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I just finished reading a book about this, so I thought I'd look up the relevant Wikipedia pages: The wreck of the Batavia, in 1628, and the subsequent reign of terror on a tiny group of desert islands just off western Australia that left 110 men, women and children dead - and not because of starvation or thirst, but almost all murdered on the orders of one of the castaways, Jeronimus Cornelisz.Wiki posted:Cornelisz established a brutal personal rule in the islands, backed by a core of men who had plotted with him on board ship. When food and water supplies became scarce, the mutineers began to kill their fellow survivors, at first covertly, then more and more openly. In all, Cornelisz and his henchmen were responsible for the deaths of between 110 and 124 men, women and children over a two-month period. Their victims were drowned, strangled, hacked to pieces or bludgeoned to death singly or in large groups. Seven surviving women were forced into sexual slavery. Lucretia Jans was given preferential treatment by only having to serve Cornelisz. Jeronimus had an uncanny command of the mutineers, who did all of the murders at his bidding. He himself seemed more comfortable issuing orders to murder, than committing them himself, and in many ways was a fairly pathetic figure - the wiki lists his only personal act of violence as when he "tried and failed to poison a baby." It all culminated when a Dutch ship, coming to rescue the survivors, came across a pitched battle between two groups of castaways - the "Defenders" and the mutineers. The Defenders, led by the common soldier Wiebbe Hayes, were a small group of soldiers who Jeronimus had suspected he'd be unable to convince to mutiny, so he tricked them into looking for water on a nearby island before leaving them stranded without boats. Ironically, Jeronimus had thought he was leaving the Defenders to die, but their island actually turned out to have a water source while Jeronimus's did not. Fishermen are still discovering skeletal remains of the massacre on the islands today. Something good did come out of it, though: Wiki posted:The common soldier Wiebbe Hayes was hailed as a hero. The Dutch East India Company promoted him to sergeant, and later to lieutenant, which increased his salary fivefold.
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May 18, 2014 19:35
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:Isn't there some quasi-medical term for people attracted to murderers? Posters itt would know, I am sure. Hybristophilia. Although Charles Bronson never actually killed anyone. He just punched people and beat up washing machines.
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Aug 21, 2016 03:11
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we are the Funyuns posted:I like this more than GBS's "but...but Rapey McTattooface is just misunderstood and would have been the next man on the moon or cured cancer if the police and our terrible justice system didn't give him jail time for raping his dead mother's corpse. He didn't mean to and had a rough childhood." You tried really hard to come up with some horrible crimes for your strawman, and one of the things you chose was having a tattoo
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Oct 10, 2016 18:02
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Earlier I somehow came across this transcript of the tragic death of Candace Newmaker, and I was completely unprepared for it. I've read some pretty horrible stuff online, but for some reason this really got to me. Don't read unless you're prepared to be consumed by rage and sadness. Read the Wikipedia page for more information on the circumstances surrounding her death. Pseudo-scientific "alternative" therapies like this can kill people, and they especially kill those children unlucky enough to have stupid parents. There's something about ignorance like this that makes me much more upset than when I'm just reading about some run-of-the-mill psycho.
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May 15, 2017 11:02
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Dirty John. A long read, but worth it. It's well-written and the story is absolutely engrossing, revealing the kind of damage a single, pathological man can do to an entire family. I've read about a lot of sociopaths, but John isn't a serial killer - though he definitely fits the profile. The fact his crimes were slightly less outlandish actually made the story more unsettling, in some ways, as they seemed less like something from a horror movie and more like something I can imagine happening in my own or my friends' lives. And boy, does the story escalate. One thing that struck me was the description of how, when John got angry and let his facade slip, people looked into his eyes and saw an "utter void" looking back - it's identical to the way contemporaries have described Henry Lee Lucas, or Bundy, or any number of other psychopaths. They're charming, until suddenly something switches and they're utterly not.
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Oct 15, 2017 23:02
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Not exactly an article, but I recently discovered an epic thread by a Belgian adventurer couple about their 2008 road trip through the Democratic Republic of Congo, from Lubumbashi to Kinshasa, just a few years after the Second Congo War ended. It was the first time the drive had been attempted by anyone outside the Congo since the 1980s, back before the wars, when the infrastructure in the country was much better. It's not written in perfect English, but it's an absolute rollercoaster and worth your time. Pretty unnerving for several reasons: the tourists' cheerful disregard for their own safety; the evident after-effects of one of the most brutal wars of the 21st century; the number of times they almost died or were chased by angry villagers with machetes; the revelations about how much the Democratic Republic of Congo has suffered, and its infrastructure deteriorated, in the past 30 years; the fact that some of the older people in the Congo actually miss the brutal colonialism of the past because at least it provided some stability; and also, I guess, all the stuff about cannibal bandits and ears being fried in pans.
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Aug 7, 2018 09:54
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Kiss Kiss Bang Bang posted:Are the pictures broken or is it just my browser? Just your browser, I think. I'm using Chrome and the pictures are fine.
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Aug 7, 2018 15:10
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I've just finished reading this baffling and ultimately unsatisfactory account of Andrew Blake, a guy who's apparently infamous in multiple online fandom communities. He told young livejournal kids that he's inhabited by the "souls" of Elijah Wood and Orlando Bloom and dozens of other actors or fictional characters, then played his own fake personalities off each other to manipulate them into moving into his apartment, performing sexual favours, cutting off ties with their parents through fake accusations of abuse, and joining his weird cult of personality. He scammed people into paying him money for festivals that never panned out. At one point a bewildered Sean Astin gets involved. Ultimately he ends up fleeing across the Canadian border on foot in a blizzard. Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the double murder and suicide. It's a completely bizarre story, and I wish the article dug even deeper. There's a lot left to unpack.
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Aug 17, 2018 10:35
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Thank you both, this fills in a lot of the extra detail I was looking for! I already thought there was something creepy and cultish about the most dedicated fandom communities, I guess Blake has identified them as easy targets for unpleasant exploitation. And I can't help but feel he's just going to keep up that exploitation as long as he can.
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Aug 17, 2018 14:52
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I think this is the most genuinely unnerving Wikipedia article. Also heart-wrenching, horrifying, soul-destroying. There's something about that list of names, with their brief descriptions, that fills me with a sadness that settles into my bones. It's a litany of terribly sad stories. Like the famous Jewish actor who was forced to make a propaganda film about how life at the camps was great, and then he and the entire crew was immediately gassed. Or the child actress who died in the cattle wagons. Or the esteemed Rabbi who was shot dead at the camp's gates when he loudly, bravely, suicidally protested at the treatment of his people. Or the woman who smuggled gunpowder under her fingernails to the Sonderkommando and helped them blow up two of the gas chambers. The personal nature of these stories, and the sheer number of them, helps bring home the brutish, pointless, despicable reality of the Holocaust in a way that statistics elide.
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Oct 30, 2018 20:58
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Aren't the books just a string 50 pages long creepy sex scenes with GRRM self-inserts? Isn't the TV show just a string of 50 minute long creepy sex scenes that the TV writers took from the books but changed into rape scenes?
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Jan 2, 2019 12:55
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Pick posted:fly infestation in horse stomach 
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Jun 28, 2020 09:15
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Tehdas posted:That’s possibility due to how it’s pretty boring to do cases where the cops bring their A game and solve the case pretty quickly. When they bring their C game, then you get longer, more interesting cases. Yeah sometimes cops bring their A game, sometimes they bring their C game. Then sometimes they'll bring their A game again. And after that? Their B game.
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Dec 16, 2020 20:44
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