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fizzymercury
Aug 18, 2011
Just so you know, I appreciated seeing the actual footage. I had no idea the shooter was that methodical and just...robotic. I'd only ever read about it, and I didn't realize the shooter was so detached from humanity. That he took the time to square up his targets is so odd. It's like he was rabbit hunting.

And yeah, you can't control the fat weirdo with a permanent tragedy-based boner. This was an onion of psychos.

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Caganer
Feb 15, 2018
Someone posted this is GBS and it’s super interesting (but very unnerving)

BattleMaster
Aug 14, 2000

Tbh I think the best punishments give the offender some time to think about what they did.

Caganer
Feb 15, 2018

Osama Dozen-Dongs posted:

It's pretty weird and creepy how he crammed the IF THEY HAD A GUN in at the end with the cowering grannies. Yeah, that 95-yo sure would have put the gunman down if she just had a gun.

I mostly want to know why the announcer has his hands poised above his nipples like he’s rubbing them Mel Gibson style when the footage plays

Aesop Poprock
Oct 21, 2008


Grimey Drawer

Caganer posted:

I mostly want to know why the announcer has his hands poised above his nipples like he’s rubbing them Mel Gibson style when the footage plays

It's because he's obese and already had short arms to begin with so his scapula and erector spinae situation is probably a disaster zone. A lot of those builds of dudes hold themselves like that because it's more comfortable than letting all the stress hang straight down from the QL

dobbymoodge
Mar 8, 2005

Aesop Poprock posted:

It's because he's obese and already had short arms to begin with so his scapula and erector spinae situation is probably a disaster zone. A lot of those builds of dudes hold themselves like that because it's more comfortable than letting all the stress hang straight down from the QL

Now that's unnerving.

Aesop Poprock
Oct 21, 2008


Grimey Drawer
I get a little bit of enjoyment from watching the killer lock eyes with a scrawny rear end dude at the door and then flee from him in terror when he thinks he's coming after him cause it just shows what a coward he actually is but what a loving rear end. I am not pro corporal punishment that involves execution but I'm glad he hung himself because that was a person incompatible with life

Wasabi the J
Jan 23, 2008

MOM WAS RIGHT
I suspect it's more about modem tactical bullshido about having your hands at the ready. The secret service does it and the cargo cult came around and picked it up, even though they do not do executive protection.

Source: I'm in the army with a lot of people that imagine themselves being the badass that would've totally shot the Mandalay Bay shooter with their pistol.

Caganer
Feb 15, 2018

Aesop Poprock posted:

I get a little bit of enjoyment from watching the killer lock eyes with a scrawny rear end dude at the door and then flee from him in terror when he thinks he's coming after him cause it just shows what a coward he actually is but what a loving rear end. I am not pro corporal punishment that involves execution but I'm glad he hung himself because that was a person incompatible with life

Meh, you don't know his background/mental health state.

We live in a country where a vast majority of people have voted against funding health care and social services.

What he did was terrible and wrong, but I wish we'd spend just a smidgen of the rage against him with posts like this against conservatives and neolibs who create the conditions that lead to these incidents.

Wasabi the J posted:

I'm in the army with a lot of people that imagine themselves being the badass that would've totally shot the Mandalay Bay shooter with their pistol.

"I've hit shots much father than that in Call of Duty, it has a very realistic bullet drop algorithm :smug:"

:goonsay:

pookel
Oct 27, 2011

Ultra Carp

Wasabi the J posted:

I suspect it's more about modem tactical bullshido about having your hands at the ready.
I have just learned an amazing new word.

Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi
Mar 26, 2005

If only there had been a well-trained, ready for action macho man like our YouTube hero at Fort Hood

TapTheForwardAssist
Apr 9, 2007

Pretty Little Lyres
Apropos of my earlier post about POWs from Iraq and Afghanistan (all dead or returned by now), for a while I used to wonder why the POW/MIA flag is still such a huge thing in the US, given that for a good while we had one single POW, Bowe Bergdahl from Afghanistan. So were all these flags literally for one guy?



The story behind it is actually pretty unnerving: there existed (and arguably still exists) a body of Americans who believe that the US abandoned a number of troops in Vietnam and then covered the fact up for decades. Given that this issue has been routinely investigated by Congress and multiple branches of government and agencies, it's not too far to file this under "conspiracy theory" but the idea still resonates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_POW/MIA_issue

After the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, the US worked a deal with then-North Vietnam to return any remaining POWs, and they sent us back 591 guys and said that was all they had. At that point, we were still missing around 1,350 guys, and the public was skeptical that North Vietnam wasn't holding some back for later bargaining chips.

What really kicked these rumors into overdrive was the 1979 return of Marine PFC Garwood. There are two competing arguments: one that Garwood was ambushed and kidnapped in 1965 by the VC, and held prisoner in the North for 14 years, where even after 1973 he knew a number of other American POWs who had not been released for Operation Homecoming. The other side is that Garwood either defected or got caught doing something stupid off-base, then rolled over and worked for Vietnam, was freed by 1973 at the latest and just refused to return to the US and kept working for the Vietnamese. A Marine patrol in the highlands in 1968 swore they ran across a white English-speaking soldier fighting for the VC, who physically resembled Garwood, but they were unable to capture him. After 1973, there are reports of Garwood working, forced or volunteer, at reeducation camps and PAVN military bases. When Garwood returned he was court-martialed for a number of crimes including desertion, but ended up with just a charge (equivalent to felony) of communicating with the enemy and assaulting another POW. But as shady as Garwood was, many people took his claims as evidence that many POWs were left behind in '73, and the government was covering it up.

Going into the 1980s, the "left behind myth" became a staple of film and books, most notably Rambo II where the hero goes back to Vietnam to rescue abandoned POWs. Then toss in multiple Chuck Norris films, episodes of the X-Files and JAG, various country songs, and the issue stuck around in the popular imagination. A number of people, mostly ex-mil, raised funds to go back and find POWs, and wrote a number of expose books, which starts to raise some questions about the financial motives in perpetuating the legend. Even Ross Perot started banging the drum during his 1992 presidential run.

As the Wikipedia article notes, at some point you have to start asking, *why* would the Vietnamese hang on to people past '73 and never bring them up again? You'd have to believe the Vietnamese had some plan in mind, but they never made any efforts to say "hey we found more guys, give us money". Just my opinion, but I'd expect that anyone left after 1973 was either there of their own volition, had been traded to another communist country (post-USSR Boris Yeltsin said they *might* have received some POWs), or frankly just been murdered since they would be a liability. I'm hard-pressed to think of any reason to keep an American POW around especially after 1975, since their intelligence value would be long-gone, and the Vietnamese didn't really have an NK-style program of stealing translators and teachers. And it says a lot that multiple public and private expeditions have turned up nothing over decades.

In whatever case, the US continues to send field trips over at least annually trying to find the bodies of guys still missing in Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos. The 2016 count is 1,621 missing (which is mostly people we're sure are dead but we want the bodies). The only issue in question is around 50 individuals classified as "LKA" (last known alive) so people who last we saw were getting swept up in an ambush, parachuting out of a plane, or seen in a POW camp. It's almost certain that those people are dead, but a small part of me kind of hopes that a couple of them are way up in the mountains in a Montagnard village with a wife and a bunch of grandchildren, smoking local weed and running a small farm, because they just decided they wanted to stay.

TapTheForwardAssist has a new favorite as of 01:00 on Apr 16, 2018

Azathoth
Apr 3, 2001

It is the same psychological reaction that causes parents of kidnapped children to hope that, decades after the kidnapping, that their children are still alive, only occurring on a national scale. Even if it is highly irrational, it is very understandable.

Brawnfire
Jul 13, 2004

🎧Listen to Cylindricule!🎵
https://linktr.ee/Cylindricule

Azathoth posted:

It is the same psychological reaction that causes parents of kidnapped children to hope that, decades after the kidnapping, that their children are still alive, only occurring on a national scale. Even if it is highly irrational, it is very understandable.

After reading this thread, I'd hope my child died almost immediately because the alternatives are... hosed.

TapTheForwardAssist
Apr 9, 2007

Pretty Little Lyres

Azathoth posted:

It is the same psychological reaction that causes parents of kidnapped children to hope that, decades after the kidnapping, that their children are still alive, only occurring on a national scale. Even if it is highly irrational, it is very understandable.

It's one thing when it's just you and your family, but it's got to suck all the more when the crazies come out of the woodwork with conspiracy theories, politicians thump on it to increase their cred, etc. Plus it's got to feel terrible to see the POW flag and wonder "is that about my son/brother/husband too, or is he long-dead?"

C.M. Kruger
Oct 28, 2013

TapTheForwardAssist posted:

It's almost certain that those people are dead, but a small part of me kind of hopes that a couple of them are way up in the mountains in a Montagnard village with a wife and a bunch of grandchildren, smoking local weed and running a small farm, because they just decided they wanted to stay.

That happened in a few cases, there's a handful of MIA soldiers that turned out to have been deserters who just hid out in the local populace, went to neighboring countries or back to the US. Though the Vietnamese apparently managed to find and deport most of them back to the US after the war ended, on suspicion of being CIA spies.

The main one I recall was about a black soldier named McKinley. IIRC he deserted in South Vietnam in the 60s, apparently after that point he married a Cambodian-Vietnamese woman and got involved with Viet Cong propaganda and was allegedly seen wearing a NVAs officer's uniform at a couple POW camps. After the war ended he was offered a chance to return to the US but refused, and apparently went to Cambodia with his wife, and they were murdered by the Khmer Rogue late in the 70s according to his Viet Cong contacts.

TapTheForwardAssist
Apr 9, 2007

Pretty Little Lyres
Apparently it's Nolan McKinley, one of two recognized defectors of the Vietnam War. Got to grab dinner, but later I'll see if I can dig up the other one.

Is covering the US defectors to North Korea unnerving enough for this thread? I'd say that bailing out of the US for what you presumably know well is a totalitarian regime and monolithic ethnostate speaks to a very unnerving mentality. There's one of the guys whose proximate cause for defection was that he'd gotten busted for smoking weed at his base in South Korea. I really wonder how often he asked himself whether he should've just taken the one-rank demotion and loss of pay for three months instead.

Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
I do have to wonder if the idea of American PoWs ending up in the USSR after WW2 or kor a holds any water.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/1996/07/19/world/decades-later-tales-of-americans-in-soviet-jails.html

The Times cites a Rand report from 1994. (Here for free https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR351z2.html ) but I wonder if any more recent research revealed anything.

Telsa Cola
Aug 19, 2011

No... this is all wrong... this whole operation has just gone completely sidewaysface
As I understand it currently much of the POW/MIA stuff is tied into the fact we have, and still get, a poo poo ton of forensic remains from past conflicts that are in the process of being identified. If I remember correctly Hawaii has the major lab used for this and hires fairly frequently.

Its a military thing I assume but basically you aren’t dead unless they have a body or part of one to say you are.

BattleMaster
Aug 14, 2000

Nckdictator posted:

I do have to wonder if the idea of American PoWs ending up in the USSR after WW2 or kor a holds any water.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/1996/07/19/world/decades-later-tales-of-americans-in-soviet-jails.html

The Times cites a Rand report from 1994. (Here for free https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR351z2.html ) but I wonder if any more recent research revealed anything.

I can buy American POWs from the Korean and Vietnam wars being sent to the USSR, but what's the excuse for the ones taken during WW2? Says 500 kept as "bargaining chips" but in what context? Only thing I can think of is that they were prisoners of the Germans kept by the Soviets for some reason after they captured the prison camps. But then they're not really bargaining chips if you don't do anything with them.

Telsa Cola
Aug 19, 2011

No... this is all wrong... this whole operation has just gone completely sidewaysface
Death in Yellowstone is great for showing how nature basically requires you to have like an ounce of competency and intelligence in you or it will gently caress you up. Highly recommend.


Death in Yellowstone posted:

We must remember that when we want to make a bridge with or to touch the past, the place to do it is not five feet from a bison.


Edit :

Death in Yellowstone posted:

According to Smith, a tourist chased some grizzly cubs up a tree, poked at them with his umbrella, and then was fatally mauled by their mother.

Telsa Cola has a new favorite as of 06:06 on Apr 16, 2018

TapTheForwardAssist
Apr 9, 2007

Pretty Little Lyres

BattleMaster posted:

I can buy American POWs from the Korean and Vietnam wars being sent to the USSR, but what's the excuse for the ones taken during WW2? Says 500 kept as "bargaining chips" but in what context? Only thing I can think of is that they were prisoners of the Germans kept by the Soviets for some reason after they captured the prison camps. But then they're not really bargaining chips if you don't do anything with them.

Particularly with the slide to the Cold War, you'd think most US troops would be a major liability more than anything else. Any immediate intelligence value they have is long-gone unless you've got someone really high-up. And it's not like anyone has any amazing insights about the M4 Sherman tank, given that *we* gave a bunch to the Soviets under Lend-Lease. For a second I wanted to suggest that maybe the Soviets would've taken in any Americans who wanted to join a Communist country, but then again the Soviets were quite adamant about the Allies sending back any Warsaw-region people back to their home countries, so undermining that just so Joe Schmoe can join the Worker's Paradise seems counter-productive.

It's hard to prove a total negative, and odds-are in a war that big some non-zero number of funky things happened. If you put an American officer in a Siberian gulag in 1946, all it takes is one escaped or paroled prisoner, or guard or cook, to defect to the US or just walk into any of our embassies and announce that Stalin is holding Col. Smith hostage.


quote:

Its a military thing I assume but basically you aren’t dead unless they have a body or part of one to say you are.

That said, there is a category (I don't recall the name) for "we're pretty drat sure he's dead and we ain't ever finding the body." It's mostly used for sunken ships, aviators that plunge into the ocean, or people in massive conflagrations that turn all the corpses into dust. EDIT: It's "KIA/BNR" for "body not recovered".

Even that has pretty strict rules though; we lost a pilot over Anbar Province back in the '91 Gulf War, and he was still listed MIA until we took over Iraq, and a couple years in we got smart and interviewed local Bedouins in the area where his plane went down until we found the guys who first came upon the wreck and buried him.


FAKEEDIT: It was Scott Speicher, lost in 1991, when a MIG shot his F18 Hornet down in Western Iraq. Declared MIA in January, then KIA/BNR in May, then in 2001 in an unprecedented move the Navy changed his status back to MIA. In 2002 they promoted him to Captain (Navy, so Colonel equivalent), and he was changed to MIA/Captured right as the US authorized military force against Iraq (so some political loading there). We invade, don't find anything of him but rumors and vague signs, so eventually in 2009 they just put him back as MIA. Later that year some Marines knocking about Anbar found his grave, and he was identified by his jawbone.

Similar to the Vietnam POW myth, assorted enthusiasts worked up theories about how he'd safely parachuted from the Hornet and was being held captive by Saddam's government, and was being deliberately memory-holed by a knowing US government. Which again is a really lovely way to mess with the emotions of his family and friends for political and/or conspiratorial purposes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Speicher

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Dec 28, 2007

Kiss this and hang

TapTheForwardAssist posted:


Similar to the Vietnam POW myth, assorted enthusiasts worked up theories about how he'd safely parachuted from the Hornet and was being held captive by Saddam's government, and was being deliberately memory-holed by a knowing US government. Which again is a really lovely way to mess with the emotions of his family and friends for political and/or conspiratorial purposes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Speicher

It's really weird what people will spin a conspiracy around. I can understand big events like 9/11 and Vietnam, but they do it about small tragedies as well. A friend of mine's father was killed in a plane crash in Lexington, Ky and because he was a forensic accountant there was all sorts of chatter that it was a CIA hit. My friend only found out about it because he enjoyed reading dark corners of the net and had a particular fondness for conspiracies. He said it was really really disconcerting to actually be the focus of it though. He also said, it got really old when he'd be dealing with the other victims families during the investigation worrying that these other people might believe that their loved ones died because his dad was on the plane.

Business of Ferrets
Mar 2, 2008

Good to see that everything is back to normal.
Here’s an unnerving report [PDF] on alleged sightings of U.S. personnel in the Soviet gulags.

RC and Moon Pie
May 5, 2011

BattleMaster posted:

I can buy American POWs from the Korean and Vietnam wars being sent to the USSR, but what's the excuse for the ones taken during WW2? Says 500 kept as "bargaining chips" but in what context? Only thing I can think of is that they were prisoners of the Germans kept by the Soviets for some reason after they captured the prison camps. But then they're not really bargaining chips if you don't do anything with them.

When Stalag Luft I was liberated (by the Russians), there was briefly the idea that the POWs would be released through Odessa.

This has been linked before - everything has, I think - but in 1995 New Japan Wrestling decided to hold a wrestling card in Pyongyang, with a number of familiar Japanese, American and Canadian wrestlers. And Muhammad Ali.

The experience, in short, was bizarre. All of them were quite happy to get back to Japan. The two-day show was filmed and edited down for a pay-per-view shown by WCW later that year, Collision in Korea.

RC and Moon Pie has a new favorite as of 15:10 on Apr 16, 2018

AlbieQuirky
Oct 9, 2012

Just me and my 🌊dragon🐉 hanging out
There are still people listed as "missing in action" from the US Civil War.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!
Speaking of the ACW, didnt the last surviving widow getting her husband's pension die surprisingly recently? IIRC she was his third or fourth wife (the previous ones having died of old age), and they got married when he was ancient and she was very young. Maybe he just wanted somebody to talk to. And then she lived to a ripe old age herself.

E: married in 1927 when he was 81, she died at the age of 97 in 2004. The last Union widow died in 2003 at 93, so the Yankee was probably the one that got married really young.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3765811.stm

Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 15:10 on Apr 16, 2018

Darkhold
Feb 19, 2011

No Heart❤️
No Soul👻
No Service🙅

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang posted:

It's really weird what people will spin a conspiracy around. I can understand big events like 9/11 and Vietnam, but they do it about small tragedies as well. A friend of mine's father was killed in a plane crash in Lexington, Ky and because he was a forensic accountant there was all sorts of chatter that it was a CIA hit. My friend only found out about it because he enjoyed reading dark corners of the net and had a particular fondness for conspiracies. He said it was really really disconcerting to actually be the focus of it though. He also said, it got really old when he'd be dealing with the other victims families during the investigation worrying that these other people might believe that their loved ones died because his dad was on the plane.
When I was a teen a 40 year old guy in town died from auto-erotic asphyxiation. It probably would have been 3 day gossip if not for the family (fairly well connected in the small town) kept trying to spin it into a conspiracy murder. Every few days they'd pop up in the paper saying things like 'but there was a truck at his house in the morning. Why is nobody trying to find this mystery truck!'

It was weirdly funny and sad at the same time.

Of course the cops in my town were kinda poo poo. A few years before that a highschooler who owed money to some local drug dealers was found murdered committed suicide in a field. Somehow he managed to be found 20 yards from the gun that killed him but we all know after you pull the trigger your reflex is to throw the gun.

Untrustable
Mar 17, 2009





Darkhold posted:

Of course the cops in my town were kinda poo poo. A few years before that a highschooler who owed money to some local drug dealers was found murdered committed suicide in a field. Somehow he managed to be found 20 yards from the gun that killed him but we all know after you pull the trigger your reflex is to throw the gun.

Classic fencing response.

Getsuya
Oct 2, 2013
Found this from a Japanese list of disturbing Wikipedia articles.

https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/北&%2320061;&%2324030;&%2330435;&%2331105;&%2327578;&%2320154;&%2320107;&%2320214;

The North Kyushu Inprisonment Murder Case

The article is hard to parse due to everyone being referred to by letters but I’ll give y’all a quick rundown of the worst bits:

X and Y are lovers with a penchant for extortion and manipulation. Using various tactics (getting people drunk to learn their darkest secrets which they then leak to the person’s spouse, threatening people into writing false confessions to stuff like child abuse then using those to control the person, etc) they herd a bunch of friends and relatives into a few apartments where they abuse and extort the folks before ultimately killing them.

But, to get an even better hold on the folks, rather than killing their prisoners by hand they manipulate them into killing each other or at least helping with body disposal.

The worst part was the girl referred to as G in the article. She was Y’s grade-school aged niece and, after being manipulated into aiding in the murder of her own parents and little brother, she underwent electric shocks and starvation before telling X she wanted to die and lying quietly with her chin raised so X could strangle her.

The article points out that this case is fairly unknown in Japan due to the media not wanting to report details they felt were too disturbing for public news, coupled with a desire to protect any surviving relatives from further heartache.

Edit: crap I can’t get the link to work right, probably because of the Japanese text. I guess just Google 北九州監禁殺人事件 if you’re interested?

Getsuya has a new favorite as of 17:39 on Apr 16, 2018

Judas Horse
Mar 24, 2018

ey im walkin simulator here
Here's the English article on the guy described. I don't know if those are the actual names but yeah.

Getsuya
Oct 2, 2013
Oh, hey, there ya go. I figured since the case itself didn’t have an English page there wasn’t any English info. Thanks for the find!

Aesop Poprock
Oct 21, 2008


Grimey Drawer

RC and Moon Pie posted:

When Stalag Luft I was liberated (by the Russians), there was briefly the idea that the POWs would be released through Odessa.

This has been linked before - everything has, I think - but in 1995 New Japan Wrestling decided to hold a wrestling card in Pyongyang, with a number of familiar Japanese, American and Canadian wrestlers. And Muhammad Ali.

The experience, in short, was bizarre. All of them were quite happy to get back to Japan. The two-day show was filmed and edited down for a pay-per-view shown by WCW later that year, Collision in Korea.

I remember reading about this, watching the show and listening to interviews with the wrestlers etc years ago and my favorite part of this is dementia affected Muhammad Ali, after like a day of dealing with NK's bullshit, just outright said "No wonder we hate these motherfuckers" in front of a bunch of the officials and all the wrestlers buttholes clenched

pookel
Oct 27, 2011

Ultra Carp

Getsuya posted:

The worst part was the girl referred to as G in the article. She was Y’s grade-school aged niece and, after being manipulated into aiding in the murder of her own parents and little brother, she underwent electric shocks and starvation before telling X she wanted to die and lying quietly with her chin raised so X could strangle her.
According to the English article, if I'm reading it right and if it's correct, the actual strangulation here was done by "Kumio's daughter," who testified at the trial and was not named, but who was 17 in 2002 and had been his captive since 1993 - so she would have been 8 then, and 13 at the time she killed the other child.

The killer was caught because "Kumio's daughter" escaped from him in 2002, then was recaptured, then escaped again, and then, finally, went to the police. At 17, after spending over half her life in the captivity of a serial killer who forced her to kill other people including her own father.

Getsuya
Oct 2, 2013
The Japanese version is a little different. I got X and Y mixed up in my summary but Kunio’s daughter actually did the strangling together with Ogata. The only place Ogata and Kunio’s daughter contradicted each other was in whether the main guy had shocked Aya before the murder.

And probably the saddest part of that is Kunio’s daughter and Aya were apparently good friends at first; brought together by their mutual love of Japanese boy bands.

Solice Kirsk
Jun 1, 2004

.
I didn't know about any of this and it is pretty, well, unnerving. Good find.

Christ.

JacquelineDempsey
Aug 6, 2008

Women's Circuit Bender Union Local 34



Darkhold posted:

When I was a teen a 40 year old guy in town died from auto-erotic asphyxiation. It probably would have been 3 day gossip if not for the family (fairly well connected in the small town) kept trying to spin it into a conspiracy murder. Every few days they'd pop up in the paper saying things like 'but there was a truck at his house in the morning. Why is nobody trying to find this mystery truck!'

It was weirdly funny and sad at the same time.

Your post reminded me of a couple unnerving things I kinda forgot until just now.

My stepfather was a minister. Being called on to do funerals, he was privy to info about the deaths of those deceased folks that other people might not know. I first learned about that when he had to officiate a suicide's funeral and needed to ask the family just how she died so he wouldn't say something like "her life was cut short" if she'd slit her wrists.

The thing that your post reminded me of that was stepdad finding out (and then me, by listening when my parents didn't realize I was eavesdropping) that one of his parishioners didn't hang himself by accident, it was an autoerotic asphyxiation case (he was wearing women's lingerie and there was porn on the tv, so yeah). The guy had kids about my age, and the family was trying to keep that aspect as hush-hush as possible. :smith:

Said stepdad was also the prison chaplain for this fine fellow:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jamelske

...which is a whole pile of unnerving reading in itself!

ewe2
Jul 1, 2009

Darkhold posted:

Of course the cops in my town were kinda poo poo. A few years before that a highschooler who owed money to some local drug dealers was found murdered committed suicide in a field. Somehow he managed to be found 20 yards from the gun that killed him but we all know after you pull the trigger your reflex is to throw the gun.

I was just listening to the Casefile episode on the Keith Warren story. Apparently you need two trees to properly hang yourself, you should always bring a change of clothes and don't forget to drink solvents.

Booger Presley
Aug 6, 2008

Pillbug
loving hell. Lost more of my soul recently by watching "I Am Evidence."

It's an HBO documentary exposing the thousands of unprocessed rape kits across the US.

The callous dismissal and blatant bias mentioned makes me sick. Watch it; pay special attention to the successfully incarcerated rates versus originally untested.

I need kittens.

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Busket Posket
Feb 5, 2010

✨ⓡⓐⓨⓜⓞⓝⓓ✨

TapTheForwardAssist posted:

Apparently it's Nolan McKinley, one of two recognized defectors of the Vietnam War. Got to grab dinner, but later I'll see if I can dig up the other one.

Is covering the US defectors to North Korea unnerving enough for this thread? I'd say that bailing out of the US for what you presumably know well is a totalitarian regime and monolithic ethnostate speaks to a very unnerving mentality. There's one of the guys whose proximate cause for defection was that he'd gotten busted for smoking weed at his base in South Korea. I really wonder how often he asked himself whether he should've just taken the one-rank demotion and loss of pay for three months instead.

There’s a documentary on one specific defector, James Dresnok, whose entire rationale boils down to “I get to be the bully now DAD, plus Korean women are better than American women because they don’t make fun of me, and here I’m not fat, I’m a godlike giant. Plus they put me in propaganda films as The Evil American so I’m pretty well-known.” He was given a stipend for his propaganda service that made him essentially a wealthy man in DPRK after being a shiftless doofus in his American life.

wikipedia posted:

Dresnok asserts that "because of the sanctions of the US Government and Japanese", during the North Korean famine of the 1990s, he was always given his full food ration by the government. "Why? Why do they let their own people starve to death to feed an American?", he asked. "The Great Leader has given us a special solicitude. The government is going to take care of me until my dying day."

All his firsthand knowledge of brutal totalitarianism was completely overshadowed by his ego.

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