.jpg.1f5057a129486ce70bca44b5b63b6c8a.jpg)
Brewster McCloud
-
Posts
202 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by Brewster McCloud
-
-
Calling people cunts for having different beliefs is all well and good, but wouldn't it be better to perhaps attempt to understand why such people hold the beliefs that they do? The right wing has gone bonkers in a way that hasn't really been seen before, regarding conspiracy theories and global elites and whatnot - social media has enabled people to enter echo chambers and never have their views challenged. So, what does it mean to be right winged now, in 2019? A hatred of immigrants? A desire to own a gun? A hatred of PC culture? Why did people vote fro Brexit in the UK? And what does it mean to be left winged? Distrust of global capitalism? A desire to loudly accuse people you don't like of being various isms on Twitter? It's sad to me that popular discourse about politics has become this insult culture.
-
It's not really weird. I perhaps used hyperbolic language in an attempt to prove my point(s). If I went too far then I apologize. I've actually found this discussion quite fruitful - you've proved me wrong about a couple of things and that's great. However, I do think I'm right about the main thing and I"m willing to go to the mat about it, because I'm fascinated by Jack the Ripper and I don't really get a chance to talk about the case in real life.
What does having penetrative sex or not have to do with our argument? You've stumped me there.
And, for the record, sigh, I do not think of sex workers in a discriminatory manner. They're just people doing a job to make money, often due to a terrible childhood, that's all.
-
I haven't read the Bible from cover to cover either, but I'm pretty sure God doesn't exist. I've read several reviews of Robinson's book and they are sufficient to inform me that I probably wouldn't agree with him. Using your logic, if you haven't read everything Paul Begg has ever written, then you should should refrain from criticising him. I know Robinson was accusing Michael Maybrick, not his brother, but the only reason that name was ever mentioned in the Rippersphere was because of the diary. And no, I haven't read that either damnit.
Nobody has ever said a women out at night could only be a prostitute - that would be ridiculous. What people have said is, based on statements made to the police at the time, Jack the Ripper's victims resorted to selling their vaginas in order to pay their rent. It's an unfortunate consequence of the poverty that was rife in the East end of London at the time, and not a reason to cast judgement I don't see why it's so problematic to say this.
I'll ask you again, as an ignoramus who hasn't read her book and an apparent hater of women, what evidence does Rubenhold supply that the first 3 canonical victims never worked as prostitutes or that they were sleeping when they were murdered? Did you listen to the podcast I linked to?
-
I'm not going to read Robinson's book for the same reasons I wouldn't read any silly conspiracy book, weather it concerns Jack the Ripper, the moon landing or the JFK assassination. I love Withnalil and I as much as the next man, but that doesn't mean I think Robinson has anything worth saying regarding JTR.
The reason I quoted Paul Begg, sonny Jim, is that I consider him an expert on the case. No more no less.
I ask you this: why is it sexist to look at the available documents and come to a conclusion based upon them? Why is it so important to you that she's right and everyone else is wrong?
-
4 minutes ago, tiger_rick said:
...Cunt.
I hope you feel better after posting that.
-
I used to be a Tory. I thought that they were more well spoken and rational than those on the more emotional Left. Now, though? You simply can't defend 'em. because they've gone nuts. I still have a great degree of appreciation for Thatcher, even though she was an absolute cunt to the miners and whatnot. I've been influenced by Nick Cohen's book, "What's Left?" and I also loved reading PJ O'Rourke back in the day.
So, as I enter middle age, I think I'm basically left-leaning - I welcome alternative lifestyles and views, I just wish it wasn't all so shrill and doctrinaire.
-
37 minutes ago, Chris B said:
This is exactly - EXACTLY - the point that Rubenhold is making with her book. How can she not have appreciated that?
Well, it's not really much of a "point", is it, given the fact that the point has already been made? I don't really know why you're getting upset about it. Begg's point is simply that most people want to read books about whodunnit, there is no conspiracy of misogynist trolls.
-
if you time it right you can get a decent price for a pint at Brewerkz at the end of Orchard Road. It's my go-to bar when I have to go to Singapore. They've banned smoking, though, the fuckers. If you're hanging out in Singapore, my advice would be to head to Little India or China Town. Get the MRT to Race Course Road and have a curry and a beer for 20 dollars.
-
12 hours ago, Guy Bifkin said:
Come on lads, tell us about the ladyboys
More of a Thailand thing. I did walk into a mall on one of my first trips to the 'Pore and got accosted by some rather scary girls who very much wanted me to pay for a massage. I was all sweaty and tired so I declined. I just wasn't in the mood for getting rubbed off at the time. Singapore is rather like the Disneyland of South East Asia, but it's not all that difficult to enter the realm of seediness if that's your desire. You just have to pay a fucking fortune for it. I hate to sound like a big old sexist, but Singaporean women are something else, man. You can sit in a bar on Orchard Road and simply marvel at their beauty. It's like a constant parade of supermodels.
-
On a happier note, and the risk of raising the hackles of Houchen for double, nay triple posting (!), I'm currently reading this:
It's great but a bit depressing. What I'm finding most interesting so far is how Fox News got into bed with the Tea Party wackos and the militias, and how this, disastrously, became the default setting for a lot of right-leaning Americans. I'd always considered them fringe cunts and nutjobs, but this book makes it very clear how conspiracy theory has infiltrated what used to be sober discourse in the mainstream. I used to have a bit of empathy with the small government, libertarian mindset, but reading this it's quite clear that it's a path to gun nut insanity. It's all very well trumpeting freeze peach, but not when your audience are liable to take up arms and harm people as a result of the propaganda.
The really scary thing is how Obama being elected president galvanized the loonies; they thought he was going to take their guns away and impose a fascist regime; it's horrifying to consider that people - normal people with jobs and shit - actually think this.
-
10 hours ago, Chris B said:
Well, police around the world are famously willing to put lots of resources into the deaths of homeless people, so I'm sure they've all been caught.
Oh, and a bit of googling reveals Richard Ramirez (the Night Stalker) attacked and killed multiple sleeping women. So did Ted Bundy. For starters.
You're quite right. In my defense, though, both Bundy and Ramirez also attacked people who weren't sleeping. It wasn't like that was their fetish, nor were their victims homeless and left displayed in areas notorious for prostitution, so one can speculate that breaking into their homes was enough of a violatory thrill for them. I just don't see any reason to believe that JTR attacked sleeping victims, specifically, though. He might have, but from what I've read, it seems most likely that he posed as a customer, approached the women and let them lead themselves to the sites of their own deaths. If you consider where the bodies were found, that would be the most plausible conclusion.
As for the "plucky feminist historian gets attacked by online trolls" narrative that newspapers like the Guardian have lapped up, here's Paul Begg writing before the book spawned a monster:
"I think the pre-publication publicity puffery for Hallie Rubenhold’s book is unfortunate. It should be self-evident why the unidentified murderer receives oodles more attention than the victims in books that are primarily concerned with the identiy of the murderer. We all knew the victims weren’t born in Whitechapel and that they had full lives before they ended up there. we all knew that these women had been married and had children, so there was nothing to question. The puffery makes the author sound like a total novice excited to discover something they didn’t realise everyone already knew, like a child telling everyone there was a battle fought near Hastings in 1066. Or it suggests that the book is aimed at readers who have little or no prior knowledge of the case, who will react with a ‘gosh, wow’ and be conned into thinking that Rubenhold has uncovered something new. It’s to be hoped that neither is true and that the publicist was trying to make something saleable.
I recently reviewed an awful book by Rebecca Frost which looked at the way the victims have been portrayed in books over the years. But Frost clearly had little or no grasp of the history of Ripper writing - that authors had no access to the official files until the 1970s and no easy access until the 1990s, no easy access to newspapers other than The Times or to genealogical databases such as Ancestry until the late 1990s, and so on and so on. And, apparently like Hallie Rubenhold, she didn’t appreciate that books largely concerned with attempting to identify the murderer were not much interested in the victims other than for the clues they provided to the killer’s identity (pretty much as in real life). It didn’t help that Frost was manifestly biased and determined to present Ripper authors in a poor or bad light.
Some of the comments Hallie made on Twitter suggest that she may have had the same intention in mind. I hope not. It would be a shame if someone eventually had the clout to get a major publisher interested in a book on the victims, turned it into another ill-founded attack on Ripper authors."How prescient he was.
-
That's an irrelevant point because the police at the time of the Ripper murders put all their resources and manpower towards catching the killer. It didn't matter whether the victims were prostitutes, homeless, or whatever. It wasn't like the police at the time were like "ah, bunch of dead prozies, fuck it, let's be lazy". The very fact that the police at the time made a superhuman effort to catch the murderer of some ripped whores rather negates your view.
-
7 minutes ago, Hannibal Scorch said:
Blimey. That's a bit of a bastard. I must admit, I've just had a quick peak and I'll read them fully tomorrow, but shit... I always thought he was one of the good guys.
-
3 minutes ago, Chris B said:
Well, a quick google shows the 'complete anomaly' of serial killers targeting sleeping homeless people happening multiple times in the last couple of years alone. But I'm sure that's a complete fluke and there were no more in the last century or so.
https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/serial-killer-targeting-pretorias-homeless-report-20190613
That's interesting. Those links are about male killers targeting male victims, though. I wonder if it's a different psychology? Has there ever been a male serial killer who preyed on sleeping women before, supposedly, Jack the Ripper? You've got me interested and I'm happy to admit if I'm wrong.
-
3 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:
Where have you been recently, @Brewster McCloud .
Any chance you could go back?
You could always just ban me if I bother you that much, dude. Makes no difference to me.
-
16 minutes ago, Chris B said:
Man, I was so accurate, it's creepy.
Before you congratulate yourself too much, let's consider that I was being sardonic in using the word "fun" rather than actually endorsing some murderous swine. Can you point me towards anyone who has claimed that Jack the Ripper was a "genius"? Certainly nobody sane. He was brazen and reckless and very lucky not to get caught. The "Fun" in question relates to the vast majority of serial killer's MOs - the feeling of power they get when they see the fear in the face of their victim. If you think Jack the Ripper was "just a bloke who carved up sleeping homeless women" then fine. I don't, because it would make him a complete anomaly in the world of serial killers. But, if that's what you want to believe, then go for it. I wonder why it would be considered more "sad and tragic" for someone to murder a sleeping non-prostitute than to murder an awake prostitute? That I can't fathom.
-
I know not of the scuttlebutt. Oh well. Until I hear otherwise I'll still hold him in high esteem for Trading Places and American Werewolf.
-
2 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:
Beverly Hills Cop 3, for a start.
Well, yeah, but I'm curious - he seems like the nicest guy in the world when he's talking about horror movies and whatnot in David Byrne documentaries.
-
On 6/19/2019 at 9:29 PM, Hannibal Scorch said:
He's hardly from good stock is he, I mean his dad is a piece of shit as well. Josh Trank can fuck off though, he's hardly credible as a source, but the allergations have been on social for a while, interesting they have now got him.
Why is John Landis a piece of shit?
-
On 6/19/2019 at 5:14 PM, BomberPat said:
The book's being attacked by a lot of the name "Ripperologists" for this point, most of whom are absolute hacks trying to cling to their boys' club, and refuting anything that doesn't fit their narrative, regardless of evidence. I saw one of them on Twitter saying something like, "she was seen talking to a man with a moustache at night, only a prostitute would have been out at night talking to strange men when a murder had happened recently". As if the rest of Whitechapel shut down and stay indoors after the first killing.
"Ripperology" is built on a lot of received wisdom and agreed narratives, and tends to shut down anything that sits outside of that, it's a real oddball discipline.
Bruce Robinson's "They All Love Jack" is by far my favourite Ripper take, and really challenges a lot of those assumptions, though makes a fair few logical leaps of its own.
And what evidence has Rubenhold given for her extraordinary claims that Ripperologists are just a bunch of lazy misogynists who couldn't be bothered looking into the lives of the canonical five victims and that she was the first to do so? Furthermore, what evidence has she supplied to support her bizarre claim that the victims were sleeping when they were murdered? Which of the "name Ripperologists" who you consider absolute hacks, Pat, refute anything that doesn't "fit their narrative", as far as this kerfuffle concerns? Paul Begg? Don't lump in hacks who write suspect books with people who have a scholarly, historical bent. There's a world of difference between, say, Martin Fido, and some nincompoop with a publishing deal pointing the finger at some innocent guy whose relatives have to deal with the stigma.
The reason she was "attacked", or was, more accurately, criticized, isn't because she's a woman or a feminist historian, but rather because she said some stupid shit in the course of promoting her book and in the book itself. Any author playing fast and loose with valid sources should expect to receive the same. Yeah, yeah, "she started it miss!" and all that. However! To say that no one had previously bothered to look into the lives of the victims before her is absolute twaddle; Philip Sugden, for one, wrote extensively about their lives after doing an extensive amount of research. Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner also raised the issue of whether or not the women were prostitutes in the Jack the Ripper A to Z, published long before Rubenhold waded in. It's not just that she wants to argue that the first 3 canonical victims weren't prostitutes, it's that she ignores all the evidence that suggests that they were, if not full time hookers, at least had to sell themselves for doss money in moments of desperation. There are records of people who knew the victims making statements to the police stating exactly that, albeit in euphemistic Victorian terms. Now, maybe they were lying - it's possible, but you can't just completely ignore such documents. Rubenhold did to support her peculiar thesis.
How can you possibly say that Ripperology is "based on received wisdom and agreed narratives"? The popular conception of Jack the Ripper is, certainly - the top-hatted dandy gliding through the foggy streets of London with his Gladstone bag full of tricks in hand - but you can't just write off the field as a bunch of prurient cranks clinging to myths. If you listen to the Rippercast podcast, as I do, you'll know it's pretty much people with an interest in Victorian history trying to evaluate the available sources using reason and, more often than not, your old pal Ockham's razor. When Rubenhold's book was discussed* (by male AND FEMALE Ripperolgists!) they dealt with it in a balanced and critical manner, praising it for the context it provided, and the few new factual details uncovered, but slamming it for falderal like claiming the victims were sleeping when they were murdered. As if that's a more likely theory considering the bodies were found in notorious areas where prostitutes would take their clients - it seems far more likely to me that the Ripper posed as a customer and let the women lure themselves to their own deaths, safe in the knowledge that he would be undisturbed as he mutilated the bodies. After all, where's the fun in killing a sleeping woman? Or, yeah, maybe he was the only serial killer who got a kick out of attacking sleeping women who had weirdly chosen to sleep in notorious soliciting locations...
As for Bruce Robinson's book, much as I like him, I can can't be bothered going through 800 pages of acerbic insults and putdowns just to end up at another conspiracy theory. The only debate about the Maybrick diary is whether it was a contemporary forgery or a modern one. Slagging off the police? What more could they have possibly done given the methods available at the time?
*https://www.casebook.org/podcast/listen.html?id=222
"
-
20 hours ago, Loki said:
“It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving picaninnies”.
--
“They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.”
--
“The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge anymore. Consider Uganda, pearl of Africa, as an example of the British record. The British planted coffee and cotton and tobacco, and they were broadly right. If left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain. The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty.”
--
Whilst editor of the Spectator, published an article which said “orientals” had “have larger brains and higher IQ scores”, while “blacks are at the other pole”.
--
Writing about Obama, he said his removal of Churchill's bust "was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire".
--
And of course "I would go further and say that it is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes."
So yeah, he's that sort of patronising, colonial old-school racist who views any culture other than his own as a dark reflection of actual civilisation. Saying something racist and then apologising for it (which is his method) doesn't make you non-racist, it's just a way of appealing to racists and then applying a thin veneer of respectability back. Trump does it all the time, he also uses the "just a joke" excuse as well.
If you read all this sort of shit from Johnson (as well as his many other sexist "gaffes") and think it's ok, then that makes YOU a racist as well. You obviously think that anything short of shouting "paki" in someone's face is ok, but just because racism has been forced out of polite conversation, doesn't mean it doesn't still exist and thrive through little comments like Johnson's. He's Tommy Robinson with a posh voice and an ill-fitting wig. But you probably don't think Tommeh is a racist either, and you know why? Because you're also a racist.
A lot of assumptions and nonsense in that post. I'm not a racist. Fuck off with that shit. How dare you attempt to slander me like that, you nincompoop. A pox on you. You should be fucking ashamed of yourself for attempting to boost your own week ego by ranting like that.
-
-
-
9 minutes ago, Loki said:
Great, trolling on the UKFF. How early 2000s. At least David can put a cogent argument together. You're just boring.
How am I trolling? I backed up my point(s). Saying something that most people don't like isn't trolling. Your posts don't interest me much either, but manners and all that, cunt.
All Tories Are Cunts thread
in Off Topic
Posted · Edited by Brewster McCloud
Just calling them cunts won't change anything will it, though? If change is actually what you want.