RCarr posted:

I'm pretty sure this is bullshit.

Wasn't krokodil a hoax? I remember hearing the whole thing was made up.

p-hop posted:

A long-rear end time ago (early in this thread, or maybe a previous one?) somebody recommended My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf. I was really interested but forgot about the whole thing. The other day my eyes caught a copy at the local library. After leafing through it I brought it home and devoured the whole book in a couple hours.

It's a graphic novel memoir written by a guy who went to high school with Jeffrey Dahmer. Not just a classmate, he hung out with Dahmer at school. Backderf and his group of friends could always tell that something wasn't right about Dahmer, but the story paints him as "that weird kid" in school who disappeared from the map after graduation. It doesn't detail the murders that Dahmer is famous for; the entire book takes place before he went off the deep end. Everything is corroborated with multiple sources. Every page is written based on memories from those who were part of the "Dahmer Fan Club" in school as well as Dahmer's confessions and interviews to fill in the twisted and awful world the guy was stuck in. There are several parts that would have had me busting out laughing if I was in school with Dahmer. Looking back on it all must be haunting to those involved. Anyone who likes this thread should give it a read.

RCarr posted:

I'm pretty sure this is bullshit.

Wasn't krokodil a hoax? I remember hearing the whole thing was made up.

Kugyou no Tenshi posted:

You're thinking of Jenkem. Krokodil was not only real, there was a TCC thread and people were brushing off any claims that Krokodil was dangerous by pretending that the very real impurity issues were just things that happened to other people. That was actually the thread that made me quit even lurking TCC because I didn't want to watch more goons kill themselves or lose body parts because some idiot told them "Desomorphine isn't dangerous and Krokodil is just deso, man".

The Lone Badger posted:

From what I've read it was supposed to be a satire / Modest Proposal. "You like chopping people's heads off so much, why don't you build this machine to do it more efficiently?". And the revolutionary leaders were "Excellent. We'll take ten."

quote:

Article 1: All offences of the same kind will be punished by the same type of punishment irrespective of the rank or status of the guilty party.
Article 2: Whenever the Law imposes the death penalty, irrespective of the nature of the offence, the punishment shall be the same: decapitation, effected by means of a simple mechanism.
Article 3: The punishment of the guilty party shall not bring discredit upon or discrimination against his family.
Article 4: No one shall reproach a citizen with any punishment imposed on one of his relatives. Such offenders shall be publicly reprimanded by a judge.
Article 5: The condemned person's property shall not be confiscated.
Article 6: At the request of the family, the corpse of the condemned man shall be returned to them for burial and no reference to the nature of death shall be registered.

Wild T posted:

Sort of like the mentality of Dr. Gatling, who hoped that inventing a mass-producable machine gun would paradoxically save lives since one man could provide the volume of fire of dozens. The Gatling gun worked. His plan didn't.

Nckdictator posted:

North Korea

quote:

After breakfast, the doctors were preoccupied with finding food for dinner, and after dinner, they worried about the next breakfast. (Dr. Kim) began leaving work early to scavenge in the mountains for edible weeds. Sometimes she’d chop wood to sell. Her weight had fallen below 80 pounds. Her breasts shriveled and she stopped menstruating. From afar, she looked more like a twelve-year-old child than a woman in her early thirties. The first few days she’d gone without eating she’d felt so hungry she would have stolen food from a baby. But after four days or so, she felt nothing but a strange sensation that her body was not her own, that she was being lifted into the air and dropped down again. She was profoundly exhausted. She had no strength to get up in the morning. She quit her volunteer position at the party secretariat and by early 1998 had stopped going to work entirely. She tried various ways to make money—she sold alcohol or coal at the market. She didn’t lament the waste of her medical school training. At the height of the famine, it was enough just to stay alive.

On one of her excursions to the market, she ran into an old friend. They had been classmates in high school, both of them the kind of popular, smart girls who might have been voted “most likely to succeed.” Her friend had been a class officer. They made polite small talk, telling each other that they looked well even though they were both sallow and emaciated. Then Dr. Kim inquired about her classmate’s family. Her husband and her two-year-old son had died, just three days apart, she said matter-of-factly.

Dr. Kim tried to offer her condolences.

“Oh, I’m better off. Fewer mouths to feed,” she told Dr. Kim.

Dr. Kim couldn’t decide whether her friend was callous or insane, but she knew that if she stayed in North Korea any longer, she would either be the same, or she’d be dead....By March 1999 enough people were making the trip that you could pick up tips in border towns about the best spots to cross. The early-spring landscape was just beginning to thaw out from an exceptionally bitter winter, and the Tumen was still frozen in spots. Dr. Kim went to a spot that she’d heard you could walk across. Every few feet she would throw a heavy stone to test the thickness of the ice. At least on the Korean side, it was solid. She slid one foot forward, then the next, delicate as a ballerina. She made it about halfway before her stone disappeared into a patch of slush. She followed anyway and the freezing water came up to her waist. She cleared a path with her hands as if breaking through icebergs.

Dr. Kim staggered up the riverbank. Her legs were numb, encased in frozen trousers. She made her way through the woods until the first light of dawn illuminated the outskirts of a small village. She didn’t want to sit down and rest—she feared succumbing to hypothermia—but she knew she didn’t have the strength to go much farther. She would have to take a chance on the kindness of the local residents.

Dr. Kim looked down a dirt road that led to farmhouses. Most of them had walls around them with metal gates. She tried one; it turned out to be unlocked. She pushed it open and peered inside. On the ground she saw a small metal bowl with food. She looked closer—it was rice, white rice, mixed with scraps of meat. Dr. Kim couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog’s bark.

Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.

AnonSpore posted:

One day they're gonna invent a bomb so deadly and destructive that the very possibility of it ever being used is enough to stop all wars forever

Hijo Del Helmsley posted:

Nukes basically are that bomb. Turns out we'll go to war anyway.

Rochallor posted:

I read Nothing to Envy a few months ago and I think this bit here is going to stay with me for the rest of my life. Out of context, without reading about the previous fifteen to twenty years of unbelievably horrible stuff that's happened, it might not be as effective, but it still says a lot, I think.

Hijo Del Helmsley posted:

Nukes basically are that bomb. Turns out we'll go to war anyway.

Hijo Del Helmsley posted:

Nukes basically are that bomb. Turns out we'll go to war anyway.

Hijo Del Helmsley posted:

Nukes basically are that bomb. Turns out we'll go to war anyway.

canyoneer posted:

Well, Alfred Nobel's endowment and prize really did a great switcheroo on his legacy.

Ask 100 people if they know what Richard Jordan Gatling is famous for.
Ask 100 people if they know what Alfred Nobel is famous for (I expect most of them will not say "inventing dynamite")

AnonSpore posted:

whooooooooosh

Literally Kermit posted:

Holy poo poo. You meant well, but holy poo poo.

canyoneer posted:

Well, Alfred Nobel's endowment and prize really did a great switcheroo on his legacy.

Ask 100 people if they know what Richard Jordan Gatling is famous for.
Ask 100 people if they know what Alfred Nobel is famous for (I expect most of them will not say "inventing dynamite")

KozmoNaut posted:

If that hits even harder after reading what comes before it in the book, I'm not sure I want to read it

Jack Gladney posted:

Somebody hasn't read enough political cartoons (not enough is just the right amount though. Enough is too many):

Zesty Mordant posted:

This is that thing where it's too dumb to be sincere right?

Kugyou no Tenshi posted:

Krokodil was not only real, there was a TCC thread and people were brushing off any claims that Krokodil was dangerous by pretending that the very real impurity issues were just things that happened to other people. That was actually the thread that made me quit even lurking TCC because I didn't want to watch more goons kill themselves or lose body parts because some idiot told them "Desomorphine isn't dangerous and Krokodil is just deso, man".

Syd Midnight posted:

The Krokodil thread was started as a joke, with the OP pretending to be a demented krokodil aficionado, posting gory pictures and giving descriptions of the infections and ulcers it causes. It only took a few pages for people to start earnestly defending it and wondering what it feels like and how to make some, so the horrified OP had to close the thread.

Zesty Mordant posted:

This is that thing where it's too dumb to be sincere right?

Mojo Threepwood posted:

A defense company called Temporal Defense Systems was interested

Prokhor Zakharov posted:

No he's quite serious. The same artist also made a cartoon comparing obamacare to the holocaust ovens.

A goon did do the math and found like a 1000 people would have to die from dynamite daily to make the cartoon accurate though.

atomicthumbs posted:

Jack Gladney posted:

I read it around the same time I read Dave Cullen's Columbine, which also stayed with me for similar reasons.

Josef K. Sourdust posted:

Re Columbine: JG, would you recommend the Cullen book? I looked at the reviews and I was curious. It seems that he largely rejects the idea that bullying was a motivating factor and that the killers were actually relatively popular and successful socially. That seems to contradict a lot of testimony. There seems to be a big divide between Cullen and Larkin ( http://www.amazon.com/Comprehending...nding+columbine ), (or at least a division between their supporters) with Larkin suggesting social factors were stronger than Cullen makes out. So, Cullen - psychological motivation, Larkin - social motivation. I'm just going from the online reviews, so it may be an over simplification or even a misrepresentation. Has anyone here read both books and can give a balanced view of them?

Jack Gladney posted:

It's been a while since I've read Cullen, but the killers only account for maybe 1/3 of it. Cullen's account seems thoroughly researched and matches the FBI's report. There's plenty of testimony that describes the killers as bullies themselves, and Cullen draws not only on testimony from their parents and people who knew them, but their diaries, transcripts of their interrogations, and interviews with their court-mandated therapists. It seems solidly researched to me.

bonestructure posted:

It's a tough read but very worth it. Supposedly some of the anecdotes have come into question since publication, but I haven't had time yet to google that and see what's up. The book seemed very well-documented to me.

wikipedia posted:

The colonial Australian frontier war was unofficial, undeclared and unrecorded, and the official actions of government forces was typically veiled as "policing" and "law-enforcement" although a police force normally is not constitutionally allowed to engage in acts of warfare...

...In total at least 20,000 indigenous Australians died from conflict and massacre with white Australians whilst between 2,000 and 2,500 white Australians died.

wikipedia posted:

1842. Evans Head massacre - the 1842 massacre of 100 Bundjalung Nation tribes-people at Evans Head by Europeans, was variously said to have been in retaliation for the killing of 'a few sheep', or the killing of 'five European men' from the 1842 'Pelican Creek tragedy'. It is also referred to as the 'Goanna Headland massacre'.

wikipedia posted:

1839. In about the middle of the year, the Murdering Gully massacre near Camperdown, Victoria was carried out by Frederick Taylor and others in retaliation for some sheep being killed on his station by two unidentified Aborigines. The Tarnbeere Gundidj clan of the Djargurd Wurrung people, around 35-40 people, was wiped out. Public censure led to Taylor's River being renamed Mount Emu Creek and, fearing prosecution for the massacre, in late 1839 or early 1840 Taylor fled to India. Of particular note for this massacre is the extent of oral history, first hand accounts of the incident, the detail in settler diaries, records of Weslayan missionaries, and Aboriginal Protectorate records.

wikipedia posted:

Frederick Taylor, the manager at Glenormiston station, with associates James Hamilton and Bloomfield led a group of several shepherds in their employ and attacked a sleeping aboriginal camp, firing upon and killing men, women and children. Several aborigines were able to escape and later told their accounts to Assistant Protector Sievwright, and Weslayan missionaries Benjamin Hurst and Francis Tuckfield. The bodies were dumped in the waterhole and later burnt by some accounts.

In a deposition by Edward Williamson, overseer to the Weslayan Buntingdale Mission establishment at Birregurra, outlines the events of the massacre as reported to him by Wore-gu-i-moni:

...The party advanced in an extended line upon the natives, Mr Taylor was in the centre of the line, the shepherds were on each side of him, they advanced shouting and immediately fired upon the natives who were asleep. They succeeded in killing all they could see, amounting to thirty five (35).

wikipedia posted:

George Robinson, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, in a letter to Assistant Protector Charles Sievwright on 11 July 1839, questions Taylor's allegation saying

What proof is there of the Blacks having killed the sheep? The shepherd said so. Might not the shepherd have done it himself and after keeping the hindquarters for his own use have given the forequarters to the natives ... If this is the only charge Mr Taylor can allege against the aboriginal natives it certainly amounts to very little. In point of law it proved it is an offence, but who in the name of common humanity I would ask would think of injuring those already too much injured people, and for such a trifle...

wikipedia posted:

Taylor, fearing prosecution for the massacre, in late 1839 or early 1840 fled to the obscurity of India for a few years. He returned to Victoria and in June 1844 was managing a station on the Mitchell River near Lindenow...

...For the next 13 years Taylor continued to hold licences for land in Gippsland along the Mitchell and Tambo rivers, around Lake Victoria and Lake King, and at Swan Reach, where he continued with a campaign of dispossession of the Gunai people.

DumbparameciuM posted:

So I was thinking I'd do a post on a specific massacre of Indigenous Australians, but I was having trouble finding a wikipedia article for the specific incident I was searching for.

quote:

On 1 December 1826, the Tasmanian Colonial Times declared that: "We make no pompous display of Philanthropy. We say this unequivocally SELF DEFENCE IS THE FIRST LAW OF NATURE. THE GOVERNMENT MUST REMOVE THE NATIVES—IF NOT, THEY WILL BE HUNTED DOWN LIKE WILD BEASTS, AND DESTROYED!" – Colonial Times and Tasmanian Advertiser, 1826[18][19]

quote:

When Truganini died, the Tasmanian Government declared the island’s Aboriginals to be extinct. Its intention was to make everyone understand that the native problem was over, but the government was wrong on both counts. Other aboriginal women born from full-blooded tribal parents outlived her.

quote:

In one case, the Royal Society of Tasmania received government permission to exhume the body of Truganini in 1878, within two years of her death, on condition that it was "decently deposited in a secure resting place accessible by special permission to scientific men for scientific purposes." Her skeleton was on display in the Tasmanian Museum until 1947.[39] Another case was the removal of the skull and scrotum — for a tobacco pouch — of William Lanne, known as King Billy, on his death in 1869.

nocal posted:

While many people think of Parkinson's as a disease that leads to tremors, in fact it is the treatments that lead to tremors. Parkinson's itself leads to rigidity. The addicts that shot up this batch of drugs almost instantly became "frozen," and were physically unable to move or speak.