Friday links! Naked villainy edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 1 Comment

Snidely

One of the most depressing features of the modern world is the difficulty in identifying villains. Awful scumbags are out there, obviously, but they tend to be “controversial” rather than openly evil. Deteriorating certainty in both morals and reportage has made any given villain debatable. Where once we might say with confidence that Glenn Beck was a fat liar who cried to get attention, now we can only disagree with him. Personally, I miss the old certainty. It may have cost us a few witches, but to definitively call other people villains is a satisfying atavism, like eating chicken with your hands. Today is Friday, and we still have a few unequivocal villains left. Won’t you point the finger with me?

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Missoula gay bashing fake. Good?

By Dan Brooks in Hoaxes 3 Comments

For Olympic gold

For the last week or so, the Facebook and possibly even a Tumblr have been all a-twitter about Joseph Baken, the 22 year-old gay man who was beaten up at the Missoula Club on his birthday. It turned out that did not happen. The injuries to Baken’s face were sustained when he attempted a back flip off the curb on Higgins Avenue, where he could maybe be heard saying “call me Gabby” before executing a perfect 270-degree rotation. We know this the same way we heard about his ostensible bashing in the first place: social media. Specifically, we saw this video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3uJ57u92nU

What a perfect metaphor for his time in the national spotlight.

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Is the ZANU-PF Twitter account a hoax?

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 1 Comment

An effigy of Robert Mugabe in Johannesburg’s Gay Pride parade

Yesterday in the comments, Willy pointed out that a lot of people think the @ZANU_PF Twitter account is fake. “Fake” in this context means “not originating from officials of ZANU-PF”—the ruling political party of Zimbabwe headed by dictatorial octogenarian Robert Mugabe—and in this case it is mostly an aesthetic judgment. Back in April, @ZANU-PF seemed to be fueling rumors of Mugabe’s death, an odd choice for the mouthpiece of a party that spends a lot of time insisting its leader is totally healthy. The use of the appellation Cde (for comrade) before everybody’s name seems like something out of screwball comedy, too. Then again, the previous president of Zimbabwe was named Canaan Banana, so who knows what the fudge is going on?

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Ambivalent: The Iron Sheik’s Twitter feed

By Dan Brooks in Ambivalents 5 Comments

The Iron Sheik, forced to live in the real world with Beyoncé for some reason

I assume that you are already following The Iron Sheik on Twitter, for the simple reason that I assume you are not Tito Santana. As a quick glance at Sheikie’s recent activity suggests, he and Santana are not friends. Then again, the Sheik’s claim that Santana has “the taco ass” may be kind of ironic. It’s hard to tell. The former Olympic wrestler, WWF heel and bodyguard for the Shah of Iran has presumably always separated his interior and public personae, since his public persona is completely absurd. When you think about The Iron Sheik, you have to do a lot of surmising and presuming. How else to explain six borderline-racist tweets in an hour attacking Santana for no discernible reason? And what beside pure, life-consuming dedication to art could explain tweets like this?

You would have to be dead inside not to appreciate that, and you would have to be an idiot to completely endorse it.

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What is Alessio Rastani?

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 4 Comments

On Monday, a trader named Alessio Rastani told BBC interviewers that he was “dreaming of another recession” and that “governments don’t rule the world; Goldman Sachs rules the world.” It seemed like bad news. Rastani’s candor—some might call it glee—in describing how he profits from the kind of large-scale economic disaster in which we’re currently living also made it seem like a hoax. Several Twitter wags accused him of being a member of Yes Men, the group of agitprop performance artists who impersonate corporate spokespeople to draw attention to, well, the kind of thing Rastani talked about. But Yes Men has disclaimed him, and Rastani is an actual private day trader, as near as the BBC can tell. If he is a Yes Man, the organization is fielding much better actors, as this 2006 interview with a Dow Chemical impersonator suggests. That’s what a fake interview looks like. Rastani looks real, but what is he?

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