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/sexist-humor-and-rape-proclivity...
> Evidently, you didn't try Googling..
Google isn't research. Search results only have to look right, they don't need to be right. That aside, it's not my claim to provide evidence for, that burden is on the claimant.
Attacking my character with an ad-hom, and suggesting I'm acting in bad-faith doesn't impress me either - notice how I say "the burden of proof is yours" without calling you lazy, or implying you have an agenda.
wrt "Sexist Humor and Sexual Aggression Against Women" - do you have a link to the original study and/or methodology (e.g. the paywalled pdf)?
The claim being explored here is "Rape jokes normalize sexual violence" - how that is to be interpreted is open to question, but:
- The study appears to focus on sexist and/or "control-primed" men specifically, so not a representative sample of men in general. The original link even specifies "sexist men" - again, I'd like to know how this is defined.
"[men in the study] scores in hostile sexism reported a higher rape proclivity when exposed to sexist (vs. neutral) humor"
- How is "rape proclivity" gauged/determined? Incidentally, I'm suspicious of "self reported" anything unless it is explicitly confirmed as "self validated" as well - that game has already played out in studies describing "self reported victims of sexual assault" who didn't incidentally agree with that label, but who'd descriptions where matched against a pre-determined definition of assault, whether the subject agreed with that definition or not.
- what timescale does this represent? I consider the original claim to be one of long-term, or persistent effect per the term "normalize"; not a short-term suggestive one.
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's (famously) a spectrum for autism, and individual differences in any case. You can't speak for the whole spectrum just for placing somewhere on it.
Oh, but the parent comment gets to speak for the whole spectrum by saying that autistic people wouldn't know that they shouldn't make rape jokes in public because they are autistic ? Without citing any sources, or having any qualifications to do so, or even claiming to speak from personal experience ? Perhaps you should direct your comment to them.
> gets to speak for the whole spectrum
I don't see any claim that they speak for the spectrum, i.e. no appeal to authority/identity. Sure, it means they don't provide a basis for their claims, but in this case I am attacking what I see as an invalid basis.
Also:
> by saying that autistic people wouldn't know that..
They said "Autists often don't.." i.e they aren't speaking about all/any/every, but some. They are talking about some subset of the population.
> Perhaps you should direct your comment to them.
What I feel is worth spending time criticising is my business. Given the hedge of talking about some autistic people it's almost certainly true without qualification.
> or even claiming to speak from personal experience
OP didn't talk from PE of other autistic people, but purely from their own behaviour, i.e. an n=1 generalisation.
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#306He leaves behind a complicated legacy. It's important to note that credible allegations of domestic abuse lead him to sell SA in the past year, and this can't be set aside. At the same time, SA's influence on the modern internet can't be understated. The 'image macro' of early SA (maybe created by Lowtax himself, from what Fragmaster says in his video in the link) is the direct ancestor of today's common meme image--…
From his Patreon last year:
As you know my patreon has declined from like $9k to under $1k because of the fucking idiots who embrace the ideology of, "If You Read It On the Internet, It Must Be True!" Ironically, this was the original slogan for the site, before I changed it to "The Internet Makes You Stupid." Both apply equally in this case.
Nobody seems aware that anybody can allege anything. Nobody seems to give a shit that I built and maintained this community for 22 years; one single allegation destroyed all that good will. One single allegetion destroyed my entire career, site, job, and creation. And don't even try to say "BUT LOWTAX WHUT ABOUT THESE OTHER THINGS IN YUR PAST HURRRRRR" because I've never been convicted or found guilty of doing shit. Ever. Period.
A bunch of kiwifarms people easily whipped those gullible idiots into a frenzy of self righteous outrage, and nobody from SA even gave it a second thought. I've always been honest and open with everybody my entire life, which is also why I get easily manipulated. I cannot speak in further length about certain things, so I'm trying to be as vague as possible. Look at the background of both parties involved, look at their history, look at what they've literally and legally done. Not been ACCUSED of doing, but actually DONE.
We have a court of law to determine if allegations are valid. Rushing to judgement by simply acting on an allegation, something that has, by nature, not been proven at all, is pure idiot toilet fuck shit.
This event really shows who my true allies and friends are, and who are the people that don't give a shit about the things I've actually DONE and CREATED in the past 22 years are. I'm going to capitalize the word done here one more time. DONE.
An ALLEGATION. For fuck's sake, at least wait for me to be found legally guilty of SOMETHING. Innocent until proven guilty, except on the internet where it's guilty and then still guilty and always guilty because people make up their minds once and can never change them ever no matter what. Outrage is the currency of the internet, and by god nobody will ever be wrong!
Anyway I'm making a plea for logic, if there is any logic remaining on the internet. Thank you to the six remaining patreon members left, and a huge fuck off to the SA outrage culture reactionists that were apparently just waiting for any excuse or reason, no matter how idiotic, to turn on me. Congrats, you're betting on the wrong horse.
And yes, I'm aware that by writing this I'm just going to lose more donors but whatever, I'm not and never have done anything just for cash. I just wanted to point out how the site I used to run is now populated by the hand wringing, outrage culture warriors we used to once make fun of.
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since banning ended up being a big part of their revenue model, I think an interesting approach they could have took was to allow you to re-instate your existing account if you were banned for $10, instead of having to register a completely new account. That would have avoided the chaos of losing users that had reputation while still kind of working for their odd moderation and revenue system. They could have also, o…
That was the way normal bans worked. Pay :tenbux: and get your account reactivated. Permabans, which generally required really toxic* behavior were "we never want to see you on this site again." and you weren't supposed to re-register an account at all. *Over the years Rich was running the site it seemed like "criticism of the mods" more frequently became a perma-bannable offense. e: f, b.
I don't recall it always being this way, but I may have just been mistaken at the time.
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It does. Oh, does it? Would you find me a joke with either of the specific premises I listed? Or anything in that format that doesn't have to do with rape? >Just because you don't understand that sort of humour Again, assumptions. Would you please present your Certificate of Telepathy, or otherwise stop making statements about what I know , understand , think , etc? >doesn't mean that it doesn't exist Who's denying…
> Try spinning a joke about burning Jewish babies as innocent form of humor that society doesn't look down on. I'll wait. How do you stop a million Jewish babies from bleeding to death? Holocauterization. (It's really hard to think of a joke about burning Jewish babies. This one took about 30 minutes, and it isn't even baby-specific.) As a half-Jew, this seems like innocent wordplay. But if it's problematic or harmfu…
> But if it's problematic or harmful, I'd like to understand why.
TL;DR: this article goes into detail:
https://theconversation.com/psychology-behind-the-unfunny-co...
Below, I'll explain using this particular joke. --------
Context is key here: are you laughing about our world being so so fucked up that the million deaths actually happened (the good), about it being funny that a million Jewish kids actually perished (the bad), or are just shoehorning a taboo topic/horrific event into a pun for pure shock value (the ugly)?
- The good is gallows humor, which is what someone would perceive once you identify as having Jewish heritage. It's making laughter out of tears, and it's an old, and good tradition. This particular joke would be a big stretch, but can be pulled off.
- The bad is Neo-Nazi land. The goal is to not make people laugh, but to trivialize mass murder. Jews were dehumanized, described as vermin that needs to ne exterminated prior to Holocaust — and it has heen an effective strategy to normalize the genocide. You can see the same kind of "jokes" used to send a message about South American refugees today. This is
- The ugly is juvenile idiocy of a child who just learned a bad word, and enjoys the shock it causes. The harm on such ugly jokes is that after evey edgelord makes them a million times, not only is the shock value completely gone, but people get used for the Holocaust being that-thing-people-joke-about-that-Jews-whine-about, without ever trying to understand it. They've seen it enough times that familiarity starts to feel like understanding ("I did Nazi that one coming! That's gonna holo-cost you!”). That's the loss, for the sake of a rather stupid gain.
Depending on what context you make the joke in, it can be either.
Perhaps it wouldn't be wise to tell it to someone crying at a Holocaust memorial mourning the loss of their family.
But at a Chabad dinner, when the topic of conversation is how Jews have always used humor to get through the difficult times — not the worst way to make yourself a schlimazel :)
[1] https://theconversation.com/psychology-behind-the-unfunny-co...
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#309Can someone please explain who this is and what this site is about? I poked around a bit but couldn’t make sense of it
It's mostly an internet forum that had a lot of subforums for different topics (TV, anime, drugs, etc.). Lowtax was the guy that started the forums. The forums also splintered into other projects made by other people, most famously 4chan
Thanks for explaining!
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, but the parent comment gets to speak for the whole spectrum by saying that autistic people wouldn't know that they shouldn't make rape jokes in public because they are autistic ? Without citing any sources, or having any qualifications to do so, or even claiming to speak from personal experience ? Perhaps you should direct your comment to them.
> gets to speak for the whole spectrum I don't see any claim that they speak for the spectrum, i.e. no appeal to authority/identity. Sure, it means they don't provide a basis for their claims, but in this case I am attacking what I see as an invalid basis. Also: > by saying that autistic people wouldn't know that.. They said "Autists often don't.." i.e they aren't speaking about all/any/every, but some . They are tal…
Look, the OP implied that autism maybe be a likely reason why someone could be observed regularly making denigrating jokes like "9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape", because we lack "social awareness" to tell otherwise.
As an autistic person, who knows other autistic people, and is a part of online community of autistic people, I'll go out on limb and say that the OP is talking out of their ass, and I can comfortably speak on the behalf of the community on this topic. Other people who identified as being on the spectrum in this thread agreed.
OP never said they were autistic. It's just what they think autistic people would do.
It's an n=√-1 generalization: purely imaginary, and on top of it, insulting, because figuring out why a joke like "9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape" is bad doesn't take that much.
Particularly because so much has been written about it. Go ahead and read [1], it's an excellent article. Or my comments elsewhere.
TL;DR: portraying the condition of "being a jerk" as an autistic trait is a jerk move.
>What I feel is worth spending time criticising is my business.
Then perhaps you should spend less time criticizing, and more time getting a clue — though again, I'm sure you have different plans regarding that too.
[1] https://theconversation.com/psychology-behind-the-unfunny-co...